The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  “I don’t think tonight’s a one-off for you, is it?” I say. “I know our current situation is far from ideal, but I bet you’re mean and sweary even during the good times.” No reaction at all. “The reason I don’t mind saying all this to you is that you’re so stupid,” I go on, “it’s like talking to a piece of cardboard. No ramifications whatsoever. You’re not going to ramificate; you don’t know what it means. You don’t know which of the words I use are real words and which I’m making up. I bet you’ve got the memory of a bottom-set-for-remembering-how-to-swim goldfish. Soon you’ll be telling me I’m looking after you again, having forgotten everything I’ve just said.” I smile at her, feeling quite forgiving now that I’ve unburdened myself.

  “You’re a fucking cheeky cow, that’s what you are,” Lauren announces after a short silence.

  “That’s what I am,” I agree. “Well done. See? You have no trouble defining me without reference to Jason. Perhaps you could try doing the same with yourself.”

  She stares down at her phone, holding it with both hands. “Don’t speak to me, all right?”

  Jason. Now, there’s a strange thing. “I don’t get it,” I say. “You’ve never been abroad on your own before, you’re talking about panic attacks, you’ve lied to your husband, taking a significant risk that he’ll find out, since planes are delayed all the time . . . Why? What did you have to do in Germany that took less than a day and justified the risk?”

  “Why don’t you mind your own business? How do you know it took less than a day?”

  I close my eyes. You mentioned seeing me this morning, but you might not remember having said it, so let’s not overcomplicate things. “No suitcase,” I say.

  “So? You’ve not got one either!”

  I open my eyes, and the nightmare is still real. My whole world is still a coach. The moronic Lauren Cookson is still my significant other. “That’s because I too have been in Germany just for the day,” I say patiently. “And I’ll happily tell you why.”

  “Don’t bother,” Lauren snaps.

  “All right. I won’t.”

  Behind me, a young girl’s voice pipes up. “Daddy? Are you awake now?” One of the choirgirls, probably; I didn’t see any other children waiting to board apart from a tiny baby.

  Her father clears his throat. “Yes, darling. What is it?”

  I steel myself, half expecting her to say, “The two women in front of us are being hateful to each other and it’s scaring me.”

  “You know how Silas wants to be a famous footballer when he grows up?”

  I relax. Lauren is jabbing at her phone with her thumbnail. A few seconds later she says, “Mum? It’s me, Lauren.”

  “He wants to play for Manchester United,” says the choirgirl.

  “Well, I’m sure whatever team he plays for will be lucky to have him.” The father sounds worried. I imagine he has woken up, looked out of the coach window and seen the same blank blackness and absence of informative landmarks that we’re all seeing.

  Or perhaps he’s wondering how significant a hindrance the name Silas might be for a boy whose ambition is to be a sports legend. Parents are such arrogant idiots. I’m delighted I’m not about to become one.

  “Mum, I’ve got myself in a right mess here. I’m in Germany.” Lauren is crying again. “Yeah, Germany. No, I’m not in England.”

  This is likely to be frustrating. She’s going to take half an hour to tell her mother what I could summarize in twenty seconds, but, as a self-confessed hostile stranger, I can hardly hold out my hand for her phone and say, “Here, let me.”

  Should I ring Sean? Other women in my situation would want to phone their partners—for company, for comfort. Those would be the ones with partners who wouldn’t immediately launch into yet another accuse-athon.

  “I can’t tell you now. I haven’t told Jason. No. Jason doesn’t know I’m in Germany, I’ve not told him. What? I can’t say. No. Not till I see you. I’m on a coach with loads of people earwigging everything I say. Our plane’s delayed, and now they’re taking us to a hotel. It’s horrible, Mum. I’ve been having a right panic attack. I’ve got a friend, though, that’s one good thing—an older lady. What? She’s called Gaby. Yeah. She’s looking after me. She’s being brilliant. You’d get on with her. She’s saying everything you’d say.”

  What? Oh, for goodness’ sake.

  “If Silas did play for Manchester United . . . Dad?”

  “Hm? Sorry, darling, I was just trying to get a sense of where we are.”

  “If Silas played for Manchester United, would you support them, or would you still support Stoke City?”

  “Mum, listen, I need you to ring Jason for me. You’re going to have to make up some bullshit. I’ve told him I’m at yours. Yeah. You’ll have to tell him I’ve got sick and can’t talk. Tell him I’ll be back first thing in the morning.”

  I tap her on the arm, shake my head.

  “Hang on, Mum, Gaby’s saying no.”

  “If you were sick you wouldn’t know when you’d be better,” I say. “Tell her to tell him you’ll ring him as soon as you’re well enough—hopefully tomorrow morning, but you can’t be sure. Keep it vague.”

  Lauren nods. She passes on a less coherent version of my instructions to her mother. If she’s lucky, they’ll work.

  I have just helped the willing facilitator of a serious miscarriage of justice to avoid getting bollocked for lying to her husband. If asked why I did it, I don’t think I’d be able to explain. Oh, well. Since I’m doomed to live out the rest of my days on a German coach, I don’t suppose it matters much.

  “Ah, this must be the hotel!” the man behind me says to his daughter. Other people have spotted it too. Exclamations of relief erupt all over the coach. I wipe the condensation off the window, take one look at the building we’ve pulled up outside, and wonder what’s wrong with them all. All this inconvenience, and Fly4You couldn’t even put us up somewhere decent? We’re to spend the night in this squat, gray, featureless building with tiny windows, by the side of a dual carriageway?

  “Lauren.” I jab her in the ribs with my elbow.

  “I’ve got to go, Mum, we’re at the hotel. I’ll ring you in a bit. But you’ll tell Jason, yeah? Yeah, I’ll stay with Gaby.” She drops her phone into her bag. “Thank fuck for that,” she says. “Here at last. My mum says I have to make sure I stay with you.” She stretches her arms above her head, releasing a gust of sweat mixed with floral deodorant.

  “We’re not staying here,” I decide aloud.

  “What do you mean we’re not staying here? Why have they brought us here, then?”

  “Everyone else is staying here, but you and I are going to find ourselves a different hotel. A better one. This one looks like condemned council flats.”

  “What fucking planet are you on? It’s the middle of the night!”

  “Trust me: this place will be bad in every way.” I pull my BlackBerry out of my bag. “We’ll find the nearest five-star hotel to Cologne Airport.”

  “Five-star hotel?” Lauren does a whole-body twitch, as if I’ve given her an electric shock. “Are you shitting me, or what? I can’t afford to stay in a five-star hotel! I’m a care assistant. I don’t earn that kind of money!”

  “I’ll pay for everything. I’ll pay for your room.” Which I’ll try to ensure is several floors away from mine. I’m starting to crave space—specifically, space that doesn’t contain Lauren. “My treat.”

  “No!” She bursts into tears.

  I’m so taken aback, all I can do is stare at her. “No?” Her reaction makes even less sense to me than my offer. Why aren’t I taking this opportunity to go my separate way? There’s nothing stopping me from finding a five-star hotel on my own.

  Except that I’ve heard her tell two people that I’m looking after her. And her mother and stepmother both seem to think
she needs to stay with me.

  In my real life, I wouldn’t put up with it; in this alternative universe, my role seems to be to supervise Lauren with a view to improving her. I can think of lots of ways: first break down her resistance to good hotels, then boost her vocabulary, then tackle her willingness to see blameless men framed for murders they haven’t committed . . .

  “No!” She shakes her head vigorously, sobbing. One of her tears lands in the corner of my eye. “No. I’m not the sort of person who stays in a five-star hotel.”

  “All right, forget it.”

  “I can’t do it. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “You’d do exactly the same—”

  “No! I can’t!”

  “Fine. It doesn’t matter. We’ll stay here. Lauren? I’m sorry, just . . . pretend I never said anything. This hotel will be fine.”

  She wipes her eyes, mollified. “It looks all right to me,” she says, assessing it through the coach window. “I hope it’s got something I can eat. I’m starving. Haven’t eaten a thing since six o’clock last night.”

  “You must have had something,” I say.

  “No. Nothing. My stomach’s not been right all day. I’ve not been able to face the thought of food.”

  “You were nervous,” I tell her. “About whatever you had to do today, about lying to Jason. Now you’re on your way home, you’re starting to feel better. And hungrier.”

  She gives me an odd look, then nods. Barely.

  What illicit reason could a twenty-three-year-old care assistant have for needing to come to Germany for the day? A lover? Wouldn’t she have wanted to stay at least one night, if so? Perhaps she and Jason are one of those couples that never spend the night apart. Sean would approve. He ought to move in with them and form a threesome; they’d probably annoy him less than I do.

  Eventually, there’s a gap in the line of moving people filing off the coach. “Come on,” I say. My legs buckle when I try to stand up.

  “I can’t feel my arse, I’ve sat on it for so long,” Lauren announces. She stands, pulls off her silver bullet belt and stuffs it in her bag. Her jeans slide down to reveal sharp hip bones, a red thong and a tattoo of some parallel wavy lines. I don’t know if this is purely decorative or if it means something to Lauren; to me it says, “This accommodation has a swimming pool.”

  Sean would claim this is my fault, not the tattoo’s: I spend a disproportionate amount of time surfing where-to-stay websites because my work involves so much gadding, swanning and gallivanting—three words Sean prefers to the more simple “traveling.” For Christmas last year, I bought myself an antique gold Saint Christopher medal that I wear on a thin white-gold chain around my neck whenever I swan or gad, even though I am not at all religious. I needed something to make me feel better about all the time I spend surrounded by flecks, speckles, splodges, square wall and ceiling tiles and small silver lines on metal, so I developed a relationship with Saint Christopher that involved him accepting my atheism and me redefining his role a little: the patron saint of gallivanters with whiny, selfish partners.

  Lauren and I are among the last to get off the coach. Two other coaches are parked alongside it: limping, yawning people spill out of all three vehicles. On our way into the hotel, we pass a crying woman who is holding up a very old man. “Come on, Dad,” she says. “We’re here now. You’ll be in bed soon.”

  “Look at them, poor sods,” Lauren says to me. “It’s terrible, what those bastards have done to us tonight. They fucking owe us, big-time. I haven’t got a toothbrush with me or anything.”

  “The hotel should have some,” I say. Though probably not enough for all of us. I try not to think about the top drawer of my bedside cabinet that contains at least seven unused miniature toothbrush-and-toothpaste sets, collected from various airlines’ business-class goody bags over the years. Next time I travel—in six days’ time, another dawn-cracking day trip, to Barcelona—I’ll bring them all with me, just in case my flight is delayed overnight and six unstable dimwits decide to appoint me as their primary carer.

  “Why would a hotel have toothbrushes?” Lauren asks, looking puzzled. “Don’t people normally bring their own?”

  Saint Christopher? Do you want to field this one?

  The hotel reception area is packed. Lauren and I can only just get in. We’re standing at the edge of the built-in brown welcome mat. The automatic doors keep half closing on us, then springing open again as they sense the presence of bodies. I catch a glimpse, in the distance, of a plump blonde woman behind a desk. She is speaking, but I can’t hear what she’s saying.

  “Why ‘Father’?” I ask Lauren, looking at her arm.

  “It’s my dad,” she says.

  “Whose name is Wayne. Do you call him ‘Father’?”

  “No, course not.” She giggles. “I call him ‘Dickhead’ most of the time. I love him to bits, though. He wanted it to say ‘Father.’ ‘Wayne’ could be anyone, couldn’t it? It was my birthday present to him, for his fortieth. He’s always wanted me to have his name tattooed somewhere on me. Somewhere decent—he’s not like that, or anything. Lisa had one saying ‘Husband’ at the same time.”

  A low rumble is making its way toward us from the reception desk through the crowd of bodies: the sound of mass discontent, growing louder as it approaches. Bad news. The first distinguishable words I hear come from the American woman with the dyed red hair, who is standing about a meter in front of me: “They can’t do that. They can’t make us.” She turns; of course she does. In this kind of situation, people know it’s their duty to pass on the misery as soon as they’ve received it. “Unbelievable! They haven’t got enough rooms,” she tells all of us who are behind her. “Anyone who’s on their own has to share. With someone they’ve never met before!” She lets out a cackle of outrage and throws up her hands. “I can’t see Hugh Grant anywhere in this crush, so . . . I’m out of here, gonna find a hotel with room service, satellite TV and a spa. I’m done with Fly4You.”

  She’s saying all the things I want to be saying. Except the bit about Hugh Grant—I’d prefer the young David Bowie, but he’s not here either. I want to be walking away, like the redhead, out of this crappy hotel. So why aren’t I? I can’t—cannot, will not—share a bedroom with Lauren.

  I feel something around my wrist. Her. She’s handcuffed me with her fingers again. “Don’t you even think about it,” she says tearfully. It ought to sound like an order she has no right to give me, but all I hear is desperation. Something bad has happened to her, I think suddenly. It isn’t only the delayed plane. She’s traumatized; that’s why her reaction to hearing that the flight had been rerouted to Cologne was so over-the-top. Something to do with her reason for coming to Germany. Maybe something to do with a murder.

  Does her mother know what’s wrong with her? Is that why she told Lauren to make sure she stayed with me? Is the former Mrs. Wayne Cuffley, first wife of “Husband,” so worried about her daughter that she’s pinning all her hopes on a woman she’s never met?

  “Promise you won’t go off and leave me,” Lauren hisses reproachfully, as if her imagining my betrayal and it happening are one and the same.

  “I promise,” I say blankly. Part of my brain has gone numb. There’s no way out. A sleepover with Lauren Cookson in the worst hotel in Europe. No point thinking about it. Not when you have to do it.

  She lets go of my arm. “That’s all right, then.”

  It is as far from all right as Cologne is from Combingham.

  “We’re lucky, we are.”

  “Are we?” If we are, I must be suffering from cognitive dysmorphia.

  “We’re together,” Lauren says. “A lot of these poor sods are going to have to share a bedroom with a total stranger.”

  4

  10/3/2011

  Simon was making coffee for Regan Murray, spilling water and granules everywhere.
Subconsciously deliberately, Charlie guessed, so that he’d have to waste ten minutes cleaning up after himself, and perhaps make the drink again because his first attempt was a mess. “Waste” wasn’t the word Simon would have used: in his book, if it succeeded in postponing a difficult conversation, it was time well spent.

  Was there any reason to assume the conversation with Proust’s daughter would be difficult? Stupid question.

  “Better ring your sister and tell her not to come,” Simon said in a monotone. “What did she want, anyway?”

  “You’re asking me now?” Charlie nodded toward the closed door. To consolidate their image as ungracious hosts, she and Simon had left Regan Murray alone in the lounge and shut themselves in the kitchen.

  “She’s an intruder. Let her wait. What does Liv want, and why the secrecy?”

  “Not secrecy—reluctance to get involved,” said Charlie. “On my part. Liv wanted me to ask you. I said no, because I knew there was no point, you’d never agree. If she wants to try and persuade you, that’s up to her.”

  “So she said she’d be round between eight-thirty and nine. And you didn’t tell me.” Simon was picking up individual granules of instant Kenco and transferring them from the worktop to the mug. Some were too wet from the pools of water they’d been lying in; they’d lost their solidity, and smeared across his fingertips.

  “Like I said, I wanted nothing to do with it. But—”

  “Tell me, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Give me a chance! I was about to say, let’s skip the bit where we demonstrate that what I want couldn’t matter less, since we’re short of time. Liv wants to beg you—wanted me to beg you on her behalf—to go to her and Dom’s wedding.”

  Simon looked up. “Why wouldn’t I? I’m married to you: her sister. You’re going, aren’t you?”

  Charlie was surprised. “Yes, but I assumed, and Liv assumed, that you’d be giving it a morally judgmental wide berth. Have you decided you approve of infidelity?”

  “Not my infidelity, not my business.” Simon picked up the mug. Water dripped from it onto the floor. He tilted it to wipe its bottom on his shirt, spilled coffee on his trousers, put the mug back on the worktop. “What do you think I’m going to do? Co-opt Liv and Dom’s wedding into my courageous moral odyssey by boycotting it? That’d make me a pompous arsehole. Which I’m not.”