Escaping Life (24 page)

“I’m sorry that
I mistook you for Rebecca.”  As she turned to see the warm and open face, red-cheeked
and generous, she couldn’t help but in some way feel glad that Rebecca had
spent her final moments with somebody who seemed so genuine.  She stood up and
approached his chair.  She pulled up a dining chair that was tucked under the
table.  Barry looked back at her; his eyes wide with worry at what she might do
or say, not expecting her to come near him.  She sat down next to him, resting
her hand on his forearm.  He thought how similar her hands and her touch were
to that of Rebecca and for a second he was back in his car, just moments from
the kiss of his life.

“It’s OK.”  She
smiled at him, turning her knees into his legs a little.  “You knew about me,
didn’t you?  She told you that she had a sister.”  He nodded.  “What did she
tell you?”

He thought back
to the countless Saturdays when they had sat drinking hot tasteless coffee
together.  He had always made two coffees from the machine at the back of the
staff room and they would sit and drink them together.  The first time he had
seen her he hadn’t dared speak to her.  Then, after she had begun going there
virtually every Saturday, he had snatched at just a snippet of courage, just ten
seconds of it, in order to walk up to her.  She had always mentioned her
sister.

“She told me
that she had a little sister, that that was who she went to see.”  Elizabeth gently
shook her head in disbelief, her eyes closing under the weight of his words.

“But she never came
to see me.  I haven’t seen her for four years.  I thought she was dead!”  His
face scrunched up as if he had eaten sour fruit, bitter on the tip of his
tongue.

“She always
said that was where she was going.  To see you.  She always had a ticket.  She always
got on the bus.  She told me things you did together.”

“What?  What do
you mean?”

“She told me
that she came to the city.  You would go out somewhere together, eat, have a
drink.  Normal stuff.”

“This is all
just fantasy!  I haven’t seen her in years!”  She could see the uncertainty in
his eyes.  He had four years of memories, all of which, in the light of Elizabeth’s
reality, made no sense. 
Four years of lies?
  He searched through his
mind, flicking the images back and forth as he searched for something with
substance; something that could be cross-referenced; something real.

“But you moved,
right?  You left the city.  She didn’t see you for a while then.”

“How do you
know that?”

“She told me. 
She stopped coming to the bus station for a while.  Then one day I saw her
again, I remember it because she looked ill.  White as a ghost.  I asked her if
she was OK.  I asked her what was wrong.  She wouldn’t talk about it.  She just
walked straight past me.”  Elizabeth was almost sat on top of his legs, not
breathing, waiting for him to speak like a child waiting at story time.  “The
next week she told me she had seen your
f
ather and that he had told her where
you had moved to.  She apologised for not talking to me the week before.  She
said that they didn’t get along.  I didn’t really understand it all.  It didn’t
make much sense to me.”

“Who didn’t get
on?”  None of this was making any sense to Elizabeth either.

“Rebecca and
your father.  At least, that’s what I thought she meant.  Then she was coming
to see you again.  Where was it she used to go?  I don’t remember.”  Before she
could answer or ask him anything else, Jack came back into the room.  He stood
motionless in the doorway to the living room.  He was holding something in his
hands, holding it up for Barry to see.  At first Elizabeth couldn’t see what it
was.  It was small and brown, swallowed up in his hands.  He was looking
directly at Barry.

“What’s this
for?”  He was holding it up now.  Elizabeth could see the form.  It was
familiar in shape and size and colour; small and golden brown, the jagged edge
sharp enough to cut your fingers if you weren’t careful.  The handle was the same
familiar crown shape that she had imprinted in her mind.  All it needed to
complete the picture was a plastic bag around it, and to be clutched inside the
dead hand of her sister. 

“It’s for
work,” Barry said, surprised at Jack’s interest.  “It’s the key for my locker.”

“At the bus
station?”  Elizabeth was already up and out of her seat.  She knew where they
were going.

“Yes.  There’s
a wall of lockers.  People can use them to deposit things in, that they don’t
want to take with them.  All staff have one.”

They stood
there in the doorway, Barry still sitting and unaware of the significance of
the key.  “You need to show us your locker,” Jack said.  Elizabeth knew that
the
next
of Rebecca’s clues was no
more than a car journey away from being solved.  She was already out of both
doors and waiting for them outside at Jack’s truck by the time Barry was rising
from the settee.

.

There was a
nervous tension in the car so thick that it was impossible to outrun.  No
matter how fast they drove to the police station, and no matter how quickly
Jack Fraser ran in to the station to pick up the other almost identical key, it
was a cloud that clung to the car like mist to the early morning winter
ground.  It filled the car, swirling around like an obscuring mist.  Even
leaving the windows open to let in the refreshing summer breeze did little to
shift it.  Elizabeth was poised, ready to run.  She was holding the plastic bag
between her hands, fiddling it around, feeling the object that her sister had
placed here in this moment for her, and every muscle in her body was on red
alert, ready to swing into action, her adrenaline chasing around her body like
fuel to a fire. 

Elizabeth
couldn’t hear the words clearly; her mind too shut down and focused for
external stimuli, distracted by the single most important task of its life. 
Yet she knew that through the whole journey, Jack had been trying to explain to
Barry the significance of his find.  As he looked into his rear view mirror, Jack
didn’t know if it was excitement or stress, or a mixture of the two emotions
that graced Barry’s chubby little face.  Jack would bet his next paycheque on
the fact that Barry had never been involved in any sort of police investigation
and thought that he probably found it all rather exciting; something like
standing on the precipice of an open aeroplane door, the patchwork of fields
below spinning and dancing around to entice you out of the aeroplane, with your
only hope of survival a small pack on your ba
ck
.  The excitement and will are there, yet
the apprehension that the little backpack is the only thing between you and the
call of death is difficult to shake. 

As they pulled
up outside the bus station for the second time that day, all three of them
burst out of the car like bullets from a gun, racing towards the side wall
tucked away behind the telephones where Barry had described the lockers to be. 
They charged through the station, past the ticket offices and cafes, and hordes
of people underneath the twinkling lights of destination and arrival boards. 
As they ran, pushing past the crowds of people, Elizabeth was already ripping
open the plastic bag, not a second to lose.  No time to waste.  The key had no
number on it, so she thrust the sharp point into the first closed locker.  As
she did so, before she could try to turn the key, she felt the warm, strong
grip of Jack’s hands clasp over hers.  His hands were strong, and she
immediately thought about him as a young officer, straight from training,
having to handle himself on
the
streets and in
fights.  He looked as if he could handle himself, and she had no doubt that
those hands could tell a story or two about the things that they had seen and
done.  Right now, all his years and all of his experience rested on her hands, stopping
her in the strongest and yet gentlest of ways.  She couldn’t help but think of
his son, Joshua, and how he would have cradled him so tight and so protectively. 

“Wait,” he said,
gasping for breath from trying to catch up with her, light-speed quick across
the station floor.  “We don’t know what we are going to find.  Give me the
key.”  There were several eyes upon them now, attention drawn by the commotion
that they had spread;  the quick nimble blonde, swift as a gazelle springing
her way across the ground, followed by the cop, and trailing behind, a shorter
tubby guy, waddling rather than running as he tried to keep up with his pack. 
She didn’t want to let go.  She wanted to cling to the precious connection, the
key that Rebecca had left.  For her.  “Give me the key, Elizabeth.”  His words
were firmer now, and he held her hands as she slipped them away.  His hands
followed hers, resting them down by her sides.  She nodded her acceptance; her
approval at his approach.  She had, in a very short space of time, come to
trust him.  The key was already in the first locker.  All three of them held
their breath as Jack held onto the key and tried to turn it.  Nothing; it
wouldn’t budge.  He pulled out the key and moved towards the next locked
locker.  Still nothing.  He pulled and pushed the key into at least twenty more
lockers before the key finally turned.  They were all used to the key staying
put, so that when the spring inside the locker popped the door open enough to
allow Jack to get his fingers inside, but not enough to show the contents, they
all stood motionless.  Elizabeth was first to make the slightest of movements
towards the locker before Jack brought his hand up in front of her, his eyes
fixed on the open door.  He scrambled around with his hands on his belt,
lifting from it a small torch.  Flicking on the switch, he shone the beam into
the recesses of the locker, like a searchlight deployed to illuminate a wartime
operation.  He moved it about back and forth, swivelling it around inside the
open crack of the locker.  Barry and Elizabeth were waiting at his side, eager
and itching to see the contents retrieved. 

“Come on!  Come
on!” she urged.  “What’s inside there?”

Certain in his
own mind that it was safe to do so, he peeled open the door, carefully trying
not to touch anything with his hands.  He placed his own hand into a small
plastic evidence bag, and then reached inside to pick up the contents of the
locker.  He shuffled the sides of the plastic bag up and slowly brought it out
into the light.  A key.

“Another key! 
Another key!!”  Elizabeth tipped her head back in disbelief at the continuing
cryptic nature of what she was beginning to see as the most sadistic of
treasure hunts.  “Why can’t she just tell me something?  Why can’t she just give
me some answers?”

“She is,
Elizabeth,” said Jack calmly, as he sealed up the plastic bag.  He picked up
his mobile phone and made a call.  Elizabeth wasn’t listening.  She stood with
her back to the lockers, her fingers running through her hair, the look of
exasperation etched into every wrinkle on her face.  She had built herself up,
steeled herself for this moment of discovery.  In her mind, this moment was supposed
to reveal all the answers, the locker nothing less than the veritable Pandora’s
Box, but filled with hope and love left as a message from a dead sister. 
Instead, she found nothing but a metal key, and already it was sealed up as another
bag of evidence.  Jack was already on the telephone, calling the find into the
station.  Soon this place would be swarming with cops.  A new Scene.  Barry
stood next to Elizabeth, willing Jack to finish his telephone call.  He had no
idea what to do or say.  He watched the beautiful woman stood next to him and as
she smudged away the sweat from her tired face, he thought about the woman with
whom he had shared so many coffees and so many empty conversations.  Rebecca
had been, in reality, his only friend, yet it seemed he hardly knew her.  He
had been sitting with her for several years, drinking free cups of coffee and
listening as she told him stories about her life.  It was as he saw the woman
before him, her head rested against the cold metal doors, her hair crumpled up
and messy with confusion, that he realised that it wasn’t Rebecca that he knew
at all.  It wasn’t Rebecca that had lived in the city; it wasn’t Rebecca who
had chosen to live in a small fishing village and sit on the harbour wall
eating ice creams; it wasn’t Rebecca who had married the tall, handsome
lawyer.  The only life he knew of belonged to Elizabeth.  He didn’t know the
one person he called a friend at all.  He was desperately searching for words
of comfort to offer her.  He searched his mind, stringing together imaginary
sentences and sounding them out inside his head to see what capacity for comfort
they might provide.  He couldn’t find the right words.  He didn’t know what to
say.  After all, he might know her as much as Rebecca had permitted him to, but
she didn’t know him in the slightest.

“Listen, you
two.”  Jack was staring at them both.  He was back in tough mode, the edgy
exterior of the cop that Elizabeth had first met, his shoulders set and his
brow arching in.  “There’s a team on the way to fingerprint this area.  Barry,”
he looked directly into his eyes, “I need you to do something for me.  I need
you to get your boss down here.  This whole place, this whole area,” he waved
his hands around to indicate the area around the lockers, “this needs to be
shut down.  It’s out of action.  It’s ours now.  OK?”  Barry nodded, setting
his mind to carry out the important tasks delegated to him.  “Good.  Off you
go.”  Barry shuffled away, the same hurried waddle that almost functioned as a
run, eager to play his role in the police work.