I told him I would, and left.
‘That stick-figure you did in red crayon,’ I now ask Bethany. ‘Which I think was probably your mother. What were you thinking about, when you drew it?’
‘I don’t do stick-figures,’ she says sullenly. I take it out of my folder and show it to her. She squints, frowns and shoves the drawing back at me with a stumped expression. ‘Not mine. Someone else must have done it. Someone who can’t draw for shit.’
‘I was with you. After you drew the fall of Christ, you did this.’
‘I don’t draw like that. That’s a kid’s drawing.’
‘I wonder what the kid who drew it was thinking.’
We look at each other a moment, and then she turns her face away.
It dawned on me, during the labyrinthine discussions I used to have with my psychoanalyst, that most women carry in their heads an idealised mother. A home-baking, perfect-gravy mother, a waiting-outside-the- school-gates mother, a mother with whom to share lip-gloss and T-shirts, a mother to confide in, to laugh with over a TV sitcom. A counterweight to the mother they have in real life — the mother who, in Bethany’s case, filled her so unassailably with the urge to kill that she reached for a Phillips screwdriver and made the rest history.
‘You just don’t get it,’ she mutters. ‘Look. This earthquake is right round the corner. It’s hitting Istanbul the day after tomorrow. The pressure’s building up in the faultline, I can feel it. I’m telling you. I was right about the hurricane. I was right about Jesus tumbling down the mountainside. What happens when you see I’m right about this, too?’
‘What would you like me to do, Bethany? If you were right?’
‘It’s just time someone believed me. Don’t you get it?’
Our time is up: Rafik opens the door on my nod. As I turn to leave, Bethany is looking at me intently, as though measuring the angles of my face. Then, fast as a change of wind, her mood has shifted and she’s laughing softly to herself.
‘What’s funny, Bethany?’ I ask lightly, pleased that we are back on safer ground. ‘Can I share the joke?’
‘Wow, Wheels,’ she laughs, delightedly. ‘You’re the joke. Congratulations.’
‘On what?’ I ask, uneasy.
She smiles to show the braces on her teeth. She says slowly, savouring it: ‘On getting laid.’ I roll an inch back. ‘Ha! A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me, he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts!’
‘My private life is my business, Bethany.’ It comes out too sharply. She has caught me unawares and I have let it show.
‘Not any more,’ she grins. ‘Hey. My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. He stuck it in you! Rejoice!’
Rafik turns away discreetly. Bidding them both a swift goodbye I roll speedily out.
Since half of my body withdrew from the game, I have learned to notice, relish and even fetishise life’s miniature but extreme delights. Like my oriental lilies opening in a splash of ghost-white petals and filling the flat with their alarming, erotic pungency. Or my Bulgarian choral music drifting through from the next room, mingled with homelier noises: a metallic clatter, an air-blast of burnt toast, and the muttered cursing of a physicist called Frazer Melville preparing, at my request, a pot of lapsang souchong tea in an unfamiliar kitchen. It is Thursday August 21st, but I am determined not to let Bethany’s catastrophe calendar — which predicts a massive earthquake tomorrow — spoil my day. So far I am succeeding. I am enjoying being myself and no one else. I may even have looked in the mirror and taken pleasure in my own reflection. Frazer Melville and I have been under my duvet for the best part of fourteen hours. We have been ‘experimenting’. We are absurd. We are a woman in her thirties and a man in his forties. And we’re behaving like two teenagers discovering sex for the first time. Frazer Melville and I probe, explore and exchange information — shyly, boldly, teasingly. What if I do this?
But it can’t last. I can’t let it.
I say, ‘We have to do something.’
He sighs, shifts, perches his head on his elbow, looks at me hard, and takes a deep breath before he speaks.
‘I agree.’
‘So if it hits tomorrow—’
‘I contact scientist colleagues with the other predictions Bethany’s made.’
I am more relieved than I care to admit that he has been giving the idea consideration.
‘Without mentioning her,’ I specify. ‘She can’t be named.’
‘Of course. In any case it would be scientific suicide.’
‘How will you go about it?’
He shrugs. ‘I tell a selected cross-section of scientists who I know to be open-minded, that some predictions have been made by a certain source. That they’ve proved accurate. That the earthquake’s the latest example of this. That there are further predictions which will need testing. That I believe there’s a scientific explanation which demands investigation. But more importantly, the regions concerned would benefit from being warned because lives are at stake.’
It sounds simple. Too simple. But at least we have a plan.
We lie in bed until midday and then go and see a genial, forgettable movie. He is not used to being so close to the screen, and I am not used to being kissed in my wheelchair during a film, and attracting whistles from the people in the rows behind us. So it’s a new experience for both of us. If either of us has an apprehension that this might be the last day that our world is happily balanced, we hide it well.
Sex is many things, but that night, for us, it is an urgent and elaborate distraction from the subject we are both determined to avoid, now that we’ve agreed on a strategy. Frazer Melville undresses me and makes me close my eyes. I must promise not to move a centimetre ‘or it will all go wrong’. Intrigued I wait, rigid, smiling. I feel him take his clothes off. Then I feel him come close to me. I smell chocolate. Then he touches my left nipple, but not with his tongue. With something cool and heavy. He works slowly on whatever he is doing. I feel his concentration. Half-guessing what he is up to, an electric pulse spreads outward from my breasts across my shoulders and spine, along my arms, into the tips of my fingers, across the back of my neck.
‘Now this one.’ He caresses my right nipple, the same cool pressure, and I feel the flesh swell.
‘Open your eyes.’
He has painted my nipples with chocolate paste. Where did the paste, and indeed the idea, come from? They are huge and nearly black. They glisten. I laugh. ‘Well, I knew you were fond of chocolate.’
‘Two of my favourite things both at once,’ he murmurs. His voice is thick. Frazer Melville’s erect penis is sticking out of his fly. I take it in my hand, feel its heft. ‘I can’t wait any more,’ he says. ‘I’m starving.’ And then he’s sucking my breasts and we are both getting smeared with melting chocolate. He has discovered a way of propping me up using pillows and cushions. Me naked except for the bandage on my leg, he fully clothed. I feel like a greedy queen being worshipped and serviced.
Looking into my eyes, Frazer Melville takes me and takes me and takes me. I can’t feel a thing. But as he moves back and forth inside me he says my name over and over again. I gasp, utterly confounded. And I think: perhaps I am still a woman after all. No, not perhaps. Yes, yes, I am. A woman who can make love, and drive a man—
He comes with the raucous, unashamed cry of a caveman.
I’m woken at one by rain slamming against the windows. Outside the trees sigh and creak. I settle my head on Frazer Melville’s solid, smooth-skinned shoulder and think about what last night did to my soul.
