The Rapture Read Online Free

reattached.
    Marvellous. Bring her on.
    Then suddenly - far too suddenly - a huge escorting nurse with tattooed arms has done just that. The door has opened and a dark streak of a girl has walked right up to me. And already she's too close. You never get used to everyone being taller than you, to seeing them from the wrong angle. She should step back a bit. But she doesn't. Rafik exchanges grunts with his mountainous colleague, who nods at me as if to say package delivered, and leaves. I could shift again, but I don't want to risk it. She'd know what it meant.
    Bethany Krall is small, bird-boned and underdeveloped for a sixteen-year-old. On her head, a tangled mass of dark hair like a child's angry scribble. Self-harm being an ever-popular hobby among the female patients at Oxsmith, her bare arms reveal the usual welter of cigarette burns and crosswise slashes, some old, some more recent.
    'Hallelujah. The new psychiatrist.' Her voice is babyish for her age but oddly hoarse, as though someone has scrubbed the inside of her throat with a chemical abrasive.
    'Good to meet you, Bethany,' I say, manoeuvring myself to offer a handshake. 'I'm actually a therapist rather than a doctor.'
    'Same shit, different asshole,' she declares, not taking my hand. Like me, she's wearing black: the garb of mourning. Does she still believe, on some level, that she has died?
    'Gabrielle Fox. I'm new here, I've taken over from Joy McConey.'
    'I always start by giving you guys the benefit of the doubt. That means ten stars out of ten to begin with,' she says, assessing my wheelchair. 'But you get an extra one for being a spaz. Positive discrimination, yeah? So you're starting with eleven.' The notes mentioned she was articulate but I'm still surprised. You come across it so little in this kind of place.
    'Ten's fine, Bethany. In fact, very generous of you. I specialise in art therapy. Subscribing to the theory that art's a good way of expressing feelings when words fail.'
    Her eyes are dark, feline, heavily outlined in kohl. Sallow, olive skin, a narrow, asymmetrical face: she's what you'd call striking rather than pretty. Or jailbait. Her hair looks matted beyond redemption. She seems a far cry from the girl in the family photo. Has she spent the last two years soaking up the institution's own brand of teen culture, or is this attitude intrinsic? In either case, she behaves like she's up for a fight, and she looks like trouble, and she sounds like trouble - but then most of them do, one way or another. Preliminary assessment: she's more intelligent and more verbal than most, but otherwise, so far, so normal.
    'The bottom line is, I'm here to help you, and encourage you to express whatever you want to express here in the -' I am unable to say Creativity Workshop: it gets stuck in my throat. 'Here in this studio. Whatever it is. No limits. It's an exploration. Sometimes it can take you to dark places. But I'm on your side.'
    'A spaz who patronises me. Great. Great to have you on my side in dark places . Psychobabbling away.'
    'I'm just someone to talk to. Or if you don't want to talk, I'm here to supply you with paper and art materials. Not everything works in words. No matter how big your vocabulary.'
    She waggles two fingers at her opened mouth to indicate disgust. 'You're down to five. I can see you don't belong here.' She looks at me levelly. 'So perhaps you should just wheel yourself off into the sunset in that spazmobile of yours. Before something bad happens.' She circles the chair, then stops behind me, and leans down to whisper in my ear. 'So you've taken over from Joy. Tragic Joy. I guess you've heard all about the distressing way she left?' Her knowing use of cliche. strikes me as a possible clue to her inner clockwork. She speaks as though her life is an object held at a distance, a source of amusement - a fiction rather than a reality. 'I warned her about what would happen. I warned her.'
    I'm snared by this, as she intends, but I know