ahead an overweight middle-aged man in a tracksuit is waving his arms, trying to flag down a car, his features frozen in a grimace of anxiety. We drive past him and on, using the sat-nav to weave through back roads, avoiding the chaos of the high streets as much as we can. The business districts are quiet, almost dead. But in all the commercial and residential zones we pass through, men and boys are heaving laden rucksacks out of stores, or jerkily shoving shopping trolleys piled high with plundered goods — not just food, but plasma TVs, microwave ovens, DVD players, golf clubs. Every now and then we swerve to avoid someone rushing across streets littered with thrown rubble and smashed glass. In a side-alley, two drunken girls in short skirts and impossibly high heels stagger out of TGIF’s, clutching one another and shrieking with laughter. They stumble past an elderly couple struggling to load three battered leather trunks into the boot of a white Renault, and totter into a subway, their hoots reverberating from the stairwell.
On the back seat, Bethany sleeps on, oblivious. The TV news reports that the government has repeated its condemnation of the scare, calling it ‘a cynical hoax designed to disrupt the entire country’. The Home Secretary has appealed for calm. The Prime Minister will address the nation shortly. There’s speculation that a state of emergency will be declared within the hour. The mayor of London has insisted he will ‘stay at my desk and stay sane’. But in Norway, where the alert is being taken seriously by the authorities as well as the population, whole communities have evacuated the coasts and headed into the mountains. Denmark, northern Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Atlantic coast of France are in gridlock. Still heading east into London, we pass squat malls, tattered trees, ransacked food outlets. Everywhere, buildings are emptying. The TV news bursts at us in disjointed fragments. Some of the images mirror what we can see with our own eyes from the car, while others reflect the flow chart of chaos that Ned drew up back at the farmhouse: inundated airports, violent skirmishes and arrests, cities haemorrhaging people, traffic jammed, sailboats hijacked, ferries and aeroplanes changing course. I can feel my breath becoming more shallow and strained. I need all my concentration to keep full-blown panic at bay. But I’m losing the fight, because as we drive on through thickening traffic in the direction of the stadium, a new fear has been massing energy like a geyser about to blow.
‘Are you wondering what I’m wondering?’ I ask Frazer Melville. I’m looking at the cars around us. He nods miserably. His hands are clutched tight on the wheel, his profile pale and strained.
I zap through the channels, then stop and freeze when I see Bethany’s face grinning back at me from the family photograph that I saw in her file at Oxsmith. The cheesy smile, the braces that fill her entire mouth. The image zooms out to show her parents. ‘In a new development, the abducted teenager Bethany Krall has been linked to the disaster alert.’ We exchange a look of dismay. I glance at the back seat: she is still curled up in the blanket, fast asleep.
‘When it comes to sixteen-year-old Bethany Krall, there are more questions than answers at the moment,’ says a young female reporter. She is standing outside Oxsmith. Sheldon-Gray’s rowing machine, Newton smashing Bethany’s globe, the parched institutional lawn, Mesut’s striped hot-air balloon hanging from the ceiling in the art room: mental snapshots from a lifetime ago. ‘First, could it be that the young killer, until recently an inmate here, is behind a huge global hoax? Some charismatic church leaders have expressed the belief that she predicted the massive global disaster Harish Modak’s team have warned of. Her father, the Reverend Leonard Krall, has even declared he believes his daughter is the embodiment of a satanic force. Bethany’s so-called prophecies have been uncannily accurate in the past, according to her former therapist Joy McConey. But is the teenager really a modern-day Nostradamus? What are her claims based on? As for the girl who stabbed her own mother to death: where is she now?’ Around us, the traffic is slowing down. But it shouldn’t be. It doesn’t make sense. We’re not heading out of the capital, but into it. Then Leonard Krall appears. He’s standing in front of a huge outdoor screen flashing the message
‘As a Christian, I’m praying for Bethany,’ says the man who tipped me out of my wheelchair and left me helpless in a church car park. ‘I’m a father as well as a believer. I love my child. And I love the Lord too. And when two great loves are not compatible…’ His lip quivers, his eyes shine with passion. But a corner of my mind is preoccupied with something else: why are so many other cars headed in the same direction as us? ‘If our church elders are correct in believing that this is a sign the End Times are here, I am praying that she too will be raptured along with the righteous,’ continues Krall. ‘But I fear that will not happen.’ He shakes his head, as though too upset to continue, then regains his grip. ‘My daughter has chosen another kind of future.’ And why do these cars have no roof racks or trailers? No obvious luggage? Why do the families inside them look thrilled with life, instead of scared out of their wits? ‘If Bethany were here now I would say to her, stop doing the Devil’s work and return to your true family, which is the family of Jesus Christ. I will be praying for her here today, along with many thousands of others, as we await the glory that shall be ours.’
And why do so many of them have Christian bumper stickers?
When the camera pulls out, and we see where Leonard Krall is standing, Frazer Melville says quietly, ‘Oh fuck.’
Which more or less sums things up.
I turn my head away from the screen and blink. It can’t be.
But it is.
The Olympic Stadium has been transformed into a huge, impromptu worship centre.
I whip round. Bethany is still sleeping. Did she know all along that this would happen? Did she engineer it?
‘Leave her. It doesn’t matter. We’ll find another place,’ says Frazer Melville. ‘Quick. Call Ned and tell him.’
I punch at the phone in mounting panic. But there’s no connection. I try again. And again. The line is blocked.
‘If the government’s declared a state of emergency, the phone lines will be down,’ says Frazer Melville. He has seen my panic and probably shares it. But he’s hiding it well.
With cruel efficiency, a plughole opens up inside me and hope drains out.
A tiny brown spider is making its way along the dashboard. Sometimes, as a young child, I’d squash small creatures, from a mixture of boredom, sadism and curiosity. Following its stumbling progress towards the air filter, and contemplating what I could or could not do, at this moment, to radically alter the course of its tiny, unaware life, I realise the extent of my mistake in accepting the grandiose notion that Earth’s plight is man’s punishment. That all we have wished for in modern times, and engendered in the getting, is an affront to some invisible principle of ethics. Nature is neither good nor motherly nor punitive nor vengeful. It neither blesses nor cherishes. It is indifferent. Which makes us as expendable as the dodo or the polar bear.
‘Drive one kilometre to destination,’ says the sat-nav.
‘Did you know your father would be at the stadium?’ I ask as levelly as I can manage when Bethany wakes, her face plastic with sweat. Despite the huge bruise and her tied wrists, she looks oddly serene, as though she has slept for hours rather than minutes. She inhales deeply and breathes out slowly, as though somehow, along the journey, she has studied yoga and it has nourished her.
‘Sure,’ she smiles. Her voice is measured, almost thoughtful. ‘Along with thousands of other people. All expecting the Rapture. I saw it.’
A current of fury sweeps through me. Frazer Melville swings round, his face red. ‘So you led us — deliberately — to the worst place we could possibly go!’ he yells. ‘And we can’t change the plan because we can’t get hold of Ned!’ He thumps the wheel.
‘The helicopter’s landing there,’ I say quietly. My mouth is dry: I have to force the words past my tongue. ‘Right in the middle of it. And there’s nothing we can do but go there. Did you see that, too, Bethany?’
She smiles sweetly. ‘Yup. Into the lion’s den.’
I’m remembering my calamitous meeting with the Reverend Leonard Krall. Paranoia is like a fast-growing crystal. Blink and it has sprouted a whole new section.
