The Poison Tree (5 page)

“What are you doing on Saturday?” she asked. “Because Rex and I are having a party. Well, I’m having a party, so Rex hasn’t got much say in it.”

“You live with your family?”

“Oh, it’s just me and Rex. We’re orphans.” A new set of questions formed a disorderly line on my tongue. “My twenty-first,” she continued, “so it’s going to be huge. Heinously large. Queenswood Lane, N6. Can you remember that? I haven’t got anything to write it down. There isn’t a better party in London this weekend, so don’t pretend you’ve got something better to do.”

Queenswood Lane, N6. I committed it to memory. Panic was unfamiliar to me but I felt it then as a series of obstacles presented themselves. What would I wear? How would I get home?

“Bring fabulous people,” she instructed. The panic must have shown on my face. My roommates . . . oh Christ. I could already see the antipathy between them, crackling like static on nylon sheets.

Her next words were spoken with unexpected gentleness. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to bring anyone at all. Just promise me you’ll be there.” In the glow of her understanding, I felt as though I were being read and interpreted for the first time, unfolded and examined like a map left in a drawer for so long that its creases and pleats come permanently to describe their own topography. It was at once unsettling and reassuring.

“I promise,” I said.

I have spent a lot of time since then, at least an hour a day, wondering where the cutoff point was in the chain of events that led me to where we all are—or aren’t—today. My life, had it continued along its predicted trajectory, would have been unrecognizable. No Alice. No Rex. But if I’m honest with myself, my fate, and hers, and the fate of the others, was sealed the second I first saw her.

I
WENT TO THE party on my own. I know that there are some people who can do this sort of thing as a matter of course, who love to work their way around a whole house full of potential new friends without the encumbrance of a date to introduce or fetch drinks for or apologize for. All I can say is I don’t know how they do it. I had never been to anything alone that wasn’t to do with the university—whether it be a new course or introductory drinks for foreign students in a new country. Even the thought of turning up at the party alone made my bowels loosen and my hands shake with a new and delicious kind of fear.

I looked up Queenswood Lane, N6 in my A-Z. The tatty atlas wanted to fall open two-thirds of the way through at the pages that displayed the southwest London suburbs and I had to break the spine in a second place to smooth out the Highgate pages. I think I was hoping that seeing the location depicted in yellow and green with solid black outlines would make it easier for me to travel there. And it did. It gave my amorphous, directionless obsession with Biba form and shape and line and number. The pink blocks indicating buildings were as cluttered and disarranged as anywhere in central London, but the page was dominated by two green blobs, Highgate Wood and Queen’s Wood. I squinted to read the name of the road that divided the two woods like a spine bisecting a pair of lungs—Muswell Hill Road. The relevant offshoot of this road, Queenswood Lane, was tucked away next to the station. It was so slender that the lettering spilled out of the yellow stripe and into the green. I stared at the page where she lived (as I was beginning to think of it) and tried to transcend the limitations of block color and bulky font by imagining the neighborhood. I envisaged an area rather like Brentford or Kew, but with fewer shiny cars and dusty houseplants on every windowsill. I had never been to Highgate but remembered Sarah’s father deciding not to house us in that part of North London, despite its proximity to the college, because it was full of “scruffy lefties and lesbians.” It wasn’t clear whether he made a distinction between the two.

Obsession made an eideteker of me and for the first time images, not words, sank effortlessly and permanently into my memory. I had the lines and blocks of page 32 memorized by Saturday evening but took my A-Z with me anyway as a kind of talisman, occasionally tapping my cotton shoulder bag to check that it was still there, reassuringly soft and solid. The bag also contained a bottle of sparkling wine that had been too cold to touch when I took it from the fridge but was rapidly, and unpleasantly, absorbing the warmth from my body and the train carriage. An unforecasted searingly hot day heralded the annual exposure of pasty flesh, or, in my case, time to show off the tan I had caught running in the park at lunchtime. I wore Doc Marten boots to hide my sock line and a green tie-dyed sundress picked up in a flea market in Spain, which I had never worn because Simon had hated it. The reflection I saw on the concave glass showed a nervous girl fidgeting with the bag on her lap, so I closed my eyes and rested my head against the clammy, clear plastic carriage divider, opening them only when we stopped at stations. I grew more nervous the closer we crept to Highgate.

Each Underground station has its own peculiar smell. If Regent’s Park is tile and soot, then Highgate smells like the elevator lubricant that I had only smelled before in Italy. I don’t know why: probably something to do with the escalators, some of the tallest I’d seen. A lung-hammeringly steep concrete hill pulled me out of the station and up toward Queenswood Lane. Seeing the road sign declaring my destination in black and white, the N6 a little red footnote in the right-hand corner, sent a fresh wave of anticipation and terror through me. I rested against the fence for a few seconds to let the sweat on my brow evaporate. My hair, washed only a couple of hours ago, was already plastered to my head. I turned my head upside down and massaged it at the roots, despairing at the stringy blond curtain that fell into my face.

Before me, the wooded street shimmered in the early evening heat: the houses were fuzzy and the trees smudged like an Impressionist painting. That I did not have the house number didn’t matter: I gravitated toward the beat and the screams and the laughter. The house itself was set aside from the other buildings on the lane by a distance of ten feet or so and an untended scrub of shrubs and litter. Tall and thin and tatty, it stood like a sulky, scruffy teenager not wanting to associate with the other houses. Up close, it seemed to give off even more heat, like a giant kiln. I wondered how many bodies were radiating warmth inside. Most windows showed two or three figures talking, dancing, smoking, or doing all three at once. It was a huge building, far too big for two people to live in. I wondered if it had been their family home and, if so, whether death had shattered or dissolved that family. Had her parents died together or separately? Either scenario was both desperately tragic and massively intriguing.

Sucking beads of sweat from my upper lip, I found an old rope bell pull and tugged it. When nobody came to let me in, I gave the door a gentle push. It swung wide open. Inside, the air itself was different: hotter, muggier, infused with smoke and bodies and incense. It felt like when you walk off a plane into a far-off place with a different climate and take your first step into the new atmosphere. No matter how much you’ve planned or packed, it’s not until the humid air fills your lungs or the icy wind stings your cheeks that you realize you really are in another country now.

I
KNOW THAT THE most significant thing about that party is that I saw killer and victim together for the first time. But I’m afraid when I think about it I don’t see it as a dark and portentous meeting of doomed souls. I just remember the best night of my life. It was the tipping point between innocence and experience: the perfect window of pleasure after which everything began to descend into chaos, so subtly at first that I didn’t realize it was happening, and then at such a breakneck speed that events were beyond the control of any one person.

The entrance hall, a vast space floored with black and white diamond-shaped tiles, took up most of the ground floor of the building. They were more like garden tiles than interior ones. Concrete was visible where some were missing. Many were crackled across the surface and the glaze had worn off so that they were no longer shiny but dull and porous. Existing stains looked permanent and new ones would be indelible.

The hall was dominated by a huge staircase, lit by a string of paper lanterns wound around and around the banister. I picked my way through the half-light, glad that it was too dark to make eye contact with the people who sat cross-legged on the floor. I tried to stride purposefully through the house and was grateful that no one was watching me, as I had to keep turning back on myself. The place was an impractical warren of corridors that twisted and turned, dipped down and then rose again, often without reaching any destination save for a window or a cupboard. No two rooms on any given floor were on the same level. There was no uniformity of design to guide me through the labyrinth: carpets changed pattern midpassage and a hodgepodge of different wall coverings represented every decorative fad from the last century, from dusty plaster to flock wallpaper to bubbling Anaglypta. I found one airing cupboard and two bathrooms, the second with a man asleep in the bath, vomit splattering his white T-shirt. Three years of cozy evenings spent watching medical dramas on television triggered a reflex action and I found myself shaking him awake. He was very good-looking, I noticed, as I held him by the shoulders and tried to pull his body upright.

“I need to clear your airway,” I said to him. “Please. Wake up. You could choke on your own vomit.” Bloodshot eyes struggled to focus on me, then closed with relief when he understood the reason for my concern.

“Oh, it’s okay, love,” he said, “it’s not my puke.” My efforts to look nonchalant as I closed the door behind me were wasted: he was asleep, or unconscious again, within seconds.

A tiny box room next door stood empty apart from an ancient treadmill and a drum kit. The skin of the bass drum visibly reverberated, keeping time with the music that thudded through the bricks of the house. On the first floor I found the kitchen, a pantry really, far too small for such a big house. Patches of black mold speckled the pale blue plasterwork and the fridge was plugged into a broken socket, green and red wires spilling from the wall. The sink and counter heaved with a flotsam of plastic cups and half-empty bottles. I poured a glass of my sparkling wine into a plastic cup, downed it in one, and felt my nerves begin to melt. A girl with white-blond, cropped hair pulled a bottle of screw-top wine out of the humming fridge and pressed her lips to its neck. I decided to abandon my plastic cup and take the bottle on a further tour of the house. I just hoped no one would ask for a swig from it: I hated sharing that kind of thing.

Half an hour later, no closer to finding Biba and not apparently visible to the other guests, I sequestered myself in an alcove, nursing the remains of my bottle. The small flight of stairs opposite me was even more dangerous than the last; candles in jam jars were placed on the outside edge of each step, the flames perilously near to the rims. Just one kick from a drunken toe, I thought, watching the guttering glow, and we all go up in smoke. I appointed myself keeper of the flames. If I contributed nothing else to this party I would make sure that no one died on this particular staircase. I tried to convince myself that it was enough to be at a party like this and watch, even if you didn’t quite join in or even say hello to the hosts. But I failed either to convince myself that I was right or to get up and introduce myself to people. By eleven, I was beating myself up for being so pathetic while simultaneously trying to recall the time of the last train home when my rescuer, the birthday girl herself, appeared from an unseen door and extended her arms down toward me.

“Darling!” she breathed, catching my hands and pulling me up out of my harbor. She wore a long white dress and those awful chunky sneakers again. She looked like a bride who had run away from her own wedding. “You’ve been hiding from me!” she chided, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “Come upstairs and meet everyone.” When she turned around, I saw that her costume actually was a wedding dress: the dirty train trailed perilously near to the flickering flames, and like a dutiful bridesmaid I gathered the grubby satin in my arms, out of fire’s way. Her vertebrae protruded like a string of pearls suspended between her shoulder blades. “Happy birthday,” I said to her back.

The room that we entered, through the one door I had not tried, spanned the entire length and breadth of the house. At the front, the high windows overlooking the road were pinned with pink, orange, and purple drapes. They were saris, Biba later told me, bought from a thrift store for next to nothing just for the party. They would stay there for as long as I did and bathe the house in sunset colors every morning.

At the opposite end of the room were two huge sets of French windows that gave onto a stone veranda. Behind the terrace a constellation of fairy lights winked in a tree but gave out no real light. It was impossible to tell where the garden ended and the woods began. Framed by the open windows, a boy about my own age was frowning over a pair of turntables. Speakers as tall as a ten-year-old child flanked him, one balanced precariously on a Greek urn. His right hand clamped a pair of headphones to his ear while the other glided over the vinyl, as smooth and dexterous as a potter at his wheel. His still, intense concentration was at odds with the wordless music that pulsed from the speakers: I didn’t know what it was called, but it was chaotically urgent. Simon, who was dismissive of any tune that didn’t have a verse/chorus/verse/chorus structure, would have said that it wasn’t “real music.” This in itself was an incentive to try to understand it.

The room was strewn with bodies: some dancing, some sitting, others standing around and chatting. I identified one or two faces from college, but their blank stares didn’t reciprocate that recognition. A fat woman with curly hair who lay in shadow on a fraying, sagging sofa in the middle of the room was the only one to return my smile. Biba pulled me down onto a duvet cover thrown between two chairs. Its centerpiece was a makeshift ashtray that might have started the evening as a bowl of hummus.