Liz Jensen: The Rapture

‘In the grounds.’ Just us and five male nurses with shaved heads who pump iron.

A smile is quirking the corners of her mouth. ‘Yes, you would need some physical protection. With my record of violence? Which you’ve just read about in my file? I’ve read about it too. And seen the pictures. Gory stuff. Hey, I’d be afraid of me.’

I wait a beat. But she’s used to that: no dice. ‘Are there ways you are afraid of you, Bethany? Having looked at those pictures?’

Her mother’s desecrated face barges into my mind like a crude shout.

‘You must feel, like, totally naked in that wheelchair. I mean, someone could just tip you out of it. You’d be like a beetle stuck upside down.’ She contemplates the image for a moment. My heart-rate has gone up and I’m aware of blinking more than I should. Sweat pricks in my armpits. She has pinpointed a fear, and she knows it. ‘But I’m interested in this walking thing. I mean, how would it work? Seeing as you seem to be, excuse me for pointing it out, but totally fucking disabled , lower-limb wise? Do I push you in that thing?’

‘No need. I wheel myself. You learn a lot in spaz rehab,’ I say, defusing the word and tweaking a tiny smile out of her. I’ve had this chair eighteen months, and my hands have transmogrified into tools, accessories of meat and bone, the skin of the heel calloused despite the gloves. ‘So how would you feel about a fresh-air session?’

‘How would I feel about it?’ she repeats slowly. I immediately regret my choice of phrase. ‘How would that make you feel , Bethany? Bethany, in terms of feelings , what’s going on at the moment, inside? That’s the bottom line for you, right? Look at you. Babble babble babble. You’re fucking tragic. I can’t believe they let you work here. Don’t they vet you guys? Filter out the lame ones? Whoops — no pun intended. But zero out of ten. And you’ve got there in record time. I appoint you babble champion of Oxsmith! ’

I gaze out at the slowly spinning turbines.

No: I should not be here. And Bethany Krall has swiftly spotted it.

In rehab, they lectured you on the importance of establishing a healthy routine. Hadport Lido opens at seven. In the mornings, I’ll often spend an hour there, hoisting myself into the shallow end and doing twenty tepid laps amid the drowned insects. I have come to know the staff there by name: Goran, Chloe, Vishnu, tanned and healthy and sparkle-eyed. They’ll say hi, and I’ll say hi back. To them, I am the nice lady they feel sorry for, and admire for her ‘courage’ — as if she has any choice in the matter. I overheard them once, evoking the pathos of the nice lady’s plight, noting her attractiveness, and speculating about her age. The consensus was that the nice lady was ‘late twenties’ — a flattering assessment for a 35-year-old. The nice lady, who is not really a nice lady at all, swam on. Her arm muscles, already well honed by the wheelchair, have developed into features to die for. Want them ? she feels like asking whenever she receives compliments from well-meaning people, the kind of people who drive her even more insane than she already is. I’ll swap them for your legs.

Swimming is both good and bad for rage. It can help to dissipate it, but it can also focus and refine it. I was told back in London that if I wanted to work at a senior level again, I’d need to deal with my ‘issues’. That, said my employers, would involve more intensive therapy, plus a written self-assessment and analysis. My reaction, when they told me this in the meeting — a warm afternoon, the sun just sinking behind the old Battersea Power Station — was what we in the business call ‘inappropriate’.

‘You’re talking to a trained psychologist, for fuck’s sake!’ I said.

Or did I shriek?

Yes, I must admit I shrieked. Shrieking is both deeply feminine and deeply unfeminine at the same time. When women imitate pressure cookers, they show their worst selves, the side that men call either ‘passionate’ or ‘mad’, depending on whether or not good looks are involved.

‘Don’t patronise me with lectures about coming to terms with the new reality: I live with it every day! I am the new reality!’

Nor is shrieking a good way to communicate in a psychiatric establishment, if you are not an inmate, and indeed, if you have been until now classified among the sane, and in charge of others less fortunate.

‘Gabrielle, I have enormous sympathy and respect for you, and you have been through what no person should go through. With all your… terrible losses. But you work in the field,’ said Dr Sulieman when the members of the committee had trooped out, exchanging distressed glances. ‘See it from an employer’s point of view.’

If my legs worked, I’d have kicked him. Violent urges came to me very readily back then.

The ‘negative attitude’ I had towards my diminished status as a human being after my accident was unfortunately a ‘significant problem’. As Sulieman spoke, I inspected the print on the wall behind him, the image he had chosen as his own personalised backdrop: Monet’s lily pond, with its hypnotic plays of light, its strangely hot greens and blues. ‘A problem which, until it’s resolved, means we are unable to accept you back as a therapist at the present time.’ He’s into the classics, so where’s Kandinsky? I wondered. Where’s Egon Schiele? Where’s van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, where’s Rothko, where’s The Scream?

I’d just spent an hour with my physiotherapist, learning how to hit people where it hurt. A karate chop to the balls. A squirt of vinegar in the eyes. A flung object, aimed at the head. Cripple power. A flicker of pity from my boss, and that expensive Venetian paperweight on his desk — a whirling rhapsody of trapped bubbles and squirls — would make contact with his skull.

‘I need to work, Omar. If you can’t take me back, then find me somewhere else.’

‘That’s not the best thing for you, Gabrielle. Or the people you’re helping.’

‘Look at this chair. I’m welded to it for ever. I’ll probably never have another relationship. Or children. Call me melodramatic, but the fact is, every night I lie in bed and hear the clang of doors closing on my future. So if I can’t do the thing I know how to do, and still can do, the thing you helped train me in, the thing I’m good at by all accounts, how can I even be me? If you can answer that question for me, bravo. Because I can’t. If I can’t work, I’m done for.’

When a job came up at Oxsmith, he recommended me. Then, three months later, I heard that he was dead. Good people drop like flies, I thought. And I never thanked him the way I should have.

Water under the bridge.

In the art studio, Rafik’s pager has registered the arrival of a text which he now seems intent on answering. Meanwhile Bethany has switched tack. ‘I suppose you could be something the drugs do,’ she’s saying dreamily. ‘Something in my head. That happens. I’ve still got a load of psychotropic toxins in my bloodstream, they’ll never leave my body. Like saccharine. Did you know that saccharine just builds up for ever in your system?’ The notion that I might be a hallucination doesn’t seem alarming to her. In this moment, it quite appeals to me too. ‘So what do I call my new saviour? Spaz? Saint Gabrielle?’

‘Gabrielle’s fine.’

She thinks for a moment. ‘Wheels.’

‘I’d prefer Gabrielle,’ I say, swivelling again to assess her profile. She closes her eyes. A moment passes.

‘You’re quite a fish , aren’t you?’ she says, her eyes opening again in unexpected delight. Dark, like night-pools. ‘Quite a mermaid . Always in the water! Up and down you go! You like getting out of that chair, don’t you? It’s like being freed from your cage!’ She beams, as if she has solved a puzzle in record time.