is lost.
In the belly of the aircraft there are people everywhere: on benches, or squatting on the floor amid sacks and trunks. Kristin is sitting with Bethany’s head in her lap, her face so pale and rigid with concentration she seems cast in wax. Behind them is a tiny, frail figure who I don’t recognise at first. And then with an inner pop of shock, I do. Harish Modak clutches his open jar of ashes, a dribble of grey saliva emerging from the corner of his mouth. He’s making swallowing movements. I try to catch his eye but he doesn’t see me. His whole body is shaking with sobs. Awkwardly, I shunt towards Kristin, heaving my legs behind me. She’s yelling something I can’t hear, eyes wide. The helicopter’s engine is still straining, a wild metallic shriek. A man next to me vomits. Kristin is pointing outside. I freeze. The sky has marbled and darkened.
Then comes a deafening, unworldly boom.
Its sound vibrates across the horizon, spreading in a languid, reverberating crescendo. As if it has all the time in the world. From deep beneath the sea floor, something has spoken. With sudden, colossal force, a series of jolts buffets the helicopter from side to side, then up and down. We’re being rammed from all directions. There are screams as people grab at one another for support. Somehow, the pilot manages to right the aircraft. But the engine is labouring.
I look across to the open mouth of the aircraft. Beyond the lit crescent of the stadium, the sea is pulling back in a ferocious sucking rush of spume, exposing hectares of glittering sand and rock and flipping silver creatures that must be dolphins or whales, stranded by the giant drag of water. Then on the horizon, a wide orange flare flickers and pulsates beneath the dome of the sky. As we struggle to rise higher into the air, the flare swells and changes shape, flattening itself to meet the sea.
At first it looks like a glassy mountain ridge has shot up from the exposed sand of the re-cast shoreline. But it’s a sheer wall of water. It blots out the clouds. Its base is dark, almost black. It’s topped by plumes of dancing, spritzing white.
The giant wave, more beautiful and more terrifying in its grandeur than anything I could dream, is hurtling towards us.
Then all around, there are new shouts and screams. With a lurch I understand why. We’re flying too low. Even if the wave doesn’t reach us, the air currents it will generate will suck us down.
‘Try and get some more height!’ Ned yells to the pilot. The helicopter whines and balks, battered from side to side by the residue of the shock. The pilot yells something back. ‘Tip out one of the crates!’ Ned shouts across the stewing cavern. The word goes round, and ten men — Ned and Frazer Melville among them — stagger to their feet and strain to shove the largest wooden box to the edge. Kristin joins them, leaving Bethany’s head propped on a sack. There’s a wild, animal scuffle as everyone else presses against the walls of the helicopter. I have to get to Bethany. I begin to haul myself in her direction.
Like a giant wheel, the future rolls in with all its murderous force.
I’ve nearly reached Bethany now. She blinks rapidly and musters a pained mouth-twitch of recognition. Shuffling myself up, I rest my head next to hers on the vibrating floor of the helicopter. I can feel her breath hot on my face. It smells faintly of bubblegum. With a jerky movement, she reaches over and places her hand, bony as a bird’s claw, on my belly. As long as I can keep her anger going, that Bethany rage, she will be OK. And so long as she can, I can too. I put my mouth to her ear.
‘I thought we didn’t do touching. Bethany,’ I whisper into it.
‘It’s not you I’m touching, Wheels.’ Her voice is strangled, as if she can barely breathe.
‘What do you mean, not me?’
‘It. I just felt it. Inside you. Our little friend. How’s that for bad timing?’ She laughs and splutters.
I don’t get it. I glance across at Frazer Melville, straining against the crate, his face drained of all colour. And in that moment I realise what Bethany has said. The truth of it. Of course. How could I not know what the things we have done have led to? How could I not?
Oh Christ. Not now. My heart free-falls.
And then, for no good reason on Earth, lifts.
‘You know where you’re going with that baby?’ Bethany whispers hoarsely. I nod. In that tiny glimmer of time, I feel that I have known all along. Her mouth is straining. Behind the distortion of pain, there’s something that you could mistake for ecstasy. She’s looking out into the bleached-bone nothingness of the air outside, a throb of dizzying white.
‘Get back, everyone!’ yells a voice. The men are pushing rhythmically at the crate, inching it closer to the edge, until, with a final concerted heave, the giant rectangle, now shunted halfway out, hesitates, then tips and plummets. Then it’s lost to view and there’s a sickening sideways swing as the helicopter struggles to right itself. It seems to be failing. We’re jolted sideways again. I grip Bethany’s shoulder and close my eyes.
When I open them again, I see Harish, Frazer Melville and Kristin clutching one another and swaying near the far wall of the helicopter in a strange triptych, staring out at the wall of water — filthy, frothing, black, heaving with cars and trees and rubble and human bodies — that’s rushing at us with the speed of a jet-plane. With a vicious mechanical jerk, the helicopter lifts vertically, the pilot slamming at the controls as the wash below ignites. The fire spreads greedily as though devouring pure oil, yellow flames bursting from the crest of the liquid swell, triggering star-burst gas explosions above. With a deep-throated bellow the wave gushes across the landscape, turning buildings and trees to matchwood in an upward rush of spume. As the force catapults us upward, the scene shrinks to brutal eloquence: a vast carpet of glass unrolling, incandescent, with powdery plumes of rubble shooting from its edges, part solid, part liquid, and part gas — a monstrous concoction of elements from the pit of the Earth’s stomach. There’s a gentle pliant crunching and far below buildings buckle, ploughed under, then vanish in the suck. Only a few skyscrapers stand proud of the burning waterscape as the land is relentlessly and efficiently erased. The heat is unbearable, as though the sun itself has plunged into the water and is irradiating us from below. It’s almost impossible to breathe. There’s a stench of burnt wood, melted plastic, of meat and seafood boiled to the bone. Tiny rainbows dance across the open side of the helicopter above the pulsing floodwater. It is the most terrible thing I have ever seen.
‘It’s wonderful,’ says Bethany. She is staring at it, mesmerised. ‘You’ll remember it for ever. You’ll remember me too. I know you will.’ The strange light makes her face look as translucent and ghostly as rice paper.
‘We’ll get out of here, we’ll land somewhere safe, we’ll get you treated,’ I’m saying. But then, as the helicopter begins to arc in a new direction, I realise I have misunderstood her. Utterly and completely and—
‘Bethany, no!’
I slam my arm out to stop her but she has started to roll. It’s an almost languid movement. Balletic and calm. A smooth, considered rotation. Her eyes are wide open. She knows what she is doing.
I scream but no sound comes out. Then I scream again, aloud. But against the shriek of the engine, no one hears me.
Bethany keeps rolling, until she has rolled to the very edge of the world.
And then over it.
The crest of the giant wave has sluiced on, leaving in its wake a sheet of glassy, liquefied flame, bobbing with charred bodies and black detritus, a foul, fizzing stew of water and gas and heat. My eyes trace the arc of the falling girl silhouetted against the blinding brightness below. As its furnace blasts upward, scorching my skin, I see her cartwheel down through the vapour. The motion is slow, almost graceful.
Down and down. First she is a comma and then a speck.
And then a burning shard, gulped into the abyss.
And then nothing.
Then Frazer Melville has seen what’s happened. What I failed to see in time. The granting of the death-wish evident in Bethany from the moment I saw her, whose force I so fatally misjudged: that dark, calculated single- minded mission to end it. He’s shouting to Ned and Kristin. There’s commotion as the word spreads that she has gone. With a lunge, Frazer Melville has shot across and grabbed me. He grips me to his chest so I am trapped in his arms, squeezing a great wail out of me, a cry that will echo across the rest of my life, because I know already there will be no green fields in Bethanyland, no safe place for a child to play. Nothing but hard burnt rock and blasted earth, a struggle for water, for food, for hope. A place where every day will be marked by the rude, clobbering battle for survival and the permanent endurance of regret, among the ruins of all we have created and invented, the busted remains of the marvels and commonplaces we have dreamed and built, strived for and held dear: food, shelter, myth, beauty, art, knowledge, material comfort, stories, gods, music, ideas, ideals, shelter.
