What kind of ice cream van, Beth asked herself, comes round in the middle of winter?
She was washing dishes with intense noiselessness – Rory was having a blessed nap in the other room – and at the sound of the bell-like jingle she paused, confused. Her first thought was that the noise might wake Rory, and her second, how strange it was that the noise should exist at all. She wandered through the house with soapy hands, peeked gingerly over at Rory (still asleep, thank God, thank God) and stood looking out of the window. The ice cream van jingled along to the end of the road and stopped. It was January. There was nobody there, nobody outside. For a while it hunkered by the pavement, in silence. She wasn’t sure how long she stood watching it; time had become meaningless in the few weeks or months since Rory’s birth. The van started up again, turned in the cul-de-sac, and drove off back towards the main road, trailing its jangling music behind it.
She looked down and found she had dripped soap suds all over the pile of unopened letters on the windowsill.
l
Dan came home from work at half past six every evening, and that was several hours too late, really. In the few short, precious moments while Rory slept, she did her best to clean and straighten up the house, but things around her were descending inexorably into squalor. It wasn’t Dan’s fault, either. He did what he could, helping with the cooking, emptying the dishwasher, even sometimes putting laundry away, though not in the right places, but there were only so many hours in the evening. Then he spent the night in the spare room, trying to sleep through Rory’s frequent outbursts of wakefulness, and the next day he was up at seven and out the door soon after. Each morning, when Dan left, she felt a treacly knot of despair slip into her stomach. Alone, she was alone with the baby, again.
Her dreams of escape were tinged with guilt. A good mother would treasure these days. She wouldn’t wish to leave, to switch places with Dan, to hand Rory off to some imagined nanny, or just leave him lying on the floor, naked and bawling, close the door behind her, and go for a walk.
She wandered the house with Rory bouncing on her hip, singing to him, reciting half-remembered nursery rhymes. She sat on the floor and let him chew her fingers with his bone-hard gums. She tickled his chunky chins. She rocked him exhaustedly on the edge of the armchair while he screamed. She lay with him nestled on her chest, the only place he would deign to sleep for more than ten minutes at a time. While he slept she stared up at the ceiling and marvelled at the blankness inside her mind.
One day – she wasn’t sure how many days had passed since the first time – she heard the ice cream van again. She was feeding Rory. Calming baby-music played in the background, and the dissonant chime of the ice cream van cut through it nauseatingly. She looked out of the window and saw the van. It was moving fast, like before, rolling purposefully past her house and along to the end of the street, where it stopped in the same place and waited. Waited for what? There were no customers, no children racing out of gardens with chattering pocket change and excited teeth. The grey January street swallowed up the bright blues and yellows of the van as if it had been sunk into a pond. When the jingle played, it sounded like it was underwater.
She started listening out for it every day. The van seemed to come irregularly, although maybe it was her own perception of time that was faulty. She was never sure any more what day it was, always encountered Saturdays with a jolt of surprise – Daddy was home, all day, which meant she could leave Rory with him and have a shower and wash her hair! – and she only ever had the vaguest idea what time of day it was. But the gurgling chimes cut through to her, wherever she was in the house. The routine from that point was unwavering: the van drove to the end of the cul-de-sac, waited for ten minutes or so in the grey doom of the council estate, and then turned and drove away. She watched it from various windows.
With Rory asleep on her chest one afternoon, she searched for clues on her phone. Ice cream van Scotland. Ice cream van UK winter. She couldn’t have said why she was doing this; it seemed more than idle curiosity, but the nature of her interest in the van eluded her. Something about its irregular routine, she supposed, or its spontaneity – the way it could just turn round and drive out of the estate at will – had attracted her attention.
Here in her own country, she was surprised to learn, there were two types of ice cream van: a hard van, and a soft van. In her mushed-brain exhaustion she stared at this latter term for a long moment, picturing a pillowy, cushioned construction, like the walls of a soft-play area, or perhaps a whole corrugated van made out of fluted, billowing Mr Whippy. A hard van was armed only with a freezer, while a soft van packed also a special ‘whippy-machine’, which produced that sickly, aerated foam she remembered from childhood. To construct the ice cream van, apparently, they cut up a Ford Transit and stuck a fibreglass box on the back. She was a little disappointed by this. She had always assumed the existence of a dedicated factory from which ice cream vans were churned out fully formed, giggling their jingles in the showroom to the aproned Italian men who would drive them.
She read on. In winter, on account of the climate, it was unprofitable to run an ice cream van in the UK. Vendors had to paw in what they could during the summer heatwave, then diversify in colder months into crisps, chips, and hot dogs. The arrival of the ice cream van was signalled by the distinctive music-box jingle, or ‘chimes’. British ice cream vans played a variety of popular chimes, including Greensleeves, Match of the Day, and O Sole Mio, the Cornetto song. A section headed ‘Controversies’ detailed a bitter legislative dispute over the decibel volume and permitted duration of chimes, particularly near schools, churches, and hospitals.
Rory woke with a scream that pierced her right to the fillings. She groaned upright, dropping her phone down the side of the sofa, knowing even in the moment that she would forget and search the house for it later, and set off on her incessant perambulation of the living room, the kitchen, the hallway, Rory wailing in her arms, her pulse thudding like an engine.
l
The following day, she was prepared. She had cleared her schedule, such as it was – washing machine emptied, breakfast plates cleaned and put away, Rory changed, Rory fed, cup of tea left to go cold in a forgotten room and then thrown down the sink, a cold slice of toast eaten for lunch, Rory changed again. All day the sense of anticipation had been building in her chest, energizing her, lifting her out of her usual baby-enforced lethargy.
By the time the van came, she was pacing the living room in her coat. The pockets chinked with coins harvested from Dan’s dirty laundry. She lifted Rory out of his cot, wrapped the blanket round him, and squashed a red woollen hat onto his tiny head. Holding him in the crook of one arm, she took a deep breath and marched out of the house.
It felt very strange being outside. She hadn’t washed her hair since – unclear when – and the cold January wind stirred greasy roots unpleasantly across her scalp. Should have worn a hat herself. Never mind. Stick to the mission. She wanted to laugh, at herself mostly, her determined stride towards an ice cream she did not want, but also at the emptiness of her street in this frowning mid-afternoon hour, when functional adults ought to have been off functioning, in offices or meetings or late lunches.
The ice cream van squatted by the kerb ahead of her.
She approached directly, along its pavement flank, where the hatch was, where the children should have been queuing for ice lollies. The hatch was closed. She gazed at it, her mind working slowly through the bright cartoon colours and slogans, the emblazoned MRS WHIPPY along the side. Why a Mrs? Who ever heard of a Mrs Whippy? She pursued her case to the cab of the Ford Transit, the driver’s door, and looked through the window. There was nobody inside.
The aproned Italian man must be in the back, she thought. Maybe he came here to do his stock take. Feeling lightheaded at her own idiocy, she went round the back of the van and knocked on the painted door.
The door opened, and she saw herself standing inside.
The strangeness of this took a moment to percolate. Her mind was unaccustomed to moving quickly these days. She stared at the woman in the doorway of the van. It was her, no doubt about it. That was Beth McPherson. She knew her own face, her clammy unwashed hair, her tired eyes. She was even holding another Rory, wrapped identically in a blanket and a tiny red hat.
Fear trickled into her stomach. It wasn’t just the impossibility of the situation, or the shock of seeing her own body from the outside (when had her eyes grown so sunken, and her forehead so lined?). It was also the way the other Beth looked at her: without the slightest trace of surprise, and even with boredom, or disdain. Was she really so uninteresting, even to herself? A faded, hopeless automaton, bled dry by motherhood, by life?
Her exhausted brain tried to swim its way towards understanding. This must be some kind of glitch, she told herself. A flaw in the universe. She was dreaming. She couldn’t be in two places at once. That didn’t happen, or not normally. But in the twilight zone of sleep deprivation since Rory’s birth, it didn’t seem so much of a stretch, really. She experienced a fleeting fantasy of how life could be if there really were two of her: one to drudge and express milk and change nappies, and one who could laze all day on the sofa or go out for a walk or even, heady notion indeed, go back to work. She almost giggled aloud.
The Beth in the doorway said, “I can’t let you in.”
She sounded so cross, so impatient. The skin under her eyes was bruised purplish.
She, the real Beth, said politely, “Why not?”
“Well, because I’m already in here,” said the other Beth, as though it were obvious.
Beth thought about this.
“Okay then,” she said after a moment. “I’ll wait till you’re finished.”
The other Beth nodded, and closed the door.
Beth didn’t move. And yet, when the door swung shut, she found herself suddenly standing on the other side of it, holding the handle as it closed.
She was inside the van.
She clutched Rory to her chest and twisted round abruptly, looking for the other Beth – too quickly; her head washed with lightness for an instant. Or perhaps the lightness was in the walls: the whitish chrome surfaces, the panels papered in cream with a pattern of dancing gingerbread men in party hats. There was nobody there. She and Rory were alone in the van.
The lights were on. The engine was running; there was power. Where was the nice man in the apron? Where was Mrs Whippy?
Where – a chill down her back – was the other Beth?
Rory made a small noise: buh bah. Automatically, she relaxed her knees and bobbed on the spot with him, rocking him in her arms.
To her right stood the freezer cabinet, invitingly stocked with colourful ice lollies. On the counter were large rectangular boxes of toppings. And there was the whippy-machine, just as she had read about. The long white handle which, if pulled, would send soft-serve creaming out of the nozzle.
“Look, baba,” she whispered to Rory. “Here’s the On button. See, on the side? And here are some nice lights on the panel. They’re telling us the temperature, I think. And you can hear the ice cream churning round and round inside. Perhaps we could…”
She looked around: guiltily, the well-brought up Scottish schoolgirl, not wanting to steal. There was nobody there. She fished out some of Dan’s coins and dropped them on the counter before helping herself to a cone. It was a struggle to get it out of the stack one-handed. She had to shuffle Rory into her elbow so she could hold the cone and pull the handle down at the same time. Rory watched the ice cream foam past his eyes, a gentle flumping of dairy, folding itself in a sloppy spiral into the cone. Beth held it clumsily to her lips. She felt breathless. She extended her tongue to the sweet, lingible surface, smoother-than-smooth, silky and soft as a baby’s cheek.
The sensation triggers an abrupt up-wash of memory. She is six, or maybe seven. In the square patchy gardens of her street, children with change in their pockets, the endless afternoon sun on pink necks, the squall of mothers yelling over fences. The chimes which seem to come from under the sea and promise sand. How she runs, her feet bare on the baking pavement, hot coins searing her fingers. The queue, the jostle of small legs and arms. How she has to reach up over her own head to pass the money to him, aproned Italian giant in the van; how he smiles down like a near-god and hands her carefully the towering, wobbling mound in its cheap ecru cone. The insertion of tongue into foam, cold-cold, sweet-sweet, the taste of young summer.
Rory squawks, startling her; she’s forgotten he is there. She gives him some ice cream. You’ll rot his teeth, you will, complains her own mother in the back of her mind, but he doesn’t have teeth yet. He likes it. His baby-eyes chuckle and wink for more.
She’s not sure how long she stays in the van. She dawdles up and down, bouncing the happy baby, showing him the sprinkles and flakes, the gingerbread men on the walls. They’re both children again, in her mind. He could be someone’s baby brother, clamped clumsily to her hip, while outside parents look on with indulgence and take photographs. But parents don’t matter here. They’re in the promised land, the home of sweet treats. This is the edible house to which the little children flock. These are the ice lollies, red-orange-yellow; these the wafer cones.
A knock at the door distracts her. She opens it, impatient, knowing what she will see: herself, standing outside, cold, older, greasy-haired. She doesn’t want the company. “I can’t let you in,” she says rudely – the blank, unthinking rudeness of childhood.
From her own pinched mouth outside: “Why not?”
“Well,” she says, remembering her line and wanting to laugh suddenly, “because I’m already in here.”
She doesn’t listen to the other Beth’s reply. She’s already heard it. She closes the door, wondering if she can stomach another coneful of froth. But when the door swings shut, she finds herself somehow outside on the steps, holding the handle, pulling the door towards her, although she hasn’t moved.
l
Dan came home and seemed to think everything was fine. He was tired, yawning into his pasta, forgetting where he’d put his car keys.
“Does it feel like this day’s been twice as long as normal?” she asked him as they went to bed.
“Tell me about it,” said Dan.
In his cot by the side of the bed, Rory wriggled and twisted, fretful although deeply asleep, his tiny hands balling helplessly at the air.
l
Time passed. At least, it did for others. Beth, strangely, no longer felt its weight. She forgot things: little things, like when she’d last emptied the washing machine, or what Dan had asked her to add to the shopping list. These omissions didn’t appear to matter. The future seemed of little concern to her. She found it hard to summon much interest in Dan, either. He came home, sometimes, and said all the things he usually said, and sometimes he left, and she didn’t really notice. She and Dan, she sensed, were no longer travelling in the same direction. They danced past each other, occupying the same house but at an ever-increasing distance, their lives diverging, like strangers whose paths once crossed briefly at a railway station before boarding different trains.
Beth changed, or perhaps she unchanged. Lines that had been deepening around her eyes disappeared. She stared for minutes on end into the mirror, while Rory bawled in his basket. She looked for grey hairs, but counted fewer and fewer of them; soon there would be none at all. Every day she felt brighter, more awake, more herself.
She took Rory to the baby group at the library. The other mothers – haggard creatures, they seemed to her now, baggy and leaking and ugly – opened their mouths and, after pausing, asked Beth what new product she’d been using. The envy in their eyes disgusted her. She was no longer like them. Their future was no longer hers.
When she got home, Dan frowned, tipped his head to one side like a dog, and asked if she’d done something to her hair. She just smiled.
It wasn’t as if it was a definite decision, after all, she told herself. The ice cream van still came every day. She saw it rolling past the window, as free and unbothered as a bird, the young woman in the driver’s seat with her mouth wide open, singing along to the jingle. At any point, Beth told herself, she might decide to go back out, to knock once more on the door, to undo what had been done, whatever that was. She’d tried to puzzle it out. She flicked through Dan’s old physics books, reading about the time travel paradox and closed time-like curves, about free will and causal loops and predestiny. None of it quite seemed to apply to her situation. The laws of physics were unable to explain how one might close a door and find oneself, without transition, on the other side of it; how one might enter an ice cream van and prompt time to run backwards.
Even if she couldn’t understand what was happening to her, she was curious to see where it would lead. Already her breasts felt drier, as if the milk were flowing in reverse; she pumped and out came air. She had to put pads in her underwear again to catch the renewed dribble of lochial blood. She watched with interest as hormonal blotches reappeared on her skin, spots which she had thought were gone, time unwriting itself on her body. And on Rory’s body, too. That made sense: he was part of her, in a way that Dan was not; Rory was a piece of her own body that had become mistakenly detached.
She and Dan walked round the block, with Rory in his carrier strapped to Dan’s chest. The day felt fresh and oddly warm, although it was winter. Neighbours passed by them, smiling, waving across the street at the tiny baby in his red woolly hat. Beth waved back.
“He’s been asleep the whole way round,” said Dan, gazing down at Rory. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” Beth said.
The ice cream van sailed past the road end. The driver was nodding her head to the music, tossing her hair around, free to go exactly where she chose. Free to drive all the way to the seaside, trundle her van down the beach, and vanish beneath the waves.
“An ice cream van?” Dan said. “In January?”
Beth said nothing.
l
At the end of the week, the health visitor came round for Rory’s check-up. “He’s lost weight,” she said, sounding perplexed. “Unusual at this age. He looks very healthy, though. Has he been feeding normally?”
Beth smiled and nodded.
Dan was home early from work. He waited until the health visitor was gone, then cornered Beth in the kitchen, where she was trying to read an article on her phone. Rory was asleep in his arms. “Beth, love, is everything okay? What did she mean about Ro-Ro losing weight?”
“I’m sure it’s normal,” Beth said. “They go up and down.”
“Has he been sick at all? Has anything happened to him?”
Beth peered at Dan across the kitchen. He looked different, or perhaps she just remembered him differently. At university they had gone swimming in the river together and stayed up all night watching bad films, their legs curled around each other on the narrow student mattress. She didn’t understand how this greying, thin-faced man in front of her could possibly be the same person.
“Rory’s fine,” she said at last. “I’m fine. Stop worrying about us.”
Dan reached a hand out towards her, shifting Rory’s dead weight against his chest. He touched her hair. Beth was pleased with her hair today; it was no longer falling out in clumps, and it looked as glossy and shiny again as it had during pregnancy. “You do look happy,” Dan said, and he was smiling, although his voice was sad.
Beth grinned back at him.
“We’ll get him weighed again next week,” said Dan. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Of course it’s nothing,” said Beth.
Soon she wouldn’t have to worry about these things. Her body was growing, re-enlarging, staking out space within for what was coming back to her. She was looking forward to it. Things in reverse, things returning to their rightful order. Soon she would be at peace again, the weighted peace of the heavily expectant, glowing from within. No more the anxious wrench of Rory leaving her arms, leaving her sight. Soon he would be back where he belonged. She sang to herself as she walked him round and round the house, his little form lighter and smaller each day. When he cried, she shrugged and popped her headphones on. Everything became bearable, easier, with an endpoint in near sight.
And after that endpoint, maybe, she would keep going. Back and back she could go, into her own youth, to childhood: the feel again of the foamy soft-serve licking her tongue, the tug of excitement in her guts at the sound of the ice cream van’s chimes.
Rory slept more and more as his skull shrank. She massaged her augmenting abdomen and dreamed of the day when he would sleep once more inside her, returned to his original state, purpled and slimed, abortively small, smothered away deep within her flesh.
Katie McIvor is a Scottish writer. She studied at the University of Cambridge and now lives in the Scottish Borders with her husband and daughter. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines such as The Deadlands, Uncharted, and Little Blue Marble, and her three-story collection is out now with Ram Eye Press. You can find her on Twitter at @_McKatie_ or on her website at katiemcivor.com.
Originally published in Interzone 295, September 2023