The Poison Tree (3 page)

They all had nineteen years to my seventeen, having taken a year off, and seemed worldly and sophisticated to me. Their world was one of tennis clubs, aerobics classes, theaters, and restaurants. What their friendship lacked in bohemian adventure it made up for in shared experience, a revelation to me after the loneliness of school. We did everything together, including travel. Queen Charlotte’s had a unique reciprocal network of exchange programs with similarly eccentric language departments all over Europe, and the course involved frequent and intensive trips abroad. I always felt so sorry for the exchange students who came from the great and ancient universities and found themselves housed in the misleadingly named International House, a dingy little tenement just under the overpass on Edgware Road. But we made the system work to our advantage, pooling our travel grants so that we could afford to hire a car rather than pay four individual fares and rent apartments rather than stay in hostels. By the end of the four-year course, there was barely a museum or art gallery in western Europe we hadn’t visited. We ate together, cooking, shopping, and washing dishes by strict turns. Every eight weeks, a hairdresser came to the house and gave us all the same haircut. And we dated together, too, all hooking up with members of the QCC rugby team at their Christmas 1994 ball, a glorified disco held on the HMS
Belfast
. Simon, a fullback who owned his own tuxedo, asked me to dance. By the time I found out that grace and coordination on the rugby pitch and dance floor did not necessarily translate into the bedroom, the relationship was already established, and besides, I liked and admired him. He read all the newspapers from cover to cover every weekend. He always called when he said he would. He taught me how to marinate a steak and choose the right wine to drink with it. He was the first person I ever heard use the phrase “New Labour.”

My parents had worried that student life would send me “off the rails.” In fact, I had given them the opposite cause for concern: my father once accused me of being middle-aged at twenty. I put this down to insecurity on his part: it must have been hard, I thought, for him to see me growing away from the world I was born into and assimilating into a different class with new and intimidating rules and values. I was happy to have friends and to belong and to progress. As I neared the end of my course, the only uncertainty was whether I would continue to study or take an internship in an embassy somewhere. This I had decided to leave to fate, intending to take the first opportunity that presented itself. I held my life loosely in my hands, unaware that I was about to relinquish my grip. In the space of a week, apathy suddenly gave way to a passion I had not begun to guess I was capable of.

I transferred the file from hand to hand. It was a hefty sheaf of paper, perfectly squared off and fastened with a steel clip. The pages contained twenty thousand words of thesis comparing self-conscious theater in Italian and German, an undertaking as humorless as it sounds. The compulsory literature module was the only component of my degree that didn’t come easily to me, but after I had submitted my dissertation my degree was all but over. Only a handful of exams remained, and exams were the easy part (although I knew from past experience it was a good idea to keep this theory to myself).

I let the file drop into my tutor’s in-tray, where it landed with a gratifying thud. Outside, the sun was shining. I had been in the library for so long I had forgotten what a blue sky looked like. I rolled up my sleeves as far as they would go and felt the sun on my skin for the first time that year.

They were waiting for me at home. Claire, Sarah, and Emma were perched in a row, two pairs of feet in slippers and one in socks, resting on the edge of a pale cream sofa that had cost more than my travel grant for the whole year. They had been watching a film but had paused it when they heard my key in the lock. Julia Roberts’s wide laugh, struck through with a white flickering scratch of videotape, hovered on screen. Sarah held the remote control in her hand and was twisting it around and around. A tyrannical control over the television and video was her only abuse of the power she gained from her father’s ownership of the house.

Claire glanced meaningfully at my feet, and I dashed back to the hall and kicked off my shoes. A piece of chewing gum was stuck to the sole of my right shoe. In a tiny, pathetic, and deeply satisfying act of rebellion, I deliberately transferred it to the carpet.

“And why are you three sitting here like the three wise monkeys?” I said when I came back. I slapped my forehead. “It wasn’t my turn to cook tonight, was it?” Even as I spoke I knew that wasn’t the case. We had played tennis last night, which meant today was Sarah’s turn. Three heads shook, matching glossy bobs swinging like shiny hoods.

“Simon’s here,” said Claire. “He’s in your room.” That was unexpected. Simon and I never saw each other on a Thursday. The girls didn’t meet my quizzical gaze but stared at their laps instead. “You’d better go up.”

He was leafing through the only book in my room that he would have deemed masculine enough to warrant picking up: a biography of John Lennon that my dad had left here when he’d last visited. When he saw me he tossed it away so quickly that I knew he couldn’t have been reading it properly.

“Hello, Karen,” he said. We didn’t kiss. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said, swinging down on the bed and hoisting his legs up over my lap. I had intended to squeeze his toes but had second thoughts when I saw that his socks were damp with sweat. “This is a surprise.”

“I might as well get straight to the point,” he interrupted, speaking like the management consultant I believe he subsequently became. I had heard him use this voice over the telephone and when ordering (for both of us) in restaurants, but never to me before. He took his legs off mine, and I felt the dull buzz of pins and needles.

“We’ve been together for a couple of years now.” There was no disputing this fact. “And we’ll be graduating soon.” He left another pause, so I nodded. “And I think it’s time for a fresh start all around as we both enter our adult lives. Our professional lives.”

The titles of the books on my shelf zoomed in and out of focus. I knew what was coming next, and felt only the linguist’s scholarly interest in how he would phrase it.

“I think that we shouldn’t see each other anymore. With immediate effect.” He waited for me to fill the silence that followed. I thought back twenty-four hours to the uncomfortable sex we’d had on his creaking bed in Fulham, my mind absently tracing the outlines of European countries in the textured whorls of his ceiling while he grunted his way through his short repertoire. I reflected on two years of interminable Sundays spent watching rugby matches in the pub and felt a mad little flutter of relief that I would never, ever have to go to a sports bar again.

“That’s fine by me,” I realized.

“Really?”

“Yep. I think it’s for the best, too. I take it the girls know.”

Simon nodded. “I said I wanted a serious talk and they . . . I thought they should . . . just in case you . . .”

The three of them probably still had their film on freeze-frame, waiting anxiously for my wails of grief, or perhaps they were looking up, expecting Simon’s body to break through the ceiling in a cloud of plaster and rubble and for my tearstained, heartbroken face to appear in the ragged hole above. I didn’t care to imagine the conversation in which my boyfriend had told my friends that he was planning to dump me, so I blocked it from my mind. I could do that with things I didn’t want to think about, like snapping shut a book.

“Don’t you want to know why?” he asked. I had a pretty good idea, and it took the shape of his mother, hair like a curly helmet, finger like a jabbing spear. “Not the right sort of girl . . . Fine while you’re at university, but you’ve got to start thinking about the rest of your life now, Simon . . . Things that don’t matter when you’re young become important when you’re in the real world . . . I know she’s clever, but the novelty of that will wear off. She’ll want to work, you know . . . And those parents of hers, with that accent . . .”

“Not really,” I said. Simon looked angry. I realized he’d rehearsed a speech that would let me down gently, and I relished depriving him of the opportunity to deliver it.

“I think you’d better go,” I said, getting to my feet. The numbness had worn off my legs now and a sense of lightness suffused my body. “Tell the girls I’m going to stay up here for a bit.”

I smoothed out the indentation his legs had left on my duvet cover. A thick, black hair from his head was on my pillow. I pinched it between thumb and forefinger and dropped it in the wastebasket next to my bed. I reshelved the John Lennon book and scanned my room for any other evidence of him. There was only a framed photograph that I couldn’t be bothered to take down from the wall. The low voice he could never quite manage to suppress into a whisper resonated through the crack under the door as he spoke to my friends. Since when did they become his confidantes, I wondered?

I sat on my bed and waited for the tears to come, but I could coax only a few drops from my eyes, even when I looked in the mirror and tried my hardest to feel sorry for myself. My reflection gave an infectious smile. Instead of grief or anger I felt only a sense of reprieve and freedom.

That night, I could not sleep. I was more wide awake than I knew it was possible to be, alive with potential, sharp and bright. I thought only of the things I could do, unfettered by a relationship. Crop my hair. Blow my savings on a ticket to China and learn Mandarin. Get a job in a nightclub. It was time for my second reinvention. I had the sense that I had effectively been sleepwalking my way through my four years at the university, and I had only one summer left in which to redress the balance.

That’s the thing about sleepwalking. You can walk, eat, hold conversations, and even drive cars in perfect safety. The danger comes from waking up too quickly.

I
SOMETIMES WONDER IF, that day, I was like one of those chicks that hatches and thinks the first creature it sees is its mother—would I have taken up with anyone who offered the hand of friendship? Perhaps. But I doubt I would have fallen so hard. I met her in the afternoon, and by the evening, everything had changed. She was in the same building as me all morning, only a few rooms and floors away, but I didn’t feel a crackle of electricity or notice a surge in energy. The only difference in atmosphere in Queen Charlotte’s College was the constricting silence that coiled around us more and more tightly as our finals drew nearer.

I was thinking about this the day I met her, and deciding that I would do my PhD somewhere beautiful and ancient. The next place I studied would have wooden doors and crooked staircases, and my rooms would have leaded, ill-fitting windows. I failed to let the grim realization that this might mean some degree of independent effort, perhaps even exertion on my behalf, compromise my enjoyment of this picturesque daydream. I shouldered my way through set after set of heavy green fire doors, heading for the elevator.

The landing was empty except for a girl writing a notice on the department board. I mean, she was literally writing it on the pinpricked cork with a fat red marker. She had her back to me and I watched her form the letters in silence. There was a careless grace about the way she moved.

WANTED: NATIVE GERMAN SPEAKER FOR TRANSLATION AND ACCENT TUTORING

She paused to consider the next line. This gave me more time to consider
her
. It was the summer when the Spice Girls were inescapable; most of the university’s female students had declared a fashion allegiance to one or other of the singers, decking themselves out like clowns or children or girls who worked at a perfume counter. The girl before me appeared to be dressed like all five of them at once. She wore purple crushed-velvet flares, sneakers with a platform sole that elevated her to just beyond my height, and a shiny, tiny England football T-shirt that looked older than she was, with a hole in the armpit. She also carried a brand-new Gucci handbag of padded leather with gold chains for straps.

I CAN PAY YOU—CONTACT ME—THANK YOU!!! BIBA XXX

Biba. I rolled her name around inside my head and willed her to turn around. She slipped her red pen into her bag and would have walked out of my life forever if shock at her audacity hadn’t made me half gasp and half laugh. The vandal turned to face me with a sardonic, overcasual, “What?”

The deep gurgle of her laughter made an instant conspirator of me. She smiled, glassy brown eyes sparkling from beneath heavy round lids fringed with thick, stiff lashes. I’d seen eyes like those before, on a doll when I was a little girl.

“Are you going to tell on me for defacing university property?” she asked in a tone that made it clear she trusted me not to.

“No,” I said, “I was going to point out that if you don’t leave a number, nobody will know how to contact you.”

“Fucking . . .” she said. Again, my laughter mirrored hers. “I’m always forgetting things like that.” She spoke like a BBC announcer from the fifties. If voices really can be clear as bells, hers was: the small, silver kind you use to summon servants, not the heavy iron church sort. She rummaged in the bag again for the red pen. Tissues puckered with old chewing gum bobbed above its surface like white horses on the sea.

“Maybe I can help out,” I offered, before she had a chance to remove the cap. “My German is fluent.”

“You don’t
look
German,” she said, which surprised me: many people in northern Europe took me for a native before I began to speak, and sometimes afterward too.

“I’m not,” I said. “What do you need translated?”

“I’m an actress,” she said, as though I should have known. “I’m doing a play about a woman who’s a nightclub singer in Germany. Well, she’s working as one—she’s actually got amnesia, she’s really Italian—why am I telling you this? The point is they’ve just decided they want me to sing a song in fucking German for the opening.”