The Ice Cream Girls

by Dorothy Koomson

  Because it would not be a random attack. It would be . . . No. It’s not my beach hut, it can’t be. I leap off the bus and wait for it to pull away before I step out on to the road. A car horn blares at me and I remember that I need to check the road before I cross. I search and search for a break in the traffic. There isn’t one. Everyone is eager to get to work or school or wherever. They don’t understand what I am going through.

  In desperation I dash out, the sound of horns blaring causing my heart to clamour up into my throat, but I don’t care – I need to get across the road. I make it to the central island in one piece, and pause for a few seconds. The traffic is less heavy on this side, fewer people are going the way I have just come from. After this blue car, I decide, and dash out like an athlete heading for the finish line once the car has passed me.

  I run down the path from the street to the promenade and dash the short distance to my hut, surprised the vandal hasn’t left. There is a buzzing sound – like a large demented bumble bee is trying to get into the hut beside the vandal, whoever they may be.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I shout from a distance away, above the buzzing. I am not scared, but I am not stupid. Until I know who I am dealing with, it’s best not to go right up to the person and start a confrontation. Let them show themselves so I can decide what the best course of action is. ‘What are you doing to my beach hut?’

  The buzzing sound stops just before the person appears from the gap between my beach hut, a white mask on his face and big goggles over his eyes. But I know who it is before he strips his face of its protective gear. Alain.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

  He is wearing paint-splattered clothes and in his hand he carries some kind of tool.

  ‘Sanding,’ he says. ‘You said I could visit the hut and, when I did, I noticed this edge was a little uneven. So I decided to sand it down. But once I did that bit, the rest looked tatty, so I had to carry on.’

  What do I say? I can’t make him put the uneven ridges back on the hut. I’d noticed them but had decided to leave them, to just paint over them and leave them for another time – when I could save up and buy the right tools, or even pay someone to do it. I have to engage with him now and I’d already decided not to do that.

  ‘I’m going to have to buy the paint for the sides now, and I can’t afford that at the moment,’ I say.

  He raises a ‘wait a minute’ finger then disappears back into the gap, before coming back out with two paint cans. ‘They’re the right colours,’ he says. ‘I rang the Seafront Office and checked. I’ve even got primer and undercoat back there.’ He is staring at me, and expectation fills the gap between us. He’s nervous, I realise. Wondering if I am going to throw his good deed back in his face and tell him to leave me alone. Or if I am going to accept this act of kindness for what it is – an act of kindness. He is persistent. More persistent than any cockroach I have encountered: the ones I used to crush in my prison rooms always stayed dead after they were crushed. I learnt, though, that they played dead sometimes, and I had to make sure they were properly crushed. I had done that with this man, and he still came back.

  Maybe he isn’t a cockroach after all. Maybe he is . . .

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ I ask.

  ‘Day off. That’s why I thought I’d make a start on this today. I’ve got a spare paintbrush if you’re free?’

  I search in my pocket for the familiar ridges of my keys and pull them out. I’ll go to see Serena on Thursday. She’s not going anywhere, is she? ‘I’ve got a few bits of the inside to finish off first,’ I eventually say to him. ‘Good thing I leave my painting clothes here, isn’t it?’

  Alain smiles a smile that flips my stomach upside down. ‘Yeah, it’s a good job,’ he says. My stomach flops back the other way. Stop it, I tell myself. You’re not allowed to fall in love with him. You’re not allowed to do anything until you’ve made Serena confess.

  Even as I’m telling myself this, I know my face is softening into a smile, my eyes are matching the expression in his eyes, and my heart is gently opening up, ready to let him in.

  poppy

  ‘You look incredible,’ Alain tells me. ‘Simply . . . incredible. Beautiful.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I mumble. I want to smile, but I feel a bit strange doing it. It’s been so long, I forget how to take compliments. He is full of compliments, not only for the way I look, the things I say, the way I paint, even the way I hand him coffee. He notices little things about me and then comments on them with a compliment. It’s hard not to be caught up in it, not to want to hear those lovely words aimed at me trip off his tongue.

  It’s been a bit of a natural progression to where we are now. Weather permitting, he would come by after work – he’s a college lecturer – or whenever he had free time and continue to sand and prime and paint the hut with me. Then we’d go for a drink or two afterwards. Last week he suggested we just go for a drink, and we did. Ten days later, we’ve been on a series of ‘dates’, like they do on the telly.

  ‘You don’t look so bad yourself,’ I say to him. He is wearing a white collarless dress shirt with the top two buttons open, black suit trousers and that is it. He is wearing them because he looks so fit in them. It’s the simplest outfit but, God, he looks tasty in it. There’s a hint of smooth collarbone and muscular chest visible through the open shirt buttons; that shirt flows inviting down his body, disappearing into the top of the trousers. The trousers fall in such a way that they emphasise his slender hips, rock-hard arse and muscly legs. I’m guessing about the details of his body, of course, since I’ve yet to see anything beyond the odd flash of chest and the smooth skin below the fair hairs of his forearms. He is freshly shaven, while his dark hair has a just-washed glisten, all coming together to give him a youthful, scrubbed-up look. Beside him on the pub sofa is his suit jacket, with his silky bow tie peeking out of the top pocket. We’re going to the theatre, so I’m dressed up too.

  I have rescued a blue silky gown my mother had hidden in the back of her wardrobe. I used to try it on when I was twelve – padding out the breast cups with toilet roll and climbing into her heels. Whenever she caught me in it, she used to tell me about the parties she and Dad used to go to, wearing it along with her pearls and diamonds (paste and plastic). She’d tell me how much fun they had, how this dress had become her favourite of all the others she had. She gave it to me when I was fourteen because, she said, she wasn’t going to be wearing it again and I looked so sweet in it. Then she obviously took it back.

  When they moved and recreated my bedroom, they seemed to have removed some vital pieces – namely the things they’d given me that were theirs. This dress, some of Mum’s jewellery, a 1950s edition of Peter Rabbit, a classic Mini V car model in a glass box Dad had given me – he’d always planned to give me a Mini like that for my eighteenth birthday but never got the chance. I found the items in their room, stashed away at the back of their big old wardrobe, as if they’d been trying to hide those little tokens of affection from me, hide them in Narnia where I’d never think to look.

  The wardrobe was, in fact, the first place I looked because people are incredibly unimaginative when it comes to hiding even their most precious items. Maybe I was just naturally paranoid, but I didn’t hide anything to do with Marcus in my wardrobe. I hid them under the two loose, creaky floorboards in the corner by the window. I hid the underwear he gave me, the picture I had of him I’d taken from his house without him knowing, I hid some of the clothes he gave me, I hid my diary there. I also hid the clothes I was wearing that night, the clothes that had his blood on them, there.

  So when the police came and searched the house and my room, and tore it apart, they found nothing. They found no evidence that showed them I had killed him. I don’t know why I didn’t give them the clothes. The items – a pair of high-waisted long black trousers, a plunging-necked pink top and a pink jacket – probably would have backed up my story, showed them that I was innocent. But,
by that point, they weren’t listening to me. They had decided they knew what had happened and anything they found was to back that up, not to prove who really did it. I took the stuff under the floorboards out the day before the trial started and hid my diary in a suitcase of old clothes, and the underwear and the bloody clothes I stashed in a black bag, in the early hours of the morning, under the black bags in the metal bin outside because it was bin day and I knew they would be taken away.

  Serena gave them her clothes. And they almost crucified her because of it. It was me who went to jail, but with the clothes and other things they found of hers that linked him to her, she almost went down. It was a dangerous game she played. She acted innocent, she behaved innocent, she behaved as if she had nothing to hide, nothing to fear because she hadn’t done anything wrong, when we both knew she did. We both knew she did it.

  I’m getting worked up. This happens all the time. In prison, I found equilibrium: I had to focus on the day-to-day, on getting through every day, on finding ways to make those days turn into weeks, those weeks turn into months, those months turn into years, those years into decades. I had to find ways to wish my life away. Out here, it only takes the smallest of things to drag me back to Serena: what she did; how she escaped. Everything seems to ignite the heat of anger I feel when I think of her.

  I have to stop thinking about her. Enjoy this evening with Alain.

  ‘Would Madam care for a glass of champagne before the car arrives to pick us up?’ Alain asks, as he takes my hand to help me into my seat. He is the perfect gentleman, always standing when I arrive or leave the table, always opening doors for me, always buying the first round, never attempting to kiss me . . .

  The touch of his hand is electrifying. I want to move my fingers to rest between his, I want his hand to rest on the small of my back and pull me close to him, I want him to dip his head and kiss me on the mouth. I want so much to have real, physical contact with him. Body to body, skin to skin. I have fantasises of being held by him. Being held by anyone would be nice, but by him it would be . . .

  ‘An orange and soda for me, please,’ I say. ‘The champagne bubbles tickle my nose and throat.’

  ‘Oh. I’ve asked for a bottle to be put in the back of the car. Shall I cancel it?’ he asks.

  ‘No, no, it’s very sweet of you. You drink, I’ll watch.’

  His lips part in a little laugh and my eyes are transfixed by that mouth. It is so sensuous, I’m sometimes desperate – achingly so – to trace the outline of his lips with the tip of my tongue. ‘Call me strange, but I like the idea of you watching me,’ he says, flashing one of his heart-stopping half-smiles.

  ‘Strange,’ I say to him.

  He laughs again before taking his wallet from inside his jacket and heading to the bar. It’s a good thing he likes me watching him because, even if I tried, I doubt I could remove my gaze from his divine body as it walks away.

  ‘Do you want to come back to my place?’ I ask at closing time. I have my legs curled up under me, I am resting my head back against the smooth, butter-soft leather of our sofa in the Maid Marion. Alain has his feet up on the other end of the curved sofa. The place has cleared out, as it often does during the evening when there is no football on, and it is literally just Alain and I, dressed up to the nines for our theatre date. ‘My parents have gone to London for a few days to visit my brother and sister – two days with one, two days with the other. I have the house – and the biscuit tin – to myself. If you’re very good, I might even let you have a jammy dodger.’

  ‘Do you mind?’ Alain asks, suddenly serious, his forehead a mass of concerned lines, his head slightly dipped so he can see all of my face as he questions me. ‘Do you mind that they’ve gone to visit them without you?’

  I turn my head away from him to stare at the bar, inhaling as I do so. I hate that you can’t smoke in pubs any more. I’m just the wrong side of lazy to keep going outside for a fag, and conversations like this need a fag to accompany them. Instead, I pick up a beer mat and start to spin it through my fingers while I scrutinise the bar that I’ve seen every time we’ve been in here. Along the top of the bar is a row of glasses, all hanging or sitting upside down, waiting to be used. Imagine the carnage if that shelf ever fell, if the screws holding it into the bar frame one day just gave way and the whole thing came tumbling down? It’d be somewhere equal to the carnage left behind after you’re sent to prison, only with more blood.

  September 1988

  Bella’s face was buried in her ragdoll’s body most of the time; Logan’s eyes were wide and white with fear. They watched the police tear through the house: feet trampling around our home, hands pulling things off shelves, upending furniture, ripping things apart, leaving behind a hideous debris. Mum held Bella, Dad held Logan, and I sat alone with them at the kitchen table, all of us trying to weather the chaos raging around us. None of us spoke as the soundtrack of things falling, thudding, occasionally smashing, orders to look here and there seemed to play on loop. The officer in charge, Detective Inspector Grace King, came into the kitchen and fixed me to the spot with her most fearsome look. They hadn’t found anything, which had probably annoyed her even more. I don’t know what they expected to find – maybe a detailed written confession because they had the murder weapon, and I’d told them I had thrown away the clothes I was wearing because they were ruined – but they still insisted on searching the house.

  ‘Take her away,’ she said to the two uniformed officers who had come into the room with her. I was on bail and under house arrest, the only reasons they would need to arrest me again would be if I broke my curfew conditions or they found new evidence. Or to scare me, it seemed.

  Bella began to cry and Logan anxiously shook his head as the officers wrestled me to my feet and roughly put the cuffs on behind my back. It was all for show, to scare my parents or the kids into saying something that would incriminate me. I knew it was for show, but Bella and Logan didn’t and their horrified, terrified faces as I was led out of the kitchen became scored into my mind, onto my heart. Their fears didn’t go away for that whole year leading up to the trial. Bella would wake up at night, crying for me because she was scared I would be taken away; Logan insisted on sitting beside me at dinner, when we were watching TV, even if he came into my room while I was reading.

  They didn’t really understand what was happening, just that someone said I did something bad and I hadn’t done it.

  ‘Yes,’ I say to Alain, ‘I mind. I mind very much. My brother and sister were six and seven when I was sent down. I tried writing to them but my mum asked me to stop because they were too young to understand I wouldn’t be back for years and years, so my letters were confusing and upsetting them.

  ‘I still sent them birthday and Christmas cards but I never heard anything, which I guessed meant they never got them. Then, when they were older, I started writing to them again, but the letters came back unopened, along with the cards. Well, opened by the prison staff, but you know what I mean. My family didn’t want to know. All these years I’ve tried, but now they’re old enough to think for themselves and they still don’t want to know. Mum all but said so when she mentioned the visit to London – she kind of hinted that as long as I was in the house, they wouldn’t be coming down.’ I shrug at the futility of the situation. ‘What am I supposed to do? I can’t force them to want to know me. They’ve just listened to all the crap that was said about me and believed it, I guess. Without bothering to ask me.’

  October, 1989

  I hugged Bella first, then Logan. ‘I’ll see you when I get home later, OK?’ I said to them on the last day of the trial. I truly believed I would. That’s why I’d had to hastily pack a suitcase of belongings last night just in case. They both hugged me back extra hard and ran to Granny Morag, who was staying at home with them. They moulded themselves to her, holding on for dear life, it seemed; holding on in case she went away like I was about to. ‘I really will see you later,’ I told them. I was innoc
ent, I was bound to be found not guilty – why would what I was saying be a lie?

  Alain nods, staring into space, as though considering what I have said. I don’t want to kill the mood: we’ve had a buzz going all evening.

  ‘Are things even a little better with your family?’ he asks.

  I have told him all about Mum walking around pale and shaky, as if scared of what I might do, and Dad just not being anywhere that I am. I have not told him that the only reason I stay, the only reason I don’t walk away from them now and try again when my name is cleared, is that here I get to be near her. I have not told Alain anything about her – he hasn’t asked, either. I assume he’s read all the articles, that he knows what I was accused of, but he never brings it up directly. He talks around it, acts as if he’s not bothered a lot of the time. I’m not sure if it’s because he isn’t or because he feels he has to act that way.

  ‘Let’s not talk about that,’ I say. I cannot deal with all that at the moment. I want to go back to the buzz we’d had earlier. When we’d had our ‘theatre date’, when we talked and acted as if we were about to go to the theatre any second; then, between eight and ten we talked about Hamlet, the play we were ‘seeing’. And then, from ten to the ding-ding of the last orders bell, we talked about how nice it was to get out of the house and watch live performances.

  ‘Do you want to come back to mine then?’ I ask again.

  ‘Want to? Yes. Should? That’s another matter.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I ask. From what I knew of men, and admittedly it wasn’t much, if they liked you in that way they generally didn’t need asking more than once to come home with you. They certainly didn’t debate the shoulds and shouldn’ts of it.

  ‘It means I’ll think about it as I walk you home. Come on.’ He is on his feet, shrugging on his jacket and picking up my wrap to slip around my shoulders.