The Ice Cream Girls (29 page)

‘You want to hear something ironic?’ I say, just to shatter any illusions he might have. ‘We never got to eat those ice creams. We were branded these killer vixens because we allegedly did nothing but eat ice cream and look good and Marcus died, but we never got to eat those ice creams. Marcus wouldn’t let us.’

‘Wouldn’t let you?’ His voice is sceptical, wondering how anyone could stop a woman from eating ice cream.

‘It’s hard to explain if you weren’t there, but he wouldn’t let us do lots of things. He just had this way of making you decide not to do something he didn’t want you to do. Like the ice creams – he said we should both get one for the photo, he thought we’d look good in our swimsuits, all dolled up with an ice cream. After he took the photo, he said, in this really sweet voice, to think about the damage us eating the ice creams would do to his arteries.’

‘
His
arteries?’

‘Yes,
his
arteries. “It’ll break my heart, girls, if you both got too big to look pretty any more. Poppy, sweetheart, you’re on the edge, and Serena, my love, you know how you balloon at the drop of a hat.” That’s all he had to say to get the doubts going in our minds.’

‘
I’m only saying it because you both mean so much to me. I wouldn’t bother, otherwise. And if I don’t say it, who else will? But, hey, don’t let me stop you. If you really want that ice cream you eat it, as long as you know what you’re doing as you eat it,
’ Marcus adds in my head. He had that look in his eye, the one that told me I could eat it but I would pay for it. Not just with him not loving me any more, in other ways. In other, more painful ways.

‘What did you do?’ Alain asks.

I used to love ice cream. When I was younger I used to sneak an extra one in – my own special ice cream – when I went down the road to buy them. I wanted that ice cream. I didn’t want to not eat it, but I didn’t want Marcus to stop loving me or to be angry with me. Because that was what he was saying. If I ate the ice cream, I would get fat and he would stop loving me. As it was he was already thinking that I was on the cusp of losing what beauty he saw in me; this would push him the other way. Away. Out of love. I wouldn’t have been able to bear that. I know I loved him that intensely I was willing to share him and willing to put up with the other stuff. If I couldn’t bear to give him up to another woman, why on earth would I give him up to a load of lard on a biscuit?

‘I’d love to tell you that I argued, or even took a tiny defiant lick, but I just accepted he was right and binned it. I spent the whole afternoon thinking about the ice cream, disintegrating in that bin. Serena tried to disguise that she was doing what he wanted by pretending to trip and dropping her ice cream so she couldn’t eat it . . . So, do you still think I was fabulous? Or, as is much closer to the truth, a pathetic little schoolgirl?’

‘Fabulous. Always, always fabulous.’ He draws me closer and kisses my forehead. ‘Always fabulous.’

I didn’t tell Alain what happened afterwards. That part of that day, the part I could talk about, was bad enough, but everything to do with Marcus had parts that I could not repeat, parts that had to stay hidden. And what happened at the end of the ice cream day was one of them.

When it was time to leave the beach, Marcus went to get the car while we got dressed. I waited until the last possible second, trying to soak up as much of the sun’s rays as I could – it didn’t seem to shine the same way in London, didn’t make me feel as relaxed and warm and content. Eventually I reached for my clothes, sitting in a neat, folded pile beside me on top of my bag. They had to be like that, everything had to be like that. Always. Neat, orderly, tidy. If anything was ever out of place . . . it wasn’t worth thinking about the consequences. It was easier, simpler if things were always neat and tidy.

I saw the spot before my hands touched the soft fabric of my dress. A spot of white ice cream, the size of a pea, staining the front skirt of the pink dress he had bought for me. My hand froze mid-air.

I stared at it, not knowing what to do. There was no way I could hide it. There was no way I could wash it off and dry it before he came back. This couldn’t be happening to me. I’d been so careful for so long, I hadn’t made any mistakes or said anything stupid, and now this . . .

All ready to leave, Serena came closer to me. She was zipped into her knee-length yellow dress, the pristine version of mine, her feet in her heeled espadrilles. She’d removed her big straw sun hat and had her big straw beachbag on her shoulder. She’d got dressed the moment he left because she knew what would happen if we kept him waiting.

With panic whirling around inside, I looked up at her while she looked down at what I had been staring at. She briefly closed her eyes, curled her plum and gold lipsticked mouth in on itself and shook her head slightly. She understood the enormity, the gravity of what I’d done.

Without saying a word, because she rarely spoke to me unless she absolutely had no choice, Serena dropped her bag and hat, reached under her arm and unzipped her dress. Then she slipped out of it, threw it at me so it landed in a heap on my lap, and then snatched up my dress and put it on. I sat and watched, watched as she zipped it up, watched as she picked up her bag and hat again, watched as she took a few steps away from me, and stared off out to sea.

We both knew what she’d done, what it meant, what would happen when we got back to London.

I dressed quickly, and picked up my belongings, too, and waited for Marcus to return. He didn’t come back down to the beach, he hung around on the promenade, and we both made our way over the shingles, our headway hampered by the heels on our espadrilles.

He frowned when he saw that we were wearing each other’s dresses. The frown was replaced by a flat-mouthed glare when his eyes alighted on the spot of ice cream on the front skirt of the dress Serena was wearing. He moved his gaze to her face, and she stared back at him, defiance was in her eyes, on her face, in the way she stood up straight and tall. She rarely stood straight – if she did she was nearly the same height as him and he hated that. She was doing it for me: gently challenging him so that even if he did guess that I had done it and she was trying to take the blame – which would make it worse – he’d be far more occupied with her current behaviour.

I understood what she was doing, but not why. She didn’t like me, I didn’t like her – she had no reason to save me. Especially when I wouldn’t do it for her.

Marcus’s face closed in tight, barely containing his rage as he turned on his heels and stalked away.

She followed and I brought up the rear. I wanted to speak up, but I couldn’t. My voice had been quietened by incremental degrees over time. And I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t confess. I shouldn’t have let her do it, but I was too scared to do anything else.

I kiss Alain and he kisses me back. I was anything but fabulous that day.

And I’m ashamed every time I think about it.

serena

Even though it’s crazy, I do this.

It’s almost compulsive. At least once a year, I come to the library and look through the microfiche about myself. And her. And
him
.

Most of it is online nowadays – the librarians always tell me this. But I do not want to use the Internet at home or at work to look at this stuff. On the Internet you are like Hansel and Gretel in the woods – leaving a trail behind wherever you may go. Unlike Hansel and Gretel, nothing gobbles up your path and others can find out very easily where you have been, what you have looked at. I do not want anyone in my life to know I look at this.

I had to take a half-day today to come here because I need an outlet. I need to be able to think about those times without losing the plot completely. Having my behaviour censored by being in a library is the best way.

My family think I’m a murderer, and I have to remind myself why. The fear I have of that time, the gaps in my memory it has caused, mean that if I try to think about it, I lose myself. Every defence I have kicks in and I start to fall apart.

Adrian obviously told Medina and she obviously told Faye, who obviously told Mum and Dad, because they have all been ringing me for days. Trying to get me to talk to them, I think. I do not know because I cannot speak to them. How can I speak to any of them knowing what they think, what they feel?

Evan has caught me crying in the kitchen at 4 a.m. a couple of times and has slipped his arms around me, held me and hushed me and told me it would be OK. He thinks it’s normal for sisters to fall out, that we’ll fix it soon. And I feel my throat start to ache because it wants to tell him, but the words and the fear expand so much they cannot break through. And all I can do is cry, and let him hold me and try to think of ways to fix this. Try to think of ways to rewrite history so I never met
him,
and I never let him ruin my life. Like he always promised me he would.

Working slowly and methodically, I go through the newspapers from that time. From our arrest after our confessions, the run-up to the trial, the trial and afterwards. I should know word for word what they say now, I have been through them enough. But some headlines are more eye-catching than others.

I
CE
C
REAM
G
IRLS
C
ONFESSION
! Veronica Bell did indeed get me back. She went to the newspapers and told them that
he
was a great and gifted teacher and he would show an interest in the brighter pupils. But she knew something was wrong because I threatened her. ‘He wanted to help me after class, but even then Serena had her sights set on him and told me to stay away from him. She told me that I should be scared of her.’ She is reclined along the bottom of the two-page spread, wearing a school uniform with the shirt knotted above her belly button, the buttons open to the knot, and her breasts barely contained by her pure white bra. Her skirt almost covers her bum and she has bunches in her hair. Did Mum and Dad, Faye and Medina believe that? Did they think I had really done that? Because how could anyone take seriously what she said when she was dressed like that?

T
HE
T
RUTH
A
BOUT
T
HE
I
CE
C
REAM
G
IRLS
! A ‘concerned neighbour’ of Poppy’s parents described how she had seemed a nice girl until her teens when she started sneaking around, staying out late, getting out of different cars at all hours of the night, usually with different boys. They’d seen her scantily clad, smoking and drinking, and worried what else she got up to. They also wondered where her parents were in all of this. I did not like her but I knew this was pure fiction, what the neighbours wanted to believe about her, having heard what she was accused of, rather than the truth. None of that behaviour was Poppy.

T
HE
K
ILLER
I
N
M
E
! A psychologist explained in the newspaper how everyone was a potential killer but some, like The Ice Cream Girls, like Serena Gorringe and Poppy Carlisle, were closer to the edge of actually committing murder. We did not need much to tip us over; we actively sought the flimsiest excuse to hurt someone. We had probably singled
him
out because he was weak-willed. He hadn’t been able to resist two of his pupils and then was stuck. If he ever left us, we would have ruined his life. As it probably turned out, when he decided to end it with us, we decided to seek revenge by first torturing then killing him.

I gorge myself on the stories, the headlines, the theories, the reports from the courts. I gorge myself until I feel nothing but sick: it swirls like a whirlpool in my stomach and at the back of my throat, it weighs heavy on my mind. This is what the world saw and thought. I do not blame the papers, they only reported what they were told by the people who supposedly ‘knew’ us, and the information they got from the police. But is this what my family thought? That I had seduced him? That Poppy and I were lovers because of the kissing picture he had made us pose for that the police found but never actually gave to the press? Did they really think that I was the one who went back and stabbed him through the heart? Did they read everything in the papers and believe it? Or think there had to be at least some truth to it?

And did they see that picture, the only picture the papers had of Poppy and I together, and think we really were lovers who had plotted this?

I hate that picture. It was used over and over and over again. And I hate it. If only the world knew. If only they knew what had really happened that day, maybe they wouldn’t have been so quick to use it, so ready to condemn us in the various captions. Maybe they would not have used the inscription
he
scrawled on the back of the photo,
‘My ice cream girls, 1987’
, to rename and brand us The Ice Cream Girls. To mark us in the world’s mind as cool, calculating killers.

‘Come on now, girls, you can do better than that.’

We had come to Littlehampton for a day trip.
He
chose Littlehampton because he said most people we knew would go to Brighton on a sunny day like today, so we’d come here instead. He had chosen our swimsuits – mine was a string bikini in white with red polka dots, hers was an electric blue one-piece with a plunging neckline and the legs cut so high you could see right to the top of her thighs and the smoothing of her abdomen into the v of her pelvis. We had this area of the beach to ourselves, we were there so early, so he told us to get our dresses off while he got us some ice creams so he could take a picture. We each held cones in our hands and were smiling at his camera lens.

For the fifth time he lowered the camera without hitting the button. ‘Come on, you don’t look like you’re having a good time at all,’ he complained. In unison we both fixed smiles to our faces. ‘Stand closer together . . . that’s it. Anyone would think you didn’t like each other . . . Poppy, suck in your stomach, there’s a good girl . . . Serena, stick out your chest a bit more, pretend you’ve got something to hang those bikini cups on . . . That’s it . . . Now if you could just smile, it’d be perfect.’