Free The Ice Cream Girls by Dorothy Koomson Page B

want you letting down your gran’s memory by allowing her beach hut to fall into disrepair. Or wasting your father’s hard work. Your gran believed in you right until the end. Don’t dishonour her.’
    ‘You think she was silly to believe in me, don’t you?’ I say, despite my decision three seconds ago to stay silent.
    ‘Misguided,’ my mother says. My mother thinks me capable of murder. It’s incredible that she can. I’m innocent. I wish they would believe that. I didn’t do it. How could I?
    I loved him. Right till the end. Even when I was scared of him, and he acted like he hated me, I could not stop loving him.
    ‘Thanks for the keys,’ I tell my mother. ‘I’ll go and have a look at it in the next few days. I’ll make Granny Morag proud.’
    Her silence as she leaves the room says it all: ‘You couldn’t do that even if you tried.’
    ‘I’m going to prove to you that I am innocent,’ I tell her even though she has gone to hide upstairs. ‘Do you know how? I’m going to find Serena Gorringe, and I’m going to make her confess that it was her, not me. I’m going to make her confess that, after the accident, she went back and she murdered him.’

serena
    ‘Can I tell people that the policeman put handcuffs on you?’ Conrad asks on the way to school on Monday morning.
    All weekend he has been questioning me about the incident and questioning Vee, just to make double-triple sure that I hadn’t forgotten that the policeman actually did put the cuffs on me. The novelty has worn off for me, and for Vee, but for the two who were not there it has been a non-stop source of amusement.
    ‘No, sweetheart, because it’s not the truth.’
    ‘But no one will know,’ he protests. ‘Please, Mum. I’ll tell them the truth later, but can I say it just for a little bit?’
    ‘Con, you know the difference between lying and telling the truth, and you know which one is right and which one is wrong, don’t you?’
    ‘Do you, hypocrite?’ asks my conscience.
    ‘Yeeesss,’ Con replies.
    ‘Which one do you think is the best thing for you to do?’
    ‘Hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite.’
    I know he is sticking out his lower lip in indignation. ‘Tell the truth,’ he says.
    ‘Always tell the truth,’ I say. ‘Because you’re a good boy.’
    ‘Does that mean you’re a bad girl?’
    ‘OK, Mum.’
    ‘The truth’s better, anyway,’ says Vee who is supposedly in another world, listening to her iPod and reading a Judy Blume book. ‘You can tell everyone that your mum was speeding and then it turned into a high-speed chase with the police. Because that’s basically what happened.’
    ‘Wow,’ Conrad says. ‘Thanks, Vee.’
    ‘Yeah, thanks, Vee,’ I say through gritted teeth. ‘Thank you very much.’
    Conrad receives his usual hero’s welcome when I walk him to the gates. I do this every morning I drop him off. No matter how late or how harassed I am, I always walk him to the gates and then drop to one knee, give him a hug and a kiss and tell him I love him, then kiss him again on the forehead. I know the day is coming when he won’t throw his arms around me, and say, ‘I love you, Mum’ before running off to join his friends who have abandoned their games to come hang around the gates, waiting for him. The countdown is on to the day when he’ll be mortified to have me even walk him to the school gates, so now, when I still can, when he doesn’t care that all his mates watch him tell me he loves me every morning, I do it. I hang on to my baby, I wear his words and his touch like the precious coat of diamonds they are.
    As usual, I walk away from Con feeling like I did on his first day at nursery – very close to rushing back through the gates, grabbing him and running away while calling over my shoulder, ‘Sorry, I made a mistake, he shouldn’t be at nursery, I’m not ready yet.’
    Vee is still plugged into her world of music when I return to the car. She has her feet up on the