The Rapture

Manor, and spooling out the rest of her existence there, with the occasional incident of violence, and the odd suicide attempt. Yet sometimes you want to help someone, despite yourself and what you have become, even if you know they are beyond it, and so are you; no remedy you can invent will change their trajectory: the fuse was lit long ago. But you try. Again and again you try, your life on a loop, a wheel. And when you get home you finish the bottle of Australian wine under the blank gaze of Frida Kahlo with her pet monkey and her dead hummingbird and her bad- luck cat and her necklace of thorns, and you leaf through the art books whose images still manage to flood your heart and brain, and drink your way into darkness and dream that you are flying in the stratosphere and having sex with a man you must not think about under any circumstances because the past, and the future it once held in embryo, has been wiped out.

And then you wake.

Chapter Three

Self-analysis is a bad habit I indulge in regularly, under the guise of ‘working on myself’. It’s clear that in moving to the only place that will have me, but where I have no friends, I have been trying to prove something. But what? My independence? My ability to continue business as usual? The fact that I can leave my previous life behind? My own perversity? When I look at what is happening in the world I wonder: am I projecting my own internal dramas on the social landscape, or is there actually an atmosphere of recklessness in these long, overheated summer weeks? A generalised malaise that seems to go above and beyond the norm, not just in Europe but across the whole globe, a globe that is over-freighted, claustrophobic, product-mad, too dense for its own mass? I would like to stop reading the papers and watching the TV news but I’m increasingly addicted to knowing the extent of the horror. World preoccupations remain an uneasy, toxic mix: money (too little of it), disease (too much), territorial aggression, racist executions, spiralling oil prices, web stalkers, Islamist terror, the new fly-borne malaria, melting ice caps, aggressive cults in China, carbon credit fraud, the rise of the Planetarians, the rampant spread of ‘intelligent design’ teaching in schools, contraception, overpopulation, and the new, ‘proud-to-be-a-fundamentalist’ movement. In Britain alone there are now fifty thousand Faith Wave churches, of the kind Bethany was raised in; ten years ago, there were five hundred. Meanwhile in Iran and Israel the violence is an open wound on TV, so predictable in its bloodiness that the mutilated children and howling women become a spectacle you shudder at briefly before zapping over to some Japanese game show. The well-meaning optimism of those entertainment programmes, with their perky nerdiness and banana-skin tomfoolery, provides a counterpoint to the real-world grief. Their crude hilarities flit through my head while I swim my laps, like my Spanish Kahlo mantra, or fragments of some absurd erotic fantasy, poignantly irrelevant.

When I arrive for our next session in the art room Bethany is in full manic flood, ranting at the thickset female nurse about some snail-shells missing from her bedside drawer. Still unsettled by her ability to perceive and target my vulnerabilities, I am on my guard and keen to keep a distance. ‘There were twenty-five and now there are only fucking twenty!’ she shouts. ‘Can you explain that? How about this: Heidi’s a fucking klepto. She nicks things, everyone knows it, it’s her fucking diagnosis! Hey, there’s this earthquake that’s going to destroy Istanbul,’ she says, spotting me come in. The stolen shells forgotten, she pursues her theme: the quake measures ‘seven point blah-blah’, and it’ll kill ‘zillions’. Oh, and there’s a volcano about to blow on an island she can’t name somewhere in the Pacific — though if she had a map, she’d show me. A hurricane in the south Atlantic will zap in on the twenty- ninth of this month. ‘Kapoom! And that tornado that’s just attacked the American Midwest, I predicted that, Wheels. And I have documentation to prove it,’ she says elatedly, waving a large red-and-black notebook at me. ‘Yay! Proof positive! Evidence of things not seen!’

‘Can I have a look?’ She hands it to me. ‘Shall I start at the beginning?’

She laughs. ‘You can start anywhere. Hey, hold it upside down, for all I care. It’s not like you’re going to believe it.’

I flip the notebook open in the middle and see a jumble of images tattooed on to the page in dark pencil and biro, gouged deep, and overlapping one another in a whirling palimpsest. But despite the unruliness she draws with confidence and skill. There are cloud formations, waves and rocky landscapes, vigorous lines with shadows darkly cross-hatched. Leafing through slowly, I also get the impression, from the multiple arrows flying in all directions, that Bethany imagines a scientific basis to these scenes. Her schoolteachers reported that she had an aptitude for science, art and geography. You sense, in this travesty of her three favourite subjects, the tattered remains of an enquiring mind fed a solid educational diet. The images are annotated with her tiny spider’s writing, which stumbles its way across the page haphazardly. Pressure building east west surge. Like at hief in the-night They shall be caught up.

‘Can you talk me through what’s going on here?’

She chuckles. ‘Talk you through Armageddon? Talk you through Ezekiel? I like the idea of them naming a city after me one day. Bethanyville. Or even a country. Hey, I like that. Bethanyland.’

Grandiosity: worth exploring. Patients are like tangled balls of string. You have to find the end of the string and tease the rest out. Work at it until the ball starts to unwind. Then see where it rolls. Off the edge of something, usually.

‘Do you think you’re special in some way, Bethany? Do you feel you might have special powers?’

She laughs. ‘Like I’ve been saying to everyone all along, duh. I can see the future.’

‘What do you see there?’

She looks at me sideways, suddenly furtive. ‘Bethanyland.’

‘What’s Bethanyland like?’

‘It sucks. It’s a completely fucked-up place. The trees are all burned. Everything’s poisonous. There’s a lake there.’

‘Lake Bethany?’

‘You wouldn’t want to swim in it. All the fish are dead and there are mosquitoes buzzing around everywhere, the kind that give you malaria. You wouldn’t exactly be in your element there, Wheels. But you’d have no choice. No one would. You’d be lucky to be alive. You’d have to get used to canned food. Bring a tin opener.’

‘A bleak landscape.’

‘But you know something? You’re so on the wrong track. You’re so lost it hurts. I told you, I can feel things happening. Joy McConey knew I was right.’ I remember my predecessor’s leaving card. To Joy. Who truly believed. Although the signature was illegible, it’s clear that the handwriting in Bethany’s notebook — small, frantic — is the same. I feel a frisson of disgust. Did Joy actually pore through Bethany’s scribblings, and find method in her madness? If she did, and came to believe in Bethany’s so-called predictions, no wonder she has had to take time out.

‘How was it for you when Joy left?’

She shrugs. ‘It was no big deal,’ she says, flipping through the notebook to reveal several diagrams of what look like cloud movements. ‘She wouldn’t help me to get out of here, so from my point of view she could get fucked. But it was tough on her.’ She smiles slyly. ‘You know, losing the pleasure of my company? And between you and me, I think she got a bit paranoid. I know what Joy McConey’s thinking now. She’s thinking that I’ve got my revenge.’

I wait for more, but she seems absorbed in her papers. There are drawings of volcanoes spewing fire, and more sketches of cyclones, with arrows shooting this way and that. It strikes me, not for the first time, that the disturbed imagination has fewer choices of route than one might think. She points to a huge swirl. ‘I can see the way everything flows. Blood and water and magma and air. I can see everything move. I can feel what’s happened to you, from your blood. All of it.’ He eyes glitter. ‘It’s only the electricity that’s keeping me alive. I’ve told everyone what’s happening. I’ve told you. But Joy listened. Hey. Guess how many stars I gave her. Joy McConey, you leave Oxsmith with a grand total of nine out of ten!’

I feel oddly slapped. ‘I’m listening.’

‘No you’re not. But hey. You will be. There’s going to be a tornado in Scotland any day now. Check it out. And the big one’s on its way. The Tribulation starts in October. You’ll be listening so hard your ears fall off.’

Her laugh is too loud for her small frame. Like bottles smashing into a recycling bin in the hour before dawn.