The Ice Cream Girls (26 page)

I say nothing because I do not know what to say. He clearly doesn’t think I am a freak – he is being professional and caring without prying. He is empathy personified.

‘We’re here to help,’ he says.

I nod and stand. ‘Thanks, doctor,’ I say, feeling
horrible
as I open his door and close it behind me.

serena

‘Mum, is Dad your best friend?’ Conrad asks.

‘I suppose he is,’ I say. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘If Dad broke something, would you get cross with him even though he’s your best friend?’

Ah, I see. My crafty son has come out to join me in the garden. I had been staring up at the stars, waiting patiently for a shooting star to streak across the grey-black night.
If I see a shooting star I’ll tell Evan tonight,
I’d thought as I tugged my coat around my body and settled down to watch
. If I’m meant to tell him tonight, the shooting star will be my inspiration.

Con had come out about ten minutes ago and had climbed on to my lap and, grateful to have him behaving like a baby for a while, I’d pulled him in towards me so he could be protected from the cold by my coat, too. He’d sat so still for so long I thought he’d nodded off to sleep, when instead he was using this quality time to lay the groundwork for confessing what he had done.

‘Yes, I’d be cross but if he was sorry and told me what he had broken, before I found out what it was, I wouldn’t stay that cross for long.’

‘OK,’ Con says and slips off my lap to run back inside.

‘Hey, hey, what did you break?’

He shakes his head, confused. ‘Nothing.’

‘So why were you asking about if Dad broke something?’

‘Because Dad dropped your hair straighty thing down the toilet when he was being a famous rapper in the bathroom and he asked me to ask you if you’d be cross with him.’

‘He
what?!’
I reply, leaping up out of my chair.

‘He said to say he was sorry.’

‘He will be! You tell him he can sleep in the spare room tonight and buy me a new pair.’

‘OK,’ Conrad says happily. He goes towards the house and stops just short of the back double doors, looks up and cups his hands around his mouth. ‘MUM SAID YOU CAN SLEEP IN THE SPARE ROOM TONIGHT AND YOU HAVE TO BUY HER MORE!’ he bellows.

The bedroom window, which overlooks the garden, immediately opens and Evan leans out, tapping his finger on his lips, trying to hush up our son. Evan taught Con to do the ‘Shhhhhhh’ tapping his finger on his lips thing when he was ten months old.

‘AND SHE SAID YOU’RE GOING TO BE SORRY!’ Conrad adds for good measure.

‘Right,’ I say to Conrad, putting my hands on his shoulders, ‘now that all our neighbours know our business, let’s go to bed, shall we?’ I guide him towards the house.

‘OK, Mum,’ he says happily.

It’s not until much later, when everyone in the house is asleep and Evan is snoring gently beside me, that I remember the shooting star promise. I did not see one, so I do not have to tell. But, I want to. I shift across the bed, curl up into the shapes left by my husband’s well-built solid form and loop my arms around him.

‘I did a really stupid thing once upon a time, Evan,’ I say into warm, soft creases of his neck. ‘And I want you to know about it.’

poppy

Glancing at my watch, I realise that I am late for my Tuesday job.

I have two jobs now: on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I clean for a woman in Hove. I’d got that job through Raymond Balaine, an old friend of Mr Fitch, my probation officer. I’d met Raymond at the end of last week, in his office above a shop in Brighton town centre, and instantly disliked him. It wasn’t simply because he looked very much like a sunburnt, overweight, gout-ridden tomato, nor that when he spoke he sounded only a couple of evolutionary rungs above a grunting animal; it was mainly that he was at pains to tell me that he didn’t like ex-jailbirds, he wouldn’t piss on me and ‘my kind’ if I were on fire, and I’d better not mess up. In an ideal world I would have walked out after telling him what to do with his job, but in that world I wouldn’t also have to explain the twenty-year gap on my CV. Miraculously, he’d found me a three-morning-a-week job almost straight away – ‘I’m desperate, so you’ll do’ – and paid weekly. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I do my other job – I watch Serena. I study her life and learn everything I can about her to learn how to approach her. How to get her to confess in the quickest way possible.

I am going to be late to see her this morning, though, because the bed was too snugly. Too comfy and cosy. And when the alarm started to buzz away on the bedside table I reached out from under the covers and hit the snooze button before I even thought about what I was doing. I pulled the cream cotton sheet higher above my head and snuggled down, waiting for Mum to come in and remind me that if I was late it’d be my own fault. She’d then be followed five minutes later by Dad, often with a glass of orange juice, telling me the last one to breakfast wouldn’t get any bacon or sausage, depending on which one Mum was burning that morning.

I’d stayed in my cosy, rosy memory for longer than was decent, clinging on to the sheet and the fuzziness of sleep as I waited and waited for the creak outside the door.

After a few minutes, feeling slightly embarrassed and surprised that I’d tumbled so willingly into the memory, I’d pushed myself further into the centre of the single bed, curling myself up tighter beneath the covers, allowing the foolishness to dissipate. No one would know that I thought it was twenty years ago. No one would know that I’d gone back in time and had basked in what it was like to be loved and wanted by my parents, instead of having my father ignore me and my mother fear me.

‘I’ll know, Poppy,’
Marcus had said in my ear.

‘Like I care. And who are you going to tell?’ I said to him.

He appeared lying beside me, his face pushed right up to mine, so close I jumped a little.
‘You, of course,’
he said simply.
‘And you’d hate that more than anything. Being reminded that you’re not as hard and resilient as you pretend. You’d hate to be reminded that you’re just a bit soft girlie who cried for her daddy every night.’

‘Oh, get lost,’ I’d said and threw back the sheet and the covers to leap out of bed to get away from him.

Glancing at the red LCD numbers of the black clock radio that I’d had since I was fourteen, I realised how late I was. I’d definitely missed the paper grab, I’d miss the school run, I’d miss him leaving for work. I’d probably have to skip straight to work. Watch her go into the offices of the large insurance brokers just behind Brighton Station that she worked for. I hadn’t managed to find out, yet, what she did. Whenever I rang their switchboard and asked for her job title the disconcertingly efficient receptionist would say, ‘Just putting you through’ and before I could say, ‘No, I—’ I was being whisked into the phone system. The Internet hadn’t told me, meaning she was either too lowly to be mentioned or too important to have her details given out to the general public. With her big house and big car, two adorable children and husband, I know which one it will be. I’d hurried down the road, and came round the corner on to Boundary Road just as I saw the bus coming.

I had to run a few feet to the bus stop, but I caught it. It was quite full, which I wasn’t used to. The bus I usually get is empty, only a few people who need to be somewhere early struggle on to it. I am surrounded, right now, by people in suits, people with bags, people who read with one hand while holding on to the poles with another, schoolchildren whose chatter spills down the stairs and babbles through the bus, punctuated by the tiny tinny sounds of the new versions of Walkmans. It’s like being back in the mess hall, a bit. So many people, all crammed together to do the same thing, but not really communicating outside of their own little worlds; each spinning in their own orbit in the same solar system.

As the bus trundles down New Churchington Road towards town, I pretend for a few minutes I’m like each of the adults on the bus: I have somewhere to be, I have a job or a class to attend, I am a valued member of society. No one would ever know any different. Maybe my hair is a bit different, cropped as it is to be easy to care for, maybe my clothes of skin-tight jeans and fringed suede jacket are a little too authentically retro, but that’s the beauty of Brighton – you have to try
really
hard to stand out or look out of place.

I bend a little to look out of the window so I can count the beach huts up to mine. I do this every morning: counting up to eleven from the end, right near the exit from the promenade to the street.

‘One, two, three, four,’ I count under my breath, moving my lips as the bus moves slowly along. ‘Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, el—’ I almost cry out loud.

There is someone standing beside my beach hut, doing something. Doing something that looks like scrawling graffiti.

It takes a few seconds for the rest of my mind to catch up: my beach hut is being vandalised.

The part of me that’s been paying attention reaches out and rings the bell. Several people look up, frowning – the bus obviously doesn’t usually stop here at this time of the morning. There are no schools near here, nor offices. Just flats and houses on the roads running up off New Churchington Road and on the other side of the road the sea, the beach, and the line of beach huts with their backs turned towards the road.

‘’Xcuse me, ’xcuse me,’ I throw at the other passengers as I struggle to get to the front and to the doors. My heart is racing and my mind is galloping beside it, both of them desperate to convince me that I counted wrong. That my beach hut isn’t being defaced, that someone isn’t in the process of doing this to me.

Because it would not be a random attack. It would be . . . No. It’s not my beach hut, it can’t be. I leap off the bus and wait for it to pull away before I step out on to the road. A car horn blares at me and I remember that I need to check the road before I cross. I search and search for a break in the traffic. There isn’t one. Everyone is eager to get to work or school or wherever. They don’t understand what I am going through.

In desperation I dash out, the sound of horns blaring causing my heart to clamour up into my throat, but I don’t care – I need to get across the road. I make it to the central island in one piece, and pause for a few seconds. The traffic is less heavy on this side, fewer people are going the way I have just come from.
After this blue car
, I decide, and dash out like an athlete heading for the finish line once the car has passed me.

I run down the path from the street to the promenade and dash the short distance to my hut, surprised the vandal hasn’t left. There is a buzzing sound – like a large demented bumble bee is trying to get into the hut beside the vandal, whoever they may be.

‘What are you doing?’ I shout from a distance away, above the buzzing. I am not scared, but I am not stupid. Until I know who I am dealing with, it’s best not to go right up to the person and start a confrontation. Let them show themselves so I can decide what the best course of action is. ‘What are you doing to my beach hut?’

The buzzing sound stops just before the person appears from the gap between my beach hut, a white mask on his face and big goggles over his eyes. But I know who it is before he strips his face of its protective gear. Alain.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

He is wearing paint-splattered clothes and in his hand he carries some kind of tool.

‘Sanding,’ he says. ‘You said I could visit the hut and, when I did, I noticed this edge was a little uneven. So I decided to sand it down. But once I did that bit, the rest looked tatty, so I had to carry on.’

What do I say? I can’t make him put the uneven ridges back on the hut. I’d noticed them but had decided to leave them, to just paint over them and leave them for another time – when I could save up and buy the right tools, or even pay someone to do it. I have to engage with him now and I’d already decided not to do that.

‘I’m going to have to buy the paint for the sides now, and I can’t afford that at the moment,’ I say.

He raises a ‘wait a minute’ finger then disappears back into the gap, before coming back out with two paint cans. ‘They’re the right colours,’ he says. ‘I rang the Seafront Office and checked. I’ve even got primer and undercoat back there.’ He is staring at me, and expectation fills the gap between us. He’s nervous, I realise. Wondering if I am going to throw his good deed back in his face and tell him to leave me alone. Or if I am going to accept this act of kindness for what it is – an act of kindness. He is persistent. More persistent than any cockroach I have encountered: the ones I used to crush in my prison rooms always stayed dead after they were crushed. I learnt, though, that they played dead sometimes, and I had to make sure they were properly crushed. I had done that with this man, and he still came back.

Maybe he isn’t a cockroach after all. Maybe he is . . .

‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’ I ask.

‘Day off. That’s why I thought I’d make a start on this today. I’ve got a spare paintbrush if you’re free?’

I search in my pocket for the familiar ridges of my keys and pull them out. I’ll go to see Serena on Thursday. She’s not going anywhere, is she? ‘I’ve got a few bits of the inside to finish off first,’ I eventually say to him. ‘Good thing I leave my painting clothes here, isn’t it?’

Alain smiles a smile that flips my stomach upside down. ‘Yeah, it’s a good job,’ he says. My stomach flops back the other way.
Stop it
, I tell myself.
You’re not allowed to fall in love with him. You’re not allowed to do anything until you’ve made Serena confess.

Even as I’m telling myself this, I know my face is softening into a smile, my eyes are matching the expression in his eyes, and my heart is gently opening up, ready to let him in.

poppy