Escaping Life (11 page)

“Sorry, I went
to the toilet,” she was smiling at him and he knew he wasn’t about to get a
grilling - at least not yet.  “Good to see you.”  She leant in to kiss him and
as he brought his lips to meet hers, she tilted her head to one side ever so
slightly, his lips only just catching the very side of hers.  It wasn’t much,
only millimetres in fact.  It was barely noticeable and if you had been
standing right next to them, you wouldn’t have thought anything of it.  But he
felt it.  He felt the huge distance between them, never more so than in those
few millimetres of facial movement.

“I’m sorry
about last week,” he said, as he raised his hand up to gesture to the barman. 
“I didn’t mean to not see you.”  He turned to face the barman, not waiting for
her reply.  They both knew he wasn’t finished.  He placed the order for one
bottle of Corona beer and a glass of Merlot red for Kate.  “It’s just been a
horrible week.   You must have heard about the case?”

“Yes.  I saw
you on the television,” she said, as her eyes dropped away from his gaze.  It
was a simple enough answer, but he knew it hurt her to say that the only time
she had seen her boyfriend in the last week was when he was talking about a
dead body on the local news.  “Did you get anywhere yet?”  He shook his head,
pursing his lips together as if to say ‘
we haven’t got a clue’,
and
motioned to a clear table, towards the window.  Although he always complained
about having to come to Flanagan’s - an irritation that multiplied with every
step he had to take to get here after parking his car over ten minutes away -
he really did like it once he arrived.  His favourite tables were those by the
window, the small bevelled glass alcoves that gave you a direct view out to the
high street.  It was especially good in winter when you could sit and be warmed
by the log fire which would be roaring only metres away, as the rain pattered
down onto the curved glass windows.  He had been coming here for years, sitting
in these very chairs.

“All we found
were clues that as of yet don’t mean anything.  Just clues.  No solid leads.

“She couldn’t
have just turned up from nowhere though.”  She was whispering, the way she
always did when they discussed his work, aware that she was being permitted to
hear secret facts about police business.  It made her feel like she was in his
club.  She felt like he trusted her.  “She must have a family somewhere?”  He
thought about what she said, and for a brief moment the stuttering woman with
the insane ideas about a dead sister came to mind. 
What was her name?

“Not that we
know of.  She’s a mystery.  I think I have located her in Chesterwood on the
morning that she was found, but other than that, we’ve got nothing.”  Jack
pushed the small slice of lime into the neck of the bottle and they both sipped
their drinks, Kate’s mind working overtime already as she processed the clues. 
He knew she would be making up journey times and potential routes.  She loved
the idea of sleuthing with him on their secret missions, even if it never
involved anything more than discussion.  As he watched the concentration on her
face, brow furrowed and the small wrinkles around her lips tight with the
thoughts racing through her mind, he realised that he had missed her.  If only
he had met her under different circumstances, it would be a lot easier for them
to get along.  He rubbed at his left shoulder.  It was still aching.  The
humidity of the summer was somehow worse than the dampness and chill brought by
the winter.  It had never healed properly.

“Are you having
problems with it?  You want me to take a look?”  He shook his head as he
chugged back his beer.  “You look tired.”

“No, it’s
fine.  I’m fine.  It’s just the weather.”  She always cared about him.  He was
thankful for that, especially as he knew he never repaid it.  “I missed you.” 
It was a spontaneous statement he hadn’t intended to tell her, and he didn’t even
know he was about to say it.  The words just cascaded out of his mouth in a
waterfall of truth.  He really had missed her.  More than he realised.  Kate
sat, slightly stunned by his display of feeling.  She was used to his cold
exterior.  She understood it and she tried to accept it, believing that in time
it would eventually pass.  She had just always hoped that she had enough
patience to sit that time out.  When she had first met him, unconscious and covered
in blood, his skin peeling and blackened from the accident when the car had
flipped and rolled, she was more concerned with his injuries than anything
else.  As she had cared for him in hospital, checking his injuries daily whilst
she waited for him to wake up, she had grown attached.  Much more than she
should have.  She told herself that it was only because he didn’t have anybody
else, that she was just doing a good job, but she knew inside it was more than
that.  She had wished that she didn’t have to be the one to tell him that his
wife and son had died in the car crash, but in reality it was that very act
that bound them together in those first few weeks, and as he had sobbed in her
arms, barely able to move, she knew that she would be the one who was there for
him.  She couldn’t have forsaken him.  She had wanted to say, ‘
Let me be
there for you.  I’ll make everything alright.  I will make you forget’,
but
she also knew that she would never be able to fulfil her promise.

“I missed you
too.”  They sat for a while, silently enjoying each other’s company and the new
feeling of unity as it engulfed their little window table.  These moments were
rare, and Kate hung on to them.  She would never be the one to break the
silence.  To look at them from outside, they looked like any other romantic
couple, and he slowly reached across the table to touch her fingertips with his
own, reassuring her that she had a place in his life that was otherwise filled
by death.  She was the only living thing left for him. 

“Come home with
me tonight.”  It wasn’t a question.  He didn’t want to go back alone to sit in
the vacuity of the apartment.  All it did was remind him of his self-imposed
seclusion from the world.  “Please.”  All he wanted was to sit with her, hold
her, and be held by her.  All he wanted was her company.  It was the most
genuine and unselfish feeling that he had ever had for the woman who had saved
his life in more than one way.

“Chinese
takeaway?”  He nodded and she smiled back at him, feeling that perhaps in this week
apart they had found something new. 
Something new,
she pondered.  It
had to be better than anything they had that was old. 

Kate clung to
Jack as they walked from the car back to the old factory building.  The heat
from the takeaway carried the smell up and into the air, and she thought how
much better she would feel once they were up in his apartment, sat with their
feet up eating beef in black bean sauce and dropping crumbs of prawn cracker
into the leather settee.  In the day she felt safer, with the buzz of industry
and work being carried out.  At night however, she was always aware of the
silence outside of his building.  There was nobody else about, except for the
odd light on the other inhabited factory floors.  She remembered once that she
had read a story about a woman being attacked in this area when she had been
walking back along the riverbank to take a short cut home.  The attacker had
grabbed her from behind and dragged her into one of the empty factories.  There
were no street lights here.  Jack sensed her squeezing a little tighter on his
arm, hanging onto him with both arms. 
I’ll go into work later tomorrow,
he
told himself. 
I’ll make sure I take her to work. 

“Do you mind if
I look?” she asked as they walked into the apartment.  It felt hot and stuffy
in here, and Jack cracked one of the small windows open.  It was a wonderful
view from his apartment at night, the lights of the city twinkling like a
million unnamed stars before them.  It wasn’t this view she wanted to see.  She
was already walking towards the photographs.

“No.  Just
forget what you’ve seen afterwards.”  She could hear the rattling of plates as
he spooned out their food.  Sticking a couple of chopsticks into the top of the
food pile, he carried their dinner towards the coffee table.  Beside it, he set
down another glass of red wine, and a bottle of Corona.  She was looking at the
dead woman’s face; at first she would stand back, then a little closer, as
though examining a patient.  He remembered her doing the same when he had been
her patient.

“You know the
cause of death?” she probed, as she came to sit down on the settee.

“Well, we are
still waiting on the lab report, and toxicology, but it looks like an
overdose.  We found vomit in her mouth, and in the post mortem there was no
other identifiable cause.  She was young.”

“But you have
no idea why?”

“It’s one weird
suicide.  There is no note.  She is on a public beach.  There are items placed
around her.  If I could find anything that linked somebody else to the scene I
wouldn’t be convinced it was a suicide.”

Her brow
furrowed again.  “Why, what’s so strange about a woman killing herself?”  She
was aware that her last comment could sound bizarre, but they both spent their
days surrounded by death.  For them it was normal.

“Nothing.  It’s
the scene that’s strange.  Her clothes are not from now.  They are old, from
like twenty or thirty years ago or something.  Cigarettes with a different
brand stuck on the outside of the box.  Photographs in her hand, and a bus
ticket.  It’s like she has left clues.  Suicides don’t do that.”

“Not unless
they have got something to say.”  He looked at her hard.  She was right. 

“But what? 
These clues are virtually meaningless at the moment, and I can’t just stick up
a picture of her dead face on the ten o’clock news.”  They both sniggered,
almost embarrassed as they caught each other’s eyes that they could find humour
in such a depressing situation.

“Yeah, even if
you could, she has one of those plain faces.  Even I thought for a moment that
I knew her.”  It was true.  Her face did look plain on the photographs, but he
would bet his own life on the fact that when she was alive she would have been
beautiful.  When he had looked at the body in the mortuary, he had been taken
aback by her height and her frame, the best he could judge as her body lay cold
on the white ceramic slab.  As the pathologist had pulled back her lazy looking
eyelids to reveal the emerald green irises tucked underneath, it was as if it
breathed life into her face for just a moment giving her one final breath, and
he had had to swallow his surprise at the sight before him.  He had never
before left a mortuary with the remaining thought that the body had been
beautiful.  They both picked up their plates, sitting back into the dried up
leather of the settee.  Kate inched her body in closer to his, and she could
feel the warmth emanating from his body.  She looked at him, as he held up his
plate on the palm of his hand, stabbing aimlessly at the rice with his
chopsticks.

“I won’t judge
you if you use a fork, you know.” 

“Yes you will.” 
They both laughed as he said the words.  He picked up the remote control and
turned on the television.  A re-run of ‘The Weakest Link’ was playing.

‘Which C
completes the line of the poem, There shall be in that rich earth a richer
dust……’

‘Covered?’
the contestant answered.

‘No.  The
answer you were looking for was concealed.’

They stayed up
for hours watching the television, their legs draped over each other’s, the
skin sticking together from the humid summer night and pulling tight as it
stuck to the creaking leather underneath them.  Eventually, after falling into
bed in a sleepy haze they slept, wrapped up so tight that not the smallest
stream of light would pass between their bodies.  It was still dark when Kate
woke him, shaking him violently as if the house were on fire.

“Jack!  Wake
up!  Wake up!”  She was sat up in bed, eyes wide, and her nose alert for the
smell of petrol.  She looked wide awake.  He glanced at the clock; it was three-
fifteen.

“What?  What is
it?”  He sat up to join her, his empty apartment and the crime scene
photography clearly visible from the light of the city as it poured in through
the windows.  He faced her, rubbing his eyes with the tips of his fingers,
trying to adjust to the orange glow.  “What’s wrong?”

“Jack.  I know
who the dead woman is.”

“What?”  He was
sat wide-eyed now. 
She couldn’t possibly know, could she?

“I know her.  I
told you that her face was familiar, didn’t I?”  It was true, she had said
this, but the dead face could have reminded her of any number of her patients whom
she had seen travelling through her hospital ward on the way to another endless
and timeless place. 
How could she know this dead woman?

“I’m telling
you that I remember her face.  I have seen her before.” 

“Where?”  He
couldn’t believe what he was hearing.  A week of nothing and now the woman to
whom he was lying so close in his own bed was telling him that the dead woman
that he could see in the photographs taped to his dusty floor was somebody she
knew.  “A friend?”

“No, no.  Not a
friend.  It must be about four years ago.  I was visiting a friend in the city;
I remember it because I hadn’t seen her in years.  On the news that morning,
there had been a car crash.  It was that face they flashed up,” she said
pointing to the pictures.  Suddenly he remembered his own picture; the photograph
that the newspaper had somehow acquired.  Their family memory captured, used simply
for another digestible news story which would play out on a quiet Sunday
morning for the viewers to forget in a second.  Her beautiful face, and the
innocent angelic smile of his four year old son. 
Stop it.  Don’t let them
into this,
he scorned himself
.