Liz Jensen - The Rapture

‘So now you can announce the press conference?’

‘Yes. We’re doing a big stunt to publicise it. Keep an eye on the news. By the way, the forecast says we’re in for thunderstorms. They’ll sweep across northern Britain this afternoon, and move south. Can you pass me to Frazer? I need to run something past him.’

Interesting, how easily I can do that now that I know she is not, and has never been, my sex rival. Now that I am free to like and admire her, I find that I do. Intensely. I hand over the phone and she and Frazer Melville begin a technical conversation about the series of graphs that have just appeared on his laptop. While they speak, I pull my wheelchair across and transfer into it. I have not seen Bethany since she ran out of the lake, but if I am to be in any way professional, I must talk to her.

I only wish I felt readier.

When Frazer Melville finishes on the phone, I say, ‘I’d better talk to Bethany. Alone.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I have to.’

‘I’ll make some tea, and get her to come down.’

Ten minutes later Bethany, engulfed in the tartan bathrobe, has flung herself on the sofa opposite me. She’s scowling.

‘I accept your apology,’ I say.

‘I didn’t apologise.’

‘I know. So I offered it on your behalf, and then I accepted it on mine.’

‘How the fuck does that work?’

‘Magic. Don’t knock it.’

‘Harish Modak calls me Miss Krall.’

‘And you like the sound of that?’ She nods. ‘In that case you can stop calling me Wheels and call me Gabrielle. Deal, Miss Krall?’

She blinks, considering, but doesn’t speak. Frazer Melville enters with two cups of tea and places them on the table between us. ‘Lapsang souchong,’ he announces. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ He closes the door quietly behind him.

There is a silence. Then Bethany says, ‘She used to do that.’

‘Who used to do what?’

‘My mum. She’d bring me a cup of tea.’

I am immediately alert. I misjudged her mood. This is the first time she has mentioned her mother unprompted. She’s on the brink of something.

‘She brought you cups of tea, but what kind of person was she?’ She shrugs and looks away. ‘Something went very wrong between you. What was it like, that evening?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How can’t you know?’

‘You can forget stuff.’

‘Sometimes you need to forget. Because it can make things easier. Like feeling that you’re dead. But the ECT can bring memories to the surface. Perhaps that’s what’s happening. You had a big dose.’

She reaches to bury her fingers in the rug and flexes them. I think of the photo of the Krall family: the handsome father; the girl with a broad smile and braces on her teeth; the mother, a bloodless, ineffectual mouse. When she speaks, her voice is barely audible, carried on her breath like an exhalation.

‘I was never good enough for them.’

‘In what way?’

‘Even when I believed in God, the Bible, Genesis, the whole bag of shit, I wasn’t good enough. So I tried being bad.’

‘Sex?’ I ask, remembering the case-notes. A boy at school. But I feel there’s more, something bigger and more fundamental.

‘Have you ever tried burning a book?’

‘No. How do you go about it?’

‘You have to pour white spirit on it first.’

‘And why would you want to burn a book?’

‘Because it’s full of shit. Right from the beginning.’

She looks at the fresh bandages that Frazer Melville has wrapped around her hands, having swabbed them with antiseptic. ‘The beginning is Genesis. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep . It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful shit. And they expect you to go on believing it even when you know, you know—’ She stops. She stares out of the window at the turbine wheeling its arc, the tilt of birds in the far distance. To migrate or not migrate? More and more, they are having trouble deciding. How small Bethany looks in her big stupid tartan bathrobe. It swallows her up. I reach under my seat for my thunder egg and hold it out to her.

‘This is millions of years old. From the time before humans, before dinosaurs. Before fossils, before life. What happens to someone who burns a Bible because they think Genesis is full of shit ?’

She takes the thunder egg and cradles it in her scabby, wrecked hands. ‘The big bang.’

‘That sounds more like the beginning of something than the end.’

‘It’s both.’

‘What happens to Bethany, during the big bang?’

When she starts talking it comes in a flood that catches me unawares.

‘She gets tied to the stairs. They try to get the Devil out of her and then they tape up her mouth so the Devil can’t curse them and they keep shaking her but the Devil won’t come out so they tie her up and the next morning the Devil’s still there so they shake her some more and that goes on for three days and they won’t let her eat or sleep and she’s tied up the whole time and the Devil won’t come out.’ She stops abruptly and turns the thunder egg in her palms. I’m aware of the grandfather clock ticking. Of the sky outside darkening to a bruised grey. Of birdsong and the taste of whisky in my mouth.

I say, ‘So that night, when your father was away, it was just you and your mother.’

‘I’d got one hand free. But as soon as I get the other one loose she comes in from the kitchen and starts screaming at me. I run for the door but I can’t do it, I’m dizzy. She stops me and she’s going on about the Devil and she won’t shut up, and she blocks the door, she won’t let me past, and then she grabs me by the hair and starts shaking me and screaming at me that I’m an ungrateful evil freak and why don’t I just die. I’m on the floor, doubled up. There’s a screwdriver just lying there. Like it’s waiting for one of us to use it.’ She laughs. ‘Like God put it there.’

I nod. ‘Go on.’

‘So I grab it and jam it into her.’ I try not to picture it. And fail. ‘In her throat. But it doesn’t stop her. She won’t let go of me. So I jam it into her again. When she falls down it’s easier. I just hold her down and keep shoving it into her. Everywhere. And it feels so fucking good.’

Her face has gained colour, as though ignited by the memory. Then it drains away as quickly as it came and she stares at her hands. There is another long silence, yawning out into the space between us. A bird screeches. Then she turns to face me, her eyes vivid with pain.

I roll closer. ‘Your mother’s job was to protect you. That’s what parents are supposed to do. What they did to you was wrong.’ I remember Leonard Krall’s frank, open-faced conviction. Terrible things happen. And God seems to let them happen… Things that don’t make sense to us make sense to Him . Does torturing your own daughter make sense to God? Somehow, Leonard Krall and his wife Karen must have convinced themselves it did. ‘If someone’s done something monstrous to you, I can understand how you’d feel that the rules had changed.’ My heart is hammering. If Karen Krall were standing in front of me now, perhaps I’d want to kill her myself.

‘That’s what happened,’ she says. ‘The rules changed.’

She slumps back in the sofa. Time and thought settle into a solid mass within me, condensing like a cast. Her face is wet. I reach out and dab it with a tissue. She winces, but doesn’t resist.

‘Gabrielle.’ She is whispering, as though she fears someone is listening. ‘I saw us.’

It’s the first time she has used my name. But her voice is faint, like distant wind receding to silence. I wait. There are so many things she could mean. I wait a long time. ‘I saw us. I saw you and me.’