Escaping Life (25 page)

“What do we do
now?” Elizabeth asked, her head still resting against the locker doors.  “Where
do we go from here?”  He stepped in closer and for a moment, in any other
situation, she would have thought he was about to kiss her.  He rested both
hands on her shoulders, the small plastic bag containing the key still clutched
in between his fingers.

“You go home. 
Back to Haven, just as you planned.”  She opened her mouth, her protest already
formulated in her mind.  “I don’t want to hear ‘No’.  Come on.  I need to do my
job.  And like you said, you have a husband, a father.  They need you too.” 
All day he had thought her beautiful, since the moment the sun rose and the
light rays shot through her fine shiny hair that morning at the beach.  Her
green eyes like olives, her hair a golden crown.  In her darkest and most
vulnerable moment yet, her eyes and lips quivering under the weight of impending
tears, she had never looked more stunning.  “I’ll call you as soon as I have
something.  I promise you, OK?”

She heard the
sirens of the other police cars arriving as she sat waiting for her bus back to
Haven.  She thought about them fencing off the area with the same blue and
white tape that they had used at the beach.  She thought about the people who
would be bustling at its edge, trying to get a look at the scene of the crime. 
The couple sat next to her on the bench had had their attention spiked.  They
were stretching up, like meercats, their necks elongated and eager to see what
was happening, but their interest was no more than a passing thought, and they
soon returned to their crosswords and magazines.  Elizabeth called Graham at
work, and told him that she would be home that evening when he returned.  He
promised that he would be home early too, desperate to see her and hear the
developments of her trip to Chesterwood.  She had missed his voice and it was
good to think of being sat with him, in the sanctuary of their garden,
surrounded by the aromatic plants and busy insects conducting their work in the
fading light of the day.  She tried to shut out the sounds of the bus station,
and the commotion of the police.  She put to the back of her mind the keys and
clues and friends of her sister’s that she had never known or had ever
imagined.  She encased the thoughts of her sister’s weekly visits that she had
never been a part of, deep into the depths of her mind.  There were still four
years of mystery life that she couldn’t understand, yet all Elizabeth craved
was the security of her own.

The bus
meandered through the city streets, stretching and turning its way through the
old city, the narrow streets slowly compressing until they eventually squeezed
together and spat the bus out onto the motorway.  Elizabeth hadn’t slept the
night before, and the gentle rocking of the seat as the wheels bumped their way
along the ground lulled her off into the early stages of sleep.  Her head
rocked back and forth, her eyes shutting and opening rhythmically, her mind
still desperately wanting to stay awake.  How could she sleep now,
a new
clue having been revealed
only half an hour before?  Her eyes were gritty from the city, her eyelids
heavy like guillotines, anxiously teetering above the next of the condemned. 
She tried to process the day behind her, still early and in its infancy, but aged
and haggard to her.  She had first arrived at Jack Fraser’s apartment that
morning, sleepy but resolute in her decision to remain here, to solve the case
like a professional detective and then, so convinced of her decision made at
Lyme beach, to return home and go back to Haven.  It was true, her family did
need her, her father she imagined, more than anybody else, even if they were
not close anymore.  But yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she should have
stayed.  She should have challenged Jack, she told herself.  She should have
made him let her stay.  Yet in that instant, she knew that as strong as she was,
the constant rollercoaster of emotions was almost too much to take and she
needed to get back to Haven, just as much as she had needed to move there in
the first place.  For the last four years she had been running to escape
Rebecca and her death, and yet Rebecca had thrust herself back into Elizabeth’s
life once more, back from the grave, only to die again. 

Random images
of an imagined life came to her as she lulled on the edge of sleep.  Flashback
images of life, like the flames of a fire when fed by fresh oxygen, burst into
her mind:  of the ravine and the smouldering car residing at the bottom of it, 
snapshots of her scrambling to safety, clinging to the grass of the cliffs as
she hauled her way back out.  Ideas of her journey to Chesterwood and the
beginnings of a new life under the radar filled her mind; friends, parties, and
days out imagined from nowhere and given flesh and bones as Elizabeth’s mind made
them a reality.  She had to think of her as a live, living person, to give her
breath and blood running through her veins, for to be dead - lost for four
years into empty isolation - was worse than losing her a first and second time
combined. 

Their last
meeting had been haunting her, teasing her like a demon.  The thought of Rebecca
desperately clinging on to her arms, scratching and pulling at her as Elizabeth
tried to escape through the front door, Rebecca behind her and terrified of
what Elizabeth didn’t know.  She thought about her peeking out through the
window as she left the house for the final time.  In the following hours,
something inside of Rebecca had told her the only way out, the only redemption
and the only absolution for the thing that was weighing so heavily on her, was
to disappear.  But not just from her family.  From the world.  For four years
she had been dead to everything except the ground she walked on, the air she
breathed, and a random person she had coffee with at the local bus station.  In
all of the police work and all of the searching, the only person who actually
appeared to know Rebecca, to have had any contact with her for the last four
years was Barry, and the police hadn’t even found him.  He had found them,
completely by accident. 
What was it that he had said?  They didn’t get on? 
Had he said that her father and Rebecca didn’t get on? 
Barry had said a
lot over the last few hours, but she was too tired to recall it all and as she
dropped in and out of consciousness, the lullaby of the hum from the road
gently rocked her into a deep and dreamless sleep.

She awoke as
the bus bumped its way over the sleeping policemen on the way into Wellbeck,
the road humps designed to slow down the approaching traffic.  She couldn’t
recall when they were built, but she had heard about it; roughly fifteen years
earlier after a child had been accidentally run over.  There had been protests
and demonstrations until the council had agreed to their construction and then
following, news reports in the paper of the success of the people’s campaign.

She took the
next bus back to Haven, refreshed from her sleep.  She picked a seat near the
back where it was quieter and settled into a surprisingly soft and comfortable
cushion.  Barry’s words were still on her mind as she travelled home.  Elizabeth
knew that it had always been she who was closer to her father.  There had been
too many incidents where they had argued and fought.  Elizabeth had always
known she was the favourite.  Rebecca had understood this too.  But to think
that she had seen their father and that he hadn’t said anything was
impossible. 
He would have mentioned that. 
Even stranger still, Elizabeth
thought, was how Rebecca had also told Barry that she had been visiting her on
these various Saturdays at the bus station, and Elizabeth hadn’t seen or heard anything
from her in all of that time.  For what possible reason should she take
anything that Rebecca had told Barry to be the truth?  The only things of which
she could be sure were those things that she experienced with her own eyes,
before Rebecca had left their lives, the good things and the bad.

It had been
late afternoon when Elizabeth took the call from Auntie Sarah.  They never
spoke on the telephone, and when Elizabeth answered and heard Sarah’s soft and
unusually cautious voice she knew that something was wrong.  She agreed to meet
her at the house.  Auntie Sarah wouldn’t tell her why.  As Elizabeth turned the
corner into the street where she had grown up, the familiar grass verges and
wide open cul-de-sac were littered with police cars and ambulances, with cops
buzzing around on the grass outside her house.  It was a sinking feeling:  already,
there was no possible way to believe, once the mess of cars and vans was
cleared, that everything would be as it had been only half an hour before.  She
could see the flashing blue lights reflecting back and forth in the huge
windows of the oversized houses, scattering through the leaves of the trees
like sickening disco lights.  As she pulled up in the car, the officers
approached her, primed and waiting expectantly for her arrival.  By the time
she arrived there, there was no body lying bloodied on the kitchen floor, neck
swollen and bruised, eyes void and red from blood that had haemorrhaged into
the once white sclera.  Instead, there was just a simple white tape outlining
where the body had once been. 
Somebody had broken in,
she told
herself. 
Somebody broke in and got killed,
as she glanced around the
room looking for signs, like shattered glass and blood splatter from a
stranger’s gun.  Instead, all she found was Rebecca, still huddled tightly in the
corner and surrounded by police officers, her body trembling, poisoned by its
own adrenaline. 
Where is Daddy?  Where is Mummy?  Did Rebecca own a gun?
 
Elizabeth crouched down next to her asking over and over again what had
happened.  Rebecca had remained silently terrified in the corner of the kitchen,
pressed up against the wall, her knuckles white with fear and body paralysed.  

Through muffled
words, Rebecca had realised that it was Elizabeth next to her; her fear
diminished now that Elizabeth was there and next to her.  She grabbed her
tightly, pulling her down unsteadily towards the floor.  She clung onto her
like a baby orang-utan, her tight fingers gripping her arms, and her face
buried into her shoulder.  “It’s OK, Becca.  It’s OK,” said Elizabeth, having
no belief that even she trusted her own words.  She knew that something was
very wrong.  She looked up at the nearest officer, the same one who had rushed
in after her as Elizabeth had raced through the house.  “Please,” she begged,
“what is going on?”

The officer
explained that her father was outside in one of the ambulances, being treated
for shock; in another one was the neighbour who had stumbled into this hornet’s
nest of horror, and in the final ambulance lay her mother’s body, stiff, cold,
and dead.  And murdered.  She felt Rebecca clinging on to her more tightly than
ever.  It was the only time that she had wanted to let the world just consume
her, to let the world around her collapse and fall apart.  When she heard the
final words of the police officer, his honest and well trained face delivering
the words he had so carefully chosen, that Rebecca had been found here in this
very corner terrified and repeatedly muttering the word ‘
Betty, Betty’,
she
knew that she had to be strong.  She had to be there for Rebecca.

As the bus
pulled into the car park, she realised that she hadn’t even been aware that
they were approaching Haven.  She waited for the bus to traverse over the lumps
and bumps on the ground, and then made her way to the front of the bus.

“Bye, have
fun.”  She turned to see the smiling face of the driver, open and familiar as
he pulled the lever to release the doors.  A shot of air spewed out from the doors’
pneumatics, whooshing out and letting the hot August sea breeze stream in. 
Elizabeth wasn’t perturbed by his overt friendliness.  It almost sounded
strange after spending the last twenty four hours in the city.  She rarely
travelled back to the city now; she didn’t feel like she belonged there
anymore.  She felt suffocated in the haze of smog as it sat above the ground,
choking you slowly and subconsciously.  It was only when you stepped out of it,
into real air and felt the swell of the ocean that you could realise how
suffocating life could be surrounded by concrete and cars.  She smiled back at
him, his warm face bathed by the sunlight, his eyes squinting and crippled in
the daze.

“Thanks, I’ll
try.”  She wasn’t sure what she was promising to the driver to try and have fun
with.  The fun had been sucked out of her life long ago, the moment that Auntie
Sarah had first made that telephone call;  the moment that she had found
Rebecca huddled on the floor of their parents’ kitchen, the sister she knew
lost forever.  She had learned to laugh again, but she knew that she saw the
world through different eyes now.  The normal sense of fun and easiness about
life, she had decided, were for those people in the world who could still look
upon it with a sense of naivety.  When you have survived the capabilities of
the human condition, the willingness of some who seek to destroy the life of another,
you see the world in its true colours, for what it really is.  Her blinkers
were off and as much as she tried, she just couldn’t block the reality, her
reality, out.

Jack had
watched her leave as the bus pulled out through the grand arched doorway of the
station.  This place had been built long before he had been born.  There was a
plaque that read, ‘The first covered bus station in the United Kingdom, 1926’. 
What had really been built was a giant box, onto which a large ornate
façade had been constructed to give the whole place the grand feel of
the Victorian era.  The bricks were a burnt red, with simple and elegant
lettering in relief that read ‘Chesterwood Bus Station’.  The first buses that
bobbled through the doors on the previously cobbled streets were open-topped
and solid wheeled, providing nothing like the comfort that Elizabeth had ridden
away in today.  The new bus station of Chesterwood, then an affluent town and
yet to grow into the pulsating monstrosity of a city as it stood today, had
been described by its mayor at the Opening Ceremony, as ‘a place of the people,
for the people’.  Guests at the Opening had been presented with ornate metal
gifts, as the sunlight filtered through the glass, looking almost molten with
its imperfections as it refracted the light through it.  The windows had since
been bricked up, after riots in the early nineteen-eighties had resulted in
them being smashed.  The grandeur had been lost, yet it was still a place for
the people, even if those people no longer came from the cream of society’s
high class.