The Poison Tree (22 page)

And how did she think we’d felt, forcing ourselves to stay awake, not knowing whether she would pull through?

When I saw how badly the car had been parked I was surprised that we had not been clamped or towed away. There was only a parking ticket inserted under the windshield wiper. Rex put it in his pocket and told me that he would take care of it, that it was the least he could do. If I had not been in a fit state to drive to the hospital, I was worse on the way home. I had sobered up but I was buckling under the weight of a tiredness I never knew existed, and the rush-hour traffic was clogging our route home. I drove through Highgate village, reasoning that although it was a less direct route, I wouldn’t get up enough speed to do any damage. Still, Rex twice had to point out pedestrians on the main street who would have ended up in the Whittington themselves if he hadn’t alerted me.

Biba stank of stale disinfectant, and I wondered if the hospital smell had permeated my hair and clothes too. She felt my tiny recoil when I helped her out of the car.

“I know . . . I know. I’m disgusting. I’m going to wash it off now. I think I’ve got sick in my hair.”

I heard her wince in the shower as the soap stung the stitches in her leg, stitches that she had been told not to get wet. While she washed, I stripped her bed. She had been smoking in it: tips of ash had been smeared into little gray comets on the sheets. I dressed the bed with fresh sheets and waited for her.

“Darling,” she said when she dripped back in, “that’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me. You’re the best friend I could wish for. I don’t deserve you.”

“Indeed you don’t,” I said. “Come here.” She laid her head on my lap and I combed her damp tendrils through with my fingers. The pad of wet hair cooled my thighs.

“They weren’t very nice to me in there,” she mumbled. “They knew it was an accident, that I was just another pisshead. They treat you completely differently when they think you mean it. They were lovely to me the last time.”

The evening had been a horrible inversion of the first, endless night I had spent at the house. Then, on the evening of Biba’s party, the more I tried to prolong the hours the more they turned into minutes and rushed by me. Again, the sleep I slipped into in the morning was fully clothed and grateful. I didn’t wake until three in the afternoon, when a threatened implosion in my abdomen reminded me that it had been twenty-four hours since I had last eaten. There was nothing in the kitchen apart from a bunch of browning bananas. I ate three and took the other two back up to bed with a pitcher of water.

There was a light snoring from Biba’s room but in Rex’s a noise that I thought was laughter told me that he was awake. My tiptoeing wasn’t subtle enough: he called my name in a hoarse whisper. He sat cross-legged in the middle of his immaculately made bed in his Rolling Stones T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, a cup of tea resting in the diamond-shaped space between his legs. His upper and lower teeth were exposed in a weird grin and he rocked back and forth. It took a few seconds to realize that it wasn’t laughter but tears. I had never seen a man cry before. It was fascinating and repulsive and pitiful in equal measure and I knew that I would say or do anything I could to stop him doing it.

“Would you like a banana?” I said. He batted away the proffered fruit.

“I thought I’d lost her,” he said through a sob. “I thought she was going to die.”

“Oh, Rex.” I sat down next to him. “Have you been to sleep at all?” He shook his head.

“I’m so tired,” he said, and I got the impression he wasn’t just talking about the last few hours. I didn’t have the words to soothe him so I held out my arms and he fell into them like a little boy. I inhaled his hair as I stroked it. Rex’s smell was like Biba’s but also his own, like a subtly different blend of the same fragrance. His scent carried a top-note of soap rather than cigarettes. I waited until I was sure he’d stopped crying and tried to pull away.

Inching in, he held his forehead against mine for a long time and then softly, slowly, pressed his lips on mine. When I returned his kiss, he tasted of salt and sugary tea. The sensation of absolute yielding was sudden and unfamiliar yet instantly recognizable. I felt liquid, like warm milk, and was astonished by the rapid rise of instincts I never knew I possessed and a confidence that was a revelation to me. The qualities that made Rex a frustrating housemate made him a wonderful lover; the reticence and consideration, the attention to detail were exactly what I had never known I needed. The climax that he coaxed out of me was my first.

“I’ve wanted to do that for so long,” he said when it was over. “Since the first time I saw you. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever made love to.”

He was asleep seconds later. I kissed the small of his back before creeping back up to my attic. When I awoke I took a few seconds to figure out that the dusty gray light in my bedroom was not dawn but dusk.

The two of them were at the kitchen table. Biba, apologetically dressed in a demure pale yellow smock, had evidently enjoyed a restorative sleep. The red graze on her forehead was the only evidence of her ordeal. Rex had a hollowness about his eyes that was worse than a reprimand and made me feel as though I’d kicked a puppy in the face. The wrench of guilt was so acute it was physical. Biba had a selection of magazines and newspapers spread out in front of her—
The Stage
, I think, an Equity magazine, and a thick doorstop of a book called
The Actor’s Yearbook
. She and Rex were circling with pink and blue highlighters courses, auditions, and theater companies that might be of interest. She was engrossed in their task, but his focus was only on me.

“I’ve been telling Rex how sorry I am,” she told me, without looking up from the page in front of her. “But things are going to change. I know I gave you both a scare, and I scared myself, too. Fucking . . . I’m never drinking again.”

“And never seeing Guy again,” said Rex, still holding me in his gaze.

“And never seeing Guy again,” confirmed Biba, tipping her Golden Virginia packet upside down to confirm its emptiness. “Although I do seem to remember that he left a pack of cigarettes somewhere around that beanbag. I don’t have to boycott them, do I? I mean, waste not, want not. I do hate having to resort to rollies.” She swung her legs off the bench and headed up to the Velvet Room, leaving Rex and me alone.

“Was it so bad that you had to leave?” was all he said.

“No! Not at all, I just didn’t want Biba to find me there.” He reached across the table for my hand and traced circles on my palm with his thumb. His body began to exert a centrifugal pull on mine. “Rex. It was amazing. No one has ever made me come before.” I had never said anything so explicit. I think it was the first genuine smile I’d ever seen him give: it took up his whole face and endowed him with beauty that was a match for Biba’s. Her footsteps on the stairs and a preceding plume of smoke told us she’d found the cigarettes.

“Tonight?” he asked in a whisper. I wasn’t sure when we had conspired that she wasn’t to know, but the agreement was as solid as if we’d signed a contract. He dropped my hand with seconds to spare. Biba was unreceptive to the tension.

“I’m really enjoying this new sobriety,” she announced, although her blood alcohol content was probably still at the level that costs people their driver’s license. “I feel really energized and positive.”

“Do you want me and Karen to stop drinking too? We don’t mind.”

Didn’t we? Anger diminished my newfound desire. I wasn’t sure I was ready to abandon this lovely disorientation that I’d come to bathe my nights in.

What we denied ourselves in wine that evening we consumed in hot drinks. Mismatched mugs replaced empty bottles on the terrace where we lay. Rex retrieved a tin of herbal tea that Nina had left in the kitchen and made pot after pot of it. It smelled more like something you’d pour into your bathwater than drink. Laced with honey it was palatable, but it was no Shiraz. The transition from day to night felt incomplete without alcohol, and I was almost surprised when the sun set without wine.

Biba began to drool onto the splayed pages of the magazine she was reading, and when Rex suggested she head to bed she did so with uncharacteristic meekness. Rex slithered across the blankets and quilts like a snake until he was stretched out with his head on my belly. I glanced up at Biba’s bedroom window, directly above where we lay.

“She’ll sleep for hours,” he said, teeth nipping at my waistband.

“She might not,” I said. “She was in bed all day.”

“She will,” he argued. “She’s had five milligrams of Valium.”

“Why would the hospital give her Valium?”

“They didn’t. I put it in her tea.” I sat up and he fell out of my lap.

“You did
what
?”

“Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing,” he said, as though the dosage and not the act itself was the problem. “Nina was a bad sleeper. Too much coffee. She left a handful of downers behind when she went.”

“Jesus, Rex! Is this so important that you have to drug your own sister to get to me?” I asked.

He put his hands on my shoulders and gently pushed.

“Yes,” he said, arranging his body over mine.

Something else I learned about sex that night; you can despise someone’s actions and it won’t lessen your attraction to them in the least. I sank back onto my blanket and dissolved into his kiss.

“You promise she won’t wake up?” I whispered.

“She’s dead to the world,” he said.

Biba kept her resolve for a week; she didn’t drink, and her focus was entirely on her career. Although she had just spent three years studying drama, she promptly enrolled in a course at a private West End drama center—paid for with Rex’s dole money—to equip her for the realities of life as an auditioning actress. “It’s awful, really,” she said cheerfully, heading out of the front door at eight o’clock in the morning. “You spend three years immersing yourself in Chekhov and Ibsen and Shaw and preparing monologues and then you come out and it’s all about standing in front of a bloody camera. But I’m meeting with actors who’ve been working for years and they still study. That’s the thing about the craft: you never, never stop learning.”

I was on a steep learning curve of my own. Those tangled, sultry days were passed in Rex’s bedroom or mine, bodies locked together and always listening out for the door. Every day I was newly surprised and delighted by the way I could reciprocate his tender brand of passion. I remembered what Nina had said about needing something “a bit more Latin” and thought her mad.

Nothing about his personality changed: the confidence he showed in the bedroom did not extend beyond it. He was still simultaneously deferential to and controlling of his sister, neurotic about the house, and uptight, even boring, but my feelings for him were undergoing a subtle evolution. Perhaps Rex was filling the void left by Biba’s absence, or perhaps that’s just what sex does to you, but the focus of my attention and affection was slowly transferring from sister to brother. Nina had been right that Rex was someone’s idea of the perfect lover; he was mine. I wondered how I could have ever doubted his loveliness. His face was no longer a simulacrum of Biba’s but beautiful in its own right.

T
HE COMPUTER I WORK on is in the space under the stairs, my chair facing away from the living room and its distractions. When I come back from the village, the papers that I left piled on its keyboard have been dumped on the coffee table. Alice is sitting up at the screen on her own, her tongue rolled into a little pipe of concentration as she scrolls through a Web page I don’t recognize.

The machine should be accessible only to me, not because I have anything to hide but because I want to control exactly what Alice views. It is protected by a password that she could never begin to guess but Rex evidently has, or knew how to bypass or disable. It’s a long word and an unusual name, one with four consonants in the middle. If it was a laptop I’d slam the lid down on her fingers but instead I pull the plug out of the wall.

“Mum!” says Alice as the machine accepts its blackout with a compliant sigh. “I was looking at that?” There appears to be nothing her teachers or I can do to turn her sentences from questions into statements. Rex comes in from the kitchen, knife in one hand, onion in the other, which is why, I suppose, he looks as though he’s been crying.

“She’s not allowed unsupervised Internet access,” I say.

“I was literally ten feet away,” he says. Of course he was. It’s physically impossible to create more distance between two people in this tiny house.

“She thinks I’m going to be abducted by a pedophile,” says Alice, rolling her eyes. She stomps across the room and falls onto the sofa cushions in a flounce. She did not pick up this flair for the dramatic from me. “Like I’m dumb enough to let myself be
groomed
. We had a talk at school. I know what I’m doing.”