“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.
“We have to move on now Elizabeth. It’s over.”
“Over? You’re delusional, Daddy!” Elizabeth gripped the telephone tighter. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Did you listen to anything whilst you were in Chesterwood? Rebecca was alive. Alive! Four years of life that we know nothing about!”
“It’s irrelevant, Elizabeth.” She could hear that he was starting to become irritated with her. There was a certain punctuation to his voice when he lost his temper, where every word sounded staccato, and the tone went down at the end of his words. It couldn’t have been any less of a question.
“It’s not irrelevant,” she begged. “You didn’t stick around long enough to find out. She had a whole life. Friends. We found something.” She knew that they didn’t yet know much about Rebecca’s life. But Barry had been the closest thing to a friend. She had to embellish the story a little. She had to make him see. “We found a key. It has to be for her house. We have to find her house.”
“Elizabeth!” He was shouting at her now, using the same exasperated tone as when she’d been a child. He’d rarely used to shout at her, but when he did it was deafening, and heart-breaking. Her ears would ring as his voice would open up and rip through the atmosphere. As a child, she would cower as he screamed at her, his booming voice instantly softer as he saw her big green eyes widen in terror. But she wasn’t the same child anymore, and he certainly wasn’t the same father. She was barely listening to him now, but Graham could hear him. He had heard him very clearly and he could see where this was going. The only result that he could predict, as he sat down on the arm of the chair next to her, was a full-on blazing row - the kind where the atmosphere left behind would cling on indefinitely, refusing to leave.
“We will find her house and then we can understand why she disappeared, and what she means by these letters she has been leaving me.” She didn’t hear his breathing bubbling up on the other end of the phone, ready to boil over. “She has been coming to see us. She didn’t forget ….”
“That’s enough!” She heard that same crippling voice that would have made her cower before him. “I won’t listen to your craziness anymore!”
“But Daddy.....”
“ENOUGH!” She stopped talking. They both stopped talking. She could feel herself putting each brick in place; the perfectly constructed wall between her own beliefs and her father’s, as she saw it, unwillingness to see the truth. He was hurt, she knew that. He hadn’t coped well. But it didn’t matter now. It was time to pick a team, and he’d picked the one that she wouldn’t play for. Without speaking, she replaced the receiver on its stand and felt Graham moving in to talk to her. It was a big chair next to the telephone table, and there was enough room for him to sit on the arm of the chair and swing his feet up onto the seat. He sat like this, facing his wife. He knew that she was aware of him, but he didn’t want to say the wrong thing. He wanted to choose his words carefully. At work, standing in his office with a client, or in a courtroom, this was easy. But with Elizabeth it was harder. He could and did say the wrong thing. It was Elizabeth who had taught him how to make mistakes.
He sat with his knees tucked underneath the crease of his elbow, as Jack had sat next to her on the beach that very morning. He could see that she was watching him from the corner of her eye, with her lips pressed shut, waiting for his verdict; his judgment.
“You said some pretty surprising stuff in that ‘phone call, Elizabeth.” His hands were clasped together, his thumb tapping at his sealed lips. “You said she had been visiting us. I don’t remember you telling me that before.”
She turned around to look at her husband. She could see from his pleading face that he was desperate for answers, yet desperately concerned at what he might hear. “That’s what Barry said.”
“Who’s Barry?” “The guy I told you about at the station, who met with her. He said that she visited us. That she used to come and see us. He knew about my life, and about Daddy. He knew stuff.” She could feel the heaviness of the tears forming in her eyes as she tried to prevent herself from blinking, desperate to hold herself together. “She trusted him”.
“You think she used to come here? To Haven? Elizabeth, we live in a small fishing village. Do you not think if there were two of you walking around, somebody wouldn’t have mentioned it? That they wouldn’t have noticed?” The ‘they’ to which he referred was the collective mass of Haven residents, solid in number and their hearts pulsing as if one. What one person in Haven knew, the rest of them knew. They moved and lived as a single being, even the reluctant ones dragged along by the collective pull of the mob. It was virtually impossible to consider that Rebecca could have come here without being mistaken for Elizabeth. It was even more unthinkable that Elizabeth wouldn’t have heard about it. Could she have been here? He didn’t think so. But what was possible, was that Rebecca lived in a fantasy land; one where four years of self-imposed loneliness created memories and events that somehow lessened the crushing sense of bewilderment that he was sure that she must have felt. He had to at least try to make her see this.
As they sank into the crumpled white sheets of the bed, unmade as always in Elizabeth’s absence, Graham dared to venture his thoughts.
“Elizabeth, I think Rebecca was sick. She lived for four years alone, for reasons yet we don’t understand. We have to try and let the police do their job. They will help us understand. I promise you.” He never made her promises that he couldn’t keep. “Talk to your father tomorrow. Calmly.” It was an instruction, rather than a suggestion, but one made out of love, not annoyance. “He needs you too.” She didn’t say anything. She just snuggled into his chest, her face cushioned in the soft crinkled skin of his neck. She forgot the age difference usually. It was at moments like this when she could feel how his body had aged past hers, his skin more pliable and less plump than she remembered. She breathed in the scent of his knowledge and experience, his insurmountable ability to see logic through the cloud
of ambiguity. For tonight at least, she would sleep soundly in his arms, building the strength to face another fight at the break of tomorrow’s dawn.
Twenty seven
Jack was waiting outside when Kate left the hospital. He had noticed her walking out, her face pulled back in anticipation that he may actually be waiting for her. When she saw him, her face came alive, the happy look on a child’s face with the realisation that Santa Claus had indeed not forgotten them as they crept into the living room on Christmas morning. He kissed her as she got into the car. He had decided beforehand that he would make a conscious decision to ask about her day. He hadn’t forgotten how this was supposed to work, even if, for the last year, he had acted as if anything he had previously learned was gone.
He had been in hospital for almost six weeks after the accident, and it was Kate who had been at his side every day of his stay. After he had learned of the loss of his wife and son, he hadn’t wanted the company of anyone. He had refused his meals, refused to answer the doctor’s questions. He had even refused treatment for a time. It had been Kate who had been there each day, talking him through it and counselling him. Even now, he didn’t know just how many of those hours had been her own personal hours that she had given up freely. It had been her shoulder that he had first cried on; it had been her presence which had made the reality of the situation too clear to avoid, inescapable, as the prospect of returning to an empty house loomed ever closer.
She had gone home with him that day. As he had walked into the living room filled with toys, still strewn about the floor but with a covering of dust, she had stood by him and held him up. She had promised him that she would help him adjust. She couldn’t tell him, but she had fallen in love with him the moment he had opened his eyes in the hospital bed. She hadn’t believed in love at first sight, and told herself that that was not what it was. But yet she couldn’t leave his room without thinking about him, and her concern reached much further than interest in his injuries and recovery. She just wanted to be around him, even at his worst, and even when all he wanted to do was to run away from the world.
“How was your shift? No broken bones?” He knew broken bones made her stomach crawl and retch as if she had eaten bad food. She smiled, enjoying the normality of the question.
“Yes, it was fine. Easy. I hardly did anything all afternoon.”
“Lazy bones!” They both giggled as he said it. He had a feeling that he wanted to draw her into him, bring her in closer. It was a new feeling and he liked it. He had missed it. He reached out and took her hand and squeezed it a little. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t see you yesterday. I missed you.”
She didn’t say anything in return. She didn’t know what to make of it. Driving along in a truck with this man beside her, a man with a receding hairline and olive skin that reminded her of freshly baked bread, was not the same man she had met in Flanagan’s only a few nights before. He never told her that he missed her, he never picked her up from work, and he certainly never apologised for not seeing her. She couldn’t help but think about the cliché that her mother used to tell her when she got caught up on a boy at school. She ran the words around in her head, playing them out in her mother’s upper class tongue. ‘If something seems too good to be true, it is simply because it is’. She had always thought the words pessimistic and untrusting, until she had experienced the true pain of reality when her first perfect boyfriend had dropped her so quickly, as if she carried a disease, as if her touch scalded his skin. It was that very episode that had sworn her off boys and then later, men, right up until when she had met Jack. He hadn’t done much to prove her mother wrong either, quite the opposite, but for Jack, Kate always found a way to make an excuse. She hung around, but not blithely like a fool just waiting and hoping, but with the belief that by the end of his torment, it would be she whom he wanted, and needed. She hoped that that was where they had now got to, but she wouldn’t lay all of her defences down just yet. She had to be sure.
They took the old freight lift up to his flat on the sixth floor, and closed the rickety old door behind them. He could see her physically relax, safer inside his apartment than outside in the dark of the streets and the depths of the city night. Unusually, he wasn’t wearing a jacket as it was too warm on the sticky summer night to need or tolerate it, so he emptied his pockets of his phone, keys and cigarettes, throwing them down on the table. He opened the buttons of his shirt to reveal the T shirt that he had thrown on earlier in the morning when Elizabeth had unexpectedly turned up. He walked over and threw his shirt on the bed, and started to unbuckle his trousers whilst Kate walked over to the police photographs, still haphazardly taped to the floor. She stood with her hands in her back pockets, her slim arms jutting out like a model’s. She always tied her hair back when she was at work, her blue black hair sleekly piled up and held in a large plastic grip. He always said that it looked like a torture device, and she would regularly and spontaneously pinch him with it ever since.
“Did you get any further?” she asked, pointing towards the photos as she kicked off her small patent heels, and took her stethoscope from around her neck. She picked up the photo of Rebecca’s face that had been left on the bedside table two nights before. “Did you trace that accident?” Jack was sitting on the settee now, feet placed restfully upon the edge of the small table in front of him. He had fetched himself a beer already and was nursing it in his lap. He had put one down on the table for Kate too; he hadn’t asked if she’d wanted one or not.
“Kind of.” He thought about where to start. So much had happened over the course of the last forty eight hours, since he had last been with Kate and he’d felt that difference as they’d lain in bed together that morning, that he didn’t quite know where to begin. “I went and found Rebecca’s sister.” Kate looked puzzled. “Rebecca was the woman from the crash.” She was nodding now, she had caught up. “That’s where I went. She lives in a place called Haven. It’s just a little fishing town, mainly full of tourists.” She sat down next to him and picked up the beer, placing the hollow face in the photograph down onto the table. “You were right, it was that woman. She has been missing for four years. The family thought she was dead”.
“So what, she faked the accident?” She took a full swig of her beer. It was ice cold. Perfect. The heat in the apartment was suffocating, and she got up and quickly opened one of the large windows that overlooked the city.
“That’s how it looks. She has been living for four years with seemingly no real connection to the family. They haven’t been seeing her. The only guy we have got that can fill in anything from the last four years is a random guy from the bus station that found us by chance. He is the only person that can tell us anything about her.” He could see Kate trying to process everything. In spite of the heat, she was taking out the clip from her hair, shuffling her free hand into the creased and swirling spirals, freeing them from the tight plastic. She shuffled in a little closer, and he could feel the heat radiating from her, rippling towards him like a mirage. “And to be honest with you, he barely knows anything about her. Doesn’t even know where she lives.”
“A person can’t just disappear. They have to leave a trace behind. She couldn’t have been on her own for four years.” She considered her words again. “It’s impossible.”
“Maybe, but the same person that knew her at the bus station was the last person to see her alive.” He could see the suspicion rising on her face: her furrowed brow, the tight lips pulled into a smirk. “At her request, though. She asked him to drive her to the beach that morning. He dropped her off a few miles away from the beach. She said to him, ‘Never choose to be alone’. Never choose.” He emphasised the word choose, prolonging the rounded sound of the word. “She chose to be alone.”
“Why?”
“If I knew that, the case would be solved. But it’s to do with her mum’s death. The mother died only four days before Rebecca disappeared. It’s too much of a coincidence.”
The
y sat for a while, swigging on their beers and stretching out on the settee, their feet propped up on the coffee table, and legs splayed out. They had both taken off their trousers, and let the breeze from the open windows wash over their skin. Up on the sixth floor, you could always find some relief when the oppressive heat of the city intoxicated the air. It was the only thing that she liked about this apartment. It was Jack who brought up the subject again. He couldn’t let it lie.
“Can you imagine it, Kate?” He turned his head, dropped sideways against the sticky black leather. It was a defenceless look that exposed the pulsating blood vessels in his neck and one kept only for people close to you. He shuffled in his seat and the leather creaked as it peeled away from his skin. “Four years of nobody. How can a person live like that?” The irony of his statement was not lost on Kate. She wanted to ask how he had managed one year. She wanted to tell him that he should already know the answer, that he was a specialist at cutting out the world. She turned her head to him, mirroring his open gaze. He looked almost sad: the corners of his eyes and mouth turned down, every muscle in his face soft and relaxed.
Escaping Life Page 19