Liz Jensen - The Rapture

‘That’s Kristin,’ says Ned. I try to look interested instead of appalled. ‘I’m hoping that the person she’s talking to is Harish Modak.’

Modak: the Planetarian with the hooded eyes. The eco-movement’s é minence grise . ‘The connection being?’ Hearing the engine, Kristin Jons dottir turns and smiles and points at the phone, indicating she will join us when she has finished her call. Ned waves back.

‘His wife Meera was Kristin’s supervisor and mentor. And a mother-figure too, I gather. After Meera died, Kristin stayed in touch with Harish Modak.’ She is wearing a long sweater but you can see the shape of breasts and hips beneath it. ‘Modak is our biggest hope at the moment. If we can get him on board, we’ll get the attention we need.’

‘And if we can’t?’ I can see why the physicist would want her in his arms. What sane man wouldn’t?

‘I’d like to say we’ll find another way. But I can’t.’

I think: I shouldn’t even blame him.

‘So what if Harish Modak can’t be convinced?’ I ask, to distract myself.

‘He has to be,’ says Ned, pointing ahead. ‘Just pull up here. That’s why Frazer’s been in Paris. He took Bethany’s drawings with him, and just about everything else he could lay his hands on. But Modak’s a difficult old bugger. He wants more evidence.’

I stop and turn off the engine. ‘Would he be willing to speak out publicly if he had it?’

Ned stifles another sneeze and opens his door. ‘There’s no telling with Modak. He’s seventy-eight. He doesn’t have kids. And he has no great affection for the species. He thinks we’ve been hard-wired to self-destruct as part of some Gaiac cycle. To him we’re just a species like any other. And species come and go. So if he ends up believing us, he may still decide to do nothing. Just shrug his shoulders, say we’re getting what we deserve, and enjoy the fireworks.’

‘How would you propose to change his mind?’

‘You’re the psychologist,’ he says, undoing his seat belt.

‘Is that the other reason I’m here?’

He flashes me a boyish, winning smile. Even in a foul mood, with my worm wreaking havoc, I can’t dislike him.

He opens the car door. ‘I’ll get your chair.’

The interior of the house exudes the nostalgic, grandmotherly smell of wood-polish. Low ceilings. Darkness, after the blaze of the sun, giving way slowly to a dull ivory gloom as the eyes recalibrate. Thick ceiling beams. From upstairs, the sound of a running shower which abruptly stops.

‘That’ll be Bethany,’ says Ned. ‘Glad to say she’s discovered hygiene. She’ll be down in a minute. This way.’

I follow him along a corridor past an impressive if haphazard collection of art: dark woodcuts, limpid watercolour landscapes, heavier oils, and lavishly detailed diagrams of insects, fish and molluscs. Sometimes you don’t realise how hungry your eyes have been. Perhaps it’s a displacement urge. But I want to gorge.

Ned Rappaport pushes open a dark door to reveal a cavernous living-room-cum-study fetid with age. The blinds are drawn, but through the gloom I can make out a clutter of old sofas and armchairs, a coffee table, a computer desk and a collection of glass cabinets packed with specimens of dried fish, fossils, pickled worms and seashells, all carefully labelled according to genus and era. Someone methodical has been at work in this fusty space, diligently categorising. On two of the walls are shelves full of jars which glow with a pale, ectoplasmic light. Entering the room and drawing closer, I see they’re filled with small green-blue shrimp-like crustaceans with delicate claws, trapped in a liquid suspension.

‘What are they?’ I ask, pulled towards their luminosity like a moth.

With an enormous hand, Ned pulls down a jar and passes it to me. It’s heavy and cool. Clasping it between my palms, I peer in at the pickled, tentacled shape. Around it, small light-filled fragments rise from the bottom and swirl in the cloudy light that emanates from the centre of its body, fading at the delicate extremities.

‘Myodocopia. Ostracod. They’re chemi-luminescent. They release a dye as a mating signal. It can go on emitting light-waves even after the animal has died. Collective name, Luxifer gigans. Japanese soldiers used them in World War Two. They’d collect them on the beaches, then crush them up and smear the stuff on their hands. As an instant light source.’ He takes the jar back and replaces it on the shelf. ‘Now, according to my research, you won’t co-operate fully with anything until you’ve had coffee. I’ll get some in the works.’ He tosses the Haribos on to an overstuffed green sofa, its upholstery burst at one end, and heads for the door.

‘Ned. Wait.’

But it has closed behind him.

After driving for so long I’m aware of the need to shift the weight off my pelvis, so I wheel further into the room, negotiating my way around the cabinets. Near a fireplace stuffed with pine cones and dried birch branches, there’s a tattered, red-striped chaise-longue on whose padded upholstery I can imagine myself getting comfortable. Next to it, a walnut coffee table studded with cup-rings, and opposite, the green sofa and a couple of sagging leather armchairs of the kind favoured by old men’s clubs. I manoeuvre out of my wheelchair and on to the chaise-longue, take off my shoes, heave my legs up, and settle lengthways. Thin stripes of light filter through the slats of the blinds, dancing with dust-motes. My eyes are still adjusting, so I don’t see her come in.

Or hear her. Until—

‘BOO!’

I jump, and stifle a scream.

‘Scared you there, Wheels.’

Wet from the shower, her T-shirt blotched with damp, her scalp speckled with a thin growth of stubble, Bethany Krall resembles a manic voodoo doll. The thermal burn-marks streaking her arms are a virulent purple leached with yellow, her hands a mess of tattered, blistered skin. Spreading her arms wide, she waggles them at me in a vaudeville gesture. They look like terrible, ravaged starfish.

‘Bethany. I’m glad to see you.’

‘Watch out, we’ll be lesbian lovers next.’

She comes towards me, too fast, her arms held aloft, as though wielding huge mechanical pincers. Stranded without my chair, I shift to an upright position.

‘How have you been?’ I ask. I need more space between us. But within seconds, I have it: catching sight of the Haribo packet on the sofa, she leaps over, snatches it up and starts tearing it open with her teeth. I curse myself for not hiding it.

‘How d’you think I’ve been?’ She closes the space again by leaping on to the coffee table where she stands barefoot, like a vicious elf, her green leggings stained with patches of damp where she failed to dry off, a sickly chemical smell seeping out of the sweet-packet in her hand. Fishing inside, she finds a spiral of liquorice, unrolls it clumsily, and dangles the end into her mouth, face tipped back. ‘This place is like a five-star hotel. Want one?’ She is on the cusp of something. Glad to be free. And free to—

‘No thanks. And go easy on the sugar.’ She rolls her eyes.

I shift again. I feel vulnerable without my chair, and regret abandoning it. She’s still standing right over me, flexing her ruined hands.

‘Hey, I’ve got this weird electric feeling in my fingers.’

‘It’s called pain. It’s something normal. Why don’t you take a seat?’

‘Have you felt how close we are to the sea?’ she asks, jumping off the table and moving across to the window. She can’t seem to stay still. ‘It’s breathing at us. Can you feel it? Can you smell it? If you want to survive, you’ve got to go inland.’ She flicks the blinds further open and daylight streams in. Outside, the road, the bright landscape, the greenhouse, the wheeling white blades of the wind turbine. ‘Cabins in the mountains, that’s what we need. I’d go there, except I’d miss the grand finale. I need some volts, Wheels. Can you get me some in this place?’