The Ice Cream Girls (6 page)

On the landing outside the bathroom, beside the huge picture window that lets light flood into the upstairs areas, I bump into him. Not literally – he is leaving their bedroom – I am leaving the bathroom, but our worlds have converged at this point.

He looks old. There is no other word for it, no other way to describe him. Mum had looked older, but he looks old. As if time has paid particular attention to him, ravaging him over and over until he is sixty-one but looks old.

His hair, although still neat and short, has thinned and disappeared on top, what is left is now almost completely white, with only a few darkish grey spots here and there. His handsome face has been softened and lined; his eyes, the colour of bluebells, are heavy and sad. Incredibly, painfully sad. A sadness that affects the set of his mouth, and hollows out two wells in his cheeks. His body always upright and strong – he was a muscular man who didn’t seem to be physically intimidated by anything or anyone – now he seems to have shrunk, his shoulders hunch forwards a fraction and his limbs seem less solid. The shell of him, the man who he was, is different, but he is still him, still Dad. Mum used to tell me that when I was just learning to talk and he would leave the room, I’d stare at the door for ages, waiting for him to come back. And when I heard a noise outside the room, I would, in my baby voice, call, ‘Daaaaaa!’ Asking him to come back, asking him where he was and what he was doing without me. That was one of the few things she could accurately recall from my childhood, and I knew she was right because, in the entire world, the person I loved the most was my dad.

I have not seen him in twenty years, since the day of the verdict. In my heart, in my soul, I feel a tug, a desperate need to reach out and touch him. I want to feel his arm under my fingers so that I can confirm that he is real, I have not imagined him, and I am not going to lose him again when reality comes back to me. I smile at him, hesitantly, waiting for him to respond, react, notice me. While I was ‘away’ he could pretend I was not around, but here, in front of him, he has to at least acknowledge me – even if it is just to tell me to put some clothes on. The smallest contact is all I need.

However, I am a ghost. I am insubstantial and unreal. He looks straight through me, his eyes focusing beyond me, and then he continues on his path to the stairs and moves down them, out of sight.

I thought I had felt it when I saw my old room magicked down here, but really that feeling was nothing.
This
is what it’s like to be dead to someone.
This
is what it’s like to be a spectre in your own life.

serena

‘Can you step out of the car, please, Madam?’

His voice is professional, but clipped. I didn’t pull over soon enough and he’s not happy. Maybe he thinks I was being defiant instead of just plain terrified.
How often do the police mistake terror and anxiety for criminal behaviour?
I wonder as I reach for the door handle.

My hands work remarkably well, all things considered. I can tell Verity is on the verge of bursting into tears. She’s scared because I am, and she doesn’t like to get into trouble or to see someone else in trouble. And I am, clearly, in trouble. My legs don’t shake, my knees don’t knock, as I swing my jeans-covered legs out of the car and plant my feet on to the concrete on the hard shoulder of the A26.

I’m only an inch shorter than the six-foot policeman and that surprises him for a minute.

‘Licence?’ he asks, his voice a little more clipped, I think, because I am not a small woman. As his eyes meet mine, I see a flashbulb of recognition pop in his eyes. He knows my face from somewhere, but he can’t quite place me. I lower my head and reach back into the car.

‘Pass my bag, please, love,’ I say to my daughter who is trembling like a newborn foal.

She does as she’s told and from my purse I produce my licence. It’s not a new, photographic one – which would give him more time to study my face, work out where he knows me from, if I am a fugitive on the run – but it does have my parents’ address. This is the one thing I never got around to changing in all this time. I am an idiot.

He slips it out of its plastic wallet and unfolds it. He doesn’t speak as he studies the green paper, only the buzz and whoosh of cars driving on by, going about their business, surrounds us. I think he is waiting for me to say something, to ask what the problem is, to confess to something.

Silence is the best way forward, I’ve found. I do not have to say anything, at least I didn’t the last few times I was arrested, and I’m going to exercise that right. Even if it makes me look guilty as sin, I’d rather not say anything that can’t be taken back. Silence can always be explained away, erased almost with a single word; the wrong words in the wrong combination at the wrong time can damn you to hell. Or, at least, to prison.

The cars continue to whiz by and I find myself comforted by them, allowing myself to float on the sound of them as they hurry by.

‘Do you know how fast you were driving, Madam?’ the police officer eventually asks because I haven’t thrown myself on my knees, begging for mercy and I obviously have no intention of doing so.

‘Um . . . no,’ I reply. ‘I speeded up to overtake the blue Micra. But only for a few seconds.’

‘You were travelling well over eighty-five miles per hour for at least ten minutes.’

I was?
‘Oh,’ I reply. ‘I didn’t realise. I thought I was only going that fast to overtake. I never speed. I always try to drive safely.’

He is still studying my licence, still reading and re-reading my name, trying to join up the dots in his mind. When all the dots are joined, when he gets to the end of the puzzle, the policeman’s face gives him away. It freezes in its inquisitive expression as everything falls into place and he connects the dot of my old name with the dot of my general description with the dot of my alleged crime. And there he has it: who the woman he’s just pulled over is.

He recovers quickly, hides his shock behind a professional mask again, but, when he looks up at me from the licence, his eyes are piercing. They want to slap handcuffs on me and cart me off to jail where he – and quite a lot of people – think I belong. He appears, in the short time I have known him, to be the kind of man who would not advocate simply throwing away the only key – but melting it down, freezing it in liquid nitrogen, shattering it into a trillion pieces and having those pieces scattered all across the world’s oceans just to make sure that they were never found, even accidentally, so one such as I could never be released.

‘Is this your licence, Madam?’

‘Yes. I haven’t got around to updating it with my new address,’ I say.

He raises his left eyebrow a little.
And new name?
he’s trying to ask.

Correct
, I think back at him. I will not say it, though. If he wants to know what I’m calling myself these days, he’s going to have to work that bit harder.

He hands the licence back to me. ‘You should get it updated. It’s an offence to drive without a valid licence,’ he says.

I nod at him. ‘Yes, officer,’ I say.

‘I could breathalyse you and have you come down to the station for driving over the speed limit,’ he says, just to watch me squirm, I’m guessing.

‘Yes, officer,’ I say. He is getting a thrill out of this. He’s only human, after all. In his shoes, I might do the same thing. I might get some enjoyment out of ‘paying back’ someone I thought beat the system.

‘I won’t,
this time.
’ He knows how to be professional and menacing in just the right proportions and it would worry me if not for Verity. My concern for her overrides my fear. She must be scared of this skin-deep Jekyll and Hyde impersonation he has going on. It’s bound to be even more terrifying because she doesn’t know what is really happening here. ‘I’d better not have occasion to stop you again,’ he says. ‘You won’t be so lucky next time.’ We both know what he means by that.

‘Yes, officer,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

As I shut my door behind me, I feel safe again. Protected from the prying outside world by a simple metal shell. I was lucky that time. If he had been the true menacing type, I would be heading for a cell. For a breathalyser, for a urine sample, for what feels like a catalogue of small humiliations only to receive a metaphorical slap on the wrist and to be sent on my way with no charge, not even a few lines scrawled on a page ripped out of a notebook. No record. That’s happened to me about twenty times. I’ve been stopped in a car and recognised and then ‘put in my place’. After each time, I vow to change my licence details, to make myself inconspicuous, but each time I forget. My defences kick in and I try not to think about it. I can’t tell anyone – least of all Evan – about it, so I end up pretending it didn’t happen . . . until next time.

This is the first time it’s happened with someone else in the car. And poor Verity is still trembling.

‘It’s all right, sweetie,’ I say, trying to hide how much I’m shaking as I slot the key into the ignition. ‘Just a misunderstanding.’

‘But why did he say all those things?’ she asks, distressed. She looks every one of her thirteen years; no longer older and a little mature, now she looks like a little girl who needs a hug and a mountain-load of reassurance from her mother.

‘He was just doing his job,’ I say.

‘But he said he was going to arrest you!’ she wails.

‘No, he didn’t. He said – quite clearly – that he could arrest me, but he wasn’t going to. It’s fine.’

‘It’s like he knew you, Mum,’ she says. ‘It’s like he knew you and he didn’t like you. Why?’

I shrug my shoulders and shake my head. ‘How could anyone not like me?’ I say as I check my rear-view mirror and blindspot then indicate to pull out. ‘I’m lovely.’

I was lost. Properly lost. I had parked my car around here somewhere while I went to the house to pick up the material for Medina for her dressmaking course – although why she couldn’t do it herself was still a mystery – and now I couldn’t find my way back to my car. The material, which was light and floaty when made into a chiffon dress, was heavy, bulky and unwieldy in my arms in the quantities she’d bought it. The seller who had put the small ad in the paper was obviously feeling aggrieved with the hard bargain she had driven on the phone because he hadn’t offered to carry it to my car for me – he hadn’t even offered me a black binbag. It didn’t surprise me – Medina rarely paid full price for anything. I’d seen her try to haggle in supermarkets! According to her, the price on the ticket was just a starting point. She had a way, too, of making the person feel as if they were in the wrong for wanting the price they asked for.

I struggled on down the backstreets of Kensington. In this fading light, they all looked the same to me – big imposing houses and blocks of flats, narrow windy roads.

A tall man came striding towards me and, as always when I was alone in a street with a man, my heart did a frightened little jump. It was momentary and reflexive, I’d had that for years. I should probably ask him for directions, but he seemed to be in a hurry, his long legs striding out, and I didn’t want to get in his way. He gave me a brief nod, and smile; the dark acknowledgement, Faye, Medina’s twin, calls it – the way black people acknowledge each other when they’re in a predominately white area. I gave him a brief smile and nod back, and he strode on. After a second, I stopped, turned back to look at him. He had stopped too.

It was, it was him.

‘It is, it’s you,’ he said.

‘It is, it’s me,’ I replied.

He came back the few steps to me, and without even asking, he took the bundle of material out of my hands.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Thanks?’ he asked, confused.

I pointed to the material that now filled his arms. ‘For lightening my load.’

‘Oh, don’t mention it,’ he said. ‘You look exactly the same.’

‘Wow, that didn’t take you long, did it? Less than three minutes to start the insults.’

‘What insults?’

‘You said I look exactly the same.’

‘You do.’

‘And, the last time we met, you said you didn’t fancy me. I assumed it was because you didn’t find the way I look particularly attractive. So if I look exactly the same, that means I’m still unattractive to you.’

‘You deduce far too much from far too little,’ he said. ‘And talk a lot.’

‘Only around you, actually. Most of the time, I’m pretty quiet.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘OK, I suppose that is your right.’

‘And you’re wrong, anyway. I do find you attractive.’

‘
Now
you might do, but then you didn’t.’

‘Would you rather I found you attractive in the past and not now? Especially since back then I seem to remember you had sworn off relationships.’

‘Well—’

‘Answer carefully, little one, for the wrong answer could bring all this rather fine flirting to a screeching halt. And wreck any chance we may have of getting together.’

‘No pressure then.’

‘There is a vast amount of pressure, didn’t you understand that from what I just said?’

‘I was being sarcastic.’

‘Nah, I don’t think you were.’

‘You’re incorrigible,’ I said.

‘I’ve always wanted to be incorrigible. Are you going to come for a drink with me then? Or are you still off all men, for ever and ever amen?’

‘I am. But I might make an exception for you, seeing as you’re so incorrigible and so pleased to be incorrigible. When were you thinking?’

‘No time like the present.’

‘Ah, can’t, I have to get this material to my sister.’

‘Where does she live? Maybe we can drop it off then go for a drink. It’ll be nice to meet the future family.’

‘Don’t be starting all that “my parents would love you” stuff again. Actually, my sister lives in Bethnal Green, not far from me.’