Escaping Life (35 page)

“And then you
get to this one.”  He pointed out the name from the oldest dated newspaper
clipping.  “Alice Jackson.  Look whose name is next to it, Boss
.
”

Graham had
called out to Edward as he sat in the garden smoking.  He either hadn’t heard
him, or he had chosen to ignore him, like the ignorant sod that he knew he
could be.  Their relationship had always been a bit difficult, and with the
exception of his honest desire to try to help him and Elizabeth come through this
mess, having him here was starting to grip his muscles and every tendon in his
body every time he was around Edward.  Graham would always remember the first
time that they’d met:  Edward had barely spoken, other than to raise his
sarcastic concerns that a man in his thirties had surely grown out of dating
girls fresh out of university, but Graham figured that the youngest child would
always be a father’s baby, and he tried to cut him some slack for this.  As he
pulled out of the driveway, he coasted in neutral down to the road that would
lead him around the bay and up towards the long winding country lane that would
eventually join the larger roads, like capillaries leading to a vein and which
would take him directly into the heart of the city.   He took one final glance
in his rear view mirror, and whispered his usual silent goodbye to Elizabeth as
he left the village of Haven and their cottage behind. 

Elizabeth had made
the decision that the best way forward for her was to keep busy.  By ten
o’clock she had already cleaned the bathroom, including a wall of tiles that no
matter how small the cottage was seemed an endless task, like the painting of
the Forth Bridge.  She had emptied the cupboards:  the shelves had been cleaned
and the towels all returned into neat little piles of differing heights, like a
virtual city skyline.  Her efforts had moved through to the bedroom, where the
open window was still letting the trails of cigarette smoke from the garden
below creep in.  She closed the window that faced the garden and opened the
other side that faced out onto the village and the hills behind her.  She
pulled the sheets from the bed and a small scattering of dust rose into the air,
like the first flurries of snow that would in a few months be falling on the
bay before her.  Winter, she thought, was a beautiful sight from her hilltop
garden.  It was too cold to sit out there, and the wind battered the walls of
her cottage like the northern face of a towering Himalayan summit.  As this
weather front would invariably hit her home with the full force of an army, and
the fog would creep in from the open ocean, crawling along the surface visibly
riding over the waves as it clung low and secretively to each broken ripple, it
would consume the whole of Haven.  If the snow fell heavily enough, they would
be cut off by road too and this had occurred a number of times over the last
few winters.  It had been at times like this that the weather had been a
fortress, designed to keep everybody out.  She had never realised how much she
cherished those times until today as the thoughts of winter came back to her,
and to her fresh mind.  She wondered if now she would find the same peace in
the isolation of it, knowing how isolation can destroy life, rather than protect
and heal it.

She had placed
the sheets from the bed in the washing machine and the gentle whirling and
sound of the water gurgling through the pipes, either being squirted in or
sucked out, was strangely meditative as she cleaned her way through the
cupboards in the kitchen.  She couldn’t shake the image from the corner of her
eye of her
f
ather still sitting in the
garden.  She had seen him move a few times.  He headed once over to the apple
tree that had failed to fruit this spring and early summer.  He had sat down again,
and then later headed over to the side of the garden by the fence, where only
the smallest barrier was there to obscure the path to the side of the cliff. 
The cliffs were maybe thirty metres high at the highest point just up the road
from the cottage and adjacent to the bench where she had first sat.  At the
level of the garden they were still well over twenty metres higher than sea
level, and occasionally she had sat on the edge to admire the crashing of the
waves below.  She had only done it a few times, never daring to continue the
habit in case her continued weight in the same spot somehow caused a weakened
fracture of the ground that was invisible to the naked eye.  One thing that she
knew was that she had no desire to die and she had even less intention of
sliding down the edge of these cliffs, never to be found again.  That’s when
they’d decided that they had to build a fence, and they had
barely
stepped over it since the
day it was erected.

With the
contents of the cupboards securely back in place, neatly stacked food placed in
rows and ordered by type and size:  pasta on one shelf, tins on another and so
on and so forth, she grabbed the washing basket from the under stairs cupboard. 
By the time the washing machine had stopped revolving and had begun impatiently
beeping at her, she was already crouched down next to it waiting.  She dragged
the bundle of sheets out of the machine, dropped them into the plastic basket
and braced herself ready to go outside.  She didn’t want to avoid her
f
ather, but she really didn’t feel that
she wanted to spend any time with him either. 

Propping the
blue basket against her hip and gripping it with the other hand, she opened the
French doors that led into the garden.

“Hey, Daddy.”

“Good morning
Elizabeth.”  His words felt like an announcement, not at all relaxed nor
welcoming.  “You have been a very busy girl today.  I hope you haven’t been
avoiding me.”

“Daddy?  Why
would I avoid you?”  She hoped that he couldn’t sense the lies.  She could feel
the knot in her throat that always came when she told a lie, and she replayed
her words over in her head to see how they might have sounded.

“Well, because
I have been very difficult to be around.  It took me quite some time and quite
a lot of these evil little friends of mine,” he motioned to the cigarettes, “in
order to find some clarity in all that has happened.”

“Of course it
did Daddy.  It would for any
body
.  Me too.”  She walked
over to the washing line which was a roller system that was hooked up between
the house and one of the large trees that bordered the far side of the garden. 
It was effective, but it essentially blocked out the whole view from the
garden.  She tried to use it only in the morning and late afternoons, the times
when she would normally be working at her desk inside.  She picked up the first
corner of sheet from the basket and pegged it to the line with a little red
plastic clip.  “To be honest, I had forgotten that you even used to smoke until
I saw you this week.”

“Yes.  I
assumed you had.”  She carried on hanging up the sheets, one by one clipping
the pegs onto the line.  He didn’t offer to help her, and she didn’t expect him
to either.  He had never been the handy type, or a husband who would chip in
with the washing up.  She thought that he had probably never even changed a
nappy in his life, even with two daughters.  She considered her last thought
over and over again. 
Yes, two daughters.
  It was still the right thing
to say.  She was pleased to have some sense of normality back with her
f
ather, as his depressive, immovable
mass in the garden had started to infect the rest of the house.  His sullen and
consistent silence had started to filter through the nooks and crannies, and
his rejection of the events of the last few days had been taking its toll on
both her and Graham.  At least with him talking, they would start to move on. 
As
a family again.

 “I’m making a
cup of tea.  Would you like one?”  Her face was both sympathetic and inviting. 
She wanted to sit with him now.  She wanted them to make the first steps to a
future; she wanted to make them together.  She noticed that her mobile was on
the table in front of her
f
ather.  She must have left
it out there the night before, when they had gone to bed and left him sitting
there.

“I left this
here last night?”  She looked at Edward, but he didn’t respond.  She pressed
the small silver button and the screen came alive, casting a glow onto her face
and highlighting her dark, sunken eyes.  Eight missed calls.  All from Jack. 
“Daddy, why didn’t you tell me it had been ringing?”  She didn’t care if he
heard the annoyance in her voice.  She wanted him to hear it.  She dialled Jack,
but she could already see the battery was flashing red.  Jack answered so
quickly it was as if he’d already had the phone in his hand.

“Elizabeth!  Where
are you?  Are you OK?”  There was a rush in his voice, and she heard it.  He
sounded panicked, or as if he was running.

“Jack
?
 
What’s wrong?  What’s the matter?” 
She heard the beep of the battery; it was about to give up on her.

“Elizabeth, who
is…….” then the phone went dead.  She brought it away from her ear quickly
enough to see the quick flash of the ‘goodbye’ message just before it shut
down.  Battery dead.

“That was weird
.
”  Her face contorted as she pondered
the strange and unnerving phone call.  In all the time she had known Jack, she
had never once heard him flustered.  To her, it was as if he walked around with
a constant air of que sera sera.  But not today.  “Daddy, you should have told
me the phone kept ringing.”  She took in a relaxing deep breath.  Her patience
was frayed and her words sounded tight, like a stretched elastic band.  She
suddenly felt the urge to go back inside and leave him out in the garden on his
own again, but she fought against it.  “Do you want that cup of tea?” she said
trying to sound as unperturbed as possible. He started to nod slowly, as if he
had considered a much more conspicuous offer, one with considerably more
conditions and issues than a simple drink with his daughter.

She filled the
kettle with water and set two cups down on the workspace.  She plugged in her
mobile phone and set it down.  It wouldn’t turn back on for at least another
couple of minutes. 
Long enough to make the tea,
she thought.  While she
waited for the kettle to boil, she placed her hands onto her neck, stretching it
back and forth to relive the tension from the morning of over-enthusiastic
cleaning.  The kettle jumped about on it
s
base, sending out jets of steam and water
droplets.  She heard the click as the boiling stopped and into both cups she
placed tea bags, filling the cups with the freshly boiled water.  She added the
milk and stirred them both, creating a ringing sound like cut crystal as the
metal of the spoon rang against the sides of the ceramic cups.  She pulled out
the tea bags and dropped them into the
old
ice cream tub that sat on the workspace
for this very reason.  Grabbing both cup handles she turned to walk back out into
the garden, when suddenly, she let out a yelp, the adrenaline of surprise surging
through her body, grabbing her and twisting her in an instant and terrifying
hit, the muscles of her body and hands tightening right up, sending the cups crashing
to the ground.  She hadn’t seen nor heard her
f
ather creep up behind her, but he was
now no more than half a metre away from her.  His full height towered over her
as she grabbed a roll of kitchen towel and began mopping up the spilt tea which
had scalded her bare feet as it had cascaded down like a waterfall, before
rising back up like the water in the ocean when broken by a huge stone thrown
from the beach.

“Daddy!  What
are you doing?  Look what you made me do!”  He wasn’t paying her any
attention.  He stood instead above her like a huge towering cliff face,
blocking out the light.  “What’s wrong with you?”  She was on her knees in
front of him.

“Don’t you ever
wonder why she chose that life, Elizabeth?  Don’t you think that it doesn’t
make sense?”

“What?  Rebecca?” 
We haven’t moved on at all
, she thought.  They were right back to square
one, at Rebecca’s miserable flat, her
f
ather
standing there in a daze.  Or even back at her parents’ kitchen, her
f
ather sat outside in an ambulance
talking constantly, but not making any discernible sound or coherent words.  Only
this time he was talking properly and his eyes were fixed on her, not staring
off into the unknown distance.  He was scaring her, and Elizabeth suddenly
thought of all the times that she had been sat like this, outside of that childhood
dining room door, listening as her
f
ather
had bellowed at Rebecca on the other side.  “Daddy, it will never make sense. 
There is nothing that can make it make sense.”

“But there is,
Elizabeth.”  She tried to get up, and he held out his hand.  At first, she
thought that he was trying to help her, but then she felt the full force of his
overpowering frame pressing against her shoulder and at the same time, feeling
the broken edges of the ceramic cups digging into her leg.  She let out another
cry, only weaker this time, her voice fraught with fear. 

“You’re hurting
me, stop it!”  She was starting to whimper, tears in her eyes and her heart
beating like the revolving coupling rods that held the wheels of a steam
locomotive together as it powered along at full speed.