The Ice Cream Girls

by Dorothy Koomson

  So I don’t understand how he thinks I could have done this.

  I knock on the door of Dad’s study. I haven’t ventured in there since I have been here, not even when they’ve been out and I have gone searching through their rooms for the things of mine that are missing. It used to be Grandpa Adam’s study and when he died Granny Morag kept it exactly as it was, until her death, I guess.

  There’s no reply. I know he’s in there, and he knows it’s me because Mum is off doing some shopping. I want to talk to him. Just talk to him and have him connect with me verbally. Even if he tells me he wants me to go, I would prefer that to the silence, the blank stares, his equivalent of exiling me to Siberia.

  I miss him. If he would let me, I would tell him that. I would tell him I’m sorry for not being his perfect girl. I would beg him to love me again.

  I knock again, wait again.

  I knock a third time, this one half-hearted and desultory. After the same reply, I turn away. Dad is not there. Mr Carlisle is in but my dad has left the building. Has left my life.

  October, 1989

  ‘Guilty.’

  The word sounded hollow and heavy at the same time. Hollow, heavy, final. I did not sway, I did not faint with the vapours, I did not burst into tears. I turned to seek out Dad, sitting in the upper rafters of the large court. He had been saying for weeks, months, in the whole run up to this day that it would be OK. That I would not be sent away from them because I was innocent and innocent people were not found guilty. Dad, my dad, the greatest man in the world, the man who was always right, stared back at me. He met my eye and I met his and I felt the world open up between us; a fissure in the universe that was going to separate us.

  Of all the people in the world I did not want to be separated from, it was him. My dad. My hero.

  He held my gaze and then his blue eyes fell away as he shook his head.

  He thought it was true. Everything that had been said, everything that had been written, he thought it was true – that I was capable of that. Of murder.

  ‘Ah, Pepper, love, why? Why, why, why?’ I could hear him saying in my head. He stood up and Mum immediately stood with him. Scritch scritch came from somewhere behind me and I realised that the court impressionist was capturing this moment. The moment where I turned to my dad to help me make sense of what was about to happen to me and the moment, with disgust in his eyes, he turned away. He and my mother climbed the short flight of steps to the exit and then they left without a look back.

  ‘Dad?’ I whispered deep down inside where no one would ever hear. ‘Dad?’

  ‘I’m not going away, Dad,’ I say to him when he enters the kitchen fifteen minutes later.

  I tricked him. Only a little trick: after his silent reply to my knocks, I opened and closed the front door to pretend that I had gone out. Then I crept back into the kitchen and waited. It was two: he would need his post-lunch coffee, and thinking I had gone out would make him leave the safety of his study and venture into the kitchen.

  He stops in the doorway, surprised to see me. In front of me I have two mugs of coffee, the milk in a jug, the sugar bowl with a teaspoon and a plate of his favourite biscuits – ginger snaps. I’ve done all this as quietly as humanly possible so he wouldn’t know I was still here.

  He observes my handiwork with a steely silent stare, then glances so briefly at me it stings like a quick, unexpected slap. Then he turns to leave.

  ‘I’m not going away, Dad,’ I repeat. ‘Even if you want me to leave, even if you ask me to leave, I will keep coming back until you talk to me.’

  My dad, my big strong father, doesn’t move from the spot he is standing on. This is his olive-branch of hope. Possibility.

  This is my chance to tell him everything I have wanted to say all these years.

  ‘None of it was true,’ I say to him. ‘What they wrote in the papers, what they said on the news, it wasn’t true. That wasn’t me. You know I wasn’t like that. You know me. Please, believe me, it was all made up.’

  He takes a step, he is slipping away again. I had him for thirty seconds.

  All those nights, all those days, alone in my cell, alone and surrounded in a shared cell, I wanted my dad. I wanted him to make it all better. I need him to know that.

  ‘I cried for you,’ I say. He stops. ‘Almost every night, I cried for you. I wanted you to make it better. To tell me it was going to be all right. You were the only person on earth who could do that.’ I sent him visiting order after visiting order. ‘You never came to see me,’ I say. I keep thinking I’m angry about that, but I’m not. I’m terrified. Because if he could not see me for twenty years, that means he stopped loving me. ‘I was your little girl, and you never came to see me. Why, Dad? Why?’

  He shakes his head in slow motion.

  ‘All I ever wanted was for you to come and see me. In twenty years, you never came. And I’m not a little girl any more. I grew up and you never saw me. Didn’t you want to see me?’

  He takes another step away, still shaking his head in a slow, precise manner.

  ‘Talk to me, Dad. Please tell me what you’re thinking. Please, just talk to me. Please.’

  His head shaking stops, suddenly and brutally. Then he shakes his head, once.

  ‘Dad, talk to me.’

  ‘Can’t.’ The word is so quiet, it is barely a whisper. ‘Can’t.’

  He walks away and I hear the door to his study slip into place behind him, and then the turn of the key in his lock rico chets like a stray bullet throughout the silent house.

  It’s not only me who was the prisoner. He was too. That’s what they say, isn’t it? When you send someone to prison, rightly or wrongly, you sentence all their family, too.

  I knock over the chair I am sitting on to dash to the closed, white panelled door of his study. I press the palms of my hands against it, lay my head between my hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ I murmur to the wood, hoping it will carry the message to the man inside. ‘I’m sorry, and I love you.’

  As I walk towards my beach hut, I try to pretend I did not hear him crying on the other side of the door. I try to pretend that I did not hear the bravest man in the world crying because he is still serving his prison sentence. For him it will never end, and it’s all my fault.

  part three

  serena

  Medina’s house is in order when I arrive, unannounced, for a visit.

  I wouldn’t normally do such a thing and anyone who did it to me would get a more than frosty reception. However, things are not right with my sister and if I rang her she would fob me off, pretend that she was fine and that I was worrying over nothing. But she wasn’t fine the other day. We all laughed and joked after the spat at my dress fitting, but her eyes, sad and heavy in her otherwise beautiful face, were still ringed a post-cry scarlet. It wasn’t simply to do with our row. There was more, and I had to find out what.

  ‘This is a nice surprise,’ Medina says warmly as she steps aside to usher me in. She has one of her wide, relaxed smiles on her face and I can tell she means it. Her twins and two non-twins are in the large living room of her Georgian ‘mansion’, as I call it. One of the twins and the oldest non-twin are in front of the television, glued to a repeat or DVD of Doctor Who. The other two are further back in the room, sitting on the floor with one reading a book, the other drawing on a large piece of paper. Everything is so serene, I wonder for a moment if she has a switch that she flicks that puts everything in place when the doorbell goes: the kids are deposited in specific places to carry out specific activities, the floor flips upside down and everything that was on it is dumped underneath, while the top part that’s on show is clear and tidy and neat. And the volume in the house is set at ‘four’ instead of ‘eleven’ like it is in my house, most of the time.

  I hate that expression ‘I don’t know how she does it’ but in Medina’s case it is entirely appropriate. I don’t. I can’t even begin to fathom it. My house with two children, one of whom is a teenager, is chaos
more than ninety per cent of the time – Mez has four children under ten and she lives in serenity by the look of it. The kids are so engrossed, absorbed in what they are doing, they do not even notice I am here. Probably a good thing since I want to talk to Medina uninterrupted.

  ‘I was in the area,’ I say to Mez as I follow her rounded little bum, confined in tight jeans and topped with a floral homemade gypsy top, to the kitchen.

  ‘Really?’ she asks. ‘What were you up to?’ She immediately goes to the kettle, flicks it on.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I wasn’t in the area at all. I wanted to see you.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ she says. She moves to the fridge, takes out a half-bottle of wine. ‘Would you like a glass?’ She waves the bottle of pinot at me. ‘Seeing as you’ve come all the way to see me?’

  ‘Nah, I’m driving.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, sorry, didn’t think.’ She rehouses the wine, reaches instead for a four-litre bottle of milk and a box of Belgian chocolates. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asks as she retrieves two mugs from the cupboard by the kettle.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘Why the special visit, then?’ She makes tea quickly and deftly – in half the time it takes me to do most things. She does most things quickly – quick and efficient is my youngest older sister, even though she is creative and flamboyant. If I had been making the tea, I’d still be dithering as to which mugs to use and why Evan doesn’t check that stuff from the dishwasher is clean before he puts it in the cupboard and whether I should open that new packet of biscuits or finish off the chocolates in the fridge.

  Mez takes a seat opposite me at her round wooden table. She has put the cups in front of us and pushed the chocolates over to my side of the table, although she is beadily eyeing them – I suspect she will slap my hand away if I reach for one of her favourites.

  ‘I wanted to see if you were all right after the other day.’

  ‘The other day? What was the other day? Oh, you mean the day of the fitting? Gah!’ She waves her hand away dismissively. ‘That was nothing. You of all people should know that.’

  ‘There was more to it, I could tell. I noticed you’d been crying up in the loo. I want to help, if I can.’

  Mez shakes her head, her hair bouncing as she shakes. The pink fringe has gone, it is now black and short and straight. ‘I was just tired or something. You have nothing to worry about, little sis, I promise.’

  ‘Mez, I know something’s wrong. And I’m not leaving until you tell me what it is. Evan’s taking the kids out for pizza tonight so I can literally stay here all night if necessary.’

  All of a sudden she sags in her seat, sits back and throws her face up to the ceiling. She has a striking profile that is, quite strangely, different from Faye’s. Most of the time you could not tell them apart – they are identical twins, after all – but when you look at them sideways on, you can see subtle differences. Medina’s jaw is slightly squarer, Faye’s nose is a fraction flatter at its tip.

  She shakes her head as she stares up at her ceiling. ‘I’m in trouble with the police,’ she says quietly.

  I do not know what to say. I am so shocked, I opt for my default setting and stay silent. It really is the best policy when you are in trouble. Or in shock. Opting for silence stops you from saying something that will at some point be used against you. I’m pretty certain that choosing silence in most arguments I’ve had with Evan has probably saved my marriage. I am too shocked to speak right now. Medina is so sensible, how can she be in trouble with the police? But then, wasn’t it I, the original goody two-shoes, who was on trial for murder?

  She lowers her head to continue shocking me. ‘I was speeding a little, just a little, but the police were doing stop-checks.’

  ‘Speeding a little isn’t too bad,’ I offer.

  ‘No, it isn’t. But, I’d been for lunch with a couple of people I used to work with. I’d had a couple of drinks. Well, maybe three. I failed the breathalyser. Only by a little, but it was enough of a little to make them arrest me and take me down to the police station. I admitted guilt so I was cautioned and released on bail.’

  There’s a sick feeling you get when you know you’ve done something wrong; it lodges itself under your ribs and won’t allow you to do much of anything – especially not breathe or sit comfortably – because what you have done is going to hang over you for the foreseeable. Probably for ever. I have this feeling now, listening to my sister. This is bad – actually, this is something that ‘bad’ doesn’t even cover.

  ‘I’m going to lose my licence, there’s no two ways about it. The arresting officer told me that. She was really sweet, really nice about it because I was obviously so oblivious to how much over the limit I was and I held my hands up to it straight away. But she said, with the speeding as well, there was no way I wouldn’t lose my licence. Minimum twelve months loss of licence, maximum prison.’

  I do not know what to say, I really don’t. I cannot form a thought, let alone offer comfort. I remember what it is like in prison, in cells. The fear and the loneliness. The fear of being alone, the fear of being with other people who might be dangerous. I do not want that for Mez. She can’t go to prison. But she might. She might have to do what I did until the courts could be persuaded to let me out on bail under house arrest. She might have to experience what I did until the courts could accept that I was not a flight risk and, after telling me to hand over my passport and requiring my parents to put up their house as collateral, they let me go under curfew for nearly a year.

  ‘That’s not even the worst part,’ Mez says, her eyes flicking briefly to the door, checking to see if any of the kids are hanging around and in earshot.

  ‘How can this get any worse?’

  ‘I haven’t told Adrian.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask, trying not to be shocked and openly horrified. It is difficult, though. But then, I haven’t told Evan, have I?

  ‘You of all people have to ask me that?’ she replies, hotly. She is about to shout at me for being a hypocrite, I can tell. She’s done that several times over the years – not as many times as Faye, though.

  ‘I can understand why you wouldn’t, but I presume, as this is something that isn’t going to go away and you’ll have to attend court, he’ll have to know soon enough. Why haven’t you done the deed already and softened the blow? And got some support, even. I hate to think that you’ve been going through all this on your own.’

  ‘Support? Adrian?’ She snorts in ridicule at the very idea. ‘I can barely get him to look at me nowadays let alone support me.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ I ask.

  ‘Life,’ she says, pushing out her chair and standing up. She rubs the palms of her hands on the front of her jeans, leaving small trails of sweat. ‘Life is what happened. We both have one, but they’re not exactly merging at the moment. He’s out working all hours, I’m working all hours here with the kids and never the twain shall meet.’

  ‘But he’d want to know that you’re under so much pressure, that you’re in a bit of trouble, surely.’

  I feel, rather than see, the ‘would he?’ expression pop up, like done toast in a toaster, on her face. She moves to the dishwasher, pulls it open and starts to unload it. ‘A few months ago,’ she says, as she quickly but neatly starts to replace the glasses in the wall cupboard to her right, ‘I had a bit of a “moment”. I was shopping in the supermarket and I picked up a bar of chocolate for Adrianna, but didn’t put it in the basket. I completely forgot about it and almost walked out with it. Luckily at the last minute, something inside reminded me about the chocolate bar and I paid.

  ‘I came home, told Adrian about it – you know, as you do, wife to husband.’ She swings round suddenly, clutching a white china mug in her hand and pointing it at me as though she was about to accuse me of something sordid and tea-related. ‘Do you know what he said? “God, Mez, isn’t it enough that we’ve already got one crim in the family, or is it something genetic?”’

&nb
sp; I thought Adrian liked me. I thought, because he knew me, because he was around at the time of the trial and the stuff in the papers and the aftermath, that he knew I didn’t do it. I thought, like everyone else in our family, who stood by me, who were supportive and strong, that he knew I wasn’t capable of such a thing. Obviously I thought wrong.

  ‘He was joking, he said, when I burst into tears. But not that much, eh? So, that’s why I don’t tell him. Imagine what he’s going to say now. What other “jokes” he’s going to come up with. I can’t handle it at the moment.’ Having seen the hurt and horror on my face, Mez hides her face in the cupboard. ‘I will tell him, just when I feel better about it. When I know what to expect exactly, I’ll tell him.’

  ‘Do you want me to come to court with you?’ I ask the back of her head.

  ‘No,’ she says emphatically. ‘I’d never put you through that again. Thanks for the offer, but no, I’ll be fine. Adrian will probably have to come, show them I’m a respectable woman with a supportive – ha ha – husband and a young family, who made a mistake I’ve owned up to and who they can’t throw the book at. I’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.’

  ‘What about you and Adrian?’

  ‘We’ll be fine, too. We just need to sit down and talk for a change. It obviously doesn’t help that he’s off on holiday with the boys every two seconds. Trying to “blow off steam”. That’s why I blew up at Fez. That crack she made really hit home. And hot on the heels of Adrian’s remark – it all just got a bit much. But it’ll all be fine. Everything will be fine.’