Dreams has some, and even more surprisingly, it comes close to being adequately cold. If he thinks it odd that I have nothing better to do on my birthday than have dinner with a physicist I met at a function to which I had to scrounge an invitation from my well-connected boss, he doesn’t mention it: he says it’s an honour, and he raises his glass in a complex toast which pays tribute to my ‘fabulous dress and its contents’, to Child B, and to the vagaries of high and low pressure uniting us ‘at this auspicious moment of twenty-first-century history’.
Frazer Melville, who is forty-four, who lost his mother to cancer only two months ago, and who is divorced from a Greek geologist called Melina, eats in the same way he orders. He is eager, greedy, unselfconscious, and sure of his own taste. Melina couldn’t have children, he tells me. But that’s not why the marriage failed. It was more complex. ‘And quite humiliating for me,’ he confesses. ‘Knocked me right back.’ I nod and wait for him to go on. ‘Irreconcilable differences just about covers it. It was tough, but we’re on amicable terms now that she’s back in Athens. Our interests overlap, so we run across one another’s work from time to time. Exchange the occasional e-mail about marine landslides and whatnot.’
‘Did you ever make fireworks when you were a boy?’ I ask him.
‘Only the basic liquid kind with Diet Coke and menthols. I wasn’t a sophisticated pyromaniac. I melted gallons of wax over bonfires and made a million tangerines explode. A normal childhood for someone who ended up as me. OK, my turn. Gabrielle as a kid. Hmm. You were a mini version of what you are now. You were sharp, and very proud of that amazing hair, even though you knew you shouldn’t be. You knew how to empathise but it got you into trouble sometimes. But you weren’t so angry back then. Or so beautiful.’
The problem with blushes is that once they’ve started, there’s no preventing them from running their course. The champagne is going down well. Giddy after two glasses, I start telling jokes, culminating in the one about the faith healer. I barely recognise myself.
Later, back home, I wonder if I am still able to like people. It isn’t something I’ve properly tested. I let him push my chair when we went through the hotel kitchen — and not just because I wanted to protect my dress from being splattered with sauce by some maniac sous-chef. In the delicate etiquette of wheelchair use, I permitted an intimacy.
A few nights later I am having one of my vertebra dreams. I am operating on my own lower back, fixing the damage with pliers and a monkey wrench. ‘There,’ I tell the nurses and medical students who are watching. They are in a semicircle. ‘If I can do it, you can.’ I point to the diagram of the spine, the one they first showed me when they explained my injuries. It looks like a bonsai tree. An alarm bell goes off. It is a warning. I must finish the operation because they need the pliers back. And the monkey wrench.
It’s actually the phone.
There is light coming through the blinds, but it feels like the middle of the night. I check my alarm clock. It’s seven a.m. The phone is cordless and I have left it on the table by the door, too far to reach in any hurry. So I do not pick up — partly because I suspect it is Lily, who I know from our conversation a few days ago is gearing up to one of her love crises. Vertebra dreams always throw me. I am having trouble getting my mind in order. My head hurts. I had three glasses of wine last night. Alone. Lesson number one of paraplegia: alcohol is bad for you. After six rings, the answerphone kicks in.
‘Sorry to ring so early, Gabrielle,’ he says. ‘You’re probably fast asleep. Dreaming of new ways to—’
‘New ways to what?’ I ask, picking up. Funny how a paralysed woman can shift her butt quite quickly when she wants to.
‘New ways to intrigue men from Inverness. But listen here. This is going to sound odd but I have to ask you. That south Atlantic hurricane your psychotic case talked about. Child B.’ He sounds excited, a bit reckless. ‘Can you remember when she said it would hit Rio?’
‘The twenty-ninth.’
There’s a grunt on the other end of the line and then a fumbling sound: my Scottish physicist friend is apparently getting dressed, one-handedly, as we speak. I can hear Radio Four on in the background.
‘I thought so. Just had to check.’
‘Isn’t the twenty-ninth today? What is this?’
‘I don’t know. A weird and amusing coincidence. Look, thanks, Gabrielle, and sorry to wake you, lovely one. I’d like to talk but I’m going to be busy over the next few days. Look at the news and you’ll see why. I might just be buying you dinner.’ And he hangs up, leaving me disturbed and excited. By the phone call, and its content. And by the interesting expression ‘lovely one’.
According to the TV news, a hurricane that has been brewing in the south Atlantic ocean is now whirling its way down the coast of Brazil. Its name is Stella. Its mass and speed qualify it as a super-hurricane.
And it is heading for Rio. Just as Bethany said.
Chapter Five
Television is a cruel medium, continually ushering newsworthy visitors, uninvited, into your living-room. After the commercial break, the guest of honour is carnage. The hurricane is busy flattening a sprawl of towns and villages down the coast of Brazil. On the screen, splintered trees and a blur of broken man-made lumber jostle along fast-flowing rivers of mud, or spin into the vicious cycle of a whirlpool system, where the flotsam of urban catastrophe churns circularly in all its heart-wrenching banality, with sofas, beat-up cars, road-signs, office equipment, hoardings and human bodies bobbing like oversized corks in a brown froth of mud. If Stella hits Rio it will be ‘a disaster on an unprecedented scale’, according to the CNN commentator, who is explaining with a set of rapidly evolving graphs how the vortex of wind is picking up momentum and vibrating its way south. Brazilians struggle in the flooded wreckage of what must once have been their homes — a sheet of corrugated iron here, a door-frame there, a child’s bed. Desperate people clinging to gas canisters and oil-drums. Lives upended in the time it takes for a pan of beans to boil.
Hurricanes can threaten one place and hit another, veering off randomly, says a meteorologist. This is particularly the case with super-sizers. The current projection of the computer models is that Hurricane Stella will not hit Rio, but head out to the ocean where it will eventually dissipate. But no one wants to take chances: with a backward glance at the unhealed wounds of New Orleans and Dallas, a mass exodus has begun, bringing with it a new set of crises and panic-induced emergencies. There are three-mile-long tailbacks on the exit roads, and the trains are bursting.
Nightmares of a certain variety can do me in. I have not yet worked out how to avoid succumbing to them. As the TV horror blooms like a pornographic flower, I close my eyes and inhale, and I am back in the stench of my own private hell: a sewerish, earthy, petrol stink, the blinding, almost transcendental torture of my neck and chest, the odd blankness of my lower half, the choking smoke, the seemingly endless wait for help as I drift in and out of consciousness. Alex’s groaning.
I held on to his elbow, the only part of him I could reach. At least it felt like an elbow. Rain was falling — big thundery drops, warmish, strangely greasy. It seemed we were outside. I felt soil, or silage, or compost, or mud. We’d been on a minor road. And were they nettles, stinging my arm? Or a new, excruciating form of torture, designed to make your brain float out of your head and hover somewhere above you like an alternative moon in a sky filled not with light, but with the eiderdown of irradiation that is the twenty-first-century urban night? My atheism forgotten, I mouthed the default prayer of the desperate, like a beached fish gasping its last. Mild concussion tumbled the phrases in a linguistic tombola.
Any port in a storm.
Enough. ‘I am grateful it was T9 and not CI. I am grateful I am alive not dead, and I am grateful that for my mother it’s vice versa, and that Dad doesn’t know who the hell I am when I come to visit him. I am grateful, I am grateful, I am grateful,
