The Ice Cream Girls (44 page)

I move in the darkened living room to the window and crack it open a fraction, not so much that the magic will start to leak out, just enough to let some of my smoke out. I curl up in the armchair by the window, and pick up my cigarettes and lighter, settle the ashtray on the arm of the chair, and slip a cigarette between my lips.

The past two days we have not talked about that night. I just didn’t want to. It’s hard enough to recall it, so I always avoid going through it in detail, picking over the carcass of my misguided notions of love, but now I will.

I flick shut my lighter and inhale life into the cigarette.

I’m going to allow myself to think about it because I am all talked out. All the stuff that was inside me is outside, so there is space, room for the memory to breathe. Room so I don’t get crowded and panicked when I think about it.

My eyes slip shut and I whirl the clock back. My mind goes with it. Racing back to that night.

It didn’t begin that night, of course.

No story begins the night it ends.

serena

I’d had enough. I’d had enough and I was leaving him.

It wasn’t, as I thought, that I couldn’t take any more. Of course I could. I could take more and more and more. I could take whatever he piled on top of me, the last two years had shown me that, but I’d decided enough was enough.

If it meant that he was going to kill me, then so be it. He could kill me and I wouldn’t have to suffer any more. He had done that to me. I had nowhere left to turn: I could not talk to my sisters, I had no friends to speak of because he didn’t like me hanging around with other people – I spoke to the people I worked with in the supermarket but never socialised with them. My whole life had become about him and pleasing him and not angering him and waiting for him to get rid of Poppy. It wasn’t a life, I realised. I had finally grown up. I had finally stopped being the naïve fifteen-year-old he’d relieved of her virginity, who he had moulded into his willing puppet.

When he opened the door to me, he knew. He knew that whether he beat me or ignored me or told me he loved me it would do no good. I was not going to be with him any longer. One way or another we were over.

Looking back, I know I should not have gone there. I should have called and told him. But for some reason I went. I went to tell him and I went to tell him clearly and openly. Like the adult I had become.

His face, usually a mask of confidence, slipped for a moment when he saw my face and he said nothing, just stepped aside to let me in.

‘And to what do I owe this dubious pleasure?’ he asked as he led the way into the living room and threw himself on to the sofa. He lounged back, his head on one side as he stretched his arms wide along the back of the sofa and sat with his hips thrust slightly forwards.

‘I came to talk to you,’ I said, amazed that my voice, which had been small and timid and quiet for so long now, sounded different. It sounded like my real voice. The voice I used to speak with before him. It was normal and ordinary. Just like I was. Like I had been before this.

‘So talk, baby. Got another appointment soon. You do know that tonight’s Poppy’s night, don’t you?’

He said that, I think, to test me. To see if it would get a rise out of me, because that would be a weakness he could exploit, that would be proof to him that I wasn’t completely free. I hadn’t completely had enough. Disappointment circled his eyes and mouth when I just stared at him. For a moment, I’d wondered who Poppy was – so determined was I to do this, I’d forgotten that I shared him. That he probably wouldn’t care that one of the people he tortured would no longer be around. Except, he might but only because he hadn’t done the chucking first.

I cleared my throat, to make sure that I wouldn’t stutter or pause, to make sure everything I said was clear and concise and to the point – like he always used to say my essays should be. ‘I don’t want to go out with you any more,’ I said. ‘I want this to be over. Tonight. I don’t want to be with you any more.’

His eyes narrowed and the right side of his top lip curled upwards in a sneer. Slowly his eyes crawled over me, from the top of my head to my feet. I had tied my hair back, and I was wearing jeans, a loose white T-shirt and my stonewashed denim jacket. He hated those sorts of clothes on me. My biggest crime, though, was wearing my black plimsolls. He hated them most out of anything in my wardrobe. His eyes lingered on the plimsolls for a long time before they crawled their way back up to my face. The sneer deepened.

‘Who is he? I presume this sudden bout of disobedience is down to some little oik you’ve picked up along the way. Who is he? Tell me, so I can kick the shit out of him.’

‘You,’ I said. ‘“He” is you. I don’t want to be with you any more.’ I would never have said something like that to him six months ago. Not even a week ago. But now I didn’t care and I’d had enough so I could say whatever I wanted. When you don’t care, you don’t worry about being hurt, about being damaged. You are foolish and reckless and do the things that need to be done.

‘You don’t mean it. I wish you did, but you don’t. You’ll be back before the end of the week, begging me to take you back.’

‘If it makes you happy to think that, then think it. I’m going, now. I just needed to tell you that.’

‘Hey, wait.’ He sat forwards, his arms open in surrender, it would seem, if I didn’t know him. ‘Is that it? Don’t I get a say? Don’t I get to talk to you about it? Try to change your mind, at least? I mean, what is it? Is it Poppy? Because I can finish with her tonight if you want me to. What is it? Because, baby, I love you. I can change.’

That was the whole point. He couldn’t change. He wouldn’t. He’d said it before, over and over and over again. And it always ended up the same: me in pain from a beating. Me lying to people about how I got hurt. Me trying to work out how to avoid it happening again. I was sick of it all.

‘I don’t want you to change,’ I said. ‘Because I don’t want to go out with you any more.’ Someone had once told me that if you kept repeating the key phrase in any speech it would ensure that your core message would stick in your audience’s mind and it would make you believe one hundred per cent in what you were saying.

‘But I love you, Serena. I
love
you. I’ve never felt like this about a woman before.’

His heart wasn’t in it, I could tell. He was just saying the words with no feeling or emotion behind them. Or maybe that’s the way it had always been; he’d always just been saying the words but with no emotion, no feeling, no love or sincerity behind them, and I hadn’t been able to see that. I’d always been so wrapped up in the fear of not upsetting him, enraging him, not doing anything to make him hit me that I did not notice before. Everything about him was one-dimensional. I had only just seen that.

A knock on the door followed by a short ring of the bell interrupted us. That was Poppy’s signal – mine was a ring and then a knock. ‘Hold that thought, baby, hold that thought,’ he said, leaping to his feet. Instead of going straight to the door, he went to the kitchen first. In that time, Poppy didn’t knock and ring again. She wouldn’t dare. She, like me, knew what was good for her.

What would be good for me would be to leave now. I’d told him, and I was sure he understood, so I should leave. Nothing here was mine: all the clothes and underwear were all stuff he had bought me. I did not want them, I did not need them. I could go back to dressing like the teenager I was now. I could stop dressing to please him.

‘Poppy,’ he said as he finally let her in. ‘Go straight through. We’ve got a surprise guest – you’ll never guess who’s here.’

She was a little startled to see me. She stared at me, her eyes as wide, round and wary as an owl, but it was not because I was here. It was because of how I was dressed. It was because, in her wide-open owl eyes, I could see that she was where I was. She had come to finish it too. And she was scared that she’d not be able to do it with me standing there. She must have guessed from how I was dressed, from the plimsolls on my feet, that I was doing it too. That I had got in there first.

I decided to stay. I’d been about to duck out, to leave him to it, but I knew if I left he would take it out on her. And she would probably be trapped for ever. She would never be able to leave because even though she had reached her decision, even though she was going to do it too, my being there had thrown her. Thrown her to the point where she might decide to do it on another day. And if she did that, she’d never do it. I did not want to be the cause of her staying more than one second with him. I did not want her to suffer another beating at his hands. I hated her, but I didn’t want anything bad to happen to her again.

When he entered the room, I realised that whether I wanted to or not, I was staying. From behind his back, I saw the glint of it. I saw the glint of the knife.

‘I’m glad you’re here, Poppy,’ he said to her, still holding the knife behind his back. I wasn’t sure if she had seen it or not, or what she thought he was doing, but from where I was standing I could see its outline, its dark brown wooden hilt, its wide, flat, sharp blade.

Poppy stood very still, not sure whether to ask why he was glad she was here, or to blurt out that she was leaving him. She clearly hadn’t seen what he had behind his back, and knowing her as I did, I knew the second she did see it she was going to panic. Maybe not scream, but definitely panic. She wouldn’t pretend not to see, she wouldn’t start mentally chasing a plan of escape for us both, she wouldn’t even try to see if she could communicate with me telepathically, she would hurtle headlong into a panic and we would both be lost.

He strode to the centre of the room, his eyes fixed on me, trying to intimidate me into not making a run for it until he was ready. I was probably meant to see what he had in his hand; I was meant to know that he intended to keep that promise he made to me.

‘Poppy, darling, I’ve decided that the time is right. I know you’ve been mostly patient with me, but I’ve decided that you’re right; I should dump Serena.’ Poppy’s owl eyes seemed to double in size.

‘I’ve found a way for us to be together, and to make sure that Serena stays gone from our lives. Because you know what she’s like. Even if I dump her, she’ll just keep coming back and coming back, trying to make trouble for us. She might even tell people – it’d be lies, of course – that I started seeing her when she was my pupil. And you know how mud sticks. It’d ruin me. No, it wouldn’t be fair on me to do that. So I’ve decided the only way forward is to make sure she never comes back. And never tells.’

Poppy’s body was growing more and more still with every word he spoke. She had finally twigged what he was saying. She was starting to guess what he had in his hand. I don’t know if he had ever threatened her with a knife – it’s not as if we ever talked, compared notes, compared bruises, we disliked each other far too much for that – but if he had then she would know. She would know what he was about to do.

Of course, I didn’t think he would do it. Not really. It wasn’t as simple as slapping someone, or kicking her when she was down on the ground after a beating. It wasn’t as easy as wrenching arms from their sockets, or punching her in the back as you tell her to walk away from you. Killing someone could not be that easy. He wasn’t going to do it. He might threaten it, he might try to show he was serious by doing this in front of Poppy, but he wasn’t going to do it. Not really. He couldn’t. He wasn’t that evil.

Moving slowly and carefully, he brought the kitchen knife into view. It was one of the larger ones. Sharpened by me just over two weeks ago. Its blade so fine it could cut clouds into thin, neat, even slices, ready to be topped with a thick layer of sunshine.

‘I want you to remove her from our lives,’ he said to Poppy. ‘I want you to put an end to her and her blight on us. I want you to kill her.’

He was offering the hilt of the knife. Involuntarily, she took a step away.

‘Come on, baby, it’s the only way, you know it is. I want to be with you, and if you do this one thing for me, just this one little thing, we can be together for ever. We could . . . we could even get married.’

The worst part was, of course, that if he had brought up marriage, I would have considered it. Even after all he’d done to me, I would have thought it’d be the fresh start we needed; I would have convinced myself that things would change after we got married, he wouldn’t hit me any more, we’d go back to how we used to be. It wouldn’t occur to me that how we used to be only existed because he had manipulated me into being with him. Slow and subtle, but definite. He had probably decided to seduce me from the moment he worked out what I was like: quiet, studious, a little bit of a loner – someone who could obviously keep a secret. There was never anything loving or real about our relationship, there was nothing to base a marriage on.

He held the knife out more forcefully, obviously surprised that she hadn’t immediately snatched it from his hand and plunged it into my breast.
He won’t let her do it,
I thought.
He’ll just let me think he’s going to let her, scare me into submission. He won’t want to kill me, not really. Not really.

‘Isn’t us being together what you’ve wanted from the start? What you’ve constantly dreamed of?’ Again, his words were hollow and flat. Each of them said in his honey voice that used to convince me of anything – convinced me that he was sorry and it wouldn’t happen again – but my ear had been tuned out of his frequency now. I could hear the truth. And the truth was he felt nothing. I should have been scared by that. Because a man who can do what he did to me and still live with himself rather happily must feel nothing. And someone who feels nothing will have no problem killing. But I did not feel scared. Deep down, I knew,
knew
, he was good. He had some goodness inside him.