The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly Page A

white whipped into a peak. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”
    “Yeah, well, it was supposed to take twenty minutes,” says Alice, her tone and her folded arms laying the blame entirely on her father. “We’ve been here for nearly an hour and it’s still all lumpy. I can’t make it all nice like you get it.”
    “It’s under control,” says Rex. “Come on, Alice. We can do this.” His cuff is dangling into the mixture. Alice tuts and begins to roll it up for him. He pulls away, but not in time.
    “What happened here?” she says, holding up his wrist and twisting it to expose the hairless white flesh on the inside of his forearm. The skin is puckered and pocked with scars. How did I fail to notice them last night?
    “I got splashed with hot fat,” he says, hastily rolling down his sleeve. “Occupational hazard of working in the prison kitchen.”
    “I thought you worked in the library,” I say. He has pulled his cuff down to his knuckles.
    “Oh, I only did the one shift,” he replies, and looks away.
    “You can totally tell,” says Alice. “I’m not being rude, right, but I think I’ll cook with Mum from now on.”
    I do not get another chance to examine his arm until he is asleep, his lanky form curled into a fetal position as though he is afraid to take up too much space. By the light of my bedside lamp it is obvious that the tiny craters of pink shiny skin are too circular, too regular to be the result of an accident. He stirs in his sleep as I pull up his T-shirt. There is another scar on his chest, three more on his back. The shape is familiar: I have seen something like it before. Suddenly I recall a drunken Biba grinding out a cigarette on the leather arm of a chair and drop Rex’s arm so suddenly I am surprised he does not wake. Some of the burns are pale and faded while others are deep and red, suggesting that people used his flesh to extinguish their cigarettes more than once, that it was a regular occurrence over months or perhaps years. I feel the familiar, futile guilt at my failure to protect him while he was inside, and my resolve to defend him now that he is outside grows stronger. I curve my arm around his sleeping form.
    “Oh, my poor baby,” I whisper. “What did they do to you in there?”

    Biba gripped the rim of the sink with her arms and swung her body up so that it was perched on the edge. “What do you want to do today?”
    “I’ve got to head back.” Emma had called a house meeting, and I wanted to cross London on the relatively clear midday roads. Biba turned the corners of her mouth down and swung her leg in front of her in a lazy kick aimed at no one in particular.
    “Oh,” she said. “I’ll miss you.”
    “I’ll leave my number,” I said. “Call me whenever you want. Have you got a pen?” Biba scrabbled in the silverware drawer and produced a stub of black eyeliner. I dictated the number to her: she scribbled it on the wall next to the mounted telephone, doodling a star and the letter K next to the seven digits. It stayed there for the rest of the summer, smudged but legible. Rex has since told me that he used the minutes between my leaving the house and his arrest to wipe it from the wall.
    “There. Even I can’t lose it now. I’ll walk you to the Tube.”
    There was nothing but twenty or so houses between Biba’s front door and the entrance to Highgate Tube station, but she managed to steer me into a café before I even realized that I had made a detour. Somehow she had got me to cross Archway Road without my noticing. She ordered two coffees, which we drank from polystyrene cups, sitting gingerly on rickety aluminum chairs that wore a patina of North London smog. The café was placed directly opposite another café, the Woodman pub, a bus stop, and the Archway Road entrance to the Tube station, and afforded a perfect opportunity for people watching.
    “See that couple across the road?” said Biba, pointing to a middle-aged man and woman at