‘This is millions of years old. From the time before humans, before dinosaurs. Before fossils, before life. What happens to someone who burns a Bible because they think Genesis is full of shit ?’
She takes the thunder egg and cradles it in her scabby, wrecked hands. ‘The big bang.’
‘That sounds more like the beginning of something than the end.’
‘It’s both.’
‘What happens to Bethany, during the big bang?’
When she starts talking it comes in a flood that catches me unawares.
‘She gets tied to the stairs. They try to get the Devil out of her and then they tape up her mouth so the Devil can’t curse them and they keep shaking her but the Devil won’t come out so they tie her up and the next morning the Devil’s still there so they shake her some more and that goes on for three days and they won’t let her eat or sleep and she’s tied up the whole time and the Devil won’t come out.’ She stops abruptly and turns the thunder egg in her palms. I’m aware of the grandfather clock ticking. Of the sky outside darkening to a bruised grey. Of birdsong and the taste of whisky in my mouth.
I say, ‘So that night, when your father was away, it was just you and your mother.’
‘I’d got one hand free. But as soon as I get the other one loose she comes in from the kitchen and starts screaming at me. I run for the door but I can’t do it, I’m dizzy. She stops me and she’s going on about the Devil and she won’t shut up, and she blocks the door, she won’t let me past, and then she grabs me by the hair and starts shaking me and screaming at me that I’m an ungrateful evil freak and why don’t I just die. I’m on the floor, doubled up. There’s a screwdriver just lying there. Like it’s waiting for one of us to use it.’ She laughs. ‘Like God put it there.’
I nod. ‘Go on.’
‘So I grab it and jam it into her.’ I try not to picture it. And fail. ‘In her throat. But it doesn’t stop her. She won’t let go of me. So I jam it into her again. When she falls down it’s easier. I just hold her down and keep shoving it into her. Everywhere. And it feels so fucking good.’
Her face has gained colour, as though ignited by the memory. Then it drains away as quickly as it came and she stares at her hands. There is another long silence, yawning out into the space between us. A bird screeches. Then she turns to face me, her eyes vivid with pain.
I roll closer. ‘Your mother’s job was to protect you. That’s what parents are supposed to do. What they did to you was wrong.’ I remember Leonard Krall’s frank, open-faced conviction.
‘That’s what happened,’ she says. ‘The rules changed.’
She slumps back in the sofa. Time and thought settle into a solid mass within me, condensing like a cast. Her face is wet. I reach out and dab it with a tissue. She winces, but doesn’t resist.
‘Gabrielle.’ She is whispering, as though she fears someone is listening. ‘I saw us.’
It’s the first time she has used my name. But her voice is faint, like distant wind receding to silence. I wait. There are so many things she could mean. I wait a long time. ‘I saw us. I saw you and me.’
‘Where did you see us?’
‘Up in the sky.’ I wait some more. ‘But we went different ways.’
‘Where did we go?’
‘After the thunder we went to the golden circle. Then we were caught up in the air. But you went to one place and I went to another place.’
‘Look at me, Bethany’. Slowly she lifts her face and our eyes meet. Hers are glittering. ‘Bethany. We won’t go different ways. I won’t leave you.’
She shakes her head slowly, as though it is an immeasurable weight. ‘It doesn’t work that way. But I just want to tell you, it’s OK. You mustn’t feel bad.’
‘About what?’
She seems to be looking right through me, at something on the other side of my head.
‘About the way it ends.’
Chapter Fourteen
I enter the kitchen feeling dazed. ‘I just spoke to Ned,’ says Frazer Melville, looking up from his laptop. I have left Bethany on the sofa, staring catatonically at the wall. ‘How did it go with Bethany?’ When I give him a condensed account, he sighs heavily. ‘Jesus. Poor kid. No wonder she’s screwed up.’
‘What’s the news from London?’
‘The seismic data’s been published on the web. The good news is, some prominent scientists are getting on board.’
‘Who?’
‘Kasper Blatt, Akira Kamochi, Walid Habibi, Vance Ozek.’ I can’t put faces to anyone but Kamochi, but the names are all familiar. ‘The bad news is that Ned says the other lobbying they’ve done has hit a brick wall. No one wants to believe it. But the rumour’s spreading on the net and the data’s out there. By the way, he says to watch the news.’ I flick on the TV and zap to BBC World. Another failed assassination attempt on the president of Iran: three bodyguards dead. They show some blood-stained paving. More food riots in South America. But it’s the third, far more outlandish headline, that grabs our attention.
It concerns graffiti in Greenland.
The local correspondent’s report thumbnail-sketches a territory of Inuits with huskies, snowmobiles, alcohol problems and, more recently, livelihoods collapsing due to climate change: a Danish-administered enclave which from June to August is bathed in nonstop, hallucinogenic sunshine. But during the winter months, like now, it’s a land engulfed in darkness, illuminated only by electricity, the moon, and the night sky, with its canopy of stars and the magic swirls of aurora borealis—
And now, as discovered within the last hour, graffiti.
Giant graffiti. A jumble of numbers and letters. Some sort of code. It straddles fifty kilometres of ice cap, far from anywhere habitable. And it glows in the dark. Frazer Melville’s face is breaking into a grin. A satellite image has appeared: a pale blue tracery of semi-legible numbers and characters — seemingly meaningless — etched on the night-darkened landscape. They’re impossible to make out clearly but each cipher, says the anchorman, measures at least ten kilometres high and across. I can see the number 3, and the letters E and B and what looks like a hyphen, and an N. Out there in the darkness, on the Greenlandic ice, somebody with a monstrous ego has been determinedly expressing themselves. Or—
‘Ned must’ve tipped off a local camera crew,’ murmurs Frazer Melville. ‘Just watch.’ The camera lights create a halo around the Greenlandic reporter’s head, broadened and flattened by the TV’s wide-screen function. It’s minus twenty degrees and he’s trembling with cold beneath the fur-trimmed hood of his anorak. Against the velvet Arctic sky, there’s a pulsing light-show of red, blue and green, a swish of colour that makes it look as if the scene has been filtered through the gaudy wing of a giant insect. ‘The characters on the ice are so big you can only see them by satellite,’ he shivers, the northern lights pulsing behind him. ‘Space shots show they weren’t there yesterday but there’s no mistaking them today. They’re calling it the world’s biggest ever publicity stunt. I’m standing here on the down-stroke of the number four. Now this line forms a ridge that stretches all the way over to the horizon, as far as the eye can see.’
The camera pulls back to show it, at the same time revealing the reporter’s female companion, whom he introduces as a local biologist. Bending down, she uses a small ice-pick to detach a chunk of whiteness tinged with a pale mauve glow which she holds out to the camera. She pronounces it to be a phosphorescent liquid that has frozen on contact with the ice. The notion seems to please her profoundly.
‘The dye appears to be organic, and to contain the crushed shells of some form of crustacean. We don’t know exactly what it is yet, we’ve sent samples to be analysed.’ It’s bluish-green with a touch of mauve: a colour
