Escaping Life (17 page)

“
Elizabeth,
I
’
m
sorry.
”
 
It had been a genuine mistake. 
“
I
had been trying to keep them away.  I hadn
’
t
realised that I had taken it out.
”
 
She placed the photographs back, dead face down on the Formica table in front
of them.  She swallowed back down the contents of her stomach, and took a large
glug of coffee.  She looked at him straight in his eyes, desperately needing to
see life and hope.

“
Jack,
”
she paused,
“
I
need to call my father.
”

Elizabeth sat
waiting in the foyer of the police station.  It was swelteringly hot, and the
small fan that whirled round and round was doing nothing but blowing warm air
in her direction.  Her legs kept sticking to the plastic waiting room chairs,
just as they had in the service station and she couldn’t stop shuffling about
in her chair and walking around the small claustrophobic reception.  This place
and these chairs were not intended for two hours of immobility.  People came
and went frequently, but she barely heard them, their activity nothing more
than a background humdrum of commotion.  Occasionally, somebody would shout
out, proclaim the injustice of their arrest temporarily snapping her back to
reality, but she soon tuned it out, the dead face of her sister once again
filling her mind.  Detective Fraser had been out a couple of times to check on
her whilst she waited for the arrival of her father, but other than that, she
sat in silence, waiting.

She could see
the outline of Edward Jackson as he approached the front doors of the police
station, his features shadowed with the sun behind him.  His frame was
unmistakable; his metre broad shoulders and six-foot-six height too familiar to
be any other person.  When she was little, she used to call him the B.F.G,
after the big friendly giant in her Roald Dahl books.   He was her protector
for so many years, and as he would snuggle up next to her, his big oversized
giant hand stroking her childish body and the prickly stubble that had grown by
the end of a long day, leaving a red rash across her cheek, he would stay next
to her until she slept. It was many years since he had made her feel safe; it
was many years since she had felt more than an obligatory connection to call
once every couple of weeks, and many more since she had last felt like the six
year old girl who craved to be at his side in the shadow of his imposing
physique, her little chubby arms wrapped around his leg.  She had always been a
daddy’s girl.  Now, as he approached her, flicking his hands in front of his
face as the wall of heat hit him, his body completely blocked out any of the
sunlight that was pouring through the doors as he stood before her.  Elizabeth
sat motionless, waiting for him to say something.  Too much time had passed
since they had seen each other, and too many awful things had happened that had
destroyed part of them both, and they no longer had the easy going reunion that
should permeate a meeting of father and daughter.

“Elizabeth. 
What’s going on?  You barely made any sense over the telephone.”  His well
educated accent still intimated to his affluent past of boarding school
elocution lessons, the mark of the upper middle class family from which he
came.  Elizabeth could recall many visits to her grandparents’ home; it was the
kind of building that either intimidates or excites a child.  Their own home
was big and she, if she had wanted to, could get lost in it for a whole day
without having to see another person, or explain what she was doing to her
parents.  But her grandparents’ place - well, that was something else.  It was a
huge, ornate Victorian property with more land than house, and a river flowing
at the bottom of the garden which kept out unwanted ramblers.  On Saturday
afternoons, after they had been presented to their grandparents, fully
inspected and
stamped
with their seal of
approval or disapproval, a man in a black and white suit, whom they always
called ‘The Penguin’, would waddle them through into a small playroom towards
the back of the house.  They would pass through several doors, the ceilings
slowly tapering lower and lower, and the corridors narrower and narrower until
the small room, stuffed with toys, came into view.  As small girls, Rebecca and
Elizabeth loved the adventure of having their own playroom, but as they grew
older and the toys became more and more redundant, the visits to the grand old
house and the need to stay away from view, confined to their outgrown playroom,
became more and more of a chore. 

“Daddy, it’s
Rebecca.”  Her face grew tighter and she could see that she had already angered
him.

“Elizabeth,
really, how many times do we have to go over this?  You have dragged me down
here for all this nonsense!” His jaw was set tight, the tension contorting his
shoulders so that they hunched together, his neck disappearing within them. 
There was a time that Elizabeth would have been able to convince him of
anything;  there was a time that the only words he had for her were mild soothing
words that fluttered into her ears like the angels in the stories he would tell
her before she slept.  There was a time, when he always believed her, and she
him.  Now, with a dead mother and wife, and a dead daughter and sister between
them, the void was too deep an abyss to bridge.  There was no place for angels
anymore.

“Daddy, you
don’t have to believe me.  We are identifying her body in an hour.”

He sat down
next to her, his legs and arms spilling over the plastic seats.  He neatly
folded and placed his jacket on the seat next to him, taking out his
handkerchief and dabbing at the beads of sweat from his brow and then his neck
in the respectable way he had learnt to do so when he lived in that big old
house.  She could see from the way he regarded their surroundings and the disdain
with which he looked upon the other people in the waiting room - people that Elizabeth
had barely noticed - that he felt that he didn’t belong there.  He looked as if
he was trying to smell the air around him, his nose twitching at the rate of a
rabbit’s.  Elizabeth sat next to him in silence, as she had done so as a child,
when she knew that she had his disapproval and desperately wanted his
forgiveness for whatever misdemeanour it was that she had committed.  He was
breathing deeply as he sat there quietly trying to process his daughter’s
words.  He was continuing to sweat, and she wondered why he still insisted on
dressing for autumn when it was clearly the height of the warmest summer
recorded in the last fifty years.

“I have to ask
you, Elizabeth.”  He didn’t turn to look at her, although she was staring
directly and expectantly at him.  “For what reason are you so convinced that
this woman that we will be viewing is Rebecca?  Do you not remember that we
went to her funeral?”

She wanted to
scream at him: “W
e never buried anything!” 
She wanted to scream: “
I
have already seen her face, dead as anything lying there on a beach, looking
just like a dead version of me!” 
She said neither of these things.  Anger
was not the best way to deal with her father.  She had learned this on
countless unforgettable occasions as a teenager, sitting beside him, waiting
for absolution many times before.  Her own anger had always prolonged her
agony.

“She sent me
the letters in the paper, Daddy.  They were from her.  The police believe me.”

“Well,
everybody knows that the police can make mistakes.  My daughter died four years
ago.”  As he mopped his sweaty brow for the third time in as many minutes, his
handkerchief saturated in sweat, she knew that there was little point in continuing
her case.  He rested his head back against the wall, his hands resting on his
knees.  He had decided that whatever they saw today, he wouldn’t believe it. 
In his mind, the truth was set.  Finalised.  There was nothing that would sway
him.  She was on her own.

Detective Jack
Fraser came through the double doors, his hand held out in deference to the
imposing statue of a man before him.   Edward Jackson grabbed the outstretched
offering of Jack Fraser with his giant hand and firm grip.  “Detective, I am
sorry, but I believe we are wasting your time.”  He shook the detective’s hand
vigorously.  “My daughter, you see, has never really accepted the loss of her
sister.”  They were both looking at Elizabeth now.  She considered the fight; she
considered what it would be like to become another one of the bickering
families or couples in the waiting room of the police station, who dragged up
their messy lives and purged out obscenities at one another in full view of the
world.  In truth, she would love to tell her father exactly what it was she
thought of him right now, and she was sure that the watching crowd would love
to see it too.  They were watching them intently, as if they could sense the
education, the money, and the grandeur of the lives that they lived when not
confined to the police reception area.  Instead, she kept her mouth tightly
shut, as she chewed on the inside of her top lip. 

“Well,” said
Jack Fraser, “I’m sorry, but that is probably with very good reason.”  He was
on her side.  He was her back up.  “Before we go over anything, or discuss in
any further detail, I need a positive identification.”  He had already prepped
Elizabeth.  She knew what they were about to do, and so she made her way out of
the front door into the sunlight, so bright it almost blinded her.  She walked
calmly, yet with conviction, each step a confirmation that she was doing the
right thing.  The sunlight was strong on her face, and the heat prickled at the
damp surface of her skin.  She knew that they would be following her, but she
was just glad to get outside.  There was a very slight breeze coming from
behind the police station, and it flicked her blonde hair over her shoulders. 
She opened the door of Jack Fraser’s Explorer, the leather of the seat burning
her as she sat.  She was in the car and winding down the windows before the
others were even at the door.

As they drove
towards the mortuary, Jack Fraser spoke continuously.  He explained the white
cloths draped over and underneath the body.  He explained the stained glass
window.  He explained that there would only be one other person in the room besides
them.  He explained how only one of them needed to identify the body. 
Elizabeth already knew that it would be her.  As they pulled up outside of the
small brown building, it looked more like a cheap home, built somewhere on an
estate:  rows and rows of identical houses all lined up together.  Yet it stood
alone, surrounded in trees in some sort of man-made arboretum which made her
think of her grandparents’ house again.  ‘
Come and catch me Betty!’
  The
words raced through her mind, as the image of two girls charging towards the
billowing river, the noise of it almost drowning out Rebecca’s words, lit up in
her memory.  Elizabeth closed her eyes tightly, replacing the miserable brown
home of the dead that stood before her with the image of her sister, a living
eight year old running along in front of her, with straw-yellow pigtails and
ruby red ribbons flapping behind her as she ran through the grounds of the
Victorian house.  As Elizabeth braced her little chin against her chest to
confront the forthcoming winds, and sprang her legs into action, she raced
after her sister and promised herself at that moment that she would always
follow her, no matter where it was that she went.  Today was no time to back
down from that promise as the unexpected smell of incense filled her nostrils,
almost making her gag. 

“Are you
ready?”  Jack Fraser looked at them both, as they stood before a very solid
looking door.  The small metal plate, brass with engraved letters stood before
them. 

‘Viewing
room’.

 
Jack Fraser pushed open the
door, holding it firm to the side to let Elizabeth pass, and she felt him come
in immediately behind her.  It was cool in the room, and she could hear the air
conditioner whirling away above her.  There was a bible on the table and other
books that she didn’t recognise, for denominations of faiths to which she
didn’t belong.  There were decorative flowers that stood on ornate candelabras
either side of the table that was covered by a brilliant white sheet.  There
was a form underneath the sheet, just as Jack had explained.  As she stepped
into the room and closer to the sheet covered lump the smell of incense grew
stronger, a heady mixture combined with the fresh flowers.  The sheet was fine,
much more silken than the idea that she had in her head, from endless police
and hospital shows that played out on the television.  She used to love those
shows, but she doubted that watching them would ever have the same draw again. 
It was heavy too, and it clung to the features of the corpse’s face.  She could
already see the nose and chin; the mouth looked hollow, like it had dropped
open slightly.  It didn’t look like Rebecca; the profile was different. 

“I’m going to
pull back the sheet, briefly,” said Jack Fraser.  “I just need you to give me a
‘yes’, or a ‘no’, like we talked about.  OK?”  His words were softer than
before, but programmed.  He had done this a hundred times before, she assumed. 
He was used to seeing dead bodies.  More than she could ever realise.