The Rapture

bulk of moisture and the flux of air above, the drama such combinations can trigger, the fact that with global warming, they will soon become ‘part of the landscape’.

Part of the landscape.

I try out the odd expression on my tongue as I windmill my arms and watch people I don’t know as they panic, improvise, weep, wave, and drown.

When my mind is in turmoil, my stomach needs fuel. Like many poor cooks, the scrambling of eggs is something I have learned to master in order to survive. I smash four into some melting butter, and start stirring. What I lack in culinary skills I make up for in coffee-making expertise: thanks to the benign influence of my first psychoanalysts, I have developed an anally precise morning-beverage preparation ritual, which involves the grinding of Colombian beans, the careful charging of my small but perfect percolator, filched from my father’s flat when he retreated permanently to his private netherworld, and the frothing of hot milk with a special battery-powered gizmo that bears a passing resemblance to a dildo. Ten minutes later, breakfast prepared and consumed, I feel if not a whole woman again (that I’ll never be), then three-quarters of one, which is as good as it gets for me on the rehabilitation front. I drive to work. On the radio, there’s more news of Stella. At last, she is veering out to sea.

Through the open door of the recreation room at Oxsmith, you can hear the rapid clatter of a ping-pong game and the thud of MTV on the big screen that’s surrounded by a group of kids. Along the south-east wall, a lone boy, prostrate, is chanting tonelessly on one of the scuffed prayer-mats while a Tourette’s kid shifts from one foot to the other muttering expletives. I wheel my way past a hugely fat girl swaying to the music, her belly spilling over the top of her jeans, her face as smooth and empty as moulded plastic. She has wound T-shirts around her head to form a giant multicoloured turban. Watching her fixedly, a boy who a month ago removed his own eyeballs and had to have them surgically replaced, is gearing up to masturbate. Business as usual.

I find Bethany Krall watching CNN on the small television in an annexe off the main room, where two male nurses are talking desultorily and punching at their mobiles. She has made herself comfortable. Perched on a chair with her legs tucked underneath, she’s chewing gum furiously, as if there’s some kind of speed mastication record she’s hoping to beat in the course of her day, which is somehow related to the unfolding nightmare on the screen. I can see immediately that she’s riding high.

‘It’s back to the worst-case scenario,’ says a woman on the TV. ‘Hurricane Stella’s changed course again, and she’s now definitely heading for Rio. She’ll hit any time in the next hour.’

‘Yo, Wheels.’ Bethany grins as she spots me, then fists the air like a triumphant athlete. But with a third coffee inside me, I am back on track, and I refuse to let the latest news shake me. The only sane approach to what’s happened is to take it as given that Bethany’s prediction of the hurricane is a guess based on something she has gleaned, via the internet, from some obscure weather station. Or simply coincidence. What did Frazer Melville say? Case dismissed. My job, as a professional, is to manage Bethany’s conviction that it isn’t a random fluke. And even reverse it. The alternative — the Joy McConey model — doesn’t bear thinking about. The trouble is, when you deal on a daily basis with people’s fantasies not coming true, there’s no handbook on how to behave when they actually do. I’ll have to run on whatever instincts I have left.

‘Yes, you were spot-on, Bethany,’ I say.

‘Well, duh,’ she says through her gum. Her face is still pale, but the cheeks carry a faint, waxy flush, reminding me of those Madonna statues that cry tears of blood on demand in mystically devout pockets of the world. ‘Well, Wheels? Aren’t you going to say anything?’

‘I am,’ I say non-committally. ‘But I don’t imagine it’s what you’d most like to hear.’

‘You’re going to say it was just a random coincidence, right? Well, Joy was just like that at first. Back in the days when she was a zero too. So if that’s what you want to believe, you go right ahead.’ I nod slowly but say nothing. ‘They always give people blankets,’ she comments, jerking her head at the screen, and rolling her grey- green gum around on her tongue and teeth. ‘Why’s that? It’s not like it’s cold.’

‘Shock makes your body temperature drop,’ I respond automatically, trying to hide my irritation at the laconic, I-told-you-so way she’s watching the drama unfold. She can’t seem to imagine what this means for individual lives. For her, they’re like tiny pixillated screen-beings. Little Sims whose lives you can meddle with and overturn at will. ‘Especially if you’re wet. It’s comforting.’

It’s more than two years ago that I held Alex’s elbow and thought that cold flesh needn’t always be a bad sign. That if I just kept hold of it, kept squeezing it so he’d know I was there, passing on my warmth, everything would somehow be all right. I thought, too, about his family. Now everything would be out in the open. There’d be no avoiding it, no denying it, no more pretending. Sickness mingled with relief, and the hovering suspicion that I would probably panic later, if I could muster the energy. They would give me a tranquilliser of some kind, I hoped. Perhaps they already had. At that point, it didn’t cross my mind that I was badly injured. The fact that I couldn’t feel anything seemed like a blessing, a sign that I was intact, that I hadn’t lost anything. Yes: I’d been given some kind of tranquilliser. How good of them, how thoughtful, professional and well-organised. I could close my eyes and sleep.

‘My life is over,’ a weeping Brazilian woman in a floral dress tells the world, via a duhbed American voice. ‘Everything has gone. My baby is dead.’ Babies have a way of getting to me. I turn away. Through the window-bars, the sky is full of popcorn clouds.

‘Right. We’ll discuss this later. I can’t hang around,’ I tell Bethany.

‘Yeah. Anger management, right?’ She smirks, then turns back to the screen, where they have moved briefly to other news: Japan’s stock market has gone berserk, an actress who once starred alongside Tom Cruise has taken an overdose, the body-count in Iran has reached half a million. I’m just rolling out of the room when a stupid but brutal thought strikes me. I stop in the doorway and turn round.

‘What else do you feel you have known about in advance?’

She shrugs. ‘Lots of stuff. That earthquake in Nepal two weeks ago? I told you about it.’

‘Did you?’ At a recent session in the art studio I recall her reeling off a list of dates, places and events while drawing a diagram of what might have been a sex act performed by machines. But I was more interested in the artwork than the manic rant that accompanied it.

‘Yes. And you didn’t listen,’ she says, catching the nurse’s eye and offering him some gum, which he declines. I did listen, I think defensively. But I filtered. The way you have to, to make sense of anything these kids say.

‘What else?’

‘Try listening next time,’ she says, yawning. ‘It’s not like it’s going to stop happening.’

‘But this — thousands of people killed or made homeless, and if it hits the city—’

‘It will.’

‘Then thousands more lives about to be ruined—’

‘That’s OK, it’s cool,’ she interrupts. ‘Heard of a fait accompli?

Anyway, how come you suddenly care about all those South Americans? Because you didn’t last time I mentioned it.’ She shakes her head in disbelief. ‘It’s like Dr Ehmet. Hassan to you.

He’s Turkish, right? But when I tell him about the earthquake destroying Istanbul, it’s like talking to the wall.’

‘An earthquake in Istanbul?’ Perhaps the filter needs adjusting. Just as an experiment, of course. My stomach tightens. ‘Remind me.’

‘Next month. Put August the twenty-second in your diary, Wheels. It’s going to make this thing look like a fun ride at Disneyland Paris. Ay caramba!’

When I return two hours later, Bethany is still lounging in her chair, one leg splayed over the arm-rest, chewing her gum and watching Hurricane Stella whirling through Rio, a mass of roiling water, vapour and debris.

‘Oi!’ Bethany greets me with a waved hand in the air. ‘Come and join me.’ I manoeuvre alongside her. On the TV, helicopters pester at the storm’s tail like gnats, relaying images of the disaster zone: filthy corpse-bearing torrents that fill valleys and swamp plains, relief trucks blocked by precipices of rubble, and out at sea, glassy slicks of oil from shattered tankers. As Stella wreaks her worst on Rio, a deeper metropolis is revealed, skewed and ravaged, beneath the flesh of the old: a Hieronymus Bosch landscape of liquid streets and bust-apart shacks and unidentifiable shards that were once part of — what? Playgrounds, schools, bars, hospitals, brothels, homes where children bickered and adults made love and cooked rice and gave birth: the ebb and flow of simple, frustrating,