The Ice Cream Girls

by Dorothy Koomson

  ‘Really,’ said the other.

  ‘Yes! Alicia was cleaning the Big Luv’s office and she heard Black Tina tell him he’d have blood on his hands if he didn’t move the Ice Cream Girl into a shared room before her appeal. After the appeal would be too late.’

  ‘Alicia ought not to be listening at doors like that.’

  ‘I told her, she won’t listen. But she was right, cos Black Tina’s got the Ice Cream Girl as a roommate.’

  ‘Black Tina always calls it right, though. She can see who’s going to top themselves a mile off.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The two other women, older than me and older than Tina, were standing in the corridor that led to the showers and didn’t know I was standing just around the corner, listening to them. I’d been on my way to get another shower in after spending the day getting all dusty while helping out in the library, when something in the way they were talking just around the corner made me stop where I was out of sight and listen. You got to know which conversations were worth listening in on very quickly in here. You found out the best gossip, the real news and, of course, you found out how vicious people could be about other people. Now I knew why Tina and I were sharing. She thought I was weak enough to do that. She thought I was like the other women who had done that. I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t. I hadn’t even done any cutting up in about three months and the scars on my arms were starting to heal. There was no need to. I didn’t need the release I’d discovered in here from cutting up any more. I knew my appeal was going to be heard and my conviction quashed, worst-case scenario I’d be given a new trial. Tina really had no reason to worry about me. I didn’t mind that she’d been grassing me up, because it was out of concern. And she really had nothing to worry about.

  In your last letter, you said you’d come and visit me when you got out. Girl, I say when you’re out, stay out. It’s the worst thing in the world walking through those gates again, as I’m sure you’ll remember.

  November, 1990

  The world is a vicious, vicious place.

  There is no justice. Nothing is fair.

  Nothing is fair and I do not want to be here any more.

  I stared up at the window of the cell: the bars looked thicker, more solid now that I was going to be here longer. Now I was going to be here for ever. They had strengthened themselves because with my current need to escape, I could probably bend them with my bare hands. I could pull them clean out of the wall like Wonder Woman. I could rip apart the steel door and push aside every single person who stood in my way to get out of here. That was why the bars looked stronger, that was why the door seemed more solid – they were preparing themselves for a fight.

  ‘You would do well, young lady, to concentrate on paying your debt to society, to stop wasting the Court’s time with appeals and to admit what you have done. There is a certain grace in admitting your failings, and it will help you in the future when it comes to release if you confess and face up to what you have done.’

  This time, I did not need a few days for the judge’s words to sink in, to assimilate the knowledge that no one believed me, that they weren’t going to quash my conviction, nor give me a new trial on the basis that the original verdict was unsafe. This time I had heard everything that was said when it was said. And I knew it was the final nail in the coffin. No new evidence meant no chance of anyone listening to me. All they had to do was listen to me. I wasn’t a liar. Yes, I had lied a couple of times, only to do with Marcus and to make sure no one found out about us. And I had hidden the clothes I was wearing that night because I was scared. But I was not a liar. And I would never lie about something as important as this.

  No one believed me, though. Not even the two people who were meant to love me more than anything: Granny Morag had shown up at the court every day for the three days of the appeal because Mum and Dad did not need a babysitter. They did not come to the appeal. They thought I was liar, too, apparently. They thought I had got what I deserved. Only Granny Morag believed in me.

  The image of her crying as the judge gave his verdict branded itself on my mind, on my corneas, like red-hot metal on flesh. Only the two of us in court knew the truth. Everyone else was there to see me get sent down again or to cover it for whichever publication or show they worked for. No one was interested in the truth.

  Even my solicitor and barrister hadn’t been able to look me in the eye after the verdict. And when I mentioned another appeal, they had both exchanged looks and advised me to take some time to reassess what I wanted to do. In other words, you can appeal again if you want, but without us.

  I am here, for ever.

  I am here, for ever.

  I am here, for ever.

  The thought kept playing in my mind.

  Tina came back to the room after being somewhere else. She had tried to comfort me when I came back but, when I would not let her touch me and would not speak to her, she had wisely decided to leave me alone. As I would be properly, if it wasn’t for her interfering.

  ‘Come on now, love, you’ve got to get up,’ she said. ‘Get changed out of your suit and put on some civvies. Seeing you all dolled up like that gives me the willies.’

  ‘This is your fault,’ I said to her, quietly, but forcefully. I wanted her to know that I knew what she had done. How she had taken a part in this conspiracy against me. ‘You jinxed me. By getting me moved in here, you jinxed me.’

  ‘I wish I were that powerful,’ she said, calmly. ‘Pops, I’ve been around a long time, I’ve seen this time and time again. Very few people, especially those convicted of murder, get out on the first appeal – especially if someone else hasn’t come forward and confessed to doing it. I didn’t want you to be alone if it happened to you.’

  ‘Who died and made you my mother?’ I asked nastily.

  ‘You say you’re innocent, so don’t let this be the end of it. You have to get up, and get back to trying to prove you’re innocent. Write letters to people who can help you, find a new brief – because most of them jump ship after the first appeal fails – and get back out there, fighting. Don’t take this lying down.’

  ‘I don’t see you doing any of that,’ I said. ‘I don’t see you “out there” fighting. I see you just sitting back and taking it.’

  ‘But I’m guilty. I did what I did, and I’m being punished for it. Self-defence or not, I broke the First Commandment and I deserve to be punished for it. Would I rather my sentence was shorter? Yes. But could I cope with being told over and over again that I got what I deserved – not only from him but also from the courts? No. But if I hadn’t killed him, not even in self-defence, as you say you didn’t, then nothing would stop me fighting.’ I felt her shrug across the room. ‘But that’s the difference between you and me, isn’t it, Ice Cream Girl? You’re still waiting to be rescued. I know that no one can rescue you until you’ve rescued yourself.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ I said, simply.

  ‘And fuck you back,’ she replied happily. I heard her climb off her bed and then come across the room. She yanked back the covers and took my hands in hers. I had never noticed before but the backs of her hands were a mass of scars, deep cuts and cigarette burns. They looked old, ingrained in her skin like they were always there. She gently pulled me upright, but didn’t let go until she had tugged me to my feet.

  ‘You’re not allowed to be depressed about this now. Now, you go out there with your head held high and you start thinking about how you’re going to fight this. When the time is right, and you’ll know when, I’ll leave you alone to get depressed. And when that’s over, you can apply to be on your own again. Because then you’ll be ready for it and I can stop worrying about you.’

  ‘What if I don’t want to fit in with your little plan for my life?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course you’ll want to fit in, because you’re still not ready to rescue yourself, are you?’

  I shrugged a little because she was right. I wasn’t ready to
rescue myself – but only because I didn’t know how. I defy anyone who had led a life like mine up until eighteen to know how to rescue themselves from a high security prison. I defy anyone, no matter what sort of life they’d lived, to know how to rescue themselves from a high security prison.

  So, have you got yourself a jump yet? Was that the first thing you did, picked yourself up a willing bloke who didn’t look like the wart on my bum and screw him senseless? That’s my plan. I didn’t tell you, did I? My parole board review is coming up soon. I might be out there with you before long. And we can go for that drink we always talked about.

  May, 1991

  ‘I think it’s time,’ I told Tina six months later.

  It was the middle of the night and we had both been quiet and still in our beds, while music and shouting and screaming and laughing raged in the world outside. Those were the sounds of the post-bang-up hours: the sounds of people connecting and escaping in any way possible by projecting themselves noisily into the atmosphere around their rooms. If you listened carefully, you could hear the sadness and tragedy, too. The sobbing into pillows and towels, the deafening peace of hearts breaking, the silent din of minds collapsing.

  I had learned to tune it out. All of it: the loud racket and the quiet chaos; I shut it out so I could sleep, so I could survive.

  ‘I know, sweetie,’ she said.

  ‘I’m going to miss you,’ I said to her.

  ‘More than you realise,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m being ghosted, to begin the next stage of my sentence. I don’t know where I’m going, but it’ll probably be back up north. I hope so. I’ve been getting on better with my mum recently. If I’m up there, then she might be able to afford to come and see me.’

  ‘God, I hope so. I don’t want you to go, but if it helps you and your mum get back together . . . I just hope so.’ Because if her and her mum can overcome that, then I could, too. I could get my parents back in my life as well.

  ‘I probably won’t see you again, Ice Cream Girl.’ I hated it when people called me that, except when she did it. Tina, my best friend, the only real friend I’d ever had, could probably call me anything and I’d be fine with it. Marcus had made sure I didn’t have any friends, because – he said – they might have told about him and me. When, really, it was to make sure I only had him to depend upon and I had no one to stand back and say, ‘Get out of that thing with him, get out of it now!’ It took coming here to meet someone who I could get on with, someone I could trust.

  The thought of never seeing her again . . . it cleaved my heart in two. ‘Don’t say that,’ I begged her. ‘Please don’t say that.’

  ‘It’s true. It’s best to prepare for that, then anything else is a gift.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to her, after waiting for the news to sink in, ‘for the rescue.’

  ‘It ain’t no ting,’ she said in her ‘Jamaican’ accent. ‘It ain’t no ting at-all at-all at-all.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we both know it was everything.’

  ‘Keep in touch, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I replied.

  We both knew we’d try, but if it’d work was another matter. Once this place got hold of you, once you accepted that you were going to be there a while, you found it hard to make connections with the outside world. Because every connection, every tiny touch from them was a reminder of what you had lost. What you hold dear. What you may never have again.

  Look, I’m running out of things to say. I’m hoping things are good for you out there. Tell me what it’s like out there. Tell me if I’ll like it.

  I miss you.

  (But not enough to have you back, OK?)

  Love,

  Tina xxxxx

  I refold the letter after reading it several times. I can’t wait to tell her that I’ve already found Serena, which means I’m well and truly on my way to clearing my name.

  part two

  poppy

  At 7 a.m., the bright blue front door opens and, wrapped up in a silky blue-and-red, knee-length kimono, with a silky red scarf around her hair, she leans forwards and reaches for the rolled up newspaper on the ‘You’re sooooo welcome’ doormat. Her lips move in a curse upon the head of the paperboy as her long fingers close around the daily newspaper – The Chronicle, I checked – and pulls it towards herself.

  She checks, as she always does, the space by the door where milkmen leave the milk and as always she seems surprised to see it empty. She does not order milk from the milkman, so I can only guess that it’s a reflex left over from childhood.

  At 7:55 a.m. the front door opens and he appears. As usual, he is wearing a suit and carrying a black bag that looks like a satchel, but probably contains a computer. He pats his left pocket with his right hand, before turning to call inside the house, then uses the brass knob at the centre of the door to shut it. He walks a few feet down the road and uses the keyfob in his hand to unlock his car. He dumps his bag in the boot, then climbs into the sleek, silver beauty, sticks on his sunglasses – even if it is raining out – and drives away.

  At 8:05 a.m. the front door opens again. She herds out the children, a triangle of toast in her mouth, her arms a chaos of coats and bags and sandwich boxes, then asks the son to shut the door. The daughter, her spitting image, strides ahead, earphones jammed into her ears, while the son sticks beside his mother, chatting and chatting as they walk even further down the road to her car. She’s got the family car that has seen better, cleaner days on the inside. The son takes her keys and unlocks the car door, and the daughter climbs into the front seat. The son happily jumps into the back, while she dumps the things in her arms on to the backseat of the car beside the son. She takes glasses from the glove compartment on the dashboard and slips them on. She checks they are all strapped in, then does her mirror and signal checks – twice – before pulling out of her space and disappearing in the same direction as her husband.

  Every morning it is the same; sometimes the paperboy puts the paper in the door, sometimes one of the children runs back inside for something, sometimes the husband leaves five minutes after the rest of the family, but mostly this is the way it happens. This is the way Serena Gorringe, now Serena Gillmare, lives her life. This is the way Serena lives a life that should have been mine.

  serena

  ‘Ow!’ I yelp as I’m jabbed for the umpteenth time. ‘Will you stop doing that? It blinking well hurts.’

  ‘Ah, well, if you will be having those fancy-smancy nerve things all over your body, what do you expect but pain?’ Medina, my sister, replies.

  Our other sister, Faye, smirks from behind her magazine. My sister who is jabbing me – on purpose I suspect – is going to make me a wedding dress that is a fraction of the cost of the ones I tried on last week. Evan said that was defeating the point of ‘going large’ this time, but I couldn’t face another excursion to a bridal boutique, where I’d have to look at myself in full-length mirrors and maybe have that blood vision again. As it is I’m still feeling sick from having held an ice cream the other day. He would be laughing his head off if he could: ‘What, the Ice Cream Girl doesn’t like ice cream any more? How funny!’ Besides which, it’d be far more special this way – I haven’t worn a Medina Bryse original in years.

  Medina – Mez – who is on her knees, has been pinning pieces of white material all over me for hours now, and treating me like her own private voodoo doll in the process. She is thirty seconds younger than Faye, or something like that – I should probably know, having had two kids and being married to a doctor but it’s the sort of thing that’s only really important to Faye. She, having used all other arguments at hand, rolls out the ubiquitous, ‘I am the oldest’ when she needs to try to get us to fall in line. (She’d be gutted to know that Mum once told me that she’s not all together sure that Faye is the oldest. She just assumed because Faye looked like she wanted to be first when they were both lying in their cribs.)

  If it wasn’t for F
aye’s need to wear glasses (to make herself look more intelligent and more like the chemical scientist she is – they are the weakest prescription above plain glass) and Mez’s habit of radically changing her hairstyle every time I see her, you could not tell them apart physically.

  ‘I’m so glad Evan’s decided to make an honest woman of you at last,’ Mez says. ‘Marrying you this time because he, like, actually wants to.’ (I’m sure somewhere out there Verity would be spinning in her seat – a forty-something woman is probably not legally allowed to use ‘like’ in that way in a sentence.)

  ‘Excuse me!’ I protest. ‘I think you’ll find he wanted to marry me the last time. That’s why we’ve been together for so long. That’s why we’re here today, with you doing this.’

  ‘But he had to last time, didn’t he?’

  I shake my head, trying – and failing – to look convincing. ‘No!’ I am aiming for ‘aghast at the very idea!’ but come off slightly camp and ineffectual.

  ‘No?!’ exclaims Faye from behind her magazine. ‘Oh, come on, Sez, no one – not even Mum and Dad – bought that whole “honeymoon baby” story.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Purlease!’ Mez rocks back on her heels so she can look up at me, her long shocking-pink fringe falling backwards as she looks up. ‘We’re all older than you, remember, we’ve all been there – did you really think we’d believe that nonsense? That wedding had “shotgun” all over it.’

  ‘If you cut it in half, it’d have shotgun written through it,’ Faye chimes in.

  ‘If you held it up to the light, it’d have a shotgun watermark.’

  ‘In fact, didn’t your wedding licence actually have a “shotgun” watermark?’

  They both start laughing. Once they start their double act, nine times out of ten I’m the butt of their jokes. I curl my lips into my mouth to express my indignation and try to rise above it, as Mum used to say I should.