Liz Jensen - The Rapture

‘Where would we be without al-Qaeda?’ says Frazer Melville.

Axelsen furrows his brow. ‘I’m not denying accidents do sometimes happen on these rigs, it’s a risk that comes with the territory. But we have all the security systems in place and a system of checks and balances to ensure that…’

‘Blah blah,’ says Bethany, stretching theatrically. She seems to have made a dramatic recovery, but I am still anxious about her state of mind. She wanders over to the fridge and flings the door open wide. ‘I’m hungry. I’m going to make an omelette,’ she announces, dropping the duvet to the floor and reaching for a pack of eggs.

‘Isn’t methane one of the most dangerous greenhouse gases?’ the anchorman is asking.

‘Sure, if it’s not handled correctly,’ responds Axelsen. ‘But we’re extracting the hydrates under controlled conditions, liquefying the gas on the seabed and piping it up. I emphasise that we have nothing to hide. Come and see for yourselves. We’re inviting members of the media here today, to take a look.’

While I zap channels, Bethany swiftly cracks six eggs into a huge Pyrex bowl, flinging the shells into the sink. On CNN, a marine biologist has appeared, with the verdict that the ‘organic dye’ is sea-water in which the ground-up remnants of the phosphorescent crustacean Luxifer gigans are suspended. ‘It may have been spread from a vehicle on the ice cap itself, or offloaded from a helicopter on a carefully configured flight-path.’ An Arctic pilot and a cartographer appear in the studio to discuss the logistics of the airdrop method. I flick over to Euronews, where a weather map shows storms heading for Britain. Bethany pours an alarming amount of salt into her egg mixture and starts whisking manically.

‘Our last normal hours on Earth,’ she says, lighting the gas. She scoops up a hunk of butter with her bandaged fingers and flings it in the pan. When it starts to sizzle, she sloshes in the beaten egg.

‘I’d dispute the word normal. But what do you mean, hours?’

‘It might all happen sooner.’ She sounds hopeful. She fishes two nectarines from the fruit bowl and begins to juggle them. ‘The smell’s getting stronger. I can feel it coming. Maybe it’s all happening sooner than I thought. I’m getting headaches.’ She tosses the nectarines back in the bowl, grabs the remote control and starts zapping. ‘Hey, The Simpsons!’ Lisa and Bart are in a tent. A monster appears. Marge scolds it and tells it to go away. It obeys. ‘Maybe it’ll even hit this afternoon. Can’t you smell it? I can. Rotten eggs.’ Her face has a dark, riotous look. ‘It happens everywhere. Here and in the golden circle. And there came a rushing as of a mighty wind. The sea catches fire. I saw the end of the whole fucking story.’ The omelette starts to bubble. ‘I saw Bethanyland. I saw it with my own eyes.’

The phone rings. I pick up and press the loudspeaker. It’s Ned. His voice urgent. ‘Gabrielle. I’m sorry. But you have to leave, now.’ Frazer Melville draws a deep breath and pinches the bridge of his nose, as though summoning his thoughts to an internal muster station. ‘They raided the anaesthetist’s flat. It’s quite possible they’ve traced him and he’s told them where you are. Take the Nissan that’s outside. The keys are in it. And a mobile. Don’t stop anywhere for long. Keep an eye on the news: you’ve got a TV in there. Head south towards London and we’ll send a helicopter. Find somewhere we can land and send us the coordinates.’

He hangs up. Claustrophobia engulfs me. I force myself to concentrate. ‘We need to avoid the worst of the traffic chaos,’ I say. ‘Because once the story’s out, if other scientists start backing it publicly, which they will when they’ve seen the data, then there’s going to be mass panic. We should head for the Thames estuary. Everyone else will be leaving it.’

‘Helicopters need space,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘It’s got to be a playing field. Or a car park.’

‘The golden circle,’ says Bethany, poking at her burning omel-ette. The smell of the smoke makes me want to retch. ‘That’s where we get caught up in the air. I saw it.’

‘But where is it?’ asks Frazer Melville sharply, snapping off the gas. Bethany is rummaging in a drawer for a fork.

‘How the fuck should I know? It’s golden. It’s a circle. A great big circle.’ She begins shovelling the steaming egg mess into her mouth, straight from the pan. ‘Christ, I could eat a fucking horse.’

‘We need a satellite map,’ I say. Seconds later, on Frazer Melville’s laptop, we have the British Isles, seen from space. ‘Now find it,’ I tell Bethany.

She plonks the frying pan on the table, perches on a chair, and points her laden fork at the screen. ‘There,’ she says, indicating a section of south-east London. Frazer Melville zooms in.

‘But that’s the East End,’ he says, staring blankly. ‘That’s the ‘ ‘Yes,’ she says non-committally, still eating. ‘That’s it. That’s what I saw. That’s the golden circle.’ She wipes her mouth on her sleeve, leaving a greasy trail. ‘That’s where we get caught up in the air.’

Frazer Melville zooms in further, until there’s no mistaking it. I should have guessed. The Paralympics were held there some months after my accident. I watched some of the games on TV in rehab with several other newly injured patients. We were all cheered and energised by the stream of wheelchairs racing around the track at dizzying speeds — though no one warned us about the slump that would hit afterwards, when we were struggling with floor-to-chair transfer techniques and failing over and over again. We christened it Post-Paralympic Inadequacy Syndrome, which allowed us to joke about something that wasn’t funny. A necessary condition of psychic survival.

‘You could land a helicopter there easily,’ says Frazer Melville. He has been Googling. ‘There’s a concert next week, but nothing listed before then. It’s empty.’

Hard to imagine, though I read that after the 2012 Games they dismantled half of it, and sold the seats.

A depth charge of fear vibrates its way up from my smashed vertebra. My breath shakes as I exhale, as though I’ve been punched in the chest. It’s odd, and new, to want so fiercely to live. But the smell of burnt egg has got to me. Hurtling to the bathroom, I throw up the entire contents of my stomach. I throw up until my head is spinning furiously on the axle of its own emptiness. When I breathe in again, a weird, self-disgusted despair has engulfed me. It’s a despair that’s intimately connected to my Alex-dream. I don’t know how, or why. But the knowledge is rooted too deep for me to argue with.

When I come back, Frazer Melville is heaving bags out of the back door and into a grey hatchback. Everything looks different. As though this is a place I am remembering rather than seeing, a place I am looking back on from a time in the distant future. There is an invisible line across my abdomen beneath which I feel nothing. But now, above it, in the section that has nerves, a muscle clenches like a sea anemone. I spread the flat of my palm across the bare skin and I can almost feel an alien growth burgeoning like a parasite that has a knowledge I don’t possess, a brain of its own, a will.

It’s screaming no.

In the thrum of Norfolk traffic, banality confers invisibility. A grey hybrid Nissan with a small pseudo-family inside it, a middle-aged patriarch at the wheel, heeding the speed limit and heading for London via the not-so-scenic route: we could be anyone. Which effectively and reassuringly makes us no one. To our left, a sour, metallic sea; to our right, the dun of ploughed agricultural land, interrupted by a sporadic urban sprawl of industrial zones, caravan parks, office blocks, and food outlets advertising coffee, hot dogs, Coca-Cola and internet access. I’ve programmed the sat-nav to guide us along minor roads to Great Yarmouth, then down the coast past Lowestoft, Aldeburgh and Felixstowe, and west towards Stadium Island parallel to the Thames estuary. With a psychotic teenager to factor into the mix, there’s no telling how our unexpected road trip might play out, but mercifully Bethany has colluded in our escape so far. When Frazer Melville stopped at an anonymous service station for supplies, including the jumbo pack of popcorn she insisted on, she slipped into the toilets with a fistful of make-up and emerged as a darkly whorish Goth. No one gave her, or us, a second glance. So far so good. But I won’t make the mistake of trusting her. Sprawled on the back seat confetti’d with exploded caramel grains, her eyes flitting to and fro, her shaved head now sprouting a ghostly helmet of stubble, she resembles a chained beast awaiting its glory moment. Occasionally she reads out a billboard advertisement in a cracked Marge Simpson voice (’Need a loan? Call 0870-101IOI now for a free consultation. Pagoda Emporium, all-you-can-eat breakfast!’). But otherwise it’s a silent drive. We’re all cocooned in our disparate thoughts.