The Ice Cream Girls (43 page)

His thumbs caress the palms of my hands and he leans as close to me as he can without touching me. ‘Make me understand,’ he says. ‘I want you to talk to me until I do understand. OK?’

I stare at him. Wondering how I can do that.

‘First, I’m going to call the hospital, find out how Serena is. And then you and I are going to sit here and you are going to talk to me until I understand what you’ve been through.’

I shake my head. ‘It won’t do any good. I can’t make you understand.’

‘You have to try because this can’t go on, Poppy.’

‘What?’ He sounds like he is threatening me.

‘You can’t keep stalking Serena.’

‘I’m not going to do that any more,’ I say. ‘I decided earlier I had to stop.’

He presses his lips together; there is something he wants to say but is scared to. What, in case I turn into Prison Poppy again? In case I become ‘terrifying’?

‘What you did,’ he says, again with the gentle tone, ‘what you did was compulsive. You did it because you felt you had to, not because you wanted to. I’m worried that you’re going to feel like that again. That you’ll start to watch her again because you won’t be able to help yourself.’

‘I will be able to help myself.’

‘Poppy, you are innocent. You think the only way to prove that is to make Serena confess. How are you going to do that if you stay away from her?’

‘I . . . I don’t know, but I’ll find a way.’

‘That’s what I mean. In a few days, when the horror and shock of all of this fades a little, when your feelings of resentment towards her start to resurface, you’ll want to go back to how it was before. You’ll want to be in control again. She was responsible for your world being destroyed, for you being powerless, so you are going to need to feel in control –
powerful
– again. The easiest way is to go back to what you’ve been doing.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Maybe. But hold that thought. I’ll just go get my mobile. It’s got the number of someone at the hospital who may be able to help, OK?’

I nod at him. He is wrong. I may be a monster, and I may want the monster-maker to pay, but I won’t do that again. Today was the wake-up call I needed. Serena’s accident, her husband’s face . . .

A shudder scuttles through me when I think of it all. I can’t go back to that.

Alain’s house is cosy, a nice place in Poet’s Corner. It’s all swish and posh, with fireplaces and floorboards and large windows.

I stand up, shake my legs out and walk the length of his room towards his work area. It is where most people have their dining area in similar houses I clean around here. His work area is a chaos of papers and books and in the middle, at the eye of the work storm, is his computer.

I’ve almost forgotten that his job and the fact he was originally ‘researching’ me is why we broke up. It’s also the reason why I called him. After his questionable behaviour, he wouldn’t be in any position to judge me. Although now I wonder if he would have judged me even if he hadn’t done what he had done.

His computer swirls with a pattern of coloured lights that twist and turn on themselves. His desk is a mess. I don’t know how he manages to work in all of this. I glance down at the notepad on his keyboard and my name jumps out at me. He has sketched my name in block capitals over several lines in blue biro. Some of the letters are filled in with sketchy blue biro lines, others are not. Inside the ‘O’ of my name he has drawn a little blue angular heart which has been coloured in, filled over and over until that section of paper is heavy with blue ink; until his heart is full.

I reach out to touch it, run my finger over the little blue angular heart. Touching it unhitches a new fear inside me, causing my stomach to spin.
‘I love you. I absolutely love you.’
Alain said that to me.

How can he? How can he love a monster?
What is wrong with him?
I ask myself.

I did it, I loved a monster. I loved Marcus. And look where that got me. Look how it all turned out.

I hear the creak of Alain’s footsteps as he paces upstairs, the murmurs of his voice as he talks on the phone.

What is
wrong
with him?

I snatch my hand away from the notepad and decide to leave.

I have to get away from here. From him. From this. I have to be on my own to think about what I’m going to do next. I’ll find out about Serena some other way.

I just have to get away from this.

I ease the door shut on my way out. I do not want him to know that I’ve gone because he’ll probably come down the stairs and try to stop me. Try to be nice to the monster. And we all know that you should not feed monsters, it only makes them want more.

‘She’s going to be fine,’ he says to me.

I suppose I didn’t try too hard to hide. Outside the beach hut, the world is crying, a torrent of tears is falling from the sky, bouncing down on the smooth skin of the promenade. I have been listening to it patter down on the roof, counting the tears as much as I can.

‘They think it was a panic attack. She hyperventilated which is why she was unsteady on her feet and then hit her head. But she’ll be fine.’

I am sitting on the green table – I didn’t have the energy to unfold a deckchair – and I continue to stare at the floor as I nod at him, relief ebbing slowly into me.

His trainers are wet. They look expensive and they are wet. So are his trousers, and what I can see of his beige raincoat. The world has cried on him. What does the world have to be so glum about?

‘Do you want to fuck me?’ I ask him, not bothering to look up to watch his reaction.

His immediate response is silence. The kind of silence that says he does not know if there is a right answer to that question, if he is just being set up to fail.

‘We could do it here,’ I say. ‘Or at your place. Even at my parents’ house. Anywhere, really. If you want to.’

‘Yes, I want to,’ he says, carefully, as though stepping through landmines. ‘But what I want more is for you to make me understand what you’ve been through.’ He sits on the floor in front of me, ignoring the tiny puddle that has collected on that part of the floor from him and from the slight leak in the roof. ‘I
need
you to make me understand.’

‘Why?’ I ask, knowing that if he says he loves me, I will probably throw up on him. The word doesn’t mean anything. Marcus used to say it all the time, and I used to lap it up, so stupid and naïve was I. Marcus did not love me. He said he did. And then he did all those things. What he loved about me was being in control. You can say the word ‘love’ until it is the same as ‘sand’ or ‘boobies’: it doesn’t mean anything if there is nothing behind it.

‘You can’t go on how you have been,’ Alain says. ‘You need to do this for you. All this rage is not going to leave you until you start to make yourself heard. Forget about Serena, forget about Marcus, just think about Poppy. And tell me. Tell me about Poppy. Tell me about her life. Tell me what you’ve been through. Tell me. I want to understand.’

I shake my head. ‘I don’t know how.’

‘You do. Just start at the beginning.’

‘The sky isn’t a square of patchwork quilt,’ I eventually tell him. ‘Sometimes with two or three black bars running down it, sometimes with wire mesh upon it. The sky is vast and deep and capable of smothering me.’

serena

Evan wants me to tell him about that time. About what happened and why I got involved in it all.

He came into the bedroom three nights ago and lay down on top of the covers and started to talk. About nothing in particular and then suddenly he asked: ‘What was
he
like? Beyond what you’ve hinted at and said, what was
he
really like? Why don’t you ever say his name? What happened that night? The night
he
died.’

I had been stroking the fine bristles on his head and had to stop. My current life, the one I loved, had already been contaminated enough by the past. By coincidence after coincidence, by Poppy and her crazy demands, by my decision not to tell Evan, by my guilt that made me try to help Poppy. I had contaminated this life enough with the other life: I wanted it to stop. I wanted this life to heal, and that wouldn’t happen if I made what happened a part of now.

I wanted separate compartments for everything and for that time – everything about
him
– to live in a compartment that was locked, with the edges glued shut and the keyhole blocked and the key lost for ever. I wanted
him
to stay gone. When I told Evan this, he seemed to understand. He still slept in the spare room, but he understood. Or so I thought.

Because right now, I am sitting on the bed watching him pack. He is leaving me. Not the kids, not our family, just me. I cannot talk to him, I cannot be one hundred per cent open with him and he cannot take it any more.

It’s an odd thing, watching someone leave you. Maybe that’s why he had to stay in the garden that time he made me leave. Odd is the wrong word. Horrendous is probably closer to the reality.

I want to reach out and stop his large, gentle doctor’s hands from moving. I want to take everything he has neatly folded up into his bags and put them back in the drawers and hang them up in the wardrobe. I want to stop him, but I cannot do so physically. I am frozen. I could do it with a few words. I could stop him, I could stop the dissolution of our marriage but that is something else.

‘Don’t you love him?’ Mez had asked when I told her what he wanted on the phone.

I told her I did.

‘Then why won’t you just tell him?’

I explained it all, how I felt, why I had never told anyone let alone him.

‘Ah well, I suppose it’s your marriage. If you don’t want to do everything in your power to save it, then there’s nothing any of us can do. For the record, I think he’s right to ask. I’ve always wanted to, but couldn’t bear to hear it all.’

I had said to her that what she meant was that she couldn’t bear to hear something that would confirm to her that I am what she thought I was, a killer.

‘I thought we said we weren’t going to talk about this,’ she said.

She was the one who brought it up, I reminded her. She was the one who wanted to know what was happening with Evan, and I had told her.

‘Fine, let me put it like this: if you’re innocent, then you’ve got nothing to hide. Tell him.’

Which is not true. I do have something to hide. And I want to hide it from him. Of all the people on the earth, I want to hide it from him. I do not want Evan to judge me, to be horrified by what I have to tell him. I do not want him to be horrified like I am, every time I think about it.

‘I think that’s it,’ he says, looking at his two holdalls, sitting by the bed like giant brown pebbles stolen from the beach.

This really is what
he
meant when he said he’d kill me. He meant he would kill everything good in my life. If Evan goes,
he
will have killed the children’s happiness as well. Killed their chance to a happy family home with two parents. I’m sure we can find a different happiness without Evan, but they will be divided. They will have to live with one parent here, one parent there and the knowledge that I did not do everything I could to make it work.

Some things are irretrievable, irreconcilable, but not this. Some marriages and relationships become broken with no hope of being fixed. Not this marriage, not this couple. All I have to do is own up. Confess.

What is it the Americans say? I have to own my truth.

I have to own my truth so that I can try to make my husband not leave me. Even if he still does leave me, even if he can’t understand or bear what he hears and still leaves, at least I’ll know I tried. I tried everything to make him stay.

‘I loved him,’ I say.

Evan moves slowly, pivots on his sock-covered heels and turns to me. I am sitting cross-legged on the bed, unable to look away from the spot on the wall by the light switch. One of us has swatted a fly and not cleaned its dead body away.

‘I’m ashamed of that,’ I continue. ‘I’m ashamed because after everything
he
did, I still loved him. I hated him, but I loved him, too.

‘I can’t talk about it because right up until the end, even afterwards, after he was gone, I was still in love with him. And I’m so ashamed of that. I’m so ashamed to admit that. He was awful. He was an awful, terrible person. For more than two years he mentally, physically and emotionally terrorised me; I watched him do the same to Poppy and I still . . . I could still love him.’

Evan sits on the edge of the bed. Listening. Listening to me tell him why I think so badly of myself.

‘I could never admit that to anyone, not even Poppy, and I know she must have felt the same because she was there almost as long as I was. The things he did, and neither of us walked away. Even in court, when we were both fighting for our freedom, part of us, part of me certainly, but I assume it was the same for her, was protecting him. We told what he did, but not the full horror. No one would have believed us, anyway. How could anyone in their right minds love a person like him?’ I shrug. ‘I don’t know the answer to it; all I know is that I did. And what happened that night only happened because of Poppy. I thought he was going to kill me, which was bad enough; I’d been prepared for that, I’d been willing to fight that, but what actually made me react, what actually made me fight back, was Poppy. I hated her, I really hated her, but the only reason I reacted, fought back, was because he was going kill Poppy, and I could not let that happen.’

poppy

I leave Alain sleeping and slip out of his bed, grab his grey dressing gown from the bedpost as I creep out of the bedroom, and put it on over my naked body outside the room. It’s a chilly May, so the wooden treads of the stairs are cold underfoot as I go down.

We have been in each other’s company non-stop for nearly forty-eight hours and most of them have been spent talking. In between we’ve eaten, drunk, showered and slept. Nothing else. I’ve been tempted to go home to get some clean clothes and my toothbrush and other everyday knick-knacks, but I know that once I step out of the door, once we open ourselves up to the outside world, the magic will disintegrate. I won’t be able to talk any more, I won’t be able to explain, I won’t be able to make him understand.