The Rapture

is more whole in spirit than the boy who made it. It’s both consoling and intriguing, that art can do that. Look at a pickled brain, and you’ll see a putty-grey bolus, lumpy and naked as an exposed mollusc. But there’s space inside for a thousand worlds, none of which need be remotely compatible.

‘Perhaps it’s time to try making something in here,’ I suggest. ‘Is that something we could schedule in for you?’

It’s as though I haven’t spoken. I ride out the silence for a while, but then realise she’s playing a waiting game too. The fixity of her expression — contempt as a default mode — indicates that her mind’s lodged somewhere she considers safe. I catch Rafik’s eye and he looks at me with what might be sympathy, or even pity. He’s well-liked here. He’d be called ‘a rough diamond’ or perhaps even ‘a devoted family man’ in news reports of his violent death at the hands of a psychotic patient. I wonder how many Bethany Krall sessions he has sat through.

‘Bethany?’ I prompt eventually. ‘Any thoughts?’

With a sudden movement she perches herself on the central table and lets out a theatrical sigh.

‘First I get my ECT. Then Tragic Joy. And now you. So my thoughts are that Oxsmith is treating me like a fucking princess. You’re down to one star, missis.’ Turning to the inbuilt wall-mirror, she inspects her teeth, still caged in the same silver braces as in the family photo. ‘Hey. See anything interesting in there, Uncle Rafik?’ she asks, noticing his eye on her. ‘Fancy a high-risk blow-job?’ He turns away, and she cackles in triumph.

‘If you don’t feel like doing any artwork we can just sit together and watch movies if that’s what you want,’ I persevere.

‘Porn? Extra star for saying yes.’

‘Sure,’ I say, noting how quickly sex has entered the conversation. ‘Anything for a star on the Bethany Krall Competence Scale. If they have any porn in the DVD library. I haven’t investigated. How do you feel about watching hardcore sex?’

She laughs. ‘You’re babbling again. You people are so fucking predictable.’

She is right of course. If Bethany is disturbed minor number three hundred for me, I am probably therapist number thirty for her. She knows the tricks of the trade, its let’s-coax-it-out ploys, its carefully framed ‘open’ questions and neat follow-ups, its awareness of key words and phrases, a set of formulae I’ve been increasingly inclined to abandon since my accident. It’s clear that with a case like Bethany, the normal rules do not apply. I can see that at this rate, we’ll soon be going off-road. Gonzo therapy. What’s to lose? But for now, I stick to the well- worn track.

‘The art group meets here three times a week for sessions. But some people prefer working alone. I’d guess you might be one of them. I’ve got watercolour equipment, acrylics, inks, clay, or you can do computer imaging, photography, that sort of thing. My only rule is, no home-made tattoos.’

‘And if I don’t want to do any of that shit? Including date-stamping myself by decorating my tits with snakes?’

‘The content of our sessions is up to you. We could just talk. Or go for a walk.’

Her face sparks up meanly. ‘Go for a walk, like how?’ Her voice is cross-hatched with elaborate scorn. Exhausting, to maintain those levels of anger and yet have no specific target. How tired she must be.

‘In the grounds.’ Just us and five male nurses with shaved heads who pump iron.

A smile is quirking the corners of her mouth. ‘Yes, you would need some physical protection. With my record of violence? Which you’ve just read about in my file? I’ve read about it too. And seen the pictures. Gory stuff. Hey, I’d be afraid of me.’

I wait a beat. But she’s used to that: no dice. ‘Are there ways you are afraid of you, Bethany? Having looked at those pictures?’

Her mother’s desecrated face barges into my mind like a crude shout.

‘You must feel, like, totally naked in that wheelchair. I mean, someone could just tip you out of it. You’d be like a beetle stuck upside down.’ She contemplates the image for a moment. My heart-rate has gone up and I’m aware of blinking more than I should. Sweat pricks in my armpits. She has pinpointed a fear, and she knows it. ‘But I’m interested in this walking thing. I mean, how would it work? Seeing as you seem to be, excuse me for pointing it out, but totally fucking disabled, lower-limb wise? Do I push you in that thing?’

‘No need. I wheel myself. You learn a lot in spaz rehab,’ I say, defusing the word and tweaking a tiny smile out of her. I’ve had this chair eighteen months, and my hands have transmogrified into tools, accessories of meat and bone, the skin of the heel calloused despite the gloves. ‘So how would you feel about a fresh-air session?’

‘How would I feel about it?’ she repeats slowly. I immediately regret my choice of phrase. ‘How would that make you feel, Bethany? Bethany, in terms of feelings, what’s going on at the moment, inside? That’s the bottom line for you, right? Look at you. Babble babble babble. You’re fucking tragic. I can’t believe they let you work here. Don’t they vet you guys? Filter out the lame ones? Whoops — no pun intended. But zero out of ten. And you’ve got there in record time. I appoint you babble champion of Oxsmith! ’

I gaze out at the slowly spinning turbines.

No: I should not be here. And Bethany Krall has swiftly spotted it.

In rehab, they lectured you on the importance of establishing a healthy routine. Hadport Lido opens at seven. In the mornings, I’ll often spend an hour there, hoisting myself into the shallow end and doing twenty tepid laps amid the drowned insects. I have come to know the staff there by name: Goran, Chloe, Vishnu, tanned and healthy and sparkle-eyed. They’ll say hi, and I’ll say hi back. To them, I am the nice lady they feel sorry for, and admire for her ‘courage’ — as if she has any choice in the matter. I overheard them once, evoking the pathos of the nice lady’s plight, noting her attractiveness, and speculating about her age. The consensus was that the nice lady was ‘late twenties’ — a flattering assessment for a 35-year-old. The nice lady, who is not really a nice lady at all, swam on. Her arm muscles, already well honed by the wheelchair, have developed into features to die for. Want them? she feels like asking whenever she receives compliments from well-meaning people, the kind of people who drive her even more insane than she already is. I’ll swap them for your legs.

Swimming is both good and bad for rage. It can help to dissipate it, but it can also focus and refine it. I was told back in London that if I wanted to work at a senior level again, I’d need to deal with my ‘issues’. That, said my employers, would involve more intensive therapy, plus a written self-assessment and analysis. My reaction, when they told me this in the meeting — a warm afternoon, the sun just sinking behind the old Battersea Power Station — was what we in the business call ‘inappropriate’.

‘You’re talking to a trained psychologist, for fuck’s sake!’ I said.

Or did I shriek?

Yes, I must admit I shrieked. Shrieking is both deeply feminine and deeply unfeminine at the same time. When women imitate pressure cookers, they show their worst selves, the side that men call either ‘passionate’ or ‘mad’, depending on whether or not good looks are involved.

‘Don’t patronise me with lectures about coming to terms with the new reality: I live with it every day! I am the new reality!’

Nor is shrieking a good way to communicate in a psychiatric establishment, if you are not an inmate, and indeed, if you have been until now classified among the sane, and in charge of others less fortunate.

‘Gabrielle, I have enormous sympathy and respect for you, and you have been through what no person should go through. With all your… terrible losses. But you work in the field,’ said Dr Sulieman when the members of the committee had trooped out, exchanging distressed glances. ‘See it from an employer’s point of view.’

If my legs worked, I’d have kicked him. Violent urges came to me very readily back then.

The ‘negative attitude’ I had towards my diminished status as a human being after my accident was unfortunately a ‘significant problem’. As Sulieman spoke, I inspected the print on the wall behind him, the image he had chosen as his own personalised backdrop: Monet’s lily pond, with its hypnotic plays of light, its strangely hot greens and blues. ‘A problem which, until it’s resolved, means we are unable to accept you back as a therapist at the present time.’ He’s into the classics, so where’s Kandinsky? I wondered. Where’s Egon Schiele? Where’s van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, where’s Rothko, where’s The