The Dark Light (27 page)

As the candle drops its light increases in momentum. A ravenous flame expands and expands until it fills the whole church.

TWENTY-SEVEN

REBEKAH

There’s pain. The opening of a door, which seems to draw the fire, orange and terrible, towards me. I can see Hannah with tongues of flame dancing about her head, but she does not move, still she kneels, fingers knotted hard together, her lips moving in silent, determined prayer.

‘
Alex!
’ But it’s so hot my words are taken from me, scorched and turned to ashes before they are even heard. I’ve never seen Father move so quickly. He jumps towards me, grabbing the cloth from the altar and throwing it over my head. And he’s squeezing me tight, and saying a prayer over and over.

I’m surprised how calm I feel. It doesn’t hurt. It is like stepping from one room to the next except the door is slammed shut behind you, no going back, as the room you used to live in is destroyed.

Everything is dark, muffled, then suddenly I can see everything. As if I’m above it all looking down. Mary and the boys running, Mr Bevins collapsing on his knees, Jonathan curled up in a ball beneath a chair. Father trying to push us through the flames to the doors, but it’s too late. The wooden chairs have caught and go up in a wall of fire that forces him to step back.

I wonder what Mr Bevins feels right now? What does he see in the middle of his transformation? Does he see the welcome chorus of angels? The cherubim and seraphim? St Peter and all the prophets? Was it worth it? I think he is happy because he is not alone. Isn’t that the point to take us all down with him?

In Mary’s encyclopaedia it said fires need three things – heat, oxygen and fuel. And to fight a fire you need to starve it of one of these elements. This is what Mr Bevins understands so well: that all fires, whatever heat creates them, however much oxygen they receive need fuel to burn. Without the fuel of his congregation he is nothing but a lonely madman.

On the grass in front of the church is a machine, with thin blades and a body like a fat insect: a helicopter. I’ve seen them sometimes out at sea. Gideon said they use them on the rigs. Then outside the church two figures, one with a red canister that sprays white dust, fighting against the thick black smoke and the heat that keeps forcing them back.

‘
Rebekah!
’ Alex is outside, screaming, and then she’s gone and I’m not in the church any more at all and the island beneath me becomes small and the world becomes bigger and bigger, the shape of the coastline like a jagged cut outlined by beach and cliff and patches of white surf.

There is a slow, hazy memory that I’m not sure is a memory at all. A hot afternoon, a river, light playing on the surface of the water, and a voice in the distance that I know belongs to my mother. I am a little toddler, I don’t know where we are, maybe the park, I didn’t even know I remembered this, and she is somewhere near me, her breath so close it tickles my ear, telling me not to be afraid.

TWENTY-EIGHT

ALEX

When I wake up I’m lying on my back looking at the sky and the clouds and I cough as if my lungs are coming up through my throat. I close my eyes and wonder for a moment if I’m dead, until a pain so sharp and searing burns up the back of my neck and I put my hand there to touch my hair but all it meets is a raw mess. Someone presses a wet towel to my head. I struggle to sit up.

I can’t work out why I’m still here. I’m supposed to be Raptured. I’m supposed to be Raptured. The thought goes round and round my head, until I realize I’m saying it out loud.

‘Shhhhh,’ someone says. ‘You need to lie down.’

A woman, close to my face. She has black and red burns on her arms, and her hair is matted and charred.

Mary, minus her headscarf. I hardly recognize her.

‘Wha—?’ My voice is a kind of strangled croak.

In front of me the twins and Thomas, sitting inside the open belly of a helicopter, drinking water from a bottle.

‘Shhhhh.’

‘But . . .’

There are shouts from further down the field, beyond the helicopter, and a plume of thick black smoke rising above the church. I can’t work out why I’m here and not in there.

‘Did Jesus come and leave me behind?’

Mary shakes her head. ‘Shhhhh.’

I get up, although it feels as if I am standing on a sponge; any moment I could fall over. There is something important that I’m forgetting. It’s hard to fit the pieces together. As if time has suddenly changed speed and life has jumped ahead into a new dimension that I don’t understand.

Then there is a loud hiss and the roof of the church pops like the lid of a jar, flames licking through the plastic and the tarpaper and then the whole structure seems to melt, the wooden walls folding over and falling in on themselves, and the heat is so intense and fierce I can feel it even from this distance. Two men run towards me. One has a neat grey beard and a shaved head, the other, wrapped up in scarves to protect him from the smoke, is just a mop of thick black hair, but I can see his eyes are wild, his dark pupils huge.

‘There was nothing we could do!’ he says over and over. ‘There was nothing we could do!’

‘
Rebekah!
’

We are in the back of the helicopter while the men call for help on their radio. There are too many of us to go all at once apparently.

‘Go where?’ I ask, to no one in particular. My voice sounds hollow, almost as if it’s coming from a different body. I realize I’m shivering, although I’m quite warm. One of them puts a silver blanket around my shoulders.

‘To hospital! Those burns need treating.’

Thomas sits with his head in his hands, which are burned and raw. He won’t look at me and he is mumbling over and over something that sounds like a prayer.

My body seems caught between wanting to run back to the church and the terrible, impossible truth that I can’t. Anger rises up in me. I can’t believe I ever fell for it. I can’t believe I never saved her. I could murder Mr Bevins with my own hands, except I know he is already dead.

‘It’s
your
fault!’ I say, my voice coming out like a shout, a scream. ‘It’s your fucking fault!’

Mary looks at me with drowning eyes.

‘And yours! It’s all your fault!’ And before I can stop it I start to cry, loud and sudden.

Mary touches me on the shoulder. ‘Alex –’

But I shrug her off and cry until everything hurts.

The men decide they will wait for more help rather than leaving some of us here. Mary looks relieved. ‘I must stay with the children.’

They get their first-aid kit out and make me lie down, then spray something on my hair and legs and bandage them. They tell me not to move.

‘How many of you?’ the one with the beard asks.

‘Thirty.’ Mary says.

‘How many children?’

‘Four.’

I wrinkle my nose. ‘No, two,’ I say.

‘Four,’ Mary says again, ‘but only three made it out.’

‘Rebekah,’ I say, it comes out in a pitiful croak. ‘Rebekah.’

There is a long silence where the man looks at us and we look at him. He smiles uncertainly.

‘Are you the Antichrist?’ Peter asks. ‘Or Jesus?’

He looks surprised. ‘If I have to be anybody, then Jesus,’ he says. ‘But my name’s John – and that’s Duncan. Friends of the Earth.’ He points at a logo on his jacket.

Mary nods wearily. John gets out a flask and unscrews the lid, offering it to me. Whiskey. It smells of peat and burns my mouth and makes me cough.

‘We tried to land on the other side but it was too windy. We’ve been tracking that whale, the one that ended up on your beach?’

Mary nods. ‘It was beached after the storm.’

‘There have been a few these past months. We were hoping to find out why.’

‘We didn’t know anyone still lived here, like,’ Duncan says; his voice has the same northern lilt as Jonathan’s. I look at the church, still spewing out smoke and flames; even the wet grass around the building is singed. ‘What happened?’

I look at Mary. There is a blank page where my thoughts ought to be.

‘It was because of the Rapture,’ I say.

‘Because of the
what
?’ The men look confused.

‘The Rapture. It was supposed to happen last night, only it didn’t,’ I say.

‘And what would that be then?’

Mary groans.

‘The end of the world where Jesus comes to claim his own,’ says Thomas.

‘Religious, are you?’

I nod, but Mary does not. ‘You could call it that,’ she says.

Another helicopter arrives, bigger with more men in uniforms, Red Cross, police. We are quickly put to lie down in special stretchers. They have given me some painkillers that make everything seem far away, although I know that I will feel it later. There is a deafening sound and the helicopter seems to lurch up in the air, slowly, and then quickly, swaying a little as it pitches against the wind. Thomas sits beside me, solemn and shocked. I reach out a hand and touch his arm, and he leans towards me. I think he says sorry.

I turn away from him and start to cry. I know that in the future when people talk about New Canaan or ask me about my scars I will tell them about what happened and about Rebekah and they will ask me what I believe, and I will say that all I know for certain is that somewhere inside of me is this deep river, a flow of molecules and atoms, of water and blood, a precious current of electricity that moves through the muscles of my body, a sap that rises from the earth to fill me. The miracle that was inside me all along: life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the friends who cheered me along with the writing of this book – Tina Jackson, Jean McNeil, Emma Forsberg, Lara Newson, Katie Sampson, Donna Mclean. But also especially to Emma Hargrave for all the close editorial help, my editor Rachel Petty for reading many drafts, and my agent, Hellie Ogden, for being visionary about this in the best possible way.

‘I’m
fat
,’ I hear myself saying. I look in the mirror. My face has gone hot and red. I feel like I’m going to explode. ‘I’m
fat
.’ It sizzles under my skin, puffing me up, pushing me out, making me massive.

Weight has always been a big issue in Carmen’s life. Not surprising when her mum is obsessed with the idea that thin equals beautiful, thin equals successful, thin equals the way to get what you want. And soon this obsession starts to take over.

When her mother sweeps her off to live in Birmingham – taking her away from her stepfather, the only good influence in her life – Carmen finds things spiralling out of control. And she begins to ask: if she was thin, could it all be very different?

‘Exceptional – a superb portrayal of three generations of women for whom food is a problem’
Times Educational Supplement

‘Perceptive and disturbing’
Bookseller

Julia Bell is a writer and teacher and her novels have been published in the UK and US and translated into many foreign languages. She is also the co-editor of the bestselling
The Creative Writing Coursebook
, which she wrote and compiled while teaching at UEA. She is an alumni of the UEA Creative Writing MA and is a Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, where she runs a successful MA programme. She also writes poetry and short stories and is the founder and director of the Writers’ Hub website and the annual anthology
The Mechanics’ Institute Review
.

Books by Julia Bell

The Dark Light

Dirty Work

Massive