Escaping Life (33 page)

“She did this
herself, it seems.”  Jack wasn’t talking to anyone in particular.  “The
landlord came forward to say that she hadn’t paid this month’s rent.  He hadn’t
seen the picture on the television, but said his tenant was called Elizabeth
Jackson.”  Elizabeth turned sharply to look at Jack, hearing her old name, not
used for years.  “Once we put two and two together, it was fairly easy to
follow her tracks.” 

“Which were
what?”  Edward looked nervous.  He looked as if he almost dared not to ask the
question, yet the will was too strong to resist.

“She lived here
for almost the last four years - I assume from pretty much the same time as she
went missing.  I looked at the evidence, Elizabeth.  Your friend David did a
pretty good job of making it look like she had to have been in that car, but
the clues were always there.  She was never in that car when it dropped over
the ravine.”  Elizabeth sat down on the edge of the sofa, and Graham sat down
next to her.  He took her hands in his own, just like he always did, just like
she wanted him to.  “Once we had an address and a name, it was pretty easy to
find her and put the pieces together.  She’d been working in a local factory. 
The owner didn’t want to talk to us at first, scared about revealing too much. 
It was a cash-in-hand job.  No need for a tax number.  She was virtually
traceless, from an official point of view.”  He walked over to the wall, and
pointed at a series of red circles that had been drawn over the pasted
newspaper pages.  Elizabeth hadn’t noticed them before.  “You see these?” he
was talking to Edward now, who himself looked transfixed, his pallor white and
ghost-like, “I recognise most of these names.  Chesterwood is a big place, lots
of crime.  These names, the circled ones,” he tapped against the wall with his gloved
knuckles, “are cases of mine.  These people died suspiciously.  Murdered or ‘unknown
causes’.  Every page that has been stuck up has one of these names.”  Sure
enough, as Elizabeth looked again at the walls, she could see that somewhere on
each page there was a red circle and next to it, another page or pages of
newspaper stories dedicated to the circled name, detailing the case that
surrounded their suspicious death.  He crouched down in front of Elizabeth as
she sat motionless on the settee.  He rapped his knuckles against the pages on
her right.  She knew that he was tapping the pictures of her mother.  “It all
starts here, Elizabeth.”

They trudged
slowly back down the dark stairway, gradually walking towards the light.  Her
eyes hurt as they approached the lower levels, only now
appreciating
the darkness that entombed
the higher floors.  Graham was already outside.  He had followed Edward, who
had left the room early.  It was the first time that Elizabeth had seen her
f
ather crying.  Not even at the funeral
had he cried, not for their mother and his wife, or Rebecca.  He was already sitting
in the car with his hands on the wheel, eager to leave this place.  Elizabeth
stood with Jack, taking in big breaths of fresh air, desperate to breathe in
anything other than the staleness that had filled her lungs inside the small
flat.  She felt like the stink of the stairway was upon her, and she could
still smell that same disgusting stench.

“She was
terrified Elizabeth.  She chose to duck out of the world.  She just couldn’t
cope.  She became obsessed with the crimes that reflected in some way the crime
committed against your mother.”

“But what about
the clues?  The letters in the paper, the photographs, and the key?  Why would
she do that?  Why now?  Why kill herself now?”  Elizabeth was trying to process
the information.  She was trying to place the sister she knew into the facts of
the life that she had learned of in the last week.  None of it made any sense
to her.

“Elizabeth, how
do you feel when you’re on your own?  Do you enjoy your own company?”

She didn’t
understand where this was going, but she nodded.  “Yeah, sometimes.”

“Sometimes. 
But only when you want it, right?  You can choose to live in solitude for a few
hours, even a day, but eventually you’ll crave the company of somebody else. 
Maybe Graham, your
f
ather, your friends.  To
take that choice away, to remove that stimulus of the outside world and the
normal everyday things that make our lives human and tolerable,” he paused, “it
destroys us.  It destroys who we are.  We are human, and we are somebody, at
least in part, because of other people.  How do we even know we are alive, if
there is nobody in our life to remind us?”

Elizabeth
looked at Graham, fifty feet away, crouched down at the side of the car, next
to the open driver’s door.  Her
f
ather
was sat beside him, his hands still on the wheel and ready to drive away. 
Graham was holding the keys, talking to him.  She couldn’t hear what he was
saying, but she could imagine it.  “You think that’s what she chose?” she
asked, as she turned back to Jack.  “Just simply not to be a part of the world
anymore?”

“She lost
control when your
m
other was murdered.  She
couldn’t find her way in her old life.  Instead she found her way here.  The clues. 
The letters.  It was all just an attempt to try to make a last connection with
you, knowing that she wouldn’t be around any longer.  She couldn’t cope anymore,
but she simply couldn’t forget you.  She just couldn’t let you go.”  He rested
his hand on her shoulder, and he pulled her in a little closer.  He put his
other hand around her back and held her tightly.  It was a simple hug and she returned
it.  It was the hug that she had first wanted to give to him when they’d sat
together at Lyme beach.  It was not the embrace of two lovers, whose bodies
melt into each other; it was an embrace of understanding, of completion.  They
knew the case was over.  He let her go, and rested his hands onto her arms. 
“Remember her words, Elizabeth.  Remember what she taught us both.  Never choose
to be alone.”

The car journey
back to Haven passed in somewhat of a mental blur for Elizabeth.  She was aware
of what was going on around her, yet somehow felt that she wasn’t quite part of
it.  Her head bobbed along against the window as Graham drove along with her sat
in the back of her
f
ather’s car, her mind
playing out fragmented images from the past.  The tormented scenes of their
final meeting gradually passed her by, the anguished face of Rebecca fading to
reveal a lighter and happier memory.  She remembered the times that they had sat
together in the city apartment that they’d shared before Elizabeth had moved
into Graham’s apartment.  She had moved in straight from university, her hippy
style rucksacks stuffed full of unwashed clothes and draped over both her
shoulders.  Rebecca had laughed at her when she’d met her outside the tube
station, had grabbed and cuddled her, poking fun at her scruffy red converse pumps
with the laces hanging out and the heels wearing thin.  “You’ll need to buy
some new threads, Sis!” she had said as she gave her the warmest hug.  Rebecca herself
was only twenty-five, but she had been living in the city, doing well as an
investment banker for one of the top firms whose offices were so high up in the
skyscrapers that it was virtually impossible to see them from the road, due to
the glare of the sun against the wall of glass.  They had arrived home, the spare
room of Rebecca’s minimal apartment Elizabeth’s new home, and had popped a
bottle of acidic Chardonnay to celebrate their new adventure.  It had been a
wonderful time, living together, full of laughter and late night settee dozes
surrounded by takeaway pizza boxes that they had brought back with them from
their night out.  They both had other friends, but rarely saw them, never
having the need for anybody from outside of their own virtually impenetrable
unit. 

As she dozed in
and out of sleep, other more distant memories would come to her.  She remembered
their times at the seaside, but for Elizabeth these times would now always be
tainted in some way.  She recalled how she had been bullied when she’d first
started high school, and remembered the day that Rebecca had seen what was
happening and had walked straight up to Janice Scott and punched her squarely on
the nose.  Rebecca found herself in an inordinate amount of trouble for this
action, and had been on lunchtime detention for two weeks, clearing chewing gum
from the desks.  She had taken her punishment though, and had told Elizabeth
that she hadn’t regretted it for a second.  That had been the last time anybody
had picked on Elizabeth.  Her memories rolled by in a dreamlike state; flash
images of the park, their bikes, broken chains that couldn’t be repaired and
had to be pushed back; days of baking with their mother and fixing the bikes
with their father; lazy Sundays when they would always read the Announcements
before racing off to their playroom to play another game of Bride and Groom and
where Elizabeth always had to be the groom, no matter how many times she had
begged to be the bride.  They would recreate anything from the announcement
pages:  weddings, birthdays, anniversaries.  They only played funerals once,
after their mother had told them that it was disrespectful the first time they’d
done it.  Elizabeth had played the dead person then.  She had watched from half-open
eyes as Rebecca threw her voice low and deep, her words slow, yet rising to a
crescendo before dropping even deeper at the end.  They had found her
impression of the local vicar hilarious, but their mother, who had been drawn
by their laughter, had scolded them harshly and forbidden such heinous re-enactments.

She awoke from
her dreams as the car drove over the curb and she heard the familiar crunch of
gravel under the tyres of her father’s car.  The journey had been quiet, and
nobody had been talking.  There were no toilet or coffee breaks, and the
incessant chatter between Graham and Edward that had filled the journey there
was nowhere to be found.  Getting out of the car, her senses were met with the
smell of home as the last days of the scent of the honeysuckle wafted through
the air, and the rows of blood orange Heleniums, that she had planted for a
splash of later summer colour danced as they were swept along by the constant
coastal breeze.  Everyone sat quietly in the garden at first, sipping tea
prepared by Graham.  It was Elizabeth who broke the silence.

“I couldn’t
believe the place that she was living.”  Elizabeth wanted to talk about it. 
She wanted to verbalise her thoughts aloud.  Everything that had happened today
was real and she could accept it because she had felt it.  She had seen it and
smelled it; she had sat on the couch and felt the dust beneath her hands; she
had seen the crusted walls that spoke of nothing but death, with newspaper
cuttings galore and decorated only in red circles of madness.  “It was
disgusting, wasn’t it?”  She looked at Graham.  He had a slightly surprised
look on his face.

“I wouldn’t
wish her to have lived like that, no.”  He had loved Rebecca too.  It was easy
for Elizabeth to forget how close they had been when she was alive, and still
in their lives.  They too, had become sister and brother.  It was easy to
misjudge his level of hurt, and how almost unimaginably strong he had been for
her.  Elizabeth turned to her father.

“Daddy?”  She
lowered her head to look up towards him, his chin too low to his chest to see
his face properly.  “Daddy, are you OK?”  He didn’t say anything as Elizabeth
put down her tea and reached for his hand.  She looked to Graham, a plea for
help, her own mind blank and at a loss as to what she should do.  Graham
reached his hand across Edward’s shoulder.

“Edward, come
on.  Now is the time we have to pull together.  We can draw a line under the
past.  Have a proper funeral, like you said you wanted.”  Graham was trying his
best, and trying to appeal to Edward’s own desires.  This was the first time
that he had felt in his own heart that closure may be at hand, and that they
may be able to move past the two horrible deaths that had afflicted their lives
for so long.  Edward’s mouth trembled, as if the words sat tentatively on his
lips, yet not quite fully formed and able to be spoken.

“What, Daddy? 
What is it?”  He thought for a moment before he looked up at her and finally
began to speak.

“I let you both
down so terribly.  Your mother too.  Everything was such a mess at the time.  I
wasn’t there for you both.”

“Edward, you
can’t begin to blame yourself.”  Graham still had his hand draped across
Edward’s shoulder and it reminded Elizabeth of the first funeral that they had
held for Rebecca when they had pretended that she had died.  She wondered
briefly if they would all cry at the next funeral, or whether they had cried
all of their tears already. 

Edward turned
to face Graham, no hesitations this time, the words already formed, spilling out
before even he realised that he was talking.  “Oh, but I can.  To abandon a
child, to cast her out.  And then a second.”  He pointed at Elizabeth.  “I let
you down too”.

“Daddy, it
wasn’t you that cast Rebecca away from us.  You didn’t make her leave.”  She
was begging him now, her hand gripping his tightly and her eyes a fixed,
determined glare.

“I didn’t make
her stay.  I should have done the necessary things to make her stay.”

The next couple
of days were hard for Elizabeth, whilst her father sat almost continuously in
the garden and only ventured into the house to use the bathroom and to sleep. 
The end of the summer was proving to be remarkably mild, although the nights
were beginning to draw in, and after eight o’clock there was a definite chill
in the air as it whipped up over the cliff top and into the garden like a wave
from the ocean.  Edward continued to sit outside.  She had mentioned this to
Graham several times, telling him that she was sure that somehow, her father
blamed himself.