The Ice Cream Girls

by Dorothy Koomson

  His trainers are wet. They look expensive and they are wet. So are his trousers, and what I can see of his beige raincoat. The world has cried on him. What does the world have to be so glum about?

  ‘Do you want to fuck me?’ I ask him, not bothering to look up to watch his reaction.

  His immediate response is silence. The kind of silence that says he does not know if there is a right answer to that question, if he is just being set up to fail.

  ‘We could do it here,’ I say. ‘Or at your place. Even at my parents’ house. Anywhere, really. If you want to.’

  ‘Yes, I want to,’ he says, carefully, as though stepping through landmines. ‘But what I want more is for you to make me understand what you’ve been through.’ He sits on the floor in front of me, ignoring the tiny puddle that has collected on that part of the floor from him and from the slight leak in the roof. ‘I need you to make me understand.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask, knowing that if he says he loves me, I will probably throw up on him. The word doesn’t mean anything. Marcus used to say it all the time, and I used to lap it up, so stupid and naïve was I. Marcus did not love me. He said he did. And then he did all those things. What he loved about me was being in control. You can say the word ‘love’ until it is the same as ‘sand’ or ‘boobies’: it doesn’t mean anything if there is nothing behind it.

  ‘You can’t go on how you have been,’ Alain says. ‘You need to do this for you. All this rage is not going to leave you until you start to make yourself heard. Forget about Serena, forget about Marcus, just think about Poppy. And tell me. Tell me about Poppy. Tell me about her life. Tell me what you’ve been through. Tell me. I want to understand.’

  I shake my head. ‘I don’t know how.’

  ‘You do. Just start at the beginning.’

  ‘The sky isn’t a square of patchwork quilt,’ I eventually tell him. ‘Sometimes with two or three black bars running down it, sometimes with wire mesh upon it. The sky is vast and deep and capable of smothering me.’

  part seven

  serena

  Evan wants me to tell him about that time. About what happened and why I got involved in it all.

  He came into the bedroom three nights ago and lay down on top of the covers and started to talk. About nothing in particular and then suddenly he asked: ‘What was he like? Beyond what you’ve hinted at and said, what was he really like? Why don’t you ever say his name? What happened that night? The night he died.’

  I had been stroking the fine bristles on his head and had to stop. My current life, the one I loved, had already been contaminated enough by the past. By coincidence after coincidence, by Poppy and her crazy demands, by my decision not to tell Evan, by my guilt that made me try to help Poppy. I had contaminated this life enough with the other life: I wanted it to stop. I wanted this life to heal, and that wouldn’t happen if I made what happened a part of now.

  I wanted separate compartments for everything and for that time – everything about him – to live in a compartment that was locked, with the edges glued shut and the keyhole blocked and the key lost for ever. I wanted him to stay gone. When I told Evan this, he seemed to understand. He still slept in the spare room, but he understood. Or so I thought.

  Because right now, I am sitting on the bed watching him pack. He is leaving me. Not the kids, not our family, just me. I cannot talk to him, I cannot be one hundred per cent open with him and he cannot take it any more.

  It’s an odd thing, watching someone leave you. Maybe that’s why he had to stay in the garden that time he made me leave. Odd is the wrong word. Horrendous is probably closer to the reality.

  I want to reach out and stop his large, gentle doctor’s hands from moving. I want to take everything he has neatly folded up into his bags and put them back in the drawers and hang them up in the wardrobe. I want to stop him, but I cannot do so physically. I am frozen. I could do it with a few words. I could stop him, I could stop the dissolution of our marriage but that is something else.

  ‘Don’t you love him?’ Mez had asked when I told her what he wanted on the phone.

  I told her I did.

  ‘Then why won’t you just tell him?’

  I explained it all, how I felt, why I had never told anyone let alone him.

  ‘Ah well, I suppose it’s your marriage. If you don’t want to do everything in your power to save it, then there’s nothing any of us can do. For the record, I think he’s right to ask. I’ve always wanted to, but couldn’t bear to hear it all.’

  I had said to her that what she meant was that she couldn’t bear to hear something that would confirm to her that I am what she thought I was, a killer.

  ‘I thought we said we weren’t going to talk about this,’ she said.

  She was the one who brought it up, I reminded her. She was the one who wanted to know what was happening with Evan, and I had told her.

  ‘Fine, let me put it like this: if you’re innocent, then you’ve got nothing to hide. Tell him.’

  Which is not true. I do have something to hide. And I want to hide it from him. Of all the people on the earth, I want to hide it from him. I do not want Evan to judge me, to be horrified by what I have to tell him. I do not want him to be horrified like I am, every time I think about it.

  ‘I think that’s it,’ he says, looking at his two holdalls, sitting by the bed like giant brown pebbles stolen from the beach.

  This really is what he meant when he said he’d kill me. He meant he would kill everything good in my life. If Evan goes, he will have killed the children’s happiness as well. Killed their chance to a happy family home with two parents. I’m sure we can find a different happiness without Evan, but they will be divided. They will have to live with one parent here, one parent there and the knowledge that I did not do everything I could to make it work.

  Some things are irretrievable, irreconcilable, but not this. Some marriages and relationships become broken with no hope of being fixed. Not this marriage, not this couple. All I have to do is own up. Confess.

  What is it the Americans say? I have to own my truth.

  I have to own my truth so that I can try to make my husband not leave me. Even if he still does leave me, even if he can’t understand or bear what he hears and still leaves, at least I’ll know I tried. I tried everything to make him stay.

  ‘I loved him,’ I say.

  Evan moves slowly, pivots on his sock-covered heels and turns to me. I am sitting cross-legged on the bed, unable to look away from the spot on the wall by the light switch. One of us has swatted a fly and not cleaned its dead body away.

  ‘I’m ashamed of that,’ I continue. ‘I’m ashamed because after everything he did, I still loved him. I hated him, but I loved him, too.

  ‘I can’t talk about it because right up until the end, even afterwards, after he was gone, I was still in love with him. And I’m so ashamed of that. I’m so ashamed to admit that. He was awful. He was an awful, terrible person. For more than two years he mentally, physically and emotionally terrorised me; I watched him do the same to Poppy and I still . . . I could still love him.’

  Evan sits on the edge of the bed. Listening. Listening to me tell him why I think so badly of myself.

  ‘I could never admit that to anyone, not even Poppy, and I know she must have felt the same because she was there almost as long as I was. The things he did, and neither of us walked away. Even in court, when we were both fighting for our freedom, part of us, part of me certainly, but I assume it was the same for her, was protecting him. We told what he did, but not the full horror. No one would have believed us, anyway. How could anyone in their right minds love a person like him?’ I shrug. ‘I don’t know the answer to it; all I know is that I did. And what happened that night only happened because of Poppy. I thought he was going to kill me, which was bad enough; I’d been prepared for that, I’d been willing to fight that, but what actually made me react, what actually made me fight back, was Poppy. I hated her, I really hated h
er, but the only reason I reacted, fought back, was because he was going kill Poppy, and I could not let that happen.’

  poppy

  I leave Alain sleeping and slip out of his bed, grab his grey dressing gown from the bedpost as I creep out of the bedroom, and put it on over my naked body outside the room. It’s a chilly May, so the wooden treads of the stairs are cold underfoot as I go down.

  We have been in each other’s company non-stop for nearly forty-eight hours and most of them have been spent talking. In between we’ve eaten, drunk, showered and slept. Nothing else. I’ve been tempted to go home to get some clean clothes and my toothbrush and other everyday knick-knacks, but I know that once I step out of the door, once we open ourselves up to the outside world, the magic will disintegrate. I won’t be able to talk any more, I won’t be able to explain, I won’t be able to make him understand.

  I move in the darkened living room to the window and crack it open a fraction, not so much that the magic will start to leak out, just enough to let some of my smoke out. I curl up in the armchair by the window, and pick up my cigarettes and lighter, settle the ashtray on the arm of the chair, and slip a cigarette between my lips.

  The past two days we have not talked about that night. I just didn’t want to. It’s hard enough to recall it, so I always avoid going through it in detail, picking over the carcass of my misguided notions of love, but now I will.

  I flick shut my lighter and inhale life into the cigarette.

  I’m going to allow myself to think about it because I am all talked out. All the stuff that was inside me is outside, so there is space, room for the memory to breathe. Room so I don’t get crowded and panicked when I think about it.

  My eyes slip shut and I whirl the clock back. My mind goes with it. Racing back to that night.

  It didn’t begin that night, of course.

  No story begins the night it ends.

  serena

  June, 1988

  I’d had enough. I’d had enough and I was leaving him.

  It wasn’t, as I thought, that I couldn’t take any more. Of course I could. I could take more and more and more. I could take whatever he piled on top of me, the last two years had shown me that, but I’d decided enough was enough.

  If it meant that he was going to kill me, then so be it. He could kill me and I wouldn’t have to suffer any more. He had done that to me. I had nowhere left to turn: I could not talk to my sisters, I had no friends to speak of because he didn’t like me hanging around with other people – I spoke to the people I worked with in the supermarket but never socialised with them. My whole life had become about him and pleasing him and not angering him and waiting for him to get rid of Poppy. It wasn’t a life, I realised. I had finally grown up. I had finally stopped being the naïve fifteen-year-old he’d relieved of her virginity, who he had moulded into his willing puppet.

  When he opened the door to me, he knew. He knew that whether he beat me or ignored me or told me he loved me it would do no good. I was not going to be with him any longer. One way or another we were over.

  Looking back, I know I should not have gone there. I should have called and told him. But for some reason I went. I went to tell him and I went to tell him clearly and openly. Like the adult I had become.

  His face, usually a mask of confidence, slipped for a moment when he saw my face and he said nothing, just stepped aside to let me in.

  ‘And to what do I owe this dubious pleasure?’ he asked as he led the way into the living room and threw himself on to the sofa. He lounged back, his head on one side as he stretched his arms wide along the back of the sofa and sat with his hips thrust slightly forwards.

  ‘I came to talk to you,’ I said, amazed that my voice, which had been small and timid and quiet for so long now, sounded different. It sounded like my real voice. The voice I used to speak with before him. It was normal and ordinary. Just like I was. Like I had been before this.

  ‘So talk, baby. Got another appointment soon. You do know that tonight’s Poppy’s night, don’t you?’

  He said that, I think, to test me. To see if it would get a rise out of me, because that would be a weakness he could exploit, that would be proof to him that I wasn’t completely free. I hadn’t completely had enough. Disappointment circled his eyes and mouth when I just stared at him. For a moment, I’d wondered who Poppy was – so determined was I to do this, I’d forgotten that I shared him. That he probably wouldn’t care that one of the people he tortured would no longer be around. Except, he might but only because he hadn’t done the chucking first.

  I cleared my throat, to make sure that I wouldn’t stutter or pause, to make sure everything I said was clear and concise and to the point – like he always used to say my essays should be. ‘I don’t want to go out with you any more,’ I said. ‘I want this to be over. Tonight. I don’t want to be with you any more.’

  His eyes narrowed and the right side of his top lip curled upwards in a sneer. Slowly his eyes crawled over me, from the top of my head to my feet. I had tied my hair back, and I was wearing jeans, a loose white T-shirt and my stonewashed denim jacket. He hated those sorts of clothes on me. My biggest crime, though, was wearing my black plimsolls. He hated them most out of anything in my wardrobe. His eyes lingered on the plimsolls for a long time before they crawled their way back up to my face. The sneer deepened.

  ‘Who is he? I presume this sudden bout of disobedience is down to some little oik you’ve picked up along the way. Who is he? Tell me, so I can kick the shit out of him.’

  ‘You,’ I said. ‘“He” is you. I don’t want to be with you any more.’ I would never have said something like that to him six months ago. Not even a week ago. But now I didn’t care and I’d had enough so I could say whatever I wanted. When you don’t care, you don’t worry about being hurt, about being damaged. You are foolish and reckless and do the things that need to be done.

  ‘You don’t mean it. I wish you did, but you don’t. You’ll be back before the end of the week, begging me to take you back.’

  ‘If it makes you happy to think that, then think it. I’m going, now. I just needed to tell you that.’

  ‘Hey, wait.’ He sat forwards, his arms open in surrender, it would seem, if I didn’t know him. ‘Is that it? Don’t I get a say? Don’t I get to talk to you about it? Try to change your mind, at least? I mean, what is it? Is it Poppy? Because I can finish with her tonight if you want me to. What is it? Because, baby, I love you. I can change.’

  That was the whole point. He couldn’t change. He wouldn’t. He’d said it before, over and over and over again. And it always ended up the same: me in pain from a beating. Me lying to people about how I got hurt. Me trying to work out how to avoid it happening again. I was sick of it all.

  ‘I don’t want you to change,’ I said. ‘Because I don’t want to go out with you any more.’ Someone had once told me that if you kept repeating the key phrase in any speech it would ensure that your core message would stick in your audience’s mind and it would make you believe one hundred per cent in what you were saying.

  ‘But I love you, Serena. I love you. I’ve never felt like this about a woman before.’

  His heart wasn’t in it, I could tell. He was just saying the words with no feeling or emotion behind them. Or maybe that’s the way it had always been; he’d always just been saying the words but with no emotion, no feeling, no love or sincerity behind them, and I hadn’t been able to see that. I’d always been so wrapped up in the fear of not upsetting him, enraging him, not doing anything to make him hit me that I did not notice before. Everything about him was one-dimensional. I had only just seen that.

  A knock on the door followed by a short ring of the bell interrupted us. That was Poppy’s signal – mine was a ring and then a knock. ‘Hold that thought, baby, hold that thought,’ he said, leaping to his feet. Instead of going straight to the door, he went to the kitchen first. In that time, Poppy didn’t knock and ring again. She wouldn’t dare. S
he, like me, knew what was good for her.

  What would be good for me would be to leave now. I’d told him, and I was sure he understood, so I should leave. Nothing here was mine: all the clothes and underwear were all stuff he had bought me. I did not want them, I did not need them. I could go back to dressing like the teenager I was now. I could stop dressing to please him.

  ‘Poppy,’ he said as he finally let her in. ‘Go straight through. We’ve got a surprise guest – you’ll never guess who’s here.’

  She was a little startled to see me. She stared at me, her eyes as wide, round and wary as an owl, but it was not because I was here. It was because of how I was dressed. It was because, in her wide-open owl eyes, I could see that she was where I was. She had come to finish it too. And she was scared that she’d not be able to do it with me standing there. She must have guessed from how I was dressed, from the plimsolls on my feet, that I was doing it too. That I had got in there first.

  I decided to stay. I’d been about to duck out, to leave him to it, but I knew if I left he would take it out on her. And she would probably be trapped for ever. She would never be able to leave because even though she had reached her decision, even though she was going to do it too, my being there had thrown her. Thrown her to the point where she might decide to do it on another day. And if she did that, she’d never do it. I did not want to be the cause of her staying more than one second with him. I did not want her to suffer another beating at his hands. I hated her, but I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her again.

  When he entered the room, I realised that whether I wanted to or not, I was staying. From behind his back, I saw the glint of it. I saw the glint of the knife.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here, Poppy,’ he said to her, still holding the knife behind his back. I wasn’t sure if she had seen it or not, or what she thought he was doing, but from where I was standing I could see its outline, its dark brown wooden hilt, its wide, flat, sharp blade.