The Poison Tree (2 page)

“Will you take me to school when I go back next week? Will you drive Mum’s car or are we going to have two? Lara’s mum and dad have a car each but she
still
walks to school. Don’t you think—oh my God, you can come swimming now! What’s your best stroke? Mine’s front crawl. Will you take me swimming?”

“I’ll do whatever you want,” says Rex, and Alice kisses the top of his head. Her knees fold forward and nudge the gearshift while an elbow knocks against my head as I try to negotiate the Archway traffic circle. I shout at her when I had sworn I wouldn’t, not today. She shrugs off my scolding. The car swings to the left as I take the exit for the Great North Road. Rex crosses his legs, folds his arms, and shifts in his seat. He knows where I’m going. Perhaps he was expecting it. Perhaps, like me, he needs this one last visit to the past before we can build our future.

Archway Road is unusually clear, and the three of us cruise underneath the bridge in the long, low autumn dazzle. The neighborhood has been gentrified in the decade since we lived here. We pass a designer baby boutique where a thrift store used to be. The liquor store that would sell us two bottles of nasty wine for five pounds, even at three in the morning, has now been upgraded to a wine merchant, and even the old pubs and restaurants look cleaner and brighter than I remember them: more plate glass, fewer metal shutters. But Archway still has some way to go, I think, as I swerve to avoid chunks of glass exploded from a bus stop window and scattered across the street like ice cubes.

Neither of us has been here for over a decade but I can still drive this street, anticipate those lights, make these gear changes, on autopilot. I could do it with my eyes shut. For a reckless second, I’m tempted to try, to close my eyes and lock the wheel on a right curve. But I make the double turn into Queenswood Lane wide-eyed and unblinking. The noise of the city falls away as we enter the secret sliver of wildwood, where the ancient trees muffle the sirens and the screeches of the street and the half-hidden houses occupy a dark green private universe, cushioned by money as much as by trunk and bough and leaf. I drive carefully between the expensive cars, their side-view mirrors tucked into their bodies in case someone unfamiliar with the road drives too quickly and knocks into one. But I am more familiar with this lane than any other road, including the one I grew up on and the one I live on now. It’s the setting for most of my memories and all of my nightmares. I know every old brick wall, every bump in the road, every lamppost. The 1860s apartment block with its Italianate walled garden still sits alongside that glass-and-concrete bubble, someone’s vision of the future from the 1960s that would never make it past the conservation society today. Stern Victorian town houses tower over a pastel-colored fairy-tale mansion. Their windows glower down at us.

I deliberately don’t look toward the last house, the place where everything happened, before the street surrenders to the trees. I focus on the road as the leafy tunnel swallows this car for the first time and park with the house behind me, telling Alice that Mummy and Daddy need to stretch their legs. She tumbles out of the car and skips into the trees, her tracksuit a flash of pink through half-undressed branches. The little red lights in the heels of her sneakers wink at us like tiny eyes.

“Don’t go too far!” I call. We watch as she drags her feet through the fallen leaves, tracing letters with her toes, staining the hem of her trousers with flakes of wet bark and leaf mold. She doesn’t know it, but she’s playing yards away from the spot where she was conceived. Rex speaks first.

“It’s got to be done, I suppose.” He circles the car to open my door. I get out and point the key at the car, and it locks with a
powpow
noise. Rex raises an eyebrow. “Very swish,” he says, taking the key from me and examining it as though it contains an entire album of high-energy dance tracks. I close my eyes to make the turn, and when I open them, there it is. Exactly where we left it, I think—although where could it have gone? The four-story town house surrounded not by cars and concrete but by lime and plane and birch and oak; half stucco, half gray brick, it really belongs on the end of a terrace in Islington or Hackney. Its incongruity is one of the things that always made its presence on the edge of the forest so magical. It has changed, of course. It looks naked, cleaner and more metropolitan than ever now that someone has pulled down the dark green ivy that covered all of the side wall and half the front one and found its way in through the windows in the summertime. The creamy stucco gleams, not a single peel or crack in the paint. It looks
innocent
. But then, so do I.

The flaked black paint on the front door has been replaced by flawless turquoise gloss, and the golden lion door knocker gleams. The steep front steps—formerly a death trap of long-dead herbs tufting out of broken terra-cotta pots, lone roller skates, empty wine bottles, and never-to-be-read free local newspapers—have also been restored, and instead the door is flanked by two perfectly symmetrical bay trees with twisted stems in aluminum pots. Six recycling boxes are stacked neatly and discreetly behind a magnolia tree in the front garden. Instead of the nonworking bell pull which no one ever bothered with, there are six buzzers. The first time I ever came here, I spent ten minutes looking for just such a row of doorbells bearing different names. It didn’t occur to me that people my age could live in the whole of this building rather than occupy an apartment within it. I don’t need to get any closer to know how the place has changed on the inside. Without peering through the white-shuttered windows, I know exactly how the interiors of these apartments will look: coir or sisal carpeting, because the battered floorboards were beyond restoration even for the most dedicated property developer. The black and white hall will have been renovated, an original feature that will have added value to the house price. It was in terrible condition when we lived there, and afterward, there was that terrible stain.

There will be magnolia walls with flat-screen television sets flush against them, stainless steel kitchens, each boxy white bedroom with its own frosted-glass bathroom. It had been sold, but not until a long time after the police and the press had gone. The redevelopment had begun as soon as the yellow incident tape had been taken down and the cameras and reporters had moved on. Only then did the real estate agents begin to throng the house. I had often imagined the swarm of suits trampling polystyrene and paper coffee cups discarded by reporters, looking beyond the building’s grisly history, seeing only the rare opportunity to sell a sensitively converted character property in a highly desirable location, situated seconds from the Tube and on the edge of the historic Queen’s Wood.

The violent physical reaction I was half-expecting—a swoon, or a full faint, or even vomiting—doesn’t come. Rex too is calm, indecipherable, and it’s he who has the most, and the most gruesome, memories of this place. It was his home for twenty-four years and mine for only one summer. Alice breaks the reverie, dropping five feet from a tree I hadn’t noticed her climb, bored now, asking Rex for a can of Coke because she knows I’ll say no. I shrug and let him decide. Tonight, we’ll sit down and establish some ground rules for dealing with Alice before she becomes hopelessly, irretrievably spoiled. But today, I’ll let Rex play the indulgent father. One day won’t hurt.

She gets her drink, but not from the newsstand near Highgate Tube; I bet it’s still owned by the same family. They might not recognize me, but of course they would remember Rex. They would have sold enough newspapers with him on the front page. Instead, we drive up Muswell Hill Road and I let Rex and Alice jump out and into a more anonymous convenience store. Did I ever go there? The fruits and vegetables piled up in front of the shop, their dull skins patiently absorbing the fumes from my exhaust, do nothing to jog my memory. Rex and Alice are in there for a while, and it’s not until she emerges, red-faced and holding out her hand, that I realize I haven’t given him any money.

Before we’ve even reached the North Circular Road that links Rex’s old part of London to his new home, Alice has slipped out of her seatbelt again and is lying across the seat, kicking at the air, singing to herself and spilling sticky cola all over her clothes and the car seat. Ten years fall away and I remember another journey on this road. It was the day Rex’s credit card arrived, and we celebrated by driving to the supermarket to stock up on all the food and drink we could cram into my little Fiat. Rex sat beside me losing a wrestling match with the sunroof, while Biba took up the whole of the backseat, so Guy can’t have been with us. She dangled a cigarette out of the left-hand window, her feet poking out of the right-hand one in a desperate attempt to cool down. I can feel the gummy heat of that summer now. I remember the prickle of my heat rash and the way the sweat from my body made my cheap purple T-shirt bleed dye onto my skin like an all-over bruise. I remember the way perspiration gave Rex a permanent kiss-curl in the middle of his forehead, like Superman. I can still see the crisscross sunburn lines on Biba’s back. A pink leg comes between me and the rearview mirror.

“Put your seatbelt on, Alice,” I say. She walks her feet up onto the ceiling, printing a thin layer of leaf mold in the shape of her shoes across the pale gray ceiling. She’s testing me and I fail. “I said, put your fucking seatbelt on, Alice!” Or did I say something else? Rex looks at me in horror while Alice, more interested in the unfolding drama than offended by my swearing, is suddenly silent and upright.

“
What
did you call her?” he says in a whisper, and at the same time Alice asks, “Who’s Biba?”

M
Y MOTHER STILL HAS the letter. It is dated January 1993 and tells the reader that I have been awarded a scholarship to study modern languages at Queen Charlotte’s College. It is stuck to the mirror in my parents’ hallway, the letterhead bleached by light and time but the main body text still decipherable. When I had opened it and we had all read it three or four times, she pasted it to the mirror for safekeeping, accidentally using my father’s extra-strength wood glue, and the bond was permanent. My mother went mad, not because the mirror was ruined but because she had denied herself the opportunity to brandish the letter at bus stops and bank counters and street corners. She was all set to ask the college for another copy just for this purpose until my father talked her out of it, even though he was as proud as she that the first person from our family ever to enter higher education should do so at such a prestigious university. I noticed that in the months that followed we had more visitors than usual, and my mother would serve them cups of tea in the entrance hallway, a strong picture light trained on the gummed glass.

If my mother was a whirlwind of enthusiasm, then I was the calm at the eye of the storm, watching the celebrations and preparations with the detachment that was my way back then. For I had a guilty secret—or what felt like one at the time, before I knew what guilt and secrecy really felt like. The thing that I did not have the heart to tell anyone, not my parents or my teachers, was that where they saw burning ambition there was only inertia. The four languages I had mastered by my sixteenth birthday had come effortlessly, and when I was praised for my dedication and clutch of precocious A levels I felt like a fraud. The ability to wrap my tongue around alien sounds, to master the clicks, lisps, and rolls of foreign languages, was something I’d always been able to do. As a child, I could mimic the accents in the soap operas my parents watched, perfecting Liverpudlian and Mancunian and London accents. When I was ten, we went abroad for the first time, to Madeira: I came home almost fluent in Portuguese, and my secret was out—I could pick up new languages as easily as the other children at my school copied radio jingles and cartoon catchphrases. After basic instruction in the grammar and syntax, it was usually a case of plowing through a novel or two with a dictionary by my side, or watching a couple of foreign films with the subtitles on, and it was in. It’s a science, not an art. It’s something I can do, it’s not who I am. Before I met Biba, it was the defining thing in my life, and had I not met her, I expect that it still would be.

The name of the college conjures images of Regency buildings, a Nash terrace housing oaky libraries and elegantly striped seminar rooms, or at least it did to me when I submitted my application form. It couldn’t have been less like that. The main campus on the north side of Marylebone Road was a cobalt-blue, sixties-built tower block, double-glazed to keep the traffic noise at bay. The windowless corridors were painted the sickly pea-green of military hospital bedclothes, and the flecked gray vinyl floors reflected the neon strip lighting on the ceiling. It was a horrible combination, able to steal the color from the cheeks of the youngest and rosiest students, but once I got over my initial disappointment at not being able to waft through quads in crinoline, I grew to appreciate the place. It had a neutrality about it that’s important when you’re studying several different languages.

The student halls, however, lacked not just romance but also safety and privacy. I was allocated a grimy shared studio in Cricklewood that had the twin disadvantages of being too far out of the center of town to be cool and not far out enough to be comfortable. Emma, my roommate, was a friendly, horsey type from Surrey with a warm laugh and immaculate vowels and was clearly even more terrified of our new neighborhood than I was; her pressed pastel clothes marked her out as a moving target on the strip-lit grays and blacks of Broadway. In our introductory lecture we met Claire and Sarah, two other students in the same position. Friendship was instant, inevitable, necessary.

“I can’t bear it,” Sarah told us as we waited for the bus on Edgware Road, arms aching with the weight of textbooks in stretched Blackwell’s shopping bags. “I’m going to ask my father to buy somewhere. He’ll rent it to us for less than we pay here. Are you in?” I thought she was joking, but by October the four of us were ensconced in a house share in Brentford, a West London hinterland with no Tube station. But the house was clean and airy, and the street was safe. It was not the student life I had been expecting: we never burned incense or stole a traffic cone or slept until noon. But it was different enough from my old life to feel like progress.