The Ice Cream Girls

by Dorothy Koomson

  ‘The hospital called.’

  Relief comes in a small, gentle wave that doesn’t shake my bruised head and body too much.

  ‘I met Poppy outside in the waiting area.’

  My body sags, my eyes close.

  ‘She’s very worried about you.’

  ‘I’ll bet she is.’

  ‘Her concern did seem genuine.’

  ‘Hmmmmm,’ I say.

  ‘Look, I think you should come home. At least until you’re better, then we can talk about it again. OK? I can sleep in the spare room.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, no?’ He is confused and the confusion strips him of his cool voice and demeanour.

  ‘I mean, no, I’m not coming home.’

  ‘What?’

  I turn my head, ignoring the tug of a thousand nerve endings being lit up with pain. ‘I’m not coming home, Evan. I’m not coming back to the house where you walk around like you’re allowing me to be there under sufferance, while I lie in bed dreaming up more and more elaborate ways to get you to believe I’m sorry for not telling you everything sooner. It’s not going to happen.’ I take a deep breath and hold on to my ribs as I do so. ‘I’m not living like that again.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘That’s . . . that’s what he was like.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Him . . . him . . . the man who died.’

  ‘Marcus Halnsley?’ It feels like an abuse of love to have Evan say his name, to have the man I love humanise the man who almost killed me.

  ‘Yes. I was scared all the time. On edge all the time. Trying as hard as I could not to upset him. Trying to anticipate the things that might enrage him and trying to fix them so he wouldn’t go off on one. And I’m not doing it again. I was so worn out. Exhausted and scared. I can’t . . . I won’t do it again.’

  ‘You need looking after, you can’t rest properly in a B&B.’

  ‘I’ll survive.’

  ‘Was he really that bad?’ Evan asks.

  I’m sure he’s seen it all the time in his work. He’s experienced it and counselled on it but still Evan wants to ask why I didn’t just walk away. Leave. Move on from him. And the answer is always the same: I couldn’t. Until the night he died.

  That was why no one believed us. When Poppy and I tried to explain what he was like, tried to tell that he wasn’t our victim but we were his, no one believed us because no one could really understand why one of us – let alone both of us – would put up with it. Would tolerate being so beaten down we would have done almost anything for him. Almost anything. It was the ‘almost’ that was important in the end. The things he did, the fact that Marlene refused to talk about him, made it easier for people to believe that we were a couple of spoilt vixens who seduced, abused and ultimately killed a decent, if flawed, man rather than that we were capable of putting up with so much.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I say.

  ‘What about the kids? They’ll be worried if they find out you’re ill and not at home with them.’

  ‘Don’t do that, Evan. Don’t use the kids. You didn’t think of them when you were sitting on your high horse and throwing me out. Don’t try to use them against me to get what you want now.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That was a bit low. I just want you to come home is all. Even if the atmosphere isn’t great, I don’t want you to be too far away in case something happens to you again.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. Maybe time apart is what we both need right now. So that you can process stuff and I can . . .’ I don’t know what I’ll do. I buried myself in my family, in being a wife and being a mother. I don’t know much else. That’s why I clean my B&B room every night and hide the knives; I can’t break that habit.

  ‘I don’t want time apart. The past few days have been hell. I gave myself a glimpse of what life without you is like and I hate it, Sez, I really hate it.’

  ‘I hate being without you and the kids, but I can’t come back if you’re going to be awful to me.’ I swallow, the pain moving in waves down my throat and chest. ‘I’m not saying you don’t have a right to be angry. God, you’d be a bit of a freak if you weren’t. But I can’t be there with you treating me like a subordinate.

  ‘One of the things I love about you, about being with you, is that we’re equals. I’m not saying we can do exactly the same things as each other, but we’re equals in every other respect. When we make decisions we make them together. When we argue it’s as equals – not because one of us thinks we’re better than the other and the other has to feel bad and accept they’re wrong and start kowtowing to avoid trouble . . . You have no idea how difficult it is living like that. I never had that with you, I was always free to say what I like and think what I like and know that even if you don’t like it, or you shout at me, you’re not going to follow it with a punch, a slap, a kick, or withdrawing your affection. Until now.’

  ‘What, you’re scared of me?’

  ‘No, but I was starting to be because I was starting to do things to make sure that I didn’t upset you. It’s no way to live a life: walking on eggshells in case you set someone off.’

  Evan reaches up with his left hand and scratches his left eye. Verity used to do that as a baby, when she was tired or about to start a marathon cry. I used to pull her hand away and tell her no. A few times, in the middle of the night, when I had picked her up to resettle her I would scratch my eye, she would take my hand away as if to say, if she wasn’t allowed to do it, then why was I?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I was just so shocked and hurt. I couldn’t understand why you didn’t tell me. And I just wanted to shout at you. I didn’t mean to make you scared.’

  ‘Evan, I’m not saying if I come home you have to forgive me or pretend you’re not cross with me. I just want you to act as though you’re cross with me as an equal and not expect me to creep around feeling bad.’ I gingerly touch the centre of my chest. ‘I could not feel worse about not telling you, believe me, and I will apologise and apologise and apologise – till the end of time, if I have to, but I won’t come home and apologise if you’re going to use it as a way to treat me badly. I’d rather suffer in a hotel and apologise from afar.’

  ‘Come home,’ he says immediately. ‘We can work everything out later, once you’ve got the all-clear, just come home with me.’

  ‘I’d love that. Honestly, I can’t think of anything better.’

  ‘You say that now,’ he says. ‘Wait till you see all the washing up, laundry and tidying that needs doing.’

  He doesn’t kiss me, or hold my hand. There’s a long way to go before that can happen. It might not happen ever again, but at least at home I can be with the children and I can start to pretend I’m a boring old Brighton mother without a real-life skeleton buried in my past. At least at home I can be something approximating Serena again.

  poppy

  ‘I’ve been stalking Serena,’ I finally admit to Alain.

  ‘Serena? The Serena?’

  I nod.

  ‘Oh. OK. OK. Why?’

  ‘To get her to confess to killing Marcus, of course. To get her to clear my name.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘What do you think? Fucking hell! If she had cleared my name, don’t you think I’d be celebrating? I wouldn’t have fucking called you, would I?’

  ‘I guess not,’ he says, moving his lithe body forwards in the armchair and linking his hands together as if in prayer. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘She’s in hospital.’

  ‘Oh . . . Oh, fuck. What happened?’

  ‘We . . . we were arguing. And she . . . she fell and hit her head.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘I don’t know. Her husband wouldn’t tell me. He told me to go away. You have to find out for me. I have to know that she’s OK. You have to help me.’

  ‘She just fell?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t . . . You didn’t hit her or anything?’ />
  ‘What?! NO! Why would you ask such a thing? I wouldn’t . . . I couldn’t. What makes you think . . . ? What?! I mean, what?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he says, raising his hands in surrender. ‘I had to ask.’

  ‘Why did you have to ask? How could you think such a thing of me? I’ve never hit anyone except in self-defence. And that was cos some silly bint thought that I was an easy mark. She was a grass and, to throw suss off her, she tried to make out I was the grass. Got herself a room spin and blamed it on me. When I wouldn’t bite she came at me, tried to make it look real. I only shoved her to get her off me. It wasn’t my fault. That was the only time. I talked myself out of all sorts of trouble. I’d never hit someone first. Why would you think that I would?’

  Alain gets up, crosses the wooden floor of his Hove living room and comes to crouch down in front of me. Gently, he reaches out, covers my hands in his in a warm, tender embrace. He looks up at me with his head to one side, like a man studying a painting he can’t quite see properly in a gallery, like a climber wondering if he can really reach the summit of the mountain in front of him. ‘Poppy, please, please don’t take this the wrong way – because I think you’re incredible. You are gorgeous, and generous and funny, and beautiful and kind,’ he says. ‘But you can also be terrifying.’

  Me?

  ‘I love you. I absolutely love you but sometimes without warning you switch into what I can only guess is prison-mode. You rant and start in with the prison slang, your body sort of toughens and you hold yourself in a covertly menacing manner, while your eyes seem to start scanning the room for danger or for a weapon. It’s . . . terrifying.’

  He is talking gibberish; I am only ‘terrifying’ when I need to be.

  ‘And when you’re like that, it’s easy to believe you capable of anything.’

  ‘Anything,’ I repeat in a monotone. ‘Including murder?’

  He sighs and glances away for a moment, before increasing his hold around my hands and refocusing his attention on me again. ‘Anything,’ he says, with a slight, resigned nod of his head.

  ‘But I didn’t . . .’

  ‘I know, I know. Poppy, I believe you, that’s why I never asked. After spending two minutes with you I knew you weren’t a murderer, but there is something about you that is capable of causing harm. I’m sure you weren’t always like this. I’m sure it’s happened as a result of prison, but it’s there. It’s who you are sometimes. That’s why I had to ask.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,’ Alain continues, gently. ‘I have no idea what you’ve been through, and what has caused this in you. But, Poppy, it’s there. And it’s scary.’

  ‘She gets to live this wonderful life and I . . . I get this. I get all of this. And even when I try to put things right, I’m the one who ends up in the wrong.’

  ‘I’m not saying you’re in the wrong. Hell, I’d want to clear my name, too. But I’m just not sure this is the way to go about it.’

  ‘How else am I going to go about it? After my second appeal was rejected, I wasn’t allowed to appeal again because there was no new evidence. Nothing to show and prove that I didn’t do it. Do you understand what that means?’

  He nods. Naturally, he nods because he thinks he does. But he doesn’t, how can he?

  ‘It means, it meant, that they didn’t want to hear the truth. No one wanted to hear the truth. I was guilty as far as they were concerned – the evidence said so. But the evidence was wrong. I didn’t do it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No, you don’t!’ I scream at him. ‘How can you know? I had all these years of being told I did it. People offering me the chance to change my plea to manslaughter so I’d get less time. People wanting me to go on courses where I talked about my crime and the impact it had and to be rehabilitated. But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. How could I plead guilty to manslaughter when I didn’t do it? How could I talk about my crime when I didn’t do it?

  ‘They all kept wanting me to face up to it or they hinted that they wouldn’t recommend me for probation, etc. But at the same time, because I wasn’t like the other girls my age, because I kept working hard and I didn’t get involved in the fights and the drugs and all of that, they kept trusting me with the important jobs. They knew I was trying to unofficially study for a degree, and they encouraged me to take an Open University course. But still, I was just a prisoner to them. I was a murderer to them. It was as if they knew on the one hand that I didn’t do it, but on the other hand kept badgering me to admit I did.

  ‘Twenty years of that.’

  ‘I’m not surprised you’re angry,’ Alain says reasonably. ‘I would be, too. Anyone would.’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ I wail. ‘You just don’t understand.’ How can he understand when he sums up things like that, when twenty years of that can be summed up with essentially, ‘Anyone would be angry’?

  His thumbs caress the palms of my hands and he leans as close to me as he can without touching me. ‘Make me understand,’ he says. ‘I want you to talk to me until I do understand. OK?’

  I stare at him. Wondering how I can do that.

  ‘First, I’m going to call the hospital, find out how Serena is. And then you and I are going to sit here and you are going to talk to me until I understand what you’ve been through.’

  I shake my head. ‘It won’t do any good. I can’t make you understand.’

  ‘You have to try because this can’t go on, Poppy.’

  ‘What?’ He sounds like he is threatening me.

  ‘You can’t keep stalking Serena.’

  ‘I’m not going to do that any more,’ I say. ‘I decided earlier I had to stop.’

  He presses his lips together; there is something he wants to say but is scared to. What, in case I turn into Prison Poppy again? In case I become ‘terrifying’?

  ‘What you did,’ he says, again with the gentle tone, ‘what you did was compulsive. You did it because you felt you had to, not because you wanted to. I’m worried that you’re going to feel like that again. That you’ll start to watch her again because you won’t be able to help yourself.’

  ‘I will be able to help myself.’

  ‘Poppy, you are innocent. You think the only way to prove that is to make Serena confess. How are you going to do that if you stay away from her?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know, but I’ll find a way.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. In a few days, when the horror and shock of all of this fades a little, when your feelings of resentment towards her start to resurface, you’ll want to go back to how it was before. You’ll want to be in control again. She was responsible for your world being destroyed, for you being powerless, so you are going to need to feel in control – powerful – again. The easiest way is to go back to what you’ve been doing.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’

  ‘Maybe. But hold that thought. I’ll just go get my mobile. It’s got the number of someone at the hospital who may be able to help, OK?’

  I nod at him. He is wrong. I may be a monster, and I may want the monster-maker to pay, but I won’t do that again. Today was the wake-up call I needed. Serena’s accident, her husband’s face . . .

  A shudder scuttles through me when I think of it all. I can’t go back to that.

  Alain’s house is cosy, a nice place in Poet’s Corner. It’s all swish and posh, with fireplaces and floorboards and large windows.

  I stand up, shake my legs out and walk the length of his room towards his work area. It is where most people have their dining area in similar houses I clean around here. His work area is a chaos of papers and books and in the middle, at the eye of the work storm, is his computer.

  I’ve almost forgotten that his job and the fact he was originally ‘researching’ me is why we broke up. It’s also the reason why I called him. After his questionable behaviour, he wouldn’t be in any position to judge me. Although now I wonder if he would have judged me even if he hadn’t done what he had done.
<
br />   His computer swirls with a pattern of coloured lights that twist and turn on themselves. His desk is a mess. I don’t know how he manages to work in all of this. I glance down at the notepad on his keyboard and my name jumps out at me. He has sketched my name in block capitals over several lines in blue biro. Some of the letters are filled in with sketchy blue biro lines, others are not. Inside the ‘O’ of my name he has drawn a little blue angular heart which has been coloured in, filled over and over until that section of paper is heavy with blue ink; until his heart is full.

  I reach out to touch it, run my finger over the little blue angular heart. Touching it unhitches a new fear inside me, causing my stomach to spin. ‘I love you. I absolutely love you.’ Alain said that to me.

  How can he? How can he love a monster? What is wrong with him? I ask myself.

  I did it, I loved a monster. I loved Marcus. And look where that got me. Look how it all turned out.

  I hear the creak of Alain’s footsteps as he paces upstairs, the murmurs of his voice as he talks on the phone.

  What is wrong with him?

  I snatch my hand away from the notepad and decide to leave.

  I have to get away from here. From him. From this. I have to be on my own to think about what I’m going to do next. I’ll find out about Serena some other way.

  I just have to get away from this.

  I ease the door shut on my way out. I do not want him to know that I’ve gone because he’ll probably come down the stairs and try to stop me. Try to be nice to the monster. And we all know that you should not feed monsters, it only makes them want more.

  ‘She’s going to be fine,’ he says to me.

  I suppose I didn’t try too hard to hide. Outside the beach hut, the world is crying, a torrent of tears is falling from the sky, bouncing down on the smooth skin of the promenade. I have been listening to it patter down on the roof, counting the tears as much as I can.

  ‘They think it was a panic attack. She hyperventilated which is why she was unsteady on her feet and then hit her head. But she’ll be fine.’

  I am sitting on the green table – I didn’t have the energy to unfold a deckchair – and I continue to stare at the floor as I nod at him, relief ebbing slowly into me.