The Carrier

by Sophie Hannah

  I decide not to press her for more details. I don’t think I’d like them if I heard them.

  “I once knew a man who was nothing like anybody else I’ve ever known, male or female,” I tell her, slipping free of my usual controls. “I’d have married him like a shot.” And had his name tattooed on my upper arm, both my arms. All over my face and body, even the soles of my feet. Sometimes I think that there is nothing I wouldn’t do, absolutely nothing, if I could have Tim.

  “What happened?” Lauren asks.

  “I fucked it up, then blamed Sean.”

  “Blamed Sean? Why, what did he do?”

  “Nothing. But I’ve found a way round that: it’s called being unfair.”

  “So what about the other one?” Why does she look and sound so avid? Having shown no interest in me up to this point, she’s suddenly staring at me wide-eyed, as if my theories about my love life actually matter to her. “Is that why you’ve not married Sean, because you’re still hoping to pull him?”

  I laugh. The word “pull” in connection with Tim is absurd.

  Lauren shoves more crisps into her mouth: enough to reveal that she expects to be listening and not talking for the foreseeable future.

  “Tell me about your man first,” I say. “Not Jason—the innocent one who’s going to prison for murder.” Lauren isn’t a bad person. She seems to have a strong sense of fairness, even if she does wave it around irresponsibly in public places. And something else that’s just occurred to me: willing and enthusiastic participants in miscarriages of justice wouldn’t typically use that form of words: “let an innocent man go to jail for murder.” That’s the sort of thing you’d say if you were against, not in favor. And Lauren wouldn’t be in favor. Incredible as it sounds, I feel I know her well enough to be able to say that. I don’t believe she would stand by and let someone be framed for murder unless she felt she had no choice.

  Unless she can’t go to the police with the truth, because she’s too scared of what the real killer might do to her. Could that real killer be Jason, her husband?

  Or am I leaping to crazy conclusions?

  Lauren stands up. “You won’t let it go, will you?” she says bitterly. She brushes Pringle crumbs off her fingers onto the carpet, picks up her bag and heads for the door with the missing corner. Before I have time to apologize—insincerely, since I don’t believe anyone would let it go, and nor should they—she’s locked herself in the bathroom.

  Hasn’t it occurred to her that I could easily go to the police? I more than could, I decide: I will. I’m not scared of Jason Cookson; he has no hold over me. No one should do time for a crime they haven’t committed.

  The lines from the poem I half remembered at Düsseldorf Airport come back to me again: Our time in the hands of others, / And too brief for words. How can I have forgotten the rest? I don’t like to think I’ve lost anything that came from Tim. They were someone else’s words originally, but when Tim read me the poem at the Proscenium, they became his.

  I pull my BlackBerry out of my bag and switch it on. Ignoring the symbol telling me that I have voice mails, I hit the Internet browser button and type the two lines I remember into the search box. The first result that comes up is the one I want. I click on it, and the poem appears on my screen like an old friend. “Unscheduled Stop,” it’s called, by Adam Johnson.

  I sit in the Charles Hallé

  At windy Manningtree,

  While gulls enact their ballet

  Above the estuary.

  “We seem to have a problem . . .”

  A faltering voice explains.

  I spy, along the platform,

  A sign: “Beware of trains”

  And picture you, impatient,

  In the car park at the back

  Of a gaudy toy-town station,

  Or craning down the track

  As the afternoon rehearses

  An evensong of birds—

  Our time in the hands of others,

  And too brief for words.

  To my horror, I find that I am crying. I can see Tim at the top of the Proscenium’s ladder, can hear him telling me that the poet was dying when he wrote the poem. It’s his voice in my head, reading the words of each verse aloud.

  I wipe my eyes briskly, hoping Lauren won’t emerge from the bathroom anytime soon. The older I get, the longer it takes me to lose the crying look.

  Who is the carrier?

  I have to stop this. Now.

  I’m about to turn off my phone when I have an idea: would an Internet search track down Lauren’s wrongly convicted man? Unlikely, since I don’t know his name.

  Unless Lauren’s name would do the trick. Even more unlikely: “Lauren Cookson, wife and protector of the real murderer, Jason Cookson, stood by and did sod all to prevent police from arresting someone who had nothing to do with it.”

  Still, I type Lauren’s name into the search box because it gives me something to think about that isn’t Tim. Quicker than the blue line of a pregnancy test, the result I’m looking for comes up: “Lauren Cookson, her twenty-three-year-old care assistant . . .”

  I press my hand over my mouth to make sure no noise escapes, nothing that might alert her. Has this been in the local papers, the ones I never read? On the local news that I never watch because I’m too busy? There’s too much here to choose from. I click on Lauren’s name.

  God oh God oh God. This can’t be right. Cannot be happening. I’ve had this exact feeling before, so I know that when what’s unfolding in front of your eyes is simply not possible, you still have to deal with it. You have to think and act and breathe, and sometimes speak, even though you no longer believe in the world that contains all these things.

  It would be ideal in so many ways if this were to turn out to be a dream. It would mean I’m asleep now, for one thing; I’ve wanted to be asleep for a long time. Only, can I swap this nightmare for a dream that doesn’t make me want to scream until I wake up?

  My eyes skid over the story, disorientated, trying to take in what they can. “The body of Francine Breary, forty, was found by Lauren Cookson, her twenty-three-year-old care assistant . . . husband Tim Breary has been charged . . . DS Sam Kombothekra of Culver Valley CID . . .”

  The words won’t lie still and let me read them. I’m going to black out. I have to close my eyes.

  It’s Tim. Lauren’s innocent man is Tim Breary.

  POLICE EXHIBIT 1432B/SK—

  TRANSCRIPT OF HANDWRITTEN LETTER FROM DANIEL JOSE TO FRANCINE BREARY DATED 22 DECEMBER 2010

  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. Begged me. Repeatedly. 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 swore she’d never 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.

  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 s
eems 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 skeptical. 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 I have to stick to Kerry’s rules. Yes, I have a mind of my own, but I couldn’t begin to formulate a set of rules for living that would be superior to or even equal to Kerry’s. 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 this letter, or part of it. You should know about Tim’s suicide attempt. You deserve to know that being married to you has that effect on people. 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 behavior 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 changed the subject—to something about rugby, I think. 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 micromanage 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 instructions on 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 every order 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 toward 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, signaling emergency. We hadn’t heard from him since the letter he’d written us when he left you and Heron Close, apologizing for having to let us know 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. Kerry said, “Wait there, we’re coming.” 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 have to recognize 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 things up. 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.”

  Tim’s rules, Kerry’s rules. Come to think of it, you used to have a fair few rules yourself, Francine: no shoes in the house after you bought 6 Heron Close, with its immaculate engineered oak 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 close to 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 prefer to come out for lunch with Kerry and me than to 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 r
ead this, and [b] I don’t give a toss). The constantly looming threat that Kerry and I never spoke of to Tim, nor he to us, was that you would ban him 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 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, directly 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 complained on his behalf, 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?”