The Ice Cream Girls (20 page)

I ignore him, and instead turn my face upwards to the dark sky. It is black and it is clear and it is where I want to be right now. My fear of the sky has worn off, and has been replaced by a desire to be a part of it. To dance and jump from cloud to cloud, to string together the stars, to swim in the pitch black ocean of a starless night. I want to be up there.

‘You do, don’t you? You like him,’
Marcus persists as I start to walk towards home.

‘Shut up,’ I say to him in my head.

‘He’s better looking than you.’

‘Go away, Marcus.’

‘Fine. Don’t go away. I’m just going to ignore you.’

I’m not shaking any more; focusing on ignoring Marcus has had the effect of calming me down.

‘Poppy, talk to me,’
he begs. He used to have this voice, did Marcus, that he would use afterwards. It was as smooth and gentle as baby’s skin, perfectly pitched to touch that part of me that might be looking to escape.
‘Please talk to me, Poppy, please.’
It hit its target every time, every time I would forgive him, wouldn’t consider leaving because I
knew
it wouldn’t happen again, I
knew
he could not be sorrier, I
knew
that things would be OK if I tried a little bit harder as well.

I start back towards Mum and Dad’s without Marcus in my head. I don’t know who he thinks he is, but he can’t control me any more.

serena

Every time I came and left home, I would look at the space up the road from my house, where
he
would pull up and drop me off – ‘our’ spot. I would always look at it if I walked past, I’d imagine seeing his car, imagine what I’d think if I was a stranger walking past and saw a white Escort, parked there, with two people in the front. I’d imagine what I’d think about the two people, if I would assume they were boyfriend and girlfriend, or if I would think it strange that they were together and wonder if they were just friends, or even teacher and pupil.

As I walked on the opposite side of the street approaching ‘our spot’ I glanced across at the place as usual and there was his car.

But surely, it couldn’t be. I was meant to see him tomorrow, not today. And he never risked coming to pick me up, just dropping me off when it was late. It had to be another car that looked like his. I carried on walking, carried on staring and as I drew level with the car, I realised it was his car. And he was in it.

Not alone.

Beside him was the girl from the park. The one who had been eating ice cream and he had gone to speak to, about three months earlier.

He had his fingers tangled up in the long strands of her black tresses and was smiling at her as she spoke.

He leant forwards and kissed her. Brief but significant. Then he sat back and looked right at me. Almost as if he had been waiting for me to come home so he could do that and I could see.

That was why he hadn’t said a word two days earlier when I had to cancel him to go shopping with Faye. He hadn’t said a word, hadn’t reacted, because he didn’t care whether I was there or not. If I didn’t turn up, there was always someone else who could stand in for me. There was always the ice cream girl.

‘Serena, what do you expect? You can’t keep cancelling on me and expect me to sit in on my own, can you?’

I had only cancelled on
him
the once. Once. I did not say that, though. It was not worth the trouble it would cause for me to point that out.

‘Why were you kissing her?’ I asked quietly, careful to strip my tone of anything that even resembled anger or jealousy. He would hate that.

‘Are you questioning me? Saying that I can’t do something?’ he asked defensively.

‘No. No,’ I replied quickly, trying to calm him, stop him . . . ‘I was wondering . . . Is she your girlfriend?’

‘I don’t have a girlfriend, you know that, Serena. You know that I can’t have a girlfriend when I’ve got you.’

I didn’t understand what he meant, whether he was saying I was his girlfriend or not, but I couldn’t ask. ‘OK,’ I said, quietly. ‘OK.’

We sat on opposite sides of his living room, him on his big leather settee and me on the hard, wooden chair he kept by the telephone table. He got up from the settee and my heart bolted to my throat, my body tensed. With every step he took, the more rigid my body became. I braced myself as he came to a stop in front of me, braced myself for it. For that moment. He reached out, took my hands in his and then pulled me gently upright.

Slowly, gently, he enveloped me in a hug, took me in his arms. ‘You know I love you, don’t you?’ he said.

It took a while for me to realise it wasn’t going to happen. Then it took me another second to realise what he had said: ‘I love you’. I had been waiting to hear those words since the moment he stroked my face in the classroom, and now he had said it and I had almost missed it.

I nodded quickly, in case he thought I didn’t know he loved me.

‘I’d hate to think you didn’t realise how special you are to me. How much I love you.’

I relaxed a little. He really did love me, after all. It’d been worth it, it’d all been worth it.

‘I only went with Poppy because she’s a virgin and you weren’t, the first time.’

My body tensed again and he held me tighter, almost as if trying to hug away my body’s anxiety. ‘I was,’ I said quietly. I was. I honestly was. I hadn’t done that with anyone else. I couldn’t. I hadn’t met anyone else I loved as much as him.

‘A complete virgin? No one had ever kissed you or anything like that?’ he asked.

When I was thirteen, Tommy Marison had grabbed me when we were alone in a classroom together and pushed his mouth on to mine. It lasted for all of three seconds and I hadn’t even wanted him to kiss me so I didn’t think of that as a kiss.

I’d told
him
about it, of course – I told him everything about me – and at the time he’d said it wasn’t a kiss. Why had he changed his mind?

‘Tommy Marison pushed his mouth on to mine. That wasn’t a real kiss,’ I said.

‘Real or not, a kiss is a kiss is a kiss, baby, and Poppy had never been kissed before. She isn’t damaged goods. I needed that. To be with someone pure. You understand, don’t you?’

‘Please hurry up and find yourself another naïve fifteen-year-old virgin.’
Isn’t that what Marlene had said in her message? Her words, the conviction in her voice, whirled around my head like a battery-operated spinning top.

‘Please tell me you understand, baby. I need for you to understand. I didn’t do it to hurt you, it was what I needed. Tell me you understand.’

‘I understand,’ I stated.
I understand a lot of things. I understand that this is not my fault. I understand that I did nothing wrong. I understand that I cannot say to you I did nothing wrong.

‘Thank you, baby, that means so much to me. You mean so much to me. Poppy, she’s nothing. I can’t get rid of her just yet – me being her first means she’s really attached to me. It’d break her heart. I don’t know what she’d do to herself if I ended it now. I’ll keep her around for a bit longer and then let her down gently, OK?’

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘You make it so easy to love you,’ he said.

I have to get away from you
, I thought.
You are going to keep hurting me if I stay
.

The day I got my O’Level results, after I had opened them to show my parents, I had come over to his house and had handed him the envelope. He’d pulled out the slip of paper and had screamed with joy.

‘My God, Serena, you’ve done it!’ he shouted, then scooped me up in his arms and spun me around. ‘You’ve done it, you’ve done it! You’re amazing! Seven As and four Bs. I couldn’t have hoped for better for you.’ He kept spinning me round and round until we were both dizzy with happiness. ‘You can do anything you want now, you know that, don’t you? The world’s your oyster.’ He put me down then, telling me to wait where I was, he sped out of the room and upstairs, then came back with a box wrapped up in gold paper.

‘I got this for you, but it doesn’t seem enough now, after you’ve done so well.’

I carefully opened up the paper and inside was a Walkman. My very own Walkman. I’d been saving for one of them and now I didn’t need to because he had got me one. It played tapes on both sides, as well, so I wouldn’t have to keep taking the tape out to turn it over, and it was a beautiful blue colour.

He pressed a kiss on my mouth suddenly. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ he said, quietly, seriously. His voice caught in his throat and tears filled his eyes. He looked away for a second, composed himself. ‘I don’t think I could be more proud of you than I am at this moment.’ I had to leave to go home for a family lunch but on the doorstep he’d smiled at me and said, ‘No one deserves these results more than you.’ And I’d floated on air all the way home.

That was only three weeks ago. Three weeks ago he thought I was the most amazing person on earth. Things had only really started to go wrong between us when he met this girl. They hadn’t been perfect before, but they were a lot better. Maybe I should give him another chance. I wasn’t scared of him all the time. Maybe if I just let him deal with this Poppy in his own time, afterwards, we could be together properly. We could even go public. All I had to do was wait for him to get rid of her, then things would be good between us again. Good. Solid. Wonderful.

After all, he said he loved me. And that was what I’d always have over her. He would never love her, not when he was with me.

Not when he’d said it not once but three times.

She was smaller and curvier than I expected. Of course she was pretty, and it was hard to believe she’d never been kissed before
him
.

I wanted to ask her how she could live with herself when she was sleeping with someone else’s boyfriend. I wanted to ask her if she knew how much it hurt me to know he had been with her. I wanted to ask her why she couldn’t find someone of her own. Instead I stuck out my hand for her to shake and said, ‘Good to meet you.’

‘You too,’ she said.

And I fancied for a moment that I heard the faint click of a key turning in a lock; the moment destiny set the lock of the shackles that would bind me to Poppy for ever.

poppy

‘Well, well, well, fancy meeting you here,’ he says.

It’s that idiot from the pub the other week. He cuts a striking form along the promenade which is packed with people, even on a Wednesday afternoon.

I was in the middle of a painting break, munching on an apple rescued from Mum and Dad’s fruit bowl and drinking from a bottle of water filled from the tap, when he appeared. Although there are many, many people on the seafront, all out here trying to soak up their own little piece of sunshine, he stood out. His frame, tall and wiry, was sheathed in an eye-catching Hawaiian shirt that was a mass of green, red and yellow palm trees, beige knee-length shorts and Jesus sandals. I recognised him even with his wraparound sunglasses on – because there was something forced and purposeful about the way he sauntered down the promenade.

‘You’re the cock from the pub,’ I say, without removing my sunglasses. I picked up these sunglasses for just over a fiver in the markets in the old post office in Brighton the other day. Marcus would have pitched a fit if he caught me wearing these: they would have offended everything about looking polished and finished he held dear. I started to get like that, too. It wasn’t worth the pain, the consequences, not to pay close attention to how I looked by following what he said I could and couldn’t wear. Nothing was worth that. But these black plastic things are all I can afford and, honestly, not so bad. They do the job, keep the sun out of my eyes, and that’s all that I can ask for, really.

‘No, I’m Alain,’ says the man in front of me with a smile.

‘That’s what I said, you’re the cock from the pub the other day.’

‘And, like I said, I’m Alain.’

This could go on a while and I have no interest in partaking any further. As it is I’ve broken my ‘do not engage’ rule twice in two minutes. I return my gaze to the sea, a blue that I have never seen anywhere else before, and my breathing immediately falls in time with the rock and roll, the to and fro of the waves. I had been captivated by the surfers who were sitting astride their boards, paddling further out in search of bigger waves; and I’d been fascinated by the yachts and boats bobbing around casually as a backdrop to the swimmers and paddlers who have ventured into the water. Every day I am astonished by the world. Every day, I remember that I had forgotten that these sorts of things existed. When my life was grey and boxed in and regimented, this was going on ‘out there’. This and a hundred million other amazing moments. I take another bite of the apple, sighing to myself as its delicious tart juice fills my mouth.

‘Lovely day for it,’ A Lon says. I thought he’d rightly guessed I had no intention of speaking to him again.

A feeling slips down from my head to my stomach, filling me with an icy dread. I turn back to him, and instinctively shade my already shaded eyes so I can see what his face does when I ask, ‘Have you been following me?’ I stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago and this is one coincidence too far.

A Lon does not dismiss my question straight away and more chilling dread creeps through me. He bobs down to my height and curls his top lip in to chew on the right side of it. ‘Not exactly,’ he says, eventually.