The Poison Tree (8 page)

“You don’t need to be polite, I know we’re an odd couple.” Nina cringed cheerfully. “I needed somewhere to live. We were living on this barge in Camden and it was just so . . . filthy. I knew that once we were sleeping together he’d feel obliged to house us.” The revelation was harder to swallow than Nina’s coffee. “You think I’m cynical, I can tell. It’s different when you’ve got kids. I’ve had sex with worse people for sanctuary,” she said, leaving me to wonder who else she had shared that generous body with, and in what circumstances. She refilled her cup and I placed my hand over my own even though it was nearly empty. “He’s a sweet boy, it was lovely while it lasted, but you know what it’s like. The irony is, Rex is someone’s idea of a perfect fuck. But not mine. I need it a little bit more
Latin
, know what I mean?”

“Er, um,” I said, having no idea what Latin sex might be like, and wondering if I should be troubled by the lack of it in my own life. Gaia came through the door in a forward roll and offered me a little round pill with a dollar sign etched in its chalky surface. Nina snatched the ecstasy tablet away from the toddler, who started to howl.

“Although when things like this happen, I’m glad I won’t be here much longer,” she said.

“You’re leaving?” I said. “Why? This is the loveliest place I’ve ever been to. If I lived here, I’d stay here forever.”

“You say that, but it’s not always easy actually living here,” said Nina, picking lumps of dough out of the barbed-wire bracelet that circled her plump wrist. “I’ve already got two kids. I don’t need to become a substitute mother for two more who are old enough to look after themselves.”

I saw my opportunity.

“When did their parents . . . leave?” I asked, hoping the euphemism would make the question sound casual.

“Christ, all that happened long before I met them,” said Nina. “It’s a tragedy. I sometimes wonder how they stay here after all that. They didn’t have much choice, I suppose.”

“Oh?” I raised an eyebrow.

“It’s no wonder they’re the way they are.” She drew her children closer to her, her focus returning to her own family, and the conversation was steered out of my control again. “Like I said, I owe my own babies a future. I’m going to educate the children. Not school them. There’s a difference. I mean really educate them, take them traveling. Inigo’s school age now, but I want to save him from all that.” Nina launched into a brief rant about the toxicity of formal education before detailing her plans to teach the children herself by taking them on a tour of their various genetic heritages. It comprised most of the countries touching the Mediterranean Sea, due to Nina’s Algerian and Portuguese parentage and no small doubt about Inigo’s paternity. I was only half-listening as she told me how easy it was to “live off the radar” as she put it. Later, I would wish I had paid more attention.

“If you work cash in hand, and you don’t claim benefits, no one bothers with you. And I’m a jewelry designer.” She grinned and twirled her earring with a silver-adorned hand. “It’s the ideal trade for someone living on the run. You just pack up your jewels and you go.” I thought about my own life and its lengthy paper trail. My education had been measured out in consent forms, grant applications, exam board papers, and scholarship documents. That it was possible to survive, let alone thrive, outside the state system, was a revelation. I was shocked and thrilled in equal measure. If I hadn’t seen Nina do it so carelessly and confidently, would I have had the courage to do what I did later? What she told me over a cup of coffee influenced the way I reacted when everything had happened. She taught me how easy it is to disappear. How easy it is to hide a child from the world.

We dance a clumsy excuse-me around the bed, unsure who has claim to which side of it. Rex and I used to sleep on different sides depending on whose room we were in: he would always want to sleep next to the wall. In this room, both sides are exposed. We always slept naked—it was too hot that summer to do otherwise—and now he is staring at the folded nightclothes I have handed him.

“Gone off me already?” he says, eyebrows disappearing under a wing of hair. The reverse is true. The weight he has put on has softened his jaw and covered his Adam’s apple and brought his arresting good looks down to a more manageable level. His hair is accidentally fashionable. Back then, it was de rigueur for men his age to wear their hair either very short or floppy and parted in the middle, and Rex always looked out of place. Now men spend money on products that tease their hair into the mess of peaks and quiffs that he always struggled to control.

“It’s not me,” I say. “It’s Alice. She comes in in the night . . . I did tell you.”

Alice has slept with me almost every night since she was old enough to toddle from her room to mine. I tuck her into her own bed each evening but I never wake up alone, even when we’re on holiday, or at my mother’s. At around four o’clock every morning, the corner of the duvet is tugged and a little voice says, “Can I dig in?” and she curls around me. I don’t even notice her do it anymore.

“Oh,” he says. “You did tell me. I’d forgotten. Yeah, that might be a bit weird.”

Rex knows that ten-year-olds don’t climb into bed with naked fathers. The years when she might have surprised him in the shower or late at night are long gone: a pocket of innocence that Rex lost out on along with diaper changes and her first steps. All families have their own codes about this sort of thing, unwritten rules about where you can and can’t be naked, that silently and organically establish themselves over the years. We, on the other hand, have been thrust into devising new codes and rules for every situation that is new to us.

He shakes out the starched pajama bottoms in a multicolored skinny pinstripe and the crisp white T-shirt with matching trim. He regards them blankly and I know that I wasted my time and money on the designer label.

“There’ll be lots of little things like this, won’t there?” he says, sliding into the right-hand side of the bed. “Faux pas. Things I don’t know. Stuff I get wrong.”

“Only for a little while,” I try to reassure him.

I change into the blue camisole and shorts that have replaced my usual flannel pajamas: a self-conscious compromise. It’s ten o’clock, and still no noise from the bedroom next door. Maybe Alice will sleep through the night after all. Rex catches me looking at the clock.

“I was right about bedtime, though,” he says, his voice a caricature of smugness.

“You were lucky.”

“She’s happy to have me back, I think. Isn’t she?”

I lie on my front, my chin resting on his chest. He sighs so deeply I sink another inch into the bed.

“She’s elated. We both are.”

A car passing the road outside swishes a beam through the bedroom curtains, a brief illusion of searchlights that sweep over the bed where we lie. The car’s low purr fades into the night. The only noises left are the soft sound of his breathing and the odd rustle from outside the window. Last time I lay with him, the night before it happened, it was like this, only then we had the white noise of the A1 fleshing out the skeleton of silence.

“Shall we tell her?” he says suddenly.

We both know that the question is rhetorical. It is when, not if. We have to tell her, and soon. The story she knows is not too far from the truth—that there was a fight and a panic and two people died, and although Daddy isn’t a bad man, he had to go to prison to say sorry. To her credit, she never struggled with accepting the concept of a good person living in prison, and has never questioned Rex’s character. She is young enough now not to ask questions. I sometimes think I have deliberately kept her young for this reason. But next year she will be ten, she will soon leave the tiny village school where she has been cosseted for so long and be thrust into a huge comprehensive where I can’t protect her. Ours is the kind of secret that gathers power the longer it is kept.

“You know we have to.”

“But not just yet,” he says. “Can we have a little honeymoon period first? Time to settle in?”

How long does he need? How much time do we have? What if tomorrow is the day my mystery phone caller decides to play his or her hand? I am still protecting Rex from the calls, feigning frustration when yet another “call center” interrupts a meal or a television program. We are living by a stopwatch, but only I know it.

“Another week or two won’t hurt,” I concede. “But we must tell her.”

“What? Everything?”

“Christ, I don’t know.” I pull away from Rex and prop myself up on my elbows. “I’ve had ten years to think about it and still I don’t know. Edited highlights?”

“You know her better than I do,” he says nervously. “What parts is she old enough to understand?”

Now it’s my turn to sigh.

“I’m not sure it works like that. I still don’t feel old enough to understand it sometimes, and I was there.”

“Please don’t say that.” His voice rises and his face assumes a familiar expression, one I used to hate. Panic and neediness etch themselves into the crease between his eyebrows. “You have to understand. Who else will? No one else was there. If you don’t understand, then what did I do it all for? What have the last ten years been about?”

“Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Come here.” I flip onto my back and he curls around me like a baby. His breathing slows to a light snore but I stay wide awake.

Rex thinks that the talk we must one day have with Alice is the last hurdle he needs to leap before he can relax and resume his life. He thinks it’s the last loose end we need to tie up. Of course, he is wrong. There is another, greater secret that only I keep. The real question is not shall we tell her, but should I tell him?

B
IBA DIDN’T COME IN through the front door but emerged from the back garden as the children had. I wondered if she’d been lurking in the underground rooms all this time, but the bag under her arm and the lick of perspiration on her forehead suggested otherwise. I tried not to make my delight too obvious.

“Karen! I’m glad you’re here,” she said, as though I had kept an appointment. She kissed me hello on the lips, opened the fridge door, and then shut it again without really looking at its contents. “Help yourself to whatever.
Mi casa, su casa
. . . that’s Spanish, that is,” she said with a wink in her voice before eyeing the pastry that Nina was working on. “What are you making? How many are we for dinner tonight? Me, you, Rex, Karen, the kids . . .” She flicked a finger up with each name so that her hand was splayed like a fan stripped of its lace or paper. “Are Tris and Jo around?” Nina nodded.

My eyes were dragged to the pavement outside by the sight and sound of a pair of scuffed brogues shuffling up the outside steps. I’d met him just once, but I knew that walk, feet barely breaking contact with the ground, could only belong to Rex. He shambled about overhead for a bit before creaking his way downstairs. He appeared in the doorway in a light gray shirt and faded denims, corner shop bags the color of cornflowers slicing into his palms.

“What have I said about the front door?” he said to the whole room. “It was swinging wide open when I got home. Anyone could walk in.”

“Anyone did,” said Biba, nodding at me.

“Hello, Karen,” said Rex, putting the shopping bags on the one clear patch on the counter and flexing his hands. “Nice to see you again.”

He crossed the kitchen and started cleaning up after Nina, heaping mismatched dishes and silverware into a white sink big enough to bathe a toddler in and old and battered enough to be fashionable again. Occasionally he plucked a glittering mineral from the suds and consigned it to the box containing Nina’s jewelry-making apparatus.

Biba foraged in the bags, opening a round wrap of goat cheese and eating it straight from the packet, and Rex reached over and smacked her on the wrist as though she were one of Nina’s children. She smirked and began to load the fridge with the wine, milk, olives, and butter he’d bought. She had a white crumb of cheese on the middle of her bottom lip. I watched her fiddle with the ancient Pye radio, a black brick with a perforated wooden fascia, flecked with paint from some decades-old redecoration. The aerial had long ago ceased to extend fully. She chased through all the stations, finally achieving a fugitive and fizzing reception of Radio One. The evening’s soundtrack taken care of, she picked a lemon from the fruit bowl and threw it across the room over my head. I followed its arc with my eyes. Tris, emerging through the doorway, caught it in his fist. “Two for a fiver!” said Jo, presenting a pair of cheap-looking screw-top bottles of Merlot to Nina, who was evidently in charge of drink as well as food. “It’s gonna taste like piss, but it’ll get you where you want to be. Carrie, isn’t it? Nice to see you again.”

“Karen,” I said, but she was already facing Rex.

“The front door was open again, by the way,” she told him. “You’ve really got to get it fixed.” Rex put his head, heavy with the weight of this domestic chore, in his sudsy hands.