The Poison Tree (10 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said, coming to a stop. “I can’t remember the first time I came here, so I don’t know what it’s like for new people. Look, we’re nearly on the path.” I felt the ground become more even and the branches that poked their fingers into my eyes part and withdraw. A sharp tug on my wrist sent me wheeling around to my right and I blinked as though a switch had suddenly been thrown.

The clearing we were in was surrounded by upward-sloping woodland. Silver light shone down on a child’s round wading pool, dry and empty apart from a few scuffed leaves. The turquoise paint in the base of the pool had faded and peeled but it made a mirror for the full moon, which hung directly above, a perfect circle the color of champagne, just for us.

“The heart of the wood,” she announced, swaggering into the center of the circle and sinking to a cross-legged squat. She pulled a joint from behind her ear and ran it under her nose.

“It’s lovely,” I said. “It’s like something from a storybook.”

“Henry VIII used to hunt here,” she said. “Well, not in the wading pool, obviously, although there is a rumor that Elizabeth I splashed about here as a toddler. This is part of the ancient wildwood that used to cover the whole of England. It’s technically the same wood as the New Forest. Just with a few hundred miles of buildings in between. There’s only this and a couple of other forests left of it in London. This is the best one, though. And no one loves it more than I do.”

She ignited her lighter again, this time to light her joint. The flame missed its target as her coordination faltered and a shower of sparks rained down in my direction. She was drunker than I was, and I was very drunk: her clear voice had grown cloudy, like glass that has been in a dishwasher too many times. I lay back next to her, my hot skin making grateful contact with the cool ground.

“The first show I was ever in was held down here,” she said. “A school play. We did Hansel and Gretel. In the round. I was Gretel, obviously. You can imagine how excited I was, doing it in my back garden. I was so desperate for my mum and dad to get good seats that I made them sit on that bench there from noon. The play didn’t start till two. And then when I went on . . . everything changed.”

“What?” I said, picturing her parents spontaneously combusting, or a light aircraft crashing onto the bench.

“I found out that I was an actress,” she said, as though she were telling me about the day the doctor told her she had cancer. My playful swat missed her by a hand span. “It’d be a great place to fuck, out here. I made a bet with Rex about it. I said first one to do it out here gets dinner at the restaurant of their choice.”

“Who won?” I said.

“No one yet,” she said, wrinkling her nose as if puzzled by this. She lit the joint, took a deep drag, and stretched out next to me. We lay back, moonbathing in silence. The heat of her body warmed the left-hand side of mine and when she passed me the joint our fingers touched. I coughed before I had even put it to my lips.

“If you’re not used to it, just go easy.”

“Who says I’m not used to it?” I said. “For all you know, I’ve got a long-term crack habit.”

“You haven’t, though, have you?” she said.

“No,” I admitted. She held me in her gaze and suspended me in time. I broke eye contact and turned my attention to the ember between my fingers. I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with smoke as rich and heavy as red wine. As I exhaled, the stars pricked into sharper focus and I let out a hoot of exhilaration that turned into irrepressible, infectious laughter; tears bunched Biba’s eyelashes and she drew her knees up to her chest as she rocked with silent giggles. A swimming, stoned lust flooded my body. I wanted to crawl all over her. I wanted to be closer to her than her makeup. A pulse hammered between my legs and my heart no longer beat but vibrated. I rolled onto my side, a clumsy and intoxicated prelude to a kiss. A rush of vertigo paralyzed me, my center of gravity swung suddenly and violently forward, and I passed out facedown on the floor of the pool.

When I was shaken awake a couple of hours later, a cloud had covered the moon and Rex was standing over us with a flashlight and a look of disappointment. We followed his beam the long way home: a pebbled and even path that held few surprises and led directly to the sofa he had made up into a bed for me. As I surrendered to sleep for the second time that night I was already grateful, with a relief as overwhelming as sexual release, that my attempt to consummate this friendship had failed, although I couldn’t tell if it was rejection or reciprocation I had had a lucky escape from.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized it wasn’t about sex. It was affection and confusion, the thrill of peer acceptance at last. It was a desire to communicate something that I couldn’t express in any language. But how could I have known it then? I didn’t know anything about desire. That was still to come; the night when Rex changed everything was still weeks away. He finished something that was started that night, when I lay with my best friend in an empty pool in the middle of history, puddled in moonlight and stupid with love.

I
T’S A DRY AND sunny day, so I bike to the shops. Usually I pace myself on this route, not because it’s particularly dangerous but because Alice is behind me and I try to lead by example. Today I freewheel down the shallow hill, legs sticking out on either side of the pedals, hair free of my helmet and combed out by the wind. The level Suffolk countryside has been stripped of leaves and the bare branches make it seem flatter and more endless than ever. This road stretches as far as the eye can see and the temptation is to keep pedaling over the horizon and never stop. I know people who did that. Nina did it all the time. Why shouldn’t I? If I go, Rex and Alice will still have each other. I know I won’t do it, not really. It’s just a weird compulsion—the same crazy instinct that makes you want to leap off a cliff when you stand on its edge.

The road forks in front of me and muscle memory or duty or both of these things turns the handlebars left. This curve I take with my eyes closed, knowing the road well enough to take this little risk. When I open them on the other side of the bend I see the straggle of little red houses and street signs that mark the village boundary.

In the small supermarket I fill a basket with groceries and, as an afterthought, a bottle of sparkling wine. While we were apart I barely drank at all, and certainly never alone. Now, just a week after Rex came home, sharing a bottle of wine with him—white, of course—is as much a part of our nightly routine as it was the first summer we spent together. I know that he has missed it desperately. Not just the alcohol but the privilege and the freedom to decide for himself when his day is at an end and to drink in silence or companionship in a home of his own. I drink very differently now. Wine then was usually something I drank to chase pleasure, to incite adventure and then to prolong those moments when they happened. Now it’s something I do to get me through the night. We never get through more than one bottle an evening, or at least we have not done so yet.

I meet Dawn Saunders at the deli counter. Dawn lives in one of the huge houses on Aldeburgh Road and is never knowingly underdressed. Although her husband runs one of the largest employment agencies in the southeast, she has not worked since the day she ceased to be his employee and became his wife. Today she’s in white boot-cut trousers and a taupe wrap top that skims her tidy curves. Her daughter Sophie is in Alice’s class at school, although they will separate next year when Dawn sends her child to the large private school farther up the coast and Alice goes to the local comprehensive. Dawn is an acquaintance but if anyone local asked me I suppose I would call her my friend. We air kiss once, right cheeks not quite touching, and she leans over and peers into my basket.

“Champagne, eh?” she says. It’s Prosecco, but I don’t correct her. Dawn’s voice has the local rounded whine. Certainly her children do not sound like she does, the result of Saturday morning elocution lessons disguised as drama classes. I often wonder why, when she has spent so much of her husband’s money on decorating her house and body, she hasn’t tried to modify her own speech. In her situation, it would be the first thing I would tackle. “What’s the celebration?”

I have remained deliberately enigmatic on the whereabouts of Alice’s father. Some people believe I am a widow, while others believe that his identity is unknown. Telling Dawn about our change in circumstances is tantamount to sticking a notice to that effect on the community bulletin board that dominates the wall behind the cash registers.

“Alice’s dad has come back to live with us.” Her mouth circles and her eyes stand out, making her look like the trout on the slab behind her. “We’ve decided to give it another go,” I say.

“That’s fabulous, Karen,” she says, and touches my forearm with a recently manicured hand. Three diamond rings, engagement, wedding, and eternity, weigh heavily on her ring finger. “It’ll be so good for Alice to have a father around. We must throw a dinner party to welcome him to the community.”

I think of the last dinner party Rex and I attended together, the impromptu supper cooked by Nina and attended by Biba, Tris, and Jo. Dawn’s gathering will be formal and stilted, and the talk will be not of art and travel and love but of house prices and school fees and reality TV shows—until the subject of Rex’s absence is subtly, tactfully broached. It is time, I suppose, that we came up with a story.

By the time I come home, it is apparent that dinner preparations have begun without me. Alice and Rex are elbows deep in a mixing bowl, a recipe book curling on the table before them. Flour clings to every surface in the kitchen and eggshells carpet the floor.

“What are you making?” I say.

“A quiche,” says Rex. There is a smear of dough on his nose and his hair sticks straight up like egg white whipped into a peak. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

“Yeah, well, it was supposed to take twenty minutes,” says Alice, her tone and her folded arms laying the blame entirely on her father. “We’ve been here for nearly an hour and it’s still all lumpy. I can’t make it all nice like you get it.”

“It’s under control,” says Rex. “Come on, Alice. We can do this.” His cuff is dangling into the mixture. Alice tuts and begins to roll it up for him. He pulls away, but not in time.

“What happened here?” she says, holding up his wrist and twisting it to expose the hairless white flesh on the inside of his forearm. The skin is puckered and pocked with scars. How did I fail to notice them last night?

“I got splashed with hot fat,” he says, hastily rolling down his sleeve. “Occupational hazard of working in the prison kitchen.”

“I thought you worked in the library,” I say. He has pulled his cuff down to his knuckles.

“Oh, I only did the one shift,” he replies, and looks away.

“You can totally tell,” says Alice. “I’m not being rude, right, but I think I’ll cook with Mum from now on.”

I do not get another chance to examine his arm until he is asleep, his lanky form curled into a fetal position as though he is afraid to take up too much space. By the light of my bedside lamp it is obvious that the tiny craters of pink shiny skin are too circular, too regular to be the result of an accident. He stirs in his sleep as I pull up his T-shirt. There is another scar on his chest, three more on his back. The shape is familiar: I have seen something like it before. Suddenly I recall a drunken Biba grinding out a cigarette on the leather arm of a chair and drop Rex’s arm so suddenly I am surprised he does not wake. Some of the burns are pale and faded while others are deep and red, suggesting that people used his flesh to extinguish their cigarettes more than once, that it was a regular occurrence over months or perhaps years. I feel the familiar, futile guilt at my failure to protect him while he was inside, and my resolve to defend him now that he is outside grows stronger. I curve my arm around his sleeping form.

“Oh, my poor baby,” I whisper. “What did they do to you in there?”

Biba gripped the rim of the sink with her arms and swung her body up so that it was perched on the edge. “What do you want to do today?”

“I’ve got to head back.” Emma had called a house meeting, and I wanted to cross London on the relatively clear midday roads. Biba turned the corners of her mouth down and swung her leg in front of her in a lazy kick aimed at no one in particular.

“Oh,” she said. “I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll leave my number,” I said. “Call me whenever you want. Have you got a pen?” Biba scrabbled in the silverware drawer and produced a stub of black eyeliner. I dictated the number to her: she scribbled it on the wall next to the mounted telephone, doodling a star and the letter
K
next to the seven digits. It stayed there for the rest of the summer, smudged but legible. Rex has since told me that he used the minutes between my leaving the house and his arrest to wipe it from the wall.