Free The Ice Cream Girls by Dorothy Koomson Page A

explaining about the sweetest taboo.
    I lay back on my bed, listening to her sing, listening to her words, and when she had finished, I spent the whole evening writing his surname after my name. I wanted, desperately wanted, to be a part of his life for ever and ever.

poppy
    ‘These are for you,’ Mum says as she slides what she has been holding in her hand for the last few minutes across the wooden kitchen table towards me.
    She has managed to sit down at the same table as me for more than three seconds. She didn’t make herself a cup of tea, so I knew she wasn’t staying, but it was a start. She actually came into the kitchen and didn’t immediately walk out again. We can build on that. Dad being shut away in his study is something I do not know how to work on so I will not think about it for now. Now, I stare at what my mother has given me.
    Keys.
    She has given me five keys on a metal loop. Keys. For nearly twenty years I’ve only ever heard the sound of keys in locks, and seen them hanging on the belt loops or sitting in the hands of screws.
    Heard them, seen them, not held them. Certainly never owned them.
    Carefully, as though they are a potentially rabid animal that could snap venomously at me at any second, I extend my hand and stroke my fingers over the top of them. When they do not bite me, I pick them up, hold them in the palm of my hand, reacquainting myself with the coolness of metal and the delicious jagged edges.
    ‘Two are for the front door,’ Mum says. ‘The smaller three are for the padlocks to Granny Morag’s beach hut,’ she says.
    ‘She left it to you.’
    ‘And you’re actually giving it to me?’ I ask.
    ‘Of course, Poppy. It’s what she wanted. It would be illegal not to give it to you.’
    Why don’t you just add, ‘Some of us aren’t criminals like you’ and be done with it? I think at her. I stare at the keys. Gosh, not only do I have keys, I have property.
    Granny Morag always believed that ‘the system’ would come to its senses and would see the truth, would see I’m innocent and let me out. So, in her will, she had left me beach hut number 492.
    Mum’s eyes are intently watching me, although I do not know what sort of reaction she expects. ‘Your father has been painting it twice a year, he changes the locks and keeps an eye on the place,’ Mum says as I continue to caress my keys. ‘He’s kept it nice for you.’
    ‘Bless Granny Morag,’ I say. ‘Just bless her.’
    Mum smiles. A sad, wistful thought is clearly clouding her mind, and I suddenly feel how difficult and harrowing it must have been for her to live without her mother all these years.
    ‘Do you miss her?’ I ask.
    ‘Every day. You get so used to someone being there, and I suppose you take for granted the time you have because you forget to say the things you want to say until it’s too late. I miss her wit and her sharp eye. I miss her grumpiness in cold, damp weather and her false teeth in a glass beside her bed. I miss—’ Mum comes out of her reverie and, blinking quickly, realises she is talking to me. ‘But you get used to living without people, don’t you? If you don’t it will eat you up whole. You find a way to put them to one side and carry on.’
    ‘If you say so,’ I reply and run my fingers along the jagged edges of the keys. I feel like putting them in my mouth to find out what freedom tastes like.
    ‘Well, the beach hut is your responsibility now,’ she says rather ominously.
    ‘Could you make that sound any more threatening?’ I say to her. ‘You sound like the Big Luv during a bollocking.’
    Her mouth tightens and colour creeps up her neck into her cheeks at my language. ‘What is the Big Luv?’ she asks tersely.
    ‘The Governor, the main governor. It’s rhyming slang – Guv to Luv.’
    The tension in her mouth increases, her colour, usually a pinky-red, is now red and high. She obviously doesn’t like being compared to someone from prison.
    ‘I just don’t