The Carrier (11 page)

‘Come in,’ he called back cheerfully. The music was turned right down, as if to make way for friendly conversation. Once again, I started to doubt Kerry’s take on the situation. It would be exactly like Tim, I thought, to make us drive for three hours in the middle of the night and then greet us with ordinary banter, taking up where we’d left off as if we all still lived round the corner from one another.

I saw how wrong I was when Kerry and I walked into the bedsit. Tim was sitting on the bed wearing only boxer shorts and a T-shirt. Next to his feet were pools of blood and a small knife, the sort you’d use to chop garlic. The puddles weren’t huge but they weren’t small. It was a slow-drip-from-the-ceiling volume of liquid, I remember thinking at the time, as if the roof of Tim’s building had a few broken tiles and had leaked red rain in several places.

I freely admit that I was useless, Francine. I froze. Did nothing, said nothing. Well, not quite nothing: I did a lot of looking, staring. So much that I can see the scene clearly now, years later. There were cuts to Tim’s wrists, bloodstains and streaks all the way up to his elbows. His skin had a green tinge to it. He’d also cut at his ankles and heels, hence the blood on the floor. The room that contained him was in as sorry a state as its occupant. There was mould growing up the walls, and several of the windowpanes were cracked. Two corners of the ceiling were sporting cobwebs the size of hammocks: thick, grey rope-like constructions that must have been there for years. It horrified me to think that Tim had rented the room in this condition, that he hadn’t even cleaned away those enormous webs. ‘Because he planned to do nothing in that bedsit but decline and die,’ Kerry explained later.

‘Don’t come near me,’ Tim ordered us, picking up the knife. ‘You’ll get wet and sticky.’ It looked and sounded to me as if he was threatening to harm himself further if we approached him physically, but I could have been wrong about that.

Kerry was brilliant, Francine. Acted as if nothing remarkable or upsetting had happened, as if this was just a practical issue that we could easily deal with. ‘I can tell you now that none of those injuries is fatal,’ she said matter-of-factly to Tim, striding away from him and over to the table where his laptop sat open. There was a pen and a notepad next to it, with something that looked like a list on the pad, dotted with flecks of red where Tim had bled as he wrote. Kerry fiddled with the keyboard and the screen came to life. ‘Were these your instructions?’ she asked.

‘They’re rubbish,’ Tim said. ‘If they were any good, I wouldn’t still be here.’ The sickly greenness of his skin became more pronounced every second. How did Kerry know he was in no danger of dying? I wasn’t so sure. The blood was flowing, there was no doubt about that. Kerry had her phone out. ‘Don’t phone an ambulance,’ Tim snapped at her. ‘I’m sure it’s going to happen soon.’ I remember feeling as if someone had poured a bucket of icy water into my stomach. Was that why Tim had summoned us: to watch him die? Did he want us there for moral support? Didn’t it occur to him to wonder about the effect it might have on us?

Kerry snapped back at him, ‘I will phone an ambulance, and you’ll shut up.’ And she did. And Tim let her. She asked him when he’d done it. ‘Half past ten?’ he said speculatively. Every few seconds he gripped his knees as if they were the part of his body that hurt most. ‘“Happy slashing”?’ Kerry read aloud from the website. I shuddered when I heard those words – literally, a whole body shudder. I wished the internet had never been invented, and hoped that everyone who put suicide instructions on it would practise what they preached and die, in pain and soon. I knew the second I heard the words ‘happy slashing’ that I’d never be able to get them out of my head, and I was right: I never have been able to.

Kerry told the ambulance people it was urgent: a man had cut his wrists and ankles and was losing blood. ‘I’m glad you didn’t tell them I tried to kill myself,’ Tim said. ‘Didn’t you?’ I asked him. He dodged the question, saying, ‘Spilled blood is visible, cuts are visible. Intentions are not visible. Better to stick to the facts.’ Kerry told him again to shut up, and that there was no way he’d done this to himself at half past ten. ‘You did it half an hour ago, after I rang you to say we were twenty miles away. Didn’t you?’

Do you think that’s what happened, Francine? Has Tim told you? Not that you’d be able to tell me if he had. I’d love to know, though. Did he do it as late as possible, so that we’d be in time to save him? Was that his plan all along? If he wanted to live, why not skip the wrist- and ankle-slashing altogether? Wouldn’t someone like Tim have chosen a more dignified way to cry for help? Or did he mean to kill himself and fail? In which case, why not admit it, say, ‘I can’t even kill myself properly, I’m so useless’? Rubbishing himself has been one of Tim’s favourite hobbies for as long as I’ve known him. I said that to Kerry, and she said, ‘But he’s also proud. You’ve heard him insist that he doesn’t miss Gaby. He rubbishes himself in the abstract – “I’m third-rate, I’m unoriginal” – while defending his craziest behaviour like a zealot and insisting he’s never made a wrong decision.’

While we waited for the ambulance, Kerry interrogated Tim, trying to get a coherent account out of him, her tone strongly implying that she didn’t believe a word he said. She sounded almost like you, Francine, and told me later that she’d hoped to increase Tim’s chances of survival by forcing him to use his brain to defend his story. ‘Why did you write out your wrist-slitting instructions by hand, on paper?’ she asked him. ‘Why not just read them off the screen? You wanted to kill time, didn’t you? Kid yourself you were working towards your goal. You’d made a few tentative cuts and you were putting off making any more.’ Tim’s responses were inconsistent. He strenuously denied putting anything off, but also wouldn’t admit to having tried to take his own life. When the ambulance pulled up outside, siren wailing, he said, ‘Why am I being saved, exactly? “I do not approve, and I am not resigned”, as a poet once said. That poet was Edna St Vincent Millay.’

You never approved of Tim’s love of poetry, did you, Francine? You thought it was effeminate. When he joined the Proscenium Library, he didn’t tell you. He knew you’d say it was a waste of money and sulk until he ‘decided’ to give up his membership.

Tim was furious with Kerry and me, once he heard the footsteps of the ambulance team running up the stairs and realised he was unlikely to die. ‘Why all this effort and fuss for me?’ he demanded. ‘Does someone in Spilling have some VAT they need to claim back? Are all the other accountants busy? I’m not going back there, you know. It’s not safe for me to go anywhere near Francine. You’re deluding yourselves if you think you can move me in with you, unless you have a house I know nothing about that’s nowhere near the Culver Valley.’ After saying this, his eyes started to close and he seemed to be drifting off. Kerry burst into tears. I wondered what Tim had meant about it not being safe for him to go near you, Francine: safe for him or safe for you? The ambulance people rushed into the room and started to do their stuff, and it was a huge relief not to be responsible any more. I put my arms round Kerry, but she was too busy to be comforted – she was already planning. ‘We have to leave Spilling,’ she said. ‘We’ll sell up, buy a house miles away from Francine.’

Well, we did. And we took Tim with us. We didn’t think we’d ever come back, but then you had your stroke and here we are. Tim claims we’re here because of you – another of his convenient distortions. You could be anywhere, couldn’t you? We could all tell you that you were in the bedroom of a house in Spilling and you wouldn’t know any different. The move back was nothing to do with you, Francine. It was all about Gaby Struthers.

Signing off for now,

Dan