Read The Ice Cream Girls for Free Online Page B

Waiting, I realised, for me to leave. She would not ask me to, but she was hoping I would. I had nowhere else to go, except possibly under the arches down on Brighton seafront. ‘You’d better come in,’ she eventually said.
    I’d stepped in, and experienced a rush of memories of tearing over this threshold as a child on a visit to my nan, barrelling into the living room and almost knocking over Granny Morag I was so excited to see her. She was my favourite person in the world after my dad, and coming here was always the biggest treat on earth. When she had a fall fifteen years ago, my parents had moved in to take care of her, and then stayed after she died two years later.
    ‘You can put your things upstairs,’ she said, unable to disguise her disgust at the clear HMP Trembry Hall plastic bags and the tatty holdall I’d got from a prison volunteer that held all my worldly possessions. ‘You can stay in the room you used to sleep in.’
    Her voice did not prepare me for what I found in ‘the room I used to sleep in’. It was exactly the same as I left my bedroom at the end of the eighties, when I was still a stupid teenager who wanted to be Madonna and thought she’d marry Don Johnson. Except it had been transported from London to here. Everything was exactly as I remembered leaving it: the single bed with the blue-sky-white-cloud pattern over brown nylon sheets; the hulking, mahogany veneer wardrobe that sat to the left of the window; the tatty white with gold edging dressing table that had a neat line of unicorns with coloured manes along the back edge under the mirror; my Madonna-inspired chunky silver crucifix that hung over the corner of the mirror, next to a picture of the lady herself, all in black, chains and chains around her neck, a black bow tying back her shaggy hair. Even the posters – Madonna, Miami Vice , Michael Jackson, Prince, Adam Carrington from Dynasty – seemed to have been put up in exactly the same place.
    This is what they would have done if I had died , I thought to myself as I moved slowly across the room and sat on the bed, looking around, trying to take it all in. This is what they have done because, in their minds, I did die . When the verdict was read out in court, and I was found guilty of murder, I died to them. I had been slipping away from them as the trial unfolded and they found out more and more about me; more and more that told them I was no longer their little girl. And when the word ‘guilty’ was proclaimed, I flatlined. I passed away. I was gone, but the little girl who had created this room lived on, and they could survive quite happily with these things because they belonged to the girl who wasn’t a slut, who wasn’t a liar, who wasn’t a murderer.
    As I discovered more and more things that had been replaced exactly as they had been twenty years ago – the LCD clock radio on the gold-edged white bedside table, my line of mix tapes on the shelf in the bedside table, my stainless steel digital watch hanging on the corner bedpost – I thought: this is what it feels like to be dead to someone.
    Soft white towels that smell of flowers. They have to go on my ever-growing list of everyday extravagances. I wrap this giant one around me, breathing in and breathing in and breathing in until I become high on the scent of the towels.
    I’d had a shower yesterday, but a quick one, feeling guilty for being in their house when they weren’t expecting me, feeling unnerved to be back in that room. I also wanted to go down and try to talk to Mum. If I left it too long to try to break through that barrier that had arisen between us it might become stronger, harder to traverse. By the time I had found something to wear that wasn’t so obviously from the eighties it told the world I had been ‘away’ for some time and fit my now-thinned frame, and wasn’t from my prison bags, and descended the stairs, Mum had gone. She left a note saying she and Dad were out for the rest of