The Ice Cream Girls

by Dorothy Koomson

  Why is it that each time she says everything will be fine, I believe her less?

  ‘Let me know if there is anything I can do,’ I say to her. She won’t. I know her, she’s like the others in my family; we won’t ask for help no matter how bad things get. We continue until breaking point; we soldier on until we cannot march any more. It doesn’t matter though, I know exactly what I have to do to help her.

  ‘OK,’ she says, from inside the cupboard. ‘Will do. Do you want to stay for dinner? There’s plenty.’

  ‘No, I, erm, have a couple of things to do before I head back to Brighton. I’ll just go play with the kids for a while and then go.’

  She finally stops unloading the dishwasher and while carefully avoiding eye contact with me, she turns her head to look at me. She smiles the saddest smile I have seen in years and my heart starts to break. ‘See ya, then. I’ll let you know what other ideas I’ve come up with for the dress.’

  ‘Oh, no, don’t worry about the dress, I’ll buy one. You’ve got enough on your plate.’

  ‘I’ve said I’ll make it and I will. I want to make it. It’ll take my mind off everything. I’ll email you some sketches.’

  ‘Fantastic. See you, love.’

  ‘Yeah, see ya.’

  My sister is still smiling her sad smile as I leave the kitchen.

  I know how to help her all right: to give her husband a kick up the backside.

  July, 1989

  ‘I don’t understand why you were at this man’s house, anyway,’ Mum said.

  Unusually, the police, who had just arrested me, let my parents and my sisters visit me in the police cell. They were being generous because, they said, in the morning, after the hearing, I would be sent to Holloway without the chance to go home in between to see them. I could be on remand there for up to a year until the case went to court. They were going to recommend no bail because of the nature of the attack, they were going to tell the Court that I was a dangerous criminal and that I should stay behind bars until the Court could put me away for good.

  That was how they told it to me, before they led me to the cells, and that was probably what was going to happen, my solicitor said, because I admitted being there. It was no wonder the police could be generous with my visitors: from now on, they said, it’d be two people at a time for the rest of my life.

  My father had his arm around my mother, while Faye and Medina, I’m not sure they were aware, were clutching each other’s hands, like they used to do when we were small children. Faye had a face of stone on her; Medina looked like she had been crying. They’d both been called away from their lives in other parts of London to come here to see me. To see me like this, sitting in a dank, tiny room on a hard metal bed garnished with a wafer-thin mattress, and with a metal toilet in the corner.

  ‘He’s my boyfriend,’ I said to Mum, knowing that I had to tell them everything before the police told them. ‘I’ve been going out with him for a couple of years.’

  Faye and Dad both frowned deeply, not wanting to take in what I was saying; Mum and Medina’s eyes widened in alarm. Yes, that would mean I was fifteen when it started.

  ‘He was your teacher,’ Faye said. ‘Your History teacher. And you were going out with him?’

  I looked down at the floor in shame. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But, Serena, how could you?’ Medina asked.

  ‘He . . . he said he loved me.’

  ‘He’s not allowed to love you,’ Faye said angrily, ‘he was your teacher. He raped you.’

  ‘No, no, it wasn’t like that. He didn’t force me or anything.’

  ‘If you were under sixteen, then he raped you,’ Faye said. ‘You’re not old enough to give consent. He should know that. Whether you said yes or no, he’s not allowed to do that with you.’

  ‘I know, but . . .’

  ‘But, what?’ Medina said. I’d never heard her so angry, so enraged. ‘What? How can he love you when he’s an adult and you’re a girl and he’s meant to be looking after you? And now he’s dead.’

  ‘I didn’t do it.’ My eyes swung round wildly to each of them, trying to make them see and understand. ‘I didn’t. I couldn’t. No matter what the police say, I didn’t do it.’

  ‘But you were there,’ Faye said.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ I said. I could feel the tears building up behind my face. ‘Mummy, I promise, I didn’t do it. I didn’t.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, breaking away from Dad and coming to me. She put her arms around me. ‘I know you didn’t do it, Serena. I know you couldn’t do that. That’s not how we brought you up. You couldn’t.’

  I held on to my mother, knowing that I wouldn’t get hugged like this again in months, maybe years. The other three watched us, looking slightly removed from the situation.

  I knew I had to get them to believe me. Because I didn’t do it, not in the way they were saying. I did not murder him.

  Adrian holds up a ‘one minute’ finger to me as I enter the plush cocoon of his office because he is on the phone. His office is decorated in warm reds and burgundies with sumptuous furniture fabrics and thick-pile carpet. His office always reminds me of a womb, what it must look like to a baby, all red and soft. I’ve always privately thought that it’s a sign he never wants to grow up, but that’s the sort of thing I’d never say to anyone. Why would I? You don’t make mean jokes about the loved ones of the people you love. I like Adrian, womb-like office and all, which is why the whole journey over here to his management consultancy office in West London has been difficult. I cannot believe he thinks I am a criminal. What else has he said about me behind my back, what else has he thought about me and what I was accused of?

  ‘Sez,’ Adrian says, standing up as he throws the phone back into its cradle.

  Don’t you ‘Sez’ me, I think at him. Not when you think I’m a criminal.

  ‘Haven’t seen you in ages,’ he says.

  Like Judas, he comes to me and kisses me on both cheeks. I feel his touch like a burn of accusation, like the nicks of the knife he has inserted into my back. I stiffen at his warm greeting and allow him to move away before I relax and take the seat opposite his desk that he indicates.

  ‘I know, Adrian, it’s been a while – we really should get the kids together.’

  ‘I hear congrats are in order,’ he says. He claps his hands together and rubs them hungrily, as if in anticipation of the party we’re going to have. ‘You’re doing it all again, I hear. From scratch.’

  ‘Yeah, we are.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here? To ask me to be in the wedding party?’ He pushes a hand through his blond hair, temporarily moving it off his face, showing his fine-boned features and smooth-skinned forehead. ‘I know Mez is making the dress, and I’m assuming she and Fez will be bridesmaids, so I guess Harry and I will be groomsmen? I’d be honoured. Truly. Honoured.’

  Adrian’s job as a senior management consultant – hence his own office and never being able to turn off his mobile – means that he can sometimes take over. He anticipates what a person (client) wants and needs then tries to fulfil that want and its corresponding need. However, when it’s not work-related, he often doesn’t actually take the time to find out what the person he’s dealing with really needs or wants. He makes assumptions and then takes over.

  ‘No, that’s not why I’m here,’ I say, gently. ‘I’m actually here to ask you to stop being such an arse to my sister.’

  He sighs and deflates all at once. ‘It was only a matter of time before you showed up, too. You can’t have one Gorringe bollocking without the other.’

  ‘Too? You mean Faye’s been here already?’

  ‘Of course. The second Medina starts moaning to one of you, I know you’re bound to turn up shouting the odds. No wonder Harry calls you the Witches of Ipswich.’

  ‘Yes, and no wonder Harry gets the living Michael taken out of him at every opportunity. And am I shouting?’

  ‘No, I guess not, at least that’s something.�
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  Faye when riled, when she thinks someone is taking advantage of a family member, is a monster. I can well believe she gave him a verbal kicking he won’t forget in a hurry, but it clearly hasn’t worked. Subtlety is the way to get Adrian to admit he’s being a dick, that he is a father not a single man and he cannot live the single lifestyle any longer. Or rather, he can but can’t expect to have his family there waiting for him at the end of it. I need to kick his arse so gently, he has no idea that it’s been kicked.

  ‘What’s going on, Ades? And, for the record, Medina didn’t come moaning. She hasn’t said anything that wasn’t dragged kicking and screaming out of her. She is one hundred per cent loyal.’ I leave the ‘unlike you’ bit hanging there like a ripe, red apple on a tree – he can take it and swallow it if he chooses or he can ignore it, but we both know the accusation, the fruit, is there, waiting for him.

  ‘You tell me,’ he replies. ‘I have no idea what’s going on in my marriage any more.’

  ‘Why are you either working all the time or running off on holiday with “the boys”? Why don’t you want to spend time with Mez and the kids?’

  ‘It’s not all me,’ he says defensively, spinning on his chair to stare out of his window at his uninspiring view over the hotchpotch black and grey of rooftops in this little square of London. ‘I just can’t talk to her any more. She’s not . . .’ He raises his hands and moves them towards each other as if he is holding a ball and trying to jam his hands together, but the invisible ball is stopping his hands from making contact. ‘She’s just not there.’ Another jam at the ball. ‘She’s not the woman I married.’

  ‘Well, of course she’s not – you married a single, working woman, now she’s a stay-at-home mother of four children. How can you expect her to be the same? Has it occurred to you that you’re not the man she married? The man she married would talk to her if there was a problem, not hide behind work or his mates.’

  ‘Serena, you have no idea what it’s like.’

  ‘Tell me then.’

  ‘I love her, of course I love her. I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving her. And the kids. They are my world. But . . . Medina’s got . . . She’s . . . I can’t talk to her. I come home after a busy day and all she wants to talk about is what the kids have done and the bread she’s baked and this new dress pattern she’s found. I don’t have a wife any more, I have a 1950s housewife who, for all I know, is doped up to her eyeballs on happy pills. It’s like Medina’s not there any more and in her place is this strange woman who has nothing beyond the home to talk about. I spend time with my mates so I get some stimulating conversation every now and again.’

  ‘How dare you.’ I keep my voice low and calm, let the words do the talking. If I do not shout, maybe the shame he should feel will be more acute, more effective. ‘She is bringing up four children – your children. What exactly do you expect? For her to take care of the children every day and then to go rushing to you when you come home and take care of your every need and provide you stimulating conversation and a good shag while she’s at it?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he says.

  ‘Well, then make me, because you’re not presenting a very good image of yourself here, Ades.’

  ‘Oh, Serena,’ he says on the crest of a sigh. ‘All of that wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the rest of it. Her obsessions.’ He glances over to see if I am listening, which I am, avidly. ‘She sees danger everywhere. Sometimes I’m surprised she lets the kids go to school at all – she was actually thinking about home-schooling them at one point until I put my foot down.

  She’s scared of what will happen to them at school. Not with the other kids so much as, well, with the teachers.’

  That knot of sickness, the one that comes from having done something wrong, tightens in my stomach again. Tugs itself so taut, I almost have to double over from it.

  ‘And every time the kids are out of the house and out of sight, she thinks something’s going to happen to them. That the world is full of people waiting to prey upon them. I can’t convince her that it’s not true, no matter what, so I’ve kind of given up. Because, you know, she thinks I don’t care enough if I don’t buy into all her paranoia.

  ‘Then of course, things always get that little bit worse for us when you do something.’

  ‘When I do something?’

  ‘Yeah. When you got married the first time, when you had Verity, when you moved to Brighton, then when you had Conrad, now this wedding. Every time something good happens to you, she starts to obsess that the police will find that missing piece of evidence that will send you to prison.’

  ‘But there’s no evidence to find.’ I am confused. ‘How can they find evidence that isn’t there? And why would . . .’ My words fail, drain right away as Adrian becomes flame-red from the line where his forehead meets his hair probably right down to his manicured toes in his expensive shoes. ‘She thinks I did it,’ I say. ‘She thinks I’m guilty.’

  ‘She worries about you. She just—’

  ‘She just thinks I’m a murderer and a liar.’

  ‘No, she thinks that you were scared and that it was self-defence and that you knew no one would believe you—’

  ‘So I lied.’

  This is too much new and unsettling information for my brain to process at this current time. Medina, my sister, thinks I am a murderer. She’s always thought that. She thinks I have killed someone, that I have taken a life.

  ‘Sez,’ Adrian begins, sounding troubled at my silence.

  I hold my hand up to stop him talking. ‘No, no, don’t say anything. This isn’t about me, we’re talking about you and Medina. If you’re right, and she has got these obsessions, then it sounds as if she’s traumatised, not crazy. And if you love her—’

  ‘Of course I love her. Even when it’s not easy to be around her, I love her.’

  ‘If you love her, you should be supporting her rather than running off with your mates all the time. Seriously, how is that going to help? And how do you think the kids are taking it? If, as you say, their mum won’t let them out of her sight and the rest of the time their dad’s not there, what are they supposed to think and feel?’

  ‘She won’t let me get involved with the kids,’ he says. ‘If I try to do something with them, she has so many things on the list of dos and don’ts it’s not worth it.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so pathetic. These are your kids you’re talking about. Not worth it? Ades, are you seriously telling me that if you cancelled one of your “holidays” and took that time off work and every morning you said to Mez that you’d give the kids their breakfast and take them to school, she’d say no? Cos, you know, even when Verity and Conrad were really young and I was still convinced they would break if the wind blew too hard, on Saturday mornings when Evan would get them dressed and take them out, I thought it was a blessing. I mean, he’d give them chocolate pastries and juice drinks that were full of sugar for breakfast, and he’d dress them like they’d fallen into a pile of jumble, but that was just his way of doing things. And you could not get a more paranoid mother than me, but I could relax because they were with him, the only other person on earth I’d trust them with.’

  Adrian says nothing, he is staring into the mid-distance, and ever so slightly sulking.

  ‘To be perfectly honest, the only reason I trusted Evan so much, bad as it sounds, is because he proved over and over that the kids are the most important people on earth to him. More important than me, even. I know he’d never let anything happen to them. Yes, yes, I should be able to entrust them with him because he’s their father, but the simple fact is I couldn’t at first. I was so worried and paranoid, but Evan reassured me that he cared about the kids as much as I did. How can you prove to Mez that you love the kids as much as she does and stop her being so paranoid if you’re always jetting off on your hols? How can that do anything but prove to her that she’s all alone in this and that she needs to be doubly vigilant because the person w
ho’s meant to have her back hasn’t?’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he mumbles.

  ‘Try to get her some help, too. Maybe get her to talk to someone? See if they can help her with her obsessions and her worries. But do it in a way that says you love her and you’re worried about her, not that she’s a crazy person you can’t bear to be around.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s a crazy person.’

  ‘You’ve got to prove that to her, not me.’ I stand up, ready to walk away from this meeting enlightened. I came to kick his ass – I am walking away knowing that he and my sister think I am a killer. ‘And stop feeding her paranoia by telling mean “jokes” about having criminals in the family.’

  Adrian colours up again and looks down at his desk in shame. Or is it embarrassment? Shame would mean he feels bad and knows he was wrong; embarrassment would mean that he feels bad because I’d been told what he said – he meant it, but I wasn’t meant to know. ‘Serena, I—’

  I shake my head at him and hold my hand up again to halt his words. ‘Sorry’ isn’t going to change this, or make either of us feel any better. ‘I’ll see ya, Adrian. I’ll see you soon.’

  ‘Yeah, bye, Serena.’

  Don’t you mean, ‘Bye, Murderer’? I think as I walk out of his office.

  I am having trouble walking to my car.

  My legs will not move one in front of the other as they are supposed to; they feel like they are on springs and that my body is bouncing and swaying as I move.

  My entire family think I am capable of committing the ultimate crime.

  If Medina thinks that, then Faye definitely does. And so do my parents, because they are the only people who could convince them that their sister is innocent. If they haven’t managed it, then they must think it too.

  Four of the seven people I care about most in this world think I am a murderer. Four of the seven people I care about most in this world think that I should have spent the last twenty years rotting away in a prison cell.