The Poison Tree (39 page)

“Help,” she said. She was wedged solidly in between the seat and the dashboard. I reached between her legs and pulled the lever that sent the seat flying back on its coasters so that she had room to breathe.

“I wish I’d known it was here,” she said. “I could have been driving it for
months
. Public transport when you’re pregnant is no fun.”

“You couldn’t drive,” I said. “Look at you. You’d never be able to fit behind the steering wheel. You’re far too big.”

“I bet I could,” she said. “Go on, let me try now.”

“No. Apart from anything else, you’re not insured to drive it.”

“You used to let Rex drive it. He wasn’t insured.”

“Well, I shouldn’t have. Have you even got a license?”

“Christ, I’d forgotten how anal you could be about paperwork,” said Biba with a grin. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Oh, it’s
delicious
not to have to take the bus. Let’s never get on a bus again.”

As we pulled out of the garage, the man waved us off. “Don’t forget where I am if you need to store a dead body,” he called after us, and crumpled into helpless laughter.

“I mean, I know he doesn’t know about what happened,” said Biba. “But I do think that’s rather insensitive of him.”

One of the first things she had ever said to me was, “I haven’t any money.” Her two acting jobs had been well paid but she had saved nothing from them, and was as poor now as she had been when I met her. I had been happy to subsidize her then, and did so out of necessity now. She had bought no clothes for her baby: it was me who went to Boots and Mothercare to buy diapers, blankets, and starter kits of miniature clothes. What was left of my wages from Bern I shared with her, paying for the food we ate and taking responsibility for topping up the plastic cards that fed the electricity and gas meters. Spending summer evenings by candlelight in a rambling house in Highgate was one thing. Freezing in semi-darkness in a flat in Kentish Town was quite another. Frequently I woke in the morning to find that the power had gone out in the night, and if I wanted a hot shower or a hot drink, I would have to walk the mile to the nearest corner shop offering a top-up service. On one such morning, I left with the key to the flat, the electricity card, and a twenty-pound note in my pocket. Craving caffeine, I bought myself a polystyrene cup of instant coffee from a café and drank it in the window. I returned an hour later, fed the key into the meter, and watched several appliances, including the television and every light in the place, spring to life at once. No wonder we ran out of power so frequently. I turned everything off and made a cup of tea to take to Biba in bed. She had been asleep when I crept out of the flat but her bed was now empty. The flat was not large enough to suppose she was anywhere else, and there was only one reason why she would leave the flat, in a hurry and alone. There was a Yellow Pages discarded in the hallway. With shaking hands I liberated it from its cellophane wrapping and looked up the number of the Royal Free Hospital.

“I’m looking for a Biba Capel, I think she’s having her baby now,” I said to the nurse in the maternity ward. She told me that they had no one by that name on their books. “What about Bathsheba Capel? She won’t be on your books, but she might have come in as an emergency.” The nurse transferred me back to the switchboard but nobody in Casualty could help me either. I worked my way through all the hospitals in North London, from the Whittington in Highgate to UCL and St. Thomas’s in the South Bank, and as far out as Barnet and Edgware in the suburbs. None had admitted a woman in labor with her name. I began to understand the impetus that had made Rex pace. I ate frosted cornflakes with milk for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The sugary gloop made a hard paste in my stomach but I was unwilling to leave the apartment even for the five minutes it would take to stock up on provisions at the shop across the road. I went to the toilet with the bathroom door open in case the telephone rang and, at 11 p.m. when exhaustion threatened, I pulled the duvet cover onto the sofa with the telephone by my head. It finally trilled at seven the following morning, pulling me out of a shallow sleep.

“Will you come and get us?” she said. “We’re waiting for you outside the Royal Free.”

There she was in a shapeless tracksuit, a little bundle in her arms. Plain white shopping bags were piled at her feet; she wedged the baby under one arm before throwing them onto the backseat. A packet split open and mysterious waddings and gauzes escaped. The baby on Biba’s lap was asleep but it did not look relaxed. Its face was a red ball, screwed up tight.

“I called them,” I said. “They said you weren’t there.”

“They went through my bag,” she said, as though that explained everything. I raised an eyebrow. “I had your purse with me. I needed money for the taxi and your license was in there. I had it in my hand when they wheeled me in. They assumed I was Karen Clarke and I just . . . let it stand.”

“You could have got them to call. I would have been there with you.”

“Darling, I couldn’t even remember my own name while I was in there, let alone my phone number. It
really
fucking hurts. You have no idea.”

A tiny grasping fist emerged from the white bundle, opening and closing like an anemone underwater.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A girl,” said Biba. I put her deadpan voice down to exhaustion. “It’s not drinking out of my boob, though. I’m ravaged enough as it is. Did you know that you hemorrhage for up to six weeks after giving birth? As though I hadn’t been through enough indignity. I suppose it’s nature’s revenge for not having had a period for nine months.”

The white shopping bags contained diapers, clothes, bottles, and cartons of baby formula.

“They gave them to me at the hospital,” she said. “The suits are castoffs from other babies and the other stuff they give you if you haven’t got any of your own.”

The baby had little apart from the meager layette I had bought; no nursery, no toys, not even a push chair. Only a sling made out of hemp to carry her, which had been a present from Arouna, given before the birth.

“How long does it all last? What is it all
for
?” I couldn’t figure out if the large cotton wad I held in my hand was a sanitary towel for Biba or a diaper for the baby. Biba shrugged.

“There’s a booklet in there somewhere.”

While Biba and the baby slept on the futon, I read the booklet. I made up a bottle of baby formula, testing it on the back of my arm like the instructions told me to. I had no idea whether it was the right temperature but a bottle was ready for the baby when she awoke, her tiny body emitting a huge sound that made the next-door neighbor turn up the television in retaliation. Biba sat up in bed with a wince. There was an old stain near her left nipple and a fresh one leaking from her right. At the end of the bed a pair of stained tracksuit trousers were screwed up in a ball and the sheet was smeared with bloodstains where she sat.

“Is this much bleeding normal?” I said. The clothes gave off a musky, metallic smell that provoked painful memories.

“Me and normal parted company a long time ago.”

I went to fetch a towel from the bathroom. When I came back, the baby was on Biba’s lap, puckering her lips and kicking her arms and legs as though trying to swim toward her mother’s breast.

“Isn’t she clever?” I asked. “She knows exactly what to do.”

“It’d better not get ideas about
that
,” said Biba. I handed her the bottle and she tipped it upside down over the infant’s mouth. The baby rejected the rubber teat twice and her screams got louder.

“I can’t do it,” said Biba. She threw the bottle down on the bed and looked as though she might do the same with the baby. “Here,” I said. “Give her to me.” I cradled the baby in the crook of my left arm and gently placed the bottle a few millimeters from her frantically working mouth. This time she latched on and suckled. “We should think about a name,” I said. “We can’t just keep calling her ‘she’ or ‘the baby.’” The child opened her eyes briefly; they were not the black-brown eyes of her mother and uncle but fathomless dark blue pools. Her lids lowered and they were two perfect sea-shells, pink and glossy, and her lashes were thick, black rushes of grass. I felt the little body slacken in my arm and she looked like nothing so much as an old man drifting happily off to sleep in his favorite chair after half a bottle of whiskey.

“She’s happy now,” I said to Biba, but she, too, was asleep.

Without discussion, I had become the baby’s nurse, attending to her feeding, patiently confident that Biba would fall in love with the little girl as soon as she was over the fatigue that had confined her to bed since her return from the hospital. I was the only child of two only children and had never so much as held a baby before. I had no expertise, only a handful of leaflets and a Miriam Stoppard book acquired from a local thrift store to equip me with the bewildering array of new skills necessary to keep the baby dry, warm, fed, alive. I would consult the book in the middle of the night, my spare hand flicking frantically through the index, the letters seeming to exchange places on the page in front of me as sleeplessness and the baby’s screaming conspired to rob me of my ability to read. I had thought myself tired before, in the days immediately after the murder, but I was now coping with exhaustion as debilitating as any illness I had ever experienced. The selflessness and drudgery involved did not come easily to me, and certainly not to Biba, who was content to let me feed and change the baby while she recovered. Rex would have been a natural at this, I thought, one freezing night when I was scooping powdered milk into boiled water. We needed Rex.

Ten days in, Biba was still refusing to endow the baby with a gender, referring to her as “it.” Whenever I made up a bottle and offered Biba the chance to feed her daughter, she would roll over and tell me that she didn’t feel well enough, that she wasn’t up to it. She did feel well enough to drink, revealing a stash of boxed wine in a cubbyhole under the stairs that she may or may not have been drinking throughout her pregnancy. We kept a box balanced on one arm of the sofa and were drinking it when I tried to bring up the subject of the baby’s name again. Biba deflected my question with a startling non sequitur.

“He had to get legal aid, you know,” she said. I had been trying to get her to talk about the night that had forced us into this situation since my return from Switzerland. “It’s really good. You get a solicitor and a barrister and they know exactly how to work the system. They were very clever. The police already knew the gun, like it was a person with a criminal record. They traced it to some bloke Guy knew. So they knew that Rex didn’t—what’s the phrase they used?—oh yes, that Rex didn’t
procure
the weapon, so it was manslaughter or self-defense or something. They sentence you to five years but you get out in two and a half. He’s served six months already so he’d be out in a couple of years if he hadn’t shot Tom Wheeler.”

“He
didn’t
shoot Tom Wheeler!” I said. “You did!”

“Sorry!” she said with a giggle. “I heard it so often I almost believe it myself now. The thing with lies is to stick as near to the truth as possible. Rex told the truth, which was that Guy was shot in panic, but there’s still no excuse, really. That wasn’t self-defense, you see, it was murder and he pleaded guilty to that one, too.” I pressed my fists into my cheeks. “It’s money, really. They don’t bother to challenge your story if you plead guilty because it saves them the expense of a trial and stuff.”

“Did it never occur to you to tell the police what really happened?”

“Darling, of course it did. I said that to Rex when I was visiting him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He said the one thing that was keeping him going was knowing that you and I were totally safe. He did it to protect us.”

“There’s more to it than that, though,” I said. I had promised myself that I would stay relatively sober for the baby but now I poured myself another glass of wine. “He blames himself for how your mother died, and he blames himself for you finding her. It’s his fucked-up idea of atonement for something that wasn’t even his fault in the first place.”

“Look, it’s done now,” she said wearily.

“But he
didn’t do it
! He’s in prison for a murder you committed! Do you know what happens in prison? Men are
raped
in prison. Heroin and gangs and beatings and . . .” My intention had been to shock Biba out of her lethargic state, but I only seemed to be distressing myself with these images. “Are you even listening to me? This is your brother we’re talking about!” Furious on Rex’s behalf, I grabbed her by the shoulders and went to shake her, but the movement roused the baby, who gave a strangulated wail before settling back to sleep. I let Biba go. She remained silent for a long while, swilling wine around her glass and frowning.

“I was very angry with him at the time,” she said eventually.