The Carrier (30 page)

How would you feel, Francine, if I told you that when you married Tim, you took the surname of his secondary school English teacher? Would you keep an open mind for his sake, because you care about him, or would you bypass curious in your haste to get to furious? I asked Dan about this this morning. He nearly spat out his cereal. ‘Francine, open-minded?’ he said. ‘She’d be incandescent.’ We started to giggle over our Weetabix like hyped-up kids. The idea of someone whose anger is frightening getting really, really angry is funny as long as it’s not actually happening.

I’d like to tell you – not the full story, just a teaser. You’d be desperate to get your hands on all the details, but since you can’t speak, you wouldn’t be able to demand them. Maybe I’d adopt the morally superior tone that used to be your trademark and ask you a test question: ‘Do you want to know for the right reason,’ I’d say, ‘or only so that you can assemble your Yet Another Terrible Thing That Was Done To Me narrative? The Truth My Husband Withheld That I Had A Right To Know?’ If I felt really vindictive, I might then make a show of waiting for the answer you’d be incapable of giving me. How you’d hate me for using your beloved ‘right reason’ line against you, for knowing something about Tim that you don’t. How dare he tell me and Dan and not you?

In case you haven’t worked it out yet, Tim dares to tell me and Dan things because he knows we’ll accept his decisions, even the bad ones. Like marrying you. Like moving back in with you after the stroke. Though, actually, that’s done him good. I was certain any contact with you would be dangerous for him, but I was wrong. (That’s why you should never attack another person’s autonomy, Francine – because what if you’re wrong? What if you emotionally blackmail them into doing what you ‘know’ is right, and it turns out not to be? And isn’t it kind of unbelievable that there are people like you who need this spelling out for them?)

Watching Tim lose his fear and start to be more natural around you convinced me that I’d miscalculated. I’ve stopped worrying that he’ll try to kill himself again; now I worry instead that he’ll kill you, which might bring him psychological closure but would also land him in prison. Having said that, I think Tim could live quite happily in prison – more so than most people. He doesn’t give two hoots about his physical surroundings as long as there are books there. He’d have a prescribed routine, plenty of time to read, lots of people to charm and impress and, crucially, proof that he’s a bad guy. I think he’d find that comforting.

Thank God prison is the worst-case scenario for him. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about our capital punishment argument – remember that horrendous evening, Francine? If words could leave scars, yours would have. It started off as a discussion, but you quickly turned it nasty and personal. You were (are?) in favour of the death penalty, and Dan and I were (are) against, and when we tried to explain why, you couldn’t handle it, could you? You started yelling at us, saying that it was thanks to people like us that multiple murderers killed again and again. You told us there was blood on our hands. I remember, Dan and I laughed afterwards about how we’d both looked down at our hands at that moment. We examined them, found them unbloodied, then did what we always did when you made a scene: pretended you weren’t behaving badly, upped our own politeness levels to counteract your self-righteous hostility. Anyone watching us would have found the scene surreal, as if you and we were participating in two wholly separate dialogues: a hissy, red-faced ‘All I know is, I’ve got no child deaths on
my
conscience!’ followed by a silky-smooth ‘Absolutely, and your sense of justice is really admirable, and I can totally see why you feel the way you do, but . . .’ And then a self-effacing shrug, because it would have been too incendiary to say, ‘But we believe it’s wrong to kill people, even if it’s legal and those people are violent criminals.’

Tim rang us three days later to apologise for your aggression. Being Tim, he didn’t use the word ‘aggression’ or say, ‘I’m sorry’ at any point in the conversation. I answered the phone and he chuckled and said, ‘You two got off lightly the other night.’ My heart plunged to my guts. I’d have preferred it if Tim had got off lightly, since he was the one who’d been unable to leave at the end of the evening, or at the end of any evening with you. Tim was the one who had to sleep next to you, wake up with you. Unlike me and Dan, he didn’t get to escape with someone who loved him unconditionally and approved of him; he didn’t get to laugh cathartically and compare notes about your insane need to create misery for yourself and everyone around you.

It surprised me to hear that he hadn’t got off lightly, naïve fool that I was. Even then, well into his marriage to you, I hadn’t got to grips with the full extent of your corrosiveness. By your standards, I thought, Tim had surely behaved better than Dan and I had. Insofar as it’s possible for anyone to have done nothing wrong in Francine World, he had done nothing wrong. He hadn’t disagreed with you about the death penalty, hadn’t spoken a single word until the conversation had moved on to a less contentious subject. ‘Did you say something to wind her up after we’d left?’ I asked him, thinking it incredibly unlikely. Tim always took care to say as little in your presence as he could get away with.

‘It’s what I didn’t say that was the problem,’ he explained. ‘My silence was disloyal, apparently. I should have made it clear I was on her side.’ ‘You’re pro-death penalty?’ I said, surprised. It’s probably wrong of me, but I naturally assume everyone I like is anti. Tim said, ‘If I’m only executing in the abstract, then I’ll hang, guillotine and crucify all the livelong day to get my own sentence down.’ Two days in the dark cloud for the minor disloyalty of failing to defend Francine’s point of view. I’d get at least a fortnight for the major disloyalty of not agreeing with it. And she’s quite right: she’d never be disloyal to me, minorly or majorly. When I start to defend state-sanctioned murder in public – and quite frankly, what’s holding me up? – she’ll be front and centre cheering me on, even after my unforgivable behaviour of the other night.’

I was stunned. ‘She actually said that? That she’d defend you if you were spouting
her
opinions?’ I resisted the urge to say ‘bigoted, barbaric opinions’. ‘Yup,’ said Tim cheerfully. ‘She meant it, too. My wife’s a better person than I am: she never says things she doesn’t mean. I do it all the time. And, to be fair to her, she thinks our opinions are interchangeable. She’s far better at being married than I am.’ God, he could be infuriating: the deadpan way he’d describe your outrageous attitudes and behaviour towards him as if he didn’t disapprove of them himself, purely to wind me up.

What would the penalty be for lying about his name and his family, if you were in a position to hand out punishments, Francine? Would Tim’s sentence be harsh or lenient? How long in the dark cloud for telling you his parents were dead and he had no siblings, when in fact he has two brothers – one older, one younger – and his parents are alive and well and living in Rickmansworth? Their surname isn’t Breary, it’s Singleton. That’s what Tim used to be called. Breary came from his fourth year English teacher, Padraig Breary – housemaster at Gowchester School by day, poet by night, died of a brain tumour in 2007, aged sixty-three. Tim read about his death in one of the poetry magazines at his local library: if it weren’t for the library, he told me and Dan, he wouldn’t have made the effort to leave his Bath bedsit to buy food. He’d have starved to death and saved himself the bother of having to do melodramatic things with a knife.

It was exactly a month after Padraig Breary died that Tim tried to follow his example: same date the next month. Tim didn’t tell me that. I found out by accident months later, when I read an obituary of Padraig Breary from
The Times
that Tim had cut out and kept. I never mentioned to him that I’d made the connection between the dates.

I don’t think you’d be all that interested in Padraig Breary, would you, Francine, even if I told you what a brilliant poet he was? You were proud of your belief that poetry was a waste of everyone’s time. You’d want to know all about the Singletons, though: the in-laws Tim denied you that were yours by right – his parents, Veronica and Trevor, both now retired, and his two brothers, Stuart and Andrew. Veronica used to be a solicitor like you, though her field was employment law, not pensions, so not too spookily similar. Trevor was something senior and managerish at British Airways. Stuart sort of followed his dad’s example and is a pilot, and Andrew runs a gourmet pizza takeaway and delivery company. They’re both married, with a child each.

Tim didn’t tell me about his brothers’ careers or families because he doesn’t know. Shortly after his suicide attempt, I paid a private investigator for information about Stuart and Andrew Singleton. In case Tim ever wants to trace them, I’ve saved him the trouble. Though, truthfully, that’s not why I did it: it had more to do with wanting to be able to get in touch with them quickly and easily if anything were to happen to Tim. He has no relationship with them now, but I’d want to let them know, and I’d want to know if I were them.

I don’t think there’s any circumstance that could make me want to contact Veronica and Trevor Singleton, who never spoke to their children apart from about the practicalities of day-to-day life, never kissed or cuddled or said they loved them, never took them anywhere a child might want to go more than an adult would. From all the stories Tim told me and Dan (as if they were hilarious and had happened to someone else) what most sticks in my mind is his description of family mealtimes: Veronica and Trevor reading in silence while shovelling in each day’s identical food – porridge for breakfast, salad and tinned fish for lunch, stew for supper – with their books held up close so that their sons couldn’t see their faces. They bought no books for their sons, ever, though they didn’t mind if Tim read the paperback novels they’d finished with, which he did as soon as he was old enough. Stuart and Andrew never showed an interest, and read only at school when they had to.

The Singleton boys weren’t allowed to be upset or to cry, weren’t allowed to get angry or argue or make any kind of mess, weren’t allowed to have problems of any kind, couldn’t have friends round to play in case those friends created inconvenience, weren’t allowed pets. It was made clear to Tim, Stuart and Andrew every day that their presence would only be tolerated by Trevor and Veronica if it mimicked an absence. They were expected to be hassle-free shadow children.

For the eighteen years that Tim lived in his parents’ house, he was uncomplaining and compliant – the good son whose needs never inconvenienced his parents because he appeared to have none. Stuart suffered from all kinds of strange eating disorders as a child and was hospitalised several times with malnutrition because he couldn’t keep food down. When they visited him, Veronica and Trevor took with them files full of paperwork and whatever books they were reading, and looked up from their printed pages only occasionally, to tell Stuart he had to get better quickly because it was yet another problem for them when he wasn’t well.

The doctors could never find anything wrong with him. ‘That’s because membership of the Singleton family doesn’t show up on X-rays,’ Tim told me and Dan. The three of us laughed about our appalling families quite often. What else could we do? I never told you, Francine, but my father is a convicted paedophile. He’s been to prison twice. My mother’s still with him, unbelievably. She stood by him, and now lives as the wife of a known sex offender. Last I heard, my sisters were still in touch with him intermittently, trying to make the best of a bad situation. I haven’t spoken to any of them for nearly ten years. It’s the only way I can cope, by shutting it out, getting on with my life, trying very hard to be the best person I can be. (Which you make difficult, Francine.)

I’m supposed to be telling you about Tim, not about me. His dreadful parents, not mine. His brother Andrew got heavily involved in the local drug scene as a teenager and ended up in a young offenders’ institute. Veronica and Trevor didn’t visit him, not once. Andrew’s attention-seeking criminal behaviour mustn’t be rewarded, they said. Stuart visited once and was ignored by Trevor and Veronica for nearly six months as punishment, but Tim was unwilling to go against the parental line. ‘I couldn’t risk it,’ he said. ‘Mum and Dad were forever debating whether it was worth stumping up the school fees for Stuart and Andrew, given that they were such pains in the arse. They never said that about me, but I knew they’d start if I put a foot wrong. School was the only place I liked.’

Tim did brilliantly at Gowchester and got a first in English from Rawndesley University. Then came the accountancy training, the good job, the rented flat overlooking the river – all part of his escape plan from the start. Finally, he had a home and an income of his own and no longer needed his parents for anything. He’d already changed his surname to Breary by this point, though his family didn’t know it. He also hadn’t told them about the flat, and he’d lied about which firm he’d be working for. He moved out without giving notice to the Singletons, and he’s had no contact with any of them since. As far as he knows, none of them has ever tried to find him.

How would you use that knowledge, Francine? If I told you the story I’ve just written down, and if you were fit and healthy, what would you do? Or perhaps I should ask instead: what would you make Tim do? Would it be all right with you that he’d opted out of the family and name he was born into? I don’t think it would be. Would you criticise him for abandoning his brothers? Most people would. Tim’s suffering as a child wasn’t Andrew’s fault, or Stuart’s. True, Francine, but they’re in touch with Trevor and Veronica, and that’s unlikely to change, Tim thinks – that’s why he can’t allow their presence in his life.

I don’t think you’d trust him to have made the right decision. You’d insist on meeting them all. That’s why Tim would never have risked telling you – you’d have tried to seize control.

This is why your helplessness is hard to regret, Francine. You can’t defend yourself, which means that, finally, Tim can. I hope he doesn’t kill you for his sake, but if he does, it’ll be the clearest case of self-defence there’s ever been. I don’t care if the law says otherwise.