The Poison Tree (29 page)

It was unlike Guy to leave his phone unattended but on this occasion, in the haze of lust or in a stoned stupor, he had lumbered upstairs without it. I picked up the handset. A London number but not a local one and the word HOME flashed up on the tiny screen. I looked up at the ceiling as though it would help me gauge whether he would come running down to grab it from my hands, but he would never hear it. I extended the antenna as I had seen Guy do himself and stabbed a few random keys with my fingertips before hitting the one that made the connection to a tinny voice shouting a staccato of repeated hellos. Rex was awake now and watching me with interest.

“Guy’s phone.”

“Who are you?” said the voice. It wasn’t the low male rumble I’d been expecting, but a female whine. The accent was moneyed, educated, middle-aged London, the sound my mother was aspiring to when she adopted what my father called her “posh telephone voice.” I didn’t give her my name.

“Are you Guy’s roommate?” I asked.

“Roommate?
Roommate?
Certainly not. I’m his mother.” Guy having a mother did not sit well with the myth he had sold us about himself, a lone ranger in the gritty urban environment. “If it’s not too much to ask, could I possibly speak to my son?”

“Guy,” I said when Rex and I were outside the bedroom door. “Phone for you.” I wondered if his mother could hear the giveaway sigh and creak of the bed as it pitched beneath their bodies.

“Tell them to ring back, I’m balls-deep,” said the ever-gallant Guy.

“It’s your mum,” I said. An abrupt stillness was followed by the music being extinguished and an under-the-breath “Fuck,” audible to us if not to his mother on the telephone. Then there was a fumble and a crash as, presumably, Guy extricated himself and his balls from Biba. He opened the bedroom door and grabbed the phone from my hand. He was clutching a bedsheet around his groin. Biba sat up in bed, wrapped in the rest of the sheet, apparently unconcerned by the interruption. She had picked up on the crackle of tension that foretold a drama about to play out. Uninvited but unopposed, Rex and I crossed the threshold of the room and sat on either side of her. Guy turned his naked back to us and mumbled, but his mother’s voice was strident enough to be heard through the receiver.

“What has happened to your father’s computer?” she was saying. “It’s missing from his study. Have you taken it out of the house?”

“No.” He spoke in an unconvincing, unsteady warble.

“It’s not even his personal computer, you know. It belongs to his office.”

“I just borrowed it.”

“Guy, I’m very disappointed in you. I have no idea where you are, but you will come home tonight and you will bring the computer with you.”

“Aw,
Mum
. . .” I wondered how old Guy actually was. His height and bulk had always led me to assume that he was well into his twenties, Rex’s age at least, but this was the first time I wondered if he might be younger than the rest of us, years younger, a teenager still.

“Oh Mum, nothing. Supper is at eight. I expect you and the computer to be here. Is that understood?”

“I s’pose.” Rex, Biba, and I exchanged a three-way glance and I knew that laughter would ensue if we didn’t break eye contact immediately. I fixed my attention on a pint glass filled with cigarette butts and roaches in the middle of the floor. My lungs ballooned with the effort of staying silent.

“Do you want shepherd’s pie or lasagna?”

“Shepherd’s pie.”

Beside me I felt Biba begin to convulse and heard a bubble of laughter burst from Rex’s lips, and it was too late.

“Thank you very much. I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me who answered the phone. No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. We really do need to have a conversation about your future, Guy.”

Guy retracted the telephone’s rubbery antenna and silenced his mother with a curt beep. He rounded his shoulders and our laughter bounced off his broad back.

“Guy,” teased Rex, “do you still live with your mum?”

“I don’t live there
as such
,” he said to the wall.

“But this apartment in Ladbroke Grove that’s full of your ‘people. ’ Is that actually where your mum and your dad live?”

“Yeah, well,” he said in futile and belated self-defense. “It’s the life you live on the streets that makes you who you are. B’s met my entourage, she knows.” He looked to her for support but Biba was laughing with us, at him. The moment marked a triumph for Rex. Guy may have laid a temporary claim on his sister, but Rex, who knew her better than anyone, could see that this was the beginning of the end. He knew that Biba could forgive—even glamorize and admire—low-level criminality, idiocy, bad taste in music and drugs; but inauthenticity was the one thing she would not tolerate. Now it was just a matter of time. Like the hairline crack in the plaster that appears above the doorframe, all Rex had to do was keep slamming the door hard enough, often enough, for the whole wall to come apart.

“Don’t laugh at me,” said Guy, turning to face us now. “You don’t know shit, holed up here in your house in your little bubble, and the three of you pissing about in the woods like Hansel and fucking Gretel.” I had never heard Guy speak so emotively before. Just as my mother’s posh telephone voice slipped to expose her true class when she was drunk, or angry, Guy’s accent slid up the social scale as he lost control of his temper.
T
’s and
h
’s suddenly found their way back into his alphabet, making him sound more public schoolboy than inner-city gangster.

“Whereas you’re keeping it real by stealing your father’s computer and eating your mum’s shepherd’s pie,” said Rex. Glee at finally having one up on the man he hated was making him confident and even witty. “Guy, can you sort me out with some spliff? A shooter? A
lasagna
?”

Guy was pathetic in his scrap of bedsheet.

“Yeah, well, don’t think I couldn’t get a gun because I could!” he said. His lower lip was actually protruding in a toddler’s pout and I half expected him to end his sentence with “So
there.
” “I know people who can get anything. Whatever. I
could
.”

He bent at the knee to pick up a pair of jeans he had discarded at the foot of Biba’s bed, dropped his sheet, and marched out of the room. Seconds later he returned, wearing the jeans, to retrieve his phone. “Fuck all three of you,” he said, before storming out again. “Just fuck right off.”

“He’ll be back,” said Biba.

And he was, a day later, having been fed by his mother and returned the laptop to his father. He and Biba spent the afternoon having noisy reconciliation sex, but all four of us shared the evening and it was apparent that a subtle shift had occurred. Guy was chastened, and his silent demeanor, once heavy with potential menace, was now exposed as an embarrassed sulk. Physically he and Biba seemed as close as ever, but her face no longer wore the rapturous expression it once had, and her attention and conversation were turned back to Rex and me.

We had a pink and gray quilt covered in dubious stains laid out in the near-side corner of the gardens. The sun, which had been chasing across the garden all day, had painted us into a corner of warmth away from the woods and next to the fence that divided our garden from Tom Wheeler’s. We were close but—crucially—out of sight. Wheeler’s neighborhood-watch campaign had gone from reactive to proactive and he had begun to actively seek out evidence of our antisocial behavior, real or imagined. More than once we’d seen him craning out of the oriel window at the top of his house to look at what was happening in the garden or on the terrace, and Rex had a theory that it was only a matter of time before he began to take photographs. We joked that he had a whole room in his house devoted to noise-measuring apparatus, with flip charts that plotted graphs of our delinquency.

“He’ll have one of those line graphs with a jagged red line that shoots down,” said Biba, “showing how the tone of the area has been lowered because of us. It’ll be called
There Goes the Neighborhood
.”

“Even though you’ve been here for years longer than he has,” I said.

“Too right,” said Biba. She shouted through a knothole in the fence. “Did you hear that, Wheeler? We were here first!”

Wheeler didn’t take any photographs and he did not have a room full of visual aids but we had not underestimated his attention to detail. It all went into his book, blue ink on white paper, bound with moleskin, the pages and Rex’s fate sealed with a little leather strap; when he was arrested, the book was immediately produced from next door. That night, Wheeler made a note that the smell of marijuana was clearly detectable between the hours of 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. and that conversation directly outside his children’s bedrooms had kept them awake. He wrote that he heard two male voices and one female one. He didn’t refer to me, although I’m sure I spoke just as much as any of the others that night.

When the knock on the door comes I am upstairs in my underwear doing my hair. I curse Rex for forgetting his keys, retrieve the spare set from my bedside table, and go to toss them down with a reprimand. But what I see when I lean out makes me ricochet violently from the window. A police car, a Suffolk police car, sits outside the house. Two uniformed officers, arms folded and sturdy legs parted, stand back from the front door and look up at the eaves where the windows are, their eyes traveling up and down the terrace as though trying to establish which of the cottages contains me. I crouch on the floor as though hiding from a marksman, inelegant in mismatched underwear with a large round barrel brush rolled up in a lock of hair at the front of my head. Even in my fear I am grateful that Rex and Alice are still at the swimming pool and that whatever happens, they won’t find out like this.

After a minute or so, squatting like a frog becomes uncomfortable, and I stand up. Before I dare look out of the window again I reach for the oversized T-shirt that lies on the back of my dressing table and pull it awkwardly over my head. The hairbrush becomes tangled and its bristles scratch my forehead. By the time I unknot the snarl of hair, there has been a development in the street outside. I open the window, letting the words ride in on a sled of cool air, and slowly realize that the house the policemen were shouting up to was not mine, the hammering is not on my door but two houses to the left. Noises carry like that in these cottages, and I’ve often opened the door only to find one of my neighbors welcoming someone over their own threshold. I look out of my bedroom window so that I won’t have to put on a dressing gown and disrupt my day.

“Come on, Dave,” says one of the policemen. “You know what this is about.”

I hear the click of the catch and feel the reverberation of the swinging front door as, two houses to my left, Dave lets himself out. He walks toward the policemen, dressed lightly for the weather in an Ipswich Town football shirt and gray sweatpants. One of the policemen says something to him, and Dave disappears back into his house, only to emerge a minute or so later wearing a big brown fleece. His neck sinks into the cowl of its collar.

Not until Dave is being driven away in the police car do I register the presence of the white Micra. Its driver is perched on its hood, the scarf that had been draped over her head like a hood now loose around her neck. It is a middle-aged woman with a little wizened face and thin hair escaping from a loose topknot, clutching a file to her chest. I can just about decipher the letters
SCC
—Suffolk County Council—on the chunky plastic ID badge that swings from her neck on a thick ribbon. Not a journalist after all, but a local government employee. She has a look about her that reminds me of Rex’s parole officer. A small smile of satisfaction thins her lips as she finishes filling in her form.

Neighbors gather in the front gardens to analyze recent events. It’s benefit fraud according to one neighbor, an elderly woman I don’t know very well. Apparently Dave has been claiming disability benefits, pleading a bad back, but working as a casual laborer on the new housing development. How she knows all these details within minutes of the police driving him away she does not say, but she seems confident of her sources.

“It just goes to show,” she says as her audience disperses. “You could be living next door to anyone.”