The Carrier (10 page)

Francine,

I don’t want to write this letter, and you’re never going to read it. Not exactly the most promising start.

Who am I writing it for? Kerry’s the one who asked me to do it. For Tim’s sake, she said, so a better answer might be Tim, except he’ll never read it either. Kerry says that doesn’t matter. He’ll know it’s there, she says, like he knows her letters are there. He might read them and he might not. Kerry thinks there’s a good chance. I disagree. And, since I said I’d only do it if she promised not to read what I wrote, and I have to say I trust her on that, I’m fairly sure I’m now writing a letter no one will read. That idea is supposed to make me feel free to say whatever I want, but, as I told Kerry, I don’t think that works unless you have something you want to say, and I don’t. Generally, I only bother saying things to people I like who might listen to me. You never fell into either of those categories, Francine.

So, I have two options, I suppose. The cop-out would be to put a blank sheet of paper in an envelope, seal it, write ‘Francine’ on it and shove it under your mattress. Sorry – it’s not yours, and never will be, even if you lie on it for the rest of your life. It’s Kerry’s and mine, on loan to Tim (that’s right, Francine: to Tim, not to you) for as long as he needs it, and that’s the only reason you have the use of it. This seems as good a moment as any to make it clear that if it weren’t for Tim’s decision to move back in with you and look after you when you had the stroke, Kerry and I wouldn’t have got involved. You’d have had no money and no support from us. Just so you know: Tim’s the one we’d do anything for. He’s the reason you’re in the lap of luxury with your own round-the-clock care assistant. You’re the one we’d do nothing for.

Looks like I did have something I wanted to say after all.

Well, this piece of paper’s no longer blank, so if I’m going for option one I’ll have to start again with a new piece, and not start writing next time round. I don’t think Kerry would check. She trusts me. As she should, since I never lie to her. Even if she looked, I don’t think a sealed envelope would make her suspicious, though I know she doesn’t put her letters to you in envelopes. She leaves them open and accessible, so that Tim can read them.

She believes she’s found a loophole in his policy. Direct communication about anything personal has always been forbidden (well, not forbidden so much as evaded, but it amounts to the same thing), but if Tim can read her letters secretly and replace them without ever having to admit he’s read them, that’s a different scenario. He might find it acceptable. If Kerry’s theory’s right and Tim avoids conversations about feelings because he’s not prepared to risk becoming emotional in front of anybody, this is the perfect solution. Personally, I’m sceptical. I think Tim’s as afraid of feeling the difficult stuff in private as he is of looking weak in public. That’s why he tried to kill himself. He’d succeeded in escaping from you, Francine, and from me and Kerry and everyone else who knew him, but he couldn’t escape the contents of his own head and heart. (He would say, ‘Are you being superstitious again about the muscular organ that pumps blood around my body?’)

It’s a pity I’m not allowed to read this letter to you, but Kerry says I mustn’t, and she’s the fairest and wisest person I know. That’s not to say I always agree with her: I don’t think there would be anything wrong with making an exception and reading you extracts at least. You should know about Tim’s suicide attempt. You deserve to know that being married to you has that effect. You’re a tyrant. Were, I mean, before the stroke. Kerry and I agreed on that definition of you about six months after you and Tim married. ‘A tyrant is anyone whose death would free somebody,’ Kerry said. ‘Even only one person.’

I blame you for what Tim did to himself, though he laughed at me once when I told him this, and said, ‘No aspect of my behaviour has anything to do with Francine, now or ever. I ignore her as scrupulously as you ignore my free will.’ Seeing that I wanted to pursue it further, he forcefully changed the subject. Later, I puzzled over what he might have meant, and came to this conclusion: he didn’t have to marry you. He could have left you at any time. Or he could have stayed with you but stood up to you when you tried to micro-manage every facet of his life. When he finally walked out on you, he could have gone straight to Gaby Struthers and told her she was the woman he loved and wanted to be with. He needn’t have turned his back on his friends and his career, rented a hovel of a bedsit in Bath, logged on to the internet five months later in search of advice about how to slit his wrists in a way that would guarantee his death. At every stage he had choices – that was what he was trying to tell me. To an external observer, it looked as if he obeyed your orders slavishly until the day he left you, but Tim chose to define it differently. He liked to think he disregarded you entirely, and picked the course of action that was best for him every time. If that happened to be whatever would keep you happy and therefore off his back, then the benefit to you was a side effect. Kerry’s sure this is how he saw it, and I agree with her.

Has he told you about trying to end his life, Francine? Maybe he has. He talks to you now in a way that he didn’t before, when you could answer. He didn’t tell me and Kerry when he rang us out of the blue, after no contact for five months, and said in his normal tone of voice, ‘I suppose you’re too busy to come round, aren’t you?’, as if we were still regularly in touch and nothing had changed. Kerry said we weren’t too busy. There was and is no such thing in our world as being too busy for Tim. You wouldn’t understand, Francine, but he’s our only family. All three of our actual families are worse than useless – quite a lot worse. We have no one but each other. I’ve come to the conclusion that people who suffer our particular type of deprivation tend to gravitate towards one another: those of us looking for water that can be thicker than blood is for most people, if you get my drift.

Do you know the story of Tim and his family? Has he told you yet? Post-stroke, I can’t see why he wouldn’t.

I knew it was Tim on the phone from the way Kerry sat upright and waved frantically at me, signalling emergency. We hadn’t heard from him since the letter he’d written us when he left you and Heron Close, informing us that we’d never see him again, consoling us with the assurance that we were better off without his third-rate presence in our lives.

‘Where are you?’ Kerry asked him. ‘Give us an address. We’re on our way.’ The address was in Bath, three and a half hours’ drive from Spilling. It was eleven thirty at night. We knew we would miss work the next day. Neither of us cared. Kerry suggested this might be the perfect opportunity to both hand in our notice. We were about to become very rich thanks to Tim, and Kerry was convinced that his unexpected phone call meant that we would need to abandon our regular lives for the foreseeable future and devote ourselves entirely to helping him. ‘He wouldn’t have rung if his situation wasn’t desperate,’ she said on the way to Bath. Having delegated the driving to me, she was taking care of the worrying.

I tried to disagree. ‘He might just have missed us and fancied getting in touch,’ I suggested. ‘No,’ Kerry said. ‘Whether he fancied it or not, he wouldn’t have allowed himself to do it unless he’d reached a crisis point. And this is Tim we’re talking about. He’d need to recognise it as a crisis – think how bad it’d have to be for that to happen. If it wasn’t life or death . . .’ I heard her exhale, trying to breathe her anxiety out. ‘Tim isn’t an undoer. He makes the most uncomfortable beds, then lies in them until his whole body’s riddled with bedsores.’ ‘Nice image,’ I joked, trying to lighten the mood. I suspected she was making a fuss about nothing, but she wasn’t having it. ‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘Marrying Francine, letting Gaby disappear out of his life. It’s one of his rules: he doesn’t value or like himself, so he’s rigid about what he will and won’t allow himself to do.’

You used to have a fair few rules yourself, Francine: no shoes in the house after you bought 6 Heron Close with its immaculate oak engineered flooring; no putting anything damp to dry on a radiator (why the hell not?); no food or drinks in the lounge; no having the central heating and the gas fire on at the same time, even when the cold’s getting into minus degrees; no opening a suitcase to pack for a holiday, and certainly no entering a supermarket, without first making a list. Once in a supermarket, no buying anything that isn’t on the list. And then the subtler never-directly-stated rules that governed the psychological lives of all those around you: no preferring anybody to you, no finding anybody more interesting than you, no being closer to anybody than to you. No suggesting, ever, that Tim might want to come round on his own if you were busy on a particular evening, or that if you needed to go into the office one Sunday, Tim might like to come out for lunch with Kerry and me rather than sit at home alone doing nothing, for no reason other than to ensure you didn’t feel excluded. We had to remove a hell of a lot more than our shoes for you, Francine. We had to shed our authentic selves (yes, I know that sounds intense, but a) no one will ever read this, and b) I don’t give a toss). The constantly looming threat that was that you would ban Tim from seeing us: one of us would slip up and do something that made it clear that the three of us were closer to one another than any of us was to you, and that would be it – Tim wouldn’t be allowed to see us again. None of us was prepared to risk that. Without Kerry and me, Tim wouldn’t have had anybody in his life apart from you. So we swallowed most of the conversations we’d have liked to have, and sat there like robots, saying the kinds of things we thought would meet with your approval. In our fucking socks, most of the time.

Apart from making us remove our shoes when we were in your house, you couldn’t dictate what Kerry and I wore, but Tim wasn’t so lucky, was he? Before he met you, he wore young duffer clothes, always: old-fashioned tweedy suits with waistcoats that made his clients look twice at his face and wonder if this might be an exceptionally young-looking seventy-year-old. The clothes might have looked strange on anyone else, but they suited Tim. Instead of looking like a relic from a bygone era, he looked exactly as everyone knew he was meant to look, and, even weirder than that, he somehow made everyone around him look wrong. I freely admit that shortly after Tim’s company merged with mine, I started to dress more traditionally, influenced by him. The irony is that I still dress that way, even though Tim hasn’t for years. When he got engaged to you, Francine, you told him he looked like Colonel Mustard and bought him a whole new wardrobe of clothes that would make him look exactly like everybody else. Tim didn’t seem to mind. When I asked him about it, he smiled and said, ‘Francine cares more than I do about what I wear. She thinks it matters; I know it doesn’t.’ I was unwilling to let it drop. I said, ‘She also cares more about getting married. You don’t really want to do it, do you? So why are you?’ ‘Because I said I would, and she wants me to,’ Tim explained, as if it made sense. ‘You’re right, she cares more. It seems fair that the one who takes the greater interest should have their way, don’t you think?’

But there was more to it than that, Kerry says. In contrast to Gaby Struthers, who adored Tim and believed he was special (and therefore she couldn’t be trusted), you behaved as if you thought he was a useless piece of rubbish, which tallied with how he saw himself. You were forceful, too – determined to impose your will. Kerry thinks that’s why Tim married you and stayed with you. You always seemed so intent on improving him. Maybe he hoped you’d succeed.

‘But she’s so relentlessly horrible to him,’ I pointed out. ‘He has zero freedom. I’d give up all hope of improvement and reclaim my life at this point, I think.’ Kerry told me I didn’t understand. ‘Tim has no interest in self-ownership,’ she said. ‘Who’d want to own a product that they perceive as among the most flawed on the market? Francine convinced him early on that his life was more her project than his. He doesn’t think sufficiently highly of himself to treat himself to a second chance.’

She said a similar thing on the way to Bath, about Tim having phoned us out of the blue, five months after writing to us to say he was exiting our lives forever. ‘I’m sure he knew within days that banishing himself was a bad move, but this is Tim. He believes that if he forces himself to live with the consequences of his cock-ups, he’s at least keeping himself in line. Only utter desperation would provoke a U-turn on this scale – a late-night phone call, a summons halfway across the country, with no notice.’

I sort of knew she was right. Or maybe that’s hindsight. I think I can remember being on the verge of saying, ‘But he’s U-turned before, when he left Francine,’ and then stopping myself when it occurred to me that in his farewell letter to us, Tim had written, ‘Francine might contact you with a hysterical and asinine account of my having left her. If she does, do your best to impress upon her that I’ve done no such thing. What I am doing is no reflection on anybody else, nor is it something I am doing “to” anyone, as all but the most ego-ridden will appreciate. I decided it would be beneficial for me and for those close to me if I were to isolate myself, and so that’s what I’ve done. And, more importantly, it’s all I’ve done. I have not left my wife.’

‘Only Tim,’ I said to Kerry. Or perhaps she said it to me. We said it to one another all the time, and still do. ‘Only Tim would leave his wife, then claim emphatically that he hasn’t left her, and mean every word of it.’

We arrived at Tim’s flat at 2.30 a.m. on the night of the surprise phone call, having done most of the journey at an illegal ninety miles an hour. Kerry put her hand on my arm as we pulled up outside number 8 Renfrew Road. ‘Prepare yourself,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to find, but it’s going to be bad.’ The house was a shabby Georgian carve-up on a street that was basically a hill, nearly too steep to park on. The front door was standing open, but the effect was the opposite of welcoming. It was more suggestive of none of the residents caring enough to shut it properly. The communal areas were disgusting. The threadbare carpet was every shade of stamped-in mud, the walls were cracked and damp-stained. The place smelled of a mixture of stale urine and wet dogs. Kerry and I tried not to touch the banister as we walked up the stairs. Tim had one of the two rooms on the top floor, he’d told us on the phone. We assumed it was the one with the open door, from which music was drifting out onto the windowless uncarpeted landing: classical. Songs, in German, a male voice. I looked at Kerry. I probably raised my eyebrows somewhat optimistically. Tim used to listen only to classical music before he met you, Francine – before you called it depressing, and banned it. Kerry shook her head: no cause for optimism. That was when I realised that the guy singing sounded pretty desolate. ‘Tim,’ Kerry called out.