The Ice Cream Girls (21 page)

‘What does that mean?’

‘I saw you a week or so ago, here. You were painting the side of the hut and you looked . . . Your fringe was getting in your face and you kept doing this really cute thing of blowing it away. You had the tiniest splatter of paint on your face, and lots of little spots of paint on your arms and hands. I just thought you were so beautiful. I wouldn’t have dared speak to you, then I saw you again in the pub and I thought, “It’s Fate, I have to give it a go”.’ All the time he is speaking, his head is bowed, like a man in prayer, his gaze focused downwards where his prayer book should be. He is avoiding eye contact because he is lying.

‘And, I kind of recognised you. I kept thinking I’d seen you somewhere before, you seemed so familiar.’ Now he glances up, dares to look me right in the eye. ‘Then you said that thing about being in prison so I typed in lots of different things on the Internet about women who kill their boyfriends, until . . .’

‘You found my picture.’ I swivel back to stare at the sea.

‘I found your picture. And I kind of remember some of the stuff from that time. I was about eighteen then.’

‘So, what are you doing here? Most men would have run a mile.’

‘I like you,’ he says.

‘Right,’ I reply with a sigh. Fetishist. Probably wants me to dress up, beat him, hurt him, pretend I’m going to kill him. I had many, many letters in prison from people like that, people asking for that; people who didn’t seem to realise I was locked away from the world.

‘I do,’ he insists, ‘I came for a walk today hoping you’d be out here.’

‘Right,’ I say again.

‘All right, I’ll come clean.’

This is more like it. ‘Yeah?’

‘I’ve always wanted access to a beach hut. You’ve got one, I have to pretend to like you to get access to it.’

My head snaps round to stare at him. He grins and raises an eyebrow. ‘Which reason are you gonna believe, huh?’

I shake my head and look away, to hide my ever-so-slight amusement. No one has gone out of their way to make me laugh in a while. To give him his dues, he is funny – but he is a man. And I do not have the best track record with men. The first was my last for twenty years. The first has probably broken me.

He sits back, rests on his arms.

‘I didn’t say you could share my beach hut space,’ I remind him.

‘No, but I have the feeling you’re going to.’

‘You know, A Lon—’ I say, not looking at him.

‘That’s
Alain
. Alan with an “i” – it’s the French version, my father’s French,’ he explains.

‘Right, I see.
Alain
, I was in the library the other day.’

‘That’s good, you should always use your local library.’

‘Yeah, you should. Especially if you can’t afford books.’

‘True, true.’

‘Like I was saying, I was in the library the other day and I came across this book called
He’s Just Not That Into You
.’

‘I know it. There’s a movie too.’

‘
Really?
I never did! You know, the title offended me so much I couldn’t actually make myself reach out and pick it up.’

‘OK,’ he says cautiously.

‘“Who do these people think they are,” I was thinking to myself, “letting men get away with all sorts of poor behaviour and telling women to accept it because they’re ‘just not into them’?”.’

‘Right . . .’

‘Turns out I was wrong.’ I fix him with a beady-eyed, hundred-yard stare. ‘It’s a great line. Because, you know what, I’m just not that into you. Please leave me alone.’

‘Go on, give me a chance, you might find you grow to like me,’ he asks. ‘What have you got to lose?’

I curl my lips, salty from the sea air, into my mouth and shake my head. He goes to speak, a protest on his lips, but I speak to halt him. ‘I’ve lost half my life already, don’t you think I’m entitled to at least have myself heard when I tell someone I want to be left alone?’

He sighs a little. ‘You’re right, of course, you’re right. I’ll leave you alone. But is it OK if I drop by every now and then to visit the beach hut? I’m going to miss it so.’

‘It’s a free country, or so I’m told.’

He jumps to his feet, makes a big show of patting gravel off the palms of his hands. ‘I’ll see you?’

Replying to him with a sort of head shake/nod is the best I can manage at the moment. I do not want to encourage him, but of course I’m disappointed by what I had to do as he walks away. He is someone who wants to spend time with me, even knowing where I have been and what the world thinks I did. Ghost Marcus was right: I do like him, I could grow to like him even more. I’m sure if I spoke to someone more worldly-wise about these things they would probably say it was perfectly normal to want to have . . .
that
with him. I don’t mean just sex, I mean the whole lot. That is what I have missed. When I had it with Marcus it was fabulous. It was like floating on air and believing you’d never touch solid ground again. He knew how to make me feel like there was no one else in the world but me.

Marcus knew about the other stuff as well – he knew how to make life far too real. He knew how to twist pain and fear and terror into the strands of everyday moments.

It’s that ‘real’ stuff I do not want any more of. I’ve had about as much reality as I can take. Alain seems nice. He looks like someone off the telly. He has a sense of humour. But he could still turn. And that is a risk I’m not willing to take.

BANG! CLASH! BANG!
behind me on the road has me leaping out of my seat and ready to stand well back from the door before I think what I’m doing. My head swings around, wildly, looking for the prison van, waiting for the silent screams of the first-timers as they are uncuffed and herded like frightened cattle into the holding area. On the street beyond the green behind my hut is a man unloading a couple of deckchairs and a picnic hamper from a campervan. It is not the prison van. I am not still in prison.

I must look a little silly standing here like this, gawking at the campervan couple who are oblivious to the anxiety they’ve sent spiralling through my veins. I recap my water and wrap my apple back in its plastic bag for later. I need to get back to painting the beach hut. I need to get back to doing something I know I can do and I can focus on.

I need to concentrate on this and forget all about the man with the Hawaiian shirt, dazzling smile and tight ass who I sent walking out of my life.

serena

I’m being followed.

At least, it feels that way.

I can’t be sure, and I don’t know who would or why they would, but it’s a feeling I’ve been having a lot recently. One of being watched. One that someone is encroaching on my personal space from a distance. It used to happen to me all the time, after everything.

Notoriety of the kind I managed to garner does not go away overnight. It is not fleeting and forgotten, wrapped indelicately around someone’s fish and chips the next day, even after I was found not guilty of murder. It sticks around, waiting impatiently for someone to discover something else new, or someone to remember a story that might just prove my guilt. Then it would start again, and I would have that creeping sensation of someone trying to learn a little bit too much about my life by watching me.

I have that feeling now. It is Thursday and Evan and I have an appointment with the priest at the church where we’re going to get married. There are so many things left to do that I’m having to work ridiculous flexi-time hours, but my boss is all right. I’ve been his personal assistant for many years and as long as I get all the work done and he never misses a meeting or family birthday, he doesn’t mind how I structure my hours. When I first applied for the job, he’d said that someone who had eleven O’Levels, three A-grade A’Levels and a first-class Honours degree would be under-challenged in the role on offer. I’d proved him wrong. I had applied to do a doctorate in English Language, but I now had a baby and she had to come first. Also, Evan and I needed the money, especially after stretching ourselves to buy the house in Preston Park as part of his move to work at a small surgery down in Brighton.

I quite enjoyed organising someone else’s life and, all these years later, I still enjoy it, and I’m still grateful it gives me the flexibility to leave whenever I need to. Which is why having the creepy feeling of someone following me today, when I am leaving work at a time I would normally be here, is even more worrying. Maybe they sit here all day and wait.

I usually park in the underground parking spot in our building, but today I was in a rush and couldn’t find my pass so had to park in the public car park a few minutes away.

During that time of our arrest and then the trial, when she and I were nicknamed The Ice Cream Girls, I learnt what it was like to be watched and followed and basically stalked, and it is happening again. Someone is watching me. Regularly.

I stop in the car park and look around, trying to see who is watching me, who is causing the hairs on my neck to tingle and my spine to shiver. People are milling around: getting out of cars, pulling into spaces, climbing into cars, loading boots up with shopping. Everyone looks normal. As if they should be there, as if they are going about their daily business like I was until I felt someone’s eyes on me again. Someone who is closely,
deliberately
watching me.

After that little snippet in the paper, maybe someone has tracked me down and is trying to start it all up again. But they’d be more unsubtle, I think. After a few days of watching me go about my basically boring life (which I love), they’d need something else to keep their interest going. So I don’t think it’s the press again. It could be
her
but I don’t know how she would have found me since I have a new name and I don’t live in London. No, it must be someone else.

I unlock my car door and climb in, knowing that all the while someone is observing me. Someone is scrutinising my every move. I hate the not knowing. If I knew who it was, then I wouldn’t be so worried. I’d be worried, yes, but not like this. This is so frightening because it makes me feel powerless. And everyone I pass in the street, every car that seems to be going in my direction for just that bit too long, is a suspect. A potential assailant. The person who is going to hurt me, hurt my family.

Pulling out of the car park and on to the main road, up on to the road that leads me out of town, I feel the eyes drop away, the scrutiny lessen. It’s got worse over the past few days, I realise, my heart skipping up a few beats as I admit this to myself. Before, the chill would come over me fleetingly; the past week or so it has been happening much more often. In different places at different times. Sometimes when I am picking Con up from school, sometimes when I am getting the paper in the morning, sometimes, like today, when I am leaving work.

I want to tell Evan about it, but it’s like a lot of other things in my life I can’t share with him because they are all interconnected by the same poisonous web, and if I tug one cord all the other cords will fall apart too – if I explain part of it, I’ll have to explain the rest of it, and that isn’t how I want to tell him.

If I just knew who it was, then I’d feel a little better. Who is stalking me? And why?
Why?

‘Are you OK?’
he
asked when I had not been moving for a while.

I wanted to speak but I could not, because my mouth could not form the words and my chest detonated with agony every time I breathed in too much or breathed out. I could not get enough breath together to form even a word. One simple word. One word: ‘enough’. ‘Stop.’ ‘Please.’ ‘No.’ Whatever the word, it would not be yes. Because I was not OK. This was not OK.

‘I’m sorry, Serena, but you made me do this.’

‘“But” doesn’t make an apology, it makes an excuse of your behaviour,’
I heard Mum say in my head. Mum.
I want my mum. I want her to hold me, to tell me it’s going to be OK, to make all of this go away. I want my mum to turn back time so I never did this. I never got involved with this.

‘You made me. Why did you have to smile? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you love me any more? You’re everything to me and sometimes I think you couldn’t give a fuck what happens to me. If I died tomorrow would you even cry? Would you even notice?’

I tried again to move, to uncurl myself from the ball I had turned into when he’d started to kick me. Not quick enough, not fast enough, and I had cried out when the steel in the toe of his new shoes connected with my ribs. Through the shooting stars of pain, I managed to curl up and tried to breathe even though it was agony. I tried to breathe and hold on and wait for it all to be over.

‘God, Serena, you know I love you. Why do you make me do these things?’

‘I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t make me.’

I tasted blood in my mouth, and felt pressure on my side. I still could not breathe properly. The air was being stained with the sound of how I felt: inhaling was an agony of shrieking, gasping sounds and stars behind the eyes, exhaling was a silent cry of suffering.

‘Serena? Why are you breathing like that? Serena?’

His hands made me wince, even though I could tell they were trying to be gentle.

‘Serena? Stay with me, baby. Stay with me. I’ll get you to the hospital, OK? It’s all going to be OK.’

I want my mum
, I thought at him as he gently lifted me into his arms, catapulting the agony like stabbing knives through every nerve in my body.

Evan has already booked St Catherine’s church not far from us in Preston Park for the date he suggested because he knew you have to do these things months, sometimes years in advance.