The Poison Tree (20 page)

“As what?” he said. “I haven’t got any skills. I haven’t got any qualifications.”

“None at all?”

“I dropped out of school when I was fifteen to look after Biba,” he said.

“Don’t you ever resent that?” I said. It helped to explain why Biba’s career was so important to Rex. If she did not make it as an actress, the failure would be his as well as hers. The value of formal education had been so impressed upon me that I could not imagine giving mine up for anyone, no matter how much I loved them.

“Resent what? No. I hated school,” he said. “Well, my mum kind of put it in my head that exams weren’t important because I wouldn’t have to work if I didn’t want to—that my dad would always look after us. Actually I didn’t mind the academic stuff, I quite liked lessons, but there was so much emphasis on sports, and the other boys . . . I didn’t exactly have lots of friends.” Had Rex
ever
had any friends of his own? Everyone I had met so far, even Nina, his lover, had been drawn to the house through Biba. Perhaps he too was pondering the bleakness of his social situation because after a short pause he returned to his default topic of conversation, home improvement. “Of course, we’re lucky in that there isn’t really that much major structural work to do. Knocking the ground floor through to make it a kitchen-diner is the biggest job, and the supporting wall is already reinforced. The only real challenge is how we’re going to fit a bathroom in that attic level where your room is. Actually, I’d like your opinion on that. Do you think an en suite—”

“Okay, that’s it,” I said, to snuff out this soliloquy. “We’re going to find her.”

The backstage area was behind a black door with a steel handle in a corridor near the lobby, between the men’s and women’s restrooms. It smelled like a school gymnasium changing room and gave directly onto the stage. I looked out into the dim auditorium, trying to work out what it was about that sea of faces that actors craved so much. Even with it empty I felt on show, exposed, as though I was about to be found out for a crime I couldn’t name but knew I was guilty of. I once heard someone say that everyone lives in fear of being “found out,” that all you have to do is tell them that you know their secret often enough and paranoia will make them confess. I didn’t believe that to be true—not everyone, I thought, harbors a secret so terrible that they can be made to confess in that way. I reasoned that it was just a quirk of human nature, an abstract and innate paranoia, like fear of the dark or hating the sound of nails on a blackboard. That was before I had a past worth covering. Now, I read accusation and knowledge into the most innocuous everyday encounters.

Directly behind the stage was another corridor, with a few tiny, open dressing rooms misted with perfume and hairspray and cigarette smoke but empty of people. We had a look in the other corridor, navigated the concrete angles, and by the time we came right back out into the bar it was midnight and the last of the glasses were being loaded into the dishwasher.

“The bar’s closed,” said the pockmarked teenager behind the Formica counter.

“Are you sure there’s no one left in the theater? Anywhere in the building?” I said to him.

“They’re doing the final check now,” he replied, sliding the shutter down to end our discussion. The lights were extinguished with a finalizing click and the dark squeezed us out of the theater and into the street.

Rex was starting to twitch, his brow bisected by a deep vertical groove.

“It can’t be good news,” he said in the voice I’d heard on the telephone the evening he overreacted to Biba’s two-hour disappearance. He put both hands up to smooth down his hair. He had forgotten he’d had it cut that day, and looked at his hands as if he expected his fingers to be laced with clumps of it. “Right, let’s think about this logically. If she hasn’t got an agent, then she needs to be at home in case one calls. There’s still a chance, isn’t there? Or maybe she’s gone off somewhere. What shall we do?” He looked at me expectantly.

“I don’t know, Rex,” I said. “She’s your sister. She’s also twenty-one.”

Impatience at Rex’s panic was eclipsing my own dismay that, on one of the most important nights of her life, Biba had not come immediately to me, to seek my opinion or to share her news.

“I’m going back to the car,” I said.

“I’m not leaving without her!” he almost sobbed.

“I meant, to look for her.”

The car was outside some apartments a block away from the theater, and Biba sat on the hood. She was still fully made up but wearing an oversized man’s shirt as a dress, belted at the middle with a scarf, her legs crossed underneath her. She was babbling away to three men who stood around the vehicle, stopping Rex and me in our tracks. Light from the streetlamps above distorted their features and gave their faces an eerie, menacing cast. One of them, the tallest of the three, with scruffy blond hair, looked familiar. He was the only one actually listening to Biba. The other two I had never seen before. One was stocky and swarthy with buzz-cut hair, while the other had a ponytail and a ring through his eyebrow. A leather lead was wrapped around his wrist; on the other end was a white pit bull terrier, a solid, violent-looking little brute, unmuzzled and straining in our direction. They exuded the kind of danger that I could tell Biba found thrilling but that I found simply unpleasant and uncomfortable. I had the feeling that they might actually get into my car and drive off and, worse, that if they did so, I would probably let them.

Biba saw us and called our names excitedly. As if by prior arrangement, her companions receded into the shadows and began a muttered discussion.

“Where were you?” cried Rex, no anger but only relief in his voice. “I was worried sick!”

“Well done,” I said, when I was close enough for her to hear me and then, “How did it go? Are you okay?”

“I got one!” she said, clapping her hands and sliding off the hood. The name and the agency she gave meant nothing to me, but the other actors the man represented were familiar, their names recognizable from regional detective shows and hospital dramas.

“When did you find out?” Rex and I asked simultaneously.

“Literally as soon as the curtain fell. He just came straight up and said he’d like to represent me. Fucking . . . it’s the best-case scenario. No waiting, no tension, nothing.”

Not for her, but for me and Rex, three hours in the bar, the wait had been interminable.

“And I couldn’t have done it without you,” she said to me. “Thank you so, so much.” She left a port wine kiss on my cheek. “I’m sorry I didn’t come and find you,” she said. “I got chatting to Guy and lost track of time. But I’ve been waiting for you here. You’ve been ages.”

“Guy?” I said. The name was familiar but I couldn’t conjure a face.

“You remember Guy. Can I bum a cigarette, darling?”

The blond man muttered to his companions and grazed knuckles with them in a careless handshake before they shuffled into the night, the dog alone giving a backward glance.

Up close, I knew exactly who he was; the mysterious benefactor who had given me the free E on Biba’s birthday. Guy reached into one of the many pockets of his voluminous khaki jacket—it was far too heavy for such a hot night, and I wondered what he kept in those various compartments—and pulled out a packet of Marlboro Lights.

“Thank you, darling,” she said as he lit it for her. “I was
dying
without my cigarettes.” Biba was always dying. Dying of thirst, dying of boredom, dying for a cigarette. It is a turn of phrase I shudder to recall.

Guy grunted an acknowledgment of our presence. I wondered if he ever spoke, or appeared in daylight.

“Guy came to see the show,” said Biba, “and he’s going to come back to the house for a smoke, aren’t you?”

I waited for Rex’s protest but instead he held out his hands to me.

“I haven’t had much to drink at all,” he said to me. I tossed him the keys. When he unlocked the car door, even in the relative cool air of the night, it was like standing next to an opened oven.

“You’ll have to go in the front, mate,” said Rex to Guy. I winced: Rex saying “mate” was like hearing your dad pretend to like dance music in front of your friends. Biba and I pressed together in the backseat while Guy and Rex extended the front seats as far back as they could go. Neither man spoke throughout the drive. Rex tapped impatiently on the steering wheel at the Swiss Cottage traffic lights and then climbed up Frognal in too high a gear before cutting through the heath. There, a breeze finally found its way through our open windows. Biba threaded her fingers through mine and spoke in a whisper.

“I’m getting lucky tonight and no mistake,” she said. She let go of my hand and began to stroke the back of Guy’s neck with her left hand. “I’m glad I’ve got you to distract Rex. He can be a bit funny about things like this. You can stay for a bit of a smoke with us, but you don’t mind making yourself scarce afterwards, do you?”

Rex parked the car on the pavement directly outside the house, right tires perched on the double yellow lines.

“Remind me to move that first thing in the morning,” he said, before thundering ahead to the house. He left the front door open for me but let it swing back as Biba and Guy staggered up the steps behind. It would have slammed shut in their faces if the faulty lock had not caused the door to bounce open against its jamb. They had already established themselves as a single physical unit. Their bodies were as entwined as they could be and still walk, as though they were entering some kind of three-legged race.

In the Velvet Room Rex lit the candles while Guy lay with Biba on a balding corduroy beanbag that had once been orange. I could see that he might hold attractions for her that went beyond the lure of free drugs. He was extraordinarily good-looking in an obvious, immediate, almost intimidating way. Unlike the Capels’ beauty, Guy’s did not steal up on you slowly: it hit you in the face with all the subtlety of a cola commercial. Muscles rippled beneath evenly burnished skin, blue eyes and full lips dominated a face that was saved from femininity by a strong brow and solid jawline. A feathering of blond hair curled around his face like daisy petals closing for the evening. He had finally taken off his jacket. Underneath he wore a kind of undershirt with the number 66 printed on the front. His upper arm and shoulder were covered with overlapping tattoos. They were pancultural designs: an anchor, the word
Mum
etched in a scroll beneath a heart, Chinese letters, Maori symbols, and Celtic knots, needlework representing hours of pain. Biba’s dark little features tilted toward his face like a sunflower to the rays, and every time she shifted closer to him, tiny polystyrene beans bled through a tear in the sack and rolled around on the floor. Her dark eyes wore an expression I’d never seen before. Not love, not humor, there was none of the intimacy that she reserved for Rex, and for me. They sparkled with something less substantial but more compelling.

Rex was flipping noisily through a selection of uncased CDs that had fanned on the floor beneath the stereo until I selected one at random and thrust it into his hands. Obediently, he placed it in the tray and the speakers broadcast the synthesized strains of something slow and unsyncopated. Guy began to roll a joint without taking his hand off Biba’s thigh. A voice inside my head that wasn’t mine screamed,
Get your fucking hands off her
. Across the room I saw Rex’s obvious discomfort and wondered if he’d heard it too.

“So . . .” exhaled Rex. “Here we all are.” The silence hadn’t been awkward until he said that but it was then. Even stilted conversation, I reasoned, must be better than this.

“Herbs or chemicals?” Guy said to Biba, holding up two tiny plastic bags with Ziploc seals, one containing what looked like dried basil, the other a white powder. Whatever it was there was an abundant supply, a whole party’s worth, but it was clear that the offer didn’t extend to Rex and me. He was talking about the provenance of his drugs the way some people enthuse about the vineyard their wine is grown in, telling Biba that the marijuana had come all the way from Thailand. I wondered what Guy’s background was. The glottal stops and dropped
h
’s that flecked his speech sounded like an affectation to me. Round and expensive vowels slipped through the wide net of his London drawl.

“Going for a piss,” he said suddenly and slunk out, taking his jacket with him.

“What do you think?” she said. “Isn’t he gorgeous? I think I might have found a new partner in crime here.”

“What does he actually do, apart from take drugs, sell drugs, and talk about drugs?” said Rex. “Has he got a proper job?”

“You can talk, dole boy,” retorted Biba. “Anyway, when did we start demanding to see people’s pay stubs before we let them cross your precious threshold?”

“I don’t want a dealer hanging around the house,” said Rex as he swept up beanbag stuffing with his hands and piled the little balls in a ceramic ashtray. “I didn’t like the look of his friends, either.”

“It’s just little bits, here and there, for friends. He’s hardly Carlos the Jackal. Don’t roll your eyes at me.” She passed me the joint and I balanced it between my first and middle fingers before taking a drag. I was learning that the trick of achieving pleasant befuddlement without nausea was to hold the smoke in my lungs for no more than a second. This was not a problem when faced with the bitter, acrid taste of Guy’s cannabis.

“It’s just that I really don’t think it’s a good idea to get involved with him, sweetheart,” said Rex. “He’s always off his head. Is he someone you want around you right now? This is the crucial time we’ve been gearing up to for years. You got an agent, what, four hours ago? You should be putting all your energy into your work.”

Biba stuck her chin in the air. Her stage makeup was starting to cake at the corners of her nose and mouth, and her heavy black eye shadow was starting to flake and settle in the feathery creases around her eyes.