Escaping Life (27 page)

She could see
that as promised, Graham was already home, his car parked in the new driveway
out of the glare of the sunshine.  She didn’t open the front door.  She always
preferred to walk around the back of the house, and take a glimpse of the Bay
of Haven as it lay below her cliff top garden, the very view that first offered
her the solace that she had been searching for that day, sat on the far cliff
top bench.  Graham was in the kitchen, filling the kettle with water as she
opened the back door.  If ever he heard or saw her coming in when he was
already at home, he would start making her a cup of tea.  Graham had lots of
these small quirks and habits that made her love him so much:  he would
regularly subscribe her to magazines without asking her, be it for the garden
or for her home computing business.  Once, he had subscribed her for ‘Runner’
Magazine; she had had no idea why when she had first opened the package, but
then, according to Graham, she had mentioned one dinner time over a bottle of
wine with David and Helen that she fancied starting running.  He had been
straight on to it the next day, ordering her six months of ‘Runner’ Magazine. 
There were still six ‘Runner’ magazines in the magazine basket in the bathroom,
still pristine, only their covers flicked through when a guest came to stay. 
He always had to pass a small garden centre on the way back from the city, but
he never brought her flowers.  Instead, he would bring seedlings, planted in
small biodegradable pots that could be dug straight into the ground:  chilli peppers
and bell peppers, or lettuce and other salad fare.  Once he had even had blueberry
seedlings flow
n
in from America, but they
had never really amounted to anything having been battered by the high south
coastal winds.

He placed the
kettle on its base, and walked directly towards Elizabeth.  He didn’t say
anything at first; he just cupped her face in his hands, breathed a huge sigh
that said ‘you’re home’, and pulled her in close to him.  It was as his breath brushed
past her ear that she heard him utter the words, ‘I’ve missed you’.

“I’ve missed
you too.  It’s good to be back.”

“Tea?”  She did
want tea, but the first thing she wanted was a shower.

“Just give me
five minutes in the shower.  I feel filthy.”

The bathroom
was one of her favourite rooms of the house.  It was one of the rooms that they
had both paid special attention to, and the results had been the cumulative
effect of a series of arguments.  Elizabeth had planned a coastal themed
bathroom, blue with foraged wood and shells scattered about.  The lack of
enthusiasm for her suggestion was clear on Graham’s face, who had been hoping
to create a much more masculine retreat; dark tiles with a wet room at one end
of the unnecessarily and unexpectedly large cottage bathroom.  Finally, they
had settled on a perfectly white bathroom, a mix of traditional and new, and it
was the cleanest and shiniest place in their house.  Neither could deny their
own ideas would have resulted in an inferior result.  They had hung a large
mirror on one wall, a head to toe mirror ideal for a myriad of uses.  As she
stood before it now, her clothes kicked into a small pile on the perfectly
white floor, she looked at the tired face in the mirror.  Her body looked
young, but in the last week her face had begun to look tired and drawn.  She
had dark circles under her eyes, and her usually sleek blonde hair was a knotty
and frizzy mess like the ropes that hung from the fishing boats.  She was the
same age now as Rebecca had been when she had disappeared.  The face in the
reflection, drawn and breaking under the strain of events, looked not too dissimilar
to Rebecca’s on the night she had chosen to leave their world.  Elizabeth had
been haunted by that face, and every time that she had looked in the mirror,
her same green eyes would look back at her, taunting her, telling her how she
had let her down and how she had abandoned her.  After her disappearance, she
had stopped looking in the mirror altogether for over six months, her own face
too painful a reminder of that which she had lost.  This mirror was an act of defiance:
 she had put it there to force herself to look at her own face again, adamant
that she would not carry the same old burdens into this new life and to this
new place.

She thought
about Barry as she showered.  She thought about him sat in his perfectly
cleaned apartment with the smell of wet rotten wood outside, and surrounded by
chaos and crime.  He seemed like a good man.  She didn’t know why Rebecca had
trusted him, but if she chose to believe what he told her, he seemed to have been
the closest thing that Rebecca had had to a friend for the last four years.  He
had said so many things that she didn’t reconcile with her sister;   the way
she lived a solitary life, with no solid connections to anybody else, not even
Barry;  her fantasy life regarding visits to see her family, herself and their
father;  her final moments with Barry and her advice to never choose to be alone. 
Her body ached;   she was so tired, yet the last thing she could think of doing
was sleeping.

She curled her
feet up underneath her legs, her oversized man’s T shirt from the nineteen
eighty-four Los Angeles Olympic games, spilling over her hips and the shoulders
creeping down over her own.  Graham’s father had brought him a larger than
necessary size, so that he could still wear it as an adult.  When he could
retrieve it from Elizabeth’s clutches, he still did.  She sipped her tea, as
Graham sat down next to her, his body turned into hers just as she had sat next
to Barry earlier on in the day.  She told him in bullet point form about the
trip to the police station, the photographs and the findings from the scene. 
She told him about her afternoon, and how she had wandered aimlessly through
the streets of Chesterwood, until she had realised that the sun had set, and
she had nowhere to stay, and had taken up overnight residence in a twenty-four
hour coffee shop.  The trip to the beach, the bus station, Barry, his flat, and
then the key.  She had learned to tell her stories with the necessary facts and
statistics, and to leave the emotions until the account of what had happened
had been delivered.  With many years of her life spent with a lawyer, she had learned
how to tell a story properly, and how to win an impossible argument.

“So who is this
guy?  He’s the only connection they have?  What are the police doing?”  Graham
shook his head in a mixture of annoyance and disbelief, letting out a big sigh
of exasperation.  “Bloody useless.”  She didn’t want to argue with him, and she
was surprised to feel a sense of protectiveness towards Jack Fraser.  She
couldn’t help but think of his dead wife and son. 

“Detective
Fraser is good.”  She looked down at her tea.  “I think so, anyway.  He
understands.”  Graham wasn’t really listening to her.  He was already in ‘lawyer
mode’, as she called it, and was trying to argue a case he knew nothing about.

“I’m calling
David.  He was the one who argued that Rebecca had to be in the car.  He was
the one who disputed the insurance report.”  Graham was talking about the
report from the night of Rebecca’s crash.  It was David who had secured the
money from the insurers.  It was David who made the impossible possible.

“Why?”  She had
raised her voice more than she intended to.  Her tone was as sharp as a knife,
her mood hanging right on the tip of the blade, possible to go either way with
just the right push.  “What’s he going to do tonight?  He’s not a cop.  He’s a
lawyer.”

“Elizabeth,
this is not my area of knowledge.  I’m a corporate lawyer.  I deal with
business contracts, not death.  He will know what to expect.”  He had pushed
her.  He had pushed her the wrong way.

“What to expect?!” 
She was shouting at him now.  All she wanted to do was cuddle up with him.  She
didn’t want a row.  But she wouldn’t let this
go
.  “Don’t tell me what to expect. 
David told me she was dead.  ‘Dead as a fucking door nail, Lizzy’,” she blurted
out, thick with a mock Etonian accent.  “But she wasn’t.  She was alive
Graham!  Four years she has been alive!  The last time I saw her she was
scared.  Scared fucking shitless and all I did was slap her across the face!” 
Her right hand grabbed at her face, smothering her mouth and nose, eyes,
buckling up as they filled with tears.  Graham put down the receiver of the
phone which was already in his hand, and walked back over to Elizabeth.  He
crouched down before her, taking the tea from her hands.  He set it down on the
wooden floor board, knotted and crooked and brilliantly polished, and held her
hands in between his own.

“I’m sorry. 
You don’t need my bullshit tonight, right?”

“She was so
alone, Graham.  Four years, with nobody but a man at the bus station.”  She
wiped away the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand that she had slipped
out of his grip.  “What could make her disappear like that?  I let her down so
much.”  He didn’t answer her.  She didn’t need any of his answers.  All she
needed was him at her side, and he realised that now. 

“Your father
called.  He said he had come home yesterday, that he didn’t stay.  He wants to
organise the funeral as quickly as possible.  He says he needs it to be over.”

In truth,
that’s what she wanted too.  If she could just go to a funeral, bury her sister
and say that finally it was over, she would.  But she knew she couldn’t.  She
knew that it wasn’t just going to go away this time.  She knew this time that
she couldn’t hide away in sleepy little Haven and pretend that everything was
alright in the world.  She had already decided that she needed to follow this
through to the end, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to let her father, David,
or Graham, force her into doing otherwise.  Rebecca, as far as Elizabeth could
see it, had killed herself twice.  The first time Elizabeth had let her down. 
To think of it was almost unbearable; to even contemplate letting that happen a
second time, was simply unimaginable.

She had called
five times before Edward Jackson finally picked up the telephone, and it was
late.  She had started to get worried.  He sounded out of breath.

“Daddy!  Where
have you been?” she asked, checking the watch that sat neatly on her wrist, the
one he had given her on her eighteenth birthday.  A ‘Swatch’ watch, too colourful
and immature for her now.  “It’s eleven o’clock”.

“I have been
out Elizabeth.  When did you get back, because I spoke to Graham earlier on in
the day and you were still in Chesterwood?  Listen,” he began, his usual way of
speaking at such a rate and with subjects strung together that made getting
your own point across an almost impossible task.  “Graham and I spoke and we
decided that it is best to have the funeral as soon as possible.  I will travel
to Haven this weekend and we can discuss the arrangements.”  She had heard
statements like this before.  Her father was a colluder.  He would string
people into his own judgments and decisions, making it sound entirely plausible
that there has been a mutual agreement.   She didn’t doubt for a moment that
Graham hadn’t suggested an early funeral.  Graham understood the importance of
the truth, and of mourning Rebecca for a second time.  What she had never been
able to understand, was how her own father seemingly didn’t.  He had been the
one who had pushed for the initial funeral, against her wishes.  She wouldn’t
let it happen a second time.

“Daddy, just
wait a minute.”  Her tone was firm.  He wasn’t used to hearing her speak this
way to him, and four years ago she never would have, but the distance that had
drifted in between them over the last four years made for different allowances. 
She knew that his distance and his conclusive way of thinking was just a way of
coping, his own private strategy.  But it wasn’t hers, and he wouldn’t impose
it on her.  Not again.  “Rebecca is in the mortuary.  Nobody is burying anybody
else until the police tell us so.  They are still investigating what has
happened.  So stop talking about the funeral.”  She wanted to add in that if he
had stayed a bit longer, if he hadn’t been so quick to step out of the police
station and back into his overly flashy and inappropriately expensive car, then
he might know that.  She was angry with him.  Not just because of the last
twenty four hours, either.  Her anger towards her father had grown steadily
throughout the last four years, fuelled by his absence in her life.  She felt
orphaned by him, yet still loved him the same as when she was a five year old
girl, when he would balance her up on his feet and hands whilst he laid on his
back and she pretended to fly.  She had fallen once, and she still had a little
scar on the top of her forehead where she had crashed into the corner of the
coffee table.  There had been torrents of blood, and Elizabeth and Rebecca had
heard their mother screaming blue murder at their father that night.  Rebecca
had said
, ‘That’s it.  You’ve really done it this time.  You have got him in
so much trouble
’ laying all the blame squarely at Elizabeth’s feet.  She
was always looking for a way to make Elizabeth feel bad when it came to their
father.  They had been forbidden from playing that game again, so they had taken
to playing it only when they were alone.  They formed their own club, of which
not even Rebecca was a part.  There was a different kind of bond between
Elizabeth and her father; one that for some reason, Rebecca had never shared. 
It had stayed with them
throughout
her childhood, but had slowly disintegrated by the time she was an adult, until
one day it just disappeared.
 
That day when somebody was strangled and the whole world changed.