Liz Jensen - The Rapture

The door opens and Kristin Jons dottir walks in, smiling.

She comes towards me, her hand outstretched. She has one of those faces you’d look at twice without quite knowing why. A broad forehead and calm eyes. A serenity. ‘Gabrielle. I’m so pleased to meet you at last.’

In the next room, Bethany has begun a new tirade.

‘Gabrielle,’ says the physicist, ignoring the noise. ‘This is Kristin.’

Reluctantly, I take the hand she offers, but drop it again as swiftly as possible.

‘Kristin Jons dottir with a soft J, pronounced Y,’ she says, smiling. ‘I am Icelandic.’ There’s a catch to her accent that might make you want to hear more, if you were in love with her. It strikes me that she seems to feel no embarrassment about meeting me. She even looks happy. Because — I flush as it dawns on me — the physicist never even told her we were lovers. Just as he never told Ned. I am no threat to her. And never have been.

‘I looked you up,’ I say. ‘But the soft J wasn’t mentioned.’ If she hears the irony in my voice, she ignores it. She is still smiling, taking me in with her calm, friendly eyes. The world of women is divided between those who can be bothered with make-up, those who can’t, and those who don’t need it in the first place. She’s the last: a fresh-air woman who offsets her carbon emissions.

‘I’ve been looking forward to this. Encounters with art therapists aren’t normally on the agenda of someone specialising in the world fifty-five million years ago.’

What about encounters with your lover’s cast-off girlfriends? I flash the physicist a furious look and he replies with a shrug, as though aggrieved. Ned comes in, looking shaken, greets Kristin, and slumps down gratefully on the sofa opposite me.

‘Whew. Jesus.’

‘All sorted?’ I ask.

‘She scratched me.’ He shows his forearm, striped with beads of blood. ‘So, Kristin. What did Harish Modak say?’

She takes a breath. ‘He’s still reluctant.’

‘I’ll go and ring him,’ says the physicist, rising to his feet. He probably can’t leave fast enough. ‘Ned, perhaps you and Kristin can fill Gabrielle in some more?’

‘Sure thing,’ says Ned, lifting a laptop from the floor and booting it up. ‘Just give me a minute and we’ll do a visual.’

‘So, Kristin. Geology,’ I say, when the door has closed behind the physicist. I pull the thunder egg from its pouch under my seat. I feel like hurling it at her, but instead I hold it out. She takes it, and a smile of great beauty illuminates her face. Her eyes are a delicate greyish green. She weighs it in her hand, then shakes it. ‘Solid. You’ve never been tempted to crack it open?’

‘I’m waiting for the right moment. It’s an heirloom.’

She smiles. ‘Where’s it from?’

‘Nevada.’

‘If it’s fromthe Black Rock Desert, it probably has a lovely opal filling. Some of them are agate. Or a mixture.’ So she can identify a piece of rock as fast as I can diagnose a loony. I hate her with a hate that I fear may be deeper than the deepest love. Handing the thunder egg back, she clasps her other hand over mine, enclosing it around the stone. ‘You’re upset with me. And you’re right to be. I owe you an apology.’

I shrink into myself. She is looking me in the eye with a terrible calmness. With a sharp movement, I tug my hand back. The last thing I’ve expected is candour. It might be more than I can bear. I take an inward breath. I too must be candid.

I say, ‘Yes. I think you do.’

Ned is watching us with interest. A spot of red has appeared on each of Kristin Jons dottir’s cheeks.

‘The way I handled things when you rang me out of the blue like that was unforgivable. I’m afraid I panicked. It never crossed my mind that you would find out about me, and then call. It threw me totally.’

‘I bet it did.’

‘You must be quite a detective.’

‘Not really. I just followed up a few clues.’

Ned interjects anxiously. ‘I told you: none of us felt good about keeping you in the dark.’ Heavily, he rises from the sofa and begins hanging a white bed-sheet from some nails above the fireplace. It seems he is constructing a makeshift whiteboard.

Kristin says, ‘I can only apologise. Again. When Frazer showed me the drawings and told me about Bethany’s ability, I wanted to talk to you. But he insisted that if we were going to intervene with her, you mustn’t be involved, because you’d be compromised professionally.’

‘Intervene is an interesting euphemism for what you did. So tell me. At what point did you decide to kidnap my patient?’ From the corner of my eye I register Ned’s increasing unease.

‘When we learned she was being moved to another facility. Where there’d be no access to her. The fact that she was in a public hospital made it easier.’

She looks down at the dark wood floor with delicacy, as though she is considering whether to polish it, and what product she might use to achieve maximal results. She is so patently unaware of the damage she’s wreaked, and so obviously pained by my hostility, that it almost hurts.

Ned steps back and contemplates his handiwork, then shifts the position of the laptop on the coffee table so that the screen is projecting on to the whiteboard, and adjusts the focus. Kristin Jons dottir leans forward on her chair earnestly, hands clasped together. Despite her good skin and fine, intellectual-looking bones, she probably never spends time gazing into mirrors. She doesn’t need to. She doesn’t need to because she knows who she is. Her sediment has settled, I think enviously. While mine is still moiling about. Perhaps that’s why Frazer Melville found her irresistible. Perhaps it isn’t a rejection of my paraplegia after all. Perhaps it’s a hundred thousand times worse.

‘When I saw Bethany’s drawings I was intrigued by the way in which these images occurred. These projections, these…’ Her Icelandic lilt trails off.

‘Visions,’ I finish. ‘Psychotic visions.’ For some reason I want to call a spade a spade. I want to be blunt and charmless and graceless. Despite the gloom, I can see the red of Kristin Jons-dottir’s cheekbones intensifying. Perhaps it has sunk in that my feelings towards her are neither benign nor sisterly. ‘Bethany says visions. Just so you know.’ How empiricists — and I include myself — disdain anything that smacks of the supernatural, of manipulative TV series, of low-budget believe-it-or-not, of strange-but-true.

‘Sorry to interrupt but I’m going to close the blinds now,’ says Ned quietly. ‘So I can project these images for you. And we can move on a bit?’ We both nod at him distractedly and the room darkens.

She says, ‘It’s not my field, so I can’t presume to comment on the genesis of the, er—’ She elegantly replaces the word ‘visions’ with a hand-gesture indicating something ephemeral being flung outward from the temples. ‘But with respect to the actual depictions—’

‘What Kristin’s getting at is, we need more information in order to locate the site of this possible disaster,’ says Ned, clicking his mouse. ‘Take a look at this.’ One of Bethany’s drawings appears on the sheet. He adjusts the contrast. ‘It’s got a lot of detail on it. Not the kind of detail you’d be aware of. Unless you knew the mechanics of rigs.’ He points to the platform, and the line that works its way down beneath the sea. ‘Images like this are what make us concerned that she’s seen the beginnings of a submarine landslide triggered by activity at one of the rigs. But we don’t know which one. They’re all fairly distinctive.’ He shoots me an amused glance. ‘The people who discover the sites are allowed to christen them, so they’ve mostly got quite fanciful names.’