The Rapture (7 page)

But people mean well. Flashing her a smile, I execute a fast wheelie and cross the room swiftly. A wheelchair can part crowds like the Red Sea. The white-tuxedo'd Dr Sheldon-Gray is with his wife Jennifer, who I recognise from the photo in his office, which flatters her because it doesn't show her porky bottom or her visible panty-line. Will I ever get used to the way I am forced to assess crotches whether I wish to or not?

'Is there a guest-list?' I ask bluntly.

'In Reception, I think,' offers Jennifer. Clearly relieved I have found a project, Sheldon-Gray smiles, winks in a generalised way, and excuses himself: he and Jen are off to work the room. I part the seas again.

The guest-list is attached to a noticeboard on the wall just out of my reach. This feels dangerously like the final straw. After a few attempts at grabbing it I'm about to give up and go home when a large, tall man emerges from the mC1i.e of the hall wiping his face with a napkin. Spotting my predicament he strides over, rips the list down and presents it to me with a comedy flourish.

'Thank you.'

'Are you looking for someone on there?' he asks. His accent is Scottish.

He is big and slightly overweight, with a soft-featured, pleasant, if unassuming face and an interesting oddity in his left eye - a splotch of green in the hazel-brown of the iris. 'Not really. I'm just interested to see who's here.'

'Well,' he says, pointing at a name. 'Members of the great-andthe-good club mostly. But there I am. A non-member.'
Dr Frazer Melville, Department of Physics.
'Pleased to meet you.' He thrusts out a hand to shake. 'And you?'

'Gabrielle Fox,' I tell him. His hand is warm and a little sweaty.

'I'm a therapist at Oxsmith.'

Dr Frazer Melville - who I pray is not going to be a weirdo - is studying my face sidelong with forensic interest. 'Shall we re-enter the fray?' He gestures at an empty table just inside the hall, near the shelter of a large pot-plant. When we have made our way to it, he pulls up a chair and sits himself opposite me. 'So you're a Londoner.'

'You can tell just by looking?' I ask.

'Yes. As it happens.'

'Are you some new breed of urban anthropologist?'

'No, but I'm a Scot, and one fish out of water can spot another.'

'It's not London that does that. It's the chair.' It comes out more grumpily than I intend. 'But if you're a physicist, maybe I could pick your brains about something. I have a patient who has a kind of climate-and-geology obsession.'

The big Scot smiles. I like the splotch of green in his eye. It's like a tropical fish darted in and set up home. And his teeth. I like Dr Frazer Melville's teeth, too, which are white and even and not too small for his face. This matters to me. He is probably - though this is totally irrelevant - about forty.

'Sure. But I'll be honest with you. I'm not planningto stay here long. I hate these functions, and I hate wearing this ridiculous costume. There's an Indian restaurant across the road that won't poison us.'

Immediately, the prospect of rejecting a chaotic buffet scrum in favour of a quiet curry has distinct appeal. In addition, Frazer Melville's accent entertains me enough to make me want to hear more of it, and I like his attitude to the charity event.

'But if you'd rather stay here with the thoughtfully assembled, er,
amuse-gueules . . .'

I shake my head as a pesto confection glides past on a tray. 'My turn to be honest. I can guarantee you that this thing I'm wearing is even more uncomfortable than your outfit, if we're having a competition. I'm hitting seven out of ten on the pain scale here.'

'Well, it may not be comfortable, but it's flattering,' he says, openly surveying my cleavage. 'You're a joy to behold, if I may say so.' Oh well. I have put it on display, so it would be hypocritical to complain, I suppose. But I am on shaky ground.

'My friend sent it. She's a fashion buyer,' I say quickly, feeling a radical blush spreading upwards from the flesh in question and blooming on my face like a Rorschach test.

'What you need is food, Gabrielle Fox. I can see you're hungry. May I?'

When he manoeuvres me out through the frenzy of the kitchen, I feel like a baby in a buggy kidnapped by its eccentric uncle.

Outside, I take charge of the chair again. The heat from the kitchen is still burning on my skin in the warm air. The blush hasn't quite died down either. As we approach a zebra crossing side by side, I wonder whether I should tell him it's my birthday. No: he'd offer to pay for the meal, and I can't allow that. I stay on the pavement but Frazer Melville steps out jauntily, forcing two cars to brake hard. With a burst of inappropriate amusement, I realise that I am in the company of a man who might well turn out to be as dangerous as he is energetic.

Delhi Dreams, aromatic and low-lit, with flock wallpaper and red furnishings, is a classic British Indian with d6cor untouched since the 1970s. Ensconced at a quiet corner table, the physicist is telling me that he moved to Hadport from Inverness six months ago, having obtained a grant to continue his research at Hadport University. His background is pure and applied physics. He tells me that his current branch of study, fluid dynamics, covers a wide spectrum but, in the case of his PhD, involves the kinetics, pressure and flow of ocean currents. 'But then I wanted to broaden things out, so I studied meteorology and started investigating air turbulence. Trying to discover why molecules move the way they do. Did you know that flocks of birds and shoals of fish and swarms of insects follow similar kinetic rules? It seems random but there's a logic to it. There are lots of new theories around at the moment. None of which I can explain without drawing mathematical equations on a napkin and boring the pants off you. So tell me about this patient of yours.'

Wait! Me first! It's my birthday!
I want to blurt. But even if I could find an unchildish way of telling him it would still sound abrupt, incongruous and borderline tragic. He'd wonder why I'm not somewhere else, with friends. Which would set me wondering, too, and reaching dismaying conclusions. We order poppa-dums and a comfortingly aggressive house red, and I tell him about Bethany - who, in a last-minute nod to professional confidentiality, I refer to as 'Child B'. I tell him about Child B's Faith Wave background, Child B's nihilistic delusion of being dead, followed by her breakthough with ECT, her intelligence, her intractability, her militant cynicism, her artwork. I can't have spoken at length to anyone for a long time, because it's like someone has unplugged a cork. I wonder if I sound a little obsessed with Child B - but if I am, it's still a relief to discuss her with someone who isn't in the business and will never meet her. 'It's like she's always playing some kind of game with you. She's unsettling. She claims to have the power to predict natural catastrophes.'

'Meteorological or geological?'

'Both. Just the other day she said, there was going to be a tornado in Scotland. And sure enough, there was.'

'The one in Aberdeen?'

'I have to admit I found it unsettling.'

He smiles. 'You shouldn't have because it's emphatically a coincidence. Small tornadoes happen far more often than anyone realises. We get a lot in this country. Case dismissed. Go on.'

'And she can sense things in people's blood too, or so she claims. Blood and water and rock.'

'They have more in common than you'd think,' says Frazer Melville, tearing off his tie and shoving it in his pocket. The poppadums arrive and he attacks them with verve. 'Why not make a note of what she says? Or better still, get her to write it down.'

'She already does. She has notebooks full of drawings. But I don't press her on the detail. It's best neither to confirm nor deny a patient's fantasy.'

'That's policy?' This also seems to amuse the physicist. 'You have a fantasy policy at Oxsmith?'

'In a way. And not just at Oxsmith.'

'But what if it isn't fantasy?'

'The paranoids really are out to get me? Istanbul really is about to be destroyed by a massive earthquake?'

He pauses mid-bite. 'It's on a faultline. So it's a real possibility. Quite well-known.'

'And there's going to be a massive hurricane hitting Rio de Janeiro next week? On the twenty-ninth? She gets very specific. And it all seems to be Armageddon-related, one way or another.'

'Para-catastrophology.' He pulls out reading glasses to survey the menu we've just been handed by the waiter. Not forty, then, I think. A bit older. 'A whole new field. Could put experts like me out of a job. There was a bloke in the States, in Vermont, called the Weather Wizard, he's dead now. His real name was Louis D. Rubin. He looked at the clouds and predicted days when there'd be unusual weather. He was mostly right.'

'So she might be right about this hurricane, for example? By picking up signs the rest of us can't see? Because that's what she'd claim.'

'I'd doubt it. It's still the hurricane season, and they're getting bigger every year because of the increased air temperatures. But super-hurricanes are a complex phenomenon. With global warming, we're seeing all sorts of things we haven't seen before. That's the trouble with trying to model anything on a computer: we only have the parameters of what's already known. But Rio de Janeiro - highly unlikely, I'd say. It's south Atlantic, and typically they're in the north. The first on record was in 2002. Took a lot of us by surprise. But it may have marked the start of a trend.'

'So what are the chances that she's right?'

At this his eyes change shape and you can almost see his brain turn into a calculator. 'Off the cuff? A thousand to one.' He smiles suddenly. 'I'd be happy to bet our next dinner on it.' He takes a big bite of poppadum and crunches noisily.

I can't help smiling too. I can't be used to it, because it makes the muscles around my mouth ache. Is it possible that I am enjoying this evening after all? I agree to the bet, but insist that this dinner's on me, because it's my birthday. There. I have said it. Delighted, he orders champagne, for which he insists he'll pay. Surprisingly, Delhi Dreams has some, and even more surprisingly, it comes close to being adequately cold. If he thinks it odd that I have nothing better to do on my birthday than have dinner with a physicist I met at a function to which I had to scrounge an invitation from my well-connected boss, he doesn't mention it: he says it's an honour, and he raises his glass in a complex toast which pays tribute to my 'fabulous dress and its contents', to Child B, and to the vagaries of high and low pressure uniting us 'at this auspicious moment of twenty-first-century history'.

Frazer Melville, who is forty-four, who lost his mother to cancer only two months ago, and who is divorced from a Greek geologist called Melina, eats in the same way he orders. He is eager, greedy, unselfconscious, and sure of his own taste. Melina couldn't have children, he tells me. But that's not why the marriage failed. It was more complex. 'And quite humiliating for me,' he confesses. 'Knocked me right back.' I nod and wait for him to go on. 'Irreconcilable differences just about covers it. It was tough, but we're on amicable terms now that she's back in Athens. Our interests overlap, so we run across one another's work from time to time. Exchange the occasional e-mail about marine landslides and whatnot.'

'Did you ever make fireworks when you were a boy?' I ask him.

'Only the basic liquid kind with Diet Coke and menthols. I wasn't a sophisticated pyromaniac. I melted gallons of wax over bonfires and made a million tangerines explode. A normal childhood for someone who ended up as me. OK, my turn. Gabrielle as a kid. Hmm. You were a mini version of what you are now. You were sharp, and very proud of that amazing hair, even though you knew you shouldn't be. You knew how to empathise but it got you into trouble sometimes. But you weren't so angry back then. Or so beautiful.'

The problem with blushes is that once they've started, there's no preventing them from running their course. The champagne is going down well. Giddy after two glasses, I start telling jokes, culminating in the one about the faith healer. I barely recognise myself.

Later, back home, I wonder if I am still able to like people. It isn't something I've properly tested. I let him push my chair when we went through the hotel kitchen - and not just because I wanted to protect my dress from being splattered with sauce by some maniac sous-chef. In the delicate etiquette of wheelchair use, I permitted an intimacy.

A few nights later I am having one of my vertebra dreams. I am operating on my own lower back, fixing the damage with pliers and a monkey wrench. 'There,' I tell the nurses and medical students who are watching. They are in a semicircle. 'If I can do it, you can.' I point to the diagram of the spine, the one they first showed me when they explained my injuries. It looks like a bonsai tree. An alarm bell goes off. It is a warning. I must finish the operation because they need the pliers back. And the monkey wrench.

It's actually the phone.

There is light coming through the blinds, but it feels like the middle of the night. I check my alarm clock. It's seven a.m. The phone is cordless and I have left it on the table by the door, too far to reach in any hurry. So I do not pick up - partly because I suspect it is Lily, who I know from our conversation a few days ago is gearing up to one of her love crises. Vertebra dreams always throw me. I am having trouble getting my mind in order. My head hurts. I had three glasses of wine last night. Alone. Lesson number one of paraplegia: alcohol is bad for you. After six rings, the answerphone kicks in.

'Sorry to ring so early, Gabrielle,' he says. 'You're probably fast asleep. Dreaming of new ways to -'

'New ways to what?' I ask, picking up. Funny how a paralysed woman can shift her butt quite quickly when she wants to.

'New ways to intrigue men from Inverness. But listen here. This is going to sound odd but I have to ask you. That south Atlantic hurricane your psychotic case talked about. Child B.' He sounds excited, a bit reckless. 'Can you remember when she said it would hit Rio?'

'The twenty-ninth.'

There's a grunt on the other end of the line and then a fumbling sound: my Scottish physicist friend is apparently getting dressed, one-handedly, as we speak. I can hear Radio Four on in the background.