The Carrier (3 page)

I unwrap the box, take out the test, drop the instruction leaflet back in my bag. I’ve done this before – once, last year, when I knew I wasn’t pregnant and took the test only because Sean wouldn’t accept my gut instinct as good enough.

It’s not a cross, it’s a plus sign. Let’s not call it a cross: bad for morale.

It doesn’t take long before there’s something to see. Already, a flash of blue. Oh, God. I can’t do this. I only slightly want to have a baby. I think. I actually don’t know at all. More blue: two lines, spreading out horizontally. No plus sign yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Sean will be pleased. That’s what I should focus on. I’m the sort of person who doubts everything and can never be uncomplicatedly happy. Sean’s reaction is more reliable than mine, and I know he’ll be thrilled. Having a baby will be fine. If I didn’t want to be pregnant, I’d have been secretly guzzling Mercilon for the past year, and I haven’t.

What?

There is no blue cross in the wand’s larger window. And nothing is getting any bluer. It’s been more than five minutes since I did the test. I’m not an expert, but I have a strong sense that all the blueness that’s going to happen has happened already.

I am not pregnant. I can’t be.

An image flits through my mind: a tiny human figure, gold and featureless, punching the air in triumph. It’s gone before I can examine it in detail.

Now I really don’t want to speak to Sean. I have two disappointing pieces of news to deliver instead of one. The prospect of making the call is panicking me. If I have to do it at all, I need to get it over with. It seems hugely unfair that I can’t deal with this problem by pretending I don’t know anyone by the name of Sean Hamer and disappearing into a new life. That would be so much easier.

I leave the ladies’ toilet and start to retrace my steps to the Departures Hall, pulling my BlackBerry out of my jacket pocket. Sean answers after one ring. ‘Hi, babes,’ he says. ‘What time are you back?’ When I’m away, he sits and watches TV in the evening with his phone next to him, so that he doesn’t miss any of my calls or texts. I don’t know if this is normal loving partner behaviour. I’d feel disloyal if I asked any of my friends, as if I was inviting them to slag Sean off.

‘Sean, I’m not pregnant.’

Silence. Then, ‘But you said you were. You said you didn’t need to do a test – you knew.’

‘You know what that means, don’t you?’

‘What?’ He sounds hopeful.

‘I’m an arrogant fool who can’t be trusted. I really, really thought I was up the duff, but . . . obviously I was wrong. I must be feeling hormonal for some other reason.’

‘Don’t take the word of one test,’ Sean says. ‘Check. Buy another one. Can you buy one at the airport?’

‘I don’t need to.’
Of course you can buy a pregnancy test at an airport.
I tell myself Sean doesn’t know this because he’s a man, not because he has no desire to venture beyond our living room, and spends every evening on the sofa watching sport on TV.

‘If you’re not pregnant, why are you so late?’ he asks.

I’d like to blame the weather conditions at Dusseldorf airport, but I know that’s not what he means. ‘No idea.’ I sigh. ‘Speaking of late, my flight is too. The plane’s been rerouted to Cologne – we’re about to set off there on a coach. Allegedly. Hopefully I’ll be back at some point tomorrow. Maybe very late tonight if we’re lucky.’

‘Right,’ Sean says tightly. ‘So, once again, my evening goes up in smoke.’

Be soothing. Don’t argue with him.
‘Shouldn’t that be, once again
my
evening goes up in smoke? I’m the one who’s probably going to spend tonight sleeping upright in the passport control booth at Cologne airport.’ I hate myself when I use sentences that begin, ‘I’m the one who . . .’, but I have a strong urge to point out that it is not Sean who is trapped in a large building full of electronic bleeping noises and strangers’ echoing voices, about to be shunted off to another similar bleeping grey and white neon-lit building. Sean is not the one struggling with the sense that he is being slowly disassembled on a molecular level, that his whole being has become pixellated and won’t attain proper personhood again until he next walks through his front door. If he were ever to find himself in that situation, and if I happened simultaneously to be sitting on the couch drinking beer and watching my favourite kind of TV, I like to think I’d show some sympathy.

And, pregnancy test notwithstanding, I’m still an arrogant fool who thinks she’s right about everything. I’ve tried to be humbler, but, frankly, remembering you might be wrong is not easy when the person you’re arguing with is Sean.

‘
Hopefully
you’ll be back tomorrow?’ he says. In the few seconds since he last spoke, he has been shovelling Carlsberg-flavoured fuel into the furnace of his indignation. ‘What, you mean it might be the day after?’

‘This may come as news to you, Sean, but I’m not exactly a big cheese at Cologne airport. They don’t have to run all their flight schedules past me. I’m a powerless passenger, just as I am at Dusseldorf airport. I’ve no idea when I’ll be back.’

‘Great,’ he snaps. ‘Will you bother to ring me when you do
know?’

I resist the urge to crush my BlackBerry against the wall and reduce it to fine black powder. ‘I suspect what’ll happen is they’ll tell us one thing, then another, then something different altogether,’ I say patiently. ‘Anything to keep us at bay while they desperately cobble together a plan for getting us home, and we stand outside the closed Duty Free shop, shaking its metal grille and begging to be allowed in before we die of boredom.’ I haven’t given up hope that Sean might notice I’m not enjoying myself this evening. ‘You don’t really want me to ring you every hour with an update, do you? Why don’t you look on Flight Tracker?’

‘So you don’t care enough to keep me updated, but I’m supposed to sit by the laptop, looking—’

‘No, you’re not
supposed
to do that. You can accept that I’ll be back soon, but that neither of us knows exactly when, and just deal with it like a grown-up.’

Sean mutters something under his breath.

‘What was that?’ I say, reluctant to let an infuriating statement go unheard and uncontested.

‘I said, who’s the carrier?’

I stop walking.

It’s a shock to hear the words spoken so casually. It makes me think of other words, ones that will always live in my head even if no one ever again speaks them aloud to me.

i carry your heart with me, i carry it in my heart
. . .

I clear my throat. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’

‘For fuck’s sake, Gaby! Who. Is. The. Carrier?’

An image of Tim storms my mind: at the top of a ladder at The Proscenium, looking down at me, holding a book in his right hand, clutching the ladder with his left. He has just read me a poem. Not
i carry your heart
; a different poem. By a poet who died young and tragically, whose name I don’t remember, about . . .

My skin starts to tingle with the weirdness of coincidence. The poem was about a delayed train. I don’t remember any of it but the last two lines: ‘Our time, in the hands of others, and too brief for words’. Tim approved of it. ‘See?’ he said. ‘If a poet has something important to say, he says it as simply as he can.’ ‘Or she,’ I said petulantly. ‘Or she,’ Tim agreed. ‘But, rather like a poet, if an accountant has something important to say, he says it as simply as he can.’ Who but Tim would have thought of that response so quickly?

Tim Breary is The Carrier.
But Sean can’t possibly mean that.

‘Are you asking which airline I’m flying with? Fly4You.’
Who’s the carrier?
Why would he choose to put it like that? There’s no way he can know. If he did, he’d come straight out with it. Wouldn’t he?

You’re being paranoid.

‘Flight number?’ Sean asks.

‘1221.’

‘Got it. So . . . I guess I’ll see you when I see you.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I say lightly, and press the ‘end call’ button.
Thank God that’s over.

I’ve sometimes wondered if the moving walkways in airports are there to fool us into believing the rest of the floor isn’t moving backwards. I am still not where I need to be, and feel as if I’ve been walking for years, following the many signs directing me to Departures. Very soon, seeing the word won’t be enough to keep my spirits up. I might start to cackle like a deranged witch-monster and crab-walk sideways in the opposite direction, for the sheer hell of it.

I turn a corner and walk into an arm with ‘FATHER’ tattooed on it. Its red-eyed owner has stopped crying. She’s tearing into a box of cigarettes the size of a small suitcase.

‘Sorry,’ I mumble.

She backs away from me as if afraid I might hit her, stuffs the half-unwrapped Lambert & Butlers back into her shoulder bag and starts to move in the direction of the signs that point the way to further signs. The reassuring sensation of a cigarette between her fingers is less of a priority, it seems, than getting away from me.

Is it possible that my self-righteous dressing-down scared her? I decide to put it to the test by picking up my pace. It’s not long before I’m level with her. She glances at me, speeds up. She’s panting. This is ridiculous. ‘You’re running away from me?’ I say, hoping it will help me to believe the unbelievable. ‘What do you think I’m going to do to you?’

She stops, hunches her shoulders: braced for attack. She doesn’t look at me, doesn’t say anything.

I help her out. ‘You can relax. I’m relatively harmless. I only had a go at you to stop you laying into Bodo.’

Her lips are moving. Whatever’s emerging from them could be meant for me. This is how a member of an alien species would look if it were trying to communicate with a human being. I lean in closer to hear her.

‘I have to get home tonight. I
have
to. I’ve never been out of the country on my own before. I just want to be home.’ She looks up at me, her face white with fear and confusion. ‘I think I’m having a panic attack,’ she says.

You bloody fool, Gaby. You chased this girl. You initiated conversation. All she wanted was to avoid you – an arrangement that could have benefited you both – and you blew it.

‘You wouldn’t be able to speak if you were having a panic attack,’ I tell her. ‘You’d be hyperventilating.’

‘I am! Listen to my breathing!’ She grips my wrist, locking her fingers and thumb around it like a handcuff, pulling me towards her. I try to shake her off but she doesn’t let go.

‘You’re out of breath from running,’ I say, trying to keep my cool. How dare she grab hold of me as if I’m an object? I object. Strongly. ‘You’re also a heavy smoker. If you want to improve your lung capacity, you should jack it in.’

Anger flares in her eyes. ‘Don’t tell me what to do! You don’t know how much I smoke. You don’t know anything about me.’

She’s still clutching my wrist. I laugh at her. What else can I do? Prise her fingers off one by one? If it comes to it, I might have to.

‘Could you let go of me, please? The profits from the sale of the cigarettes in your bag alone will see Lambert & Butler comfortably through the next twelve global recessions.’

She screws up her forehead in an effort to work out what I mean.

‘Too complicated for you? How about: your fingertips are yellow? Of course you’re a heavy smoker.’

Finally, she releases me. ‘You think you’re so much better than me, don’t you?’ she sneers: the same thing she said to the bald man with the newspaper. I wonder if it’s an accusation she levels at everyone she meets. It’s hard to imagine the person who might encounter her and be beset by agonies of inferiority.

‘Um . . . yes, probably,’ I say, in answer to her question. ‘Look, I was trying to help – bitchily, I suppose – but, actually, you’re right: I really couldn’t give a toss whether you continue to breathe or not. I’m sorry if I offended you by making a joke you’re too thick to understand . . .’

‘That’s right, you’re
so
much better than I am! Little Miss Stuck-Up Bitch, you are! I saw you this morning – too up yourself to smile back when I smiled at you.’

Little Miss? I’m thirty-eight, for Christ’s sake. She can’t be more than eighteen. Also, what’s she talking about? ‘This morning?’ I manage to say. Was she on my crack-of-dawn flight from Combingham?

‘So much better than me,’ she repeats bitterly. ‘Course you are! I bet you’d never
let an innocent man go to jail for murder!’ Before I’ve had a chance to absorb her words, she bursts into tears and flings her body against mine. ‘I can’t handle much more of this,’ she sobs, wetting the front of my shirt. ‘I’m falling apart here.’

Before my brain produces all the reasons why I shouldn’t, I’ve put my arms round her.

What the hell happens now?

‘So,’ Simon said slowly. He was watching Charlie, who wasn’t watching him back. She was staring at, but not really seeing, a programme on TV, and trying to act naturally. Like someone who wasn’t keeping anything secret. The programme was one in which celebrities experienced life in an African slum before hurrying home to Hampstead the minute the cameras were switched off.

‘So, what?’ she asked. She hated keeping things from Simon; he’d successfully indoctrinated her over the years, instilled in her the conviction that it was his God-given right to know everything, always. To distract him, she pointed to the screen. ‘Look – are those living conditions any worse than ours? I mean, I know they
are
, but . . . we should go and buy some wallpaper next time we’ve both got a day off – or one of those roller thingies, at least, and a tub of white paint.’ She was sick of the lounge walls being a hotchpotch of faded colours no one had wanted for years: a jagged crest of 1970s wallpaper here, a peak of old plaster there. The clashing, unevenly stripped collage effect looked like a psychedelic mountain range, and sometimes felt like a form of visual torture. ‘You’re staring at me,’ she told Simon.

He looked pointedly at his watch. ‘I’m wondering what time we’re expecting your sister.’

‘Liv?’ Could Charlie be bothered to deny it? ‘How did you know?’