The Poison Tree (16 page)

“Weather report,” her voice fell through the hatch. “It’s a beautiful day. Let’s go out. Let’s have a Sunday, like normal people do.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “I’m perfectly normal.” I turned my pillow over to the cool side and closed my eyes again.

“Employed people, then. We can go and have a nice pub lunch and read some papers and then, at around seven o’clock, we can start to grumble about having to go back to work tomorrow.” Her enthusiasm infused the most mundane activities with magic and it was contagious: with Biba, everything felt like you were doing it for the first time, no matter how often you’d done it with other people.

I sat up in bed, my face catching the angled sunbeam. I was reminded that I had serious work to do in clearing the backlog of fun I had accumulated during my studious past.

Biba dropped beside me with a thud that was followed seconds later by a loud crack from the foot of the wooden bed frame.

“Have you asked Rex?” I said, half-hoping she would say that he was busy.

“I’ve
told
him, yes.” She laughed, a shrill descending arpeggio, amused by the idea that Rex’s time was his own to spend. “Now, hurry up and have your shower. I want to get going while the sun’s shining.”

I don’t know why she was in such a hurry to catch the midday sun. Her skin and Rex’s were protected by an almost constant canopy of leaves, and they treated a walk on the open heath like some kind of desert mission, smothering each other with gloops of high-factor sunblock. With his sleeves rolled up, I saw that Rex was less puny than I’d imagined; biceps bobbed like Adam’s apples in his arms. He slipped the straps of Biba’s dress down and covered her shoulders, using his thumb to rub the white cream into the notch in her collarbone. She stood on tiptoe to smooth it into his cheeks. In reflected profile their likeness was more uncanny than ever. Rex’s eyes returned her smile: something about the proximity of his face to hers animated him, like electricity that arcs from one cable to another. I turned my eyes away from this rather unsettling mutual massage to wipe the smears from my sunglasses. By the time they’d finished, the cream had left a pearlized sheen on their bodies, making them look paler than ever.

Leaving the house was an adventure in itself, a scrabble for loose change and lost purses. Rex checked the front door three times to see if the latch had closed properly before we could set off and would have checked it a fourth if Biba hadn’t stood on the bottom step, arms folded, forbidding him to go back.

If she had instigated our day out, he was our tour guide, striding ahead with his hands in his pockets. Traffic fumes formed tiny black beads that clung to the fine hairs on his forearms, already clotted with zinc from the sunblock. A sweat patch appeared between his shoulder blades and I could taste the salt on my own upper lip.

We walked up North Hill, a new route for me into the heart of Highgate village. The hill looked steeper than it was because of the tall, tilting buildings that lined it: elevated by slanting, cracked walls, the houses and apartment blocks seemed to lean inward and gave the wide street a dizzying and claustrophobic feel. Scaffolding at regular intervals confirmed this sensation of sinking and subsidence. I could imagine millions of pounds’ worth of bricks suddenly sliding down the hill like lava.

The pubs were already beginning to throng with people enjoying prelunch drinks. We passed a dozen thirsty dogs collapsed around the ankles of their owners, pink tongues skimming the pavements, the lucky ones drinking water from plastic containers and a border collie tentatively licking a puddle of spilled beer.

Had I been on my own with Biba, I would have suggested that we take our place among them, staking out a corner table from which to pass conjecture on the other people in companionable silence. Our great expedition to the heath would have turned, like so many of our other truncated excursions, into an afternoon’s dedicated people watching, well lubricated by a bottle of good red. But Rex’s presence stopped me making such a suggestion. While I was confident that he had the patience needed to watch people come and go, I doubted very much that he had the requisite imagination.

By the time we reached the heath my own thirst had swelled my tongue. After a sharp left onto a gravel drive, Kenwood House loomed up so suddenly that it felt as though the house had rounded the corner on us, not the other way around. Sunshine bounced off its white walls. Rex relaxed his pace to a stroll as we walked around the perimeter of the house: an acre of sloping ground led down to the ponds that separated the manicured lawns of Kenwood from the scrubland of the heath. Groups of people like clusters of daisies gemmed the green grass.

“I never knew that London could be so beautiful,” I said to no one in particular. I detoured from Rex’s route when I saw a sign for a bathroom and dashed into it, jumping the line and glugging greedily from the drinking fountain, closing my eyes against the straw-haired, red-cheeked woman reflected in its shiny steel. Outside, Biba was giggling manically while Rex stood a few meters apart, arms folded and brow knitted. What’s happened? I thought. Surely they can’t have had a row in the time it took for me to drink and run my wrists under the cold water? But I wasn’t imagining the change in atmosphere. As soon as Rex saw me, he stalked off quickly, shooting anxious glances over his shoulder. Biba sauntered behind, a snigger on her lips.

Rex led us along a dizzying zigzag of paths and slipped through a low door in a mossy brick wall into a walled garden carpeted with green and silver leaves. The change in air was as sudden as the difference between indoors and outside: thick and heavy to the point of cloying with the smell of lavender and rosemary. Rex gave one final backward glance and then sank onto a patch of lawn, his back to the wall, scowling at his sister. The reason for our scurried departure suddenly became evident as Biba tipped the contents of her bag out. Two croissants, a slice of cheesecake, a packaged salad, and bottles of water and fizzy drinks fell onto the grass. She looked at me in triumph, then gave her bag another shake: a Mini Milk ice pop slid out. A string of liquefied ice cream oozed through a hole in the wrapper and pooled around it.

“When did you get all that?” I said to her.

“She stole it,” said Rex. “While you were in the restroom. She went into the canteen and she stole the lot.”

“I had to,” said Biba. “We’re local. We shouldn’t pay these tourist prices for this.” She held up a bottle of organic cola, beaded with condensation, like it was an exhibit in an old-fashioned murder trial. “Two pounds fifty! Fucking outrageous,” she said, although I knew she happily spent twice that much a day on cigarettes.

“If they’d caught you . . .” Rex put his head in his hands.

“But they didn’t . . .” she replied.

“But if they had . . .” he pressed on. I twisted open the bottle of cola. Sticky brown bubbles showered everywhere.

“This place is like a maze,” I said. “I feel like Alice when she went through the looking glass and whichever path she took, she ended up farther away from where she was going.”

“I loved the Alice books,” said Biba dreamily. “When I was little I tried to climb through a mirror in my mum’s room and fell off the mantelpiece. Look.” She showed me a lightning bolt of white scar on her inner elbow and shoved a croissant into her mouth.

“Me too,” I said. “My thing was rabbit holes. I was convinced that it was just a question of finding the right one and falling down it.”

Rex was trying, and failing, to flick away a marching line of ants that had decided to colonize the ice cream.

“She actually tried to get us to call her Alice when she was about seven,” he said. “She spent a whole summer wearing this filthy black headband and asking for a pet white rabbit.” His words brought a temporary truce and for a while we munched in silence.

“How come you know this place is here?” I asked him.

“I had to learn my way around here when I was younger,” said Rex, his face darkening. The ants had begun to crawl up his legs and he stood up to wash them off with water. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get going.”

We flitted in and out of light and shade as we crossed the heath. In the wooded areas my friends looked more silver than ever, literally sylvan as their skin glowed in the filtered sunlight. The ground was worn flat with footprints. Unlike in Queen’s Wood, where the trails were arbitrary and inconsistent, there were wide dirt tracks here, dozens of them crisscrossing the space like a huge cat’s cradle. I suddenly felt the urge to take to my heels and run in a way that I hadn’t for weeks, to test my lung capacity and work the muscles of my thighs until they shook. But I knew I’d never be able to orient myself alone. The infrequent maps and signposts we passed left me more, not less, confused about our whereabouts. We walked in single file, me following Rex, Biba trailing behind us, muttering dialogue from the play she was learning under her breath, occasionally stopping to repeat a line that she’d stumbled over.

When she was lagging almost out of sight, Rex and I waited for her to catch up to us next to a tree that had lost a limb. The fallen branch had hundreds of rings, too many to count, bordering a darker circle in the middle like the yolk of an egg. I explored the rotten wood with my toe, then turned my attention to the tree itself. Its leaves were fat glossy spikes and I plucked a few and held them to my nose. Before I could detect any aroma, Rex had slapped my hand away.

“Don’t eat it!” he yelped, an adolescent hiccup in his voice.

“Rex! What was that for?”

“It’s toxic! Don’t eat it!”

“Why would I want to eat it? I just wanted to know what it smelled like. Christ, Rex.” I looked for backup but Biba was still out of earshot, eyes on the path, lips mouthing her lines.

“I’m sorry,” he said, panic turned to contrition. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

He reached out to touch my hand where he had slapped it but I drew it away.

“You didn’t hurt me, you just shocked me,” I said. “Is it really poisonous? What is it, anyway? I’ve seen trees like this before, they’re everywhere. There’s one in the wood at home, near the fence.” It was the first time I had called his home my own, but this landmark utterance was lost on him.

“It’s a yew. They can be deadly. One mouthful can be enough to kill. Biba ate some leaves—off that tree by the fence, actually—when she was six. We thought she was going to die. She was sick for days.”

“Didn’t anyone warn her?”

“Oh, she knew exactly what it was, Mum had warned us both off it the day before,” said Rex. “She called it a poison tree.”

“So why did she do it?”

“Dad had just come back from a long shoot somewhere. I think it was her way of welcoming him home. She had a well-developed sense of drama even then.”

“Jesus,” I whistled, but Biba was on our heels now and I scanned the foliage for a change of subject. To Rex’s left grew a thick tree with indecipherable initials carved into its trunk a foot or two above our heads.

“Look at that,” I pointed.

“Ah, the mighty oak,” he said. “Can’t you tell from the leaves? Something you’ll find interesting about the oak, if you don’t know already . . .”

“Who are you, David Attenborough?” interrupted Biba. “Shut up, Rex. Karen’s only being polite, she doesn’t want to hear your nature ramble.”

His features assumed their version of repose: an expression of glum submission to his sister.

“Test me, Karen,” said Biba, as we emerged from the trees and began a steep climb up a sun-bleached hill. She began to sing her German song, loudly enough for passersby to stop and stare. I no longer had any need to correct her: she was word-perfect, if not quite pitch-perfect. She had dropped her voice an octave to achieve the Marlene Dietrich sound that she felt the song deserved. I wondered how her lungs, which I always pictured as child-sized, could project such a noise.

We stopped at the top of the hill, staring out to where the hills of Crystal Palace hid behind the river’s haze. Below us, the city huddled in a giant natural bowl. Now the London Eye must dominate that view of the city, but it wasn’t there in 1997. The Canary Wharf towers loomed at the left periphery, but Centrepoint and the Post Office Tower ruled the cityscape then.

“Look,” said Biba, pointing to a low-rise block that tugged at the skirt of the tallest tower. I pressed my cheek next to hers while I followed the direction of her finger and identified the unlovely buildings of Queen Charlotte’s College. She grabbed my hand. “That’s where we met.”

The narrow streets were clogged and claustrophobic after the air and space of the heath, and the crisp, cleansing sunshine I’d basked in on top of the hill now hung in a low pall and mingled with the other pollutants, turning the air to glue. The smell of freshly baked bread and sizzled garlic wafted from the delis and bakeries that jostled with the boutiques of Hampstead, but I could taste gasoline and diesel in the air, too. A pair of women pushing baby buggies walked abreast along the narrow pavement, forcing the three of us to walk single-file in the gutter. Their husbands, following five paces behind, gave us an apologetic cringe. The shabby pub Biba stopped at was a disappointing destination after our hike.

“Here we are!” she said with a flourish and a bow. The glaze had come off the ceramic tiles that covered the bottom half of the building. Although no sign swung from its upper story, the words THE MAGDALA were emblazoned across its threshold in tall black capitals. Dozens of drinkers crammed into the tiny beer garden, while a couple of rebellious types had taken pint glasses across the road to laze under the trees opposite.

“Oh God, not this one,” said Rex, but followed her in. The pub was as dark and empty inside as it was bright and crowded on the outside. Two rooms shared the same central bar, empty apart from an old man in a hat and a coat, sipping a murky brown pint. Enormous checkered, leaded windows with the occasional flourish of colored glass filtered the daylight and cast an eerie gloom at odds with the blazing sunshine we’d just stepped out of. Biba collapsed onto a pew. I sank into a chair beside her. The relief of taking the weight off my feet was instantly eclipsed by thirst.