The Carrier

Why are you still here, Francine?

I’ve always believed that people can will their own deaths. If our minds can make us wake up exactly a minute before our alarm clocks are due to go off, they must be capable of stopping our breath. Think about it: brain and breath are more powerfully linked than brain and bedside table. A heart begged to stop by a mind that won’t take no for an answer – what chance does it stand? That’s what I’ve always thought, anyway.

And I can’t believe you want to stick around. Even if you do, it won’t be up to you for much longer. Someone will kill you. Soon. Every day I change my mind about who it will be. I don’t feel the need to try and stop them, only to tell you. By giving you the chance to take yourself away, out of reach, I am being fair to everybody.

Let me admit it: I am trying to talk you into dying because I’m scared you’ll recover. How can the impossible feel possible? It must mean I’m still afraid of you.

Tim isn’t. Do you know what he asked me once, years ago? He and I were in your kitchen at Heron Close. Those white napkin rings that always reminded me of neck braces were on the table. You’d got them out of the drawer, and the brown napkins with ducks around the border, and slammed them down without saying anything; Tim was supposed to do the rest, whether or not he deemed it important for napkins to be inserted into rings only to be taken out again fifteen minutes later. Dan had gone out to collect the Chinese takeaway and you’d marched off to the bottom of the garden to sulk. Tim had ordered something healthy and beansprouty that we all knew he’d hate, and you’d accused him of choosing it for the wrong reason: to please you. I remember blinking back tears as I laid the table, after I’d clumsily grabbed the bundle of cutlery from his hands. There was nothing I could do to rescue him from you, but I could spare him the effort of putting the forks and knives out, and I was determined to. Little things were all Tim would let us do for him in those days, so Dan and I did them, as many of them as possible, putting all the effort and care into them that we could. Even so, I couldn’t touch those wretched napkin rings.

When I was sure I wasn’t going to cry, I turned and saw a familiar look on Tim’s face, the one that means ‘There’s something I’d like you to know, but I’m not prepared to say it, so I’m going to mess with your head instead.’ You won’t be able to imagine this expression unless you’ve seen it, and I’m certain you never have. Tim gave up trying to communicate with you within a week of marrying you. ‘What?’ I asked him.

‘I wonder about you, Kerry,’ he said. He meant for me to hear the pantomime suspicion in his voice. I knew he suspected me of nothing, and guessed that he was trying to find a camouflaged way to talk about himself, as he often did. I asked him what he wondered, and he said loudly, as if to an audience stretching back several rows in a large hall, ‘Imagine Francine dead.’ Three words that planted an instant ache of longing in my chest. I so much wanted you not to be there any more, Francine, but we were stuck with you. Before your stroke, I thought you’d probably live till you were a hundred and twenty.

‘Would you still be scared of her?’ Tim asked. Anyone listening who didn’t know him well would have thought he was teasing me and enjoying it. ‘I think you would. Even if you knew she was dead and never coming back.’

‘You say it as if there’s an alternative,’ I pointed out. ‘Dead and coming back.’

‘Would you still hear her voice in your head, saying all the things she’d say if she were alive? Would you be any freer of her than you are now? If you couldn’t see her, would you imagine she must be somewhere else, watching you?’

‘Tim, don’t be daft,’ I said. ‘You’re the least superstitious person I know.’

‘But we’re talking about you,’ he said in a tone of polished innocence, again drawing attention to his act.

‘No. I wouldn’t be scared of anyone who was dead.’

‘If you’d be equally afraid of her dead, then killing her would achieve nothing,’ Tim went on as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘Apart from probably a prison sentence.’ He took four wine glasses with chunky opaque green glass stems out of a cupboard. I’d always hated them, too, for their slime-at-the-bottom-of-your-drink effect.

‘I’ve never understood why anyone thinks it’s interesting to speculate about the difference between murderers and the rest of us.’ Tim pulled a bottle of white wine out of the fridge. ‘Who cares what makes one person willing and able to kill and another not? The answer’s obvious: degrees of suffering, and where you are on the bravery–cowardice spectrum. There’s nothing more to it. The only distinction worth investigating is the one between those of us whose presence in the world, however lacklustre and chaotic, doesn’t crush the spirit in others to extinction, and those about whom that can’t be said, however kind we might want to be. Every murder victim is someone who has inspired at least one person to wish them out of existence. And we’re supposed to sympathise when they meet a bad end.’ He made a dismissive noise.

I laughed at his outrageousness, then felt guilty for falling for it. Tim is never better at cheering me up than when he sees no hope of consolation for himself; I’m supposed to feel happier, and imagine that he’s following the same emotional trajectory. ‘You’re saying all murder victims are asking for it?’ I willingly rose to the bait. If he wants to discuss something, however ridiculous, even now, I debate with him until he decides he’s had enough. Dan does too. It’s one of the many million odd forms love can take. I doubt you’d understand.

‘You’re assuming, wrongly, that the victim of a murder is always the person who’s been killed and not the killer.’ Tim poured himself a glass of wine. He didn’t offer me one. ‘To cause someone so much inconvenience that they’re willing to risk their liberty and sacrifice what’s left of their humanity to remove you from the face of the earth ought to be regarded as a more serious crime than taking a gun or a blunt instrument and ending a life, all other things being equal.’

By inconvenience, he meant pain. ‘You’re biased,’ I said. I knew Dan might be back any second with the food, and I wanted to say something more direct than I’d normally have risked. I decided that, in starting this extraordinary conversation, Tim had given me his tacit permission. ‘If you think of Francine as a spirit-crusher, if the only reason you haven’t killed her is that you’d be more scared of her dead than alive . . .’ I said.

‘I don’t know where you’ve got all that from.’ Tim grinned. ‘Hearing things again?’ We both understood why he was smiling: I had received his message and would not forget it. He knew it was safe with me. It took me years of knowing Tim to work out that change is never what he’s after; all he wants is to stow the important information with someone he can trust.

‘You can leave her more easily than you think,’ I told him, craving change – the enormous, irreversible kind – more than enough for both of us. ‘There doesn’t have to be a confrontation. You don’t need to tell her you’re going, or have any contact with her after you’ve left. Dan and I can help you. Let Francine keep this house. Come and live with us.’

‘You can’t help,’ Tim said firmly. He paused, long enough for me to understand – or misunderstand, as I knew he’d insist if I made an issue of it – before adding, ‘Because I don’t need help. I’m fine.’

I overheard him talking to you yesterday, Francine. He wasn’t weighing his every word, planning several conversational moves ahead. He was just talking, telling you another Gaby story. It involved an airport, of course. Gaby seems to live in airports, when she’s not in mid-air. I don’t know how she can stand it – it would drive me insane. This particular story was about the time the scanning machine at Madrid-Barajas ate one of her shoes, and Tim was enjoying telling it. It sounded as if he was saying whatever came to mind without censoring himself at all. Nothing contrived, no element of performance. Very un-Tim. As I eavesdropped, I realised that any fear he once had is long gone. What I can’t work out is: does that mean he’s likely to kill you, or that he needs you to live forever?