The Carrier Read online

  To my right, a smartly dressed woman with postbox-red hair and an American accent says, “We don’t need to hurry, people. These are hypothetical coaches: the slowest kind.”

  “How long on the coach from here to Cologne?” a man calls out.

  “I have no details yet about the timetable of the coaches,” Bodo Neudorf announces. His voice is lost in the spreading ripple of groans.

  I’m glad I can miss out on the visit to Baggage Reclaim. The thought of everyone else traipsing down there to pick up the luggage they waited in a shuffling, zigzagging, rope-corralled queue to check in not much more than an hour ago makes me feel exhausted. It’s eight p.m. I was supposed to be landing in Combingham at eight-thirty English time, and going home for a long soak in a hot bubble bath with a chilled glass of Muscat. I woke up at five this morning to catch the seven o’clock from Combingham to Düsseldorf. I’m not a morning person, and resent any day that requires me to wake up earlier than seven a.m.; this one has already gone on too long.

  “Oh, this is a fucking joke!” Psycho Rag Doll pipes up. “You have got to be shitting me!” If Bodo imagined that by amplifying his voice and projecting it electronically he could intimidate his nemesis into silent obedience, he was mistaken. “I’m not going to collect any suitcases!”

  A thin bald man in a gray suit steps forward and says, “In that case, you’re likely to arrive home without your bag. And everything in it.” Inwardly, I cheer; Flight 1221 has its first quiet hero. He has a newspaper tucked under his arm. He grips its corner with his other hand, expecting retaliation.

  “Keep out of it, you!” Rag Doll yells in his face. “Look at you: thinking you’re better than me! I haven’t even got a suitcase—that’s how much you know!” She turns her attention back to Bodo. “What, so you’re going to unload everyone’s cases off the plane? How does that make sense? You tell me how that makes sense. That’s just . . . I’m sorry for swearing, but that’s just fucking plain stupid!”

  “Or,” I find myself saying to her, because I can’t let the bald hero stand alone and no one else seems to be rushing to his aid, “you’re the one who’s stupid. If you haven’t checked in a bag, then of course you’re not going to collect any suitcases. Why would you?”

  She stares at me. Tears are still pouring down her face.

  “Also, if the plane was here now and could safely fly to Cologne Airport, we could fly there on it, couldn’t we?” I say. “Or even fly home, which is what we’d all ideally like to do.” Shit. Why did I open my mouth? It’s not my job, or even Bodo Neudorf’s, to correct her flawed thinking. The bald man has wandered away with his newspaper and left me to it. Ungrateful git. “Because of the weather, our plane can’t fly into Düsseldorf,” I continue with my mission to spread peace and understanding. “It’s never been here, it isn’t here now, and your suitcase, if you had one, wouldn’t be on it, and wouldn’t need to be taken off it. The plane is somewhere in the sky.” I point upward. “It was heading for Düsseldorf, and now it’s changed course and is heading for Cologne.”

  “No-o,” she says unsteadily, looking me up and down with a kind of shocked disgust, as if she’s horrified to find herself having to address me. “That’s not right. We were all sitting there.” She waves an arm toward the curved orange plastic seats on their rows of black metal stalks. “It said to go to the gate. It only says that when the plane’s there ready for boarding.”

  “Normally that’s true, but not tonight,” I tell her briskly. I can almost see the cogs going round behind her eyes as her mental machinery struggles to connect one thought to another. “When they told us to go to the gate, they still hoped the plane would be able to make it to Düsseldorf. Shortly after we all pitched up here, they realized that wouldn’t be possible.” I glance at Bodo Neudorf, who half nods, half shrugs. Is he deferring to me? That’s insane. He’s supposed to know more about Fly4You’s behind-the-scenes operations than I do.

  Angry Weeping Girl averts her eyes and shakes her head. I can hear her silent scorn: Believe that if you want to. Bodo is speaking into a walkie-talkie in German. Choirgirls nearby start to ask if they’ll get home tonight. Their parents tell them they don’t know. Three men in football shirts are discussing how much beer they might be able to drink between now and whenever we fly, speculating about whether Fly4You will settle the bar tab.

  A worried gray-haired woman in her late fifties or early sixties tells her husband that she only has ten euros left. “What? Why?” he says impatiently. “That’s not enough.”

  “Well, I didn’t think we’d need any more.” She flaps around him, accepting responsibility, hoping for mercy.

  “You didn’t think?” he demands angrily. “What about emergencies?”

  I’ve used up all my interventional capacity, otherwise I might ask him if he’s ever heard of a cash machine, and what he was planning to do if his wife spontaneously combusted and all the currency in her handbag went up in smoke. What about that emergency, bully-breath? Is your wife actually thirty-five, and does she only look sixty because she’s wasted the best years of her life on you?

  There’s nothing like an airport for making you lose faith in humanity. I walk away from the crowd, past a row of unmanned boarding gates, in no particular direction. I am sick of the sight of every single one of my fellow travelers, even the ones whose faces I haven’t noticed. Yes, even the nice choirgirls. I’m not looking forward to seeing any of them again—in the helpless, hopeful gaggle we will form outside the Departures Hall, where we will stand for hours in the rain and wind; across the aisle of the coach; slumped half asleep at various bars around Cologne Airport.

  On the other hand, it’s a delayed plane, not a bereavement. I fly a lot. This sort of thing happens all the time. I’ve heard the words “We are sorry to announce . . .” as often as I’ve seen the flecked gray heavy-duty linoleum flooring at Combingham Airport, with its flecked blue border at every edge, for contrast. I’ve stood beneath information screens and watched minor delays metastasize into cancellations as often as I’ve seen the small parallel lines that form the borderless squares that in turn make up the pattern on a million sets of silver airplane steps; once I dreamed that the walls and ceiling of my bedroom were covered with textured aluminum tread.

  The worst thing about a delay, always, is ringing Sean and telling him that, yet again, I’m not going to be back when I said I would be. It’s a call I can’t face making. Although . . . in this instance, it might not be so bad. I might be able to make it not so bad.

  I smile to myself as the idea blooms in my mind. Then I reach into my handbag with my right hand—not looking, still walking—and rummage until I find the rectangular plastic-wrapped box I’m looking for: the pregnancy test I’ve been carrying around with me for the past ten days and never quite finding the right moment to do.

  I’ve been worrying quite a lot recently about my need to procrastinate, though I’m obviously putting off tackling the problem. I’ve never been like this about anything work-related, and I’m still not, but if it’s something personal and important, I’ll do my best to postpone it indefinitely. This could be why I don’t weep in airports when my flights don’t depart on time; delay is my natural rhythm.

  Part of me is still not ready to face the test, though with every day that passes, the whole rigmarole of weeing on a plastic wand and awaiting its verdict starts to seem more and more pointless. I am so obviously pregnant. There’s a weirdly sensitive patch of skin on the top of my head that never used to be there, and I’m more tired than I’ve ever been.

  I glance at my watch, wondering if I’ve got time to do this, then tut at my own gullibility. The American woman was right. There are no physical real-life coaches on their way to rescue us. God knows when there will be. Bodo didn’t have a clue what was going on; he fooled us all into assuming he was on top of the arrangements by being German. Which means I’ve got at least fifteen minutes to do
the test and phone Sean while the rest of them are retrieving their luggage. Luckily, Sean is easily distracted, like a kid. When I tell him I won’t be back tonight, he’ll gear up to start complaining. When I tell him the pregnancy test was positive, he’ll be so delighted that he won’t care when I get back.

  I stop at the nearest ladies’ toilet and force myself to go in, repeating silent reassurances in my head: This isn’t scary. You already know the result. Seeing a small blue cross will change nothing.

  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 gulping down 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 behavior. 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 sports on TV.

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

  I’d like to blame the weather conditions at Düsseldorf 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 sympathetic. 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 gray-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 pixelated 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 beers and watching my favorite 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 shoveling Carlsberg-flavored 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 Düsseldorf 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. I don’t want them in my head, but there’s nothing I can do. They are there. They will always be there, 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 shouted down at me. “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 backward. 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.