A Faraway Smell of Lemon (2 page)

Playing his guitar was what Oliver did when he was sad. It offered escape to a land where girls had long hair and wept over Irish seas. Sometimes she listened to his milky voice, crooning at an upstairs window for what was lost, or had never been found, and she was envious even of a set of strings.

However, the shop woman is still talking. She is still on cleaning fluids. Binny wonders if she has anything else in her life. She imagines the young woman’s Christmas shopping list.
Pink emulsion disinfectant for Aunty Florence. Pine gel for Uncle Stan
. The young woman is saying, “Of course, some materials you can’t use on plastic. Or carpets. Even lino you must be careful with. You have to match the product to the problem.”

This is anathema to Binny. Surely there is simply clean or not clean? And in her own house there is only the latter. She tries to find a new point of contact. “Where I live, there’s a smell. I don’t know what it’s of. It’s been there years.”

“Drains?” Despite herself, the assistant looks very interested.

“No. It’s more like—old things. The past. You get it differently in different parts of the house. For instance, upstairs, just outside the loo, I can definitely smell the aftershave of my ex-husband, and he left eight years ago. Sometimes I’ll get this overwhelming scent of my mother’s jasmine soap. Then there was a friend I had once who wore patchouli. She went to live in South Africa, but I still get that one too, once in a while. Do you think the memory of a smell can hang about in a room? Would you say you have anything for that?”

“For the memory of a smell?” The assistant frowns.

“Of course you don’t. Basically, the house is covered in shit.”

“Is this connected to the smell?”

“
Metaphorical
shit.” Binny laughs. She regrets it instantly. It sounds like the sort of thing her ex-husband used to say. It sounds as if she thinks she’s clever.

Although she’d emerged from Oxford with a first, her intelligence is not something Binny likes to flaunt. It’s the same with her feelings. When her mother died a few years ago, hot on the heels of her father, she refused to cry. (So much for the people “who did.” Broken hearts, it turned out, were not on the agenda, and neither were lungs.) “Binny, you must let go,” her friends urged. “You must grieve.” She wouldn’t, though. Given the size of her, it felt dangerous. Instead, she just stopped ringing her friends.

Binny tells the young woman, “Our hoover broke. My partner was going to fix it. I don’t think he actually
knows
how to fix things. He just wishes he was like those people who can mend hoovers, so he said the kind of things they would say.”

“Does it suck?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your hoover? Does it pull up the dust?” The young woman gives a small intake of breath to indicate what she means by suck. It sounds like a hiccup. “Maybe all you need is a new bag.”

“If only
life
were that simple,” says Binny. “What do you suggest for the heart?”

The young woman is looking confused again.

“Joke,” Binny reassures her.

“Yes,” says the young woman. But once again she is not laughing.

The real joke is that Binny had believed things were looking up for her and Oliver. Only ten days ago they’d made love. It wasn’t abandoned, like at the beginning, when the need for each other was like hunger. But it was familiar: faces breathing smiles in the dark, skin on skin, the honey warmth of him. Oliver’s kisses were beautiful things; his whole mouth opened over hers, as if he were giving a part of himself that was unavailable at other times. Words had whispered through her head.
I love him, I love him. I should tell him. I don’t know why I never do
. Silently he had moved within her until deep inside she opened like a flower.

Next morning he’d limped barefoot into the kitchen, dancing the weight from his left foot as if the sole were shot with invisible nails. “Ooh,” he’d sighed like one of the children, waiting to be noticed. “Ooh, ooh.”

“Morning, Oli.”

“Where’s Coco?” he’d asked. “She said she’d find me a plaster.”

“She’s at school, love. It’s five to ten. Why do you want a plaster?”

“Ooh, ooh,” he’d repeated, hobbling to a chair. “I’ve got a verruca, Bin. Coco took a look. It hurts. It hurts a hell of a lot, actually. I don’t know why you’re laughing. It’s not exactly very nice.”

She’d said not to be a weed. Let me have a look, she’d said.

And when she’d looked she’d seen his toenails. Silvery blue, they shimmered like
mermaid scales, with little black hairs sprouting just below the nails. She’d laughed again. “Hey, Oliver, what’s with the nail varnish?”

“Oh,” he’d said, appearing to remember something insignificant. “Oh, yes, Sally did those.”

And then it all came out.

Binny and Oliver sat at opposite sides of the kitchen table and spoke quietly. There was no anger. They even smiled. They forgot about the verruca. Holding her hand in his, studying her fingers as if he’d lost something in them, Oliver explained how he’d met Sally when he did the breakfast cereal commercial. She was in advertising, he said. Hated it, of course.

“Of course.” The gulp Binny took seemed to fill the air like the draining of a large plughole. “You can’t blame her,” she added. She found she was taking Sally’s part, as if she were a friend. And this was strange when she had lost touch with so many real friends. “Are you in love with her, Oliver?”

“This is so hard for me.”

Yes, she said; well, it was hard for her too.

“Sally gets really excited about what she believes in. Not like all those mothers in the playground first thing in the morning. They look as if they can’t
remember
what they believe.”

“At that particular moment they’ve got their hands quite full. They’re amazed they’ve got their kids to school, for one thing. And that they’re dressed, for another.”

“Sally’s got so many opinions. She collects ideas like—I don’t know—like other women buy shoes. She keeps me thinking and thinking. I know this sounds mad, but you’d really like her, Bin.”

Binny felt an impulse to shout and sat on it. “I don’t suppose that’s important,” she said. “And also, not
all
women buy shoes.”

“I know I’m an arse.”

“No, you’re not,” she urged him.

Oliver sighed. He sank his head to the table, as if he couldn’t bear the weight of it. Binny glimpsed beneath his T-shirt the melty, pale skin of his back. It would be golden again by the summer. She longed to slip her hand down there, to touch the softness of him. She thought of lying naked beside him and then wondered if what he was saying meant that was over now. Sensing his eyes on hers, she felt a sudden rush of heat to her face, as if she’d been caught stealing.

“What’s up, Bin?” said Oliver. “You’ve gone a funny color.”

“I’m just trying to understand,” she said.

Would she never touch his torso again? Was that what he was saying? That he was out of bounds and they must now behave like people who knew each other only in clothes? She wished that when she’d last touched his skin she had taken in every bump, every dimple. It struck her how brutal the dividing line was between love and separation.

“Are you listening?” said Oliver.

“Yes,” she said; she was trying very hard to listen.

“I wanted to say something to you before,” he said. “I
should
have said something. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, Bin. Oh, I feel really shit now.”

“Please don’t,” she said, reaching again for the companionship of his fingers. But he dipped his hand between his knees, and her arm was left shipwrecked on the table.

Oliver told Binny how Sally knew all the lyrics to his songs. She’d said he was a gifted musician as well as an actor. “It’s not just the sex,” he added. They had done it only six times. Twice after the commercial, twice in the van—

“Not
my
van?” Binny gasped. The words shot out. She never normally referred to things as her own.

And twice at her parents’ place.

“Her
parents
?”

“She’s moved out. She had to. Now there’s going to be a baby.”

Binny’s body slumped to the table as if she’d been walloped in the spine. Her fingers were rammed between her teeth. Van? Parents? Baby? There was not enough room in her lungs for the words and the breath and the emotions that were swelling in there like an amorphous mass of bile and confusion.

Oliver flexed his silvery blue toes. His eyes melted with tears. “I’m sorry, Bin. I just think I’ve got to do the decent thing. You know. Stand by her and all that. I mean, I’m only realizing this as I say it. I think I kind of hoped the problem would just disappear. But it’s because of you, Bin.”

“What’s because of me?”

“You’re such a good person. Now I’m telling you, I’m sort of seeing it through your eyes. And I’m seeing I’ve got to stick by her. She needs me, Bin. I don’t know how she’ll manage with a kid on her own. I have to keep telling her it’ll be OK. I mean, it
will
be OK.
Won’t
it?” He hadn’t talked so much in months. God help her, he looked younger and younger. “This is what I’ve always wanted, Binny—”

“What, Oliver? What have you always wanted?”

Suddenly self-conscious, he twiddled a strand of hair. “I’ve always wanted someone to look after.”

Binny gazed at him, and tried to speak, but couldn’t. She remembered the words of love that had filled her head as he had moved his soft body on hers. All she knew was that nothing made sense, as if someone had cut a space out of time and failed to tell her. For a moment, brief as one breath, there was only that look of loss between them. Then:

“No!”
she roared. She thumped the table so hard that the piled-up breakfast bowls rattled and chattered. “What about
me
? What about Luke? And Coco?”

“I know, Binny, you’re right. And I’m heartbroken that I’ve lost you, see. But what would
you
do?”

His mind was made up, then. She swallowed hard, but the thing in her throat stuck there like a stone. “Off you go,” she nodded.

It took barely two hours for Oliver to snip the shape of himself out of Binny’s life and paste it into someone else’s. She piled his bag and his guitar into the van and gave him a lift to the council flat where Sally was kipping with friends. After he buzzed at the door, he rubbed his thick hair with his knuckles until a girl shape appeared at a high-up window. She looked tiny all the way up there, like a little bird framed with colored fairy lights.

“Bye, Oliver.” Binny waved.

He turned, and his face was dark and tangled up with something he couldn’t say. “See ya,” he mouthed. His hair stood up in pointed peaks.

And that was the end of it. It was that straightforward and that clean.

Only, of course, it wasn’t. Binny found that what had seemed an acceptable level of pain when Oliver told her about Sally became searingly unacceptable once he was gone. She had been seduced by his soft voice, and the regular flow of his words, into behaving as if what he was saying were reasonable. And it wasn’t. It was like the ripping out of a whole landscape. Nothing looked the same, or even suggested someplace she dimly recognized. She felt the lack of Oliver’s guitar when she failed to crash into it in the mornings, just as she felt the lack of him when her moisturizing cream remained in the same place, with the lid screwed firmly on. His absence became a presence, and she swore at it like a dog at her heels.

The children brought home paper angels and homemade stained-glass windows that jumped lemming-like off the mantelpiece every time Binny opened the front door. They sang from their bedroom about Good King Winsylass and We Three Kings of Ori an’ Tar. Luke said he would like a Go-Kart for Christmas. Coco said she wanted to donate a goat to charity. Only here was the thing: She wanted to keep the goat in the back garden first and look after it. “But the poor people who need a goat live in Africa,” said Binny. “I think that is racist, actually,” said Coco. “There are some very poor people down the road.” Overwhelmed, Binny bought nothing.

And every evening it was the same question: “Where’s Oliver?”

“He’s out, Coco.”

“I’ll wait up.”

“I wouldn’t.”

The little girl folded her neat mouth. “I think I will, though.”

Binny did not purchase a Christmas tree or get out the box of decorations from the loft or fill the kitchen with mince pies and jars of pickle. It was all so futile. So lacking in meaning. But she’d catch her daughter silent at the window, waiting for the person Binny knew she couldn’t make appear, and she was overcome. It was worse than hoping for Father Christmas. She’d kick the washing. Slam the doors. Rail at the thick mass of cold winter sky. But nothing,
nothing
eased her fury.

Last night she’d finally given in. When the children were safely in bed, she had watched a program showing the hundred funniest moments in television—she’d laughed at none of them—and drunk a bottle of red wine. After that she had phoned Oliver. Why shouldn’t she? She didn’t even know what she was planning to say. And when he didn’t answer (as she knew all along he wouldn’t), she tried again and then again, pressing
REDIAL
over and over. Now that she had started this thing she hadn’t wanted to do in the first place, this unashamed self-humiliation, this willful pecking of her bare wound, she couldn’t leave it. She tried maybe a hundred times in all. And every time he failed to answer she felt increasingly diminished and increasingly betrayed.