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

background noise you hear in a radio play when the director wants to convey upper-middle-class affluence at rest. As I retraced last week’s footsteps up the stone staircase, I felt the echo of last week’s nerves. But this was different. Then, I was nervous because Biba’s world had been an unknown quantity. Now, I was apprehensive because I knew how much I wanted to be part of it.
    The front door stood slightly ajar, which made me hesitate more than if it had been closed. A muffled “Come in” sounded from somewhere in the building’s foundations before I had a chance to knock; I pushed the door open and made sure I closed it at the exact same angle. “Down here!” sang a female voice that wasn’t Biba’s. I followed it, and the hiss and crackle of a radio, down a narrow set of sagging steps into a huge and shabby basement kitchen as vast and busy as the little galley upstairs was tiny and bare—although they were equally grubby. Children’s drawings were tacked onto grimy whitewashed walls and appliances and utensils cluttered every available work surface. In the middle, like a dais, was a battered table that might once have been pine or larch but was now colorless. The woman I thought of as the fat girl from the party sat at its head, her fingers in a mixing bowl. She was older than I, closer to thirty than to twenty, and she smiled as though she had been expecting me.
    “Nina Vitor,” she said, holding out a floury hand to me. When I shook it, the bangles on her wrist jangled like gypsy bells. “You must be Karen. We didn’t meet properly at the party but I’d have recognized you anyway from Rex’s description.”
    Irritation that he had been talking about me wrestled with disappointment that his sister hadn’t.
    She gestured to a chair. “Sit down. Have a drink. I’ve made far too much coffee to drink on my own, and I could do with some adult company,” she said, rolling her eyes and her r ’s. The lilt in her voice confirmed the Portuguese origin her name suggested. She was mixed race, although I couldn’t say which races were in that mix. She was all swoops and curves: her honey-colored hair was like a tangle of question marks, her short, wavy eyebrows like two tildes. Rolls of fat oozed over the top of the purple sarong she wore and the nut-brown skin of her hips and breasts was slivered with pale fawn stretch marks, but a pair of cheekbones that her excess flesh couldn’t disguise made her beautiful. I slid onto a bench that ran the length of the table, hoping I hadn’t been staring at her. Nina’s smile suddenly expanded.
    “Oh, my babies,” she cried. I thought she was talking about Biba and Rex until two small children, urchin-filthy, toddled into the kitchen. The little boy licked his hand and smoothed down his curls.
    “I’m four and a half,” he announced.
    “This is Inigo,” said Nina, ruffling his hair so that his curls were loosened. She scooped the girl up onto a generous hip. “And this is Gaia.” The little girl picked her nose and ignored me.
    “She’s not four yet,” said Inigo, and then, “What are you doing in my house?”
    “I didn’t think it was your house,” I said before I could stop myself, but I hadn’t offended Nina.
    “We’ve got the whole of the basement,” she said, only partially enlightening me. “There’s a couple of bedrooms back there that are sort of tucked under the garden steps. Didn’t you notice the other night?” I twisted my spine to see that the back wall of the kitchen was made up of long, tall shutters that reached from floor to ceiling. One of these wooden panels had evidently swung open to let the children in.
    “I didn’t make it this far down,” I replied, but she was distracted. Gaia tugged on her mother’s earring, a piece of jewelry as complex and beautiful as a coil of human DNA. Beads of yellow and green amber like fat raindrops were suspended in silver cork-screws. I fingered the silver coffee bean on a filigree