Chapter 51
When I was a kid, I would sit on the wall outside our house and wait for the ice-cream van to come round every Friday after tea. I remember the feeling in my stomach. Excitement, anticipation and then joy when I saw it appear around the corner of our road.
‘What’s it doing?’ Sadie asks.
‘Watching,’ Davey says. ‘Waiting.’
‘Shit.’
‘You need to go out the back,’ Stella says.
‘Then what? I’m guessing Fred isn’t going to let us stroll out of the front gates.’
‘Doubtful.’
‘The tunnel,’ Davey says. ‘I’m pretty sure I can find my way back there.’
‘You said it took hours through the woods,’ Sadie says.
‘Plus, it’s getting dark,’ I add.
‘You can take a boat along the river. There’s a few old kayaks in the boathouse, along with the sheriff’s motorboat,’ Stella says.
‘Why can’t we take the motorboat?’ Sadie asks.
‘You want the whole town to know what you’re doing? An engine is loud. Paddles are quiet.’
‘What about our passports?’
‘You can replace them,’ Stella says.
Sadie shakes her head. ‘Zelda. I can’t leave without Zelda.’
‘Sadie—’ I start to say.
‘No. I’m not leaving her.’
‘Who’s Zelda?’ Stella asks.
‘Sadie’s dead cat,’ I say. ‘Well, her bones.’
‘Mum gave her to me,’ Sadie whispers. ‘She’s all I’ve got left of her.’
And I get it. The flesh-and-blood cat may be gone, but Sadie still clings to the bones. We all do that, in a way. Cling to the bones of things long gone.
I stare at Stella helplessly. ‘We have to get the cat.’
‘You can’t—’
‘They can,’ Davey says, glancing at Sadie, and I realize he gets it too. ‘We can provide a distraction.’
‘What do you suggest?’
He considers, and then he says: ‘I’ve got an idea.’
Sadie and I remain crouched by the window. Stella strolls out of the front door. She walks purposefully to her car, parked a little way down the street (‘So as not to draw attention’).
‘Won’t they try to stop you,’ I’d asked.
‘They don’t care about me. Not right now, anyway.’
We watch as she pulls out and drives back up the street.
She stops just past the ice-cream van on the opposite side of the road.
The she revs the engine and with a screech of tyres, reverses hard into the driver’s side of the van.
The crash of metal on metal is excruciatingly loud in the quiet street.
The alarm on Stella’s car erupts in a high-pitched whine.
The chimes of the ice-cream van stutter into a weird discordant drone.
Moments later, a stocky man in white overalls, hood down, staggers out, clutching his head.
‘I think there’s only one,’ Davey had said. ‘There’s more at night.’
The white-suit dude advances towards Stella. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
Stella climbs out. ‘I’m so sorry, sir. My foot slipped.’
‘You need to get out of here—’ He breaks off, staring past her.
Davey emerges from the gate of Home and Spry, dressed in the Arnie suit. He dances as he goes, kicking his legs, shaking his furry behind. It’s surreal, comical yet also vaguely sinister. The face of the white-suit dude slackens. ‘What the—’
Davey reaches him, stops, waves … and then punches him in the face. The white-suit dude staggers but recovers and swings back at Davey, who ducks and punches him in the stomach.
I look around. The street is still silent in the hazy twilight. No one out on the pavements staring or asking what the flying fuck is going on. Conditioned inertia, or maybe they’re inside, frantically making phone calls. Either way …
‘Now!’ I say to Sadie. We burst out of the door and run across the road, praying there isn’t another person in the van.
I fumble out my keys, let us into the house, and we run upstairs.
Sadie grabs the box with Zelda in. We pound back down the stairs and burst outside, just as Davey delivers a final sucker punch and the white-suit dude collapses on to the tarmac.
‘Get him in the back,’ Stella instructs, popping the now dented trunk on her car.
I grab white-suit dude’s feet, Davey grabs his arms and we manoeuvre the inert body into the car. Stella slams the trunk closed. I turn and freeze. ‘Shit.’
A young boy stands about halfway down the street. He stares at us. A strange adult and a giant armadillo loading an ice-cream vendor into the coroner’s van.
‘It’s okay—’ I start to say.
His eyes widen; he turns and runs back up the road. ‘Mommy!’
Davey hauls his furry head off. ‘We need to get out of here.’
Stella nods. ‘I’ll take the Dairy Queen back to the morgue. Here.’ She chucks me a set of car keys, attached to a keyring shaped like a plastic ice-cream cone.
I look at it. ‘I guess we’re taking the van.’