The Rapture (26 page)

He and Kristin Jons dottir position themselves on either side of me: he on one edge of the chaise-longue, and she on a chair to my left. Trapped, I give the whiteboard my full attention. Until this moment I have not paid offshore rigs a single thought.

'They look heroic.'

'They are,' responds Frazer Melville, as though my remark is the correct answer to a secret, unuttered question. 'All that human ingenuity and ambition. All that aspiration.' It is almost like the beginning of the kind of conversation we used to have, in the days when we talked. 'Until Bethany can give us more information we have to assume it's any one of them. Now, if the submarine crack Bethany saw -'

He shifts closer to me on the edge of the chaise-longue. I lean away. But he is still close. I can feel the heat of his body.

'That's what she drew?' I ask. I'm barely able to concentrate but I need to sound normal, for the sake of my own pride. 'A crack?'

'A fissure and a flashpoint,' says Kristin Jons dottir. 'To free the frozen methane from the ocean floor, they'll have drilled beneath it horizontally and forced a pressure-change. But if they've miscalculated what's down there, and the interference has widened the gap that's already there, the pressure will build up. When it reaches a critical point, there's a risk that huge amounts of this frozen methane - far more than they ever intended - could be unleashed.'

As she speaks, I am aware that Frazer Melville is trying to make further eye contact with me, but I resist. I wonder if Kristin told him about my hostility towards her, or whether other matters -like the phone call to Harish Modak - took precedence.

Ned says, 'The sediment will destabilise and trigger a submarine avalanche. Possibly leading to the release of the entire methane reserve buried under the explored hydrate field. Thereby removing vast amounts of sediment above and adjacent to the methane. Creating further cascades across the whole area. In the case of any of these rigs, we're talking about thousands of square kilometres. Followed by a huge tsunami. Which is likely to destabilise more sediment packages, leading to more massive landslides.'

With their scientific knowledge, the three others here can no doubt picture the whole delta-shaped flow chart of the disaster's repercussions. But I am unable to. Instead, I envisage an oil painting in the style of Turner, a vast and magisterial canvas that depicts a churning miasma of water and wave and cloud: of pale, mother-of-pearl light that transforms into rose, then tangerine, then blood-red as the spume froths and bubbles and explodes into flame; in the foreground, the matchstick scaffold of a rig toppled by the force of colliding elements.

Which is not much use, except as an aesthetic comfort.

No: the information I am getting isn't sinking in the way it should.

'Which in turn is highly likely to trigger a further cycle of landslides and more tsunamis,' says Ned. 'With more of the hydrate field being dislodged and releasing more methane. Methane is ten times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than C02. If the whole thing spreads and escalates, we get runaway global warming on a scale that's beyond anyone's worst nightmare. Everywhere will be radically hotter. It used to be called the clathrate gun hypothesis. Back when it was only a hypothesis.'

The physicist is looking at me intensely, as if trying to gauge how much is getting through. Not much is. 'Last time, geologically speaking, it happened as fast as the flick of a switch.'

They all have their eyes on me.

'So we have to do what we can to warn people,' says Kristin Jons dottir. 'There'll be huge coastal flooding. Not just locally. With the domino effect, within a very short time we're talking about the whole globe.' She blinks. 'Scandinavians call it Rag-narok.'

'Chaos,' says Frazer Melville. 'A kind of Hell.' My heart shrinks to a tiny hard marble. What does he want: my approval? Ned flicks to the next image, of the Earth, spinning slowly and transmogrifying with each turn.

'The last time it happened, glaciers melted, huge areas were flooded. There were mass extinctions. This time, whether it's triggered off the coast of Siberia or Indonesia or Florida, it won't just be that region that's affected. It'll flash-heat the whole planet. Imagine a cataclysm on a scale that humans have never seen before.'

I can't. Not even with the Earth spinning in front of me, its white and blue and green patches shifting and melding into one another like a giant ball of plasticine.

'But wouldn't the energy company that owns it know about it?' I can hear my own stubbornness. Denial, for now, feels like an appropriate response. They are all being absurd. It's science fiction. The fact that there are precedents for such a catastrophe is irrelevant. These things may have happened in prehistory, but they can't happen in the age of man. Nature can't just destroy civilisation. We've come too far. We can cope with things on this scale nowadays. We can prepare for them.

Ned says, 'There might not be any visible signs at this stage. But even if the company does know, it might not want to publicise it. Especially if it's corrupt and mismanaged. There are plenty of those, believe me.'

'It might try to contain it,' I say. But even as I say it, I can hear the absurdity.

One side of my face feels hot, as though my body is registering what my brain is failing to. A moment passes. Kristin Jons dottir walks over to the window, re-angles the slats on one of the blinds, and stares out. Ned is clicking at his laptop, and the physicist, perhaps finally taking the hint that I want no more to do with him, is staring fixedly at the images on the whiteboard. Outside, a plane scrapes a white arc across the sky, leaving a delicate snail-trail of vapour.

'So what now?' I ask.

'I spoke to Harish Modak,' says Frazer Melville. 'He still doesn't share our sense of urgency. But I persuaded him to travel over from Paris tonight.' He stops, and glances at Kristin. She nods her head. There's more. Something she knows about, which neither of them is keen on conveying. 'He's coming on the understanding that we'll have something new to show him by then. If not proof, then a compelling piece of supporting evidence.'

'Why on earth did you say that when you can't guarantee it?' I'm baffled. Kristin gives me a strange, supplicant look.

'Because it was all I could come up with. I was hoping that with your help, Bethany might be able to remember some more.'

Sharply, it becomes clear. 'So this is where I come in, right? This is why I'm here?'

'Gabrielle,' says Kristin gently, 'we do need your help. You have already gone further than anyone could have expected in this. But we can't do this without you.'

I sigh, sickened. 'If we want more information from Bethany, she has to have more ECT. Do you realise that? It's the only way.'

There is a silence. Yes, they do realise.

'It's what she's been telling us,' confirms Kristin quietly. 'It's what seems to work.'

'And I have to supervise it,' I continue, thinking aloud. 'And if it goes wrong I take responsibility.'

The physicist reaches out and rests his hand on mine and gives it a small squeeze. If I had any pride left I would shake it off but I need his touch. I can feel its heat. I can remember the time when a gesture like that would have flooded me with love. Now I just want to cry. He says softly, 'You remember how we felt after Istanbul. That night, when we heard the news and -'

No. I don't want to.

My phone rings. I should leave it - it's not the moment - but I am relieved to have a distraction, an excuse to emerge. I flick it open - and instantly regret doing so.

'Detective Kavanagh here. Where are you exactly, Miss Fox?'

'At home,' I lie quickly. A reflex. But the wrong one. 'Let me call you right back,' I say, thinking wildly of ways to right what I've just said, and signalling to Ned that I've been caught unawares. But he is shaking his head. It's too late. I have blown it.

'No need for that,' says Kavanagh evenly. 'If you're at home, you can just open the door. I'm right outside. I've been ringing the bell. But no joy. I'm surprised to hear you're in there, to be honest. Because there's no sign of your car out here.' I say nothing. 'Have you heard of the term perverting the course of justice, Miss Fox? A dangerous minor's been abducted. Bethany Krall is a known killer. That's quite heavy stuff. I don't know what kind of disabled facilities they have in a women's prison like Holloway. But you can be sure there will be, er,
art therapy
. So if you'd care to -'

But he doesn't get any further because I've shut my phone and turned it off.

'Well, forget about going back to Hadport tonight,' says Ned. 'You've just become a criminal.'

The three of them are staring at me. From the next room comes the theme tune of
Friends
. I am a natural, deep-rooted pessimist, but somewhere along the way I trained myself in optimism, learning reflexes which I incorporated, as the years went by, until positive thinking came to dominate my mental landscape like an enforced code of conduct. But the bizarre rush of relief that I am feeling in the wake of Kavanagh's call does not come from that. It's not manufactured. Despite the renewed misery I have encountered here, it's real. And I must trust it. I must trust it because perhaps, all along, I've had an intuition that this moment would come. A stowaway, furtive knowledge of where I have been headed, without knowing it, from the day I arrived at Oxsmith to meet Bethany Krall, from the evening a certain physicist and I fled the Armada to order poppadums in an Indian restaurant, from the afternoon he lit the bulb inside Bethany's short-lived globe and the planet was illuminated, from the day Christ the Redeemer fell and Istanbul shuddered to dust, from the moment Kristin Jons dottir appeared on my computer screen with her red woolly hat and her chunk of flaming ice.

'You questioned your involvement earlier,' says Ned. 'But given the sudden change in your legal status . . .'

I look at him, and at Frazer Melville and his lover. I try to think of the world. Its innocence. The children who will die. But for now, suddenly, all I can think of is me. My pain, my jealousy, my double loss of womanhood. My lack of any future.

I am not ready for any of this. I will never be ready.

If I shut my eyes tight, I can blot it all out.

Chapter Eleven

'Problem sorted,' announces Bethany, striding in barefoot. She is brandishing a red plastic bucket. 'Cereal, milk, one apple, an omelette and fifteen Haribos, thank you for those, Ned. Puked up the lot in three goes. So now my stomach's empty for the anaesthetic and Wheels here has one less thing to fret about. Care to inspect?'

We don't get the choice. Having done our duty, Ned and I exchange a glance which turns into a smile. You can't help admiring Bethany's commitment to her fix.

If I'd been told a few weeks ago that I would find myself in a creaking farmhouse unpacking medical paraphernalia with an Australian climatologist in a room where illegal electroconvulsive therapy would be shortly performed on a matricidal teenager I was suspected of abducting, I'd have had trouble believing it. But here I am with Ned Rappaport, in a small damp parlour, surrounded by boxes and bubble wrap. Before dark descended, I looked outside at an apple tree, its fruit littered across an overgrown meadow shaking with teasel-brushes and the flat shimmering coins of dried honesty, and I thought of my father's garden, and then my father, and missed him so fiercely that I was ready to leave on the spot, drive to the care home, haul him out and bring him here, for no other reason than that I am the flesh of his flesh and I am lonely. The ECT machine is a small box similar to the one Dr Ehmet used at Oxsmith. Under my instructions, Ned has made up a low sofa as a bed.

'Thank you Bethany,' I tell her, nodding at the bucket. 'Now please go and empty it. Preferably down a toilet rather than over someone's head. We'll call you back downstairs when we're ready.'

Apart from worrying about Bethany's food intake, a problem now neatly resolved, my main activity over the past couple of hours has been avoidance of the physicist. Savouring the relief and the pain of his absence, I gaze out of the window.

Autumn Evening with Approaching Headlights.

'That,' says Ned, 'will be the man.'

When we reach the front door, a tall skinny man in jeans is being greeted by a reluctant-looking Kristin Jons dottir and the physicist, whose eye I still refuse to meet.

'Let's not bother with names,' says Ned quickly. 'Less grief all round.'

The anaesthetist looks young enough to be straight out of medical school. His long pale hair is parted in the middle and hangs to his shoulders in a way that exaggerates his narrow, pencilled features, and his skin bears the sullen pallor of long hours exposed to fluorescents and halogens. There's a vulnerability about him that's familiar but which I can't immediately place. He tweaks his mouth in a generalised hello. There's a subdued atmosphere. Kristin, in particular, looks as though she would rather be anywhere -perhaps at the bottom of the sea with her frozen ice molecules - than here. I almost pity her. In an upstairs room, a clock chimes six.

'We'll get out of your hair,' Frazer Melville says. 'Just call if you need us.'

'And you're the one responsible for the patient?' asks the anaesthetist. I nod. 'Then I'll need you there with me. As soon as we're done with the procedure I'll want to get going. And - no offence, but I want to forget I ever came here.'

'Is this guy safe?' I ask Ned when Kristin Jons dottir has melted discreetly upstairs, and Frazer Melville has led the medic to the parlour.

'Yes. But he doesn't have to like the situation.'

'So how did you persuade him in the first place?'

Ned looks evasive. 'We're living by new priorities. Not all the choices we make are going to be of the finest moral quality.'

'I can tell you've hung around with politicians. Are you going to add that the end will justify the means?' He doesn't answer. I sigh. 'I'll need the pictures of all four rigs ready so we can look at them immediately afterwards. I'm hoping she'll spot a detail that clinches it. We'll need good definition. Some new angles, if you can get them.'

'Right. I'll go summon the princess.'

When Bethany comes downstairs, barefoot, rebandaged and unkempt, she's hungry for action. Grabbing the handles of my chair despite my protests, she pushes me at high speed down the corridor and into the parlour, where she greets the medic with a 'Yo, doc' and a blazing orthodontic grin. He returns it with a baleful look, and eyes her as she settles herself on the low sofa, humming tunelessly and picking at the scabs on the exposed parts of her arms.

I have often wondered what draws anaesthetists to a profession which requires one to so finely judge the line between the conscious and the unconscious self, the living state and the dead. Their high suicide rate is ascribed to the ready availability of the means, but something about the way this young man carries himself makes me speculate there's more to it than that. As for Bethany, a stranger is about to blast her brain with electricity in a medical procedure whose effectiveness has never been understood - and she is ready and willing. The trust involved, the inevitability of a massive power imbalance, and the paradoxical absence of intimacy between Bethany and the anonymous doctor, makes for an emotionally lurid contract, I reflect, watching him adjust the position of the small machine on the coffee table. He inserts a rubber wedge in her mouth: she opens wide to accept it with uncharacteristic docility. Her bare feet are smudged with what looks like mud. The medic takes it all in, but doesn't enquire about how Bethany became injured. Or indeed, why she is here.

'Ready?' he asks. She nods. For both of them, it's a familiar routine. He puts the anaesthetic bag over her nose and mouth, then wipes her temples with a wet sponge.

A few moments later, Bethany's eyelids have closed and she has succumbed. I hold my breath. The medic flicks the timer on and applies the electrodes to her temples. He presses them in place, but after a few seconds he frowns as though dissatisfied.

'Her brain's built up a resistance,' he murmurs. The seconds tick by. Five, six.

'How do you know? I thought the point of the muscle relaxants and the anaesthetic was to make sure that whatever happens, it's confined to the brain.'

'There are small signs. And I'm not seeing any of them. I can tell you now, the machine's working fine, but it's not having an effect.'

The ten seconds are up. He removes the electrodes. There is still no movement from Bethany, not even the curl of toes that I saw when I watched this before, like bracken unfurling. In the distance, a phone rings.

'Can you do it again?' I whisper. 'And give her longer?'

He presses his lips together in a line of disapproval. 'Unsafe to do it twice in one day.'

'You said her brain's built up a resistance. There must be variations anyway. Aren't there?'

He looks annoyed. 'I'll wait for her to come round and then I'll make a decision.'

Within two minutes, Bethany's eyes have flickered open. I remove her mask. It leaves a faint red suction mark around her mouth, like the unhappy grimace of a clown. 'Didn't fucking work,' she slurs through the rubber mouth-guard. The muscles of her face have gone slack and distorted, and she's sweating. Even her hair looks greasier, as though the volts have somehow ravaged her, and spooled her life through years rather than seconds. She spits out the guard. 'Give me more of it, you fuckwit. A proper shot this time. Give me thirty seconds.'

He blinks and addresses his answer to me. 'I'll give her twenty,' he says, rolling up his sleeves, picking up the mouth-guard, and wiping the saliva off it with a paper towel. As he does so I notice the puncture marks on his arms. The stark fact of his addiction, which should have been obvious to me from the start, now shoulders its way into the equation.

'Twenty's not enough,' Bethany protests, as she succumbs to the anaesthetic. 'What kind of doctor are you anyway?'

He plugs her mouth with the rubber guard and she is silenced.

'One who's worried about being struck off?' I suggest to him, when her eyes have closed.

His smile is dry. 'Too late for that. I lost my licence to practise a year ago.'

I should have worked that out too. 'You'd better tell me why.'

'Sure,' he says, checking the dials on the metal box. 'I killed someone.'

Oh Christ. 'With a machine like this?'

He considers. 'Nope. A more up-to-date version.'

'Performing this procedure?' I can hear the panic in my voice, the shrillness.

He looks at me. 'I can't imagine what other procedure you'd perform with it. Yes. But I'm not prepared to do that again. I won't go over twenty seconds. I made that clear from the start.'
And if it's not enough? What then?
'Want me to stop?'

'No,' I say, detesting us both for it. 'You're here now. Just get it over with.'

He presses the switch and we both hold our breath. Only a slight twitch of Bethany's toes indicates that anything has happened, until at the end of twenty seconds a tiny noise escapes from her: a high sigh like the start of a groan.

'Do you think it's worked this time?'

He stands up, checks his mobile and pats his pockets, then heads for the door. 'I'm not staying to find out.'

'Stop,' I tell him. 'Look. I don't know your name. As far as I'm concerned, I've never met you. This equipment isn't traceable to you. If it hasn't worked, can't you try again?'

'I don't think you heard me the first time,' he says from the doorway. 'I told you. I killed someone. I have to live with that. But I don't have to repeat it.'

'Please, can't you even wait till -' But he has left the room. I know there's no point chasing after him, that he has made up his mind, that this was the deal he struck with Ned or, more simply and more importantly, with himself.

After five minutes, with the sound of the medic's car starting in the background, Bethany's eyes flicker open and I remove the mask from her face and let her spit the guard into my hand. I pass her a glass of water which she gulps down sloppily. She looks even more destroyed than before. It's almost obscene.

'Hi, Bethany.'

She looks at me fuzzily and speaks from the side of her mouth. 'Hi, Wheels. It didn't work.'

The disappointment is like a strong, ugly taste. 'He's gone.'

'Why?' Her lower lip seems to be in spasm.

'He had reasons I couldn't argue with.'

I find the others assembled in the kitchen, deep in gloomy discussion.

'Harish Modak rang,' says Frazer Melville, looking up. 'He's on his way.'

A vile heat flashes through me. 'So what do we do now?'

He shrugs. 'I don't know.'

Our eyes meet. But I cannot bear it. My failure has left me with a weariness that presses on my shoulders, turning me into a yoked beast dragged in endless circles, its hooves clogged with earth. Sensing my misery, Frazer Melville touches my arm in sympathy but, feeling me stiffen, he withdraws his hand.

'Let's talk to Bethany,' I suggest. 'Maybe some of it got through.'

Wordlessly, the others follow me back to the small parlour where she is sprawled on the settee inspecting her blistered hands, the long bandage unwound and strewn around her on the floor like a giant strand of fettuccine.

'He could see I could take more but the fucker wimped out!' she rails. 'And you let him go! I told you, Wheels. I need thirty seconds. If I'd had that long it would've worked.'

'You're sure you didn't see anything?'

'You know I didn't!' she explodes. 'Because I didn't get enough volts!'

'There's nothing we can do now,' I say. I feel flattened and helpless and oddly distanced from my own body. I could be watching myself from the far wall.

'Of course there is,' she says, lifting herself higher on her elbow and wincing from the pain. 'How dumb are you guys? Look, we've still got the machine. You know how to operate it. So go for it.'

Kristin Jons dottir's eyes widen, and Frazer Melville shoots me an uneasy glance. Ned blinks rapidly and strokes his stubble.

'You must be joking, Bethany,' Frazer Melville blurts. 'It could kill you.'

'It won't. Go on,' she says, jerking her head woozily in the direction of the little machine. 'A four-year-old could work that thing. So can Wheels here. So can any of you. Just do it. I need thirty seconds. The professor guy's on his way, right? So do it now. While you dare. Don't think about it, just do it.'

Kristin takes a step back. She seems suddenly smaller, as though ready to shrivel her way out of the room. Frazer Melville stands motionless. He opens his mouth to say something, looks at me questioningly, then closes it again. I know what he's thinking.

I say, 'No.'

'Jesus!' spits Bethany. 'You fucking coward. If you can't do it for me, then do it for the sake of all those people you think are worth saving, you dumb cow!'

I stare at the dials on the machine, then at her. She is quivering with rage. I ask, 'Do
you
think they're worth saving? Would you risk your life for them?'

'You're such an idiot. It's not about other people. It's about me. And my life's fucked anyway. So just do it.'

'Assisted suicide? No thanks.'

'OK,' she sighs heavily. 'Let's tell Wheels what she wants to hear. I
love
life. Can't get enough of it. I want to celebrate this glorious fucking world. A certain spaz has made me see just how mind-blowingly wonderful it is, with her miracle psychobabble. I can't wait to see the future. Bring it on. Just do it, for fuck's sake. It's my final wish, OK?'

And before I can think, she has shoved back the mouth-guard, reached out shakily for the face-mask, applied it to her nose and mouth and administered a pump of gas. 'Do it now,' she says, groggily, her eyes sliding shut. 'Or I'll never forgive you.'

You may not be alive to, I think. I am so terrified I could puke. Ned Rappaport, Frazer Melville and Kristin Jons dottir are staring at me aghast. Outside, there's the sound of a car approaching.

'That'll be Harish. I'll go,' murmurs Kristin Jons dottir. Noiselessly, she slips out.

People used to tell me I spent too much time thinking, analysing, reflecting, hunting for hidden meanings when perhaps there just weren't any. When something huge is at stake, something so big its sheer size could blind you, you can't waste time speculating. Sometimes, you just have to take a leap in the dark.