Escaping Life

by Michelle Muckley

  When Jack dropped Barry outside his house that night, he had driven away normally, but fifteen minutes later he had turned his car around and had gone back. Jack pulled up in the next street and walked under the shadow of the broken street lamps, stopping on the opposite side of the road to Barry’s house. He had watched him through the window, the lamps which came on by timer illuminating his small bay window, topped by boarded up windows and broken roofing. He wasn’t doing anything strange; Barry sat on his settee, the television playing in the background, different shades of light and shadow cast upon the room and onto Barry. He moved into the kitchen, and it gave Jack a better view as he hid in the shadows of the broken down buildings behind him. There was a stench in the air, a rotten smell of wood, and urine. He could hear rustling behind him in the dilapidated houses as the squatters and druggies trudged their way around the cluttered floorboards. He could hear that one of them was getting close, footsteps becoming louder and yet softer, and the caution of the figure behind him laced with uncertainty.

  “Mate, you got any smack on ya’?” the voice dared behind him. “I can pay ya’.” Jack knew this area well, and had spent many a nightshift here, watching the comings and goings of the underworld of Chesterwood. Woodside was filled with the undesirables, the inhabitants of the city that Chesterwood would rather not exist. It was financially, socially, and geographically divorced from the rest of the city, but there was always a steady trickle of two-way traffic, in and out. Some nights, as he sat there in the chilly winter months, the rain beating down onto the roof of his car, he would watch as the well kept cars from the city would roll suspiciously and cautiously into the depths of Woodside. They would crawl their way along the curb, hoping to leave with one of the girls who offered an easy route to a good time, or would pull up in dark corners trading money for little packets of powder or pills. It didn’t interest Jack. This was Woodside, and it wasn’t his fight.

  “No,” Jack replied, his words stone cold. “But I’ve got a night in the cells for you if you want it.” He could see the dead whites of the eyes of the sad figure behind him glaring back at him emptily as he realised his mistake. “Now fuck off.” He crawled his way back into the house, shock and cursed mutterings of ‘sorry’ escaping with each laboured breath and step. Jack turned his attentions back to the soft glow of the kitchen light. Barry looked as if he was cooking, his face blurred in the rising steam. He came back into the living room and set out a small table in front of the settee, a knife and fork placed delicately at the side. He placed down a glass of something transparent, and after another trip to the kitchen returned with a steaming plate of food. Jack was aware of his empty stomach, and he felt the cramping pang of hunger hit him.

  Barry sat back down on the settee, placing his plate of sausages and potatoes, drizzled in gravy down onto his foldaway table. His favourite soap opera was playing out on the television. It was something from up north, a street where all the inhabitants lived and worked and played together. They all had problems, and yet life seemed to go on independently in spite of the latest difficulty. He blew across the plate of food and took the first mouthful, the spice-enriched meat a disguise for the poor cut, the gravy hot, thick and lumpy, like he preferred. Barry watched these characters every night; sometimes he would record the programme and play the reruns too. On a Sunday, when he didn’t have much to do and the days were long, he would let the omnibus play in the background, the characters the absent friends in his life. He would lie on the settee, the net curtains pulled to cover the windows to stop the glare of the sun. He never opened the windows, the smell was there every day but he never got used to it. If you opened the windows at the height of a summer’s day the smell would hit you hard, assaulting your senses with its pungent stench. Instead, he tolerated the beads of sweat which would roll down his face, tickling him as they pooled at the base of his neck. He would snooze as the words in the background made him feel that somewhere in this world he might be able to find a life where he isn’t alone.

  Jack tapped out a message into his telephone and hit the ‘send’ button. He tucked the phone into his back pocket as he watched Barry clear his plate and make himself a cup of tea. Jack worried about how Barry might cope with the interrogation that he was about to undergo the following day. He seemed a genuine person; his face open, his heart big. He had befriended a virtual stranger, so desperate in his attempt not to be alone. It seemed to Jack that perhaps Rebecca had been his only friend. Based on what he knew so far, Barry may well have been her only friend too. It was, after all, he who she had asked to drive her on the final journey of her life, to the spot where she would end her life. He had been the person with who she had chosen to spend her last moments of shared time together. Now, here he was, alone again, knowing that the only person that he once had, had disappeared from his life. As Jack looked upon the window he saw Barry stand to draw the curtains, to protect himself from the undesirable world just outside, and wondered how different their own lives really were. Only a year ago, Jack had had all that he wanted. His life had been filled with laughter, sticky fingers, and another body wrapped up tightly in his arms as he drifted off to sleep. He might not live in Woodside now, but how different was his own life from the one he observed before him? How different was going home and eating a microwave meal alone night after night, his only free company a casual girlfriend who he had treated badly? His thoughts were interrupted by the ‘BEEP’, ‘BEEP’ of the message that had arrived. It was Kate answering his previous message:

  ‘Finishing in half an hour. Great, I’ll be waiting outside.’

  Jack knew that the life he now observed before him wasn’t for him. He didn’t want his days to be filled by the lives of others and his nights spent dreaming of company that he couldn’t have. Rebecca Jackson had been right. Her final words rolled around in his head. ‘You should never choose to be alone’.

  Twenty five

  It had felt good to step off that bus and see her cottage standing proudly, strong against the cliff top winds in front of her. The bus didn’t run as far as her road, but it was always good to be in the heart of the village. Elizabeth liked the sound of the gulls as they swooped in low and fast attempting to snatch the early morning fish; the sound of the waves as they lapped against the sides of the boats, sloshing about whilst lashed to the harbour wall. It was later, now though, and the late afternoon light that always has such a transparency about it as the sun starts to lose some height in the sky, the rays of light following a shorter, softer path, always made the village look especially pretty. The water was gentle at this time of day, as long as there was no impending storm, and the sunlight danced around on top of it, diamonds of sunlight skirting across the surface. She started the walk up the long, but steady climb to her front gate. The smell of honeysuckle and the orderly yet clustered rows of summer blooms that made up the lovingly planted garden was always the best welcome home before she walked through the door. On the warmest days, as she walked back from the village, the heat would carry the sweet scent on the breeze, and the local cats would sit with their noses high in the air, hoping to catch a waft.

  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 Gra
ham, 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 flown 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.

  Twenty six

  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.