I’m only an inch shorter than the six-foot policeman and that surprises him for a minute.
‘Licence?’ he asks, his voice a little more clipped, I think, because I am not a small woman. As his eyes meet mine, I see a flashbulb of recognition pop in his eyes. He knows my face from somewhere, but he can’t quite place me. I lower my head and reach back into the car.
‘Pass my bag, please, love,’ I say to my daughter who is trembling like a newborn foal.
She does as she’s told and from my purse I produce my licence. It’s not a new, photographic one – which would give him more time to study my face, work out where he knows me from, if I am a fugitive on the run – but it does have my parents’ address. This is the one thing I never got around to changing in all this time. I am an idiot.
He slips it out of its plastic wallet and unfolds it. He doesn’t speak as he studies the green paper, only the buzz and whoosh of cars driving on by, going about their business, surrounds us. I think he is waiting for me to say something, to ask what the problem is, to confess to something.
Silence is the best way forward, I’ve found. I do not have to say anything, at least I didn’t the last few times I was arrested, and I’m going to exercise that right. Even if it makes me look guilty as sin, I’d rather not say anything that can’t be taken back. Silence can always be explained away, erased almost with a single word; the wrong words in the wrong combination at the wrong time can damn you to hell. Or, at least, to prison.
The cars continue to whiz by and I find myself comforted by them, allowing myself to float on the sound of them as they hurry by.
‘Do you know how fast you were driving, Madam?’ the police officer eventually asks because I haven’t thrown myself on my knees, begging for mercy and I obviously have no intention of doing so.
‘Um . . . no,’ I reply. ‘I speeded up to overtake the blue Micra. But only for a few seconds.’
‘You were travelling well over eighty-five miles per hour for at least ten minutes.’
I was? ‘Oh,’ I reply. ‘I didn’t realise. I thought I was only going that fast to overtake. I never speed. I always try to drive safely.’
He is still studying my licence, still reading and re-reading my name, trying to join up the dots in his mind. When all the dots are joined, when he gets to the end of the puzzle, the policeman’s face gives him away. It freezes in its inquisitive expression as everything falls into place and he connects the dot of my old name with the dot of my general description with the dot of my alleged crime. And there he has it: who the woman he’s just pulled over is.
He recovers quickly, hides his shock behind a professional mask again, but, when he looks up at me from the licence, his eyes are piercing. They want to slap handcuffs on me and cart me off to jail where he – and quite a lot of people – think I belong. He appears, in the short time I have known him, to be the kind of man who would not advocate simply throwing away the only key – but melting it down, freezing it in liquid nitrogen, shattering it into a trillion pieces and having those pieces scattered all across the world’s oceans just to make sure that they were never found, even accidentally, so one such as I could never be released.
‘Is this your licence, Madam?’
‘Yes. I haven’t got around to updating it with my new address,’ I say.
He raises his left eyebrow a little. And new name? he’s trying to ask.
Correct, I think back at him. I will not say it, though. If he wants to know what I’m calling myself these days, he’s going to have to work that bit harder.
He hands the licence back to me. ‘You should get it updated. It’s an offence to drive without a valid licence,’ he says.
I nod at him. ‘Yes, officer,’ I say.
‘I could breathalyse you and have you come down to the station for driving over the speed limit,’ he says, just to watch me squirm, I’m guessing.
‘Yes, officer,’ I say. He is getting a thrill out of this. He’s only human, after all. In his shoes, I might do the same thing. I might get some enjoyment out of ‘paying back’ someone I thought beat the system.
‘I won’t, this time.’ He knows how to be professional and menacing in just the right proportions and it would worry me if not for Verity. My concern for her overrides my fear. She must be scared of this skin-deep Jekyll and Hyde impersonation he has going on. It’s bound to be even more terrifying because she doesn’t know what is really happening here. ‘I’d better not have occasion to stop you again,’ he says. ‘You won’t be so lucky next time.’ We both know what he means by that.
‘Yes, officer,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’
As I shut my door behind me, I feel safe again. Protected from the prying outside world by a simple metal shell. I was lucky that time. If he had been the true menacing type, I would be heading for a cell. For a breathalyser, for a urine sample, for what feels like a catalogue of small humiliations only to receive a metaphorical slap on the wrist and to be sent on my way with no charge, not even a few lines scrawled on a page ripped out of a notebook. No record. That’s happened to me about twenty times. I’ve been stopped in a car and recognised and then ‘put in my place’. After each time, I vow to change my licence details, to make myself inconspicuous, but each time I forget. My defences kick in and I try not to think about it. I can’t tell anyone – least of all Evan – about it, so I end up pretending it didn’t happen . . . until next time.
This is the first time it’s happened with someone else in the car. And poor Verity is still trembling.
‘It’s all right, sweetie,’ I say, trying to hide how much I’m shaking as I slot the key into the ignition. ‘Just a misunderstanding.’
‘But why did he say all those things?’ she asks, distressed. She looks every one of her thirteen years; no longer older and a little mature, now she looks like a little girl who needs a hug and a mountain-load of reassurance from her mother.
‘He was just doing his job,’ I say.
‘But he said he was going to arrest you!’ she wails.
‘No, he didn’t. He said – quite clearly – that he could arrest me, but he wasn’t going to. It’s fine.’
‘It’s like he knew you, Mum,’ she says. ‘It’s like he knew you and he didn’t like you. Why?’
I shrug my shoulders and shake my head. ‘How could anyone not like me?’ I say as I check my rear-view mirror and blindspot then indicate to pull out. ‘I’m lovely.’
April, 1995
I was lost. Properly lost. I had parked my car around here somewhere while I went to the house to pick up the material for Medina for her dressmaking course – although why she couldn’t do it herself was still a mystery – and now I couldn’t find my way back to my car. The material, which was light and floaty when made into a chiffon dress, was heavy, bulky and unwieldy in my arms in the quantities she’d bought it. The seller who had put the small ad in the paper was obviously feeling aggrieved with the hard bargain she had driven on the phone because he hadn’t offered to carry it to my car for me – he hadn’t even offered me a black binbag. It didn’t surprise me – Medina rarely paid full price for anything. I’d seen her try to haggle in supermarkets! According to her, the price on the ticket was just a starting point. She had a way, too, of making the person feel as if they were in the wrong for wanting the price they asked for.
I struggled on down the backstreets of Kensington. In this fading light, they all looked the same to me – big imposing houses and blocks of flats, narrow windy roads.
A tall man came striding towards me and, as always when I was alone in a street with a man, my heart did a frightened little jump. It was momentary and reflexive, I’d had that for years. I should probably ask him for directions, but he seemed to be in a hurry, his long legs striding out, and I didn’t want to get in his way. He gave me a brief nod, and smile; the dark acknowledgement, Faye, Medina’s twin, calls it – the way black people acknowledge each other when they’re in a predominately white area. I gave him a brie
f smile and nod back, and he strode on. After a second, I stopped, turned back to look at him. He had stopped too.
It was, it was him.
‘It is, it’s you,’ he said.
‘It is, it’s me,’ I replied.
He came back the few steps to me, and without even asking, he took the bundle of material out of my hands.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Thanks?’ he asked, confused.
I pointed to the material that now filled his arms. ‘For lightening my load.’
‘Oh, don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘You look exactly the same.’
‘Wow, that didn’t take you long, did it? Less than three minutes to start the insults.’
‘What insults?’
‘You said I look exactly the same.’
‘You do.’
‘And, the last time we met, you said you didn’t fancy me. I assumed it was because you didn’t find the way I look particularly attractive. So if I look exactly the same, that means I’m still unattractive to you.’
‘You deduce far too much from far too little,’ he said. ‘And talk a lot.’
‘Only around you, actually. Most of the time, I’m pretty quiet.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘OK, I suppose that is your right.’
‘And you’re wrong, anyway. I do find you attractive.’
‘Now you might do, but then you didn’t.’
‘Would you rather I found you attractive in the past and not now? Especially since back then I seem to remember you had sworn off relationships.’
‘Well—’
‘Answer carefully, little one, for the wrong answer could bring all this rather fine flirting to a screeching halt. And wreck any chance we may have of getting together.’
‘No pressure then.’
‘There is a vast amount of pressure, didn’t you understand that from what I just said?’
‘I was being sarcastic.’
‘Nah, I don’t think you were.’
‘You’re incorrigible,’ I said.
‘I’ve always wanted to be incorrigible. Are you going to come for a drink with me then? Or are you still off all men, for ever and ever amen?’
‘I am. But I might make an exception for you, seeing as you’re so incorrigible and so pleased to be incorrigible. When were you thinking?’
‘No time like the present.’
‘Ah, can’t, I have to get this material to my sister.’
‘Where does she live? Maybe we can drop it off then go for a drink. It’ll be nice to meet the future family.’
‘Don’t be starting all that “my parents would love you” stuff again. Actually, my sister lives in Bethnal Green, not far from me.’
‘Right, so where are you going? The Tube station’s nowhere near here.’
‘Oh, that – I’m lost. I’ve been wandering around for ages. My car’s parked near here somewhere. Well, I think it is.’
‘How about this for a plan?’ he said, smiling as though I was one sandwich short of a picnic, but quite liking it. ‘I help you find your car, you drive us to your sister’s and then we go for a drink afterwards?’
‘It’ll be quite late.’
‘Is that a no?’
‘I did not say the word “no”. Nor did I imply it. I just suspect we’re going to get to my sister’s house and you’ll go, “Oh, it’s a bit late for a drink, how about we just go back to yours?”’
‘Do you want to know the tragedy of this situation?’
‘Yes.’
‘That never occurred to me. I really wish it had, but it didn’t. I thought it’d be nice to do something together. I live and work just a bit beyond Bethnal Green, so I could go on afterwards, but damn it, I can’t believe I didn’t think of trying to get into your place. You’d make a good man, you know?’
‘Why Ewan, you say the nicest things.’
‘Thank you, Serena. So, is it a goer?’ He remembered my name. After all these years, he remembered my name – there was something special about that.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Right, so what road did you leave the car on?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘You can’t remember.’
‘No, my memory’s a bit fuzzy, all over the place.’
‘Really, wow. Think I lucked out there, most women I know are elephants – never forget, even the smallest transgression. If you’ve got a fuzzy memory, I think we’re really going to get along.’
‘Yeah, don’t bank on it, mate.’
‘Were there any distinguishing marks about the road? Anything, anything at all?’
‘Not that I can remember. Except, I think there was a blue house on the road. Although I might have just walked past a blue house. No, no, I think there definitely was.’
‘Blue house, right. I know exactly where your car is. Come on, follow me.’ He turned in the direction I had just come from and started striding down the road. I didn’t have too much trouble catching and keeping up with him.
‘If you don’t live or work around here, what are you doing here?’ I asked, as we turned the corner I had just navigated to get on to this street.
‘Ah, well, I was meeting someone for a drink. A girl. A friend of one of the nurses at the hospital. This nurse has been trying to set us up for ages. She was convinced we would get on.’
‘And you didn’t?’
‘Well, I thought things were going OK, until she excused herself to go to the loo. She didn’t even go in the direction of the loos, she went to the foyer and picked up the payphone. I sat there, watching her. She speaks to someone for a few minutes, laughing, joking, comes back, sits down. Five minutes later, the restaurant phone rings and the manager comes to tell her she’s got a call. She goes to the phone, comes back and deadpan says, “Something’s come up, I have to go.” I ask her what’s come up and she just looks at me, all startled because she obviously wasn’t expecting me to ask. She just shrugs and goes, “I don’t know, something” and off she trots. Leaving me with two half-eaten meals, an empty bottle of wine and the bill. And of course, all the people at the nearby tables have heard this and are looking at me.’
I burst out laughing. I had to stop in the street and hold my sides I was laughing so much. ‘That’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard,’ I managed between breathy laughs. ‘How boring must you be?’
‘I know, that’s what I’ve been thinking all this while. She’d told her friend she thought I was the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen. So now, she’s got an awful date story to tell, with me as the bad date. Me. She’ll tell people I’m nice to look at but dull. How is that fair?’
I started on a fresh crop of laughs.
‘She wasn’t exactly a barrel of fun, either, but you don’t see me dumping her, do you?’
‘That isn’t the worst part, you know, Ewan,’ I said to him, still laughing but walking while I did it.
‘It isn’t? What could be worse than that?’
‘At some point, you’re going to hear your story again but it’ll be a million times worse as it’s told back to you. Your bad date stories – being told by someone else – always come back to haunt you.’
‘Ah, great, thanks for that.’
‘No problem.’
‘You have to promise to tell me if I become boring though, OK? Don’t just dump me at the table and leave – tell me I’m being boring.’
‘You could never be boring.’
‘I’m glad you think so,’ he said as we came to a road where I could see LC, my white automatic Micra. (LC was short for Little Car.)
After I dropped the material off at Medina’s, he and I had a quick drink before closing time because he had to rush to get his train back to Essex.
‘It’s Evan, by the way,’ he said as he brushed a kiss on my cheek. ‘I’m Evan, not Ewan.’
‘But I’ve been calling you Ewan all night. Why didn’t you say?’
‘I’ve already had one woma
n walk out on me tonight, I didn’t need to ruin things with another woman.’
‘OK, Evan, I’m sorry I got your name wrong. But I had a fabulous time and you’re not boring at all.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, and cupped my chin in his hand, then leant towards me and kissed the end of my nose. ‘I’ll see you soon.’
‘Yeah.’
As I lay in bed that night, I knew it was going to work out with Evan. Fate had brought us back together. And he was gentle. Good looking, nice, funny, but also gentle. I had teased him and he hadn’t slapped me in return. He hadn’t shouted at me or sulked or made me feel afraid. People I knew often told me that was what men were really like – my sisters told me, too, but I never completely believed them. How could I, when the only man I knew in that way was not like that? He was not tolerant, he was not gentle, he had a very limited sense of humour.
Evan wasn’t like him. Even when I got his name wrong he didn’t seem to mind. He could laugh at himself, he could laugh at me, he seemed like one of the gentlest men I’d ever met. That was why my conscience was unsettled. My conscience knew that with a gentle man that Fate had returned to me, I could probably be happy.
With a gentle man, I could start to dig my way out of the prison I had been living in.
Verity is quiet and nervy the whole drive home. Her eyes keep looking in the rear-view mirror and the wing mirror and out the back window just to be sure there aren’t any more police around. That’s the problem with age: you start to see more things to worry about. If Conrad had been in the car, he would have thought it was cool to be stopped by a police officer, it wouldn’t occur to him until it actually happened that it could end with me being thrown in prison. And even then he wouldn’t take it that seriously until he was told that he wouldn’t be seeing me at home again for a very long time. Verity, unfortunately, knows what the police mean and she can also decipher the nuances of conversation. Which is why Evan and I now row – mostly – in the car when the kids have gone to sleep. Even sarcasm upsets her because she can tell there’s something going on.
As soon as we get home, she kicks off her trainers and leaves them scattered under the coat rack, wrenches off her burgundy denim jacket and slings it on top of the trainers and runs upstairs. Probably to write in her diary, maybe to cry, definitely to find an outlet for what happened. I would go after her if I didn’t suspect it would cause more harm than good. I don’t know what to say to her that would make her feel any better about what happened.
The Ice Cream Girls Page 5