The Ice Cream Girls by Dorothy Koomson

started to melt away as he held me. ‘I can imagine what you’re thinking. I’d be thinking it too if I was you.’ He held me at arm’s length so he could look into my eyes. ‘It’s not true, none of it. She only said those things because, as a male teacher, I’ve had my fair share of girls having teenage crushes on me. I would never act on them. Never. This, what we’ve got, is special. The first. The only.’
    I nodded.
    ‘She . . . I think she was having an affair. I can’t prove it, of course, but I think she was cheating on me and to make herself feel better she tried to make out that I was doing it, too. Please believe me. I don’t know what I’d do if you didn’t. We’re risking everything to be together, I don’t want you to have any doubts. If you have any doubts about this, then we can end this right now.’
    No! I couldn’t let that happen. It’d been six weeks since we’d first done it and I couldn’t end it with him. He was like the air around me: without him, I’d suffocate. I’d go back to being the boring little girl who preferred books and revising to going out to the park or watching grown-up foreign movies. I wouldn’t know who I was without him; I wouldn’t survive.
    ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’ he asked.
    I nodded. Of course I believed him. Between the man I loved and his jealous, cheating ex-wife who else could I believe?
    ‘Good girl,’ he said, pulling me into his arms, snuggling me up tight, making me his all over again. I always felt safe and loved when he held me. I always felt that no one and nothing could hurt me. ‘Good, good girl.’
    I hugged him back knowing that soon, very soon, I’d feel like a woman and not just a schoolgirl playing at being a grown-up.

poppy
    It’s probably one of the most beautiful things that I have ever seen. And it’s mine.
    I haven’t had much that is mine in my life. Up until you leave home, I reckon most kids don’t really have much that isn’t connected to their parents. Since I left home to go to be taken care of by Her Maj and her prison service, my opportunities to acquire things – status-defining possessions – were pretty much zero. I have not had much I could call my own.
    Except, as of this moment, I have a beach hut. I have a green and red wooden shed with burnt orange doors that sits on the tarmac on the promenade on Hove Seafront. I am the owner of property. Thanks to Granny Morag.
    Granny Morag was the only one who cared enough to send me the things I needed inside: a battery-operated radio, a Walkman, tapes, stamps and writing paper. She also sent me clothes and shoes on a regular basis, up to the limit that was set by the prison, and money for phonecards and anything else I might need. There was nothing I wanted for when Granny Morag was alive except for visits, which she found hard to arrange transport-wise by herself. One time, when I was sent to Cheshire for what turned out to be only a year, she came all the way in a taxi, bringing boxes of homemade biscuits with her, and a coffee and walnut cake. That was the time before everyone and everything were viewed as potential drugs mules and anything that wasn’t hermetically sealed and then opened and gone through with a fine-tooth comb was not allowed.
    We spent the hour talking and talking like we were in her living room in Brighton, eating cake and drinking tea. It was only as she was leaving that she said, ‘I’ll get you out of here, Poppy lass. I won’t rest until I do. I know you would never kill someone and I’m going to make sure the world knows it too.’ That was the last time I saw her – she died three years later of a massive stroke.
    She wasn’t like my gran at times, she was more a friend than anything. She used to come up from Brighton to London to help Dad look after me when I was little, and sometimes I would stay with her in her house for the weekend. I regret not telling her about Marcus. About what he was really like and what