Wheelchairs have come a long way since the glorified wheelbarrows favoured by Roman men. After an orgiastic party — the kind where they’d lie on a padded chaise-longue and guzzle food from a central trough, stopping only to vomit, a slave would wheel them out into the night, obese, drunk and sexually glutted. Or so I imagine it, as I struggle with my returning-to-the-house routine: chair out of the car, body into chair, body and chair to front door, body and chair back to car to get shopping from boot, open front door, wish for a slave. In fact a dough-faced Polish girl called Lydia, from an agency, now comes in once a week to clean: she’ll do the heavier shopping for me, too, and the washing. I can do all these things myself but it’s too time-consuming. As my visit to the supermarket has just reminded me.
But through it all, up and down the aisles, I thought of Bethany. Odd, the way she has taken up residence in my brain as a permanent fixture — far more than any of the other kids I’ve been seeing regularly, even little Mesut Farouk, who made the striped hot-air balloon, or Lewis O’Malley, who cut off his own hand in a ritual act of self- punishment, or Jake Ball, who bankrupted his father by buying military hardware online by credit card: damaged babies, junior would-be Terminators who bring out the frustrated mother in me. ‘Intuitive,’ Dr Ehmet called her. I never look forward to our sessions but I want to get to the bottom of her. She’s like a nagging crossword clue that I can’t solve. One that wakes me in the night, sweating.
The evening is still so sun-scorched that the air above the pavement shimmers. I don’t see the pale-eyed woman at first. She is standing across the road from my flat, her red hair oddly lustrous. Catching my eye, she raises her hand in a salute, like a secret agent using a gestural code we have both learned at spy-camp. I have mixed feelings about the mentally ill being cared for in the community.
The following morning, the radio news contains a story about a tornado in Aberdeen. It happened at six a.m. Five houses lost their roofs, and half a petrol station collapsed. There was no warning. I’d like to dismiss the fact that Bethany alluded to it. But somehow I can’t.
Like many other successful doctors, Oxsmith’s clinical director, Dr Sheldon-Gray, is a ferociously keen sportsman. His office, reached through a small antechamber where his PA Rochelle presides, is partly a gym, the broad desk sandwiched between two exercise machines, one for rowing and another for running. He is co-chairman of the regional Water Ski Association and won championships in his youth. I have learned this from my colleague Marion, who also informs me that the doctor’s super-athlete weekends are spent with his family — a sport- supportive wife and three boys in their teens, who all don wetsuits and take turns to get towed across a lake at high speed at the end of a rope. I envy them of course. Perhaps I would like to be a member of their family, and experiment with disabled athletics. They told me in rehabilitation that nothing is physically unachievable if you want it enough: just read the memoir of the young rock-climber who crossed China on a hand-propelled bike after a devastating fall, or the American quadriplegic who plays a kind of wheelchair rugby called Murderball. Perhaps if I stay on the right side of Dr Sheldon-Gray he will invite me on his speedboat and I will acquire new skills. But perhaps not, once he learns that I have come to question him about Bethany Krall’s incomplete dossier.
He has his back to me as I enter. I don’t see him at first because it’s a large room, and he’s at the very far end by the windows, at floor level. I’m not expecting that. He is in a vest and shorts, rowing on his machine. The room has recently been painted in wipe-down buttermilk: you can still smell the faint, anodyne odour.
When I reach him I swivel my chair until our contraptions face each other, almost close enough for their metal to kiss. Or even mate and breed. My boss is veering muscularly back and forth, emitting small masculine stress-sounds like ‘ungk’ and ‘gah’, his arm-sinews pulled to the maximum. He’s sweating like a rutting goat.
‘I’d like to discuss Bethany Krall,’ I say. ‘There’s nothing in the file by Joy McConey. If she made notes, they’ve gone missing.’
Apart from his fanaticism on the physical fitness front, Dr Sheldon-Gray possesses no obvious tics, and no apparent signs that he is one of the walking wounded of which my profession is largely comprised. Nevertheless the rowing machine’s pace seems to slow at the mention of Bethany. I sense hers is not a name the director wishes to hear.
‘Gah,’ he puffs. ‘Sorry, can’t stop until I’ve done my quota, so if you just talk and bear with me. Ungk.’
‘I’d like to see what Joy wrote.’
‘Of course you would.’
‘So may I?’
‘No. Gah.’
‘Can I ask why not?’
He makes me wait, listening to his intimate noises, until he has done another three strokes: his eye is on his heart-rate reading, and the digital clock.
‘It would be — gah — unhelpful.’
‘Unhelpful in what way?’
Abruptly, he stops rowing and starts rubbing at his face and neck with a towel. He looks across at me, still panting. Confidence gives a boom of volume to his voice, as though he’s speaking to a crowd. He starts wiping down his arms.
‘Well, she’s officially on sick leave but there’s more to it than that, I’m afraid. She began to show signs of mental unbalance. The notes reflect that. So I removed them from the file.’ He flips his towel over his back in a decisive, alpha-male movement.
‘I see,’ I say as he fiddles with the little digital box on the rowing machine, trying to re-zero it. ‘I’m sorry she’s ill. I knew she was on a sabbatical, but no one told me the specifics.’
‘Well, now you know them. So. Is that all?’ he asks, when the digits are fully blanked. I don’t reply. Instead, I wait. And wait some more. ‘I mean, it’s fair enough, don’t you think?’ he justifies finally. I say nothing. ‘If you, Gabrielle, in a state of extreme personal distress, wrote a report on a patient that reflected badly on your professionalism, you wouldn’t like it to remain on record, I imagine?’ His eyes meet mine. Their astonishing clarity and blueness make them look artificial, like a pair you might pick out for yourself in a glass eye shop. Given my own shaky tenure here, I can’t argue with the man. ‘I’d stick to working out Bethany Krall for yourself, if I were you, Gabrielle. Are you settling in well, by the way?’ Without waiting for a reply he starts rubbing down his strangely hairless legs, adding: ‘We must get you involved in some local stuff. Plenty going on here socially. Big charity bash coming up at the Armada. It’ll be a good opportunity for you to meet and mix. Though it’s mostly science types,’ he says with an air of apology.
‘What species of science type?’ I ask, suddenly interested. The Bethany-puzzle is still vibrating.
‘The lesser-spotted biologist, the two-toed statistician, I don’t know. The usual suspects.’
‘OK.’
‘OK what?’ The exertion has turned his face as pale as the buttermilk wall behind him.
‘OK I’ll come. Thank you. Can you get me an invitation?’
He does a double-take. ‘Of course. Leave it with me. Rochelle will contact you.’
Working out Bethany Krall for myself isn’t an easy ride. Like extreme weather, her moods vary wildly. Some days she is talkative, while on other occasions she barely acknowledges me, refusing point-blank to enter into a dialogue, even about cloud formations or another favourite topic, plate tectonics. Her artwork is impressive. She works on several large and evocative sky paintings, and dashes off a series of brooding charcoal drawings of storms spreading over wide featureless landscapes. More and more, she doodles rocky surfaces from which a vertical line emerges, heading skyward but fizzling into nothingness near the top of the page. Sometimes it takes root underground, its trajectory veering to the left and then ending in what looks like a cartoon bang. Is it plant or machine? When I ask her about it, she is non-committal: the scene is something that keeps ‘appearing’ after ECT. Perhaps it’s on another planet, she offers. But to me it whispers Freud. I try to draw her out a little on the subject of her religious background, in the hope that it might lead to some revelations about her family. She can quote the Bible extensively, but is as scathing about God as she is about doctors, repeating the question she raised when we first met: what has God ever done for her?
‘That presupposes that God exists,’ I prompt her. But at this, she falls silent. If Leonard Krall abused his daughter sexually, and her mother colluded in the atrocity, then her need for vengeance would be easily explained. I work with her patiently, trying to edge towards the subtle alteration of perception that might one day enable her to escape the tortured landscape of Planet Bethany and move to a place of lesser punishment. But if revelations are on
