Escaping Life (20 page)

“
Elizabeth,
let me drive you back home.  Don
’
t
take the train.
”

“
Daddy,
I
’
ll
be fine.  I just don
’
t
want to go back yet.  I need to clear my head.
”

“
Do
it back in Haven, with Graham.  You
’
ll
be better there.
”
 
It sounded plausible, but she didn
’
t
want to take this feeling back there.  She had gone to Haven to move past those
times that she had let her sister down.  She wasn
’
t
about to take that feeling back to that cottage.  To her cottage, and her
world.

“
I
’
ll
be fine.
”
 
She held his upper arms with her hands, and stretched up on tip toes to kiss
his cheek. 
“
I
’
ve
missed you Daddy.  I
’
m
glad you came today.
”
 
She almost thought she saw a small tear leave the corner of his eye, trickle
gently between the soft lines that framed his eyes before falling to the ground
like a drip from a tap that can no longer hold on.  He kissed her forehead, and
got into his large slate-grey Jaguar XJ saloon
. 
She didn
’
t
know when he
’
d
got it, but it was new.

As she watched him drive
away, she didn
’
t know what her plan was.  She just knew
that she wasn
’
t ready to leave.  It was Rebecca who had
brought her here, and until she knew why, she couldn
’
t imagine leaving her behind again.

“Betty! 
Betty!” s
he
cried out, desperately, her voice breaking in pain.  The door slammed shut in
front of her as Elizabeth fired herself through it.  She was through with this
shit. 
How dare she act like this
,
Elizabeth thought to herself as she
charged down the front steps of the old Victorian house. 
She was my mother
too.

Grabbing her
mobile phone from her jacket pocket, she tapped through the names, desperately
looking for ‘Graham’.  She waited.  ‘BRING, BRING.  BRING, BRING’.  He didn’t
answer.  Standing on the street corner, she could just make out Rebecca still staring
through the window, her hands pressed up against it like a forlorn abandoned
puppy.  She couldn’t take it anymore.  She needed her sister to support her,
not drive her crazy with desperate ramblings about running away and how it
wasn’t safe here anymore.  She needed her sister, but she didn’t need this.

As she wandered
through the streets, making her way slowly to the apartment that she shared
with Graham, the light started to fail.  She thought about Rebecca, alone in
her house, terrified that the bogeyman was coming to get her.  Elizabeth
thought about all the times that Rebecca had sat on the edge of her bed at
night as a child, holding her hands because she was scared.  It was easy to
convince yourself, in a house that was big enough for five families, that
somewhere in a dark corner of one of the many unused rooms something lurked,
waiting for its chance to strike.  She was convinced that it would creep up the
stairs one night, the only sound its nails or tail scratching along the
floorboards as it
dragged
itself towards her room. 
Rebecca had held her hands and tucked her in.  She had given Elizabeth her own
torch that she promised had a special kind of light that if you shone anywhere
near a monster, yes, any kind of monster, that it would vanish, leaving nothing
but a small cloud of dust trailing past the light beam.  She had even shown her
the dust trails that were left behind as they thrust the light towards the
corner of the old library, where nobody ever went except for Daddy, one night
when they had crept downstairs so that Rebecca could prove that she wasn’t
lying.  Standing now in the cold before her own front door she considered going
back a few times to Rebecca’s apartment, twice before even beginning to retrace
her steps.  But each time she told herself that it wasn’t helping, that she
would snap out of it.  She had no idea that this would be the last time that
she would see her.

Graham was home
as she walked through the door, her hair frizzy from the first drops of early
spring rain that had started to fall minutes before she arrived home.  She was
late, but she hadn’t realised.

“Oh thank God!”
he said, visibly breathing a sigh of relief.  Everybody was on high alert.  He
ran over towards her, but her rebuttal was instant.

“Don’t Graham. 
I’m fine.  I can’t take anymore tonight.”  She threw her jacket onto the
hallway table.  “I need a drink.”  They were all spooked.  She figured it was
impossible for somebody in your family to be strangled and for things to be
back to normal
only a few days later, but
tonight, just for now, she needed at least the pretence of normality.  A glass
of wine and a sensible conversation would help.  She wanted to talk about
Rebecca.

He handed her a
glass of chilled wine and a towel, and as the chill of the sharply acidic golden
fluid hit the back of her throat it reached her head immediately.  She
remembered then that she hadn’t eaten all day.

“Graham,
Rebecca’s a mess.  I don’t know what to do to help.  I walked out on her
tonight, I couldn’t take it.”  She rubbed the towel roughly through her hair,
beads of fresh water dripping onto the solid oak floor.  She took another glug
of wine, as Graham sat down in front of her on the top of the low glass table. 
He took the empty glass from her, and placed it down next to him, the
reverberations ringing their way up through the stem and finally out through
the bowl of the glass.  He took her hands into his own.  It wasn’t like when
her father held her hands, with his giant cushiony palms.  Graham’s hands were
softer, and gentler, but no less comforting.  They were the hands that she
loved.

“You can’t
solve all of this on your own.  It’s not possible.”  He moved his face in
closer to hers.  Her face had looked colder to him the past few days.  He could
see the strain written all over it and whilst he looked calm on the outside,
his mind was scrambled with thought, desperately trying to find a way to help
her.  “Your family have to try and pull together.  It’s not fair to leave it
all to you, just because you are holding it together.”  She knew he was right,
in theory at least.  In practice, however, it just wasn’t working like that.

“Who, Graham? 
Who is going to help me?  My sister has gone crazy and Daddy,” she paused,
“well he has his own issues.  He can’t be holding the rest of us together.” 

“Me,
Elizabeth.  I’m the person who will help you.  But you have to let me help
you.  I don’t know what it is exactly that you want or need.”  He stroked the
side of her face, rubbing his thumb back and forth on her cheek.  “You just
have to ask me, and I’m there.”  For a moment the icy front that had covered
her face for the last few days broke, and the softer, warmer smile that he
loved so much slipped through.

“I don’t know
what to ask you.  What do I ask you if I don’t know what it is to ask for?”  She
ran her fingers through her damp hair, and took in the deepest most healing
breath that she could muster.  “Daddy is barely answering the ‘phone or talking
to anyone, and Rebecca appears to have completely lost the plot.”

“What happened
tonight?”

She took in another
big breath, a breath of courage and strength.  “She was scratching at me and
grabbing me.  Desperately.  Like a mental person, Graham.  Telling me that we
have to go away, that we have to run away.  That it’s not safe.”  He shook his
head in disbelief.  This was not the Rebecca he knew, who was usually so
together.  Rebecca was the one that Elizabeth looked to for support and
approval.  It was Rebecca that had given Graham the first endorsement when they
started dating.  They had sat there in the restaurant eating peppered steak and
fries, the only thing served on the menu in the French style restaurant, as she
had fired question after question at him.  Not in an accusatory or
investigative sort of way; she had been perfectly friendly and genuinely
interested to get to know him.  When they left, and Rebecca waved her goodbyes
from the taxi window, Elizabeth told him how Rebecca had described him as a ‘keeper’. 
‘
A keeper with a hot arse!  Don’t let that one slip through the net’.

“What does she
think is so unsafe?”

“She just keeps
saying ‘it’s not safe, it’s not safe’.  Because we don’t know how it happened. 
Well, why somebody would do that.”  Elizabeth knew her words were wrong as soon
as she had said them, yet she still couldn’t bring herself to say out loud that
her mother had been strangled.  That her mother had been murdered.

“I’ll go and
see her tomorrow, OK?  You need a break too.  Let me take some of the load”. 
He moved himself onto the settee, and he snuggled in next to her.  He draped
his arm over her shoulders and pulled her in close to him.  He was used to
being the fixer.  He always knew what to do.  It was his role.  It was
difficult to suddenly have no solution to hand.  “Let me run you a bath?”  She
nodded.  It was the best thing that he had said since she’d arrived home.

As she slipped
into the water, it cascaded over her body like a waterfall flowing over the
rocks.  Her body was tense and hard like marble and everything about her felt
tight and uncomfortable.  As she slipped under the water, letting the water
first wash over the arms, then her breasts, and around her shoulders and neck,
she could feel the day temporarily start to dissipate into the water.  She let
her head slip under the water, and as she took a breath in and the water poured
into her ears, muffling the sounds from outside, she held her breath and glided
into the water completely.  All she could hear were the muffled sounds of the
pipes clanging underneath the bath and the occasional drips into the water, which
sounded much more powerful and louder than it would have outside of her small
underwater world.  For as long as she could hold her breath, she would stay
here, sheltered from the outside and protected from the problems.  The water
was perfectly warm, enough to turn her skin pink, but without burning her.  She
rubbed her hands up over her submerged face, massaging her palms softly over
her cheeks.  Graham knocked the door, uncharacteristically for him and
unnecessarily so.  It was proof of how out of sorts she was.  The woman in the
bath looked and sounded like his wife, but was not like the woman that he had
married six months before.  He sat on the edge of the bath, the bubbles soaking
the seat of his trousers.  It was hot in the bathroom, the small windowless
room in their otherwise expansive apartment.

“Better?”  She
nodded, and again the softer smile filled her face.  “It’s raining outside,
properly now.  Belting it down.  When you finish, we’ll sit by the windows and
watch the city, glass of wine, the best company.”  He opened his arms out as if
to advertise himself to her.  He was the best company.  He was all the company
she ever wanted.  She just wasn’t sure whether she wanted any company at all
at that moment
.  He stood up, as they
both heard the
tele
phone ring in the
background.  Elizabeth sat upright too, the water splashing out of the tub and
sending a waterfall of bubbles and foam splashing to the ground.  There was an
immediate return of the feeling of tension, and what was once the innocent ring
of the telephone had now become something much more sinister, the unknown
reason and possible unthinkable reason for the call lurking quietly on the
other end of the phone.  The telephone had become the unwanted key to bad
news.  She couldn’t hear the words on the other end of the call, but by the
time Graham was walking back towards the bathroom she was already out of the
bath and wrapping herself in a towel.  She could see his face, the same face
that she had seen only days before, the face which was wracked with guilt for
the crime that he was about to commit.

“What is it? 
Graham?  What’s going on?”  She stared at him hard, waiting for him to speak.

“Get dressed. 
There’s been an accident.”

Jack Fraser was
lying awake in his bed when the intercom bell buzzed.  He hadn’t slept well
last night anyway, and with the light of the city streaming in through the
undressed windows, he had woken early to the chorus of pigeons who sat atop his
building cooing in the break of day.  He had called Kate, but she had got caught
at work, and so he had curled up alone in bed.  He had missed the feel of her
next to him after waking up with her so closely only the day before.  He
glanced over at his watch which he had set down on the nightstand the night
before.  It was six-thirty. 
Who the hell is at the door?