The Poison Tree (43 page)

“And she believed you? Nina
knew
Rex, she knew he would never have done something like that.”

Biba gives a woolly shrug. “Why would someone make anything like that up?”

“Does she know you’re here?” With a small sigh, she buries herself even deeper into her coat.

“Nobody knows.” I slow down at the railroad crossing out of force of habit, even though the last trains have all gone. It’s my turn to talk now: we can fill in the gap of her ten-year lost weekend later. Right now, we need to find a way to explain her presence without exposing the truth to Rex and Alice.

“It’s going to be tricky, but I think we can do this,” I say, but Biba’s non sequitur is the first sign that we are still talking entirely at cross purposes.

“Nina had another baby. A little girl. Oh, Karen, she was beautiful. You should have seen her. But I couldn’t stay with her. She . . . the whole thing . . . it
awoke
things in me. I started thinking, Karen. About what I’d done. It made me realize it wasn’t too late.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’ve come back for my baby.”

Vertigo makes me loosen my grip on the wheel.

“I really don’t feel well,” I say. I pull over at the first opportunity, the junction where the construction site is. The detour up its access road is a matter of yards. I rest my chin on the wheel and survey the bleak little landscape with its portable toilets and its shut-up burger van. The floodlights are off now and the only light comes from my car and the dull orange gloam of safety lamps that dangle from the cranes and the diggers. Concrete posts wide enough to drive a car through are stacked, waiting to be turned on their sides and sunk into the holes in the ground.

There is fidgeting beside me as Biba produces a battered little green tin and a packet of cigarette papers. “Can you do that outside?” I say. She fiddles incompetently with the door handle and I reach across and release the catch for her.

Outside, a freezing sea breeze blusters. We are nearly a mile from the shore but I can taste the brine. We are on my territory: the thought calms me. Biba uses the open car door to shield herself from the wind. A dirty yellow cement mixer is still giving off heat: we must have missed the workers by minutes. Blue tarpaulins are pegged over piles of cinder blocks as big as houses. They flutter noisily and I have to raise my voice.

“The thing is . . .” I begin. “This is all really complicated. Alice thinks that Rex and I are her parents. She doesn’t know anything about you. You can’t just turn up and expect to play happy families.” Biba doesn’t say anything: I remember now that once she has begun to construct a cigarette she won’t speak until she has taken a drag. In some ways we are strangers but in others we still know each other so well. “We need to get our story straight,” I say. My feet slip and slide on a patch of cement that is still wet, and I smooth it out with the unmarked sole of my boot. “I thought we could introduce you as Alice’s long-lost auntie. We can tell her you’ve been traveling for years, and that we lost touch. I mean, it’s kind of true.” She lights her cigarette on the third or fourth attempt. The smoke is whipped into her face, away from me.

“No,” she says. Her voice has switched from quicksilver to steel.

“We’ll have to. She’s not stupid, she’ll know you’re related as soon as she looks at you!”

“No.” She sighs, as though explaining something sad to a small child. “You don’t understand. I want to come back as her mother.”

I taste bile. Why didn’t I see this coming?

“Oh, Biba, no,” I say. “Not that. I’m the only mother Alice has ever known. I mean, that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? When you wrote that note? You told me to look after her. I’m not saying you can’t come back, but not like this.”

“I can and I will,” she says, and I know that she is capable of it. I remember the last time I saw Biba with Alice, the filthy, shivering newborn held in a dangerously loose grip on the sixth-floor balcony. She is just as much a threat now as she was then.

The wind changes direction and the smell of Biba’s cigarette jerks me out of my reverie like smelling salts. I have been near smoke since then, of course I have, other people’s smoke and packs of cigarettes, but the spicy, woody smell of fresh rolling tobacco is not something I have breathed in since the last time I saw her, and it transports me. Through closed eyelids I do not see the usual images that haunt me, but a montage of scenes from the beginning of that summer, before Guy came. The woods. The Velvet Room. The heath. Dancing, kissing, drinking. Her white dress and my red one. Rex. Biba. Karen. The disparity between the happiness I felt then and the misery of the future she has threatened me with is too much to bear.

“This would
destroy
Alice and Rex,” I say. “They’ve been through so much. I’ve worked so hard to make them secure. If you care about them at all, you won’t tell them the truth.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Then don’t do this. Please. I’m begging you.” I look at the ground. It is an unwelcoming patchwork of silver-tipped grass and gravel glittered with builders’ sand, but I am ready to fall to my knees if that’s what it takes.

“A child’s place is with her mother.” Her voice is heavy with forced patience.

“Oh, please. What do you know about being a mother? Alice had her tonsils out when she was seven. They didn’t have any spare beds so I slept on the hospital floor under my coat. I didn’t want her to wake up and not know where she was. Where were you?”

“That was then,” says Biba. “She needs me now.” That she actually seems to believe what she is saying is the most chilling and dangerous aspect of it all. A strong gust sends a rush of whispers through the trees that flank the construction site. The wooden shutter on the burger van strains against its padlock with a rattle, and the site lanterns are blown about, throwing yellow light erratically so that our faces pass in and out of shadow. Unseen machinery makes strange industrial clanking noises and we both have to shout to make ourselves heard.

“I could turn you in,” I say in desperation. “Once they know what you did they won’t let you within ten feet of any child.”

“Rex won’t let you.”

“How do you know what Rex will and won’t do? You don’t know him anymore.” She raises one eyebrow.

“Blood’s thicker than water, darling. You’re not even the mother of his child.” She stops and lets out a horrible chuckle. “He hasn’t even got a child. What will he think when he finds out his daughter is really his niece? You’ve lied to him, Karen.” Her card trumps mine and she knows it. The woman who gave birth to my daughter turns her back to me. Her violet scarf makes a thick coil around her neck, the two fringed ends animated by the wind, chasing and teasing each other. Her voice carries on the breeze, like salt, like spray.

“I’m grateful to you for looking after them, Karen, but it was never forever.”

“It was
my
forever,” I say. “I can’t just pick my life up where you left it. What else will I do?” She has made me into who I am now. Who else could I possibly be?

“I’m sorry,” she says, not bothering to turn and face me. “But they’re my
family
.” If I thought she had broken my heart years ago, it is nothing to how I feel now. She could not have chosen words to hurt me more.

“They are not your family!” I cry. “They’re
mine
!” Blood travels through my body at a wild velocity. I am stunned by the physicality of my anger, as though a leak, dammed up for years, has suddenly swollen and burst into a deluge. As I walk toward her, the land seems to undulate like the sea. My hands catch the fluttering ends of her scarf on the first attempt. She is unaware that her life is literally in my hands until I wind the wool around my wrists and tug. She tries to turn to face me but a reflex action sends her hands to her throat, curling her fingers into useless claws that cannot loosen the shrinking coil around her neck. “
They’re mine
,” I sob. I pull and pull until the only breath making steam clouds in the night air is mine.

Underneath her layers of clothing, she is as slim as she ever was. She doesn’t weigh that much more than Alice, and I am able to carry rather than drag her body twenty yards toward the circular concrete hollow. I do not want to see her face.

To push her into the hole seems callous, so I spread my arms and let her fall. She belly-flops onto the wet cement with a splat rather than a splash. It is all so very far from the glamorous, plummeting death she once envisaged.

For a horrible moment I think that it has set or frozen, and that I am going to have to clamber down into the cavity and retrieve her body. Then, suddenly, the gray gloop swallows her spreadeagled corpse in one slow greedy gulp. Is it my imagination, or does her hair linger for a few seconds after her body has gone, thick strands reaching as though for life, trying to snatch a few final seconds of air? Her bags are sitting patiently on the backseat of the car. I toss them in after her.

Kneeling at the edge, I peer over at the smooth, sludgy surface. The surge of vomit takes me by surprise. On my hands and knees, my stomach contracts and contracts until the muscles that band my abdomen are on fire and there is nothing left inside me.

“W
HAT WAS UP WITH you last night?” says Rex through a mouthful of cornflakes.

Alice is in the living room watching Saturday morning children’s television. An episode of
The Simpsons
that she has seen a dozen times is playing at an uncomfortable volume.

“What do you mean?”

“You were tossing and turning. It was like sharing the bed with an eel.”

“Insomnia,” I say, and it’s true. If I managed any sleep at all last night I am not aware of it. Physical comfort was impossible and closing my eyes summoned only the obvious, terrible images. Just before dawn I had the awful apprehension that this was what it was going to be like from now on, that I would never again be able to close my eyes, that I would die of exhaustion. But now that I am up and about, what happened yesterday seems necessary, even reasonable, and I know that I will find a way to live with it. Over the years, I had come to wear my grief comfortably. The events of last night have only restored the status quo and increased my family’s security. I need only to remind myself of the threat she posed. She kills, she abandons, she lets others take the blame and pick up the pieces. I know that I too am a murderer now, but by definition my crime was a one-off. I am the opposite of a threat: I did what I did to protect. What’s one more secret?

“You know what you need,” he says. “A nice walk. Get her away from the television. Blow away those cobwebs. I’m feeling a bit cobwebby myself. Was I drunk last night?” Perhaps he was. I did not help him to empty the wine bottle that waits patiently at the back door to be recycled.

Alice clutches the remote control defiantly to her chest, but Rex simply turns the television off at the set. She opens her mouth to protest but he cuts in first. “Boots, coat, walk,” he says, arms folded, and she obeys him without question. I’m impressed.

“This is pretty, Mummy,” says Alice. “Can I wear it?” Scarlet flashes as she tugs at something tangled up in the hat stand. Biba’s shawl. I must have hung it up with my own coat when I came in last night. I snatch it away from her. It might have pockets, and who knows what those pockets might contain?

“You can wear your usual coat,” I say, and wrap the shawl around me, smoothing it down against my clothes. There are no pockets, just a huge swath of wool, enough to wrap around me three times. Outside, I hope the wind will carry her smell away. I have to breathe through my mouth.

“When did you get that?” says Rex. “I haven’t seen it before.”

“Thrift store,” I say.

“It suits you,” he says. “You should wear that sort of thing more often. But it’s a bit grubby. Oh, Karen,
look
. It’s even got someone else’s hair on it.” And he picks out a long, dark, thick hair that has woven itself into the knit, examines it with forensic distaste before releasing his thumb and forefinger and letting the strand float away.

It is one of those white-skied days peculiar to this part of the world that make it impossible to pinpoint where the sun is or what time of day it is. We walk in single file along the lane, Rex in front of Alice and me behind her. To get anywhere from our house you need to walk past the building site, and I am drawn toward it, to make sure, to remember, to begin to forget. If I believed in fate, this would be tempting it.

“Let’s see how the building’s going,” I say, shepherding my family up the access road. There is no police cordon, no scene of crime officers, just a couple of dozen laborers in high-visibility jackets operating machinery, smoking, cradling steaming tea in polystyrene cups. Their cars are parked where mine was last night. I feel strangely calm as I wonder which of the tire tracks in the dirt are mine. A Christmas song, the first I have heard this year, plays on an unseen radio. Above us, yellow cranes are primed and poised, and before us a cement mixer’s splattered orange barrel is rotating on the tilt. I could not have timed my visit better: with my family, I stand at a distance and watch it disgorge ton after ton of cement into the concrete cavity, encasing her body forever. My shoulders loosen and lower with the relief.

The aroma of frying bacon reaches us from the burger van. The fact that I do not cook them at home has elevated bacon sandwiches to the status of an exotic delicacy for Alice, and she is rubbing her hands together with excitement.

“Can I have a bacon sandwich?” she says. “Please? Please please please?”

“Sounds great,” says Rex. “Karen?”

“Not for me.” I wince. “But I’d love a cup of tea. I’ll wait here.”

I don’t think Alice has ever eaten anything from a burger van before. Rex has to lift her up to read the menu, and the man behind the counter says something that makes them both laugh. She drops to the ground and the man throws her a can of something, which she catches in one hand and holds aloft as she does a celebration dance. There is so much more to celebrate than she knows.