The Ice Cream Girls (35 page)

‘Come to think of it, Bella said she was going on a hen weekend to Amsterdam and Logan said he was visiting his girlfriend’s parents up in Scotland next weekend. There’s no point in trying to call them, they won’t be there.’

‘Funny that they’re both away the same weekend that I’m going up there.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ Mum said. She was back in her stride, demolishing the potatoes to top her only half-browned mince. It’s a wonder none of us got food poisoning growing up. ‘Coincidences happen all the time.’

She couldn’t be lying – that was too smooth, too quick a reply when I brought it up. Mum could deflect an enquiry very easily, but not in that much detail. If she was lying, she’d say something like, ‘Oh, I don’t think they’re going to be there.’ But to provide details meant it was true, or she had turned into a pretty expert liar.

‘So, you won’t mind if I go to London?’ I asked, hoping that since the other two wouldn’t be around, they might want me instead. I was grasping at the thinnest, wispiest of straws but I had to. I had to try everything.

‘No, not at all. Why don’t you stay overnight?’

Like a tap that hasn’t been properly closed and drips slowly into a plugged sink, tears collected slowly in my eyes. Not only did she not want me here, she wanted me gone completely. She might as well have told me that the best present I could give Dad was to stay away. To remove myself from the house and his life.

‘I might do that,’ I said and got up.

She looked at me. ‘You do that, Poppy. You stay overnight in London. It’ll be good for you.’ For the first time since I came back, Mum smiled at me because she would be getting rid of me for a night. It must have been so much easier for them when I was under lock and key elsewhere. They could pretend I was dead, that I didn’t exist any more. They could pretend that they only had a daughter called Bella, they only had a son, called Logan, and that the first child, the problem child, was gone, taking with her all the mistakes they made.

I do not believe in coincidences, not any more. Like meeting Marcus was not coincidental. I am convinced he saw me in the park, and recognised me from teaching at my school. Remembered me as timid and a little lonely-looking. I was in his sights from the moment he stopped to talk to me. He wasn’t sure it would work, of course, if I was naïve enough to wait for him, to call him, to come to his house, but it was a chance he was willing to take and it paid off.

I do not believe in coincidences, which is why I am waiting on the street corner near my parents’ house, waiting to see who will come for lunch. When a blue car that looks like the space age version of the Beetle pulls up outside the house, my heart catches in my throat because instinctively I know who is inside, where they are going. The driver’s door opens and out steps a young man with a muss of dark hair, a strong jawline and muscular frame he inherited from his father. The passenger door opens and out steps a young woman with loose curls of dark hair that reach down to her shoulders and a slight, almost bony frame she inherited from her mother. She carries a silver-wrapped box topped with a giant blue bow that fills her arms – she obviously can’t come to her father’s birthday lunch without a gift.

I leave my watching spot at the bottom of the road and walk casually towards the house. I don’t know what I’m going to do, I haven’t thought that bit through, but I have to get a closer look, I have to be as near as possible to them. They walk up the path, the woman first, laughing at something her brother has said and the slight dig with his elbow he gave her before they left the pavement. Her face, creased in laughter like that, reminds me of someone I used to know. Someone called Poppy Carlisle, the girl I used to see in the pictures of myself. The girl who used to be in the mirror.

I near the house as the door is opened by their mother; she grins when she sees her two children, she could not love them more. The mother’s gaze strays to the street as she steps aside to let them in and her face falls as she sees the stranger who is approaching her house. Her look of shock and anxiety stays in place as she locks eyes with the stranger, expecting the stranger to stop and turn into her gateway, to come up the path. But the stranger only keeps the eye contact for a second or two, and does not stop. The stranger instead moves on, continuing her path past their house, continuing to walk on and away from this mother’s precious home.

poppy

There was a time when Sunday afternoon meant the Carlisle home would be drenched in beautiful smells: roast chicken, roast tatties, Yorkshire pudding, stuffing, gravy, veg – the works. After midday mass, we would come back to the house and the smells of the lunch Dad had cooked would surround us as we opened the door. We would all sit around the table, eating and talking and laughing. Even if it’d been an awful week, even if we’d fallen out with each other, Sunday was the day of forgiveness. Sunday, sitting around the table together as a family, was what fixed everything.

Something in me still expects to smell this when I step across the threshold and shut the door behind me. There is nothing, of course. I don’t know when the Carlisle Sunday roasts stopped, but there have been none since I have been back. There has been nothing family-like since I returned.

Mum appears at the doorway of the kitchen as if by magic: she must have heard me close the front door, she must have been waiting for me.

‘Where did you stay last night?’ she asks, voluntarily allowing her eyes to focus on me directly, braving the dangers of being burnt by my image to see me for the first time.

‘In a B&B in Brighton.’

‘You could have come back here, you didn’t have to waste your money like that.’

‘I didn’t know how long your guests were staying; I didn’t want to intrude.’

‘They only came for lunch,’ she says.

‘Oh, right. I wasn’t sure. If you’ll excuse me.’ I start up the stairs, I have a mission to complete and it won’t do itself.

‘Poppy, can I talk to you?’ Mum says before I have cleared the second step. I pause there because that’s all I’ve wanted since I arrived home – for her to talk to me – but I’m now finding it hard to work out if I want to listen. I don’t think I need to hear anything; her lie has told me everything I need to know: I will never be welcomed back into this family. I killed that chance when they believed I killed Marcus.

‘It’s OK, Mum,’ I say, not feeling her flinch this time, ‘you don’t have to say anything.’ I risk a look at her, scared that if I do I’ll lose the composure I put together to allow me to come back here, and I’ll start to cry. I thought I’d be angry – anger seems to be the emotion I have felt the most of since I heard the word ‘guilty’ all those years ago. Anger and fear. But last night all I had was sadness. A deep, abiding sadness that I had been cast out of my family, the people who I used to be a part of no longer loved me and there was nothing I could do to change that.

My mother is wringing her hands, twisting them over and over as her thin frame stands rooted to the spot. A memory pops up. My first day of school; she and Dad both took me to the school gates and, while Dad gave me a pep talk, Mum stood perfectly still, wringing her hands. I ran through the gates to join the other children, then changed my mind and came back, ran to my mum and threw my arms around her, while still holding my lunchbox and my satchel, and squeezed her as tight as I could. ‘I miss you, Mummy,’ I said. She stopped wringing her hands and hesitantly laid one hand on my head. ‘I’ll miss you, Poppy,’ she said. As I let her go, she got down on her knees and bundled me up in her arms, her handwringing suddenly forgotten. ‘I’ll miss you, Poppy,’ she said again and kissed my cheek. I wasn’t as scared then. I wasn’t scared of the other children, I wasn’t scared of the teachers, I wasn’t even scared any more that Mum and Dad would forget about me and not come back. Well, Mum. I knew Dad would never forget, but after she told me she’d miss me I knew she wouldn’t forget to come back, either. ‘You wait right here, OK?’ I said to her.

‘OK,’ she replied. ‘OK, Poppy, I’ll wait right here.’

I don’t want my mum to wring her hands any more. She did that the whole year in the run up to the trial. She wouldn’t sleep, she could hardly eat, she just wrung her hands and paced. I was scared the stress would bring back her ‘illness’. I knew what it was, of course, I just liked to pretend to myself I didn’t. I could feel less guilty that way: she had a breakdown brought on by untreated post-natal depression.

‘Please, Poppy, I just want to talk to you.’

I give in and come back down the stairs, allowing her to lead the way into the kitchen to a seat at the kitchen table. Marcus had a kitchen table like this one. I used to think it was romantic and sexy and oh-so grown up when we would make love on it. Then he had sex with me on it in front of Serena. Ordering me to keep my eyes open and making her tell him if I closed them. She lied to him, said my eyes were open when they weren’t. But I hated the kitchen table after that. Every time I went near it, I remembered Serena’s face – an emotionless mask. He probably beat her afterwards, too. Not only did she have to watch, she had to suffer physically, as well. Serena’s experience of Marcus is like the uglier version of my experiences, the future I was headed towards because she had six months or so on me. Maybe if I had stayed with him a bit longer I would have thought I had no choice but to kill him, too.

Mum is talking. I am watching her thin browny-pink lips move, but I have not heard a word she has said. I have submerged myself in thoughts of Marcus, thoughts of Serena, thoughts of the reasons for murder – because it is easier than listening to my mother explain why she doesn’t love me.

‘Mum,’ I say to her eventually, genuine, sorrowful regret in my voice. ‘You’ll have to start again because I haven’t heard a word you’ve said. I’m sorry, my mind drifted away.’

Inhaling deeply, expanding her bony frame in the process, she once again looks directly at me.

‘I want you to understand what it was like for us, Poppy,’ she says. ‘To me, you were still a little girl, you still wore bunches in your hair and danced in front of your mirror pretending to be a popstar. And then in the middle of the night we get a phone call from the police station saying you had been arrested for killing your boyfriend. I remember almost laughing when your father told me – I said to him that it must be some other Poppy Carlisle because our daughter was asleep in her bed and wasn’t old enough for a boyfriend. But it was you. My little girl was really facing prison for killing a man.

‘And the more we found out, the more we heard, it was like we never knew you at all. You had slipped away from us and we hadn’t noticed. You were there all the time, physically, but you had gone from us two years before. Two years of living in the same house as you and we had no idea what you had been up to. It was worse for your father because he thought you and he were close, he thought you told him everything.

‘It was like a nightmare that would not end. I kept seeing your photo in the paper, in that swimsuit cut up to
there
and wearing make-up. Over and over, this picture of my little girl looking like those tarts you see on television. And the stories about the things you had done.’ Mum sags, as if memory after painful memory is piled on top of her. ‘Imagine what it was like to have to read about the things your daughter has done with a man twice her age, to hear that she had been with a woman.’ She covers her heart with her hands as if trying to stop it from trembling its way out of her body, as if protecting it from the worst of the memories. ‘The neighbours were all whispering, people would stop and stare at us in the street and we started to get hate mail. Whenever we thought we had seen the worst of it, something else would happen – like the stories from the people we knew and thought we could trust. Everyone in our lives was potentially a source for the papers. The police were here all the time and I was sure we were being followed.

‘We had to do whatever we could to protect the three of you, especially Bella and Logan. And the whole time I was so tormented because it was all my fault.’

That brings me up short, makes me sit up in my seat. ‘How could it possibly have been your fault?’ I ask.

‘I was never a proper mother to you, I know that. And killers always blame the mothers. They always say their mothers were bad or absent or not loving enough. I had my . . . problems . . . after you were born. I thought I had done this. I had not protected you enough and so I caused this. A mother is supposed to protect her child against everything. Even when they are old enough to go out into the world you still want to protect them. You still try to protect them and I didn’t do that with you.’

Serena comes to mind – I can say anything I like about her, but the second I mention her family, she flares up. She becomes a creature capable of doing almost anything to protect her young. I wonder what would happen to her if she failed in that. If, despite how hard she fought, her children were still hurt, still damaged, what she would do. How she would turn it in on herself. How deeply she would blame herself.

Because of Serena, I can understand what Mum is saying.

‘When you were found guilty, all I wanted to do was take you and hide you. I would have helped you escape if I could, you have to believe that. But it was too late for you, you were gone from me, so I had to concentrate on Bella and Logan. We left the court so quickly to get to them before someone else could tell them the news. We had to tell them in our own way before they found out in a nasty way, which a lot of people were desperate to do. They were so upset that we couldn’t leave them for too long. That’s why I didn’t come in when I dropped off your case, I had to get back to them. They were so upset, love, that I promised myself there and then to try to avoid the same mistakes again. I focused everything I was on them and on trying to make them happy and protect them from the outside world.’

‘And that world included me, didn’t it? That’s why you never passed on my letters.’