The Poison Tree (27 page)

“Crazy,” said Guy, staring at the standing stones. “Fucked up.”

We stood on either side of the clothesline.

“I knocked on the door earlier to get her bedsheets and she wouldn’t let me in. He told me to fuck off and she just
let
him,” said Rex, efficiently unpegging a giant paisley duvet cover. Folding the sheet between us, we took two steps toward each other then two back, dancing the steps of an Elizabethan pavane. “Three weeks she hasn’t changed them,” he said with a wooden peg in his mouth. “Three weeks he’s been here.”

“He’s lasted longer than I thought he would,” I admitted. Rex was at least able now to talk about Guy and remain calm.

“I’ll never trust him,” he said. “But there’s more to it than just disliking him. I miss her. I miss
us
. The three of us being together.”

“Me too,” I said.

“He’s got to go,” said Rex. “I don’t care how, he’s just got to.”

The fug of smoke emanating from Biba’s room covered the whole landing. It hung there like a featureless ghost, haunting the landing between her room and Rex’s. We threw all the windows open as wide as they would go but no breeze came to disperse it.

Even with both doors closed, their voices were still audible. Rex and I stopped making love in his bedroom across the hallway and began to sleep at the top of the house in mine.

“I won’t be back tonight, so don’t wait up,” said Biba. She had on a long brown dress with some kind of tribal markings on it and a pair of earrings made of wooden beads and feathers. The clothes were made for someone dark and voluptuous like Nina. They made Biba look like a totem pole, but as usual she gave the impression that the trend was about to catch on wildly.

“Where are you going?” said Rex.

“To a party with Guy,” she said. It was the first I had heard of it. “We’ve got a ride waiting outside. It’s a shame there isn’t enough room in the car for you two, but I’m sure you want to be left on your own anyway.” Actually, there was nothing I would have liked more than to go to a party with Biba. I minded desperately that I wasn’t invited, but I was too proud to beg her.

Hiding behind one of the saris that still hung from the front window, I watched the street as Biba clambered inelegantly into the backseat of a beat-up black sports car. It would have been a squash, but there would have been room for me alongside her. The driver’s face was obscured by a baseball cap and Guy was rolling a joint in the passenger seat. He looked up at the house and I hid behind the pink and purple silk like a shy bride behind her veil.

It was the first time we had had the house to ourselves for days, and disappointment at being left behind was soon surpassed by thrill and anticipation. Rex and I were free to wander naked throughout the house, making spontaneous love in every room of it. But he immediately began to fill the hours with housework. If he couldn’t physically evict Guy from the house, then he could at least purge the shared rooms of his detritus, and he set about doing so with a grim and focused determination that allowed no room for seduction. Guy’s things painted a perfectly accurate portrait of his personality and priorities. Jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts flopped over the backs of chairs as though hung out to dry, but they all stank of stale tobacco. You could tell which CDs were Guy’s: they were the only ones still housed in their plastic jewel cases, and they joined the pile. A packet that had contained twelve ribbed condoms now held only one. Ragged copies of the
NME
were intact, but the glossier music magazine
Mixmag
had had the bottom left-hand corner of the back cover torn out to make roaches for joints. The inside pages he had cut up, scoring neatly around pictures of album covers, to make wraps for speed or cocaine or whatever it was that he had his hands on that week. A glass bong, the kind they sell in head shops in Camden market, had apparently never been used; the makeshift one that he actually used, fashioned from a pen and an old Coke bottle with dirty water pooled in the bottom, went straight in the bin. Everything else was piled in Rex’s arms. He gathered Guy’s possessions from throughout the house and laid them on the kitchen table in a kind of memory game; appropriate, really, because I still remember those identifying, incriminating items with absolute clarity. We bundled all of them into a black Nike sports bag—also Guy’s—and dumped it in the corner of Biba’s room. He never bothered to unpack it. As far as I know he no more noticed the bag was there than he registered the absence of his belongings from the rest of the house.

That night, we went to sleep without making love for the first time. I lay next to Rex and saw the whites of his eyes glitter in the dark, but when I reached out to touch him he rolled over and feigned sleep. Nor was he there the next morning when I awoke. It was a rare overcast day and my mood matched the weather. Three empty coffee cups on the Velvet Room table told me that he had been up long before me. He was pacing on the terrace. His footfalls made no noise on the green and bronze devoré curtain that was topmost on the layers of bedding spread on the terrace, but there was a scuffing sound when his heels made contact with the uncovered stone at either end of the makeshift rug. I had never seen anyone actually pace before, walk up and down over the same patch of ground again and again and again. It is as though the mind contains too much activity and some of it must leak into the muscles and move the body around in this pointless way. Perhaps that’s why it is so horrible to witness. The exasperation that roared up in me was almost violent, a hugely magnified version of the irritation you feel when someone else is tapping his fingers on a dashboard or clicking a ballpoint pen. I found that I was mirroring Rex’s own rising hysteria.

“Fucking . . . just . . .
stop
that!” I said, in a voice that belonged to Biba. It worked, up to a point. He stopped pacing and began instead to frantically work his fingers through his hair. His eyes were reddening and his teeth were exposed in a kind of snarl. A string of saliva linked his top and bottom lips. I had once thought his face neutral and unremarkable. Now I realized that if he could be beautiful, he also had a capacity for ugliness I could never have guessed at.

“I can’t help but think the worst. I picture her dead, Karen, she looks so like my mum that I can’t help but picture her dead, hanging there or from a tree in the woods. I’m losing her to him, I can feel it. It’s making me ill. I’m going to have a heart attack.”

His breath came in short, serrated wheezes and I recognized the beginnings of an anxiety attack. I had seen one once before, when trapped in a Spanish elevator with a woman who had chosen the wrong day to try to overcome her claustrophobia; there had been a brief power outage and I had spent three frightening minutes trapped in a tiny metal box with a woman who convinced me that she was going to die in front of me. I hadn’t known how to cope with her then, and I didn’t know what to do with Rex now. I knew that paper bags were supposed to help, but only in the same vague way that most of us know that women in labor need towels and hot water. I resorted to that other folk remedy we all know but hope we will never have to use, the slap to the cheek, but my hand was frozen in midair by the ringing of the telephone inside the house. Rex sprang forward like an animal.

“That’ll be her,” he said. He sounded like someone was strangling him.

“Let me get it, then,” I said. “You’re in no fit state. Stay here and . . . take deep breaths, or something.”

The two flights of stairs between the Velvet Room and the kitchen were now so familiar beneath my feet that I was able to descend them all in seconds, hardly feeling the individual treads beneath my bare feet.

When I picked up the handset, the voice that said, “Darling?” was not the expected one; it was warm, low, and musical. It took me a split second to place it.

“Nina, is that you?” I said.

“That’s Karen, isn’t it? How lovely to speak to you. Have they moved you in yet?”

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t like her assumption. It made me think that Nina had discussed my installation in the house with Biba and that the two had agreed that I should be her replacement. “How are you? Where are you?”

“In Tunis,” she said. “It’s gorgeous. I’m as brown as a berry and the kids have gone to sleep. We’re in this five-star hotel room. Can you believe it?” I wondered who was paying for it. “We met this guy on the train who said we could stay with him for a bit. I think he’s on some kind of conference or something, I don’t know. I’m not going to turn it down: this is the lap of luxury after some of the places we’ve been staying. I’ll have to be quick, actually: he’s just nipped out and I’m not sure his generosity extends to phone calls to London. How are things, anyway? You all okay?”

“Yes,” I said. Then, realizing I was talking to the one person who might understand: “Actually no. Biba is a bit late back from a night out and Rex has got himself into a bit of a state.”

Nina accurately interpreted my euphemism. “Is he all out of breath and hysterical and talking about her dying?”

He came toward me then, his face set and his hand extended.

“Let me talk to her,” he said. Nina must have heard him.

“Do you want me to handle this?” she said. I left the room but waited on the stairs behind him.

“I know, I know, I can’t help it.” Nina’s voice fizzed down the line but I couldn’t make out her words. “With a bloke called Guy.” There was a much longer silence this time, and when Rex spoke again his voice had returned to normal.

“I know you’re right,” he said. “It just hasn’t been easy lately. I’ve been trying to talk to my dad, and there was a bit of a setback.” Another pause. “Karen? Yes, very much so. No, it’s brilliant. She’s about all that is good at the moment,” and then her next question brought a smile to his voice. “Yes, we are, actually. Thanks, Nina. How are the kids? Can I talk to them? Oh, fair enough. Will you give them a cuddle from me when they wake up?”

I closed the door behind me and left Nina to finish talking Rex down from his ledge. I wondered if I, too, would learn coping strategies for his outbursts over time, or if they were something he would grow out of. I remembered with a pang my first few visits to Highgate when Nina and Rex had quietly assumed the roles of mother and father while Biba and I ran wild like children through the trees.

“You weren’t talking for long,” I said when Rex replaced the handset with a bang and a clatter. “I thought you’d have loads to catch up on. Did that man come back into the room?”

“No. I wanted to leave the line free for Biba.” He took another deep breath, controlled but shaky. “The irony is that when she gets in, I will be so happy she’s alive and then a split second after that I will be so angry that she’s put me through this that I’ll feel I could kill her. Why does she do it? How can she be so cruel?”

Rex didn’t kill Biba when she came home at five o’clock that afternoon, minus Guy and one of her shoes. Instead, he gave her a wounded look before tossing his head and marching out of the house in a dramatic flounce that would have been worthy of the actress herself.

“What’s wrong with him?” said Biba as he slammed the door, which bounced back open again. I decided to spare her the details of last night’s hysteria.

“I don’t know,” I said. “How was the party?”

“It was wonderful,” she said, her eyes saucering at the memory. “It was in a place called . . . oh, where was it again? Somewhere east. Bromley-by-Bow,” she said, with the wonder that most people save for describing exotic, paradisiacal locations. “It was in a squat on the top floor of a housing project. It was just like something out of a cop show. They actually had a bloke with a huge dog at the door. The police came so we broke onto the roof and hid from them while they raided the place.” I realized with a sickening and absolute clarity that Biba had fallen out of love with her world just as my place in it was secured. “We watched the sun come up and then we went to sleep on the sofa with the dog. It was one of those big black and brown illegal ones that eats children. It could have savaged me at any time but it didn’t. You’d have loved it.” I wasn’t sure I would have. “Such a
shame
you couldn’t come.” She had genuinely forgotten that it was she who had denied me an invitation.

“Where’s Guy?”

“Taking care of business,” she said. “How lovely to have you to myself for a while without any horrible boys getting in the way. Shall we have cocktails? It’s not too decadent to start now, is it? The sun’s over the yardarm and all that.”

“What is a yardarm, anyway?”

“No idea, darling. Come on. I fancy a martini.” She retrieved some vodka from the freezer and found an ancient bottle of vermouth with a peeling label and a crystallized neck under the sink next to the bleach. She sloshed them into mismatched tumblers.

“Is it supposed to taste like gasoline?” I asked.

“Um.” She found a couple of shriveled olives in a container in the fridge and dropped them into our glasses. They sank immediately to the bottom. She fished one out and bit into it. “Oh. Now the olive tastes of gasoline, too.”

We took the drinks not onto the terrace but into the garden where the trees towered over us, living but silent witnesses to everything that happened. The outer leaves had begun to yellow where the sun had bleached them. Their mustard-colored tips created an illusion of autumn. I turned away, never wanting the season to change.

“I
’M JUST SAYING THAT I don’t like it,” she says. “Don’t start on at me again, Karen. I only want what’s best for my grandchild.” My mother and I are trying to negotiate how my parents will pick up Alice when they visit tomorrow. I want her to come in and see Rex, have a cup of tea, get the awkward first visit out of the way. My mother wants to toot the horn and have Alice run down the path, like a Sunday father who can’t bear to see his ex-wife.

“Right, so what are you going to do? Never come into my house again? He’s not going anywhere, Mum. He lives here now. He’s her father. You’ve got to accept it.” Silence. “Mum, trust me.”