The Ice Cream Girls (40 page)

The inside cover of the bible bears the inscription,
A gift to Betina Wynard from the nuns at St Angela’s Convent School, 1981
. The note is tucked in between the inside cover and the first page of the Bible. It is sealed, but the lack of my name on the front of the envelope tells me that it has been opened and checked as per the rules. Even in death a prisoner has no privacy. Even in death those in charge need to know everything. If she had put something incriminating in there, I would not have seen this, I’m sure.

My fingers flick through the pages of the Bible until I come to the passage she has quoted.
‘For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not die but have eternal life.’

The words float in the tears in my eyes. I wish I had her faith. I wish I could believe what she believed, then it would not hurt. I would read those words and I would feel comfort, I would feel sure that she is safe and happy. I would feel something other than this. It is pain, it is loss, it is anger. I refold the note, slip it back in its envelope, slip it back in its place in the Bible.

It was not meant to be like this.

We were meant to have our happy ending; we were meant to start our lives again together. I have not had one drink of alcohol because I have been waiting for her. Waiting for us to sit outside a pub and have our first proper drink together, like those young professionals I always see relaxing without a care in the world, outside Brighton pubs and bars. She was meant to coach me to stop smoking while taking blatant drags from the fags I’d lit. We were meant to talk about the men we met and ask each other’s opinions on whether they were good enough. We were meant to be friends on the outside too. We were meant . . .

I close my eyes and call up her slender face, her short Afro hair, her big insightful eyes, her soft voice, her gentle spirit, the smile that was never far away from her lips.
‘Tell me what it’s like out there,’
she’d written in her last letter to me.
‘Tell me if I’ll like it.’

I cover my face with my hands, trying to hold back my gushing tears.

I don’t know if you’d like it, Tine
, I say in my head.
I know that I’m not liking it. I’m not liking it at all.

serena

‘Don’t hang up,’ Mez says. She has blocked her number from my work’s caller ID, knowing that I would have to pick up the phone. ‘It’s me, but please don’t hang up.’ I don’t know why, but I’ve always been able to tell my sisters apart on the phone. Mez’s voice is ever so slightly higher, with a slight lift at the end; Faye’s is a fraction deeper and stays much more close to her normal register even when she is asking a question.

‘Verity called me; she’s worried about you.’

‘What’s she worried about?’ I ask, for the sake of my daughter. I thought I had reassured her last night, but obviously not. And Evan has failed to convince them things will be fine, too.

‘She said you’d moved out. She’s worried that you’re not taking care of yourself. She said you told her to call one of us if she couldn’t talk to you.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘I said I’d call you to find out how you really are.’

‘Tell her I’m fine.’

‘And are you? Are you fine?’

I say nothing. I am not fine. How can I be when I have destroyed my life? When my husband won’t speak to me, my daughter and son are living apart from me and I hate myself for the choices I’ve made, how can I possibly be fine?

I also do not say anything because I do not want to talk to Mez. It’s all too hard, too difficult for me at the moment. I do not know the right thing to do any more. I do not know how to fix my family. I ruined it and I do not know how to fix it. But I do know I cannot pretend that I don’t know what they think I am.

‘What can I do to help?’ she asks.

Get my husband to talk to me. Help me rewrite history. Believe in me. ‘Just be there for Verity if she needs you.’

‘Are you and Evan going to be OK?’

‘I don’t know. He thinks I’m a murderer and he hates me for lying to him, and he won’t tell me if he wants to divorce me. So I don’t know.’

‘Sez, about what Adrian told you—’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘But—’

‘I. Don’t. Want. To. Talk. About. It.’

‘OK, OK,’ she says. ‘We won’t talk about it. But I love you, little sister.’

‘Please take care of Verity if she needs you again. And please be convincing when you tell her I’m fine. I don’t want her or Con to worry too much.’

‘Will do.’

‘And I love you, too.’

That’s my problem, isn’t it? I’ve always found room in my heart to love the people who hurt me.

poppy

Every day I get out this slip of paper and I try to make those calls.

I long to talk to Bella and Logan, but what if the feeling isn’t mutual? How would I feel about talking to a person who I’ve been brought up to believe is evil personified?

I run my fingers over the lines of their names before I carefully refold the piece of paper and slip it back in my pocket.

serena

I probably shouldn’t keep meeting her.

Especially since she – her release – has precipitated what has been the decimation of my life, but I can’t really help myself. I could pretend it’s because I’m scared of what she might do, if she’ll show up at school one day and tell the kids. Or that I’m scared of her – that she’ll do something to me if I don’t show up or if I turn her down. I have seen the rage in her.

The aggression she keeps flashing at me is simply the surface of what she is feeling. It is a cover for the true anger that burns like a volcanic fire deep inside her. She is going to explode one day if she does not find an outlet for it. She is going to erupt and could destroy herself and all those around her if she does not find a way to let it out in little chunks. That is part of the reason – the real reason – I meet her. I fear for her. I feel sorry for her and the state she is in: what she has probably endured in prison, what she is probably putting up with now that she is out. I feel for her as one human being feels for another, as an acquaintance might feel for someone they once upon time knew. I don’t like her, but I feel for her.

The main reason, the main
real
reason I feel for her, is that I feel responsible. Since that night, since what happened, I have felt a weight of responsibility about the choices I made, and it burns like Poppy’s volcanic rage. That responsibility, culpability –
guilt
– created the conscience that mocks and ridicules me, it makes me lightheaded and woozy. It, I’m sure, causes the memory lapses and the moments of hyperventilation.

I feel guilty for so many little things, and I feel responsible for the big things. I feel responsible for what happened to Poppy. And, of course, I feel guilty for
his
death. I feel guilty about why he died, how he died, that . . .

Poppy enters the café and she reminds me again how different she is from the girl I knew. She walks slower, almost as though dragging her feet will stop her from getting where she is going. Her shoulders are slightly hunched, as if ready for attack. Whenever she enters somewhere, I have noticed, her eyes dart around, taking in the scene, checking where everyone and everything is, almost as though she needs to know where the exits are, where the most potentially dangerous people are, where she needs to be should something happen. Prison has done that to her.

She saunters over to me, pulls out a chair and sits down – after a quick look around to see how the environment has changed since she entered. She tugs off her brown leatherette cap and shakes out her hair, running her fingers through it. It’s growing back: the waves are starting to be seen.

‘Serena,’ she says, formally.

‘Poppy,’ I reply.

‘Now we’re sure of who we are, let’s get down to business,’ she says.

‘You mean, you’re finally going to tell me what you want?’ I say. Her aggression is disconcerting. Not scary, per se. I think it’s the absence of any other emotion in her speech sometimes, as if she doesn’t know how to be anything other than this angry, that unsettles me. Sometimes all that Poppy sounds is angry.

‘You know what I want,’ she says and sits back, puts her head to one side as she sizes me up. She’s wondering if she can take me. Wondering if she leapt at me across the table and started a grappling match on the grubby black and white lino tiles beneath our feet which one of us would gain the upper hand most quickly.

She is prison-tough, I’ll give her that. But doesn’t know what I am like in a fight between equals, what I am capable of. She’s never known, that’s why she found it easy to be with my boyfriend. She thought I would walk away. That I
could
walk away. It didn’t occur to her that I had been so brainwashed and demeaned, so broken and damaged, that – until that night – walking away was not an option.

‘If I did, I wouldn’t have said that.’

‘You need to tell the truth about what happened. What you did.’

‘I did tell the truth, Poppy. I told the police, who tried to twist it. I told the court, who found me innocent. I told the people who mattered.’

She sits forwards, leans across the table and hisses, ‘You killed him. Admit it, you killed him.’

The guilt flames up inside me. ‘I didn’t,’ I say calmly, even though inside I am shaking. Trembling, and woozy; the palpitations – the latest element to how I’ve been feeling – start up. I place my hand on the centre of my chest and try to breathe. It’s nigh on impossible with the guilt flaming up inside. ‘I didn’t.’

‘Stop lying!’ she continues to hiss. ‘Stop
lying
!’

‘If you carry on like this,’ I pause, trying to quell the fire inside, ‘I’ll leave. I don’t have to come here, you know.’

‘Yes, you do,’ she says with a smug snarl that stops her from erupting. ‘If you don’t, I’ll tell your darling hubby all about you and me and the murder.’

‘He already knows,’ I reply, relieved to be taking that card away from her.

‘No, he doesn’t,’ she says, looking unsure, unsettled and a little afraid.

‘He does.’

‘And, what, he’s been loving and supportive and believes in you one hundred per cent? Pull the other one, Serena, it’s got bells on.’

‘Hardly. He asked me to leave.’

‘He threw you out?’

‘Yes, if that’s how you want to put it. Nearly ten days now. So, you see, I have nothing left to lose.’ That is not true, of course. The kids don’t know. And I am hoping to get him back, but she doesn’t need to know that. Because right now, I have been thrown out.

‘So why did you come here, then?’ she asks.

‘Because you obviously need someone to talk to. And I thought I might be able to . . . I don’t know. Not help, exactly, but . . .’

Her face twists dramatically. ‘You came out of
pity
?
Pity!
’

If she wants to look at it that way, then she can. I came because I can’t help myself.

Poppy used to look at me at lot with resentment. She wanted
him
all to herself and she wanted me to disappear. Around the time of her sixteenth birthday she changed. I think it started to get to her. She started to see that
he
wasn’t perfect. Or maybe she knew and she stopped thinking I was the cause of
his
imperfections.

‘Serena,’ he barked, ‘into the kitchen.’

I did as I was told, too emotionally exhausted to even ask why. He held Poppy’s hand tenderly as they followed. He went to the side of the kitchen table nearest the sink and pulled out a chair. ‘Sit,’ he ordered me, his tone reminding me of Barbara Woodhouse.
Good dog
, I expected him to say any second.
Good dog, Serena
.

Ten minutes earlier, before she arrived, he had held a knife to my throat, and reminded me that leaving him wasn’t an option. I had felt the bite of the knife as he pressed it to my flesh, then he took it away. Now, he was caressing her, stroking her, reminding me he had someone else. I did not want to watch. I did not want to watch because I did not want to feel jealous over a man who wanted to kill me. It was not logical, it was primordial. He was supposedly my mate and I wanted to leave him, but I still felt bad when he went with another woman. When he went with her.

He was torturing me to get a reaction. I would not give him one, I would not show him how I felt about what he was doing. He would hurt me no matter what I did, but I would rather I got beaten for not reacting than reacting. He would get less satisfaction from that.

Suddenly he was pushing her forwards and lifting her white pencil skirt. Confusion and embarrassment exploded in Poppy’s eyes. We locked gazes, and I realised she was asking for help. She wanted me to do something to help her. I felt sorry for her, I really did, but the last time I helped her he discovered a new way to punish me. After last time, ‘let’s make up’ had entered his repertoire of torture, his latest way of prolonging the suffering of a beating. I could not risk making him that angry again.