Liz Jensen - The Rapture

‘Have no fear, people. Welcome, my darling Bethany. My beloved daughter. My blessed child.’

Bethany smiles back at him, and her smile is so beautiful and unexpected and pure it stalls us all. I didn’t know her to be capable of it. It’s that of a loving daughter. Her voice chokes as she utters simply, ‘Dad.’

There is a brief pause, then a collective exhalation of breath. Then a rush of voices all talking at once.

Krall raises his voice. ‘Yes. This is my daughter, people. My daughter.’ He is beaming.

‘My darling Bethany. We were separated by the evil. But now, to my great joy, she has cast out the Devil and expressed the wish to return to God!’ He lifts his voice to a shout. ‘Praise be!’

Agitated murmurs swill around the amphitheatre like whisky in a glass, releasing new flavours. There are triumphant exclamations but more hostile undercurrents too. Not everyone, it seems, is ready to celebrate the news. But Bethany’s smile widens as she lifts her face upward, as if to Heaven. On the huge screen, she looks unexpectedly and insanely pretty. Her eyes gleam.

‘Tell them, Dad,’ she says. ‘Tell them why I’m here.’

Hushing the crowd with his hand, Krall breathes in deep before he speaks. ‘Folks. Many of you have heard about Bethany’s fight with evil, and with her own demons. Many of you here know what she has done in the past.’ He pauses. ‘And I know it all too well. To my sorrow.’ Heads are nodding. ‘I know some of you will be sceptical. But we all have loved ones who we hope will be saved today, and who we pray may be part of the Rapture.’ At this, there is a heartfelt swell of assent. ‘And today, a father’s wish has come true.’ His smile is genuine. ‘My Bethany has chosen to ask for God’s forgiveness! And our Lord is a Lord who listens!’ Bethany’s hands clasp together in supplication and she falls to her knees, head bowed. On the screens, all that’s visible in the close-up shot is the stubbled top of Bethany’s skull, but then she looks up. Her eyes are glittering with tears. She raises her hands high above her head. Excitement and unease flash through the crowd. ‘I hear disbelief from some of you,’ continues Krall. ‘But let me remind you that the Lord our God is merciful and forgiving, even if we rebel against him! My daughter is proof that it’s never too late to banish the Devil. Repent ye therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord! Bethany, do you repent your sins, truly, before God and before us who witness you here today?’ They must have met and talked before they came on stage. But how did she convince him? Was that strange, angelic smile enough to lure him into this bizarre, public folie a deux? ‘There are those here who want to hear it from your mouth. Has the Devil left you? Speak!’ He raises his hands in the air. ‘Tell them, Bethany. And tell the Lord! Tell everyone! Let them hear it for themselves!’

There’s a huge cry of enthusiasm, mixed with yells of warning.

Slowly, Bethany gets to her feet and faces her father. Her eyes are still wet. She speaks quietly.

‘Thank you for letting me speak here today, Dad. I know what I put you through.’ There are noises of sympathy. A girl who killed her mother is asking her father and God for forgiveness: can that be anything but a miracle, fitting for a day such as this? A man standing near me frowns and nudges his wife: they exchange a concerned nod. But other worshippers are beginning to soften: the two women in front of me are whispering to one another gently and holding hands. Bethany spreads her skinny scarred arms wide, pivoting slowly around until she has taken in the entire floodlit crescent. She is her father’s daughter: I can see it now more than ever. She has his gift.

‘It’s true I had something inside me,’ she says. There’s something new in her voice I haven’t heard before. There’s confidence. But there’s also something you could mistake for humility. ‘And it was something terrible.’ She nods vigorously and hangs her head in an aspect of misery. Around us, there is a flurry of whispers. ‘Something so ugly and evil that most of you wouldn’t believe it.’ More chatter: intrigued, doubting, supportive. Bethany begins pacing the stage, glancing about sadly as she speaks. She has their full attention. ‘Mum and Dad kept trying to get rid of it. But it wouldn’t leave me, no matter how much they prayed. They tried over and over again. They did everything. And they tried harder each time. Isn’t that right, Dad?’

Leonard Krall’s face is still luminous, but a shadow crosses it. He nods warily. ‘Yes, my love. We did our best, your mother and I. God rest her beloved soul.’

‘In the end they had to strip my clothes off and tie me to the stairs for three days instead of just a couple of hours.’ The woman next to me catches her breath. ‘Now I can see some of you are shocked, but it was for my own good, wasn’t it, Dad?’ Leonard Krall steps forward, clearly horrified, but she raises a hand to stop him. ‘No, Dad, let me tell them what you had to do to try and save me from myself! Let me tell them what you and Mum did, in the name of the Lord!’

‘Yes, let’s hear it!’ shouts a man’s voice.

Bethany is in her stride now. Her voice is getting firmer and louder, her pacing faster, until she’s skipping about the stage, almost dancing. ‘You had to leave me there for three whole days, shitting and pissing on the floor. You couldn’t let me eat or sleep. That’s how strong your love was, and I admire you for it!’ Krall is gesturing vigorously for a technician to disable her microphone. There is some crackling and then the siren of howl-around but she keeps talking through it. ‘You had to get rid of the Devil in me because the Devil doesn’t believe in the Earth being without form and void and darkness on the face of the deep and all that shit. But the fact is, the Devil believes what she’s told at school because it makes fucking sense, Dad .’ There’s a collective gasp. A man shouts something incoherent, and the security guard next to me clenches his fists. Krall is staring at his daughter, open-mouthed.

‘Bethany, you know it wasn’t like that!’

‘Yes it was, that’s what happened, Dad, you know it is. And ‘ But with an ugly electronic squawk followed by a series of crackles, Bethany’s microphone is cut off. She continues yelling soundlessly for a few seconds, then with a sharp, swift movement she flings herself at her father and yanks his headset off. Too stunned to react, he stands motionless while she dervishes about him, as though on hot coals, shrieking into the headset clutched in her hand.

‘Yes! It was! But it didn’t work, did it?’ Her face is bright with rage. ‘So you and Mum started shaking my head, do you remember that? That’s how you get the Devil out, right? You take turns grabbing your kid’s head. And you shook it so hard it felt like my brains would spill out. But you still couldn’t get rid of the evil thing! It’s still in there, Dad! You know why? Because it’s not the Devil. It’s me! It’s Bethany! I’m Bethany all the way through. There’s no Devil in there and there’s no God. There’s me and that’s all. There’s just fucking me.’

With a loud crumpling sound the microphone is abruptly unplugged. Bethany stops in her tracks, facing her father with rigid defiance. The audience’s lull gives way to welling declarations of outrage, then desperate shouts. Several men in the front rows jump to their feet, then look around questioningly, unsure of what to do because it seems that all of a sudden there is no one in charge. Least of all Leonard Krall. The woman next to me fans herself furiously with her hymn-sheet. Our usher rushes off towards a group of yellow-clad staff. I should have guessed that if faced with the temptation, Bethany would be unable to resist. That she would have done anything to secure this confrontation. But looking at Leonard Krall now as he steps back from her, his face chalky, unable to believe the scale of the betrayal, I realise it wasn’t even that difficult.