Escaping Life

by Michelle Muckley

  It had been the first time that she had considered the stress that her father might be under. As they sat back in the car and began the last stretch of the journey, she had watched her father as he chatted away to Graham. Her father was not a chatty man, and he didn’t make small talk. He had always taught Elizabeth that it was a waste of her time. She could remember him sitting both her and Rebecca down when they were still at infant school. He had told them that they should consider the things that they say to people carefully, and that each word that they permit to leave their Iips should have a purpose and a benefit. Elizabeth hadn’t really understood what he’d meant, but she had nodded in all the right places, following Rebecca’s lead. It had really been a lesson for Rebecca, for it was she who was older and about to start primary school, a fact of which Elizabeth was incredibly jealous, so much so that she had purposely scratched Rebecca’s new pencil tin with the shiny point of the sharp compass that had been neatly stored inside it. Afterwards, she had suffered a terrible sense of guilt and shame at her actions, and had begged her mother to buy another one so that Rebecca wouldn’t know. Her mother hadn’t obliged, and when Rebecca had finally seen the damaged pencil tin, she had cried and had refused to speak to Elizabeth for what seemed like a lifetime. It was the worst possible punishment that Elizabeth could think of, and much worse than when her mother had made her sit on the first step alone in the hallway. When Rebecca had started talking to her again, Elizabeth had dared venture what the talk from their father had been about. Rebecca had said that she wasn’t sure, but that she thought it was because she had been scolded in class for talking when the teacher was talking. Elizabeth decided at that point that she didn’t want her misdemeanours to be the reason for one of these little chats, and she made a mental note to follow Daddy’s advice, and walk her own path in the shadow of his footsteps.

  Even still, you could be sure that no week would pass by without the need for another little sit down. He would sit two chairs beside each other in the main dining room, the one that was unused, unless there were guests expected that nobody really knew and that neither Elizabeth nor Rebecca had ever seen before. He would call them in and stand over them, his height his tool of intimidation. The problem was that Rebecca didn’t listen to her father, he explained. Elizabeth was a good girl, who did as he instructed. He only wanted the best for them both. Yet Rebecca was too strong willed for her own good sometimes, and refused time and time again to take his advice. Eventually, Elizabeth had stopped attending these lectures, and only one chair was positioned for Rebecca to sit on. Occasionally, Elizabeth would sit outside and listen as her father’s voice became louder and angrier. There were a couple of occasions when she had heard the thud of his hand as it made contact with Rebecca’s back, or bottom, or one time, her face and Elizabeth had winced as if it were her own body that he had struck. The trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s house that weekend had been cancelled and Mummy had refused to talk to him all week; the bruise on the side of Rebecca’s cheek a red and swollen reminder of what their mother had described as hatred that was growing inside her. She had told Edward, when she thought that Rebecca and Elizabeth were asleep and out of earshot, that taking out his frustrations about work and the struggle of their engineering business on Rebecca was unacceptable. That that was the last time. Rebecca hadn’t been allowed to go to school that whole week. There had been no further little sit down chats.

  As she sat in the backseat watching her father chat with pride about his new ultra glamorous car, Elizabeth was surprised at how animated he seemed for what to her was such a material object. She couldn’t believe that he had purchased it. From the snippets of conversation that she had heard, it also seemed like he had just closed the deal on a brand new city apartment. He had moved out of the family home after the murder and into a rented apartment in the city, a rather humble affair with low ceilings and only the smallest of balconies, from which, if you leaned out far enough, you could enjoy the view of the river. It seemed to Elizabeth that that was all about to change, and he sat there speaking with enthusiasm about an apartment with ‘a view to die for’, which had an unrivalled view of the river and the financial district. She knew the area that he was talking about; it was the area that she and Graham used to look towards from their city-based apartment. She knew how expensive it was.

  They pulled up outside the broken down apartment complex, and Elizabeth checked the address that she had scribbled down on a piece of paper. The wheels of the car crunched as they rode over the debris left scattered in the road. As Elizabeth looked out of the window, the dark blue of the late afternoon sky was a stark contrast to the grey image of the tower block before her. She didn’t know this area, and she didn’t particularly want to, but she was fairly sure that, based on the appearance and the fact that they had crossed the river - recognising at least two of the roads the speaking SatNav had directed them through - they must be in Woodside, the same area in which Barry lived.

  “Is this it?” She asked the question of nobody in particular. As she looked up she saw that the impossibly tall building was painted a simple white grey colour, and was divided up by symmetrically positioned windows on every floor. There was a canopied door at the bottom of the complex, which was surrounded by police officers and whose presence more than adequately answered her question. This doorway seemed to be the only way in and out of the building, and there was a sign mounted on a large plaque to the side that stated: ‘Reynolds House’, much like a commemorative wall plaque placed insitue after a grand opening ceremony and which was similar to the one she had seen at the bus station. It had been defaced, no doubt by one of the kids who were hanging around on their bikes in the park a couple of hundred metres to the left. Some of the residents of the tower block were hanging out of their windows, eager to discover the cause of the kerfuffle, having seen the police and blue and white streamers that prevented any access in or out of the building. Their attention was also drawn to the new, out-of-place Jaguar that was pulling up outside the building. Elizabeth thought to herself that she wouldn’t relish leaving such a car here in this spot, outside this building, in such close proximity to those kids who were pulling wheelies on their tiny framed bikes, if the place wasn’t crawling with police officers. Some of them were just standing outside the doors, as they had been at the entrance to the beach where she had been less than a week before. She saw the familiar figure of Jack coming towards them, and she immediately felt better and more at ease. As they got out of the car, they approached the dividing line between the police-claimed area and the rest of the world. Jack was dressed as normal, white shirt and dark trousers, but Elizabeth couldn’t help but think that there was something different about him: he appeared calmer. He still had the wrinkles on his forehead and the small puffy bags under his eyes, and yet somehow, his face looked less tired and less angry.

  “Thank you for coming, I appreciate that it’s the weekend.” He looked at Edward, and then back to Elizabeth. “This won’t be that easy. Are you ready?” She couldn’t imagine what he meant. They had been to Lyme beach; they had been to the mortuary. They had sat together and dissected the evidence as it was laid out before them. Never once had he told her that it might be difficult; never once had he tried to prepare her. She’d thought that she was ready for anything.

  Jack held open the entrance door, and she knew that she was crossing over into a life of which she knew nothing about; there was nothing past this line that was going to be familiar to her; to cross this line and discover what was on the other side of it was to realise that she no longer knew her sister, to realise that she no longer knew anything about Rebecca’s life. It was to understand, too, that the sister that she’d known, the warmest, the most affectionate person that would stand there at her side through the toughest of problems until that fateful day, would be truly lost forever.

  She walked in Jack’s footsteps, Graham and Edward following closely behind her. The hallway of the tower block was painted the same insipi
d pale grey, but here, without the benefit of sunlight, it was cold and dark, devoid of life. The elevator stood derelict, doors half open and inside the walls a fresco of graffiti. The stairway was a solid lump of concrete, each step sharp-edged as they climbed, passing bright swirls of graffiti names and cursing tags, similar to that scrawled on the metallic sign outside the building and which denoted territory. The stairs rose and rose, spiralling upwards into the darker reaches of the building. The higher they went, the less light there seemed to be, as if they were moving steadily away from any light source, and life. The graffiti that adorned the walls on the lower levels didn’t decorate the walls here; instead, the floor became dirtier, and there was an odour of stale urine that she could remember from the multi-storey car park in the city that she used when shopping. There was litter on the floor in various stages of decomposition, and the once-shiny orange handrails now looked brown and dirty.

  They approached the door of the apartment that was surrounded by police. There was a small metal grate covering the door, the kind you would use to fence in an overly enthusiastic animal in a prized garden. The door behind it was open, and Elizabeth could hear the bustle of more police officers working in the apartment. The doorway glowed orange against the dull grey dinginess of the corridor. Elizabeth couldn’t wait to get inside; she could feel the building crawling over her, its dark and penetrating corridors swelteringly oppressive. She wanted to be out of this hallway where, if not for the police presence, to her, it seemed like on any other day inhumane and criminal activities might be taking place. As she looked around her, feeling the building bearing down upon her shoulders, she wondered how it might be that the woman she once called a sister, the person that she once knew, might survive living here.

  “OK? Ready to go?” Jack handed them all gloves and shoe covers. Edward was a little behind and just catching his breath. They put on the shoe covers and gloves and Elizabeth nodded, following Jack into the apartment. He was still talking to her as they entered the confined space that seemed to function as a living room, a kitchen and a bedroom altogether, but she wasn’t listening to his words. In one corner against a wall, there was a small settee, old and threadbare that, judging by the green watermark and thick-looking lumps of growth on the arms, appeared to be suffering from damp. She could smell that faint, musty smell of mould and her chest that had not been bothered by her asthma since she was a child, felt tight. In the opposite corner, there was a small single bed, with no headboard. All around the room, there were newspaper articles pasted to the walls and in parts they were peeling away. Elizabeth moved in closer to read the dates. The articles nearest to her were from only last month; notices about deaths and births, weddings, birthdays and crimes. There were images of brides and grooms, their smiles mocking grimaces in comparison with the cruelty of this room. There were names and pictures to commemorate deaths and anniversaries. She moved along the wall, the articles and notices slowly becoming older and fainter, the closer to the small window that she got. Above the long edge of the bed, against the wall, was the only space free of newspaper clippings, a bare rectangle of plasterwork that the bed’s occupant could gaze upon, in preference to the rest of the covered walls. It reminded Elizabeth of the Wailing Wall, a giant cenotaph monument built from fragmented gravestones to honour the past lives of hundreds of souls. The only difference was that gravestone fragments had been replaced by newspaper clippings, steadily put together over years to build one solid unit. She scanned the room, observing faces and noting names until one face jumped out at her. It was as if she was staring in a mirror, her own face gazing back at her. There, positioned next to the settee and pasted on to the wall, was one of the oldest clippings: Rebecca’s face on a newspaper clipping originally posted to commemorate her loss. Elizabeth could remember selecting the photograph; it was the same one that she had chosen and given to Jack. Next to it there was a picture of their mother. It was not just a notification. Above her picture was a headline: ‘LOCAL WOMAN SLAIN IN OWN HOME’. She had seen this article before as well; she didn’t need to read it to know that it detailed how their mother was found with her skirt above her waist, her head limp and neck bruised from an obvious struggle. Elizabeth knew this story well. Next to that was another story, posted the day after Rebecca’s disappearance. It was a small article, published before the press had discovered that the woman in question was the daughter of the dead woman found in her own kitchen only days before, and on whom there were no obvious signs of a sexually motivated assault. In this article, the new fatality was described as just another car accident, sad, but not that newsworthy. It was only the next day that the connection had been made, and the press went into wild information frenzy. Those articles were there, too. There were pictures of a younger Rebecca on the wall; Elizabeth hadn’t seen these articles before, because Graham had kept them from her. He had shielded her from the storm that raged around them in those darkest days. They still didn’t know how they had managed to find pictures to print.

  “She did this herself, it seems.” Jack wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. “The landlord came forward to say that she hadn’t paid this month’s rent. He hadn’t seen the picture on the television, but said his tenant was called Elizabeth Jackson.” Elizabeth turned sharply to look at Jack, hearing her old name, not used for years. “Once we put two and two together, it was fairly easy to follow her tracks.”

  “Which were what?” Edward looked nervous. He looked as if he almost dared not to ask the question, yet the will was too strong to resist.

  “She lived here for almost the last four years - I assume from pretty much the same time as she went missing. I looked at the evidence, Elizabeth. Your friend David did a pretty good job of making it look like she had to have been in that car, but the clues were always there. She was never in that car when it dropped over the ravine.” Elizabeth sat down on the edge of the sofa, and Graham sat down next to her. He took her hands in his own, just like he always did, just like she wanted him to. “Once we had an address and a name, it was pretty easy to find her and put the pieces together. She’d been working in a local factory. The owner didn’t want to talk to us at first, scared about revealing too much. It was a cash-in-hand job. No need for a tax number. She was virtually traceless, from an official point of view.” He walked over to the wall, and pointed at a series of red circles that had been drawn over the pasted newspaper pages. Elizabeth hadn’t noticed them before. “You see these?” he was talking to Edward now, who himself looked transfixed, his pallor white and ghost-like, “I recognise most of these names. Chesterwood is a big place, lots of crime. These names, the circled ones,” he tapped against the wall with his gloved knuckles, “are cases of mine. These people died suspiciously. Murdered or ‘unknown causes’. Every page that has been stuck up has one of these names.” Sure enough, as Elizabeth looked again at the walls, she could see that somewhere on each page there was a red circle and next to it, another page or pages of newspaper stories dedicated to the circled name, detailing the case that surrounded their suspicious death. He crouched down in front of Elizabeth as she sat motionless on the settee. He rapped his knuckles against the pages on her right. She knew that he was tapping the pictures of her mother. “It all starts here, Elizabeth.”