Hanukkah at the Great Greenwich Ice Creamery - Sharon Ibbotson Page 0,1

important.

A whole lifetime of accommodating other people.

A whole lifetime of never saying what was on his mind.

So, Rushi de Luca didn’t need to worry. He wasn’t about to start asking questions now.

When Cohen pushed on the pastel-pink door, a bell chimed merrily above him, the sound still ringing in his ears as he lowered his large frame through a ridiculously small doorway. Of course, he remembered Rushi as being small, but still, this was a Hobbit level of ridiculousness, and Cohen couldn’t help but curse – loudly – when he banged his head against the doorway, pain radiating through his skull.

For a moment Cohen stood, his head in his hands, while stars danced unhappily before his eyes. It was then, while he collected himself, still wincing in pain, that he was struck by the syrupy smell of the gelateria, of strawberry sauce and chocolate shavings and burnt butter and whipped cream. It was the smell of sweetness. The smell of laughter.

It was, he suddenly realised, the smell of his childhood.

And that, to Cohen, was intolerable. It was one thing to be assaulted by a door frame. But to be assaulted by a memory? He wouldn’t have it.

Walking past wooden tables that hadn’t changed in twenty years, across a wooden floor that hadn’t changed in a hundred, through a stone-walled shop that had probably been here since the Plague, Cohen impatiently rapped his knuckle on the glass-topped counter. He deliberately ignored the rainbow colours of ice cream within, from lemon-yellow to deepest purple, pastel-green to vibrant red. He ignored words like Cinnamon Pumpkin, Birthday Cake Surprise and Crisp Green Apple, all accompanied by slightly silly sketches of the proffered product. He ignored the waffle cones, dipped in chocolate, or honey, or butterscotch. He ignored an abrupt and unwelcome memory of himself as a child, peering up and into the glass, his mother’s hand warm on his back.

Cohen swallowed hard. He was a bitter man, and this shop was a degree too sweet for him. He knocked his hand against the counter again, his patience – already ice-thin – melting further towards cracked status. But there was no reply, no flurry of footsteps from the kitchen into the shop, or hurried apologies carrying through the sugar-sweet air. After one more fruitless knock, Cohen called out, one wet foot tapping restlessly on the floor, his fingers drumming tetchily against the glass as he waited for Rushi to make her hallowed appearance.

He did not have time for this.

He did not have time for his mother, or any of her eccentric friends. He did not have time to travel an hour across the city, to cross the Thames into the southern bowels of London, where the British, in a display of ineffective quirkiness that reflected badly on their Victorian forbears, decided the tube would not travel. He did not have the time for his mother’s errands, for ‘Oy vey, just go and see her quickly. For God’s sake, Cohen, it won’t kill you to do me a favour once in a while, will it?’, or for nostalgia-heavy ice creameries. He did not have time for ice cream, for sickly concoctions in pale pink cups, or for ancient shops with empty counters, without even a bell for customers to ring so to get the attention of the staff. Staff who were clearly so busy in their ice cream dispensing duties that they couldn’t possibly take the time to dispense ice cream.

No, Cohen Ford did not have the time for this, or for any of —

A door opening from behind the counter broke his trail of angry thoughts, and he looked up and over the sea of ice cream to where a young woman now stood, wiping her hands on a gingham apron. She looked at him in surprise, chewing on her lip, which Cohen emphatically did not stare at, nor did he immediately think of strawberries, of ripe summer fruit desperate to be plucked.

He cleared his throat, still looking at her, indicating to the counter. ‘I’m looking for Rushi,’ he said, and she stared back at him, nodding.

She had brown hair – no, not just brown, chestnut hair – held back from her face in a braid tied with colourful ribbons. Logically, Cohen knew her hair was tied back because of the ice cream. He’d found the British, for all that they didn’t invest in their roads and for all that their trains made no sense and for all that they operated modern businesses out of