‘And the more we found out, the more we heard, it was like we never knew you at all. You had slipped away from us and we hadn’t noticed. You were there all the time, physically, but you had gone from us two years before. Two years of living in the same house as you and we had no idea what you had been up to. It was worse for your father because he thought you and he were close, he thought you told him everything.
‘It was like a nightmare that would not end. I kept seeing your photo in the paper, in that swimsuit cut up to there and wearing make-up. Over and over, this picture of my little girl looking like those tarts you see on television. And the stories about the things you had done.’ Mum sags, as if memory after painful memory is piled on top of her. ‘Imagine what it was like to have to read about the things your daughter has done with a man twice her age, to hear that she had been with a woman.’ She covers her heart with her hands as if trying to stop it from trembling its way out of her body, as if protecting it from the worst of the memories. ‘The neighbours were all whispering, people would stop and stare at us in the street and we started to get hate mail. Whenever we thought we had seen the worst of it, something else would happen – like the stories from the people we knew and thought we could trust. Everyone in our lives was potentially a source for the papers. The police were here all the time and I was sure we were being followed.
‘We had to do whatever we could to protect the three of you, especially Bella and Logan. And the whole time I was so tormented because it was all my fault.’
That brings me up short, makes me sit up in my seat. ‘How could it possibly have been your fault?’ I ask.
‘I was never a proper mother to you, I know that. And killers always blame the mothers. They always say their mothers were bad or absent or not loving enough. I had my . . . problems . . . after you were born. I thought I had done this. I had not protected you enough and so I caused this. A mother is supposed to protect her child against everything. Even when they are old enough to go out into the world you still want to protect them. You still try to protect them and I didn’t do that with you.’
Serena comes to mind – I can say anything I like about her, but the second I mention her family, she flares up. She becomes a creature capable of doing almost anything to protect her young. I wonder what would happen to her if she failed in that. If, despite how hard she fought, her children were still hurt, still damaged, what she would do. How she would turn it in on herself. How deeply she would blame herself.
Because of Serena, I can understand what Mum is saying.
‘When you were found guilty, all I wanted to do was take you and hide you. I would have helped you escape if I could, you have to believe that. But it was too late for you, you were gone from me, so I had to concentrate on Bella and Logan. We left the court so quickly to get to them before someone else could tell them the news. We had to tell them in our own way before they found out in a nasty way, which a lot of people were desperate to do. They were so upset that we couldn’t leave them for too long. That’s why I didn’t come in when I dropped off your case, I had to get back to them. They were so upset, love, that I promised myself there and then to try to avoid the same mistakes again. I focused everything I was on them and on trying to make them happy and protect them from the outside world.’
‘And that world included me, didn’t it? That’s why you never passed on my letters.’
‘Yes, unfortunately it did. As long as you were around, we couldn’t forget and rebuild our lives. And people would try to use them to get to you. But I couldn’t just shut you out, you’re my little girl. That’s why I came to see you.’
Not in a long time, I want to say.
‘I hated seeing you in that place. I would cry inconsolably every time I left, and your father started to forbid me from going. He couldn’t stand what it was doing to me, but I had to keep coming. When you said not to come again I was devastated. I cried for a week. I thought you were finally blaming me and my punishment was not to see you again.’
‘I told you to stop coming because you looked so uncomfortable. You could barely focus on me you were so scared. I decided to put you out of your misery.’
‘You’re my little girl, of course I hated seeing you in that place, but of course I would come to see you no matter where you were. After that, your father said we were to have nothing to do with you again. Because he knew it would start upsetting me and it would do the same to the kids, probably worse.’
‘So that’s why you wouldn’t let them write to me or visit and wouldn’t pass on my letters? You made them forget me because it might upset them?’
‘They could never forget you, Poppy. Yes, your father and I decided that they were too young to understand properly, and we forbade Granny Morag from telling them the truth, but they were always asking for you. Bella sat on the step day after day for weeks, waiting for you to come back. Logan kept asking his teachers how he could find out which prison a person was in. Bella wanted to send you Raggy, her doll, so you would have someone to hug at night. They wrote you letter after letter, but we didn’t want them seeing you in that place. We just wanted them to forget so they wouldn’t go through the pain your father and I were going through. Eventually they stopped asking, stopped talking about you. Not because they had forgotten but, I think, because they thought it would be easier on your father and I if they stopped talking about you.’
She pauses to look at me again, her eyes moving over my face as if this is the first time she has had the opportunity to see me since I turned up on their doorstep.
‘We were too hard on them, growing up. We didn’t let them have any freedom as teenagers in case it happened again. No parties, no sleepovers, no holidays with their friends. Nothing. It seemed the only way to protect them from what happened to you and give them the best chance to get to adulthood unscathed. I don’t know if we did the right thing but it was the only way we could think to—’
‘To stop them turning into me.’
‘No, to stop us feeling like failures. It’s a painful thing to know you have failed your child, to see them struggle and flounder and then to lose them. We both just wanted to have done better by you. We both wanted better for you.’
‘So why can’t Dad even look at me, let alone talk to me? He doesn’t seem to want better for me, more like for me to not be here.’
‘Poppy, your father has cried every single day since you were sent to prison. He thinks I don’t know, but he has. That’s what he does when he shuts himself in that office of his, or in his shed. Sometimes it was at the beach hut. But it almost killed him losing you. He was so angry after the trial. With you, yes, but also with himself for not guessing what all those cuts and bruises and broken bones were about. For not seeing what was going on and not protecting you. You, all three of you, are his life.
‘It was him who put your room back together exactly as it was in London. He wanted you to have something familiar to come back to. After all those years away, he wanted you to be able to find comfort in something that was yours.’
‘So why have you been so awful to me since I came back?’
‘I don’t know how to be with you,’ she admits. ‘I don’t know if I should ask you about prison, if I should just pretend it didn’t happen, if I should talk to you like I did back before all this happened. I don’t know Poppy. The last time I saw you you were barely more than a teenager, now you’re a fully-grown woman. How do you relate to someone you haven’t seen in so long who basically moves in with you out of the blue? We just have to try to rub along together until we can find a way back to where we were. But we’re still your parents, we still love you. We never stopped loving you. When you become a parent, you never stop loving your children. And there is nothing you wouldn’t do for them. Please believe that.’
I do believe that. And I believe every word that she has said.
‘I do believe you, Mum. Of course I believe you.’
From her apron pocket she produces a slip of pa
per, reminding me instantly of the paper that Marcus wrote his number on. I kept that piece of paper, I stuck it in my diary because it was the first thing he ever gave me. She looks at the piece of paper, places it on the table, slides it over to me, then almost reluctantly removes her fingers from it.
‘I think it’s time I stopped trying to protect Bella and Logan – they’re old enough to make their own decisions.’
She gets up from the table and goes back to the stove. While she bends to look in the oven at whatever she has sitting in there, waiting to be baked, I look at the piece of paper she has given me. It has Bella and Logan’s addresses and phone numbers.
I stare at the information for a long, silent moment, not sure how to respond. I wanted to make contact, I wanted to speak to them, and now I can. Now it’s all up to me and I am terrified. What if they’re like Dad and can’t bring themselves to look at me, or what if they’re like Mum, scared of me? Or what if they just can’t bring themselves to let me back into their lives?
I push aside these worries and stand up. ‘I’ll talk to you later, Mum,’ I say. Again she doesn’t flinch, she simply nods without looking round.
Pocketing the piece of paper, I go back to the mission I had when I came back here: to dismantle that bedroom, that mausoleum to a time long gone, that decayed monument to a life that existed a long, long time ago.
I kept it as it was because I did not want to destroy all their hard work; I think a part of me also believed that it would make my parents love me again. Would make them want me around. No matter what Dad’s reasoning for rebuilding the room, it has become another cage by being a constant reminder of the past I destroyed by becoming involved with Marcus. It is as if they were doing what they wanted to do all those years ago – sending me to my room to think over the consequences of my actions.
What’s that quote? I put away childish things? Something like that. I do not know where it is from, I must have read it over the years, but it is what is apt for me. The sooner I destroy all evidence of the child I was, the sooner I can start to move forwards as an adult.
Mum’s words, her explanations, her reassurances, are whirling around my head like the blades of a helicopter: fump, fump, fumping in my mind. I do believe her. I believe and even understand most of what she said. But in that talk, in all those reassurances, at no point did she say she thought I was innocent. And that’s because they both still think I’m guilty.
They may love me, but they still think I am a liar and a slut and a murderer.
poppy
‘You know, Poppy, I suffer from gaps in my memory,’ she tells me.
‘Good for you?’ I reply, unsure what I’m supposed to say.
This is our second meeting. When I call her, she answers the phone straight away – no hesitation, no ignoring me – almost as if she has been waiting for my call. It’s probably because she is scared of what I might do. That moment she realised I knew about her family must have given her a jolt, the kind you get from stepping on the live rail on a train track.
We are back in the Kemptown café again, and this time she hasn’t arrived looking so cool and removed. This time she is almost friendly, for want of a better word. She seems more relaxed, as if I am an old friend she hasn’t seen in years and she is looking forward to catching up. I do not know what her game is, but she says this out of the blue, and it sounds very much like she is trying to share with me.
‘I don’t know if the gaps are from getting smacked in the head so many times, or if they were a way of coping with what went on, but I’ve been thinking – maybe you suffer from them too?’ she says.
‘No, my memory is fine, thank you very much,’ I reply. ‘I haven’t forgotten anything at all about that time.’
‘What I mean is, maybe you don’t remember what happened afterwards? Which is why you think I did it.’
The laugh bubbles up and out of me, rumbling my belly. She has got to be kidding. That is the funniest thing I have ever heard. ‘You think that you can convince me that I did it with that lame theory?’ I laugh some more. ‘You’ve got more chance of convincing me the Sun is made of butter!’ I laugh even harder. ‘Memory gaps! You’ll be telling me that raindrops are God’s tears next.’
Serena, so pure and untainted by life, sits back in her seat. ‘I was only offering you a possible explanation for what happened,’ she says calmly, reasonably. ‘It’s fine if you don’t want to accept it as a possibility.’ I sometimes wonder how she can consistently remain so cool and together. She does not seem to react in the way that most people would. I have just ridiculed her, laughed in her face, all but called her pathetic and she doesn’t seem upset, or even slightly ruffled. She is like a brick of ice, inured to everything I throw at her. She was like this with Marcus, too. Sometimes he would goad her, he would do things like kiss me in front of her, plainly doing it to get a reaction. And she wouldn’t comply. I always reacted, I always hated seeing him touch her, talk to her sweetly, even look at her sometimes. I always wanted her to go away, probably until my sixteenth birthday. She wasn’t like that. The only times she reacts now are when I mention her family. Then she becomes something close to a wild animal – ready to attack me. Is she made of ice in the places that other people have warm blood? Is she so shut off that she cannot care about the things normal people care about? Is that what made her capable of murder?
‘Why didn’t you get upset when Marcus kissed me and stuff?’ I ask her. I have to know. Even if it puts me at a disadvantage to ask, I have to know why she is not like other people. Why she is not like me. ‘Why didn’t it bother you?’
She frowns at me, and her confusion is genuine. ‘What makes you think it didn’t bother me?’
‘You never acted it. Like on my sixteenth birthday, when you had to tidy up while we went upstairs, you smiled. You actually smiled at us. How could you?’
‘Do you always take everything at face value?’ she asks.
‘No.’
‘Then why did you take me at face value?’
‘It’s not normal to not be jealous. It’s not normal to smile when your boyfriend goes upstairs to fuck another woman.’
‘Those weren’t norm—’ She stops speaking then sighs. ‘What’s the point? Look, if you must know, if I reacted to anything like that he would be incredibly loving when we were alone. He would cuddle me, tell me that he didn’t like hurting me and he was going to finish with you soon. He’d explain that you were just something he had to get out of his system, that you were fragile and if he dumped you just like that he was scared of what it’d do to you. And if you were hurt, you might tell everyone about the pair of you and that would ruin things for us. This – the kissing and cuddling and telling me he loved me – would go on for ages.
‘Then, it would switch. He’d have lulled me into a sense of security, into believing that it would be all right, and then he’d turn on me. Sometimes it’d be after he left the room and come back, sometimes it’d be just like that!’ She clicks her fingers. ‘Slap! Right across the face as he yelled who did I think I was, making him justify himself to me. Then slap!’ She slams her hand down on the table. ‘Another one, to drive his point home. And if I didn’t say sorry quick enough, as in within seconds of the first slap, when my head was still reeling, he’d lay into me properly.
‘So I learnt my lesson, and I stopped reacting. I stopped letting him see that it bothered me, because then he wouldn’t have any reason to hurt me, right? No, it got worse. Because I didn’t react, it showed I didn’t love him enough. He had given up so much for me, he’d stopped teaching at the school he loved for me and I didn’t love him enough not to feel a little jealous when he had to be with someone else.’
Marcus used to slap me whenever I reacted to him being with Serena. If I twisted my lips or rolled my eyes or looked sad for even a moment he would be on me: slap, slap, slap. Saying the same things. Almost word for word. But unlike Serena it never occurred to me to hide my feelings. It wasn’t something I co
uld do. I’m just not made that way. Not until I went inside, though, when I learnt that I had to hide everything all the time.
‘Which left me with a choice,’ Serena continues. ‘I react and get beaten, not react and get beaten. I chose not to react because it defied him. In a small way, it defied him. He wanted me to react so that he could see he had hurt me twice, meaning he was in total control. If I stopped reacting, he lost just that bit of control and he didn’t get full satisfaction. The night of your birthday, he broke two ribs by kicking me with steel-capped shoes for that smile.’
I cannot help but take a sharp breath. That is what he did after I had gone home. While I sat at my parents’ dining table, blew out candles, cut cake, drank lemonade and ate crisps and sandwiches with Bella and Logan and Mum and Dad, Marcus broke her bones.
‘I haven’t thought about that properly in a long time,’ she says. ‘I’ve certainly never talked about it.’
‘Did you go to hospital?’ I ask her, wondering if it was like it was with me. We never compared notes, but from what was said at the trial we could have written our stories from the same main script and just substituted our names at the relevant points. When he broke my wrist by accident – he slapped me at the top of the stairs and I fell down them and my wrist snapped halfway down – he took me to hospital. To one in another part of London because I’d been to the one nearer to him before and he didn’t want people to see me coming in twice. He didn’t want people to start to get suspicious. He waited outside in the car and drove me home afterwards.
‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘he drove me. But you knew the drill: different hospital every time, waiting outside in the car, driving you home afterwards. That time, he cried. He cried and cried, real tears. He cried and said he hated himself and he didn’t understand why he did it. He begged me to forgive him, he begged me to give him another chance, he cried and he begged me not to leave him. He cried so much I had to comfort him. It broke my heart he was so upset.’
The Ice Cream Girls Page 28
