The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly Page B

the bus stop. They were kissing passionately like teenagers. His hands were in her graying hair, and her bag lolled open at her feet. The public display of affection was at odds with the tasteful and muted autumn colors of their clothing. “How long do you think they’ve been together?”
    “They’re very new,” I said. “That’s not normal at their age.”
    “They’re having an affair,” she deduced.
    “They’re not having a very discreet one, snogging at the forty-three bus stop,” I said.
    “They’re not local,” she said authoritatively, as the couple made a hand-in-hand dash across three lanes of traffic and disappeared into another café a few doors down. “They only come up here because they don’t know anyone in this neighborhood.”
    Some people say, “Oh, I can sit in a café for hours and watch the world go by,” but they don’t mean it: they’ve usually got a book on the go, or a paper on their lap, or these days, a cell phone in their hand. But Biba was like me: she could happily pass entire days people watching. I had never met anyone who shared my enthusiasm for the position of bystander before, although her capacity for imaginative conjecture impressed even me. Simon alone had noticed my voyeuristic tendencies and had remarked that if I had gone to a decent school as a child, someone would have pointed out to me that it was rude to stare, but that he supposed it was too late now. Claire, Emma, and Sarah had no need to people-watch: inseparable at all times, the other girls had never gone anywhere without one another and spent their time turning toward one another in a kind of never-ending triangle of reflected interest and affirmation. My parents had noticed my love of loitering in cafés but had identified it as a strange continental habit I had picked up, like bottled water. Of course, Biba and I had slightly different motivations. Mine were more by default than by design. If you are the kind of person other people tend not to notice, you naturally become a spectator. This tendency to voyeurism had been compounded by spending the last few years constantly showing up in new countries knowing nobody, hanging around at airports and in the strange corridors of foreign hostels and universities. Not only is it an excellent way to pass the time, it helps you grasp the idioms and gestures that make the difference between the schoolgirl linguist and the mother-tongue speaker.
    Biba too observed with a view to imitation: her desire to be a better actress was not too far from the surface of anything she did, and passersby were potential case studies for future roles. I’d often catch her repeating phrases under her breath that “characters” had just uttered. She believed that any serious actress must also be a kind of anthropologist, but she was more of an anthrophile, with a genuine interest in other people that went beyond her desire to master voices and mannerisms. She was drawn not to those like herself, whose personalities were a full-frontal assault, but to those who slunk and skulked and made you work to guess their stories. I began to share her conviction that even the mousiest of passersby squirreled away colorful backstories, perhaps because her own past was a whirlpool of chaos and mystery.
    By the time I finally pried myself away from the café and began my homeward journey, the unsupple muscles of my cheeks ached from hours of laughter. We had surmised about several other people, including the waitress from the café, three single men enjoying early pints in separate windows of the pub, a heavily pregnant woman carrying a pumpkin, and an elderly woman who, we decided, might have once been a nun but left the convent for a love affair that turned sour. To my delight, the couple from the bus stop appeared behind me on the descending escalator, bickering about whether it was quicker to get to London Bridge by Tube or bus. I gave up a silent prayer of thanks for my luck when they got on