The Carrier (40 page)

Hello, Francine,

Do you know what day it is? Probably not. You don’t need to know about dates and times any more, so why would you? I don’t need to as much as I used to either. When I was a full-time care-worker, I was constantly looking at my watch. Now I tend to judge the passing of time by how hungry I am. Which isn’t always reliable – I’m not exactly known for my tiny appetite!

Anyway. It’s Dan’s birthday, and the anniversary of Making Memories Night. I’ve been meaning to write to you about this for a while, and what better day than today? You’ll have to pardon my tipsiness. Dan, Tim and I went out for lunch at Passaparola and I had two Kir Royales – and that was before we got started on the wine.

Does the name mean anything to you, Francine? Obviously, you’ve never heard it described as Making Memories Night. Do you even remember what happened? If your reactions seemed reasonable and ordinary to you, perhaps the evening didn’t stick in your mind. It certainly stuck in mine. Over the years, I missed many chances to make clear to Tim how urgently I thought he needed saving from you, but that night was the first time. It only takes one incident to start a pattern, and Making Memories Night set the tone.

It was a few months before your and Tim’s wedding. You were still living in your separate flats, house-hunting, bound together by neither marriage nor mortgage. If I’d waved a metaphorical red flag that night, Tim might have listened. He might have escaped your clutches.

Regrets are pointless, I know, but facing up to mistakes you’ve made is a valuable use of anyone’s time. I was weak and indecisive that evening, and on many subsequent occasions. I allowed you to storm to power, Francine. You were better prepared than I was, with your detailed plan for every aspect of Tim’s life, and your manifesto-like birthday and Christmas card messages: ‘Happy birthday, darling Tim. No one in this world could love you more than I do.’ ‘I will love you come what may, until my dying day.’ You had a knack for picking endearments that sounded like threats.

Dan and I loved Tim too, but we couldn’t marry him. We were married to each other. And Tim needed someone in his bed every night to prove to the world that he’d been chosen, that he wasn’t a reject. It’s common for the children of severely neglectful parents to mistake a desire to control for love.

That’s what I should have told him on Making Memories Night, after you’d stormed upstairs in a rage. I’ve always wanted to ask you, Francine: at what point did you decide to turn Dan’s and my bedroom into your tantrum headquarters? Halfway up the stairs? Did you stop and think about it? The bathroom or the spare room would have been a more appropriate choice. We heard the door slam, and Dan mouthed, ‘Our bedroom?’ at me.

Wherever you’d chosen to locate your protest, it would have been inappropriate. All Tim did was criticise a hotel you’d asked him to look at in a brochure – possible honeymoon accommodation. It wasn’t as if your parents were the owners, or the place meant something to you sentimentally. Your only connection to the Baigley Falls Hotel (I will never forget its name) was that you had seen a picture of its swimming pool and terrace and thought it looked nice.

The blurb beneath the picture said, ‘The minute you arrive at Baigley Falls, you’ll start making memories.’ ‘What if we don’t?’ Tim asked. ‘Do you think they’ll throw us out? What if they insist we bring each new memory we make down to reception, so that they can inspect it?’ Dan and I laughed, but you didn’t get the joke, did you, Francine? ‘Why would they do that?’ you asked. ‘How could they? You can’t see a memory.’ I wondered how you managed to hold down a job as a lawyer, deaf to nuance as you so manifestly were. Tim ditched the lighthearted approach and explained that memories, if they happened, ought to come into being without any strain or effort on anyone’s part, or else there was something false about it. You stood your ground, determined to misunderstand. ‘So you don’t want to try to remember any part of our honeymoon,’ you said quietly. ‘I won’t need to try,’ Tim said. ‘Trying to remember is for shopping lists and exam crib sheets, not honeymoons.’ Dan and I made things worse by joining in. I said, ‘They probably take photos of you when you arrive to sell you when you leave.’ Dan said, ‘The blurb might as well say, “Don’t live in the moment; do everything you do in order to look back on it later.”’

You shut down at that point, Francine. Shut us all out. You got up, left the room, marched upstairs. The next thing we heard was the slamming of our bedroom door, so loud it shook the house. Tim ran up after you. I should have tried to stop him, but I didn’t. Dan and I heard him saying your name over and over again, trying to reason with you. We heard what sounded like him straining, pushing against the door. Ten minutes later he came back down and stood in the middle of the lounge, looking more bewildered than I’ve ever seen anyone look. ‘What’s going on?’ Dan asked. Since nothing had happened to warrant your storming off, he assumed he’d missed something. Tim shrugged, a defeated gesture that said, ‘You know as much as I do’. I told Tim there was no lock on our bedroom door, and he mouthed, ‘She’s leaning against it.’ ‘Did she think we were taking the mickey out of her?’ I asked, going over the conversation again in my mind, feeling guilty before I’d even worked out what I’d done wrong, if anything. ‘She can’t have. We weren’t.’

Tim’s mobile phone buzzed in his pocket. He read the message, and, with both hands, started to key in his reply. I turned to Dan, incredulous; Francine had sealed herself away in our bedroom, and Tim was replying to a random text message? The look Dan gave me, casting his eyes upward, set me straight: of course the message wasn’t random. It was from on high. That much was obvious from the expression of intense concentration on Tim’s face as he jabbed away with his thumbs. You’d refused to open the door and talk to him face to face, Francine, but you’d sent him a communication from upstairs. Even though I knew it had to be true, I couldn’t believe it. ‘Tim?’ I said. ‘Are you replying to a message from Francine?’ He nodded. ‘What’s she said?’ I asked. He wouldn’t tell me, just moved further away with his phone to the other side of the room, as if he thought I might snatch it from his hands. That was the first time he protected you, the first of hundreds.

Did you appreciate his trying to shield you from the condemnation you deserved, Francine? Long after there was any point, he still made the effort. He knew that Dan and I knew exactly how unreasonable and vicious you were, yet he hid as much of your atrocious behaviour as he could, from everybody. To spare himself the public humiliation, yes, but it wasn’t only that. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that he never stopped believing you had a good side to your character, Francine. I think he thought that to tell us about all the awful things you’d done would actually be misleading – it would make us latch on to the badly behaved you and imagine that was all there was to you.

How many messages did you and Tim send each other while you were shut in Dan’s and my bedroom? Ten? Fifteen? There was quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing by text before you deigned to emerge. You didn’t come back into the lounge to say goodbye or sorry. Dan and I didn’t figure in your calculations at all: we were the suckers who’d provided the stage for your scene, nothing more. Not people with feelings who mattered, not Tim’s friends who had been looking forward to spending a fun evening with him. On Dan’s birthday, too – not just any old evening.

You waited for Tim outside the house. Having spent a good hour and a half standing in our lounge jabbing at his phone, he was suddenly in a desperate hurry to leave, on your orders. He apologised to us – not on your behalf, but as if he was the one who’d ruined the evening. I said, ‘No need to apologise,’ then regretted it once he’d left, in case he thought I’d meant no need on anyone’s part rather than no need on his.

I never found out what was in those messages, Francine. I’d still love to know. Was it out-and-out sweary aggression and accusations from you, and fawning contrition from Tim for having offended you? I bet it was more subtle and passive-aggressive: ‘You claim you love me, but then you mock me in front of your friends. I’m sure you’re having more fun laughing at me amongst yourselves than you would if I were there.’

Once you and Tim had gone, Dan turned to me and said, ‘What was that all about? Pre-wedding nerves, do you think?’ It was such an absurd and inadequate justification that I burst out laughing and started crying at the same time. You’ll probably think me a wimp for crying, Francine. All I can say in my defence is that until you embedded yourself in my life, I wasn’t used to having my evenings wrecked by random acts of emotional violence. (I never saw you cry, not once, no matter how allegedly upset you were.)

Dan’s ‘pre-wedding nerves’ comment quickly became one of our regular jokes. It’s still one that never fails to make us laugh, even now, years later. Whenever someone’s reported on the news as having done something unspeakable, Dan and I turn to one another and say, ‘Pre-wedding nerves, do you think?’ and laugh uproariously.

If I could turn back the clock to Making Memories Night, I would say, ‘Tim, you can’t marry her. She’s twisted. Her reactions and her behaviour are too abnormal to brush aside. If you stay with her, she’ll make you suffer every day. She’ll start by cancelling the honeymoon – to punish you for questioning her choice of hotel.’

Okay, I admit it: I’m cheating. Shocked as I was by your behaviour that night, Francine, even I wouldn’t have predicted that you’d take it out on your honeymoon. Tim was back at the office two days after the wedding, trying to pretend it was actually quite useful not to have to go away when he had such a backlog of work.

I said nothing. I let him believe that I still liked you, understood that you were sensitive and prone to stress, could see what he saw in you. I consolidated my cowardice into a position, which I laid out for Dan. ‘We have to be clever here,’ I explained. ‘Tim’s inviting us to join him in the lie he’s choosing to live. If we make an issue about Francine, we’ll draw his pretence to his attention in a way that’ll make him too uncomfortable. He’ll feel ashamed for staying with her, guilty for inflicting her on us. We’ll drive him away. We have to pretend we don’t notice any of it and just go along with it, or we’ll lose him.’

I’ve started to wonder, Francine: what would Tim say if I were to kill you, and if I then told him I’d done it? Instead of writing letters in which I speculate about who else might do it and when, I could do it myself. In an ideal world, I’d do it purely to experience the feeling, then undo it immediately afterwards. I’m not sure I want you gone, from a personal point of view. Having you here like this protects Tim, and he’s all I care about. But, as contradictory as it might sound, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy putting an end to your life.

Would I ever have the courage, Francine? Would I be brave enough to make your last memory of all?