The Ice Cream Girls (49 page)

‘About too-much-pound-fifty.’

‘Faye wants to give it to us as a present. Medina’s going to virtually kill herself to get the dress done. She’s paying for the material as well. And to get my shoes made to match.’

‘Ahh, the Witches of Ipswich are back together. I’m glad.’

‘Thanks to you,’ I say to him.

‘Now, what would my life be like without the witches?’ he says, dropping a kiss on my nose. ‘I’m glad it’s all sorted with you three. I didn’t like to see you so unhappy.’

‘It’s not completely sorted. It’ll take more than a chat and a bottle of wine to undo twenty years of pain and resentment, but we’ll get there. That’s what families do, isn’t it?’ I run my hands over Medina’s books and magazines, as well as the big file that I’d started and compiled. It is bursting with pages and coloured section dividers and magazine tears and vital info. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking,’ I say.

‘Ah, but have you been reading the streets?’

I roll my eyes but don’t comment. ‘I was thinking, this –’ I indicate to the wedding in front of me, ‘this isn’t really us, is it? It’s all a bit flash and showy and we’re not like that. We’re more . . .’

‘Private and low-key.’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’ve been thinking that, too. But I thought you wanted this.’

‘What I really wanted was the proposal, I got that.’

‘So you don’t want to get married again?’

‘Yes and no. Not like this, I suppose is the real answer. And we could do so much with that money.’

‘Yeah, we could.’

‘I knew saying that would speak to the real you,’ I say.

‘I’ve got an idea.’

‘What’s that then?’

‘I can’t tell you, but I want you to trust me. We cancel all this and I put my idea into motion, what do you say?’

‘I say, if you decide we’re going to use the money to buy you a flash car, you’ll find yourself a very unhappy man. Very unhappy.’

‘Trust me, sweetheart. Trust me.’

‘Can I just emphasise the
very
of the “very unhappy”.’

‘Trust me.’ He flashes me his crooked grin. I love this man. I’m amazed that I can forget that sometimes. That in the everydayness of everything, I can forget to remember that I love him. And I love the family we’ve made. I almost let all of that go – I almost allowed my guilt to let him walk out. A shudder runs through me. Never again.

‘Here we go,’ I say, hefting up the file into his arms.

‘What’s all this?’

‘The wedding you need to cancel. I totally trust you to do that. Have fun, I’m off to pick up Con.’

His face is crumpled in dismay as he stares at the file in his arms. ‘This isn’t fair, you know,’ he calls at me as I go to find my car keys.

‘Oh, yeah, speaking of fair,’ I call over my shoulder, ‘don’t forget to call Mez and tell her I won’t be needing the wedding dress.’

‘Ahhhh,
man
! She’s your sister.’

‘And you, apparently, are the wedding canceller. It’s in the job description. Right up there with, “gets to decide what we do with the money”.’

‘This still isn’t fair,’ he shouts, as I open the front door. ‘It’s not fair at all.’

I love you
, I tell him in my head.

serena

Ange is leaving her house as I drive past and I see that she is moving stiffly, awkwardly, as though she is in pain. As though every tiny bump that is walking is causing her agony.

I hit the indicator and pull over. I get out of my car and barely remember to lock it behind me as I run to cross the road. If I think too much, I won’t be able to do this. I won’t be able to give her the chance to change her life. Maybe if someone had done this for me,
he
would still be alive. And I would not have been living with all this guilt for all these years. Maybe I would have been able to escape.

‘Ange,’ I call to her as she heads for her big posh car.

She stops and looks up at me, confusion in her eyes and fear on her face as she glances around. Scared that someone will see us together. Scared of what will happen if he finds out she was talking to someone.

‘Ange,’ I say, standing in front of her. She looks thinner, paler, too much make-up piled on to hide the bruises, her hair too straight and pulled too far forward to hide the marks on her neck. ‘I know you’re scared,’ I tell her.

‘Scared? Of what?’ She almost convinces me that I am delusional, that she isn’t constantly on edge, she isn’t constantly chasing that perfect, impossible equilibrium that will keep him happy and stop him from erupting.

‘I know you’re scared and I understand. I’ve been where you are. Except I didn’t have kids who had to watch me get beaten up. But I want to tell you my story so that, hopefully, you can get out before things end for you the way they did for me.’

‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Ange says.

‘He ended up dead, you see,’ I say. ‘He tried to kill me and because I fought back, he ended up dead. I wish I had found the strength to walk – run, actually – away from him before it came to that. But I didn’t. And because I didn’t, he ended up dead. And if it hadn’t been him, it would have been me. He told me often enough he was going to do it and, that night, I believe he would have.’

Ange is stilled now. She is no longer searching for spying eyes that are going to tell on her, she is staring at me. Something has hit a chord. Something has resonated so closely with her, she knows that I do understand. I really was where she is.

‘Do you want me to tell you?’ I ask.

She gives a brief, stiff nod of her head.

I inhale, drawing strength from the fact I’ve told this story once now. The second should be easier. The second time should remind me I have finally escaped
him
. I am not protecting him any more and because of that, because I can tell the story again to a complete stranger, I have begun to bury him for good. ‘I thought I loved him. And I thought it was my fault he was so angry. His name . . . his name was Marcus . . .’

poppy

‘Of all the cemeteries in all the world, we had to meet in this one,’ I say to her.

I’d know her shape, her outline, anywhere. And after I walked around and around looking for the right place, the right plot, I’d been only a little surprised to find her here. It is, after all, where this story ends. Where our story ends.

Her whole body became uptight and rigid when she heard my voice and, when I come to stand next to her, her profile is tense from her clenched jaw and her eyes are staring hard at the earth in front of her.

‘Are you still following me?’ she asks.

‘No, Serena, I am not still following you.’

And I’m not going to follow her any longer. I’ve come to realise that even if I was cleared, vindicated, there would always be people who would still think I was guilty. And if not guilty of murder, culpable in its execution. And the two people who I would be doing it for, the two people who I would want more than anything to think me innocent – Mum and Dad – would still think I was guilty. They will always think I’m guilty – because I was there. Because I wasn’t the perfect little girl they thought I was. That was a hard pill of reality to swallow but, now that I’ve swallowed it, I realise that I can stop. I can stop this, and start again.

‘So how come you’re here at the exact same time as me?’ she asks.

‘Because I had the exact same need to come here and lay his ghost to rest at the exact same time as you?’ I reply.

Her body relaxes a little as she says, ‘That wouldn’t surprise me.’

‘It’s weird, isn’t it? How we keep doing the same thing at the same time? We finished with him at the same time, we went to the police at the same time. We’re clearly so basically similar, it’s strange that we were never friends.’

She turns her head to face me, incredulity on her face. ‘We were never friends because you were sleeping with my boyfriend,’ she reminds me.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I say. ‘I suppose that would put the mockers on most friendships, wouldn’t it?’

‘Just a bit.’

We stand in silence for a while, staring at the patch of green in a stone plot in front of us. The grass is slightly overgrown, but is not unkempt; I suspect it is cared for by the cemetery, not by anyone else. There are no flowers. The inscription is simple:

I wonder if his son ever visits, or if he tries to hang on to memories of his father in other ways. I wonder if anyone visits? Over the years, I got about six letters from other girls – just like me, just like Serena – who said they knew what he was like, they had also fallen for him at a young age, and he had brutalised them, too. They got out, they said, but if they hadn’t, they might have had to do what I did.

I threw those letters away because I did not do it but, thinking about them now, I wonder if any of those girls came to visit? Came to lay his ghost to rest.

‘Do you miss him?’ Serena asks.

How am I supposed to answer that? What is she really asking me?

‘I’m just interested to see if you do,’ she adds to my silence.

‘I do sometimes. And it freaks me out. Even now, I’ll see something or hear something and I’ll think, I have to tell him, and then I’ll catch myself and what I’m doing.’

Marcus has been haunting me for years or, rather, I’ve been revisiting all my mistakes, all the dark, scary places of my personality through him for years. So I don’t miss nasty Marcus, he has been with me all the time, but do I miss the other Marcus? The one I fell in love with?

‘I used to miss him a lot at first, after it happened. That freaked me out. Because sometimes, in my mind, it was like he wasn’t how he was. All I could remember were the good things about him. How sweet he could be, the special little presents he’d buy, those paper boats he’d make, and the way he’d be so excited when he was helping me to study. I’d miss that. I’d crave that again.’

‘That’s the worst part of missing him, I think,’ she says. ‘I kind of remember those things, but then I don’t. I remember the presents and the help with studying, but in a haze, really. I’m still trying to work out why it took me so long to walk away.’

‘Because you didn’t know any better,’ I say to her. ‘Neither of us did.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘And that’s why I can sort of understand why you did it – you thought you had no choice. When you’re in that situation, it’s hard to see a way out. I do understand. I have been there, literally.’

She turns fully to me, faces me square-on. ‘Poppy, I’m only going to say this one more time. I didn’t do it. There, I’ve said it. Never to be repeated. If you don’t believe me, there’s nothing I can do.’

Memory loss. That’s the only explanation. She told me herself that she has it sometimes, she’s had it since she was with him and needed a way to cope, so I believe her when she says she didn’t do it – because she genuinely doesn’t remember doing it. Doing something like that is so hideous, so gruesome, your mind wouldn’t have any choice but to erase it from both long-and short-term memory. That’s why she sounds so convincing, why she believes she is innocent: she doesn’t remember doing it. It had to have been her.

Because if she didn’t do it, then it was me.

‘Does your husband know you’re here?’ I ask.

‘He drove me here.’

Alain, my boyfriend, drove me here, and is waiting for me, too. Waiting to take me where I need to go next. ‘Oh, good. Good. I’m glad. He seems like a good guy. Really nice.’

Her head creaks around to look at me again, her gaze a hard stare. ‘You stay away from him,’ she says.

‘Oh, no, I didn’t mean . . .’ I open my hands in surrender. ‘All that’s over, Serena. The stalking, trying to get into your life, all done with. I promise you. I am going to get on with my life, what is left of it. I can’t promise not to hate you from afar, but I’m not coming near you again. In fact, if I never see you again, it’ll be too soon.’

‘Feeling’s mutual,’ she replies.

Dr Evan obviously hasn’t told her that I went to see him, and I’m grateful for that. I’m eternally grateful that she doesn’t know how bad, how obsessed, I got.

She crouches down, and reaches for the smooth, simple lettering chiselled out of the grey smooth stone. She runs her fingers over it, taking his name and his description in by touch. Then, slowly, she takes her hand away and stands.

‘Goodbye, Sir,’ she whispers as if she were talking to her teacher. ‘May you rest in peace.’

As she turns away she gives me a smile, probably the first genuine one she’s ever aimed at me. ‘And may you live in peace, Poppy,’ she says over her shoulder before she walks away, and out of my life.

serena

‘All done?’ Evan asks as I climb back into our car.

‘Yup,’ I say. ‘All finally done.’

‘Where did you go, Mum?’ Conrad asks, as if he didn’t ask when Evan pulled up just down the road from the cemetery. Sometimes I think he asks questions more than once to try to fox us, to catch us out.

‘She told you already,’ Vee says. She doesn’t like sitting in the back but, on a family trip, she has no choice. And this family trip is being taken with the aid of the wedding fund.

‘Someone I used to know died a long time ago and I went to visit their grave and to say goodbye.’

‘Oh, right,’ Con says.

‘Right, so is everyone ready for the trip of a lifetime?’ Evan, the only one of us who knows where we’re going, asks.

‘Yes!’ we all say together. All he would tell us was to pack for a hot summer and a cold winter – in other words bring as much as possible. Con, of course, has no trouble showing his excitement; Vee is far better at hiding it, but not from me. I’m excited, too. Now that I have finally said goodbye to Marcus and to Poppy and that part of my life, I can immerse myself fully in the people I have sitting around me. I still hide the knives – and did so before we went away – and I still can’t eat ice cream, but change takes time.