The postie’s small brown eyes flicked down to my chest area. Even though it was the height of a long, hot, humid summer, I was wearing pyjamas and a big towelling dressing gown, so he didn’t see anything suggestive – he was lucky to get even a glimpse of my throat skin. That seemed to startle him, that the chest of which I spoke was highly covered, and he immediately snatched his eyes away again. It’d probably occurred to him that he shouldn’t be eyeing up the women on his delivery route – especially when said lady wasn’t even undressed enough to make it worth his while.
He started backing away. ‘Have a good day, love,’ he said. ‘I mean, dear. I mean, bye.’ And then he legged it down the garden path far quicker than a man of his girth and age should be able to.
The postman moved so fast he probably didn’t even hear me call ‘You too’ after him as I shut the door. I slung the letters that weren’t for me, but had the audacity to arrive at this address today, on the floor of the hallway. They landed unceremoniously on top of the other, older letters that sat like orphaned children, waiting, longing to be rescued. I usually felt sorry for those letters, wished the people they’d been sent to would give them a good home, but they weren’t my problem today. I barely gave them a second thought as I took the stairs two at a time back up to my flat.
In my bedroom I had already laid out my birthday breakfast feast: fresh croissants with smoked salmon, three chocolate truffles and a glass of Möet.
Everything had to be perfect today. Everything. I’d planned it that way. After I’d devoured my special brekky, I’d stay in bed until midday, opening birthday cards while receiving calls from well-wishing friends and relatives. Then I had an appointment at the hairdresser to get my hair washed, deep conditioned and cut. I was going for a radical change – ditching my usual chin-length bob for a style with long layers and a sweeping fringe. After that, I’d come back home and get dressed up. I really was going to wear a dress of gold sequins that set off my dark skin in a spectacular fashion. I was going to squeeze my feet into gold high heels and I was going to brush gold dust over my cleavage. And then a few of the girls from work were coming round for drinks and nibbles before we went into town to dance the night away.
I slipped carefully under the sheets, not wanting to spill any of the special spread, then took a swig of champagne before I tore through my cards like a child. Around me the pile of brightly coloured envelopes grew as I tugged out the cards and smiled at the words written inside.
It wasn’t dim of me, then, not to notice it. It was like all the others. Slipped in among the bundle, innocuous and innocent looking. And, like all the others, I didn’t really look at it, didn’t try to decipher the handwriting on envelope, ignored the picture on the front. I simply opened it, eager to receive the message of love that had been scrawled inside. My heart stopped. I recognised the handwriting before I read the words. The words I read with a racing heart.
Dear Kamryn, Please don’t ignore this.
I need to see you. I’m dying. I’m in St Jude’s Hospital in central London.
Yours, Adele x PS, I miss you.
Slamming it shut I registered for the first time that the card had ‘I love you’ on it instead of one of the usual birthday greetings.
The piece of glossy cardboard sailed across the room when I slung it as though it had burnt my fingers. It landed on the wicker laundry basket and sat there staring at me. With its white front and simple design, and three treacherous words, it sneered at me. Daring me to ignore it. Daring me to pretend the words inside weren’t carved into my brain like they were scored onto the card.
I took a slug of my champagne but it tasted like vinegar in my mouth. The croissant, carefully sliced and filled with smoked salmon, was like sawdust as I chewed. The truffles were paste on my tongue.
Still the card stared at me. Goading me. Ignore me if you can, it mocked. Go on, try it.
I threw back the covers, got out of bed and went over to the card. Dispassionately, I tore it in half. Then tore those pieces in half again. I stomped into the kitchen, stamped on the pedal bin to open it and dropped the remains on top of the rotting vegetables, the greasy leftovers and discarded wrappers.
‘There. That’s what I think of that! And you!’ I hissed at the card and its sender.
I returned to my bed. That was better. Much better. I sipped my champagne and ate my food. And everything was all right again. Perfect, even. Just like it should be on my birthday.
Nothing could ruin it. No matter how much anyone tried. And they were bloody trying, weren’t they? You don’t try much harder than with that message, dressed up as a birthday card. Very clever. Very bloody clever. Well it wasn’t going to work. I wasn’t falling for that nonsense. I was going to carry on with my plan. I was going to make my thirty-second more special than my eighteenth, twenty-first and thirtieth birthdays combined.
Because when I am thirty-two I shall wear gold sequins and six-inch stilettos and brush gold dust over my cleavage, just as I promised myself ages ago.
*
The door was ajar and didn’t protest as I gently pushed on it. I didn’t knock. I never knocked on an already open door because to me it always said, ‘Come, no knocking required.’
From her place amongst her white pillows she smiled as I stepped into view. ‘I knew you’d come,’ she whispered.
Read on for an extract from The Ice Cream Girls
serena
AS COLD AS ICE CREAM?
Serena Gorringe, one half of the so-called Ice Cream Girls duo accused of killing popular teacher Marcus Halnsley, is expected to take the witness stand today in her murder trial.
Gorringe, 19, is the older of the two and is widely thought to have been the driving force behind the pair’s cold-blooded plot to seduce, torture and murder her former History teacher.
Although Gorringe and her accomplice, Poppy Carlisle, went to the police after the murder claiming there had been an accident in which Halnsley was stabbed, evidence at the scene suggested he had been subjected to torture before he later died from a stab wound to the heart.
Both Gorringe, pictured eating ice cream and wearing a string bikini, right, and Carlisle deny torture and murder. They also both deny being the assailant who ultimately delivered the fatal blow to Mr Halnsley.
Daily News Chronicle, October 1989
serena
‘Serena Gorringe, I love you.’
Oh my God! It’s going to happen. It’s really going to happen. After nearly 15 years of wanting this, hoping for this, praying for this, it’s going to happen. He’s going to propose.
Or, maybe he isn’t. Maybe I’m having one of my ‘moments’ where I’ve so completely immersed myself in a fantasy, it seems real.
I glance around, searching for proof in my surroundings that I’m not making it all up. We’re at a table for two outside our favourite Brighton restaurant – a small, family-run Mexican cantina that sits on the edge of the beach. It’s a clear, warm night and the sky is teeming with stars. The rhythmic ssshushing of the dark sea mingles gently with the loud music spilling from inside the restaurant, while the smell of spicy food fuses deliciously with the salt air. To my left Brighton pier is adorned with hundreds upon hundreds of lights, and to my right Worthing pier’s lights seem more demure than its more famous cousin’s but are still pretty. This is such a perfect setting for a proposal, it can’t possibly be real, I must be dreaming.
I focus on Evan again. He is down on bended knee, staring at me with a serious expression on his face. This is no fantasy. It can’t be. Because in all my imaginings, Evan has never been prostrate in front of me – it’s so far removed from his normal behaviour, I’ve never been able to conjure up what he would look like doing it. Big gestures with him are so few and far between that this one is like seeing a unicorn walking down Brighton seafront – I could only believe it if I saw it. So this must be real, because I am seeing it.
‘Serena Gorringe, I love you,’ he repeats, and I know this is de
finitely real. Only the real-life Evan would know that I would have flitted off into one of my ‘crazy worlds’ as he calls them, as soon as he got down on one knee and started speaking. Only the real-life Evan would know that I’d need to go into one of my crazy worlds to double-check this was actually happening. And only the real-life Evan would know that when I returned to this reality, he would have to continue by starting again.
‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you.’ He reaches out and takes my left hand in both of his large hands, holds on to me tenderly but securely. ‘I don’t normally say things like this, so when I tell you that you’ve made my life so much more than it would have been and I never want our time together to end, you know I mean it. So, would you do me the honour of marrying me?’
‘We’re already married,’ I reply.
My husband’s face softens from his serious expression into a huge, warming smile. ‘Again,’ he says. ‘Will you marry me, again?’
I slide slowly and gently into silence to savour this. This proposal. I was robbed of this last time around. And this finally proves he wants to be with me for ever. Yes, he’s already committed to it by marrying me, but he actually wants to do it. Last time it was all rather ambiguous and necessary when we decided to do it.
May, 1996
We lay fully clothed, side by side on the bed in his small London flat, staring at the ceiling. I’d just told him that the morning-after pill I’d taken after the condom split hadn’t worked and I was pregnant. A missed period and three tests had told me so. (I’d waited until we were horizontal to break the news because I suspected he’d fall over.) ‘Oh, OK,’ he said, before sighing a deep, slightly mournful sigh of resignation and defeat. I sighed, too, knowing what he meant, how he felt. It wasn’t terrible news, it wasn’t even bad news, it was just lifechangingly unexpected. I wasn’t ready, I was sure he wasn’t either. But here we were, ready or not. A baby was on its way.
‘We should probably get married,’ I stated.
‘To stop our parents freaking out,’ he replied.
‘Because they would,’ I said.
‘Freak out. Yeah.’
‘Yeah.’
Evan didn’t realise that when I said ‘should probably’, I meant ‘have to’. If it was just about me, I wouldn’t have cared, I wouldn’t have minded not getting married. But after what had happened to our family a few years earlier, what I had put my parents through, I could not do this to them as well – I could not add ‘unmarried mother’ to my list of crimes… I had to show them that I wasn’t who the world thought I was, I was a respectable girl and I could do things the right way. I had to get married.
‘It’s not as if we weren’t going to get married at some point, anyway,’ Evan said, trying to rally, trying to rescue the situation by sounding positive. ‘We might as well do it now.’
‘Yeah, I suppose,’ I replied. And six weeks later we were married and that was that. No romance, no story to tell and retell, there wasn’t even an engagement ring to show off.
Ever since then, I’ve had a niggling doubt about where we would be if we hadn’t been married at the wrong end of a shotgun. Without doubt, if he knew Serena Gorringe at the end of the eighties, if he knew the person who was all over the papers and who had been accused of something terrible, he would not have married me. But he did not know her. He met and got to know the real me. And I’ve always wondered if the real me was good enough. If the real me was the person he wanted to marry, instead of had to marry simply to satisfy ultratraditional parents.
‘Last time, we didn’t get the chance to do it properly,’ Evan says. ‘I want that for us this time. I promised myself on the day we did that we’d do it again properly. Since our first wedding, I’ve been putting money aside so we could do it. Big church, white dress, huge party, honeymoon – the lot. We can have everything that we couldn’t afford or didn’t have time to do before, including…’ He reaches into the inside pocket of his favourite suit jacket and pulls out a small, blue velvet box. He opens it up to show me and there, languishing on a silk bed, is a large, many-faceted, square-cut diamond on a silver band.
The air catches in my throat.
‘An engagement ring. This time, an engagement ring as well as a real proposal.’
‘Is that a real diamond?’ I can barely form the words to speak in its presence let alone think about touching it.
‘Of course. We can afford it now. And it’s on a platinum band, from the same place where we got our wedding rings.’
My hands fly up to my face as tears fill my eyes and swell in my throat. He’s thought about it, he’s planned it and has done it all because I am good enough: he does want to be with me. He does want to be married to me, just as much as I want to be married to him.
I’ve never wanted to be with someone as much as I want to be with Evan. ‘What about you-know-who?’ whispers my conscience. It is the part of my conscience that lives in the past; it worships the past, clings to it, is always determined to drag the past into the present. ‘Wasn’t you-know-who the love of your life?’
My conscience is wrong, of course. Evan is The One. He’s the only one.
‘Are you sure, Serena?’ mocks my conscience. ‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’
I’m sure, I’m one hundred per cent sure. There really is no one but my husband for me. What I had with you-know-who wasn’t love, it wasn’t like what I have with Evan. It wasn’t even the same creature, how could it have been?
‘Babe?’ Evan says, in a way that suggests he has called me a few times.
‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘miles away.’ Another life away.
‘I’m getting a cold knee and a little nervous,’ he says.
‘Nervous? Why?’
‘You haven’t actually said yes.’
‘Haven’t I?’ I ask.
‘No, you haven’t.’
‘Oh.’
He grins that grin of his. ‘Do you want me to ask you again?’
I nod eagerly. Just one more time, especially now I know there’s a ring involved.
‘OK,’ he says with a slight, mock-exasperated shake of his head. ‘Serena Gorringe…’ He pauses to slip the ring halfway up my finger, and I hold my breath, trying to remember every detail because I will recreate it for the kids, for my sisters, for my parents, for anyone who cares to listen. ‘Will you make me the happiest man on earth by marrying me and becoming Mrs Gillmare all over again?’ He pushes the ring into place beside my wedding band.
I almost forget to breathe as I examine the two rings. They slot together almost seamlessly, and they look like they were made for each other. Like nothing will ever tear them apart.
‘Of course I will,’ I say and leap up as he struggles to his feet. ‘Of course I’ll marry you again.’ I throw my arms around his neck and he grins at me before he scoops me into his arms and then dips me backwards for a deep, show-stopping, movie-style kiss. Another unicorn-on-Brighton-seafront-type gesture. He is full of them tonight.
I immerse myself in it all. In the kiss, the proposal, the man. I’m only vaguely aware that we’ve had an audience and now the air around us is full of the sound of people clapping.
I’m going to hang on to this moment. I have to. I know how easily everything can be taken away. Everything is fragile, when you’re like me. Very few things are permanent. I live on a precipice of falling into my past, of people finding out what I have been accused of, how I was publicly branded, and being judged all over again on that. I live with the constant fear that someone or something is going to tip me over the edge.
But not tonight, eh? Not right now. Right now, I am the woman who Dr Evan Gillmare wants to spend the rest of his life with.
Right now, I am the happiest woman on earth and nothing bad could possibly happen to me.
Dorothy Koomson, The Woman He Loved Before
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