Monday 23 November 2020

The Ice Cream Parlour - the ending

While Stella was at the library, John returned from work. He’d cut his hand so badly it had needed twelve stitches. He’d been sent home and told to take the rest of the week off. Stella was not home. He knew as soon as he opened the door and the silence and emptiness surged around him that the flat was empty. He could not remember the last time he had been alone there. He hung up his jacket and looked down the corridor. The door to the girls’ room was shut. Stella, who still slept in there every night, always made sure the door was tightly closed. It had become her private space, a shrine of sorts. John had not set foot in the room since the girls disappeared. He’d existed in a state of harrowing stasis ever since that night, he realised. Keeping his grief safely contained was exhausting. His entire body ached with the effort of it. 

He took a step towards the girls’ door. Could he go in? The thought terrified him. The thought of losing control, being suffocated, overwhelmed by the surging emotion of it all. He hadn’t wanted to seem weakened in front of Stella, so he sealed up his grief, his memories, his love. He sealed them as tightly as treasures in a Pharaoh’s tomb. John pictured himself walking into the room, lying down on one of the beds and letting the gentle waves of memories wash over him. Memories of his daughters. His beautiful, remarkable daughters.

He pushed the door open and stood waiting to be bathed in its warm yellow light and girls’ familiar scent of strawberry milkshake and Johnson’s Baby Bath. At first, he did not register how the room had changed. The girls’ beds were neatly made with their candy-striped flannel sheets and crocheted blankets. The bookshelf was still a jumble of Enid Blyton paperbacks. The jam jars of coloured pencils and crayons still stood patiently on the old school desk, as if waiting to be used. A red plimsoll lay discarded in the middle of the floor. In many ways, the room looked as if the girls had left just moments ago, and seemed to ring with the promise they could return at any second. But the walls were different. John saw that now. The brilliance of the warm yellow walls had been masked, collaged with dozens and dozens of pictures. They seemed to be pictures taken from art books. There were landscapes and seascapes, sunsets and flowers, portraits and abstracts. There were cats, jungles and cityscapes. They overlapped each other crazily. The effect was dizzying and beautiful. John reached out and touched the wall. It seemed to pulse with energy and colour. He understood, he thought, that the wall represented everything Stella had kept hidden from him, just as he had hidden himself from her. Like two plants in the same arid pot, they were together, but growing in different directions as if fed by opposing suns. He left the room, closing the door behind him. He knew he would not be able to ask her about the pictures. That he would pretend he had not seen them. He sat at the kitchen table and wondered about his wife and how maybe he had not been the strong one after all. 


 In the library, Miss Partridge inspected Stella with keen, owlish eyes, ‘Can I ask you, Mrs Coxon? Why do you love these books so much? What do you see when you look at the pictures?’ 

Stella was silent for a while. She loved Miss Partridge because she had never asked anything of her, and this seemed to be a very personal question indeed. She was not troubled by it though. Quite the reverse. It seemed as if it was the perfect question. Miss Partridge’s question was a gift, and wrapped within its answer Stella would find a truth that she needed to contemplate and understand. 

‘Because they are beautiful. I think about how the artist must have chosen so carefully what he wanted to paint. How he must have seen something so perfect he felt compelled to capture it for us, for eternity. I suppose they make me think about which moments of my life I would preserve, if I could. The beautiful moments I have had.’

‘And have you had moments of beauty, Stella?’

Stella smiled, she smiled because her answer came instinctively, gratefully, ‘Oh yes, yes I have, lots.’

 Miss Partridge smiled too, crinkling the tiny lines around her eyes that always reminded Stella of delicate silver fishbones. ‘Good. And more to come, I’m sure. There will be more to come, my dear.’ 

That day, Stella didn’t count her steps on her journey home. She had other things to think about. She imagined her own life in the pages of a book, which images she would select. There were so many to choose from. She saw John as he was the night they first met, sitting in the spangled lights of the juke box. She saw her mother, fluttering through her allotment in a poppy printed dress and her father roaring with laughter with one of his customers in the silvery gleam of the coffee machine. She pictured her wonderful daughters decorating the ice cream parlour at Christmas time, their faces rosy with delight in the tinselled glow of the shop. And she saw herself spellbound in an empty street on a spring morning as a magical fox passed by. Those memories were the white pebbles that would lead her safely home out of the darkness. She was so grateful to discover that the world could still astound her. 

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