Liz Jensen - The Rapture

‘So what now?’ I ask.

‘I spoke to Harish Modak,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘He still doesn’t share our sense of urgency. But I persuaded him to travel over from Paris tonight.’ He stops, and glances at Kristin. She nods her head. There’s more. Something she knows about, which neither of them is keen on conveying. ‘He’s coming on the understanding that we’ll have something new to show him by then. If not proof, then a compelling piece of supporting evidence.’

‘Why on earth did you say that when you can’t guarantee it?’ I’m baffled. Kristin gives me a strange, supplicant look.

‘Because it was all I could come up with. I was hoping that with your help, Bethany might be able to remember some more.’

Sharply, it becomes clear. ‘So this is where I come in, right? This is why I’m here?’

‘Gabrielle,’ says Kristin gently, ‘we do need your help. You have already gone further than anyone could have expected in this. But we can’t do this without you.’

I sigh, sickened. ‘If we want more information from Bethany, she has to have more ECT. Do you realise that? It’s the only way.’

There is a silence. Yes, they do realise.

‘It’s what she’s been telling us,’ confirms Kristin quietly. ‘It’s what seems to work.’

‘And I have to supervise it,’ I continue, thinking aloud. ‘And if it goes wrong I take responsibility.’

The physicist reaches out and rests his hand on mine and gives it a small squeeze. If I had any pride left I would shake it off but I need his touch. I can feel its heat. I can remember the time when a gesture like that would have flooded me with love. Now I just want to cry. He says softly, ‘You remember how we felt after Istanbul. That night, when we heard the news and—’

No. I don’t want to.

My phone rings. I should leave it — it’s not the moment — but I am relieved to have a distraction, an excuse to emerge. I flick it open — and instantly regret doing so.

‘Detective Kavanagh here. Where are you exactly, Miss Fox?’

‘At home,’ I lie quickly. A reflex. But the wrong one. ‘Let me call you right back,’ I say, thinking wildly of ways to right what I’ve just said, and signalling to Ned that I’ve been caught unawares. But he is shaking his head. It’s too late. I have blown it.

‘No need for that,’ says Kavanagh evenly. ‘If you’re at home, you can just open the door. I’m right outside. I’ve been ringing the bell. But no joy. I’m surprised to hear you’re in there, to be honest. Because there’s no sign of your car out here.’ I say nothing. ‘Have you heard of the term perverting the course of justice, Miss Fox? A dangerous minor’s been abducted. Bethany Krall is a known killer. That’s quite heavy stuff. I don’t know what kind of disabled facilities they have in a women’s prison like Holloway. But you can be sure there will be, er, art therapy . So if you’d care to—’

But he doesn’t get any further because I’ve shut my phone and turned it off.

‘Well, forget about going back to Hadport tonight,’ says Ned. ‘You’ve just become a criminal.’

The three of them are staring at me. From the next room comes the theme tune of Friends . I am a natural, deep-rooted pessimist, but somewhere along the way I trained myself in optimism, learning reflexes which I incorporated, as the years went by, until positive thinking came to dominate my mental landscape like an enforced code of conduct. But the bizarre rush of relief that I am feeling in the wake of Kavanagh’s call does not come from that. It’s not manufactured. Despite the renewed misery I have encountered here, it’s real. And I must trust it. I must trust it because perhaps, all along, I’ve had an intuition that this moment would come. A stowaway, furtive knowledge of where I have been headed, without knowing it, from the day I arrived at Oxsmith to meet Bethany Krall, from the evening a certain physicist and I fled the Armada to order poppadums in an Indian restaurant, from the afternoon he lit the bulb inside Bethany’s short-lived globe and the planet was illuminated, from the day Christ the Redeemer fell and Istanbul shuddered to dust, from the moment Kristin Jons dottir appeared on my computer screen with her red woolly hat and her chunk of flaming ice.

‘You questioned your involvement earlier,’ says Ned. ‘But given the sudden change in your legal status…’

I look at him, and at Frazer Melville and his lover. I try to think of the world. Its innocence. The children who will die. But for now, suddenly, all I can think of is me. My pain, my jealousy, my double loss of womanhood. My lack of any future.

I am not ready for any of this. I will never be ready.

If I shut my eyes tight, I can blot it all out.

‘Problem sorted,’ announces Bethany, striding in barefoot. She is brandishing a red plastic bucket. ‘Cereal, milk, one apple, an omelette and fifteen Haribos, thank you for those, Ned. Puked up the lot in three goes. So now my stomach’s empty for the anaesthetic and Wheels here has one less thing to fret about. Care to inspect?’

We don’t get the choice. Having done our duty, Ned and I exchange a glance which turns into a smile. You can’t help admiring Bethany’s commitment to her fix.

If I’d been told a few weeks ago that I would find myself in a creaking farmhouse unpacking medical paraphernalia with an Australian climatologist in a room where illegal electroconvulsive therapy would be shortly performed on a matricidal teenager I was suspected of abducting, I’d have had trouble believing it. But here I am with Ned Rappaport, in a small damp parlour, surrounded by boxes and bubble wrap. Before dark descended, I looked outside at an apple tree, its fruit littered across an overgrown meadow shaking with teasel-brushes and the flat shimmering coins of dried honesty, and I thought of my father’s garden, and then my father, and missed him so fiercely that I was ready to leave on the spot, drive to the care home, haul him out and bring him here, for no other reason than that I am the flesh of his flesh and I am lonely. The ECT machine is a small box similar to the one Dr Ehmet used at Oxsmith. Under my instructions, Ned has made up a low sofa as a bed.

‘Thank you Bethany,’ I tell her, nodding at the bucket. ‘Now please go and empty it. Preferably down a toilet rather than over someone’s head. We’ll call you back downstairs when we’re ready.’

Apart from worrying about Bethany’s food intake, a problem now neatly resolved, my main activity over the past couple of hours has been avoidance of the physicist. Savouring the relief and the pain of his absence, I gaze out of the window.

Autumn Evening with Approaching Headlights.

‘That,’ says Ned, ‘will be the man.’

When we reach the front door, a tall skinny man in jeans is being greeted by a reluctant-looking Kristin Jons dottir and the physicist, whose eye I still refuse to meet.

‘Let’s not bother with names,’ says Ned quickly. ‘Less grief all round.’

The anaesthetist looks young enough to be straight out of medical school. His long pale hair is parted in the middle and hangs to his shoulders in a way that exaggerates his narrow, pencilled features, and his skin bears the sullen pallor of long hours exposed to fluorescents and halogens. There’s a vulnerability about him that’s familiar but which I can’t immediately place. He tweaks his mouth in a generalised hello. There’s a subdued atmosphere. Kristin, in particular, looks as though she would rather be anywhere — perhaps at the bottom of the sea with her frozen ice molecules — than here. I almost pity her. In an upstairs room, a clock chimes six.