The Poison Tree (12 page)

“No.”

“A drug addict? A drug
dealer
?” She put down the cloth she was holding. “Oh my
God
, it’s not one of your students, is it?”

“Jesus, Emma!”

“A lecturer? Is it Dr. Ali? He’s rather lovely, I’ve always thought.”

I smiled. Of all of them, it would be Emma I would miss.

“What then? A murderer?” Her remark was throwaway and so was my reply.

“Yes, Emma. He’s a serial killer, and the prison service has started to offer overnight stays for new girlfriends. I’ve told you: There. Is. No. Secret. Boyfriend.”

I was spared further interrogation by the shrill of the telephone. Claire handed me the chunky white handset with the aerial already extended.

“It’s for you,” she said, looking pleased with herself. “It’s a
man
. A man who isn’t your dad.” Even as I was wiping my hands down on the towel I could hear a tinny little voice calling my name. I took the telephone and went up to my room before holding it to my ear. As I kicked the door closed behind me I could hear Emma’s gleeful “I
told
you.”

“Hello?” I said.

“Karen.” It was Rex, his voice crackly and urgent. I pictured him sitting in the kitchen with the dirty telephone pressed to his face, losing a battle with the unruly curls of the cord. “I don’t suppose Biba’s with you, is she?”

“She doesn’t know my address,” I told him. That had been deliberate: I wanted to keep her out of my world almost as much as I wanted to keep myself in hers.

“Fuck!” he said, and I heard a scratch of unshaven chin against the receiver as he cradled it in his neck. “She’s not there, Nina.” A muffled conversation that I couldn’t understand took place in Highgate and went on for longer than was polite.

“Rex!” I shouted into the receiver, after what felt like five minutes. “Rex!” He came back on the line.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and there was a catch in his voice. “It’s just that Nina’s only just told us that she’s leaving us to go traveling. B hasn’t taken it too well and she . . .” He checked himself and bit back a word or phrase. “Never mind. Listen, if she gets in touch, will you tell her to call me? Literally the second you hear from her.” He dictated the number to me and I wrote it on the flyleaf of my Spanish dictionary.

“I think you’re overreacting a bit, but yes, I will. Okay, bye Rex.”

I dropped the phone in my lap. Rex’s hysterical overprotectiveness annoyed as well as puzzled me. Biba was twenty-one, and from what I had seen, more capable of looking after herself than he was.

I sprawled on my bed, finally alone to let the events of the last twenty-four hours sink in. My friendship with Biba was cemented; my home was mine alone for the summer. I could go to the gym as often as I wanted, safe in the knowledge Simon wouldn’t be there. I could visit Biba every day: we would explore London together in a way I hadn’t before, seeking out the parties and clubs I’d missed out on, spending what would have been my rent money on wine and taxis and drugs. I could take her shopping, buy her some new clothes. I would be intrigued to see what she would buy when she didn’t have to forage through thrift stores for other people’s castoffs, and also curious to discover the kind of outfits I would put together for myself shopping under her tutelage. The phone on my lap shrilled out. I pressed the green button to answer.

“Karen, it’s okay, she’s back,” Rex said, as though we had been partners in hysteria. “She’s fine, she’s here, she came back to me.”

“Give me that,” I heard in the background. There was a tussle for the telephone. When Biba’s voice came on the line it was as cool and reassuring as a glass of water.

“I’m so sorry he did that,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

“What? Yes, just really embarrassed. Fucking . . . Rex has called
literally
everyone I know. Nina leaving was a bit of a shock and I got a bit . . . het up. It’s fine, though. Listen, we’re having a leaving dinner for her on Thursday. Will you come?”

It was the evening before my German literature exam, a three-hour, hand-cramping paper on which 5 percent of my final results rested. I said yes.

After I folded the antenna back into the body of the telephone, I still wanted an excuse not to leave my room, and the digital clock on my bedside table gave me one: the green numbers told me that it was 8:05. If I called my parents now, the conversation would fall neatly into the gap between two soap operas that punctuated their weekday evenings. I pushed the usual numbers and there was the usual fuss as my father took possession of the downstairs telephone in the living room while my mother ran into the kitchen to talk to me on the extension. I sometimes wondered if, apart from when my father was at work, this was the only time they were ever in different rooms.

“I’m going to spend this summer in London,” I told them. “I’ve been asked to do some tutoring in the languages department.” It didn’t occur to either of them that there would be no students to teach during the summer. It was the first time I had ever exploited their absolute ignorance of the university system and term times, and my guilt at doing so was alleviated by a kind of impatience with them for being such easy dupes. “Tutoring,” said my mother. “My daughter, a lecturer! Well done, love. That’s amazing.” The ping of a kitchen timer summoned her away from the telephone and left me alone with my father.

“Karen, love, I worry about you,” he said in the soft voice only my mother and I ever heard.

“I’m fine. I’ve got loads of work to do.”

“That’s the problem. You work all the time. You know your mother and I are very proud of you, you don’t need to work any harder. If you need money, you can always ask us. You could have taken this summer off to just relax and do something for yourself.”

The fact that this was exactly what I intended to do compounded my guilt.

“You’ll be out in the world of work soon, and then you’ll never have a long holiday like this again,” he said. He cleared his throat. “You’re only twenty, love. You’re an old head on young shoulders, you always have been, but give yourself a break. Every young person should have one summer they look back on for the rest of their lives. Fall in love. Go and see some live music, have a proper holiday.” I flopped forward onto my bed and steeled myself for another of my dad’s homilies about the summer of ’75, his last of freedom before my mother’s pregnancy changed his life forever. He heard my sigh and changed his mind. “I’m just saying. There’s no rush to work. Even me and your mum had a long hot summer.”

I tried to imagine my parents being young, crazy in love, dancing in dirty houses, swallowing strange tablets from strange men, sick and dizzy with excitement with one foot on either side of the threshold of a new world. But I couldn’t imagine their feelings or experiences having the depth or color of mine. They were just my parents; a young couple, the same age I was then, but with a baby on the way, and a mortgage and a lifetime of work and soap operas stretching out ahead of them. Mr. and Mrs. Everyman. People who come from nowhere.

The white car is outside the house for the third time this week. I had never seen it before Rex came home and I am not imagining it now. It is conspicuous by its cleanliness and its size. A white Nissan Micra, especially one so clean, is not the kind of car that people drive around here, where you can go for miles without encountering a single traffic light and the hazards are hairpin turns and mud and floods and slow-moving trucks that disgorge loose onions onto unsuspecting windshields. This is a boxy little car belonging to someone who drives in town, who prioritizes parking and fuel economy over horsepower and tire grip. I think that the figure in the driver’s seat is a woman, although I cannot be sure. I do know that the silhouette is writing something down. The head is bent in concentration and occasionally I see a clipboard or file rest on the steering wheel while notes are made. If that’s not proof it’s a journalist, what is? He or she parks in a slightly different place every time, but that won’t fool anyone. In the country, a new car is as reliable an indicator of an outsider as the stranger who walks into the village pub and hushes every table. The conclusion is inescapable that Rex is being watched, that we are being watched. What was that quote that Biba once used to tease Guy with when he had had too much to smoke and was convinced the drug squad had cameras in the woods? “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

It sounds stupid, but entire days go by when I forget that Rex is a convicted murderer. Men like him will almost always leave in their wake someone who wants to avenge a death, and Rex has two against his name. The circle of devastation fans out further than we can see. I can conjure only the known bereaved. I think for a moment of the children and try to calculate their ages now. What have they been told? Do they know everything or are they like Alice, drip-fed details until they are judged old enough to know it all? They will not yet be independent enough to seek any real revenge, and neither are they old enough to drive. But there must be others touched by the deaths, others whose identities we could not begin to guess at. Or perhaps our persecutor is someone he met in prison? I can’t see Rex deliberately offending anyone, but I know from TV and film that everyone has to side with someone on the inside and that it’s often the weakest, most passive inmates who inadvertently choose the wrong protector. I have always kept Alice away from any films that depict life in jail and wonder if perhaps I should have avoided them myself.

Maybe someone followed us back from the prison. Perhaps there are people who do just that, who lurk outside the gates and follow people on to their new lives, waiting until the time is right to blackmail them. Who would blackmail us? We have nothing to give. This house is still heavily mortgaged, and unlike neighboring towns closer to the sea, this part of Suffolk is not so fashionable that I am sitting on a great deal of equity. If not blackmail, then we might be threatened with violence. That I know I could not bear. While it is not true to say that I have seen a lifetime of violence, it is true to say that I have seen enough violence to last me a lifetime. I had been protected from brutality, I had never seen blood that wasn’t my own until that night.

Asking Rex if there is anyone with a grudge against him is not something I want to do, but I am far from relieved when Alice beats me to it.

“Will we be seeing any of your friends from prison?” she says over dinner one evening. She has made her mashed potatoes into a little cake and is feathering the surface with her fork. It’s an attempt to look casual and disinterested but I know that she only loses her appetite and plays with her food when something is really worrying her.

“Friends?” says Rex, as though pronouncing a new word in a foreign language for the first time.

“Yes. Did you make any friends? Like in
The Shawshank Redemption
?”

“Where did you see that?” I snap. Even my parents, who bend most of my rules when she is in their care, carefully monitor what she is allowed to watch.

“At Sophie’s,” replies Alice. “She’s got a TV with a built-in DVD player in her room. And she’s got her ears pierced.”

“I didn’t really make any friends, no,” says Rex. “Nobody that I’ll be seeing again, anyway.”

Alice suddenly becomes serious.

“What about enemies?” she asks. “Have you got any enemies who are coming after you?” There is a wobble in her voice and the tip of her nose has turned pink, always a sign that she is damming up tears. She frowns down at her food. She has lined up all her baked beans around the edge of her plate so that they look like a child’s plastic necklace swimming in sauce.

“Why do you ask?” I say, trying not to let my tone become as sharp as my panic. “Has someone said something? Have you seen something? Tell me.” Alice shakes her head and looks to Rex for reassurance.

“No one’s coming after us,” he says. “No one’s out to get me. I’m home now. It’s over.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Rex’s guarantee is good enough for Alice. She clears her plate and then steals a sausage from mine. I have lost my appetite.

Later, I do the dishes while Rex reads Alice a story. Before he came home, we had long abandoned the bedtime routine of turning back the sheets and being tucked into them, of storybooks and night lights, but they both seem to derive real comfort from this babyish ritual. I don’t hear him creep up behind me over the rush of the tap, and when an arm encircles my waist, I flinch. The glass of wine that he was carrying in his other hand is flung back in his face, and when I turn around Pinot Grigio is dripping from his eyelashes.

“Hey,” he says, wiping himself with a dishtowel, “it’s only a glass of wine.”

“Sorry.” I am rigid with tension.

“What’s happened to you, Karen?” he says, his hands unclawing my own. “You used to be so calm and comfortable and now you’re all twitching curtains, snapping at Alice, jumping every time the phone rings . . .”