The Rapture

salt ocean air and the tang of warmed seaweed. After the downpour and the gales, the sun is back, a relentless fireball. The heat is abrasive, a hair-dryer with no off switch. Surfaces glitter in the shimmering air. Everyone is wearing sunglasses. I can’t think of the last time I saw anyone’s eyes in daylight. Or the last time I bared mine.

I head for a cafe. I have discovered, whose three crucial attributes I regularly celebrate: disabled bathroom facilities, a view of the waterfront, and good coffee. Here I settle at a corner table near the window and read Bethany Krall’s medical report, the first part of which is written by Dr Ehmet, listing the various drugs she has been administered over the months, before Cotard’s syndrome and electroconvulsive therapy entered the equation. Antipsychotics and antidepressants, plus drugs to counteract the side-effects: Prozac, Cipramil, Lustral, Risperdal, Zyprexa, Trazodone, Effexor, Zoloft, Tegretol. The next part is written by Hamish Bates, a therapist who worked with Bethany for two months before leaving for the private sector. According to him the ECT ‘gave her relief from the delusion of being dead, but stimulated a preoccupation with climate change, chemical pollution, weather patterns, geological disturbances, and apocalyptic scenarios’. He is interested in Bethany’s frequent references to the Rapture, ‘a notion that is heavily debated in the Faith Wave’s Armageddon discussions, along with the belief that the Messiah will return after a seven-year period of 'Tribulation' or 'End Times', in which God will punish humankind for its sins, by means of plagues, floods, fire and brimstone, etc. With the spread of war in the Middle East and the fear of biological weaponry further exposing the cultural nerve, it is no surprise that a notion such as the Rapture has seen a resurgence.’ Having done his Googling and recycled some five-year-old Guardian op-eds, Hamish Bates allows himself to wax philosophical in his final paragraph, speculating that Bethany’s recurring themes are ‘classic metaphors for the turmoil of the mind, prompted by the geological disasters and meteorological vagaries of our times: clusters of catastrophes that cry out to fit into a pattern, be it accelerated global heating or divine retribution for man’s sins’.

I may question Bates’s originality, but I agree with his assessment. Bethany’s pain is planet-shaped and planet-sized: she has her own vividly imagined earthquakes and hurricanes, her own volcanic eruptions, her own changing atmosphere, her own form of meltdown.

The pool is swarming with kids at weekends, so I spend the rest of the day and Sunday at home with the fan on, surfing the net for information on electroconvulsive therapy and state-of-the-art wheelchairs which I can’t afford. My curiosity on those matters satisfied, I move on to a subject which has been at the back of my mind since the TV debate on human cull caused by the heatwave. The Planetarian movement’s spiritual leader — though he publicly distances himself from its wilder outpourings — is the Calcutta-born, Paris-based Harish Modak, a geologist and one-time colleague of the late James Lovelock, who came up with the notion of Gaia, the planet as a self- regulating organism with its own ‘geophysiology’. I skim Modak’s latest article, which appeared recently in the Washington Post. There is ‘colossal arrogance’, he maintains, in the assumption that humans will last for ever. If we look at the planet’s life across billions of years, rather than in terms of humankind’s meagre history as a dominant species, we will see that our presence on Earth has lasted the blink of an eye. ‘We are the agents of our own destruction — and when we are gone, extinguished by our own heedless quest for expansion, the planet will not mourn us. Indeed, it will have cause to rejoice. Today, the human species stands at the brink of a new mass extinction which will see if not its disappearance, then its extreme marginalisation.’ Modak cites climate model projections which back this up starkly, and reproduces the famous table which demonstrates how, if the planet is allowed to heat up by three further degrees, positive feedbacks will force it up to four, then five, then six. ‘The Chinese curse 'may you live in interesting times' has descended on those of us living in the twenty-first century as never before,’ Modak concludes. I rather like his grandiloquence. He’d probably object to anyone saying it, but his sentiments have a biblical as well as a Hindu ring to them. ‘For the first time in human history, the destruction — already apparent — is global. In times past, children and grandchildren were seen as a blessing, a sign of faith in the future of the gene-pool. Now, it would seem that the kindest thing to do for our grandchildren is to refrain from generating them.’

Although more conservative and measured than the Planetarian on the TV, Modak’s underlying message seems to be that pessimism is the new realism. I do not doubt his projections or his figures or his graphs. But his conclusions depress me.

Once a year Hadport is home to the national British chess championships. Chess players are notorious for both their terrible dress sense and their lack of orientation skills. It was a week ago that I first caught sight of the carrot-haired woman — in her forties, badly dressed, dishevelled — opposite my flat. At first I assumed she was one of their strange tribe, stranded in Hadport after her lost chess match like a misplaced evacuee. She looked off kilter. But then I had other thoughts, prompted by the fact that she was empty-handed. Every woman — whether or not she plays chess — carries a bag. Her lack of this standard accessory made me think that perhaps she was local after all: local enough to be a neighbour who has popped out on a rare bag-free errand. Or mad. A bagless woman can look, and feel, almost obscenely naked. Dewombed. In a world increasingly full of distressed people, every small town has its aimless oddballs, men and women who drift in and out like flotsam.

When I arrive home from the cafe. later that afternoon, I see the woman again. She’s standing on the pavement opposite my flat, her hands hanging loosely at her sides. She’s wearing a T-shirt and linen trousers. I feel her watching me but I refrain from looking directly back at her. During the whole of my transfer out of the car, she doesn’t shift. Once in the house, I glance at her through the window. She is still standing there, motionless, like a mannequin on guard duty.

I close the blind to banish her but I fail. Because whether or not it was her aim, she has succeeded in unsettling me.

That night, I lie awake thinking, unable to sleep. Harish Modak is right, I decide, that humans are short- termists by nature, and only far-sighted political vision can halt the damage to the biosphere. But part of me — the part that has got me this far, despite all that has happened — refuses to agree with him that such vision will never come into being. I didn’t survive a horrific car accident in order to let Washington, Delhi and Beijing cook me to death. Cuando te tengo a ti vida, cuanto te quiera, I murmur: my tiny foreign mantra of cheer. I’m normally good at switching off from work, but Bethany Krall pesters her way in. The hoarse grate of her voice in my ear. Her wayward, carefully enunciated menace. You had two hearts and one was gone. So someone died. I keep remembering the feel of her fingers on my pulse. Like a doctor who meant me no good.

My colleague Dr Hussan Ehmet is a melancholy Turkish Cypriot with sloping shoulders and badly groomed hair, whose claim to professional fame is a study of mass hysteria and religious cults in the Far East, soon to be published as an academic book by Oxford University Press. Although he is not the most charming of men, he charms me. I like the way he wears his loneliness and erudition on his sleeve, the way he gives a small ‘heh’ when he’s cracked a medic’s dry almost-joke.

‘Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights. Heh. Bethany’s is the conflict of two rights. Hers and ours. What puts her into a state approximating to happiness, or perhaps even transient bliss, heh, is a regular dose of electricity applied directly to the brain. The interesting thing is, the rather remarkable thing is, she now requests it herself,’ he tells me over an execrable canteen lunch. ‘She can feel its beneficial effects. I suspect that within a few months, the suppressed memories will start coming back. Some of these children, they are basically like cats and dogs. You know. Carnivorous animals, sometimes they eat grass to help their digestion. They know what they need when they’re sick, heh. It’s instinct.’ It strikes me as a curiously crass thing for a psychiatrist to say, especially one who can quote Hegel at you in the lunch queue, but perhaps he is right. ‘She’s unpopular with the therapists because she’s intuitive. She picks up on moods. Her perceptions can seem a little, what-is-the-word, uncanny at times. It disturbs people.’ I try to look surprised, wryly amused, as though I am not implicated. I don’t know if I succeed. ‘Like Joy McConey. Poor woman.’

‘What was her relationship with Bethany like?’ I ask, curious that he has mentioned my predecessor because her name tends to go unspoken at Oxsmith.

‘Understandably troubled,’ says Dr Ehmet. But now he looks embarrassed. He regrets having spoken.

‘But why?’ I warned her about what would happen. ‘Is Joy…ill?’

He nudges at a falafel with his fork. ‘In a manner of speaking. Joy’s circumstances were very unfortunate,’ he mumbles. ‘She drew — er, unprofessional conclusions about Bethany.’

‘Such as?’