Escaping Life (28 page)

“We have to
move on now Elizabeth.  It’s over.”

“Over?  You’re
delusional, Daddy!”  Elizabeth gripped the telephone tighter.  She couldn’t
believe what she was hearing.  “Did you listen to anything whilst you were in
Chesterwood?  Rebecca was alive.  Alive!  Four years of life that we know
nothing about!”

“It’s
irrelevant, Elizabeth.”  She could hear that he was starting to become
irritated with her.  There was a certain punctuation to his voice when he lost
his temper, where every word sounded staccato, and the tone went down at the
end of his words.  It couldn’t have been any less of a question.

“It’s not irrelevant,”
she begged.  “You didn’t stick around long enough to find out.  She had a whole
life.  Friends.  We found something.”  She knew that they didn’t yet know much
about Rebecca’s life.  But Barry had been the closest thing to a friend.  She
had to embellish the story a little.  She had to make him see.  “We found a
key.  It has to be for her house.  We have to find her house.”

“Elizabeth!” 
He was shouting at her now, using the same exasperated tone as when she’d been
a child.  He’d rarely used to shout at her, but when he did it was deafening,
and heart-breaking.  Her ears would ring as his voice would open up and rip
through the atmosphere.  As a child, she would cower as he screamed at her, his
booming voice instantly softer as he saw her big green eyes widen in terror. 
But she wasn’t the same child anymore, and he certainly wasn’t the same
father.  She was barely listening to him now, but Graham could hear him.  He
had heard him very clearly and he could see where this was going.  The only
result that he could predict, as he sat down on the arm of the chair next to
her, was a full-on blazing row - the kind where the atmosphere left behind
would cling on indefinitely, refusing to leave.

“We will find
her house and then we can understand why she disappeared, and what she means by
these letters she has been leaving me.”  She didn’t hear his breathing bubbling
up on the other end of the phone, ready to boil over.  “She has been coming to
see us.  She didn’t forget ….”

“That’s
enough!”  She heard that same crippling voice that would have made her cower
before him.  “I won’t listen to your craziness anymore!”

“But Daddy.....”

“ENOUGH!”  She
stopped talking.  They both stopped talking.  She could feel herself putting
each brick in place; the perfectly constructed wall between her own beliefs and
her father’s, as she saw it, unwillingness to see the truth.  He was hurt, she
knew that.  He hadn’t coped well.  But it didn’t matter now.  It was time to
pick a team, and he’d picked the one that she wouldn’t play for.  Without
speaking, she replaced the receiver on its stand and felt Graham moving in to
talk to her.  It was a big chair next to the telephone table, and there was enough
room for him to sit on the arm of the chair and swing his feet up onto the
seat.  He sat like this, facing his wife.  He knew that she was aware of him,
but he didn’t want to say the wrong thing.  He wanted to choose his words
carefully.   At work, standing in his office with a client, or in a courtroom,
this was easy.  But with Elizabeth it was harder.  He could and did say the
wrong thing.  It was Elizabeth who had taught him how to make mistakes.

He sat with his
knees tucked underneath the crease of his elbow, as Jack had sat next to her on
the beach that very morning.  He could see that she was watching him from the
corner of her eye, with her lips pressed shut, waiting for his verdict;  his
judgment. 

“You said some
pretty surprising stuff in that ‘phone call, Elizabeth.”  His hands were
clasped together, his thumb tapping at his sealed lips.  “You said she had been
visiting us.  I don’t remember you telling me that before.”

She turned around
to look at her husband.  She could see from his pleading face that he was
desperate for answers, yet desperately concerned at what he might hear. 
“That’s what Barry said.”

“Who’s Barry?” 
“The guy I told you about at the station, who met with her.  He said that she
visited us.  That she used to come and see us.  He knew about my life, and
about Daddy.  He knew stuff.”  She could feel the heaviness of the tears
forming in her eyes as she tried to prevent herself from blinking, desperate to
hold herself together.  “She trusted him”.

“You think she
used to come here?  To Haven?  Elizabeth, we live in a small fishing village. 
Do you not think if there were two of you walking around, somebody wouldn’t
have mentioned it?  That they wouldn’t have noticed?”  The ‘they’ to which he
referred was the collective mass of Haven residents, solid in number and their
hearts pulsing as if one.  What one person in Haven knew, the rest of them
knew.  They moved and lived as a single being, even the reluctant ones dragged
along by the collective pull of the mob.  It was virtually impossible to
consider that Rebecca could have come here without being mistaken for
Elizabeth.  It was even more unthinkable that Elizabeth wouldn’t have heard
about it.  Could she have been here?  He didn’t think so.  But what was
possible, was that Rebecca lived in a fantasy land; one where four years of
self-imposed loneliness created memories and events that somehow lessened the
crushing sense of bewilderment that he was sure that she must have felt.  He
had to at least try to make her see this.

As they sank
into the crumpled white sheets of the bed, unmade as always in Elizabeth’s
absence, Graham dared to venture his thoughts.

“Elizabeth, I
think Rebecca was sick.  She lived for four years alone, for reasons yet we
don’t understand.  We have to try and let the police do their job.  They will
help us understand.  I promise you.”  He never made her promises that he
couldn’t keep.  “Talk to your father tomorrow.  Calmly.”  It was an instruction,
rather than a suggestion, but one made out of love, not annoyance.  “He needs
you too.”  She didn’t say anything.  She just snuggled into his chest, her face
cushioned in the soft crinkled skin of his neck.  She forgot the age difference
usually.  It was at moments like this when she could feel how his body had aged
past hers, his skin more pliable and less plump tha
n
she remembered.  She breathed in the
scent of his knowledge and experience, his insurmountable ability to see logic
through the cloud of ambiguity.  For tonight at least, she would sleep soundly
in his arms, building the strength to face another fight at the break of
tomorrow’s dawn.

Jack was
waiting outside when Kate left the hospital.  He had noticed her walking out,
her face pulled back in anticipation that he may actually be waiting for her. 
When she saw him, her face came alive, the happy look on a child’s face with
the realisation that Santa Claus had indeed not forgotten them as they crept
into the living room on Christmas morning.  He kissed her as she got into the
car.  He had decided beforehand that he would make a conscious decision to ask
about her day.  He hadn’t forgotten how this was supposed to work, even if, for
the last year, he had acted as if anything he had previously learned was gone.

He had been in
hospital for almost six weeks after the accident, and it was Kate who had been
at his side every day of his stay.  After he had learned of the loss of his
wife and son, he hadn’t wanted the company of anyone.  He had refused his
meals, refused to answer the doctor’s questions.  He had even refused treatment
for a time.  It had been Kate who had been there each day, talking him through
it and counselling him.  Even now, he didn’t know just how many of those hours
had been her own personal hours that she had given up freely.  It had been her
shoulder that he had first cried on; it had been her presence which had made
the reality of the situation too clear to avoid, inescapable, as the prospect
of returning to an empty house loomed ever closer.

She had gone
home with him that day.  As he had walked into the living room filled with
toys, still strewn about the floor but with a covering of dust, she had stood
by him and held him up.  She had promised him that she would help him adjust. 
She couldn’t tell him, but she had fallen in love with him the moment he had
opened his eyes in the hospital bed.  She hadn’t believed in love at first
sight, and told herself that that was not what it was.  But yet she couldn’t
leave his room without thinking about him, and her concern reached much further
than interest in his injuries and recovery.  She just wanted to be around him,
even at his worst, and even when all he wanted to do was to run away from the
world. 

“How was your
shift?  No broken bones?”  He knew broken bones made her stomach crawl and
retch as if she had eaten bad food.  She smiled, enjoying the normality of the
question.

“Yes, it was
fine.  Easy.  I hardly did anything all afternoon.”

“Lazy bones!” 
They both giggled as he said it.  He had a feeling that he wanted to draw her
into him, bring her in closer.  It was a new feeling and he liked it.  He had
missed it.  He reached out and took her hand and squeezed it a little.  “I’m
sorry that I couldn’t see you yesterday.  I missed you.”

She didn’t say
anything in return.  She didn’t know what to make of it.  Driving along in a
truck with this man beside her, a man with a receding hairline and olive skin
that reminded her of freshly baked bread, was not the same man she had met in Flanagan’s
only a few nights before.  He never told her that he missed her, he never
picked her up from work, and he certainly never apologised for not seeing her. 
She couldn’t help but think about the cliché that her mother used to
tell her when she got caught up on a boy at school.  She ran the words around
in her head, playing them out in her mother’s upper class tongue.  ‘
If
something seems too good to be true, it is simply because it is’. 
She had
always thought the words pessimistic and untrusting, until she had experienced
the true pain of reality when her first perfect boyfriend had dropped her so
quickly, as if she carried
a
disease, as if
her touch scalded his skin.  It was that very episode that had sworn her off boys
and then later, men, right up until when she had met Jack.  He hadn’t done much
to prove her mother wrong either, quite the opposite, but for Jack, Kate always
found a way to make an excuse.  She hung around, but not blithely like a fool
just waiting and hoping, but with the belief that by the end of his torment, it
would be she whom he wanted, and needed.  She hoped that that was where they
had now got to, but she wouldn’t lay all of her defences down just yet.  She
had to be sure.

They took the
old freight lift up to his flat on the sixth floor, and closed the rickety old door
behind them.  He could see her physically relax, safer inside his apartment
than outside in the dark of the streets and the depths of the city night.  Unusually,
he wasn’t wearing a jacket as it was too warm on the sticky summer night to
need or tolerate it, so he emptied his pockets of his phone, keys and
cigarettes, throwing them down on the table.  He opened the buttons of his
shirt to reveal the T shirt that he had thrown on earlier in the morning when
Elizabeth had unexpectedly turned up.  He walked over and threw his shirt on
the bed, and started to unbuckle his trousers whilst Kate walked over to the
police photographs, still haphazardly taped to the floor.  She stood with her
hands in her back pockets, her slim arms jutting out like a model’s.  She
always tied her hair back when she was at work, her blue black hair sleekly
piled up and held in a large plastic grip.  He always said that it looked like
a torture device, and she would regularly and spontaneously pinch him with it
ever since.

“Did you get
any further?” she asked, pointing towards the photos as she kicked off her
small patent heels, and took her stethoscope from around her neck.  She picked
up the photo of Rebecca’s face that had been left on the bedside table two
nights before.  “Did you trace that accident?”  Jack was sitting on the settee
now, feet placed restfully upon the edge of the small table in front of him. 
He had fetched himself a beer already and was nursing it in his lap.  He had
put one down on the table for Kate too; he hadn’t asked if she’d wanted one or
not.

“Kind of.”  He
thought about where to start.  So much had happened over the course of the last
forty eight
hours, since he had last
been with Kate and he’d felt that difference as they’d lain in bed together
that morning, that he didn’t quite know where to begin.  “I went and found
Rebecca’s sister.”  Kate looked puzzled.  “Rebecca was the woman from the
crash.”  She was nodding now, she had caught up.  “That’s where I went.  She
lives in a place called Haven.  It’s just a little fishing town, mainly full of
tourists.”  She sat down next to him and picked up the beer, placing the hollow
face in the photograph down onto the table.  “You were right, it was that
woman.  She has been missing for four years.  The family thought she was dead”.

“So what, she
faked the accident?”  She took a full swig of her beer.  It was ice cold. 
Perfect.  The heat in the apartment was suffocating, and she got up and quickly
opened one of the large windows that overlooked the city.

“That’s how it
looks.  She has been living for four years with seemingly no real connection to
the family.  They haven’t been seeing her.  The only guy we have got that can
fill in anything from the last four years is a random guy from the bus station
that found us by chance.  He is the only person that can tell us anything about
her.”  He could see Kate trying to process everything.  In spite of the heat,
she was taking out the clip from her hair, shuffling her free hand into the
creased and swirling spirals, freeing them from the tight plastic.  She shuffled
in a little closer, and he could feel the heat radiating from her, rippling
towards him like a mirage.  “And to be honest with you, he barely knows
anything about her.  Doesn’t even know where she lives.”