Escaping Life

by Michelle Muckley

  “She stared at me a lot. She didn’t stop staring at me.” Now it was Elizabeth staring suspiciously at Barry through squinted eyes and it was making him more uncomfortable. It was like being watched by a ghost. What did he mean by that? “It was a soft look, but she stared at me constantly.”

  “Why?” Jack wasn’t sure that there was anything else to be gleaned from this conversation. Barry just seemed to be just like any of the other losers he stumbled upon in his enquiries. Just another poor dumb fool who got dragged into a situation that he knew nothing about.

  “I asked her the same thing. I asked her, why do you keep looking at me? At me. I am not stupid,” he held out his palm, hot and sweaty and gleaming under the bright artificial light. He pointed towards Elizabeth, “She was beautiful, like you.” For Barry, it was as if Rebecca was back in his life, sat here on his settee in front of him. How he had longed to have Rebecca in his home; how he had longed for her to be more than a companion with whom he shared a weekly coffee, yet he had always been too ashamed of himself and his life to even think about inviting her to share it with him. “I pulled up, where she asked me to. I was about to get out of the car, you know, to open her door, and she grabbed my arm. Not strong, just with a certainty that stopped me. She looked at me, right in the eye. Then she kissed me. I wasn’t expecting it, but she kissed me, right on the lips. And properly.”

  “She kissed you?” Elizabeth couldn’t comprehend what she was hearing. The Rebecca that she knew wouldn’t have kissed the man sat before her. She wouldn’t have looked at him twice.

  “I know it seems hard to believe,” he said with the same defeat and the same sense of shame of who he was creeping back over him even as he relived the happiest memory of his life. “She kissed me, maybe ten seconds or so and then said to me, ‘Never choose to be alone, Barry’. She touched my face, the softest touch. Then she got out of the car and left. That was the last time I saw her.”

  “What does that mean?” Elizabeth was looking at Jack. “Never choose to be alone?”

  “Elizabeth, your sister chose to be alone. Our job,” he stopped before correcting himself, “my job, is to work out why.” He turned to Barry. “What else do you know about her? When did you meet her?”

  “About four years ago. She was always in the bus station, and she had the kind of face you remember.” They both looked at Elizabeth who averted her eyes awkwardly. “I was always working on a Saturday, and we just got chatting. I never saw her anywhere else. When she asked me to take her somewhere, you know, out of routine, I liked it ‘cos I thought maybe we would end up being better friends.”

  “You don’t know anything else about her life?” Jack could barely believe that you could pass through four years of life with somebody but know hardly anything about them.

  Barry shook his head. “I don’t even know where she lives.” He shrugged his shoulders, realising that once again he had proven to be somewhat useless.

  “You don’t mind if I take a look around?” Jack had no idea what it was that he was hoping to find. But he wanted to test Barry; he wanted to know that he wasn’t hiding anything.

  “Please, help yourself. But try not to make a mess.”

  For a few minutes, their silence was broken only by the noises coming from the other rooms as Jack searched the house. They could hear the rattle of drawers and the rustle of paperwork. Elizabeth was watching Barry out of the corner of her eye. He didn’t look uncomfortable anymore. He didn’t look harassed at the thought of the house search. He could have prevented it if he had wanted to. She was certain that he wasn’t hiding anything.

  “I’m sorry that I mistook you for Rebecca.” As she turned to see the warm and open face, red-cheeked and generous, she couldn’t help but in some way feel glad that Rebecca had spent her final moments with somebody who seemed so genuine. She stood up and approached his chair. She pulled up a dining chair that was tucked under the table. Barry looked back at her; his eyes wide with worry at what she might do or say, not expecting her to come near him. She sat down next to him, resting her hand on his forearm. He thought how similar her hands and her touch were to that of Rebecca and for a second he was back in his car, just moments from the kiss of his life.

  “It’s OK.” She smiled at him, turning her knees into his legs a little. “You knew about me, didn’t you? She told you that she had a sister.” He nodded. “What did she tell you?”

  He thought back to the countless Saturdays when they had sat drinking hot tasteless coffee together. He had always made two coffees from the machine at the back of the staff room and they would sit and drink them together. The first time he had seen her he hadn’t dared speak to her. Then, after she had begun going there virtually every Saturday, he had snatched at just a snippet of courage, just ten seconds of it, in order to walk up to her. She had always mentioned her sister.

  “She told me that she had a little sister, that that was who she went to see.” Elizabeth gently shook her head in disbelief, her eyes closing under the weight of his words.

  “But she never came to see me. I haven’t seen her for four years. I thought she was dead!” His face scrunched up as if he had eaten sour fruit, bitter on the tip of his tongue.

  “She always said that was where she was going. To see you. She always had a ticket. She always got on the bus. She told me things you did together.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “She told me that she came to the city. You would go out somewhere together, eat, have a drink. Normal stuff.”

  “This is all just fantasy! I haven’t seen her in years!” She could see the uncertainty in his eyes. He had four years of memories, all of which, in the light of Elizabeth’s reality, made no sense. Four years of lies? He searched through his mind, flicking the images back and forth as he searched for something with substance; something that could be cross-referenced; something real.

  “But you moved, right? You left the city. She didn’t see you for a while then.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She told me. She stopped coming to the bus station for a while. Then one day I saw her again, I remember it because she looked ill. White as a ghost. I asked her if she was OK. I asked her what was wrong. She wouldn’t talk about it. She just walked straight past me.” Elizabeth was almost sat on top of his legs, not breathing, waiting for him to speak like a child waiting at story time. “The next week she told me she had seen your father and that he had told her where you had moved to. She apologised for not talking to me the week before. She said that they didn’t get along. I didn’t really understand it all. It didn’t make much sense to me.”

  “Who didn’t get on?” None of this was making any sense to Elizabeth either.

  “Rebecca and your father. At least, that’s what I thought she meant. Then she was coming to see you again. Where was it she used to go? I don’t remember.” Before she could answer or ask him anything else, Jack came back into the room. He stood motionless in the doorway to the living room. He was holding something in his hands, holding it up for Barry to see. At first Elizabeth couldn’t see what it was. It was small and brown, swallowed up in his hands. He was looking directly at Barry.

  “What’s this for?” He was holding it up now. Elizabeth could see the form. It was familiar in shape and size and colour; small and golden brown, the jagged edge sharp enough to cut your fingers if you weren’t careful. The handle was the same familiar crown shape that she had imprinted in her mind. All it needed to complete the picture was a plastic bag around it, and to be clutched inside the dead hand of her sister.

  “It’s for work,” Barry said, surprised at Jack’s interest. “It’s the key for my locker.”

  “At the bus station?” Elizabeth was already up and out of her seat. She knew where they were going.

  “Yes. There’s a wall of lockers. People can use them to deposit things in, that they don’t want to take with them. All staff have one.”

  They stood there in the doorway, B
arry still sitting and unaware of the significance of the key. “You need to show us your locker,” Jack said. Elizabeth knew that the next of Rebecca’s clues was no more than a car journey away from being solved. She was already out of both doors and waiting for them outside at Jack’s truck by the time Barry was rising from the settee.

  .

  Twenty two

  There was a nervous tension in the car so thick that it was impossible to outrun. No matter how fast they drove to the police station, and no matter how quickly Jack Fraser ran in to the station to pick up the other almost identical key, it was a cloud that clung to the car like mist to the early morning winter ground. It filled the car, swirling around like an obscuring mist. Even leaving the windows open to let in the refreshing summer breeze did little to shift it. Elizabeth was poised, ready to run. She was holding the plastic bag between her hands, fiddling it around, feeling the object that her sister had placed here in this moment for her, and every muscle in her body was on red alert, ready to swing into action, her adrenaline chasing around her body like fuel to a fire.

  Elizabeth couldn’t hear the words clearly; her mind too shut down and focused for external stimuli, distracted by the single most important task of its life. Yet she knew that through the whole journey, Jack had been trying to explain to Barry the significance of his find. As he looked into his rear view mirror, Jack didn’t know if it was excitement or stress, or a mixture of the two emotions that graced Barry’s chubby little face. Jack would bet his next paycheque on the fact that Barry had never been involved in any sort of police investigation and thought that he probably found it all rather exciting; something like standing on the precipice of an open aeroplane door, the patchwork of fields below spinning and dancing around to entice you out of the aeroplane, with your only hope of survival a small pack on your back. The excitement and will are there, yet the apprehension that the little backpack is the only thing between you and the call of death is difficult to shake.

  As they pulled up outside the bus station for the second time that day, all three of them burst out of the car like bullets from a gun, racing towards the side wall tucked away behind the telephones where Barry had described the lockers to be. They charged through the station, past the ticket offices and cafes, and hordes of people underneath the twinkling lights of destination and arrival boards. As they ran, pushing past the crowds of people, Elizabeth was already ripping open the plastic bag, not a second to lose. No time to waste. The key had no number on it, so she thrust the sharp point into the first closed locker. As she did so, before she could try to turn the key, she felt the warm, strong grip of Jack’s hands clasp over hers. His hands were strong, and she immediately thought about him as a young officer, straight from training, having to handle himself on the streets and in fights. He looked as if he could handle himself, and she had no doubt that those hands could tell a story or two about the things that they had seen and done. Right now, all his years and all of his experience rested on her hands, stopping her in the strongest and yet gentlest of ways. She couldn’t help but think of his son, Joshua, and how he would have cradled him so tight and so protectively.

  “Wait,” he said, gasping for breath from trying to catch up with her, light-speed quick across the station floor. “We don’t know what we are going to find. Give me the key.” There were several eyes upon them now, attention drawn by the commotion that they had spread; the quick nimble blonde, swift as a gazelle springing her way across the ground, followed by the cop, and trailing behind, a shorter tubby guy, waddling rather than running as he tried to keep up with his pack. She didn’t want to let go. She wanted to cling to the precious connection, the key that Rebecca had left. For her. “Give me the key, Elizabeth.” His words were firmer now, and he held her hands as she slipped them away. His hands followed hers, resting them down by her sides. She nodded her acceptance; her approval at his approach. She had, in a very short space of time, come to trust him. The key was already in the first locker. All three of them held their breath as Jack held onto the key and tried to turn it. Nothing; it wouldn’t budge. He pulled out the key and moved towards the next locked locker. Still nothing. He pulled and pushed the key into at least twenty more lockers before the key finally turned. They were all used to the key staying put, so that when the spring inside the locker popped the door open enough to allow Jack to get his fingers inside, but not enough to show the contents, they all stood motionless. Elizabeth was first to make the slightest of movements towards the locker before Jack brought his hand up in front of her, his eyes fixed on the open door. He scrambled around with his hands on his belt, lifting from it a small torch. Flicking on the switch, he shone the beam into the recesses of the locker, like a searchlight deployed to illuminate a wartime operation. He moved it about back and forth, swivelling it around inside the open crack of the locker. Barry and Elizabeth were waiting at his side, eager and itching to see the contents retrieved.

  “Come on! Come on!” she urged. “What’s inside there?”

  Certain in his own mind that it was safe to do so, he peeled open the door, carefully trying not to touch anything with his hands. He placed his own hand into a small plastic evidence bag, and then reached inside to pick up the contents of the locker. He shuffled the sides of the plastic bag up and slowly brought it out into the light. A key.

  “Another key! Another key!!” Elizabeth tipped her head back in disbelief at the continuing cryptic nature of what she was beginning to see as the most sadistic of treasure hunts. “Why can’t she just tell me something? Why can’t she just give me some answers?”

  “She is, Elizabeth,” said Jack calmly, as he sealed up the plastic bag. He picked up his mobile phone and made a call. Elizabeth wasn’t listening. She stood with her back to the lockers, her fingers running through her hair, the look of exasperation etched into every wrinkle on her face. She had built herself up, steeled herself for this moment of discovery. In her mind, this moment was supposed to reveal all the answers, the locker nothing less than the veritable Pandora’s Box, but filled with hope and love left as a message from a dead sister. Instead, she found nothing but a metal key, and already it was sealed up as another bag of evidence. Jack was already on the telephone, calling the find into the station. Soon this place would be swarming with cops. A new Scene. Barry stood next to Elizabeth, willing Jack to finish his telephone call. He had no idea what to do or say. He watched the beautiful woman stood next to him and as she smudged away the sweat from her tired face, he thought about the woman with whom he had shared so many coffees and so many empty conversations. Rebecca had been, in reality, his only friend, yet it seemed he hardly knew her. He had been sitting with her for several years, drinking free cups of coffee and listening as she told him stories about her life. It was as he saw the woman before him, her head rested against the cold metal doors, her hair crumpled up and messy with confusion, that he realised that it wasn’t Rebecca that he knew at all. It wasn’t Rebecca that had lived in the city; it wasn’t Rebecca who had chosen to live in a small fishing village and sit on the harbour wall eating ice creams; it wasn’t Rebecca who had married the tall, handsome lawyer. The only life he knew of belonged to Elizabeth. He didn’t know the one person he called a friend at all. He was desperately searching for words of comfort to offer her. He searched his mind, stringing together imaginary sentences and sounding them out inside his head to see what capacity for comfort they might provide. He couldn’t find the right words. He didn’t know what to say. After all, he might know her as much as Rebecca had permitted him to, but she didn’t know him in the slightest.

  “Listen, you two.” Jack was staring at them both. He was back in tough mode, the edgy exterior of the cop that Elizabeth had first met, his shoulders set and his brow arching in. “There’s a team on the way to fingerprint this area. Barry,” he looked directly into his eyes, “I need you to do something for me. I need you to get your boss down here. This whole place, this whole area,” he waved his hands around to indi
cate the area around the lockers, “this needs to be shut down. It’s out of action. It’s ours now. OK?” Barry nodded, setting his mind to carry out the important tasks delegated to him. “Good. Off you go.” Barry shuffled away, the same hurried waddle that almost functioned as a run, eager to play his role in the police work.

  “What do we do now?” Elizabeth asked, her head still resting against the locker doors. “Where do we go from here?” He stepped in closer and for a moment, in any other situation, she would have thought he was about to kiss her. He rested both hands on her shoulders, the small plastic bag containing the key still clutched in between his fingers.

  “You go home. Back to Haven, just as you planned.” She opened her mouth, her protest already formulated in her mind. “I don’t want to hear ‘No’. Come on. I need to do my job. And like you said, you have a husband, a father. They need you too.” All day he had thought her beautiful, since the moment the sun rose and the light rays shot through her fine shiny hair that morning at the beach. Her green eyes like olives, her hair a golden crown. In her darkest and most vulnerable moment yet, her eyes and lips quivering under the weight of impending tears, she had never looked more stunning. “I’ll call you as soon as I have something. I promise you, OK?”

  She heard the sirens of the other police cars arriving as she sat waiting for her bus back to Haven. She thought about them fencing off the area with the same blue and white tape that they had used at the beach. She thought about the people who would be bustling at its edge, trying to get a look at the scene of the crime. The couple sat next to her on the bench had had their attention spiked. They were stretching up, like meercats, their necks elongated and eager to see what was happening, but their interest was no more than a passing thought, and they soon returned to their crosswords and magazines. Elizabeth called Graham at work, and told him that she would be home that evening when he returned. He promised that he would be home early too, desperate to see her and hear the developments of her trip to Chesterwood. She had missed his voice and it was good to think of being sat with him, in the sanctuary of their garden, surrounded by the aromatic plants and busy insects conducting their work in the fading light of the day. She tried to shut out the sounds of the bus station, and the commotion of the police. She put to the back of her mind the keys and clues and friends of her sister’s that she had never known or had ever imagined. She encased the thoughts of her sister’s weekly visits that she had never been a part of, deep into the depths of her mind. There were still four years of mystery life that she couldn’t understand, yet all Elizabeth craved was the security of her own.