The Poison Tree (38 page)

“Is she on her own?” I asked.

“Yes. I go to see her on my days off but she lives alone.”

“Have you got the address, please?” I said. Pathetic gratitude for Arouna’s help and kindness wrestled with an impatience to see her again.

“I will do better than that. I will take you there.”

The temperature drop, which is the real division between night and day at that time of year, had turned the air bitterly cold. Arouna’s long legs cleared the gap between boat and land easily, and he lifted me down onto the ground. I landed in a puddle and felt the beginnings of an icy dampness that told me the sole of my boot had parted company with its leather upper. He carried my rucksack for me; without it, I felt lighter than my bulk would allow.

“Do you think she’ll be in?” I asked, as we climbed Haverstock Hill.

“Oh, she’s always in,” he said. We turned right onto Prince of Wales Road. Every step we took drew us farther and farther away from the kind of place I could imagine Biba living in. We passed a floodlit, youth-infested soccer field and adjoining recreation center and a railway station—Kentish Town West—that I had seen on maps but never at street level. We were, I realized, walking the no-man’s-land between the two branches of the Northern Line. Either side of the street was filled with a sprawl of low-rise blocks, all branded by Camden Council. Some of the more attractive brickwork buildings were old enough to bear the Corporation of London logo, but the one that Arouna stopped outside was a gray tower ten stories high, its walls clad in huge concrete slabs.

“She lives here?” I said in disbelief. I only had to look at the graffiti-covered elevator to know what it smelled like. Arouna laughed but not unkindly.

“Sixth floor, number thirty-nine,” he said. I looked up, trying to identify which of the lit windows was hers.

“Do you mind if I go alone?” He hooked my rucksack back over my shoulders. Was he going to tell me something? Twice he drew breath to speak and twice he closed his lips again.

“You send my love to that girl.”

I took my chances in the elevator, managing not to breathe in while it wheezed its way to the sixth floor, where it belched me out with a shudder. An open walkway linked the apartments and I glanced over the edge of the flaking railings. Streaky wet taillights trailed after the crawling cars in the street below. It was a long way to fall. I looked in through the front window of apartment 39. It gave onto a small, dimly lit kitchen. The stove was electric, the kind with coils for hot plates, and filthy. A wine bottle filled to the brim with cigarette butts stood in the middle of the lonely little table shoved up against one wall. I recognized the blue silk scarf that hung over a lampshade, a pretty fire risk that was pure Biba.

There was no knocker on the door and the letterbox was the kind that takes the skin off your fingers without making the slightest noise. I rapped with my knuckles but there was no answer, so I hammered. I let it all out now, yelling the name that I had carried around for months like a heavy little secret. A voice, small and shrill, emanated from some unseen quarter of the flat.

“Is it you?”

I pressed my face against the tiny panel of frosted glass embedded with a grid of shatterproof wiring. I found myself eyeball-to-eyeball with a pixelated version of the face I knew so well, black eyes peering out from underneath a thick fringe. I pressed my own forehead to hers against the glass and she disappeared; I heard hands undoing the locks, as noisy as looms, that bolted out the world. At first, only her head and shoulders appeared around the side. I opened my arms and she fell into them. And then I recoiled in shock and something like horror as I encountered the swollen balloon of her stomach, such a contrast from the tiny frame I had expected to embrace. I took a step back and allowed my eyes to confirm her pregnancy.

“What took you so long?” she said.

S
HE FILLED THE NARROW entrance hall. There was no natural light inside. A maroon carpet, balding and stained, covered most of the floor and textured wallpaper had been washed over with a magnolia emulsion that did little to lighten the place up. We passed only two doors before arriving at the end of the corridor, in the living room, which was dominated by a brown, fake leather three-piece suite meant for a room four times the size of this one. A muted but flickering television set and an ashtray on a stand were the only other items of furniture in the room. Biba sat in a shiny armchair with her legs apart. She had put weight on all over, not just on her abdomen. Breasts larger than mine sat heavily on top of her bump. Her arms and legs were plump and her neck thicker, her cheeks puffy, her nose the only pointed feature remaining on what had been a strikingly angular face. I wondered how I could ever have thought her beautiful. I felt somehow betrayed to find that she had the kind of good looks that are dependent mainly on being very, very thin. I sank into the sofa opposite her.

“I don’t know where to start,” I said. “I had so many questions, and now I’ve got so many new ones.”

“Well, let me answer the obvious one. It’s Guy’s,” she said. “And I’m eight and a half months gone, I think.” I tried to do the calculations but I struggled. She must have seen my eyes flickering and failing over a mental abacus. “I’m pretty sure it happened that first time.”

“The night you went to the hospital? After your show? You conceived a child that night?”

“Hmm. It’s not a very auspicious start to life, is it? A drunken fuck up against a tree. And then this . . .” She gestured around the room. She lit a cigarette. “I know, I know. Give me the lecture now and get it over with.”

“You’re
huge
.”

“You can talk,” she said. “What’s happened to you?”

“It doesn’t help that I’m wearing all my clothes at once,” I said defensively, peeling off a couple of layers and dropping two dress sizes. “That’s what happens in Switzerland. It’s all beer and cheese. It’ll go now that I’m back in London.”

Biba had been watching a game show. Her next-door neighbor had the television tuned in to the same channel and the dialogue was intelligible through the wall.

“How are you paying for this, anyway?” I said.

“Arouna sorted it out,” she said. “It’s some kind of scam with the housing benefit. I don’t really understand it myself, but basically Arouna’s friend pretends to charge me rent, and I get the dole. This wasn’t in the plan, was it? Who’d have thought I’d have ended up signing on? I was supposed to be world famous by now.”

“I take it you’re not acting anymore.”

“Well, I’m still with my agent, just about. He wasn’t impressed. The intention is to go back to it when the baby’s born.”

“I’m surprised you decided to keep it,” I said.

“I didn’t know for ages, I wasn’t keeping track of those things, and when I found out, I’d already . . . it had . . . Guy was dead by then, and I thought, well, this is the least I can do.”

“What does Rex think about it?” I asked. It was only the second time I had spoken his name for months, and my voice buckled under the weight of it.

She shook her head. “I didn’t really look big until a couple of months ago and I haven’t seen him since before then.” I put my head in my hands, unable to process all this. “My dad doesn’t know either. The only people who do are you and Arouna.”

I recalled how Nina had convinced Arouna that Gaia was his child and said, “Oh Christ, Arouna doesn’t think it’s his, does he?”

I had forgotten how much I had missed the chime of her laugh.

“Karen, don’t be
ridiculous
.”

“Why not? Nothing anyone does would surprise me anymore.”

The closing credits of the game show blared from the apartment next door and I heard the flick of a switch and the roar of water as a kettle was put on to boil.

“I’m so pleased you’re back,” she said. “Rex will be, too. We’ve missed you. I mean, we understand why you kept away.”

“You told me we couldn’t see each other again!” I said. “I didn’t
want
to go away. I wanted to stay and help you both.”

“Yes, but it worked out for the best, didn’t it? You were the only one who wasn’t to blame for anything and you didn’t get dragged into it at all, did you?” While you, I thought, got away with murder.

“How is he?” I couldn’t say his name this time.

“As well as can be expected considering they sent him to South London. I do think that’s rather cruel of them. He’s such a North London person.” Did it really make any difference which side of the river you were on when you weren’t going to see the water for twenty years?

“I mean, how is he in himself?”

“Getting on with things. Being Rex. He rings me. I ring him. We talk about you a lot.”

She lit another cigarette. A rebuke nestled at the back of my throat like bile.

“What are you doing now, anyway?” she asked. “Are you back in that house in Richmond?”

“Brentford,” I corrected her. “I only got back this morning. I didn’t have a plan beyond finding you and now that I have I don’t know what else to do.”

“Will you stay with me?” Big eyes, small voice. “Until the baby’s born?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes, please.”

There was only one bedroom in the apartment. An unfolded futon was surrounded by Biba’s clothes, refugees from the house. They burst from bags, and hung in and around the wardrobe door and from a plastic clothesline strung on a diagonal between two corners of the room.

“You can sleep in this,” she said, tossing me a T-shirt that I recognized.

“This is Rex’s,” I said, passing it under my nose.

“I thought you’d like that,” she said. She leaned over to a shopping bag on the floor and handed it to me. “I rescued this for you, too.” It was the red dress, crumpled now and too small for me. “I thought that keeping it for you would bring you back, and I was right.”

Biba slept on her side, a pillow wedged between her calves. I nestled into her curled C-shape and tucked my legs into the backs of her knees. I pressed my face between her shoulder blades and inhaled the smell that was so like her brother’s. Pulling her close, I felt the gentle rise and fall of her rib cage, pressed my palm into her stretched and swollen skin, and gasped to feel the tiny dancing kicks of her unborn child.

With me holding her elbow, Biba felt strong enough to take a daily walk, or waddle, around her neighborhood. She was breathless and had to stop every few hundred yards to lean against a wall and wheeze until she felt strong enough to go on. I was convinced that every gasp and twinge was a sign of imminent labor.

“Where are you having this baby, anyway?” I asked. We were having a greasy breakfast in a café in Kentish Town when it suddenly occurred to me that I had yet to hear her mention a midwife or a hospital. I had a notion that women who were Biba’s size ought to be monitored by some kind of medical professional, and to have a bag packed and waiting in the hallway.

“I haven’t bothered with all that,” she said, dipping a triangle of fried bread into her egg and watching the yolk bleed all over the plate.

“Biba!”

“What? You turn up at the ER or whatever and they’ll just take you in. Or you call an ambulance. As long as I feel okay, and I do, what’s the problem? Nina had Gaia in a mud hut somewhere in Malaysia, and she’s fine.”

“Yes, but Nina had already had Inigo, she knew what it was like to have a baby. And that’s not even the point at all.”

“If you turn up at a hospital they can’t exactly turn you away, can they? I’ll be fine. I always am.” She heaved herself up out of her chair, as clumsy as she had once been graceful. We had to pause twice on the way back to the flat.

“I hate walking everywhere,” she said. “I wish we still had your car.” The sudden recollection of the key tucked in the inside pocket of my rucksack made me stop in my tracks so abruptly that an old man with a shopping cart walked straight into my back.

“You’re in luck,” I said.

It took three buses to reach the garage where I had left my car in September. To my astonishment, the man who ran the place recognized me instantly.

“Yellow Fiat,” he said before I had opened my mouth. “I never forget a face or a car. What’ve you got stashed in there, anyway? A dead body?”

“Very funny,” I said. “Nothing that interesting. Is it all okay?”

“Well, it hasn’t turned into a Mercedes while you were away,” he said. Biba joined in the wheezy laughter that followed the joke. He jangled his jailer’s key ring ostentatiously before unfastening the padlock and pulled up the rusted garage door to reveal my little yellow car. It was filmed with grime but there was still a quarter of a tank of gas. The registration was paid up until April, and the papers were in the glove compartment where I’d left them: I took my crumpled driver’s license out and put it in my purse.

I pulled the passenger seat back so that Biba’s bump could be accommodated. She hauled herself into the car and sent it six inches toward the ground. Gas there may have been, but I’d certainly have to put some air in those tires before I attempted to drive back to North London.