The Rapture by Liz Jensen

Author:Liz Jensen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2009-12-15T13:00:00+00:00

Part Two

Chapter Eight

What I have learned about psychological survival is that the plan you have for yourself might not be shared by others. That your personal notion of justice is an artificial construct, a luxury and an irrelevance in a world built of cells, minerals, wind, sea, flame, synapses. That the size of a defeat is always in proportion to the size of the ego knocked down. And that all knowledge comes at a price.

Today I am paying it.

Hangovers are a vivid form of vengeance. Last night my apartment became the venue for a small, introverted chardonnay festival. A melancholy choir of Bulgarians provided the entertainment, via a set of headphones which ended up irredeemably tangled beneath the bed. Part of me just watched. The other part was in charge.

Today, pig-sick and fallen from life's untrustworthy grace, I will be indulgent towards myself. I will arrange for a mushroom pizza with extra cheese to be delivered to my door by a wordless bike-helmeted Kosovan. I will watch home makeover pro-grammes on daytime television. I will drown in unabashed moi. I will be my own worst enemy pretending to be my own best friend, tending to my self-inflicted wounds with all the patience and compassion of a committed narcissist. I will recognise passion, sexual fulfilment and romantic love as mirages that may have fooled me once, but never will again. And I will forget that Bethany Krall is being transferred to a maximum security hospital which will feed her heavy doses of narcotics until the end of what will probably be a short life.

Tomorrow, another story: the sequel. In which I hand in my notice at work, inform my landlady, Mrs Zarnac, that I'm moving out of her vinegary domain, ask Lily if I can stay with her in London despite the tricky logistics of a second-floor apartment with no lift, stop caring about the fate of Child By banish Armageddon, and brainwash myself into erasing the fickle, freckled physicist from my psyche. That, at least, is the agenda I have mapped out for myself before I settle down with a towel to dry my hair and check my phone messages.

Upon which the plan changes.

Not as a result of the first message, an emotional outpouring from Lily - whose predicament bears uncanny parallels to my own. She and Joshua have officially split up, and she's moved out. She thinks she's glad about it. Probably. Lily's a vodka aficionado, and the slurring tells me she's had a festival of her own. She sounds seven shots gone. I feel a wave of affection for her as she apologises and self-deprecates, but it's followed swiftly by a selfish honk of alarm: does this mean I can't sleep on her red velvet sofa? My head aches sullenly. More paracetamol, it urges, as though it's someone else's head, and I'm its slave. Swallow some. You know you want to.

'Wheels. Wheels. Pick up the fucking phone!' As soon as I hear the hoarse baby-croak, I stop towelling my hair to concentrate.

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