The Poison Tree (21 page)

“Actually, someone like Guy could really help me develop as an actress. I can’t only mix with nice middle-class drama students. I mean, it’s not like every audition will be for a costume drama. There’s a whole other side of society they don’t teach you about in drama school that I haven’t got any experience of. Guy has access to these people, real people. Even Tris and Jo are only playing at slumming it . . .”

I have often wondered whether Guy, who came back to lie down beside her then, overheard that remark. It wouldn’t have made much difference in the moment, nothing she could have said would have dampened his desire for her. But he could have heard, and if he wasn’t bright enough to grasp the concept of method acting or the implications that accompanied it he would certainly have understood what she meant by the phrase “slumming it,” even if, as I suspected, he was little more than a class tourist himself. Would it have had any bearing on what he did later, the stupid thing he did that changed everything? Probably not. Even now, years later, I am still trying to look for clues that might shift the blame somewhere else.

Their lust locked us out. His hands were on her body, and she had her legs wrapped around his waist. I felt a stab of something more than the usual jealousy of anyone who got closer to Biba than I could: a pang of nostalgia for something I had never experienced. Their kiss grew louder, making a noise like someone glugging olive oil into a bowl of pasta. The sound was as repellent as the sight was entrancing.

Rex had refilled his wineglass and was already halfway up the staircase. I couldn’t resist one look back into the Velvet Room before I closed the door behind me. They had managed to pry their bodies apart and Guy was crouching in front of the coffee table. He had tipped a pile of fine white powder from a folded square of paper onto the surface of a CD, using a credit card to chop it into skinny lines while Biba poured more wine.

“Don’t worry about Guy,” I said to the lonely figure silhouetted in his bedroom doorway. “He’s just a good-looking thug. She only likes him for novelty value. We’ll probably never see him after tonight.”

“In my experience the girls go for the good-looking thug over the nice guy every time. Still, you might be right.” He pressed the heels of his hands deep into the sockets of his eyes. “I don’t think I’ll wait up for her tonight. I think I’ll try to get some sleep for once.”

The following hours were fitful. The wine I had drunk had made me sleepy but the joint made my heart beat loudly and irregularly in my ears. I didn’t sleep deeply but struggled to wake up from uncomfortable dreams. The Velvet Room had turned into a stage, with Biba’s alter ego singing her German song as her real self and the rest of us stretched out on the floor. Our clothes tangled around us and floated off us like seaweed and our bodies came together. There were no words. Biba was in the center of the orgy: sometimes she was kissing Guy while Rex stroked my skin, sometimes it was her brother’s face she held on to while she searched his mouth with her tongue and sometimes it was my body she threaded herself through like a vine. Guy and I were on the verge of congress in my dream when his voice, his real voice, broke into it. I could hear him, three floors below me, rattling the French windows and shouting at Biba.

“Come on,” he said. “Help me with the door, you dozy bitch.” Then his tone changed. “Oh, fucking hell. Wake up! Wake up! Shit . . .” In the silence that followed, I think he was trying to remember Rex’s and my names, because when his call for help came it was an impersonal but urgent “Oi!”

Rex was already on the landing by the time I made it down, his cheek pillow-printed and his eyes pink and blinking. He still wore, or had just changed back into, the clothes he’d been wearing earlier that night. I rushed behind him into the Velvet Room. Guy was outlined through the windowpane, struggling to turn the rusty handle and support Biba at the same time. Her body dangled limply from her left arm, which was slung over Guy’s shoulder. A yellow light suddenly illuminated them from the left: a switch had been thrown somewhere in Tom Wheeler’s house, another black mark against us.

Biba was barely conscious. Her makeup now looked like a death mask, the corners of her mouth were encrusted with vomit and her eyes rolled back in her head. Rex scooped her into his arms and carried her as far as the landing, where he dropped to his knees and held her in a pietà embrace, her head lolling back and her legs outstretched. Her feet were bare.

“What happened?” I asked. “What did you give her?”

“Only a bit of charlie.” Guy was defensive. “She said she’d done it before. I didn’t know she was going to flip out. She fell over while we were in the woods.”

Guy’s fly had been undone and he fastened it and checked his belt buckle.

“You bastard!” spat Rex. I sank down next to him and tried to pull Biba’s dress farther down over her hips and her underwear farther up. “If anything happens to her, I’ll bloody kill you. I mean it. I’ll kill you!”

“Hey,” I said, stroking Biba’s hair and gripping Rex’s forearm. “It’s okay. I’ve got you both. Don’t worry. We’ll get her to the emergency room or something. She’s going to be fine. We’re all going to be fine.” I spoke calmly even as a hot geyser of panic rose inside me and scalded my throat. “I think you’d better go,” I said to Guy.

“Glad to,” he drawled, walking backward down the stairs away from our panicked little tableau. “It’s not my fault she can’t handle herself, man.”

His words were defiant but he stumbled on his way to the door and his hands were trembling so much he could hardly undo the chain.

I
SEE ALL OF them all the time, impossible sightings in the most unpredictable places. Even the bit players in the tragedy, people whom I met only once or twice, loom in and out of my consciousness, their half-remembered faces reconstructed in my imagination. They lurk everywhere, ready to manifest themselves whenever a certain paranoid mood moves in.

A couple of years ago, I thought I saw Nina and her children in a shopping center. The woman dripped with silver jewelry and jangled when she walked. She had a little girl balanced on her hip while a boy pulled at his mother’s layered skirts and circled her like a maypole dancer. Of course I knew it couldn’t have been them: Inigo and Gaia must be young teenagers now and these children were little more than toddlers. And Nina, with her love of markets and craft fairs and her hatred of mass-produced goods and the chain stores that sell them, would never have patronized that shiny, out-of-town mall. But this didn’t stop me crying out and stumbling toward her, ready to duck into the arms of the only person who might have understood, the only other person who knew them like I did. The child in her arms heard the thud and rustle as my shopping bags hit the floor and turned to stare. I looked away before he had a chance to alert his mother.

Guy I see less frequently, only when I see his likeness I shrink from it. He too is an archetype: the youth tribe to which he belonged has evolved little in the last decade, even to my out-of-touch eye. You still see them everywhere, these rich boys who dress like they are poor in faded denim and designer tracksuit tops, wearing sneakers that will never know the speed or impact for which they were designed. Pub trainers, Simon used to call them. As with Nina and her children, it never occurs to me that he would have evolved, had a haircut, or bought some new clothes.

Biba of course is everywhere. I will transpose her image onto pretty much any white woman between the ages of eighteen and thirty. I look for her less now than I used to.

Some of the sightings have not been phantom. I did see Rachael, Biba’s actress friend, four years ago when I was taking Alice to the theater in Covent Garden. Her peroxide crop had been cultivated into a shining wheat-blond drape, but her face remained exactly the same. It was as though having fought against her good looks for so long she had finally decided to accept them with the kind of resignation most of us reserve for weight gain or gray hair. She was arm in arm with an older man who wore a white silk scarf and black leather gloves. A miniature dog tucked under her other arm sniffed the air, and Alice cried out that the lady had a rat in her handbag. Rachael looked at Alice but apparently saw no trace of her former friends in my little girl’s face.

Tris and Jo I have also seen, at the remove of television and along with most of the rest of the country. The documentary series about their attempts to build a carbon-neutral, off-grid, self-sufficient life in the Scottish Highlands has been the hit television show of the season. The natural warmth that made them impossible to dislike translates onto the screen, and they have retained their ability to educate without preaching. They have a brood of four or five free-range children who are as blond and bronzed and scruffy as their parents. I bought the book that accompanied the television series: it is hidden spine-backward on a high bookshelf, ready to bring out and present to Rex when he is ready, or when I am. The discovery that they once lived at the Highgate house would be a journalist’s dream, but I don’t worry too much about that. Tris and Jo never left any kind of footprint, carbon or otherwise, anywhere they lived, and their zero trace approach extended to money and forms and documents. They had no more been official residents in Queenswood Lane than I had. I sometimes even wonder if they know what happened two months after they left. I picture them living without TV or newspapers. They famously spent a year touring the UK in a gypsy caravan while Jo was pregnant with their first child, who looks about the same age as Alice. Perhaps they were already on the road when Rex first made the news and they remained there until after he was sentenced. Or perhaps they do know, and are as keen as anyone not to publicize the connection. Perhaps they talk about Rex and Biba and speculate on what happened, what led to it all. I bet they never wonder what happened to me. In a haunted life like mine it’s ironic that I am the faintest, most hazy ghost of them all. My face and personality will have been forgotten by now if they were ever remembered in the first place. Zero trace.

I should not have been at the wheel as we sped down the hill to the Whittington Hospital, but Rex was not sober either and he held his sister in his arms. She was half-conscious now, her head on his shoulder, and her feet, dirty from the wood, rested in my lap. She smelled of vomit and something else I didn’t want to identify. I ran a red light at the deserted Archway traffic circle and parked the car untidily and illegally in a residents’ space directly opposite the hospital. Rex was out of the car almost before I had time to put the hand brake on.

“Are you responsible for her?” asked the paramedic who interrupted his cigarette break to help Rex arrange Biba on a stretcher and carry her through into the emergency room.

“Yes,” said Rex. “I mean, I didn’t give her the drugs but I think I know what she’s taken. She’s my sister. Is she going to be okay?”

A nurse took him to reception where he leaned on the counter with his head in his hands. Biba was swallowed up by a cubicle, sectioned off from the corridor by a swish of curtain violently patterned with green and pink swirls. If you didn’t feel sick before you came in here, you would after a few moments staring at that print.

I sat on the floor in the long rubber corridor outside the cubicle with my legs crossed. It was the first time I had been in a hospital since my birth and I was not impressed. Instead of the whitewashed Cubist paradise I had always imagined, the walls were mint green. There were no baseboards in the corridor where I sat; the floors curved upward to join the walls in what was probably an innovation designed to make cleaning easier, but dust balls and human hair blew along on the convex curve. A thick peach-colored ridge ran along the corridor like a chair rail. It looked like it was going to be made of a soft padded material, but when I touched it it was hard plastic, and I wondered what its purpose was. The rattle of carts, the clatter of metal implements, the yowling of patients, and the low rumble of conversation in the waiting room and among the staff made it impossible for me to hear what was being said on the other side of the curtain where Biba was. Somewhere behind another curtain, a man screamed.

Rex dropped to a squatting position beside me and stayed there, apparently unable to commit to sitting on the floor.

“They won’t let me go in, but they’re going to come out in a minute,” he said. “If anything happens to her, I’m going to have that Guy charged with everything . . . murder . . . assault . . . dealing . . . I should never have let her bring him home.”

The white-coated medic who emerged from Biba’s cubicle looked like he had been up for days: black half-moons cupped heavy eyes and I wondered how long he had been at work.

“She hasn’t taken an overdose of anything,” he said. “Not in the way you think, although she says she had a line or two of cocaine that would have made her throw up if she’s not used to it. She’s simply extremely drunk, and possibly concussed, and there’s a gash on her thigh that looks as though it might be contaminated with rust. We’re going to put her on a drip to rehydrate her and keep her in to check that the bang on the head isn’t going to give us any problems. She also needs to have stitches on her leg and a tetanus shot.”

“We’ll stay here,” said Rex immediately.

I hadn’t cried for weeks but the thought of spending the night here under the flickering strip lights caused tears to sting the inside corners of my eyes. They were tears of self-pity and exhaustion as well as of anxiety. But I blinked them back, and sat with Rex in half-silence for the second time that night, drifting between the cafeteria and the corridor, watching the light change every time we refueled on coffee. At ten o’clock in the morning, a different doctor told us that we could take her home now. Her face, when they finally let us see her, was a bad actress’s approximation of repentance.

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I just wanted to go to sleep but they kept waking me up to check I wasn’t concussed. I’m going to sleep forever when I get in.”