Liz Jensen - The Rapture

Even with the door opened wide, the sepulchre is dark, its chill that of a meat-freezer. Above the pulpit, the stained-glass windows hum with complex ecclesiastical matrices of colour divided and subdivided by black lead. On one wall, there’s a mural depicting Christ pinioned to the cross, head to one side, ribs jutting, speared wound gushing blood, crowds surging around. Shivering, I rummage in my purse and drop some coins into the collection box, inhaling the wax-and-saltpetre mustiness that pervades all houses of God measuring more than a thousand square metres. They’re raising money for drought-struck Africa because fresh water has been lost from a third of the Earth’s surface. Can this be true? Lost since when? If I were a believer I would pray and hunt for a votary candle. Instead, I scrutinise the stained glass in an attempt to decipher a coherent theme linking the panels, then at a quarter to ten, I spin back out into sunshine so fierce the colours are bleached clean away, leaving only glitter-edged shapes. Back at the car, I’m dumping my folded wheelchair on the passenger seat when the black bird-dream from last night drifts into my head, perhaps summoned by the lead interstices of the church’s stained glass. Ravens? Crows?

I feel a sudden, unexpected grin split my face. Praise be to the subconscious. Wheatfield with Crows . By WG.

I switch on the car radio, wondering if there might be more news about Bethany. Instead I get a phone-in about pensions, a subject the nation’s over-fifties are increasingly obsessed with. It’s one of those programmes where people ‘from all walks of life’ but all, coincidentally, middle class, recount their fiscal woes in a polite but subtly aggressive whine. Just as a financial expert is launching into an analysis of buy-back mortgages, the door of the newsagent’s opposite opens to disgorge a man in baggy jeans and a red-and-black T-shirt splatted with a cartoon tarantula, carrying a bumper pack of Haribos. He crosses the road, scans the car park and then heads for where I’m parked, his free hand raised in the casual greeting of an old mate. He’s mid-thirties, with a tumble of unkempt black hair and wraparound shades. He could be a former skateboarder, or the drummer in a band that has not yet lost hope. I switch off the radio and lower my window.

‘Gabrielle Fox?’ he asks. I nod. ‘Then I’ll join you in the car if I may.’ Whatever the circumstances, an Antipodean accent never fails to make me smile.

‘Be my guest. Whoever you are. You’ll have to move my chair.’

He goes round to the passenger door, opens it, flings the Haribos carelessly on to my lap, and with one hand swings the wheelchair on to the back seat, then settles next to me and fastens his belt. ‘I hope these aren’t for me,’ I tell him. ‘Because I don’t like liquorice. My nephews always fight over the jelly eggs.’

‘They’re for Bethany. She likes the black shoestrings. I’m Ned Rappaport. I’m a climatologist.’

That invisible question mark at the end of the sentence: so full of optimism. We shake hands. His grip is firm, his forearm bronzed, his muscles toned. Further up his arm, below his sleeve, there is a tattoo of a small lizard. In the days before female life died in me, this configuration of characteristics might have given me an interesting frisson.

‘Australian?’

‘From Brisbane originally. Went to uni there.’ Where between seminars he surely surfed and smoked weed. ‘But I’ve lived in the US mostly, working for the NOAA.’

‘Which is known to the uneducated as?’

‘The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I quit a few years back. Got fed up after spending fifteen years modelling climate disaster scenarios and making recommendations that no one ever listened to. Went freelance after Hurricane Valentine. Let’s go for a drive. Left at the exit, then first right.’ He sneezes suddenly. ‘Sorry. Hay fever.’ So. Human after all.

‘How’s Bethany?’ I ask, turning on the ignition and pulling out. The agitation has been building despite my efforts to quell it. Anything could be happening in that head of hers, after two years cooped up in Oxsmith. How could a Brisbanian climatologist with a tattoo on his biceps be expected to spot the warning signs?

‘Well, her hands and arms are on the mend. I’ve been changing the dressings every day. And she’s mad as a box of frogs. But no surprises there, right?’

‘Energy levels?’

‘Oh, she’s up in the stratosphere.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ I say, nodding at the Haribos. ‘Is someone with her at all times?’

‘More or less. Follow the signs for the ring-road. She has the run of the house but we keep the doors locked at night just in case. And I’ve killed the sockets in her room. To be honest, she’s been getting pretty out of control. Keeps demanding volts. Not that I know what’s normal, when it comes to schizos. You’ll see for yourself in a couple of hours’ time, if there’s not too much traffic. We’re hoping you’ll exert a calming influence.’

I tighten my grip on the wheel as I assess what he has said. ‘So the reason I was contacted is that you can’t handle her?’

His profile changes shape. ‘I was given the impression you’d be willing to be part of this. Am I wrong?’ His concern sounds genuine.

‘I never agreed to being kept in the dark.’

A sheepish expression takes hold. ‘I know. I’m sorry. But we discussed it. No one was happy about it, but the consensus was, it was necessary.’

‘A consensus can be an alienating thing, if you’re excluded. Which I was. Who’s we?’

‘Me, Frazer and Kristin Jons dottir. She’s the—’

‘I know who she is,’ I interrupt, more sharply than is called for. ‘I looked her up.’

He eyes me sideways. ‘Frazer figured that if you knew we were taking Bethany, you’d have objected. Or if you’d agreed, you’d have been compromised. If Bethany’s right, there are a lot of lives at stake.’

After Istanbul, I cannot attempt to dispute that. Or diminish the moral implications. So when something selfish and rebellious stirs inside me, I suffocate it with difficulty and a certain bitterness. I concentrate on the road.

‘Is everything OK?’

‘Just about as OK as it can be, considering the circumstances under which we meet,’ I say lightly, and flash him a Cinnamon Kiss smile, the kind air hostesses use for passengers who hand them a used sick-bag. ‘So were you the kidnapper, or did you subcontract?’

‘Guilty. But there was no coercion involved. She didn’t object. On the contrary.’

I can see how being abducted by a disaster geek who wears comedy T-shirts and takes sugar orders might be Bethany’s dream come true. Or one of them.

‘So how did you get involved in all this?’

‘Frazer and I go way back. He did a stint at the NOAA.’

Which he perhaps told me about. And which I perhaps forgot. ‘So where is he now?’ The physicist: the bruise I keep pressing. Even though it hurts. Because it hurts.

‘He stopped off in Paris, on his way back from Bangkok. He phoned Kristin last night.’ He glances at his watch. ‘He should be on his way.’

I am cudgelled by jealousy. The physicist called Kristin Jons-dottir rather than me. Of course he did. Because she’s the one he’s fucking, and he was using me all along, and now he is using me again, and like a sucker, I am expected to collude — for the sake of a world I care about less and less the more I know it.

Behind my ribs, a huge, toxic worm begins to writhe.

We drive on for fifteen minutes in silence.

‘Do you think the concept of putting other people first is overrated?’ I ask eventually. Being an idealist, he probably imagines I am thinking about all those whose lives will be shattered by the catastrophe that Bethany sees flickering on the horizon like a demented mirage. But he doesn’t know about the contortions of my inner worm. I am thinking of someone I know intimately: me. With particular regard to a certain physicist who has so crushed my morale that I fear I will never think straight again. I am thinking of lost love and misplaced devotion and absent wheelchair ramps in waterlogged wildernesses, of dashed hope and practicalities and the helplessness of being left alone with two useless legs in a tunnel with no light at the end.