The Ice Cream Girls

by Dorothy Koomson

  I hold on to the steering wheel for dear life, and concentrate on the road and pulling safely back into the left-hand lane. It’s all right, they’re not here for me, I think to calm myself, even though the siren is whipping up the anxiety that darts around my chest like a bird that’s accidentally flown through an open window and can’t find its way out again. They’ve got an emergency to get to; a real criminal to arrest.

  The police car surges forwards, but instead of speeding off down the road, it keeps level with our car. Oh God.

  I risk a look across and the policeman in the passenger seat points to the side of the road. ‘Pull over,’ he’s indicating. ‘At the first safe spot, pull over.’

  ‘Mum,’ Vee hisses in alarm, her eyes probably wide like saucers.

  ‘I know,’ I say, sounding calm and in control. Not at all as if I’m contemplating putting my foot down and making a run for it.

  I look over again, hoping that he’s made a mistake.

  The finger is still pointing to the side of the road, still ordering me to pull over. His face is a little more set, a little more angry now, the shape of his mouth an unimpressed line, his eyes hard, unamused pebbles in his face.

  Oh God.

  I can almost feel the handcuffs closing around my wrists again; the smell of a police cell is not one you can ever forget.

  I hit the left indicator and start to look for a place to pull over. Once I do, once he comes striding over to me and asks for my licence and then types my name into his computer or says it over the radio, the truth will come out. He’ll find out who I really am. And so will Vee.

  poppy

  Where am I?

  I have been waking up every hour or so all night and each time I think the same thing: where am I? It’s the quiet that wakes me. Drags me from sleep, wondering what is wrong, what is amiss, what has happened to stop the world being so loud.

  My eyes would dart around the room, looking for familiar shapes – the sink in the corner, the metal toilet, my locker, my noticeboard, the window high up on the wall – and each time I didn’t see them, my heart would flutter and panic. Then the memory would settle on my mind that I was out, I was free, there was no need to panic. I’ve been doing that all night. Maybe not even every hour, probably more often. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to prison when I first got there, but now the world feels weird not having all the noise and the creak of metal, the permanent chill that hangs in the air. Cotton sheets, a thick mattress, curtains on the windows, carpet under foot – all luxuries I’ve practically forgotten exist to everyday people.

  October, 1989

  It was so loud.

  Everything seemed so loud. Even from the hospital bed where they put me first of all – suicide watch, apparently – everything seemed so loud. And now, in my single cell, which I got because I was as notorious inside as I was outside, it was so loud. Every second crammed to its brim with noise, even in the dead of night it did not stop.

  I lay on my bed with my eyes wide open, the blackness of my tenth lights-out in this room sitting on my chest, swirling in my throat, scoring at my eyes. I reached up to touch my eyes, just to reassure myself that they were open, because I could not always tell. Sometimes I would think I had fallen asleep, and that the darkness was a part of that. Sometimes I would think that if I had my eyes open and it was this black, I could close them and open them and everything would be back to normal. I would not be in this box, I would not be drowning in blackness.

  ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhh,’ it was a loud keening, this time. My eyes had been drifting shut and they snapped open at the sound that was tearing through the landings and crawling through the sliver of space at the bottom and around the viewing hatches in the doors. This time keening, other times sobbing, other times the shouting of friendships separated by bang-up at the end of the day, other times the slam of prison vans, other times arguing, other times the sound of flesh on flesh, other times the dull swallowing of anti-depressants. Always there was noise and always it went straight through you, stampeded to your core and reminded you where you were in case, for a brief moment, you managed to forget.

  ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhh,’ the keening continued.

  I wanted to tell the silly cow to shut up. That we were all in the same boat. That just because she had children she wasn’t going to see for a while, or maybe she was innocent, or maybe she’d gone to court not expecting to be sent straight here, didn’t mean that she was worse off than the rest of us. Didn’t mean she could cry and wail so loudly that everyone in the prison could hear her.

  ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hh,’ she persisted, so loud and constant I had to raise my hands and slam them on my ears. I often did that when I heard someone telling how she’d hurt the person who was abusing her children, or abusing her, and now she wouldn’t be seeing her children outside of these walls for years; or someone was saying that she’d just not paid a fine and now she was stuck here for six months and her other debts would be building up. I never wanted to hear that because I had only just begun my life here and I did not want to hear how other people had been wronged, too. And I did not want to hear this cry of a wounded animal. It was probably reality setting in. That hideous moment when they finally realised that even if they were innocent, or were going to appeal their sentence, they would be here for a long time. It’s a moment you never forget. And it makes you cry out in pain. Or turn inwards, and think about doing yourself harm to make the reality an unreality.

  ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhh,’ the noise went on. ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hh.’ I pressed my hands harder over my ears, but I could still hear this woman, this wounded animal, whoever she was. And her noise was filling up my cell. ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhh.’

  ‘OI! ICE CREAM GIRL!’ bellowed a voice from somewhere. ‘SHUT UP! Some of us are trying to sleep.’

  ‘Ohhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhhhhhh​hhhhhh.’ It was me. I was making that noise. I was the wounded animal. It was me who had been hit with reality. It was me showing the outside world inside these prison walls that I was in agony and I was scared and I was here for ever.

  It was me being so loud.

  It was me. And I didn’t know how to stop.

  Water falls on my skin like a hundred thousand little kisses, each one firm and warm and perfect.

  I lather my arms again – the third time – and immerse myself further in the extravagance of a shower with temperature control and strength above a dribble. It beats down on me like a relentless rain, the type that used to clean the windows in Trembry Hall, and I am revelling in it. I could spend the whole day in this cubicle, reacquainting myself with the finer points of washing. Sometimes we weren’t given access to the shower for three or four days; we had to make do with the sink in the corner, using our towels as flannels and washing over ourselves as quickly as possible to stop from freezing to death.

  Staying in this shower, washing off the last twenty years inside, is helpful, too, because I don’t really know what I’m going to do next. I mean literally, after this shower, what do I do next? Every day for more than twenty years has been structured, regimented, with a time for everything. Now I am free, I can do as I please. And I’m not sure how. In my head, in my wildest dreamings, I had thought I would spend the day with Mum and Dad. We would sit down and talk, eat, drink, catch up on all the missing years. They’d even call my sister, Bella, and my brother, Logan, get them to come over and we’d catch up as a family. In my reality, in the life I was actually living . . . I shudder as I think about yesterday.

  When Mum opened the door, I expected a rush of emotion from one of us. I expected to want to throw my arms around her, to hold her close in the hope that she would do the same to me. I expected to want to bury my face in the soft crease of her neck and cry. Really cry. Cry my aches inside out. Wash away the years with tears, have her dry them with sympathy and
understanding and being my mum.

  Instead, a barrier rose between us the second she opened the door.

  ‘Poppy,’ she’d said.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. The word was unfamiliar in my mouth, since I had not said it in so very long.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. Her eyes scanned behind me, and I realised she was checking to see if any of their neighbours in the identical thirties semis along the road were looking, and she was checking to see if the Old Bill were lurking somewhere ready to haul me back to the nick.

  The barrier, wide and solid and invisible, rooted itself even more firmly into the ground and thickened. Not only did she think I had escaped, she also thought me to be stupid. If I had done a bunk, this would have been the first place the Old Bill would have looked so why would I turn up here?

  ‘They let me out. Remember? I wrote to you? Told you I was coming out? Asked if it was OK to stay with you until I got back on my feet?’

  ‘I don’t think I got the letter,’ she’d said. Her face said, ‘Did you really write to me or are you lying to me, which will lead to me being arrested for helping you?’

  ‘It wasn’t returned to me, so I presumed you’d got it.’

  ‘You should have called to double-check,’ she said.

  ‘I would have if, when you changed your number ten years ago, you’d given me the new one.’

  The wrinkled skin on her neck and the smoother skin on her high cheekbones coloured up at that, while she dropped her gaze from looking just left of my head to down at her feet. She was hesitating, waiting . . . Waiting, I realised, for me to leave. She would not ask me to, but she was hoping I would. I had nowhere else to go, except possibly under the arches down on Brighton seafront. ‘You’d better come in,’ she eventually said.

  I’d stepped in, and experienced a rush of memories of tearing over this threshold as a child on a visit to my nan, barrelling into the living room and almost knocking over Granny Morag I was so excited to see her. She was my favourite person in the world after my dad, and coming here was always the biggest treat on earth. When she had a fall fifteen years ago, my parents had moved in to take care of her, and then stayed after she died two years later.

  ‘You can put your things upstairs,’ she said, unable to disguise her disgust at the clear HMP Trembry Hall plastic bags and the tatty holdall I’d got from a prison volunteer that held all my worldly possessions. ‘You can stay in the room you used to sleep in.’

  Her voice did not prepare me for what I found in ‘the room I used to sleep in’. It was exactly the same as I left my bedroom at the end of the eighties, when I was still a stupid teenager who wanted to be Madonna and thought she’d marry Don Johnson. Except it had been transported from London to here. Everything was exactly as I remembered leaving it: the single bed with the blue-sky-white-cloud pattern over brown nylon sheets; the hulking, mahogany veneer wardrobe that sat to the left of the window; the tatty white with gold edging dressing table that had a neat line of unicorns with coloured manes along the back edge under the mirror; my Madonna-inspired chunky silver crucifix that hung over the corner of the mirror, next to a picture of the lady herself, all in black, chains and chains around her neck, a black bow tying back her shaggy hair. Even the posters – Madonna, Miami Vice, Michael Jackson, Prince, Adam Carrington from Dynasty – seemed to have been put up in exactly the same place.

  This is what they would have done if I had died, I thought to myself as I moved slowly across the room and sat on the bed, looking around, trying to take it all in. This is what they have done because, in their minds, I did die. When the verdict was read out in court, and I was found guilty of murder, I died to them. I had been slipping away from them as the trial unfolded and they found out more and more about me; more and more that told them I was no longer their little girl. And when the word ‘guilty’ was proclaimed, I flatlined. I passed away. I was gone, but the little girl who had created this room lived on, and they could survive quite happily with these things because they belonged to the girl who wasn’t a slut, who wasn’t a liar, who wasn’t a murderer.

  As I discovered more and more things that had been replaced exactly as they had been twenty years ago – the LCD clock radio on the gold-edged white bedside table, my line of mix tapes on the shelf in the bedside table, my stainless steel digital watch hanging on the corner bedpost – I thought: this is what it feels like to be dead to someone.

  Soft white towels that smell of flowers. They have to go on my ever-growing list of everyday extravagances. I wrap this giant one around me, breathing in and breathing in and breathing in until I become high on the scent of the towels.

  I’d had a shower yesterday, but a quick one, feeling guilty for being in their house when they weren’t expecting me, feeling unnerved to be back in that room. I also wanted to go down and try to talk to Mum. If I left it too long to try to break through that barrier that had arisen between us it might become stronger, harder to traverse. By the time I had found something to wear that wasn’t so obviously from the eighties it told the world I had been ‘away’ for some time and fit my now-thinned frame, and wasn’t from my prison bags, and descended the stairs, Mum had gone. She left a note saying she and Dad were out for the rest of the day and all evening – it’d been planned for a while – and they’d see me in the morning. And PS, I could have the shepherd’s pie that had just finished cooking in the oven for my lunch and dinner if I was hungry.

  The half-drunk cup of tea on the kitchen table, the half-folded laundry sitting in the washing basket by the washing machine, and the open door of the dishwasher all told me that she had left in a hurry. She was that desperate to escape from me, the dead daughter who was not meant to come back, she had left her housework unfinished.

  I eventually found the plates, heaped on the shepherd’s pie, and then took my meal outside. The temperature had dropped dramatically since I had arrived, but I still settled myself at the mildew-covered white plastic table at the bottom of the garden, and ate the too-hot food. Then I sat and smoked a pack of cigarettes, watching the sky, watching the climbing vines on the walls, listening to the neighbours going about their business, immersing myself in the outside world until my fingers and limbs were so cold and achy that I could hardly move them, and the only light came from the rectangles of orange-yellow thrown out by the kitchen door and window.

  Eventually I stubbed out my last cigarette and went inside to go to bed, deciding to change the sheets on the bed for cotton ones. Still achy and cold, I washed up my plate and cutlery and water glass, then climbed the stairs feeling a little more like Poppy Carlisle again and a little less prisoner EX396798.

  On the landing outside the bathroom, beside the huge picture window that lets light flood into the upstairs areas, I bump into him. Not literally – he is leaving their bedroom – I am leaving the bathroom, but our worlds have converged at this point.

  He looks old. There is no other word for it, no other way to describe him. Mum had looked older, but he looks old. As if time has paid particular attention to him, ravaging him over and over until he is sixty-one but looks old.

  His hair, although still neat and short, has thinned and disappeared on top, what is left is now almost completely white, with only a few darkish grey spots here and there. His handsome face has been softened and lined; his eyes, the colour of bluebells, are heavy and sad. Incredibly, painfully sad. A sadness that affects the set of his mouth, and hollows out two wells in his cheeks. His body always upright and strong – he was a muscular man who didn’t seem to be physically intimidated by anything or anyone – now he seems to have shrunk, his shoulders hunch forwards a fraction and his limbs seem less solid. The shell of him, the man who he was, is different, but he is still him, still Dad. Mum used to tell me that when I was just learning to talk and he would leave the room, I’d stare at the door for ages, waiting for him to come back. And when I heard a noise outside the room, I would, in my baby voice, call, ‘Daaaaaa!’ Asking him to come back,
asking him where he was and what he was doing without me. That was one of the few things she could accurately recall from my childhood, and I knew she was right because, in the entire world, the person I loved the most was my dad.

  I have not seen him in twenty years, since the day of the verdict. In my heart, in my soul, I feel a tug, a desperate need to reach out and touch him. I want to feel his arm under my fingers so that I can confirm that he is real, I have not imagined him, and I am not going to lose him again when reality comes back to me. I smile at him, hesitantly, waiting for him to respond, react, notice me. While I was ‘away’ he could pretend I was not around, but here, in front of him, he has to at least acknowledge me – even if it is just to tell me to put some clothes on. The smallest contact is all I need.

  However, I am a ghost. I am insubstantial and unreal. He looks straight through me, his eyes focusing beyond me, and then he continues on his path to the stairs and moves down them, out of sight.

  I thought I had felt it when I saw my old room magicked down here, but really that feeling was nothing. This is what it’s like to be dead to someone. This is what it’s like to be a spectre in your own life.

  serena

  ‘Can you step out of the car, please, Madam?’

  His voice is professional, but clipped. I didn’t pull over soon enough and he’s not happy. Maybe he thinks I was being defiant instead of just plain terrified. How often do the police mistake terror and anxiety for criminal behaviour? I wonder as I reach for the door handle.

  My hands work remarkably well, all things considered. I can tell Verity is on the verge of bursting into tears. She’s scared because I am, and she doesn’t like to get into trouble or to see someone else in trouble. And I am, clearly, in trouble. My legs don’t shake, my knees don’t knock, as I swing my jeans-covered legs out of the car and plant my feet on to the concrete on the hard shoulder of the A26.