The Poison Tree (4 page)

“
Come tu mi vuoi. As You Desire Me
,” I said. “Pirandello.”

“You know it?” The accompanying smile split her tight little jaw in two.

“I studied it in Italian lit last year.” I didn’t tell her I’d hated it.

“I thought you studied German,” she said.

“I do all sorts.”

“Then you’re perfect. Don’t you see? This is fate that I found you. It can’t be a coincidence, can it? You can help me, can’t you?” The gear change from humor to intensity was alarming, and instinctively I took a step back as she took my elbows in her hands and gently shook my crossed arms up and down in a bizarre pumping movement. I was also, however, flattered by her attention and, with a middle-class sycophancy I despised in myself as soon as I acknowledged it, rather mesmerized by her voice. “Fantastic. What about now?” I thought of the surly teenager I was due to coach in French at five. The thought of the smell of socks and sweat and spunk that hung around him was certainly a disincentive. He was always late, even to his own bedroom. It wouldn’t kill him to wait for me for a few minutes.

“We can make a start now, yes,” I said.

“I’m Biba Capel,” she said. I liked the way she pronounced her last name: to rhyme with
apple
.

“Karen Clarke,” I said, holding out my hand. Hers was tiny in mine.

“Karen,” she said, and for the first time I loved the way my name sounded on another person’s lips. “Do you mind if we take the stairs? I can’t bear elevators. It’s one of my things.” She kicked the double doors open with one bulky shoe and let them swing back into my face. Before following her I quickly unpinned and retacked a notice advertising an end-of-term ball to cover the space where she had written. Loops of red ink were still visible on either side of the poster, but you’d have to be looking for them. I joined her on the landing, where she was craning her neck to see the top of Madame Tussauds and rolling a cigarette with the fingers of one hand. She licked the gummed edge of the paper. “The only problem is that I don’t actually have any money, as such,” she said. “Will you still help me?” Biba ran down the flight of stairs, flat feet thudding on every other step, shedding flecks of tobacco behind her as I floated down the staircase in her wake.

Our spontaneous tutorial took place in Charlie’s, the student bar tucked away in the basement of the college. This was a novelty in itself. Only a few days beyond my seventeenth birthday when I came up to QCC, I’d been issued a union card that instructed bar staff that it was not legal to serve me alcohol. I don’t think anyone would have asked me for ID but the thought of challenge or rejection was enough to keep me away for the first year, and after that, not going into the bar had become a habit.

It was dark inside with navy velour seats lining the walls and matching stools screwed to the floor. Trying to find somewhere to sit that didn’t ooze stuffing or wasn’t damp with spilled beer was a challenge but Biba rose to it, staking a place at an unwiped table near the bar.

“Can you buy a bottle of red, darling? A Merlot if they’ve got it,” she said, and I wondered how someone whose voice and bag suggested an expensive education and a credit card could be too poor to afford student bar prices. “It’s so much cheaper than by the glass, and we won’t have to keep going to the bar.” Red wine had always given me headaches but I ordered it then, and because Biba and Rex drank little else, I trained myself to like it that summer. I have never had a sip of it since, though. For me, the bouquet of rich red wine is now indivisible from another smell, metallic and warm and meaty all at once, one that summons up a slideshow of frozen images in my mind like a series of photographs in a police incident room.

She unfolded a concertina of sheet music before me. I skimmed it: I didn’t know the song, and the lines and dots of the music were indecipherable to me, but the lyrics were simple enough.

“The first thing you need to know is what you’re singing, so I’ll translate it for you,” I said, digging out a pencil from my bag and writing the English equivalent under the words.

“D’you want a cigarette while you work?” Biba asked, sloshing wine into the two glasses.

“I don’t smoke, thanks.”

“You’re so
lucky
,” she said wistfully. She scooted closer so that she could read the words over my shoulder. She slung an arm around me so that our cheeks were pressed together and mouthed the words as my pencil formed them. Personal space was clearly an alien concept to her. That, coupled with her eccentric clothes and complete lack of self-consciousness, meant that by now I was pretty sure I was dealing with a mad person; fascinating and disarmingly different from everything I was used to. If I closed my eyes, the image of her was indelibly printed on the inside of my eyelids. She smelled of shampoo and cigarettes and something else I couldn’t pin down. I couldn’t remember ever being this close to someone who smelled so human and so female.

“For a start, what’s that funny letter there?” she said, pointing to an
Eszett
.

“It’s like a double s,” I said. “And you’re blocking my light.” I flicked my ballpoint backward and rapped her on the nose. She moved even closer in.

“Are you always this bossy?” she said.

“When I’m teaching, yes. Then what I’ll do is write it down phonetically for you so you know exactly
how
to say it. German’s hard to learn, but it’s not that tricky to pronounce. There’s nothing in here you won’t be able to say with a bit of practice.”

She read aloud from my phonetic version. I was surprised by her confidence and the way she was able to bury her own strident English enunciation. I’ve noticed that often people with strong accents struggle to reshape their palates to adapt to foreign languages, but she stuck her tongue to the roof of her mouth to pronounce the harsh
sch
sounds without me having to tell her to.

“How am I doing?” she said, after a couple of read-throughs.

“Really well. You need to work on your long and short
u
’s—there’s no real English differentiation that’s an equivalent—but really, that’s just practice.” I made her pout her way through some umlauts.

“Thank you so, so much.” She folded the document back into her bag, then asked the question everyone always does. “So if you’re not German, how come you can speak like that?”

“It just comes easily to me,” I said. I hated explaining what my mother called “my gift” and my father called his pension plan. Biba jumped to the usual conclusion.

“I understand,” she said. “It’s innate, you can either do it or you can’t. Like acting. It’s a vocation.”

“Not really,” I confessed. “It’s just the way my brain works.”

“Like a language computer,” she said, closer now. “An automatic translator. Like that fish in that book that can translate things? What’s it called?”

“The Babel fish,” I said. She’d hit on my father’s nickname for me.

“The Babel fish, exactly! My brother’s got that book. It tends to attract nerds, doesn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I ventured, trying Biba’s boldness on for size and finding the fit comfortable. “I’m not a nerd, I’m a genius.”

“Can you draw a perfect circle freehand?”

“What? I don’t think so, no.”

“You should try. That’s supposed to be a sign you’re a genius,” she said. “Leonardo da Vinci could. I tried and tried when I was a kid, but I can’t. I was so disappointed when I realized I wasn’t one. It would suit me, wouldn’t it? Still, you seem quite normal for a genius. You’ve got social skills.” She looked me up and down. I was nursing my wineglass with both hands because I didn’t know what else to do with them. Her eyes lingered on my interlocked fingers in a way that told me she could translate body language as easily as I could flit between dialects. “I mean, they’re pretty basic, but that’s nothing we can’t work on.” Even her insults had a flare of charm.

“We’ll call it a skill swap, then,” I said, and she laughed with me. I uncurled my left hand from around the glass and, as an experiment, let it rest on the table where it didn’t flap like a caught fish but stayed still. With a covert glance she signaled her approval at this development.

“You’re so lucky, not having a vocation,” she said, apropos of nothing. She peered wistfully out of the window so that I turned my own eyes to follow her gaze, but I saw only the lower half of a row of garbage cans. “You see, I have to act, whether acting wants me or not. It’s not like a job you can take or leave.” This kind of intense, passionate conversation might have been de rigueur among the drama students but it was new to me and I found her lack of restraint embarrassing. Attractive and compelling, too, but chiefly embarrassing. Biba shifted back into her own seat and I noticed how thin she was. Her legs crossed at the thigh, not the knee, and her belly didn’t pop out when she leaned forward but folded inward, like a piece of thin cardboard. “Fucking . . .” She used this word when she was thinking of what to say next, like the French
alors
. “Fucking acting’s more than a vocation. It’s a coping mechanism,” she explained, waving her cigarette so near to my eyes that they began to water. I wondered what she had had to cope with. “I don’t understand why you
don’t
want to act. Because whatever happens to you, however awful it is, or even wonderful experiences, you can get through it by thinking, hold on to this, remember what it felt like, I can use that one day. You can’t be a truly brilliant actor if you’ve had no life. That’s why I want to do everything; try everything, meet everyone,
taste
everyone. Don’t you see? Because the more reserves I have to draw on the more I can do as an actress. In fact . . .” self-awareness seemed to strike, and she put on a pompous, gravelly voice, “one owes it to one’s craft to live an extraordinary and sensational life.” I laughed, relieved that she’d broken her own tension, and saw my opportunity to change the subject. I had to pull this conversation down from the sky if I was going to contribute to it.

“So was your mum a Biba girl in the sixties? Is that where you got your name?”

“I wish.” Biba grimaced. “It’s actually
Bathsheba
. Isn’t it vile?”

“I think it’s lovely,” I said. “Four consonants all in a row. That’s unusual.”

“Really? No one’s ever picked up on that before. Perhaps you’re right about being a genius after all. When I was a baby, Bathsheba was too much of a mouthful for my brother—he’s only three years older than me and all he could manage was ‘Biba,’ thank God. I couldn’t return the favor, though, he’s fucked: his name’s Rex and what can you do with that? You can’t shorten it, and his middle name’s Caspian so he can’t resort to that, either. But that’s seventies parents for you, isn’t it? A whole generation of us lumbered with these awful hippie names.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, thinking of the Deans, Scotts, and Tracys from my class at school.

“What about you?” she said.

“There’s not much to tell,” I said, because before I met her, there wasn’t. My questions for her backed up behind my lips like bottlenecked traffic. Where did you learn to talk like that? Is Rex an actor? What does your mother do, and is she beautiful like you? Most of all, how can I make you my friend? I allowed myself a private cringe: my modifications to my speaking voice had been successful, but my inner monologue still had a Midlands twang. I noticed with dismay that Biba’s glass of wine was down to the dregs: I was still on my second and the bottle was empty.

“That’s all the money gone,” I said.

“Where are you going now?” she asked.

“To the Tube, I suppose.”

“Excellent! So am I. Which one?”

I loved the Regent’s Park Tube station. It wasn’t the nearest one to college, but the detour I made to get there was worth it. It had never been modernized like some of the central London stops; the dark green tiles that clad its subway and ticket hall had been restored rather than replaced, making you feel like you were in a museum. Even the steel ticket barriers couldn’t detract from the loveliness of it. I fed my Travel card through the slot, surprised as always by the swiftness with which it emerged and this time newly astonished by the way a pair of hips propelled me through the barrier. I loped clumsily through and Biba tumbled after me, on my ticket. “Keep walking,” she whispered. She swung her bag and smiled sweetly at the back of the attendant who was explaining to a rucksack-laden tourist how to work the ticket machine.

We stood between the two platforms. Down here the color scheme was what my mother would call coffee and cream, the Bakerloo brown and ivory tiles giving the impression of a sepia photograph. I liked to think that the tiles were pale yellow not because they were manufactured in that color but that they were still stained yellow with nicotine from Londoners sheltering from the Blitz.

“Where do you go from here?” I asked.

“Highgate,” she replied. I pulled up the map of the Underground that I carried around with me in my head. She would need to go all the way down to Embankment and then double back along the Northern Line.

“This isn’t the most straightforward way to get to Highgate.”

“I needed you to get me into the system. I told you, I haven’t got any money. And besides, it helps me to spend a few more minutes with you. It’s been ages since I met a new interesting person.” She squeezed my arm. For the seven or eight minutes the train took to reach Embankment station, I tried to think of an excuse to see her again. My curiosity about her was urgent, but I needed to express it casually if I wanted to avoid sounding like a lovestruck thirteen-year-old asking his crush to the cinema.

I braced myself for an awkward good-bye as we faced each other in a tunnel between the Northern and Bakerloo lines. The walls were white and shiny with abstract stripes of primary-colored pigment in them. I never understood why. Surely the tourists who thronged that part of the Underground wanted something more traditional and quaint, or was that just me? Did that make me a tourist? A warm dusty wind blustered through the tunnel. Strands of Biba’s hair blew into my face and whipped at my eyes with their blunt edges. I blinked and held my hand to my eyes rather than step back from her.