Ice Cream Van
One very pleasant afternoon, in late April, while the sun was very much in the west but the day was still far from its end, an ice cream van made a right turn at the top of the street where Boris lived and began descending. The colourful truck approached, passing kempt and colourful gardens with solemn slowness. The ice cream van moved as if it came in a dream, the wheels turning too slowly it seemed, the vehicle taking too long to pass the house. Boris followed the phantom progress of the lurid vessel with his arid, spectacled, squinty gaze from behind a curtain in his dark house. Quite without warning, though Boris was already well aware of the van because of its alarming shades of green and pink and red and blue and gold and so many cream-like swirls swirling all over the place in hypnotic patterns, the ice cream van began singing in order to attract attention. An antiquated loudspeaker that looked like a trumpet began producing an extraordinarily loud jingle, a bell-like twinkling refrain that sounded like a gargantuan music box. Boris covered his ears and scowled like a bear or a baboon. The sound was extraordinary, the loudspeaker rattled with distortion.
Children appeared from nowhere in possessed crowds, and fearlessly fled from their parents towards the ice-cream van, just as it pulled into a cul-de-sac and stopped to take orders. The adults were frightened of the ice cream van. Boris stepped outside and began walking towards the van, which was still singing maniacally, ready to give the idiot in the driver’s seat a piece of his mind. Making his approach, he saw adults lying prone, timorously curled up in balls, cowering behind flowerpots, terrified. Still the music of the ice cream van went on, blaring and blazing and rattling.
Before he could even see who was in the driver’s seat Boris cried out: “Oi” and then “Turn that down! Do you want us all to go deaf!”
The children were laughing and smiling, grinning like hyenas, but Boris couldn’t hear their laughter, nor their voices, nor the chatter of their moving mouths. A long arm with no source, the hand in a dainty white glove, stole from the dark driver’s seat and placed a phallic ice lolly in a little girl’s grasp. Boris gazed in horror as the little girl began quite innocently to lick and slurp the lolly.
“What is that! Oi! Twat face! What kind of thing is that to give a child!”
But the bodiless arm continued to hand out phallic popsicles and lollies and even one or two whippies with little edible gravestones in them.
“Stop it!” Boris cried.
He remained unheeded as the children’s cold lewd treats of cream and flavoured ice began to disappear. The manner in which they consumed their chilly confections became gradually more ominous, more knowing: their faces filled, all, with a kind of grim, determined, sexual gusto. Then the children’s eyes, in concert, gradually began to rest upon Boris, who stood barking soundlessly at the bodiless figure in the driving seat of the ice-cream van. Then Boris noticed the children’s faces, the way they gleamed, soaked in the moisture and caked in the stickiness of all they had consumed. Their cheeks and chins were reddened and their faces glittered with moist flush. After a while, all that the children were left with in their sticky hands, little boys in dungarees and sailor suits and little pony-tailed ginger girls in chequered summer dresses, were sucked sticks, and sharp shards of cone.
There was a titter, like a human laugh, and then a revving, and the ice-cream van quite suddenly drove off. Yet the jingle did not cease, and the titanic growl and thunderous solar pounding of its song continued to derange Boris. Whimpering ventured, trembling, from the lips of the parents, as they continued to cower in their timid, canine positions. Then, a moment after, Boris found himself stepping backwards in horror, brandishing his arms in random flailing assaults, as the glistening children came towards him and began poking him with the sticks and points of undevoured ice-cream cone. Then they began licking and slurping and nibbling at him all over his body until he was covered in second-hand ice cream, and lubricated in sugary melted ice.
At last, the cacophony of the ice cream van died down and the children stopped acting like savages and their parents started acting like parents again as opposed to abused chihuahuas. Boris went in and had a whiskey and a wash and felt much better.
The next day, the ice cream van came back but with its jingle volume turned well down. Its fanfare was so faint that not one child came running. Boris cowered behind his curtains. As the ice cream van slowly and eerily passed his house, he spied an illuminated eye watching him from the shade of the driver’s seat. The van’s exhaust released some toxic fumes the colour of candy and a beautiful patch of tulips and snake’s head fritillary wilted to the ground, never again to be resurrected.
***
Day after day, the ice cream van returns to the street where Boris lives, bringing with its colourful approach the endless and cacophonic notes of its fearful refrain. Without fail, the novelty speaker sings out its murderous lament, its promise of sweet things, the percussive glockenspiel-ish music-box song pours from the roof-trumpet of the van. But each time the ice cream van makes an appearance, it is smaller than it was the previous day. It was a fairly capacious, a caravan-sized mobile business at first. Now it is no bigger than a toy truck. Sometimes children come running, sometimes no-body appears. Sometimes the van makes its desperate and lurid appeals to nothing but an empty street that shows only disinterest and apathy. But while the vehicle gets smaller and smaller and smaller, its jingle is getting progressively louder and louder and louder.
By the time the sycamore seedlings are falling in fast swirls, tiny propellors that drop in concert and litter the russet street, the ice cream van can no longer be seen. It is hardly the weather for ice cream, you might say. But it’s not, as an outsider might think, that the ice cream van no longer comes to the street where Boris lives. Not at all. It has, simply, never left. The sound of its jolly jingle, the summoning fanfare of its twangling music-box, plays on and on and on at a terrifying and literally deafening volume. Ghostly husks of children search for the source of that music, that music that deranges adults, makes slugs and suicides and cannibals and feral quadrupeds and bedbound depressives and schizophrenics of adults. The children badly want their ice creams and ice lollies. They would even settle for shards of wild ice. An icicle from a window ledge.
Occasionally, that pale arm, with its hand gloved in white, sprouts like a stem; without warning, just reaches up, out of the concrete, from the black depth of the earth, and puts, firmly, into a child’s hand such disparate and impudent things as a wormy clump of soil, or a dirty crisp-packet, or a used condom tied in a bow, or a sunless and diseased potato, or a little big-eyed gollywog wearing a cheerful leer as big as a crescent moon.
Everyone remains hungry and mad, as the jingle grows louder and louder causing skulls to implode and the foundations of houses on the street where Boris lives to shake and shudder. No-one has removed the six sets of ear mufflers from the corpse that swings in his attic. But such scenes are unremarkable on the street where he still technically lives, though he is a corpse. Though it no longer has any physical embodiment, the ice cream van is always there, and it will never leave. And its howling pandemonium, raining like an Olympian hail storm upon the streets of dead adults and manic starving children, has started producing scraps of avant-garde musique concrete, and freeform anarchic poetry, and urban hiphop whose lyrics tell of the ills of a system that perpetuates racism, and of gentrification and police brutality and stop and search and austerity Britain, and Fulton Sheen preaching on the mystery of the trinity and the saint-status of reformed prostitute Mary Magdalene and recorded excerpts from speeches by Hitler and Pinochet and Ceausescu and Ulbricht, and the stock-market, and sex chat lines, and gamblers and auctioneers selling everything from antiques to stuffed grannies, and Mahler’s 9th and Beethoven’s 5th and Denis Potter’s last interview before he died and the chancellor announcing the budget and a king’s speech which hasn’t even happened yet and David Attenborough with the gorillas and the Donald Trump audiobook of the bible beginning at Jonah and the whale and rewritten to no small degree and pirate radio stations of nothing but whispering.