Escaping Life (21 page)

His feet
pattered along the exposed floorboards, avoiding the rough areas and creaking under
his weight.  The bell was buzzing again, impatiently waiting for him to
answer.  He was dressed only in boxer shorts.  He was in his late thirties, and
his body was still good, with the exception of his weak shoulder.  It was
always stiff in the mornings from the immobility of the night before.  He had
spent years as a tri-athlete, competing in local races.  He had won over six
medals too, although he had never been convinced at the quality of
competition.  He had pretty much stopped the training altogether now, the only
give-away a slightly softer cushion of fat that bordered the top of his
trousers like a tyre placed on the side of the harbour wall.  Otherwise he had retained
the muscles.  The bike which sat in his hallway had been left untouched since
the day he moved in and had collected a thick layer of dust. 

He picked up
the telephone.  “Yes?”  He rolled his shoulder round in circles, back and forth
trying to limber it up.

“Detective
Fraser?  It’s Elizabeth Green.  The sister of Rebecca Jackson.  Can you let me in?” 
Six-thirty in the morning
, he thought. 
How the hell did she find
me? 
“I’m sorry, I appreciate that it’s early.”  She had a plummy voice,
but it had been softened by her time away from the city.  Even yesterday, the
easily detectable barrier of strength that sat like an invisible shield in
front of her, virtually impenetrable, was somehow kinder and more forgiving when
you matched it with her voice.  It was sweet, like the tone of a nursery
teacher, or the same delicately polite intonation of a Louisianan accent that
he had heard so many times on the television and that always sounded to him
like a shy apology.  He couldn’t imagine being angry with this voice.

“Yeah.  Slide
the door.”  He opened up the front door, and he could already hear the workings
of the ancient lift mechanisms clunking and whirling along to send down the old
freight shaft.  He was not used to receiving visitors.  Kate never came here of
her own accord, and there wasn’t really anybody else who visited him.  In fact,
as he thought about it, Elizabeth was his first willing and unpaid visitor.

She pushed open
his front door just as he was trying to pull up his jeans.  His chest was still
bare, and his shoulders glistened in the city light from the sweat that lay on
his skin.  She didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed; he didn’t even notice her
flinch.  It reminded him of Lisa Taylor, his girlfriend in his final school
year who had walked straight into the boys’ gym changing rooms to tell him that
their relationship was over.  She had walked in, slamming the door open with
her enraged arm, the thud of it against the wall stopping everybody in their
tracks and he knew what was coming as soon as he saw her.  She had walked right
up to him and slapped him across the face, undeterred by the nakedness and
leering of the other boys as she walked past them.  He had stood there in his
briefs, red-cheeked and embarrassed, not yet old enough to have the gall to
ride out his own misguided actions.  She had heard the rumour that he had been
caught in the toilets with a girl from the year below hers, and she screamed
her anger at him, lashing him with her tongue.  “
You’ll be sorry you piece
of shit!  I’ll make your life hell!!  It’s over!!” 
To his friends
afterwards he had become a hero.  He had transcended their level of childish
dalliances and quick fumbles, and become a real warrior of men in their
naïve aspirations.  Even the gym teacher had seen what was happening and had
let it slide, smiling to himself wryly.  He told Jack later that he had heard
the rumours too.  Mr. Wells, the geography teacher, had told him:  “
You have
to learn these lessons Jack.  If you want to mess around, you have to learn how
to ride it out”,
he had said as he patted him on the back laughing. 
Standing here in his own living room, he felt that same sense of
inappropriateness that he had felt all those years ago.  He fumbled around for
his white T-shirt that was on the bed, and quickly put it on. 

“I’m sorry I
came here so early.  I have just been wandering about all night, and I found
your address in the phone book.”  He didn’t even know he was listed. 
She’s
like the Terminator
, he thought.  “I just needed to see somebody.  You’re
the only person I know here.”

“I thought you
left with your
f
ather?  I said I would be
in touch.” 
What was she still doing here?

“I just
couldn’t leave.  She has sent me here on this journey.  How can I abandon her? 
I can’t do that to her again.  She wants to tell me something.  I have to know
what that is.”  Jack was guiding her to the dining table as she spoke, clearly
rattled and shaking from either the cold of a night spent outside or the first
cracks of the heavy burden that she bore.  His table hadn’t been used in months,
and he could see that there was a soft layer of dust on its surface, the same
as his bike, like a layer of soft but un-brushable fur.  That was the problem
with living here, high up where the winds carried the particles from outside
and settled them onto every available surface.  He quickly brushed off the dust
layer from the chair, sending it scattering out in clouds and streams, and she
sat down.

“You look like
you need a coffee.”  Elizabeth nodded in agreement and he moved across to the
kitchen.  His kitchen was formed by two rows of simple units.  Everything was
black, the shiny black of army boots, regimented and perfect.  As he opened the
fridge, she noticed that there wasn’t much inside.  It was so different to her
fridge at the cottage in Haven, always stacked full with fresh food and home
cooked delights. 
He must live alone.

The smell of
the coffee filtered up and over the floating clouds of dust particles and into
her nose.  It smelled rich, and unlike the coffee that he had given her at the
police station the day before.

“Sugar?”  She
shook her head, needing nothing more than the caffeine-rich coffee.

“I would like
to go to Lyme beach, if you can take me?”  He placed two hot coffees on the
table in front of them and pulled out a chair to sit next to her.  He would
happily take her to the beach.  It was still cornered off, the plastic tape
flickering in the summer breeze that rolled in from the ocean, but he couldn’t
see what use it would be to the investigation.  There was essentially nothing
left there anymore, all relevant items bagged up and placed in an investigation
box.

“I will take
you, but there isn’t much there.  The guys there are really finishing up and I
heard that the site will be reopened tomorrow, ahead of schedule.”

“I just feel
like it’s a place to start.  I have all of the things she left going round and
round in my head, and I can’t make any sense of it.  Maybe if I go to the place
that she chose to, you know ..... leave, maybe something will come to me.  I
have to work this out.”

“OK, let me go
and get dressed.  Drink your coffee and we’ll go.”

Taking her
coffee in her hand, she rose after Jack, who was making his way into what
seemed to be the only sealed room in the apartment.  She wandered over to the
windows that rose from the floor and ended above her at the ceiling.  The
apartment block was six storeys high and you could see the whole of Chesterwood
below.  You could see the river Lyme as it meandered through the heart of the
city, peeking in and out of view as it wound around factories and parks.  You
could make out the open parkland, that by day hosted families and in the dark
of night was the perfect cover for crime and shady dealings.  There were maybe
half a million people below her now, each one of their lives rolling by, almost
to her undetectable.  From this height there was no individuality.  The city
moved as a whole, the people just tiny specks breathing life into it like cells
in blood under the rhythm of the heart of the city.  At her side there was a
small table, and next to it a sitting chair.  She perched on the arm.  She
thought that he must sit here and look out to the city below.  On the table
there was a book, some biography about an old dried-up rock star.  But it was
the photograph that captured her eye.  The faces in it shone, radiantly and
full of life.  They glanced back at the camera in total trust, nothing but
shared togetherness and love etched into their faces.  A woman, squinting in
the sun, her face nestled in close to the small boy next to her.  His face
smiled back at the camera, his little baby teeth on full show and full of
gaps.  It was a close up photograph, the kind that can only be taken by
somebody who belongs there; not some random stranger.  She was holding it in
her hands, but she hadn’t heard him walk up behind her.  He took it from her
gently, but with the absolute certainty that this photograph wasn’t for her.

“I’m sorry.  I
was just looking.”

“It’s OK, it’s
just ......” he waited, searching his mind for the words to describe it.  “It’s
just I really don’t want it to get broken.”  He placed in neatly and exactly
back into the spot from
where
she had taken it
.  She noticed that there
wasn’t any dust here.  “Shall we go?”  He ushered her towards the door,
realising the crime scene photography was still taped to the floor, and he
didn’t want her to have to see it again. 

As they pulled
up at the beach, they sat for a moment, stationary at the end of the dirty and
bumpy beach road.  Jack had smoked two cigarettes on the way, and Elizabeth had
again thought about asking for one, the smell drawing her to it with its heady
concoction of addictive chemicals.  She remembered the times that she had
smoked, and thought she could almost feel the increase in heart rate and the
furry tongue that she associated with those memories.  A lone police officer
stood at the roadside of the blue and white taped-off beach, his interest spiked
at who might be in the car until he realised that it was Detective Fraser. 
Immediately, he stood a little sharper, and little more aware.  They both
chuckled inside the car, seeing the police officer before them smarten himself
up as if the headmaster was approaching along a school corridor. 

“You’re quite
important around here, aren’t you?” she teased, but secretly she was glad to be
at his side.

“So they tell
me.”  He opened up the car door, and Elizabeth followed him.  He made his way
across the first of the sand dunes, the marram grasses whipping at his legs
with each step that he took.  She followed, but not before removing her shoes
as she had done the first time she had been here all those years ago.  She
looked at the dunes before her, which now seemed so small.  Before, in their
place, she remembered mountains, great big towering mountains that had to be challenged
and beaten. 
How different the world looks through a child’s eye.
  She
could see the image of her and Rebecca, charging aimlessly about the beach,
Elizabeth following behind, tracing Rebecca’s footsteps as she always did.  She
could almost hear their laughter over the sound of the early morning tide
rushing towards the shore and the occasional call of a solitary gull overhead. 
She put the mental images to the back of her mind, and pressed on over the
dunes.  She could see his heavy regulatory shoes plodding through, kicking up sand
with each step.  Her feet were delicate on the sand.  This was the kind of
ground she was used to now, but he looked wobbly and unstable, unaccustomed to
the seaside.  She trod lightly, keeping up with his pace and dodging the blades
of grass.  As she rounded the top of the last dune, before the expanse of beach,
she could see the cornered-off area, the small yellow tent where the body had
been found.  It was exactly where she remembered them building their fortress
all those years ago.

“Don’t tread
near anything that has a flag close to it, OK?”  She nodded in agreement and
they started their walk towards the tent.  They darted through a sparse array
of plain white flags sticking out of the ground until eventually they
approached the tent.  As he peeled back the door, she saw the spray paint on
the ground, measured out perfectly where Rebecca’s body once lay.  She looked
down the beach, seeing the cottage at the other end separated only by another
of the police tapes.  Jack Fraser started to go over the details of the placing
of the objects that they had found; the photographs, the key, the bus ticket, the
cigarettes and the shoes. 

“What do you
see Elizabeth?  Think like your sister.  What is she trying to tell you?”  She
stared at the paint and pictured the dead body of her sister lying there, just
as Rebecca had intended it to be.  Her eyes wandered across the scene, willing
information to jump out towards her.

“I see that she
was scared.  That’s why she left, because she thought that nobody could help
her.  But we could of, Daddy and I, we could have helped her.”

“Look further. 
You have to start thinking about the clues.  She left you clues.”

She thought
back to the pictures of Rebecca, lying there with a deathly face, dressed in
her mother’s clothes.

“I think she is
trying to tell me the reason why she disappeared.  Why she couldn’t stay.”  He
moved in closer to the body shaped outline, painted in a haphazard fashion
against the rocks and pebbles that formed the sandy carpet underfoot.  He knelt
down, pointing out and describing each of the little flags, labelled ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’
and ‘D’.