The Poison Tree (9 page)

Tris stood in the middle of the room like a displaced tree, solid and sun-gnarled, and the children used him as a climbing frame. He grinned as a sandal slapped his left temple and hauled Inigo up above his head before depositing the little boy on the table. In the sober light of the early evening, the couple was less alike than I had thought: Jo’s features were more delicate than his and her skin was a uniform pale gold. The strands of her hair that weren’t bound and matted into dreadlocks were fine and blond. Tris was ruddy, his tan not a tan at all but rather thousands of joined-up freckles, and his hair was reddish and curly at the roots. It was their clothes and mannerisms that were identical and made them such an extraordinary couple. They finished each other’s sentences like twins and mirrored each other’s gestures. They were always touching and kissing, as though breaking contact between hands or lips would sever some invisible oxygen supply, but there was nothing overt or embarrassing about this. You could sit with them and listen and watch for hours but never feel like a voyeur.

“So this is everyone,” said Biba, looking around the table and lingering on me for longer than anyone else. “Our whole menagerie.” Behind us, Nina held a wooden salad bowl out to Rex and he placed it in the center of the table without looking at her. The ex-lovers shared the same intimate, comfortable, utterly desireless body language as my parents. I peered into the hollow and discreetly removed a long, curly hair that had wrapped itself around a crescent of tomato.

“How did you and Tris come to live here?” I said to Jo, eager to piece together this funny little family.

“We met Biba in the woods,” Jo answered me with a mouth full of bread. “It started with a row, actually. We’re conservation volunteers, we help to clean all the crap out of the woods, help out with reforesting and things like that. We’re very pro-zero trace—it’s a movement among climbers, ramblers, mountaineers, people who are into wildlife—do you know what it is?”

Tris took up the thread.

“It means that you leave nothing behind you when you’re in the natural environment, although we practice it in the built environment too.” He leaned forward, a lock of hair springing free from the knot on top of his head and swaying alongside his face. “You can’t leave any litter, obviously, but nothing else that might disrupt the biodiversity of a particular environment. Like, you can’t even leave a seed from your apple core. And so when we came across Miss Capel leaving cigarette butts on the ground we had to give her a lecture . . .”

Biba groaned and hid behind her hands in a pantomime of shame.

“. . . and the short story is that she felt so guilty, she asked us to come and live here,” finished Jo.

The main dish was placed unceremoniously in the middle of the table, a rich spinach mix under layers of phyllo pastry. I could tell it was undercooked just from looking at it. “What’s tonight’s culinary delight?” asked Tris.

I answered for Nina. “It’s spanakopita, it’s Greek.”

“Well done,” said Nina, and then to the others, “She’s a traveler, like me.”

Jo made a face. “It’s a bit raw.”

“It’s a bit salty,” added Biba.

“Piss off,” said Nina affectionately, to the delight of her children.

While the rest of us sat, Rex scurried about getting glasses for the wine. When my drink was poured, little bubbles of dishwashing liquid frothed at the rim, and when I turned the glass around to drink from the other side of the lip it had a chip in it. Gentle probing with the tip of my tongue judged that the chip had been worn smooth enough to drink from. My mother would have spotted this career-ending flaw in the glass while it was still a fissure invisible to most naked eyes and thrown it away. I tried not to hear her voice lecturing me about the bacteria that hide in cracks, and let my breadcrumbs join the powder that settled in the splits and crevices of the tabletop. There was still plenty of food to pick at long after dinner was over.

“We’re off soon, though,” said Jo to me. No one else looked up so I deduced that news of their impending departure had already been broken to the rest of the household. “Most of our lot have gone traveling for the summer, and me and Tris are going to work for a friend of his in Devon. A friend of ours has bought a small farm there, and he’s setting up a kind of commune, like an experiment to see if we can live off the land. There’s no real point in being in London in the summertime, is there? All that crap in the air. Smog. Fucks up your lungs.” She punctuated this last sentence with a long drag on a hand-rolled cigarette. If Biba had done that, I thought, it would have been with a nod to the juxtaposition of actions and words, but the irony was lost on sincere, solemn Jo. “We’re going to stay in a yurt,” she carried on. “It’s like a Turkish tent and they’re basically as good as a house. There’s going to be loads of us. You should come!”

I was taken aback by the invitation, although I didn’t doubt its sincerity. I don’t think that Jo had mistaken my reticence for assent, or that she recognized me as a particularly kindred spirit. She was just one of those rare people able to offer a genuine welcome to any stranger into wherever she happened to call home that month. I turned down the invitation with a silent smile that I tried to hold in place as I felt a pressing on the small of my back. Inigo had placed an oily green hand on my waist and left a lurid smeared handprint on my white tank top.

“Ummmm,” pointed Gaia. “Look at the lady.”

“It’s fine,” I said, jumping to the sink and rinsing it under the tap.

“I’ll need to wash that in hot water to get the stains out.” Rex clearly occupied the role of household washerwoman. “I can’t do that while you’re wearing it.”

“Well, I can hardly sit here in my bra,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll sort it when I get home.”

But Biba had other ideas. “To the wardrobe!” she said, leaping up from the table, knocking over an empty glass. There was a collective groan.

“Good luck, Karen,” said Jo, while Tris gave me a mock-solemn farewell salute. “Be careful not to go too far into it in case you end up in Narnia.”

It was dark now, and when Biba flicked on the landing light a trio of moths woke suddenly and began to dance a suicidal tango around the swinging naked bulb. A wide scarlet runner was precariously held in place with stair-rods on most of the steps; Biba walked this red carpet with the poise of a Best Actress nominee on Oscar night.

The first floor had been the epicenter of the party. I glanced through the living room door and saw that either the postparty cleanup had been abandoned, or a new party had started: mottled wineglasses and beer cans overflowing with cigarette butts jostled for space on a coffee table. The crumbling sash windows that lit every landing were home to forlorn little window boxes containing shriveled and dusty herbs. “Do you know what all the rooms are called?” she asked me. “They all have their own names. This is the Velvet Room because all the furniture used to be velvet when we were little, although it’s a bit bald and slimy now. The bit where you come in is the Black and White Hall, and where Nina and the kids sleep are the Kitchen Bedroom and the Garden Room.” We stopped on the second floor where the carpet was blue with peach flowers. “That’s Rex’s room,” said Biba, jabbing her thumb toward a closed door. “Up there”—I followed her eyes up a farther, smaller staircase with woodchip-papered walls that sloped up into the eaves of the house—“is where Tris and Jo live, in Attic One. There’s an Attic Two as well, but it’s full of junk. And
this
is mine.”

She shouldered the door opposite Rex’s room and carved an arc of visible carpet in the mulch of multicolored clothes that blocked the threshold and covered the entire floor. It was less bedroom than wardrobe: the half-dressed mattress resting on a tatty bed frame against the far wall seemed to be an afterthought. The remaining space was filled with rails, drawers, cupboards full of clothes, clashing colors and fabrics tangled, writhing and competing for her attention. You could tell these costumes had been scavenged from flea markets, sales, friends, and thrift stores. A 1950s gas station assistant’s uniform customized to make a minidress hung in the window, blocking the light. There were rows and piles of shoes, boots, and sneakers, in pairs but more frequently alone, none of which, I supposed, was molded to Biba’s feet but described the footprints of their previous owners. She had disappeared behind an overflowing tallboy, pulling clothes out of its tiny drawers like a magician pulling scarves out of a hat.

“
Mi
wardrobe,
tu
wardrobe. What about this for you?” She proffered a floral printed tea dress in all the wrong shades of pink and brown. It was unironed and hailed from a time when clothes needed to be pressed, and it smelled musty and essential, like Biba herself. I turned my back on her while I changed, surprised and delighted to find that it fit me perfectly. In Biba’s borrowed dress I felt more interesting and vital: like the dress, I felt elegantly rumpled, as though each imperfection had an interesting story behind it. I felt more like the kind of person who belonged in this house.

“You look lovely,” she said. “I want to get changed now, too.” She held up a backless green dress studded with rhinestones.

“Isn’t that a bit dramatic just for wearing around the house?”

Biba tutted. “If I waited for a proper occasion to get dressed up I’d never wear half of these clothes. Put on the clothes and you make things happen to match them. It doesn’t work the other way around.” She hoisted her arms over her head the way a child does when taking off a sweater, crossing her arms at the wrists and stripping herself with one swift pull. She was naked beneath her sundress. For a second my eyes were rooted to the unexpected swell of her breasts and the scrub of dark hair between two bony hips. I turned my back to her and studied my part in the mirror. I could still see her naked, this time from behind, as she shook out the petticoat that hung inside the dress.

“I’m so glad you came to find me. I was dreading another night in this house with Rex mooning over the children.”

“I think you’re lucky,” I said. “I’ve had more fun here in two nights than I have in three years at home.”

“Now that was spoken like someone who lives with a boyfriend,” she asked. “Do you?”

“I haven’t got a boyfriend, just an ex,” I said happily. “He dumped me last week after three years together.”

“Oh, you poor darling. Did he break your heart?”

“Actually, no, he didn’t, which was a bit of a blow to his ego.”

Biba laughed. “I’ve never really had a boyfriend, you know,” she said.

“What? How come?” I managed to bite back the obvious line about someone as beautiful as her and held my breath in anticipation of her reply.

“I’ve had lots of flings, but nothing you could really call a relationship. It just always fizzles out. I’ve always been massively in awe of anyone who can make a go of those things.”

“Maybe you just haven’t met the right man.”

“Maybe,” she agreed.

I turned slowly to find her dressed and standing by the window, where the pane of glass was half-obscured by a diaphanous peach evening gown, probably a corporate wife’s best dinner party outfit from the summer we were both born. She slid her hand into the wide chiffon trumpet of its sleeve and her flesh melted into soft focus. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.” She shoved the window sash upward violently. Flakes of paint flew into the air and floated like snowflakes down to the clothes pooled at her feet. She sat on the second-floor ledge with her back to me and her hands resting on the sill, the blackness of the garden and the wood close enough for her to touch. Then she jumped and was gone.

“Biba!” I negotiated the hazardous floor in seconds, sticking my neck out of the window, needing and not wanting to look down. The top of her head was inches beneath my chin.

“Gotcha,” she said. She stood on a balcony missing its railings that jutted out from the wall like a small stone diving board.

“For fuck’s sake!” I said.

“I’m sorry, I never can resist that.” She jumped down onto the terrace below, ridiculously sure-footed in flip-flops. “Careful. It’s tricky the first time you do it.”

I landed heavily and scrambled after her across the veranda and down the steel spiral staircase that led down into the garden. The space was half-lit by Biba’s bedroom window, making the darker, denser plants bleed into the background. The only visible landmark was the arc of lavender bushes that divided the garden in two diagonally: even in the dark, they gave off a blue haze that I could see as well as smell.

I turned back to face the house and saw the basement level from the back. Another set of French windows gave onto a bedroom, which must have led in turn into the kitchen. So that was how everyone was getting in and out. Gaia sat in the open doorway.

Biba held out her arms for a kiss. “Will you be a good girl and tell Mummy that we’ve gone for a walk?” Gaia waddled off purposefully. “Quick, while she’s not looking,” said Biba, shoving me toward the fence. “I don’t want her to know this is here. Fucking . . . can you imagine? If she goes through it Nina will
kill
me.”

She lifted a curtain of ivy to reveal a two-plank gap in the fence that divided the garden from the wood, and we climbed into the most absolute darkness I have ever known in London. The lights of the house were extinguished and it took a few minutes’ hard blinking before I could make out the branches and trunks. The forest floor remained unknowable to me but presented no obstacle to Biba. I stumbled blindly, trying to copy Biba’s rapid and deft footfalls but tripping on roots and sliding on moss.

“Trust me,” said Biba, giving me her hand. “Nobody knows this wood better than me and Rex. I’ve been running through it all my life. They never do anything to this wood, it’s a nature reserve, so once you know the way to go it never changes.”

Twigs cracked and branches sprang into my face as she pulled me at speed through the trees, down into the wood. She flicked her lighter on, but the orange flame that lit up her face in a ghoulish chiaroscuro only deepened the darkness that swirled around my feet like quicksand. I wanted to tell her I was frightened but settled for the more acceptable, “This is freaking me out.”