Liz Jensen - The Rapture

By the time he returns, fifteen minutes later, I have settled on the sofa with a blanket over me. Like a coward, I am faking sleep because I cannot face him. I’m too tired and too forlorn and I know that the conversation we will have will make me feel even worse than I already do. I’m aware of him coming in, approaching the sofa and squatting next to me. I stay immobile. He kisses my forehead and I feel a huge wave of sadness.

He whispers, ‘Gabrielle. I know you’re awake. Please stop being angry. You have to forgive me. We have to talk again. We have to move on.’

But I don’t shift.

I long for him to kiss me again, to touch me. But he doesn’t.

Instead, he sits a little longer, then gets heavily to his feet, and leaves the room. What is he feeling? Pity, guilt, remorse?

A moment later I hear his tread on the stairs and then the murmur of him talking on the phone. He must miss her, because it’s a long conversation.

Unlike lovers who betray, those who die remain forever constant. If I could erect a No Trespassing notice to prevent Alex creeping into my dreams at night, I would do it. Whenever he infiltrates, I awake with reluctance, knowing that surviving the day ahead will require an act of faith, a pledge to optimism that I will have trouble summoning. Another hour’s sleep and my perspective might change, but now the dream — an unsettling one in which Alex twisted my hair into bewildering shapes — is too recent for that to be an option. And reality is too penetrating.

‘Come on, Wheels. Let me show you the lake.’ She’s flapping a white towel in my face. Through the blinds, there is already a striped glow of light. Eight o’clock, at a guess. ‘Come on! Get moving! Let’s get some air!’

The day stretches ahead: a day of stress, of waiting for the phone to ring, of avoiding the physicist.

‘Give me five minutes,’ I say, and pull on a T-shirt.

Wheelchairs and mud do not get along well, but there’s a concrete walkway that takes me close to a waterline fringed with reeds. Bethany has run on ahead and is stripping off.

‘What are you doing? Bethany, you’ll freeze!’

‘It’s great!’ she yells, balling up her towel and flinging it at me.

But I understand her urge because suddenly, with a rush of blood to the head, I share it. I, too, would love to strip off my clothes and swim. The sunrise is a delicate tangerine, the air so warm it could still be August. There’s a faint breeze. Gulls and starlings wheel above us and hop about in the mulch. Just a few years ago, being able to swim outdoors in Britain in October would have seemed as outlandish as the arrival of seahorse colonies in the Thames or commercial papaya orchards in Kent. Now, warm autumns are just another in a long list of pill-sweeteners as we descend into the ninth circle.

Bethany has hurled her clothes on to the narrow sloping beach. Naked, she is a pitiful amalgam of skin and bone: thin ribcage, negligible breasts, concave stomach, gaunt thighs studded and criss-crossed with the scars of cuts and cigarette burns, a fuzz of dark hair between. She has abandoned her bandages but the wounds on her hands and arms are still raw.

‘Be careful!’ I call out, but she has plunged into the lake and is prancing about in the shimmering water, oblivious. If it is stinging her, and freezing cold, she doesn’t let it show.

‘Come on in!’ she screams, ecstatic. ‘This is fucking amazing!’

My first instinct is the sane one: to refuse. There are no nurses to restrain Bethany should she attack me, and leaving my chair requires a level of confidence I don’t feel. But having chosen to enter a territory with no rules, I am perversely tempted. I have missed the physical routine of my daily swims: my muscles yearn for movement, for something that edges towards punishment, and the serotonin rush that follows. I’m more mobile and free in the water than anywhere else. And it’s not far to the edge.

Sometimes I think too much. Today I won’t. I lower myself out of my chair and shuffle a few metres along the cool mud to get closer to the gap in the reeds where Bethany entered the water. Near the lake’s edge I discard my skirt, keeping just my T-shirt and knickers. The compressed soil is cold and firm against my palms. When the slope sharpens, I turn sideways and roll, using gravity to propel me. It’s an unexpected, stolen and absurdly sensual feeling. In this moment, the refusal of my legs to cooperate with the rest of my body is forgiven. Irrelevant, even. If the slope were longer, I could roll for ever. I could roll to the edge of the world. When I reach the scummy froth I am shocked by the slap of cold, but don’t let my momentum slow, merging into its chilly suck. Once submerged, I paddle a little way out, then float on my back, working my arms, savouring the harsh bliss of the water. Bethany stands chest-deep, facing the horizon, her arms held high above her, shivering and swaying.

‘And I stood upon the sand, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea,’ she shrieks out to the sky. A seagull swoops past and disappears towards a hulked mass of trees in the far distance. ‘Having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy!’

The lake is soft and benign as amniotic fluid, the creeping daylight seductive as a whisper. The world could amlost feel like a good place. Unexpectedly, the sight of Bethany cavorting in the ripples with the giant wind turbine rotating on the hill beyond provokes a strange, painful wash of tenderness.

You could care about her, and the world we live in.

Perhaps you already do.

I close my eyes and float. After a while Bethany quietens down, bored with herself, and I listen to the sound of birdsong and the rustle of the wind in the reeds. In the distance, a tractor starts up. It’s October 11th, and I would feel anxious, were it not for a vague but persistent feeling that Bethany has got it wrong, and that whatever happens tomorrow — and I do not doubt that something will — cannot affect us here. It’s too unimaginable. This country, with its patchworked farmland, its hills and cliffs and valleys and gorges, its woodlands of oak and birch and beech and pine, its rivers and cattle pastures and bright swathes of hemp and rape: there is no room for catastrophes in such a world. They cannot gain entry.

Dr Sulieman would have a thing or two to say about such fantasies of denial.

Lost in them, I don’t hear Bethany’s approach.

When she speaks, teeth chattering, her voice is right in my ear.

‘I suppose Frazer’ll want to fuck you again, now Kristin’s gone.’ Her tone is conversational. She could be commenting on the weather. I don’t want to open my eyes, but I must, if I am to face whatever comes next. She’s treading water next to me, with only her head visible. On top of it, perched like a fright wig, is a filthy clump of chickweed. ‘So are you going to let him? I guess you can’t be choosy.’ I start working my arms, heading for the lake’s edge. But she doesn’t let up. ‘He’s into tits, isn’t he? Yours are better than Kristin’s, so you’ve got that going for you, Wheels. Shame about the rest.’ I must get away. Not just from Bethany (did I catch myself, just seconds ago, caring about her?)but from everything here. This is no place for an ixgoy. I’ll go back to Hadport, explain the whole thing to Kavanagh. ‘Hey, you didn’t really think Frazer was fucking you for your sake, did you? You didn’t think he was in love with you?’ My arms are aching now, and the chill has penetrated my bones. I battle towards the shore, gulping in water. ‘Why would anyone want to fuck a spaz? I told you!’ she yells. ‘He’s fucking Kristin! You know it! Stop pretending you don’t!’

If I drowned now, I wouldn’t care.