The Ice Cream Girls

by Dorothy Koomson

  While I am embarrassed, Angie is terrified. Her eyes are wide and fixed and she is running scenario after scenario through her head about what will happen if her husband ever hears this. It’s obvious my other neighbour has been gossiping, that’s what she does, which means it may come back to him. And he will most likely go for Ange if and when it does. That’s what you do in those sorts of relationships: you don’t worry about the humiliation and embarrassment you’re feeling at someone saying something about your situation, you worry about what is going to happen to you if he ever finds out that someone else knows. That’s why you are so careful to hide your bruises and lie about cuts because you know that if he finds out that someone else saw, someone else questioned you, then he will get upset. And life will not be worth living if he is upset. Everything is easier for everyone if he is not upset. So you do everything in your power to make sure he is not upset.

  ‘Are you?’ Conrad asks again, just in case he hasn’t embarrassed me enough. ‘Are you feeling better?’

  Verity is wide-eyed in incredulity. Conrad hasn’t shared this information with her either and she is agog at this woman whose husband tried to kill her.

  ‘Come on you two, into the car. The frozen stuff will be melting. Let’s hit the road.’

  They both drag their feet getting into the car, stealing long, curious glances at Ange as they go. Even when they are belted in inside the car, they stare at her through the window. She must feel like an extraordinary special exhibit in a carnival freakshow.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ I say to her. ‘I didn’t know he knew that, nor that he was going to say it out loud.’

  ‘Please,’ she says trying to sound dismissive, ‘kids make things up all the time, I wouldn’t worry about it. We both know he’s got it wrong.’

  ‘I’ll make sure he doesn’t repeat any gossip about you when I’m out with him,’ I say in a tight voice. ‘But, Ange, we both know he hasn’t got it wrong.’

  I wish I could tell her that there is only one way this is going to end: badly. Unless she gets out now it will only end in someone getting really hurt. But she won’t listen to me. Why would she? I know what I’m talking about, but I’m pretty certain that if someone had tried to give me that advice when it was necessary, I wouldn’t have listened.

  Why would I? Why would I listen to someone who told me to walk away from him when he was the love of my life?

  ‘Did I do something wrong, Mum?’ Conrad asks as I get into the driver’s seat.

  ‘No, sweetheart,’ I say, as I watch Angie get smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror. ‘You told the truth as you knew it, and that’s the only thing any of us can do. It was just that she didn’t know that you knew.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he says, ‘I didn’t mean to make her cry.’

  ‘You didn’t. She wasn’t crying.’ Yet.

  I glance at him in the rear-view mirror – his face is scrunched up in concern and worry – and, because I cannot pull over and go to hug him, I’m glad I let him have all of the treats. ‘I’m sorry, anyway,’ he says.

  ‘I know you are. And that’s because you’re a good boy.’

  ‘You’re not a good girl, are you Serena?’ my conscience says in my head.

  ‘And since you’re such a good boy, which one of the treats are we going to have when we get home?’

  ‘What did you get?’ Verity asks.

  ‘Marshmallows, wine gums, popcorn and oven chips.’

  ‘Wine gums,’ Verity says.

  ‘Marshmallows!’ Conrad says.

  ‘I’m with Conrad,’ I say, ‘it’s gotta be the marshmallows.’

  ‘No way!’ Vee exclaims.

  We argue about the best choices on the way home, while, ‘Are you sure you don’t want ice cream, Serena? Are you sure, are you sure, are you sure?’ plays on loop in my head.

  poppy

  It’s Dad’s sixty-third birthday today.

  And my parents do not want me around for it. They haven’t said so outright, they’d never do that, but it has been made clear to me.

  Last week I casually asked Mum if they were up to anything the following weekend. I didn’t let on that I remembered it was his birthday. I just wandered into the kitchen where she was making shepherd’s pie for dinner and sat down.

  The atmosphere in the room immediately shot up a volt or two: charged, tense and uncomfortable. ‘I love your shepherd’s pies,’ I said, trying to be nice. Mum wasn’t the world’s best cook. It stemmed from the days when she was unwell; she couldn’t really do much except lie in bed most days and Dad had been given a crash-course in feeding himself and a baby, then a toddler. Ever since then, Mum had been trying to cook and bake – and having varying levels of success. Numerous times as I was growing up Dad would coach me and the kids to say something that was disgusting and barely edible was delicious. He was desperate to spare her feelings, to keep encouraging her. We got quite good at lying about her awful food.

  Her cooking hasn’t improved much over the years, but prison food makes her seem worthy of one of those Michelin Man Gold Star thingies.

  Mum struggled to hang a smile across her face; it sat uncomfortably on her thin lips and merely glanced off the edges of her eyes. My heart ached, actually physically ached sometimes, that she was so uncomfortable around me. It didn’t seem fair when I had done nothing wrong. I bet Serena’s family all love her despite everything she’s done, I thought as I watched Mum struggle to mash up the potato topping in the pan – it was obvious what the problem was: she hadn’t cooked the potatoes properly, some of them were still virtually raw.

  ‘So, Mum,’ as usual, she flinched when I used that word, like I had called her a whore or something, ‘what are you up to next weekend?’

  Her hand paused for a second in its mashing duties, before continuing. ‘Nothing special,’ she said innocently. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, no reason,’ I replied. ‘I was just thinking of maybe going to see some friends in London if you weren’t doing anything? You know, unless there was any other reason I might want to stay around here?’

  This was my olive branch, my way of saying, ‘Include me, please. Give me another chance to be your daughter.’

  ‘Your father and I were thinking of going out for dinner, maybe catch a show in town.’

  ‘Sounds nice, any special occasion?’ I asked. She must know that I knew it was his birthday. Every year I sent him a card and every year it was returned to me. But that should tell her that, because this is the first one since I’ve been out, I’d want to try again to get through to him. To get through to them. I want my parents back.

  ‘No, no special occasion,’ she said, her eyes fixed on the disgusting mash in front of her.

  ‘OK,’ I said, sitting back in my seat. ‘What about Bella and Logan? What are they up to these days?’

  ‘Oh, they never tell me anything about their lives, you know how youngsters are,’ she said.

  ‘Are they not coming down for a visit soon, maybe next weekend?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ she said. She was working up a real sweat, trying to mash up her pan of under-boiled tatties – it’d be funny to watch if it wasn’t a way of her avoiding looking at me.

  ‘Oh, OK. Well, could you give me their numbers? I might visit them if I’m up in London next week.’

  She faltered in her mashing, almost knocking the pan off the table. I have never asked directly, before. From prison, I would write them letters asking for them to be sent on, and I’d often get a reply weeks later saying Bella and Logan didn’t want to be in touch, to leave them alone. Now I was out, I wanted to hear it from them myself. I wanted them to look me in the eye and tell me they wanted nothing to do with me. Even if they had been brainwashed by Mum and Dad, it’d take nerves of steel to tell someone to their face that you had disowned them.

  ‘Come to think of it, Bella said she was going on a hen weekend to Amsterdam and Logan said he was visiting his girlfriend’s parents up in Scotland next w
eekend. There’s no point in trying to call them, they won’t be there.’

  ‘Funny that they’re both away the same weekend that I’m going up there.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ Mum said. She was back in her stride, demolishing the potatoes to top her only half-browned mince. It’s a wonder none of us got food poisoning growing up. ‘Coincidences happen all the time.’

  She couldn’t be lying – that was too smooth, too quick a reply when I brought it up. Mum could deflect an enquiry very easily, but not in that much detail. If she was lying, she’d say something like, ‘Oh, I don’t think they’re going to be there.’ But to provide details meant it was true, or she had turned into a pretty expert liar.

  ‘So, you won’t mind if I go to London?’ I asked, hoping that since the other two wouldn’t be around, they might want me instead. I was grasping at the thinnest, wispiest of straws but I had to. I had to try everything.

  ‘No, not at all. Why don’t you stay overnight?’

  Like a tap that hasn’t been properly closed and drips slowly into a plugged sink, tears collected slowly in my eyes. Not only did she not want me here, she wanted me gone completely. She might as well have told me that the best present I could give Dad was to stay away. To remove myself from the house and his life.

  ‘I might do that,’ I said and got up.

  She looked at me. ‘You do that, Poppy. You stay overnight in London. It’ll be good for you.’ For the first time since I came back, Mum smiled at me because she would be getting rid of me for a night. It must have been so much easier for them when I was under lock and key elsewhere. They could pretend I was dead, that I didn’t exist any more. They could pretend that they only had a daughter called Bella, they only had a son, called Logan, and that the first child, the problem child, was gone, taking with her all the mistakes they made.

  I do not believe in coincidences, not any more. Like meeting Marcus was not coincidental. I am convinced he saw me in the park, and recognised me from teaching at my school. Remembered me as timid and a little lonely-looking. I was in his sights from the moment he stopped to talk to me. He wasn’t sure it would work, of course, if I was naïve enough to wait for him, to call him, to come to his house, but it was a chance he was willing to take and it paid off.

  I do not believe in coincidences, which is why I am waiting on the street corner near my parents’ house, waiting to see who will come for lunch. When a blue car that looks like the space age version of the Beetle pulls up outside the house, my heart catches in my throat because instinctively I know who is inside, where they are going. The driver’s door opens and out steps a young man with a muss of dark hair, a strong jawline and muscular frame he inherited from his father. The passenger door opens and out steps a young woman with loose curls of dark hair that reach down to her shoulders and a slight, almost bony frame she inherited from her mother. She carries a silver-wrapped box topped with a giant blue bow that fills her arms – she obviously can’t come to her father’s birthday lunch without a gift.

  I leave my watching spot at the bottom of the road and walk casually towards the house. I don’t know what I’m going to do, I haven’t thought that bit through, but I have to get a closer look, I have to be as near as possible to them. They walk up the path, the woman first, laughing at something her brother has said and the slight dig with his elbow he gave her before they left the pavement. Her face, creased in laughter like that, reminds me of someone I used to know. Someone called Poppy Carlisle, the girl I used to see in the pictures of myself. The girl who used to be in the mirror.

  I near the house as the door is opened by their mother; she grins when she sees her two children, she could not love them more. The mother’s gaze strays to the street as she steps aside to let them in and her face falls as she sees the stranger who is approaching her house. Her look of shock and anxiety stays in place as she locks eyes with the stranger, expecting the stranger to stop and turn into her gateway, to come up the path. But the stranger only keeps the eye contact for a second or two, and does not stop. The stranger instead moves on, continuing her path past their house, continuing to walk on and away from this mother’s precious home.

  poppy

  There was a time when Sunday afternoon meant the Carlisle home would be drenched in beautiful smells: roast chicken, roast tatties, Yorkshire pudding, stuffing, gravy, veg – the works. After midday mass, we would come back to the house and the smells of the lunch Dad had cooked would surround us as we opened the door. We would all sit around the table, eating and talking and laughing. Even if it’d been an awful week, even if we’d fallen out with each other, Sunday was the day of forgiveness. Sunday, sitting around the table together as a family, was what fixed everything.

  Something in me still expects to smell this when I step across the threshold and shut the door behind me. There is nothing, of course. I don’t know when the Carlisle Sunday roasts stopped, but there have been none since I have been back. There has been nothing family-like since I returned.

  Mum appears at the doorway of the kitchen as if by magic: she must have heard me close the front door, she must have been waiting for me.

  ‘Where did you stay last night?’ she asks, voluntarily allowing her eyes to focus on me directly, braving the dangers of being burnt by my image to see me for the first time.

  ‘In a B&B in Brighton.’

  ‘You could have come back here, you didn’t have to waste your money like that.’

  ‘I didn’t know how long your guests were staying; I didn’t want to intrude.’

  ‘They only came for lunch,’ she says.

  ‘Oh, right. I wasn’t sure. If you’ll excuse me.’ I start up the stairs, I have a mission to complete and it won’t do itself.

  ‘Poppy, can I talk to you?’ Mum says before I have cleared the second step. I pause there because that’s all I’ve wanted since I arrived home – for her to talk to me – but I’m now finding it hard to work out if I want to listen. I don’t think I need to hear anything; her lie has told me everything I need to know: I will never be welcomed back into this family. I killed that chance when they believed I killed Marcus.

  ‘It’s OK, Mum,’ I say, not feeling her flinch this time, ‘you don’t have to say anything.’ I risk a look at her, scared that if I do I’ll lose the composure I put together to allow me to come back here, and I’ll start to cry. I thought I’d be angry – anger seems to be the emotion I have felt the most of since I heard the word ‘guilty’ all those years ago. Anger and fear. But last night all I had was sadness. A deep, abiding sadness that I had been cast out of my family, the people who I used to be a part of no longer loved me and there was nothing I could do to change that.

  My mother is wringing her hands, twisting them over and over as her thin frame stands rooted to the spot. A memory pops up. My first day of school; she and Dad both took me to the school gates and, while Dad gave me a pep talk, Mum stood perfectly still, wringing her hands. I ran through the gates to join the other children, then changed my mind and came back, ran to my mum and threw my arms around her, while still holding my lunchbox and my satchel, and squeezed her as tight as I could. ‘I miss you, Mummy,’ I said. She stopped wringing her hands and hesitantly laid one hand on my head. ‘I’ll miss you, Poppy,’ she said. As I let her go, she got down on her knees and bundled me up in her arms, her handwringing suddenly forgotten. ‘I’ll miss you, Poppy,’ she said again and kissed my cheek. I wasn’t as scared then. I wasn’t scared of the other children, I wasn’t scared of the teachers, I wasn’t even scared any more that Mum and Dad would forget about me and not come back. Well, Mum. I knew Dad would never forget, but after she told me she’d miss me I knew she wouldn’t forget to come back, either. ‘You wait right here, OK?’ I said to her.

  ‘OK,’ she replied. ‘OK, Poppy, I’ll wait right here.’

  I don’t want my mum to wring her hands any more. She did that the whole year in the run up to the trial. She wouldn’t sleep, she could hardly eat,
she just wrung her hands and paced. I was scared the stress would bring back her ‘illness’. I knew what it was, of course, I just liked to pretend to myself I didn’t. I could feel less guilty that way: she had a breakdown brought on by untreated post-natal depression.

  ‘Please, Poppy, I just want to talk to you.’

  I give in and come back down the stairs, allowing her to lead the way into the kitchen to a seat at the kitchen table. Marcus had a kitchen table like this one. I used to think it was romantic and sexy and oh-so grown up when we would make love on it. Then he had sex with me on it in front of Serena. Ordering me to keep my eyes open and making her tell him if I closed them. She lied to him, said my eyes were open when they weren’t. But I hated the kitchen table after that. Every time I went near it, I remembered Serena’s face – an emotionless mask. He probably beat her afterwards, too. Not only did she have to watch, she had to suffer physically, as well. Serena’s experience of Marcus is like the uglier version of my experiences, the future I was headed towards because she had six months or so on me. Maybe if I had stayed with him a bit longer I would have thought I had no choice but to kill him, too.

  Mum is talking. I am watching her thin browny-pink lips move, but I have not heard a word she has said. I have submerged myself in thoughts of Marcus, thoughts of Serena, thoughts of the reasons for murder – because it is easier than listening to my mother explain why she doesn’t love me.

  ‘Mum,’ I say to her eventually, genuine, sorrowful regret in my voice. ‘You’ll have to start again because I haven’t heard a word you’ve said. I’m sorry, my mind drifted away.’

  Inhaling deeply, expanding her bony frame in the process, she once again looks directly at me.

  ‘I want you to understand what it was like for us, Poppy,’ she says. ‘To me, you were still a little girl, you still wore bunches in your hair and danced in front of your mirror pretending to be a popstar. And then in the middle of the night we get a phone call from the police station saying you had been arrested for killing your boyfriend. I remember almost laughing when your father told me – I said to him that it must be some other Poppy Carlisle because our daughter was asleep in her bed and wasn’t old enough for a boyfriend. But it was you. My little girl was really facing prison for killing a man.