Read Online The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly - Free Book Online Page A

the first thing about Alice’s sleeping patterns. She’s nine, not six. I draw breath to tell him off but then remember that he isn’t six either. He’s thirty-four. He puts his head in his hands, parting his hair to reveal those shoots of gray hidden around his ears. I take in the delta of veins that bulge on the back of his hand: they are new, too. Tenderness and guilt engulf me.
    “I’m sorry. It’s okay. We’ll leave her,” I tell him. There is nothing I can say that will make him better but there is something I can do. I open my arms and he collapses into them. A sleeping spring of desire bubbles up and spills over, as sudden and inevitable as tears, and I’m not sure who is healing whom.

7
    T HE WEEK UNTIL I saw her again was a long, hot one that dragged its feet like one of my students on the way to an after-school tutorial. The heat wave that had swaggered into the city on Biba’s birthday had settled in for the summer. The sun sucked the river near Brentford into the sky so that the air hung hot and humid and dirty. Running was impossible anywhere but in the middle of the park or in the air-conditioned gym at the tennis club—a place I wanted to avoid in case I saw Simon. The atmosphere at home was hushed and heavy as Claire, Emma, and Sarah crammed for our looming finals. I watched them poring over dictionaries trying to force in words they didn’t already know and wondered why they bothered. At this stage, either you could do it or you couldn’t. Even when the girls weren’t studying, there was a tension in the house. Their breezy hellos when I entered a room suggested sudden ends to conversations, hastily ground out like illicit cigarettes. They had always had more in common with one another than with me, but this feeling that I was on the outside of a circle was a new and unwelcome one.
    I spent my days at the library, not because I needed to study but to get out of the house and increase my chances of bumping into Biba again. I even took the stairs everywhere, remembering her aversion to elevators. Queen Charlotte’s library was a square block that squatted next to the humanities building. Stuffy even in midwinter, it now developed a tropical microclimate all its own. The huge picture windows in the languages section could be opened only a couple of inches, reportedly to prevent student suicides at this time of year. The slow ceiling fans did little to relieve the heat but plenty to displace the dust that rose and spun in the slats of sunshine that bleached the spaces between bookshelves. I blamed my lack of concentration on the heat making my skin damp and parching my mouth and eyes, but it wasn’t the need for fresh air that drove me to the drama department two or three times a day. I visited Biba’s mailbox more often than my own but every day another envelope or flyer was wedged into the little wooden hollow. That we had shared the same building for three years without bumping into each other didn’t lessen my disappointment when she wasn’t there.
    I spent the weekend in Brentford tutoring teenagers and torturing myself with visions of Biba sitting impatiently in the languages department waiting for me. On Monday my worst fears were confirmed: her mailbox had been emptied but no note had been shoved into mine.
    If she wouldn’t come to me, I would find her. I walked the mile from college along Euston Road to Warren Street, hoping that fresh air and exercise would clear my head. I was wrong on both counts: the air was thick and gray with sun-baked traffic fumes, and the walk made me sweat so that the smog stuck to my skin. I submerged myself in the Tube and sweltered my way up to Highgate.
    The early evening music of Queenswood Lane was soothing and cooling after my journey. Domestic noises accompanied the rustle of leaves. The chink of silverware and the tinkle of ice cubes, a strain of classical music wafting through a high oriel window all sounded like the carefully orchestrated