The Poison Tree (41 page)

He runs his hand over my hip bones that pregnancy never widened and the stomach that childbirth never stretched or scarred, and cups the breasts that never slackened after breastfeeding. My body remains more or less unchanged and, to our mutual surprise and delight, seems to have grown more responsive to his hands while it was deprived of their touch.

“Let’s give Alice a brother or sister,” he says, the heel of his hand over the skin just below my navel. “We could be a real family.”

Shivers fan out inside me. We make love without contraception and for the first time since he came home, and for once the pleasure I show him is only partly sincere. My body shows itself to be more faithful to him than to me, responding to his touch even while my mind is wildly distracted. How do I even know that I am fertile, or that Rex is? I have never had a serious pregnancy scare in my life, not with Simon, when I took my contraceptive pill every day, and not with Rex, when I took it haphazardly and we made love once, twice, three times a day for months. Rex was with the lush and fecund Nina for nearly two years and nothing happened. Future emergencies suggest themselves, each scenario more gruesome than the last. The most frequently recurring worry is that Alice, or any forthcoming children, will become gravely ill, and tests will show not only that they are an imperfect match but that they are not siblings at all.

While my family sleeps, these thoughts spiral inward in my mind, coiling themselves into a hard little core of anxiety. I regret not telling him now. I wanted to do the right thing for Alice, to give her two living parents who loved her. And I wanted to do the right thing for Rex, to give him something to live for. But perhaps the truth told then would have been enough. Rex loved Nina’s children like his own, and would have fallen for Alice even harder. He would have loved her as an extension of Biba, as a beautiful little girl in her own right. Rex lacks the capacity to limit his love; it is indulgent and sacrificial.

He reaches for me in his sleep. Does he ever lie like this, watching me sleep, wondering whether my eyelids flicker with dreams or nightmares? He, too, has plenty to keep him awake, and secrets of his own. I wonder if he will ever tell me what happened to him in prison. I close my fingers around his wrist where the skin is thin and shiny. I do not think that I could bear to know.

I
N THE SLIMY LAVATORY at the station, I changed Alice’s diaper and fed her so that she would be on her best behavior when I took her home. Every now and then, her innocence and vulnerability made me catch my breath; when I laid her across my forearm to burp her, I felt her tiny ribs, soft and flexible as willow, beneath my palm. The flesh of her tiny back was so soft that I was surprised I didn’t leave a handprint in her, like putty. When I held her, I felt my own bones fortify and my skin toughen and knew that I would become as hard as I had to for her.

I checked the fare with the taxi driver before I got in. It used up all the money I had in the world. Another pound on the fare and I would have had to walk.

They had changed the doorbell since I had last been home. I pressed it with my forefinger and heard an insincere little rendition of the Big Ben chime ring out somewhere within the house. My mother answered with rubber gloves on, her hands slippery with suds. Her face when she saw us was a child’s drawing of astonishment, her mouth a carefully crayoned O. She was dumb with shock as I spread Alice’s shawl out underneath her and let her loll on her back and kick her legs in the air. She threw her arms and legs out in a series of startle reflexes. It was a novelty to have a floor that was clean enough for her to lie on. After my father had been summoned home from work, my mother unpacked my rucksack. The outside pocket contained my purse, my passport, and Alice’s birth certificate. Almost everything else was concerned with feeding, clothing, or changing Alice. She pulled out clothes, diapers, and wipes. When she got to the bottles and the travel sterilizer, she finally spoke.

“Aren’t you breastfeeding her?” she said. I shook my spinning head. It had not occurred to me that I might have to have conversations about pregnancy and childbirth, that I would have to bluff my way through an experience that my mother believed we now shared. I would have to buy a book and read up on it as soon as possible.

Underneath the bottles were a couple of Rex’s dirty T-shirts and the crumpled red dress. She held these items gingerly and examined them in wordless wonderment before setting them aside. I heard Dad’s key in the door. Mum had obviously briefed him, but he still flinched with surprise to see me crouching over a newborn baby. There was disappointment in his eyes where I was used to seeing pride. The tears, dammed up for six months, now fell almost hourly.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I gathered the baby to my chest, ashamed of myself for using her to disarm his anger but too tired to face it. “I’ve let you down. I’ve fucked it all up. Let me have it. Tell me what a disappointment I am.”

They sat next to each other on the sofa, so that my eyes were level with their knees. I felt more like a five-year-old than a recent graduate and new mother.

“We’re not going to tell you off,” said Mum. “I can’t pretend we’re not shocked, and circumstances aren’t exactly ideal . . . Rex
is
the father, isn’t he?”

“Linda!” admonished my father.

“Well, we’ve got to ask,” she said. “I can see you’ve really been up against it. We would have been there, you know. We would have understood.”

“I’ve fucked it all up,” I said. “I’ve fucked up college, I’ve fucked up my whole life.”

“Life doesn’t end just because you have a baby, you know,” said Dad. “You’re only twenty-one, and you’ll always have your education. We can help.”

“But aren’t you ashamed of me?” I said. I wasn’t really talking about Alice at all, but using her to make a kind of vested confession. Mum bent down and scooped Alice from my arms.

“It doesn’t work like that. You know, you’re still my baby. I still feel about you the way you feel about her now,” she said. “Does that help you to understand?”

“Yes,” I lied. Alice shifted and fixed her eyes on my dad’s in that vague unfocused way she had. He held out a finger and she clutched it.

“Can we stay here?” I asked.

“As if you even have to ask,” he said. His brow was still clenched, but what I had taken for anger I suddenly recognized as hurt, hurt I didn’t know I had the power to cause. “As if you even have to ask,” he repeated, shaking his head. He took the child from my mother and held her on his lap, his large, capable hand supporting her head. He looked from Alice to me to my mother and his face softened. “She looks just like Karen did when she was this age, doesn’t she, Linda?” he said, and bent to kiss the baby on her soft, downy forehead.

I saw him before he saw me. His face was not turned to the door in anticipation, but looking down and to the side as if afraid of what he would see. The guard at the door had told me that he knew he had a visitor but not who it was. He looked at the floor with the controlled expectancy of someone who has been disappointed time and again and cannot cling to hope for much longer. His hair had grown to collar length, and while the contours of his face were unchanged, the color and texture of his skin had altered. He looked as though someone had shaded the hollows of his cheeks and his eye sockets with a soft pencil. Alice, who had been shocked into silence by the indignity of having her diaper searched by a gum-chewing guard, was now asleep in her sling. Her hair was beginning to thicken and she looked more like a Capel every day. Like her mother and uncle before her, she bore no trace of her father and appeared not to have been born from a union of two parents, but to have sprung from her mother alone.

I had expected the crackle of menace in the prison interior, and it reminded me of my comprehensive school in this and other ways. The orange stacker chairs that bordered the plain tables were the same ones that had filled the assembly hall and the walls were painted the same unflattering, municipal shade of pale blue. But the closed-circuit television cameras that hung from the ceiling and the dark blue tabards all the prisoners wore told me that this was a very different place indeed. Men folded their arms and stared at me as I walked around the side of the room rather than through the gangway at its center. As I passed, a woman, lobes pulled almost to her shoulders by a row of gold hoops and studs, passed a tiny package to a man underneath their table. The look she gave me ensured my silence. She looked far tougher than he did.

Rex did not look up until I was standing opposite him. When he did, the surprise caused him to leap up and push his chair backward. It made a loud screech on the floor tiles that caused the nearest prison officer to hold the palm of his hand up toward Rex, who sat back down with practiced obedience. He looked at the bundle in my arms and then into my eyes, and back again, several times, his eyes moving up and down ever more rapidly. When they finally fixed on mine, they swam with confusion.

“There’s someone I think you should meet.” On cue, Alice opened her eyes and blinked up at him. “This is Alice.” I extracted her from the sling and held her on the tabletop, facing Rex. “Say hello to your daddy, Alice,” I said. Rex’s hands were in his hair and his face was split by a nervous smile. The sleeve of his sweater slid an inch or two up his arm, exposing a vicious purple bruise. I tried not to look at it.

“Alice,” he said, and his eyes were brimming with all the questions we did not have time to answer then. “Karen, I’ve missed you so much. But this . . . I can’t get my head around this. You’ve had a baby. I’ve got a daughter. How old is she?”

“Two months,” I said.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know,” I said. I had rehearsed this over and over. “I didn’t know and then by the time I did, I wasn’t allowed to contact you . . . then I didn’t know where you were.”

“I can’t get my head around this at all,” he repeated. “How did you . . . what? Shit. I don’t know where to start.”

“I wasn’t sure you still wanted to see me.”

“Of course I do! Though God knows I don’t deserve it,” he replied. “Can I hold her?” His question was not addressed to me but to the guard who had earlier moved to silence him. At his nod, I let Rex pick her up. He handled her expertly, one hand behind her head, the other cupping her rump. She had recently developed a trick of yelling whenever passed from one adult to another but settled into the crook of Rex’s left elbow with contentment, not protest. I laid my fingers on his forearm.

“I didn’t think I’d be allowed to touch you,” I said. “I thought we’d have to talk on one of those glass phone thingies.” He buried his face in Alice’s head and I let them remain like that for a few minutes. When he looked up, he asked the question I had been dreading.

“Where’s Biba?” he said. Despising myself for my cowardice, I let a long pause do the work of the awful words. I had to lower my eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Rex,” I said. “She took my car. They found it at Beachy Head.” Like me, he recognized instantly the significance. I braced myself for his howl of misery, but his reaction was one of resignation, as though he had been imagining and inventorying all the terrible scenarios that might have befallen his sister and this one featured in his top ten likely outcomes. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and I saw his dark pupils tremble beneath their thin, violet-veined lids. He bit his lip and nodded as if confirming something to himself. I think that broke my heart more than if he had demonstrated shock or disbelief.

“She’s done it, then,” he said, and I thought I detected an undercurrent of reprieve as well as resignation; or were these my own feelings I was projecting onto him? “I knew something was wrong when she didn’t come to see me.”

“They didn’t find . . . her, but there’s no way she could have survived,” I said. “I wrote to your dad when she left, before I . . . heard what she’d done. I didn’t hear back from him. I don’t suppose he told you?”

“I haven’t heard from him since he came over that night.” I closed my mind’s eye to the grisly tableau that the reference summoned.

“Do you see anyone?” I asked, wondering even as I spoke who there would be. Rex’s circle had been even tinier than mine. The only other person left alive who would want to visit him would be Nina, and she was somewhere sunny, miles away from all that had happened. She could not know about Biba, I thought, and wondered if I should ever get word to her of her suicide. Rex was slowly shaking his head.

“You’re my first visitor,” he admitted. New guilt sprang from the memory of all the evenings I had spent in Switzerland. I had been lonely—I had been so lonely—but I had had my freedom and all the company I needed. He had had nobody.

“I’m so, so sorry,” wondering which part of my involvement in the whole mess I was apologizing for. I tried to reach out to him but he buried his face in the top of Alice’s head and this time it was not to smell her but to weep. His whole body shook with silent sobbing. The man at the next table, a skeletal redhead with the word WALES crudely tattooed on the back of his hand and a dotted line inked across his throat, looked on with disdain. Rex’s eyes were pink but his cheeks dry when he drew his head away from Alice. He saw my look of consternation.