The Ice Cream Girls

by Dorothy Koomson

  ‘The reality would probably lie somewhere between the two, although much closer to Verity’s father.’

  ‘Pretty much how I’d react then,’ I say.

  ‘So, has she? Has she got a boyfriend?’ He is holding his breath, his body is tense. I wonder what he would do right now if I said yes?

  ‘She says not.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’

  ‘She’s never given me any reason to not believe her. And you know she spends most of her time here, filling up that big brain of hers. I just worry that if she has got a boyfriend she’s going to hide it from us. I’d rather know, than not know.’

  ‘I’m probably not the best person to reassure you, Sez, I’m sorry. I see girls all the time who are getting up to stuff their parents have no idea about,’ says Evan. ‘They come to me for the Pill or the morning-after pill, or they get condoms from the nurse. Some of these girls are not much older than Vee. I always ask them if they’ve talked to their parents. Almost all of them haven’t, of course, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thinking of Vee when I’m tempted to send them away and tell them to come back once they’ve spoken to their folks. But I know they won’t, they’ll just find someone else to give them what they want or even do it without any kind of precaution or protection. I always say to them to think about waiting, or to come back with their boyfriends so the three of us can talk through all their options.’

  Agitated and a little sad, Evan runs his hand slowly over his close-shaved head, then rubs his head back and forth, quickly. He takes two large swigs of his beer before he speaks again. ‘They never bring them back, of course, but I try. I hope it sinks in that if a guy isn’t willing to be man enough to come with them to sort out contraception and STI protection, then he probably isn’t right for them. But let’s be honest, by the time a girl walks through my door for contraception or advice on an STI, it’s pretty much too late, nothing I say is going to stop her.’

  ‘You never know, they might think twice.’

  ‘Think twice, still do it. They think they know, they think they’re ready. I mean, how old were you when you first did it?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ I mumble as the heat of shame burns another permanent mark on my already-scarred soul.

  ‘Could anyone have stopped you?’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  ‘Did he come with you to—?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘There you go.’ Evan swigs some more beer. ‘I see it all the time.’

  He does, doesn’t he? He sees it all the time and he is understanding, he is empathetic, he is open minded. This is the time. The time I should tell Evan everything about him and what happened. He’ll understand then why I’m worried and why I want his help to keep an extra eye on Vee.

  Not telling Evan about him is something I’ve sweated blood over for years. Since I met him, in fact. It’s easier on my body and mind if I try to shut all that out. When I think about it, I feel the world closing in on me: I find it impossible to breathe, things start to get blurry around the edges and that thing happens to my memory where I can’t remember everyday things. Like I couldn’t remember it was Saturday a week or so ago. When I think about the past, I lose time and I lose myself. Who knows what talking about it would do? But time is not on my side right now. That piece in the paper . . . All it’ll take is for another snippet to appear and for him to see and then, not only will I have to deal with the fallout of him finding out, I’ll have to explain why I didn’t tell him.

  ‘I need to tell you something,’ I say.

  ‘That’s the second time someone’s said that today,’ Evan says, his lips had been on the lip of the bottle and now they are away again. ‘It’s a secret, so when you see him, don’t say I told you. Act like you know nothing, OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘But he’s got to know I’d tell you, right?’

  ‘I guess so.’ I really wish I knew what he was talking about, why it has stopped me from telling him this huge monumental thing I have been carrying with us every day of our relationship.

  ‘He’s always calling me a girl cos I tell you everything.’ Ah, Max. He calls every bloke who isn’t constantly drinking ten pints a night, and chatting up women who aren’t his wife, ‘a girl’. Better a girl than being a sad, short accountant from Portslade, but that’s by the by. Evan plays football with him and they get on, so I mostly ignore it. ‘But why wouldn’t I tell you everything? I have nothing to hide. And you have to stay with me, for better or worse, right?’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘I have to stay married to you because I love you. Anyway, what’s the big secret?’ What is the problem so I can get on with what I really should be doing?

  ‘Max came to lunch with me and Teggie today. And he told us that his missus was married before,’ Evan says.

  ‘What? June?’

  ‘Yup. Did the deed in Vegas a while back, apparently. And that scar she says she got falling off her bike? Actually the scar from removing the tattoo of her ex’s name from her shoulder. And the bike she didn’t fall off was actually a Harley.’

  ‘This is June? Mousey little June?’ The woman who I’ve always thought deserves a medal for putting up with Max.

  ‘Afraid so. Max is gutted. He thought the reason she was so cool about the wedding being a registry office job and a small do was because he’d been so firm about not wanting a fuss, she knew her place because he’s the man and she’s the woman when, really, it just made it easier for her to cover up the previous marriage.’

  My secret isn’t that bad. Not really. I haven’t done anything to actively hide my secret, I have just avoided telling him. So have all my family.

  ‘I told him, it’s his own fault,’ Evan mumbles.

  ‘That was supportive of you.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. You treat someone like a second-class citizen, you say to her things like, “I’m the man so you have to do what I tell you” and what do you expect? I’ve always said he should treat June better. Acting like she should be grateful to have him is what got Max where he is. Why would she tell him the truth about herself if he’s being that disrespectful?’

  ‘Maybe it had nothing to do with how he treats her.’ I cannot believe my secret is making me stick up for an eejit like Max. ‘Maybe it’s just that she was scared of losing him so she kept it to herself. I mean, we know she loves him, why else would she put up with him? And if she loves him, then she knows telling him about her past might ruin things. Maybe she thought keeping quiet was the best way to keep her relationship going.’

  ‘Maybe. He’s gutted, though. He reckons she only told him because she’s planning on leaving him. Which makes him feel worse because she obviously won’t care what he says because she’s going anyway. He hasn’t actually talked to her, you understand. He hasn’t found out why she lied or why she’s suddenly told him, he’s just not talked to her. Idiot. Especially when he doesn’t want her to leave. He’s gutted.’

  ‘I’ll bet he is.’

  Evan swigs his beer, and I marvel at the arc of his profile from his forehead to his chin, how beautiful he is, how sometimes I fear that he is too good for me. I don’t deserve him. I don’t deserve him, I don’t deserve this life. ‘You know what he said after I said it was his own fault?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said it to me and Teggie, actually. He said we should watch our other halves. Cos women are devious and we never know what they’re hiding.’

  ‘Devious is your middle name, isn’t it Serena?’

  ‘That’s when Teggie said I was right, and that it was all his own fault and he was a fuckwit. I said he could sleep in the spare room till it all blew over, if he wanted.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It’s OK, he said no. He doesn’t like being away from home too long in case he comes back to find her gone. All this has only shown him how much he loves her.’

  ‘Revelations can do that,’ I say.

  ‘Too much drama,’ Evan says. ‘Just be hon
est and then there’s no revelations and no drama.’

  ‘It’s not always easy to be one hundred per cent honest one hundred per cent of the time,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah, maybe. Hang on, how did this conversation start? We were talking about Vee maybe having a boyfriend and now we’re on to honesty. That’s some ground we’ve covered in the space of five minutes. Do you want a beer?’ He stands up to leave the room.

  I shake my head, I don’t want a beer. I want to go back to the start of this conversation and see, for the first time in months and months, the best window of opportunity to tell him sitting open and have the chance to climb through it – not watch as another thing slowly closes it and then welds it shut again.

  ‘Come on now, be honest, you do want a beer, don’t you?’ Evan says. ‘Come on, tell me the truth.’

  I shake my head again, smiling before he leaves.

  ‘OK,’ I whisper. ‘I’ll be honest. Once upon a time I was arrested and tried for murder. I was tried for murder and I almost went to prison.’

  poppy

  I’m still having trouble sleeping. Getting through a night without waking up, wondering where the noise has gone, is still impossible.

  Laying here in the relative dark, I’m constantly bombarded with pieces of the past; memories of Marcus and how he did this to me. They fall from nowhere on to my mind, and play themselves out whenever they hit.

  May, 1986

  ‘Wow.’

  That was the first thing he ever said to me.

  He looked me over with those eyes as big as saucers, as clear, blue and deep as the sea after a storm, and said that one word.

  Sitting on the park bench, eating an ice cream – a 99, my favourite – I had not thought anyone would notice me. Let alone someone like him. My mouth dried up as my heart started to thump too loud in my chest and ears. It was exactly like I read about in Jackie and Blue Jeans and My Guy and Photo Love. Exactly. My heart was racing, my head was all fuzzy, my knees definitely felt weak, and my mouth was dry. The best-looking boy in the whole world had just spoken to me and I thought I was going to melt.

  The girls in the stories I read would know what to do, what to say, but I couldn’t remember anything that they said to the boys they liked. How they got him to keep talking to them. So I stared at him.

  ‘I’ve never seen anyone make eating ice cream seem so sensual.’ He put his head to the side, then gave me a small smile. He was better looking than Don Johnson and Michael J. Fox, and loads more gorgeous than the boys in my magazines. What was that word they used sometimes? Sexy. That was exactly what he was: sexy. ‘You really look like you’re enjoying that.’ His smile spread across his face sprinkling tingles, like a million trillion little stars, all over my body.

  I was aware, of course, that my tongue was hanging out; I’d been about to lick my ice cream when he spoke to me, so I’d frozen with my tongue there for him to see. ‘It’s the thing you do with your tongue,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do that.’ More smiles from him, more tingles for me. ‘You’re obviously special.’

  He reached up, ran his hand through his blond-brown hair and smiled some more. His smile was bright, and soft, and friendly, and everything good in the world. It was perfect. He was perfect. Like no one I’d ever met.

  ‘I’ll see you around?’ he said.

  I slowly nodded when I realised it was a question, not just a thing to say to someone at the end of a conversation. I still had my tongue hanging out when he threw another smile at me before walking away.

  I lie in the dark, in the room from the eighties, and another memory bomb explodes in my mind.

  May, 1986

  I hung around the park at the same time every day for nearly two weeks before I saw him again. He just happened to be walking through and his face creased up into that beautiful smile when he saw me on the same bench – this time with an ice cream and a book. It’d got boring after the first time, waiting there for two hours, just in case.

  We saw each other in the park a few more times, just talking about nothing in particular: he told me he was a teacher, he asked me where I went to school, and when I told him he said he’d taught supply there a few times and vaguely remembered me. We just talked and talked, until one day, three weeks later, he handed me a piece of paper.

  I looked down and on it was scrawled a phone number.

  ‘Ring me,’ he said. ‘Anytime. If you need help with your school work, or even if you want to just have a chat.’ He got up, looked around and then gently stroked my cheek while smiling down at me. ‘I’d really like to hear from you.’

  And then he was walking away without looking back. I stared at the number, knowing I was going to call him the very next day. Even though he mentioned that he had an ex-girlfriend called Serena who wouldn’t leave him alone, I knew I had to call him. I stroked every single digit on the page, imagining they were somehow connected to him. Slowly I lifted the piece of paper and pressed my lips against it, imagining I was kissing him. I had to call him. I just had to. I was completely and utterly in love with him, so I had no choice, I had to call him.

  And another.

  June, 1986

  ‘It’s not serious between us.’ Marcus was telling me about Serena. He’d say this a lot – every time I’d been to his house he mentioned her in some way. I had seen her once: I’d arrived half an hour early to see him, and had spotted her leaving. She was glamorous and gorgeous and all the things I wasn’t. Tall, and well dressed and completely confident. I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed her that day in the park, and I was even more surprised that he’d look twice at me when he had her. Not that anything had happened between us. We were just friends, nothing more. Heartbreakingly, nothing more. ‘I stay with her because she’s quite vulnerable.’ She hadn’t looked vulnerable when I saw her, but I didn’t say that. He didn’t know that I’d been so excited to see him that I’d arrived early that one time, and had spotted her. I had a feeling he wouldn’t like it – it would seem a bit like spying on him – so I hadn’t told him. Which meant I definitely couldn’t tell him that she didn’t look vulnerable to me. ‘I don’t know what she’d do to herself if I dumped her. I’d never forgive myself if she took a load of pills or something. That’s what she said she’d do if I ever thought about leaving her. She’s trapped me.’

  Poor man, I thought. I reached out and touched his arm, just to let him know I was there. He was so brave, having to take care of someone who was that unstable. He reached out and cupped my face in his big strong hand. I always felt so safe with him. Safe and wanted – I’d never felt like that with anyone. Being with my dad made me feel safe, but this was different. This was love. The kind of love that I’d longed and longed for, that I read about and dreamed about. This was it, true love.

  ‘You’re such a good friend,’ he said, staring straight into my eyes. I went all bubbly inside – that always happened whenever he looked at me like that. ‘I don’t know how I’d get through all this without you.’

  I managed to pull up the corners of my mouth into a smile but only just. I felt like I was drowning. I couldn’t catch my breath properly, my head was buzzing and swirling, my body was trembling. He could probably feel me shaking under his hand. He’d probably felt it every time he touched me because that’s what happened.

  ‘You make everything worthwhile,’ he whispered.

  I stopped breathing.

  ‘When I’m with you, I feel like I can do anything.’

  That’s how he made me feel. When I was with him, I was pretty and funny and clever. Not having many friends at school meant nothing. Not really getting on with my mum wasn’t important. When I was with him I had everything I needed. And he was saying that he felt the same way about me. I did that for him. He was saying he was in love with me, too.

  He leant forwards, his hand still on my face, and I felt my whole chest tighten. He was going to . . . His mouth touched mine and everything exploded in my head and chest and s
tomach and down below at the same time. He pulled away a little but was still close enough for me to feel his breath on my face. ‘Relax,’ he whispered with a gentle smile. ‘Haven’t you ever been kissed before?’

  I nodded, even though I hadn’t. I didn’t want him to think I was a silly little schoolgirl.

  The corners of his soft, pink mouth curled up into another gentle smile. ‘You don’t have to lie to me,’ he whispered. ‘Poppy, sweetheart, you have to be honest with me. I’d think it was sweet if you hadn’t been kissed before. It’d make this all the more special. I don’t get to have a lot of special “firsts” any more.’

  I just stared at him.

  He smiled some more, moved a little closer. ‘Was that your first kiss?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘You’re my special girl,’ he said and kissed me again. This time for a little bit longer. I didn’t know how to do this – I’d seen it on TV but it was different in real life. It wasn’t as easy as they made it look; how was I meant to breathe? Where was I meant to put my hands? How would I know if I was doing it right?

  ‘Relax,’ he said, his lips resting on mine. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. Just relax, OK?’

  I nodded a little.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said. He pushed me back on to the bed as his hand went up my top. We were in the spare room at his house where he’d taken me to show me the view over the back garden. It was where his young son slept when his ex let him come over, which wasn’t very often, he told me. It was a single bed, like the one I had at home, and there were a couple of Paul Gascoigne and Gary Lineker posters taped to the walls, and a Gary Lineker bedspread on the bed. We’d sat down to have a chat and now we were lying down, with him on top of me, his hand up my top. He started to kiss my neck, while his hand stayed under my top and over my bra, and I didn’t know what to do with my hands. Was I meant to put them on his back like on TV or behind his head? Or leave them on the bed?