Liz Jensen - The Rapture

The trouble with the principle of ‘time out’ is that one patient’s personal hell is another’s idea of a cushy number. Like any bottomless pit, Bethany Krall, freshly ensconced in the peer-free zone referred to as ‘seclusion’, is enjoying the increased attention levels she is receiving. Therapist contact has been upped to five hours a day in the wake of her attack on Newton, and she is on ‘one-to-one’: 24-hour risk-assessment with a nurse in continuous attendance, who will be watching for self-harming behaviour. We’re on a rota basis. Her food is brought in on a tray. ‘Room service,’ she calls it: that, too, suits her current narcissistic mood. When she needs the toilet, she is escorted there by Lola or another female nurse, who keeps her in full view at all times. Lola has told me that Bethany makes the most of this, and performs scatological running commentaries for the benefit of her audience. We discuss the damage she has inflicted but she is unrepentant. Instead, she is eager to know the gory details. In particular, which part of the globe the surgeon extracted from Newton’s scrotum when removing his irretrievably damaged testicle.

‘I’m betting it was Scandinavia. As in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark.’ If nothing else, it seems her knowledge of geography has expanded, thanks to the atlas she’s brought in with her.

‘Perhaps if you stay in solitary confinement long enough, you’ll eventually get an education and become Bethany Krall, Professor of Earth Sciences,’ I suggest. She laughs, a dirty, full-throated laugh that is too old for her, and the braces on her teeth flash in the light. Twinkle twinkle. There has been a lot of gaiety from Bethany since she has been moved to a bare cell in McGrath Wing, where we now find ourselves, with Rafik in attendance. But none of it is of the balanced-member-of-the-community variety.

‘I wonder if that episode reminded you of anything that happened two years ago, at home?’

She smiles patronisingly. ‘Wrong questions again, Wheels. You’re one fuck of a slow learner. By the time you get what’s going on, you and your spazmobile will be, like, ten metres underwater. Bibble babble, with bubbles. Hey, joke.’ Oh well, I think. So be it. Nothing can get me down today. I smile benignly at little Bethany Krall because I can afford to.

I am a woman who has had sex.

I could ask for more intensive sessions with Bethany in the wake of her attack on Newton. But resuming our previous arrangement would run counter to protocol as the hospital’s bureaucratese has it. Nor am I keen to risk further interrogation from Sheldon-Gray, after my recent debriefing with him, which took the form of questions fired at me from the rowing machine.

‘How’s Newton doing in hospital? Ungk. Are you sure you have the physical backup you need for this job? Gah. Has your confidence taken a battering in the wake of this? Ungk. Have you done your police statement? Do you need some time off, now that the thing’s been paperworked?’

I struggled to answer him coherently and convincingly as he to’d-and-fro’d, shovelling his sweaty air from one side of the room to the other, as though it were a task he could later tick off the day’s list: transport X molecules of gas from A to B. I stuck to my plan of keeping it short. The tiny digital clock on his exercise device showed me that our entire conversation lasted one minute forty-eight seconds. At the end of which I showed him the drawing Bethany had made of the stick-figure.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Good work. Pursue it.’

I told him I would, and left.

‘That stick-figure you did in red crayon,’ I now ask Bethany. ‘Which I think was probably your mother. What were you thinking about, when you drew it?’

‘I don’t do stick-figures,’ she says sullenly. I take it out of my folder and show it to her. She squints, frowns and shoves the drawing back at me with a stumped expression. ‘Not mine. Someone else must have done it. Someone who can’t draw for shit.’

‘I was with you. After you drew the fall of Christ, you did this.’

‘I don’t draw like that. That’s a kid’s drawing.’

‘I wonder what the kid who drew it was thinking.’

We look at each other a moment, and then she turns her face away.

It dawned on me, during the labyrinthine discussions I used to have with my psychoanalyst, that most women carry in their heads an idealised mother. A home-baking, perfect-gravy mother, a waiting-outside-the-school-gates mother, a mother with whom to share lip-gloss and T-shirts, a mother to confide in, to laugh with over a TV sitcom. A counterweight to the mother they have in real life — the mother who, in Bethany’s case, filled her so unassailably with the urge to kill that she reached for a Phillips screwdriver and made the rest history.

‘You just don’t get it,’ she mutters. ‘Look. This earthquake is right round the corner. It’s hitting Istanbul the day after tomorrow. The pressure’s building up in the faultline, I can feel it. I’m telling you. I was right about the hurricane. I was right about Jesus tumbling down the mountainside. What happens when you see I’m right about this, too?’

‘What would you like me to do, Bethany? If you were right?’

‘It’s just time someone believed me. Don’t you get it?’

Our time is up: Rafik opens the door on my nod. As I turn to leave, Bethany is looking at me intently, as though measuring the angles of my face. Then, fast as a change of wind, her mood has shifted and she’s laughing softly to herself.

‘What’s funny, Bethany?’ I ask lightly, pleased that we are back on safer ground. ‘Can I share the joke?’

‘Wow, Wheels,’ she laughs, delightedly. ‘You’re the joke. Congratulations.’

‘On what?’ I ask, uneasy.

She smiles to show the braces on her teeth. She says slowly, savouring it: ‘On getting laid.’ I roll an inch back. ‘Ha! A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me, he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts!’

‘My private life is my business, Bethany.’ It comes out too sharply. She has caught me unawares and I have let it show.

‘Not any more,’ she grins. ‘Hey. My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. He stuck it in you! Rejoice!’

Rafik turns away discreetly. Bidding them both a swift goodbye I roll speedily out.

Since half of my body withdrew from the game, I have learned to notice, relish and even fetishise life’s miniature but extreme delights. Like my oriental lilies opening in a splash of ghost-white petals and filling the flat with their alarming, erotic pungency. Or my Bulgarian choral music drifting through from the next room, mingled with homelier noises: a metallic clatter, an air-blast of burnt toast, and the muttered cursing of a physicist called Frazer Melville preparing, at my request, a pot of lapsang souchong tea in an unfamiliar kitchen. It is Thursday August 21st, but I am determined not to let Bethany’s catastrophe calendar — which predicts a massive earthquake tomorrow — spoil my day. So far I am succeeding. I am enjoying being myself and no one else. I may even have looked in the mirror and taken pleasure in my own reflection. Frazer Melville and I have been under my duvet for the best part of fourteen hours. We have been ‘experimenting’. We are absurd. We are a woman in her thirties and a man in his forties. And we’re behaving like two teenagers discovering sex for the first time. Frazer Melville and I probe, explore and exchange information — shyly, boldly, teasingly. What if I do this? That’s good. Not there. But there, like this. No: can’t feel a thing . A lot of the focus is on my breasts. Hallelujah: I have landed myself a tit man. Last night, he cautiously entered me again. I felt nothing physically, not even a phantom tweak of something residual in my pelvis. But in my head it was quite another matter. In my head it was explosive. In our different but perhaps not-so-different ways, Frazer Melville and I appear to be enjoying ourselves.