The Rapture

It’s late. I hesitate, then call the physicist. His phone is busy, so I decide to drive over and tell him what’s happened, hoping that I’ll end up staying the night, and that the tension engendered by our disastrous trip to London will dissolve with a session in bed. What I need is sex. With Frazer Melville. To be in his arms.

A jogger thunders up the pavement outside Frazer Melville’s house, accompanied by three high-stepping dogs on long leashes. There’s no space free directly in front, so I park opposite. The lights are on in his living-room. I’m just about to dial his number so that he can help me negotiate the steps when I glance at the house again. I don’t know why. But that’s when I see her. She’s tall, and wearing jeans, and standing at his window, looking out. Blonde. Trim. Young. She wasn’t there when I pulled up. But now, like a horrible jack-in-the-box, she has materialised in the physicist’s home. Then I see him emerging from the kitchen. Is that where she has come from, too? Has he cooked for her? Like a car driven by a reckless drunk, my heart attempts a sickening U-turn. Fails. And stalls.

The woman looks at home.

She moves away from the window and over to the sofa, where the physicist settles next to her, close enough for their bodies to touch. They’re looking at something together, heads lowered over the table. He wants to impress her. And she’s considering the matter. She has the power.

By now I’m not just trembling. I am shuddering all over. And I can’t seem to stop.

His ex, I realise. Melina. Since the e-mail, she’s been worried about him. So she’s flown over. To take care of him. She doesn’t look Greek. Has she stopped being a lesbian? Does she want him back? Does he want her?

Or not Melina. Someone else. A young colleague. One of his students.

Have they fucked yet?

She crosses her legs and I feel a flash of venomous, untamed envy. She can stand on them, she can run with them, she can use them to get up and down, she can spread them when he’s entering her. A dry retch hatches in my throat.

It makes sense, the kind of obvious sense a 3-D puzzle makes when you slot the last piece into the right configuration, having wrestled with it for hours.

I am not a real woman any more, and I was wrong to think I was. My mistake was to assume there were no other women in his life. Women with elegance and slim, fully functioning legs, Melina or someone else, someone who has every right to take a sexual interest, and is worth losing weight for. Women who can stand up, and turn on their heel, as she is now doing, and wander across the room to look at the books on the shelves, as though she is contemplating moving in, and wondering where hers will fit. Can you die from jealousy? It feels like you can, and that I will.

I am about to start the car and make my getaway. But suddenly, appallingly, I can’t — because the physicist has jumped to his feet and is heading directly for the window.

Terrified that he’ll spot me, I duck. Not easy. My heart’s thumping. Bent double like an ignoble paperclip, I’m having trouble breathing. I am absurd. I am raging. My chest is tight, my upper spine hurts, I am still shuddering. I force myself to stay with my head tucked down by the steering wheel, not daring to look up in case I reveal myself. The blood rushes to my head. My hands and my mouth and breasts are not enough for him, however alive they are, however greedy for his touch, however responsive. Because when the physicist and I make love, below the waist I am as lifeless as a blow-up doll. And nothing can change that. Ever.

When I finally dare to look up again, there’s an almost sick relief in seeing my worst fears confirmed.

I am free to drive home now, because the physicist has done what couples do when they require privacy.

He has closed the blinds and blocked out the world.

Part Two

Chapter Eight

What I have learned about psychological survival is that the plan you have for yourself might not be shared by others. That your personal notion of justice is an artificial construct, a luxury and an irrelevance in a world built of cells, minerals, wind, sea, flame, synapses. That the size of a defeat is always in proportion to the size of the ego knocked down. And that all knowledge comes at a price.

Today I am paying it.

Hangovers are a vivid form of vengeance. Last night my apartment became the venue for a small, introverted chardonnay festival. A melancholy choir of Bulgarians provided the entertainment, via a set of headphones which ended up irredeemably tangled beneath the bed. Part of me just watched. The other part was in charge.

Today, pig-sick and fallen from life’s untrustworthy grace, I will be indulgent towards myself. I will arrange for a mushroom pizza with extra cheese to be delivered to my door by a wordless bike-helmeted Kosovan. I will watch home makeover pro-grammes on daytime television. I will drown in unabashed moi. I will be my own worst enemy pretending to be my own best friend, tending to my self-inflicted wounds with all the patience and compassion of a committed narcissist. I will recognise passion, sexual fulfilment and romantic love as mirages that may have fooled me once, but never will again. And I will forget that Bethany Krall is being transferred to a maximum security hospital which will feed her heavy doses of narcotics until the end of what will probably be a short life.

Tomorrow, another story: the sequel. In which I hand in my notice at work, inform my landlady, Mrs Zarnac, that I’m moving out of her vinegary domain, ask Lily if I can stay with her in London despite the tricky logistics of a second-floor apartment with no lift, stop caring about the fate of Child By banish Armageddon, and brainwash myself into erasing the fickle, freckled physicist from my psyche. That, at least, is the agenda I have mapped out for myself before I settle down with a towel to dry my hair and check my phone messages.

Upon which the plan changes.

Not as a result of the first message, an emotional outpouring from Lily — whose predicament bears uncanny parallels to my own. She and Joshua have officially split up, and she’s moved out. She thinks she’s glad about it. Probably. Lily’s a vodka aficionado, and the slurring tells me she’s had a festival of her own. She sounds seven shots gone. I feel a wave of affection for her as she apologises and self-deprecates, but it’s followed swiftly by a selfish honk of alarm: does this mean I can’t sleep on her red velvet sofa? My head aches sullenly. More paracetamol, it urges, as though it’s someone else’s head, and I’m its slave. Swallow some. You know you want to.

‘Wheels. Wheels. Pick up the fucking phone!’ As soon as I hear the hoarse baby- croak, I stop towelling my hair to concentrate. She is calling from an anonymous number which I assume to be St Swithin’s hospital. ‘I need you here. You’ve got to come and get me out. It’s happening. It stinks of rotten eggs. We’re all going to drown. You, me, everyone!’ How did she get my number? There is a noise in the background. Bethany says ‘oh Jesus’ and hangs up abruptly. Two psychiatric nurses will be supervising her round the clock. The rules allow her one phone call. I suppose I should feel flattered she has designated me her buddy.

The next message kicks in before I have time to absorb Bethany’s call. But in the split second before the physicist speaks, I know it’s him. I flinch. Then flare. Flight-fight. I’ll opt for fight, every time — but only after a lurch.

‘We have to talk. Something’s come up. We’ll need to rethink things. Just call me right away, can you.’

His voice is low, apologetic, but with a delicate catch, an undercurrent of excitement. So the physicist has had some proper sex, with a woman who can wrap her legs round his back. Whose sudden presence in his life has led to a need to ‘rethink’ things. Good for him. Water deltas down my neck and pools in the hollows of my collarbones. For a moment I am convinced I can’t move, that the paraplegia has spread, that my body has calcified, that I am now a tetraplegic, a floating brain and no more. In the silence that follows his voice, the physicist’s absence throbs in the air, as florid as pain. I press delete.

There’s another message, but I can’t cope with the possibility of further torture just now, so I call the