Liz Jensen - The Rapture

‘Christ,’ he murmurs. ‘That’s bad news.’

‘I tried to get hold of you last night to tell you. But I couldn’t reach you on the phone. How come?’

He pretends to look puzzled, but when it comes to faking, he is an amateur. His freckles show up like grains of brown sugar, and a little pulse sets up on his left temple.

‘I worked late at the office. The switchboard doesn’t operate after five. And I must have turned my mobile off.’ His left temple is a place that I have often kissed. ‘I was there till midnight.’

I swallow. ‘And what were you working on, so late, at the office?’ I sound like a nagging wife.

‘Gabrielle, can you explain why you’re interrogating me?’ He has not squatted to be at my level, as he usually does. Like a mountain range on the far horizon, or North Korea, he is keeping a strategic distance. I have never heard this coolness in his voice before and I never want to hear it again. If he just bent down now and took me in his arms—

Then I would succumb, and loathe myself even more.

‘I don’t like being lied to.’ Folding my arms in unashamed hostility, I let this idea settle.

‘I worked late. End of story. I’m sorry I missed your call.’ Surely I am worth more than this. He looks at me with aggression. ‘Can I ask what the hell’s got into you?’

‘For Christ’s sake, just tell me the truth. Don’t you think I deserve it?’ This notion makes him shut his eyes. Perhaps he is hoping I will disappear. Perhaps I am hoping so too. But I am the pig-headed interrogator. ‘Well?’

He looks down and flushes. ‘Yes. But you have to trust me.’ Oh please. I cannot believe that someone I care about — cared about — could allow such verbal dross to pass his lips. How could I ever have — ‘Anyway, I still need to see Bethany.’

‘Why?’ I snap.

He looks at me levelly. ‘Take me to her and you’ll find out.’ I’m trying to work out how I could have misread him so badly. He presented himself as being sexually insecure in the wake of his failed marriage. Was that so I would feel I was doing something for him, too? ‘And where have you been all this time? You’re not the only one who hasn’t been able to get through on the phone,’ he accuses.

Apparently I am a therapist to my marrow because I note, almost with detachment: anger as a mask for guilt . ‘I told you. I was at the park.’

‘At a time like this? At the park doing what?’

I roll back further. ‘Meeting Joy McConey.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ he says, lifting his arms in a gesture of dismay. ‘All on your own? Why on earth — ?’

I flare. ‘Because she asked me to. And I came back in one piece, didn’t I?’ One broken piece. ‘Anyway, she’s harmless.’ Why am I suddenly the one defending my actions?

‘I don’t know why we’re arguing like this,’ he says, finally squatting so that our faces are level. ‘Look, just tell me what Joy said. It’s clearly shaken you up.’

If I can’t tell him, who can I tell? I feel horribly alone. And by extension, weak and unloved. I hate myself for caving in to it. ‘She’s got cancer, and she thinks Bethany visited it on her as some kind of… retribution. For not helping her escape.’

He makes an exasperated noise. ‘Right. All the more reason to prove there’s a scientific explanation for what’s happening with Bethany, rather than some pseudo-religious bullshit. come on,’ he says, jerking his head at the road. ‘Let’s take your car.’

Co-operate with a man who has just betrayed me, and lied to my face, and has as good as admitted it? Help him? But Joy’s bald head and the feel of her sweaty wig in my lap has disturbed me in a way I can’t allow myself to process without coming to some very sick conclusions. It’s eating at me. What if she’s right? Despite my rage at the physicist’s pathetic, clod-hopping, undignified charade, I find myself wanting — vehemently — to find an explanation for all this that does not involve a word as dogmatic and lazy as ‘evil’. What the physicist needs from Bethany, I need too. If only to prove that Joy’s reading of Bethany’s motivation is as categorically wrong as it is possible to be.

The self-harm ward of St Swithin’s hospital is an environment of complex despair, of extreme and conclusive failure. Here is where you end up, locally, if you can’t even get suicide right. Chastened by its significance, and forced into a shaky concord that I can safely bet will not last the hour, the physicist and I enter with due reverence.

In one bed, there’s an old man with a mane of white hair who sports a bloody, stitched-up scar across his throat of the variety that only an old-fashioned razor blade or a Stanley knife, brutally applied, will achieve for you. When we enter he sits up as though expecting visitors, then realises he doesn’t know us and swings his majestic head towards the wall. There’s a teenage girl not much older than Bethany whose skin is the blunt grey you get when you mix black and white paint. I recognise the most visible symptom of irreversible liver damage, caused by an overdose of paraceta-mol — which will prove fatal within a couple of weeks, unless she is offered a fresh organ. If she isn’t, she will turn bright yellow and then she’ll die. Her parents sit at their daughter’s beside with a tearful boy of about thirteen. They are blank with disbelief. Or concentration. If they are praying, it’s for deliverance in the form of another person’s sudden death and a freak stroke of luck with the transplant list. The kid brother is too young for this. They all are. September must be a cruel month because the ward is almost full. In other beds, there are the hunched shapes of people whose eyes are turned inward. The silence of their stoppered, un-screamed pain waltzes around us in invisible currents, fleeting as the shape of wind on water.

The staff nurse is on the phone. ‘I need the defibrillator,’ she says. ‘The new one. Yes. No. Yes. Hold on.’ Registering our presence, she smothers the mouthpiece with her palm and offers us the valiant half-smile of someone doing their best, but basically pissing into the wind. Quickly, I introduce myself as a therapist from Oxsmith, and my companion as a colleague from Kiddup Manor. We’re on a short assessment visit: Bethany’s two psychiatric nurses can take a short break while we’re with her. Perhaps they can be paged, and told to come back in ten minutes? When people are embattled in the way she is, they don’t have time to suspect others of lying, especially from the moral throne of a wheelchair. The nurse nods, sends a page text, and indicates a door at the far end of the ward, before returning to her call. For the first time in my life, as I watch the two Oxsmith nurses leave, I am grateful for the understaffing of the NHS.

Bethany has the room to herself. She lies with her eyes closed, a negligible mound under the bedclothes, a handful of assembled bones hunched oddly in the manner of an archaeological find. Her newly shaved head barely dents the pillow. Her scalp is a ghoulish white, with a webbing of blue veins pulsing at her temples like a flesh-and-blood section of the Underground map.

The physicist locates a plastic chair and takes it round to the other side of the bed. ‘Wheels,’ Bethany croaks, her eyes still closed. Then she opens them blearily, blinks them into focus and flashes an exhausted smile. There’s a whiff of chemicals, ointment, sweat. She glances at the physicist, who is now searching in his briefcase for something. She doesn’t seem to recognise him. ‘I heard the nurse say they’re transferring me. You can’t let them do that. You know what’ll happen. I’ll kill myself. Unless they give me some volts. Hey, you. Will they give me volts at Kiddup?’ she asks the physicist. ‘I need volts.’