The Ice Cream Girls (17 page)

‘I think it’s time,’ I told Tina six months later.

It was the middle of the night and we had both been quiet and still in our beds, while music and shouting and screaming and laughing raged in the world outside. Those were the sounds of the post-bang-up hours: the sounds of people connecting and escaping in any way possible by projecting themselves noisily into the atmosphere around their rooms. If you listened carefully, you could hear the sadness and tragedy, too. The sobbing into pillows and towels, the deafening peace of hearts breaking, the silent din of minds collapsing.

I had learned to tune it out. All of it: the loud racket and the quiet chaos; I shut it out so I could sleep, so I could survive.

‘I know, sweetie,’ she said.

‘I’m going to miss you,’ I said to her.

‘More than you realise,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m being ghosted, to begin the next stage of my sentence. I don’t know where I’m going, but it’ll probably be back up north. I hope so. I’ve been getting on better with my mum recently. If I’m up there, then she might be able to afford to come and see me.’

‘God, I hope so. I don’t want you to go, but if it helps you and your mum get back together . . . I just hope so.’ Because if her and her mum can overcome that, then I could, too. I could get my parents back in my life as well.

‘I probably won’t see you again, Ice Cream Girl.’ I hated it when people called me that, except when she did it. Tina, my best friend, the only real friend I’d ever had, could probably call me anything and I’d be fine with it. Marcus had made sure I didn’t have any friends, because – he said – they might have told about him and me. When, really, it was to make sure I only had him to depend upon and I had no one to stand back and say, ‘Get out of that thing with him, get out of it now!’ It took coming here to meet someone who I could get on with, someone I could trust.

The thought of never seeing her again . . . it cleaved my heart in two. ‘Don’t say that,’ I begged her. ‘Please don’t say that.’

‘It’s true. It’s best to prepare for that, then anything else is a gift.’

‘Thank you,’ I said to her, after waiting for the news to sink in, ‘for the rescue.’

‘It ain’t no ting,’ she said in her ‘Jamaican’ accent. ‘It ain’t no ting at-all at-all at-all.’

‘Yeah, well, we both know it was everything.’

‘Keep in touch, OK?’

‘OK,’ I replied.

We both knew we’d try, but if it’d work was another matter. Once this place got hold of you, once you accepted that you were going to be there a while, you found it hard to make connections with the outside world. Because every connection, every tiny touch from them was a reminder of what you had lost. What you hold dear. What you may never have again.

I refold the letter after reading it several times. I can’t wait to tell her that I’ve already found Serena, which means I’m well and truly on my way to clearing my name.

poppy

At 7 a.m., the bright blue front door opens and, wrapped up in a silky blue-and-red, knee-length kimono, with a silky red scarf around her hair, she leans forwards and reaches for the rolled up newspaper on the ‘You’re sooooo welcome’ doormat. Her lips move in a curse upon the head of the paperboy as her long fingers close around the daily newspaper –
The Chronicle
, I checked – and pulls it towards herself.

She checks, as she always does, the space by the door where milkmen leave the milk and as always she seems surprised to see it empty. She does not order milk from the milkman, so I can only guess that it’s a reflex left over from childhood.

At 7:55 a.m. the front door opens and he appears. As usual, he is wearing a suit and carrying a black bag that looks like a satchel, but probably contains a computer. He pats his left pocket with his right hand, before turning to call inside the house, then uses the brass knob at the centre of the door to shut it. He walks a few feet down the road and uses the keyfob in his hand to unlock his car. He dumps his bag in the boot, then climbs into the sleek, silver beauty, sticks on his sunglasses – even if it is raining out – and drives away.

At 8:05 a.m. the front door opens again. She herds out the children, a triangle of toast in her mouth, her arms a chaos of coats and bags and sandwich boxes, then asks the son to shut the door. The daughter, her spitting image, strides ahead, earphones jammed into her ears, while the son sticks beside his mother, chatting and chatting as they walk even further down the road to her car. She’s got the family car that has seen better, cleaner days on the inside. The son takes her keys and unlocks the car door, and the daughter climbs into the front seat. The son happily jumps into the back, while she dumps the things in her arms on to the backseat of the car beside the son. She takes glasses from the glove compartment on the dashboard and slips them on. She checks they are all strapped in, then does her mirror and signal checks – twice – before pulling out of her space and disappearing in the same direction as her husband.

Every morning it is the same; sometimes the paperboy puts the paper in the door, sometimes one of the children runs back inside for something, sometimes the husband leaves five minutes after the rest of the family, but mostly this is the way it happens. This is the way Serena Gorringe, now Serena Gillmare, lives her life. This is the way Serena lives a life that should have been mine.

serena

‘Ow!’ I yelp as I’m jabbed for the umpteenth time. ‘Will you stop doing that? It blinking well hurts.’

‘Ah, well, if you will be having those fancy-smancy nerve things all over your body, what do you expect but pain?’ Medina, my sister, replies.

Our other sister, Faye, smirks from behind her magazine. My sister who is jabbing me – on purpose I suspect – is going to make me a wedding dress that is a fraction of the cost of the ones I tried on last week. Evan said that was defeating the point of ‘going large’ this time, but I couldn’t face another excursion to a bridal boutique, where I’d have to look at myself in full-length mirrors and maybe have that blood vision again. As it is I’m still feeling sick from having held an ice cream the other day.
He
would be laughing his head off if he could: ‘What, the Ice Cream Girl doesn’t like ice cream any more? How funny!’ Besides which, it’d be far more special this way – I haven’t worn a Medina Bryse original in years.

Medina – Mez – who is on her knees, has been pinning pieces of white material all over me for hours now, and treating me like her own private voodoo doll in the process. She is thirty seconds younger than Faye, or something like that – I should probably know, having had two kids and being married to a doctor but it’s the sort of thing that’s only really important to Faye. She, having used all other arguments at hand, rolls out the ubiquitous, ‘I
am
the oldest’ when she needs to try to get us to fall in line. (She’d be gutted to know that Mum once told me that she’s not all together sure that Faye
is
the oldest. She just assumed because Faye looked like she wanted to be first when they were both lying in their cribs.)

If it wasn’t for Faye’s need to wear glasses (to make herself look more intelligent and more like the chemical scientist she is – they are the weakest prescription above plain glass) and Mez’s habit of radically changing her hairstyle every time I see her, you could not tell them apart physically.

‘I’m so glad Evan’s decided to make an honest woman of you at last,’ Mez says. ‘Marrying you this time because he, like, actually wants to.’ (I’m sure somewhere out there Verity would be spinning in her seat – a forty-something woman is probably not legally allowed to use ‘like’ in that way in a sentence.)

‘Excuse me!’ I protest. ‘I think you’ll find he wanted to marry me the last time. That’s why we’ve been together for so long. That’s
why
we’re here today, with you doing this.’

‘But he had to last time, didn’t he?’

I shake my head, trying – and failing – to look convincing. ‘No!’ I am aiming for ‘aghast at the very idea!’ but come off slightly camp and ineffectual.

‘No?!’ exclaims Faye from behind her magazine. ‘Oh, come on, Sez, no one – not even Mum and Dad – bought that whole “honeymoon baby” story.’

‘What?’

‘Purlease!’ Mez rocks back on her heels so she can look up at me, her long shocking-pink fringe falling backwards as she looks up. ‘We’re all older than you, remember, we’ve all been there – did you really think we’d believe that nonsense? That wedding had “shotgun” all over it.’

‘If you cut it in half, it’d have shotgun written through it,’ Faye chimes in.

‘If you held it up to the light, it’d have a shotgun watermark.’

‘In fact, didn’t your wedding licence actually have a “shotgun” watermark?’

They both start laughing. Once they start their double act, nine times out of ten I’m the butt of their jokes. I curl my lips into my mouth to express my indignation and try to rise above it, as Mum used to say I should.

‘It was his idea to get married, actually,’ I say.

‘Oh,
purlease
,’ Mez begins again. ‘He only did it so that he was the one holding the shotgun rather than having it aimed at him – I think he rightly guessed that it was more likely to go off in one of our hands.’

‘And we’d all be pleading “accidental discharge, guv”,’ Faye says.

‘Because the first one got our sister up the duff, the second discharge was more deadly,’ Mez adds.

‘Sorry, m’lud, we didn’t mean to kill him, it was an accident!’ Faye says. Time stands still and we all stop breathing, trying to pretend she didn’t say that. It’s happened many, many times over the years. A harmless joke that reminds us . . .

Faye clears her throat, and opens her mouth to apologise, I think, then she changes her mind and closes her mouth again. She draws her long, slender legs up into the chair, and adjusts her glasses on her face before she returns to the magazine article in front of her. Every so often she’ll reach up and brush a lock of her long, sweeping fringe aside, like she does when she’s in deep thought or is nervous.

Mez is now focused on one part of the ‘dress’. She’s pinning and re-pinning the wide hem without looking up, and without ‘accidentally’ jabbing me. The pins have multicoloured heads on them that look like tiny ball-bearings against the shimmering pearlescent of her nail polish.

One of us is breathing very loudly. As if she is running a race. As if at any moment she is going to run out of oxygen. I try to focus on the dress. My dress. My wedding dress. At my last wedding I wore a cream skirt and jacket over a white blouse. This version of the dress is floor-length, with minimal fullness, gently flowing out from the wide waist, a deep V at the chest with long sleeves. It’s going to be a triumph, the best thing Mez has made yet.

The loud breather is still struggling for breath, struggling to get air into her lungs and not freak out.

‘She’s coming out soon,’ I say. I do not to need to use her name, they know who I mean. ‘She might already be out, actually.’

Faye and Mez both sigh at the same time, both have the same inflection in that sigh: relief, exasperation, disbelief. Even after all this time, still disbelief.

‘I know,’ Faye says, still skulking behind her magazine.

‘We saw it in the paper,’ Mez says.

I bite the skin on the inside of my lip; my breathing isn’t as loud as it was, but it is not calm, either.

‘Do you think she’ll try to contact you?’ Faye asks.

I shrug, more in despair than ignorance. ‘I don’t know. I hope not. God, I hope not, but I don’t know.’

‘You haven’t heard from her in all this time?’

‘No. I’ve moved a lot, and it’s not as if we were ever friends.’

‘I’m sure she won’t,’ Mez reassures with a tone that suggests she isn’t that convinced about what she is saying.

My anxiety about her release is not exactly well hidden. I cannot sleep, I find it hard to eat, and every little thing seems to bring me back to that time: the dress in the wedding shop, being stopped by the police, the talk I had with Verity. Evan thinks it’s wedding nerves that have stopped me sleeping through the night; have me waking up at the crack of dawn to go and sit in the kitchen, watching the world get brighter and brighter after the darkness; and have me hiding the dinner knives as well as the sharp ones.

‘I take it you still haven’t told his nibs?’ Faye asks.

‘It never seems to be the right time.’

‘Yeah, right,’ Fays scoffs.

‘Stop being a bitch, Fez,’ Mez jumps in. ‘It’s not like it’s something you just bring up, is it? “Oh, by the way, honey, I was once tried for murder, and I didn’t go to prison, but the girl I was tried with got life. And there was lots of bullcrap written about me in the papers for weeks. Oh, and could you pick up a pint of milk on your way home?” I mean,
come on
!’

‘I’m not saying it’d be easy, but he is going to being seriously pissed off when he finds out. Wouldn’t you be? After all this time, finding out something like that about him?’ Neither Mez nor I can disagree with that. ‘It’s not exactly the best way to start a marriage. Not the first time, and definitely not the second time,’ Faye says.