Read A Faraway Smell of Lemon Online

Authors: Rachel Joyce

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Literary, #Short Stories, #Single Author, #Genre Fiction, #Holidays, #Literary Fiction, #Single Authors

A Faraway Smell of Lemon (3 page)

BOOK: A Faraway Smell of Lemon
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Knowing Oliver, he’d probably lost his mobile. It was probably caught in the lining of his trousers. And then a new thought had come to her, a real thorn. What if the mobile was not lost? What if he and Sally were lying in bed, clinging to each other like beautiful weeds,
choosing
not to answer? He would be stroking her ripe belly, and in Binny’s mind the couple sent her a closed-off smile. At that moment she wished him dead. At least then she’d have a jug of ashes to plonk on the mantelpiece. She could stick a bauble on it.

How
dare
Oliver find peace when she had none? How dare he replace her and be so easily, so stupidly, happy? Did her love mean
nothing
? She hurled an empty bottle at the kitchen wall. To her surprise, it did not break. It bounced off the fridge and into a pile of dirty washing and returned, doglike, to her feet. And because the wine bottle would not smash, she grabbed her mother’s Royal Doulton plates from the cabinet and shot them at the floor. One by one.

They broke. They splintered into a thousand blue ceramic pins. And then she bent over the pieces, the only thing she had left of her parents, and her face yawned into one gigantic noiseless scream.

“Mummy,” Coco said in the morning, “I think we had better buy breakfast at the corner shop on our way to rehearsal.” She closed the kitchen door and fetched the coats.

It was too much. All too much.
I will not cry
. Emotion waved up and over Binny, but she would not go with it. While the children were finding their song sheets, she swept the splinters of china into her hands and squeezed until she felt them spike the skin. Then she shoved her feet into two trainers—Luke’s, actually—and slammed the front door so hard that the broken pane of glass tinkled like a frightened girl. “Fucking bollocks,” she told it.

The children skipped ahead.

And now it is past ten o’clock on Christmas Eve morning and Oliver will have finished his porridge. Her children are rehearsing a Nativity play about Bill the Lizard and there are no gifts at home, or at least nothing her children might want. Outside, people are traveling to be with loved ones while Binny stands alone, in the middle of a shop that stocks nothing but cleaning products. How could this place be less appropriate? And how will she get through until the New Year, when normal life resumes? Deep inside her something is stretching and expanding and she has to grit her teeth to keep a grip.

“So may I help you?” asks the young woman. This could be the third time she’s asked the question, but she doesn’t raise her voice or say it with any impatience.

“I guess I probably need a dustpan and brush, to start with. For my kitchen floor.”

“Are we talking wood or marble?”

“We’re talking crappy lino. Does it really make a difference?”

“It affects the brush.”

The young woman fetches a ladder and reaches for a chrome-colored dustpan. She pulls out several brushes and examines them, running her fingers through the bristles. “This is the one,” she says. After she descends from her ladder she is smiling, like someone who believes she’s just converted a stranger to religion.
How easy it is to be you
, thinks Binny.

“You don’t like cleaning, do you?” says the young woman.

“I find it hard to waste my time doing something that is just going to need doing again. If it’s any consolation, it’s the same with the ironing.”

“Domestic chores can be therapeutic.”

“So can red wine,” says Binny.

To Binny’s surprise, the young woman laughs. “It’s small things that make a difference. Something simple, you know, that you can do well if you take the time. It’s important to have those things. What I do is I take out a piece of silver. I apply the polish with a duster and I wipe it all over. Then I take a fresh duster—nice and clean—and I rub carefully. Ages, I can do that. Tears will be running down my face, and I’ll keep polishing, polishing till it’s over. It makes me feel better.”

The young woman looks at Binny. There is something in her eyes, something shining, like Coco when she is hiding a penny in her hand and wants to surprise you. Suddenly she doesn’t look twenty anymore, and neither does she look tidy in that stiff way. She asks shyly, “Maybe you would like me to show you?”

“How to polish?”

“Why not?”

Without waiting for an answer, the young woman walks to the cash till, bends to fetch something, and produces a shoebox, which she sets on the counter beside the Christmas angel with her tinsel wings. For a moment she gazes at it with her hands suspended in the space above the box, as if it contains hallowed treasure. Then she takes off the cardboard lid and places it beside the box.

Inside is a folded duster, another duster wrapped around something small, and a pot of cream. The young woman removes the pot, the folded-over duster, and the bundle. She places them side by side on the counter. She unscrews the lid from the pot and shows Binny the white cream inside. Binny gets the lemon smell again. Slowly and carefully, the young woman unwraps the bundle and reveals a small silver christening mug.

“Life is hard sometimes,” the young woman says, speaking to the cup. She balances it between the tips of her thumb and forefinger and lifts it to the light. Transfixed, she stares at the cup, and so does Binny. It is about the size of Coco’s fist, and the handle is the slimmest
crescent moon, so delicate that an adult finger would not fit inside. Below the rim is an illegible inscription in a swirling font. At the cup’s center is a gleaming reflection of both Binny’s face and the young woman’s.

With her right hand, the young woman rolls the first duster into a cigar shape and dips the end into the cream. She rubs it all over the cup’s surface until it is smeared white. It’s obvious she’s done this many times. Her tongue tip rests on the corner of her mouth as, without looking, she flaps open the second duster and begins to polish. It is beautiful the way she does it, so carefully, and in such tiny perfect circles.

Binny has a feeling like a bubble in her stomach and she doesn’t know why but it rises up, up, up. She is about to ask the young woman how it is that life has been hard when something warm slips down the side of her nose toward her mouth. It tastes of salt. She knocks it back with the heel of her hand, but here come more. Tears. And now they won’t stop. With them come images from the past, images of people she has loved and lost. She has no idea why. Like winter snowflakes carried on the wind, here and there, they pass before her. Her parents, Oliver, former lovers, her ex-husband, lost friends, mothers, neighbors, the people she sees every day on the street and does not know. So many lives somehow tangled with hers, gone now, or going. So much love, so much energy, and for what? It all seems to smell of lemon.

Still more tears well from Binny’s eyes and swamp her cheeks, her chin, her hair. It is so big, this feeling, it is hard to believe she is alone with it. Are there moments when those people she remembers are plunged at the same time and without warning into the same ocean of memory? Is it possible that Oliver, for instance, is at this very moment recalling the curve of Binny’s soft thigh and picking up his guitar and singing from a high-up window while the Christmas lights
blink, blink
over a housing estate?

It is too much. Her body shudders as wave upon wave of fresh grief rises from somewhere deep inside her. To her surprise, there is a sort of relief in giving way to it, a sort of sweetness.

The young woman is still polishing the christening mug with unbroken circles. Between snuffles, Binny apologizes. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I can’t stop.”

“Would you like a tissue?”

Binny takes the tissue and blows her nose with a wild honk. Her face must look a mess.

“There’s nothing like a good cry,” says the young woman.

“This is not something I do. I can take anything. I am a rock. I
never
cry.”

“You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t cry every now and then.”

“It’s the kids. They break your heart.”

“Don’t they?” The young woman nods.

“I can deal with most stuff, but I hear Coco weeping for Oliver at night. Then I go into her room and she’s lying still, as if she’s asleep. She doesn’t want me to know how much she misses him. She’s only eight.”

“Breaks your heart,” says the young woman, not even knowing, it occurs to Binny, who Oliver is, or even Coco, but such detail seems irrelevant now. Binny splutters into a fresh tide of grief. Her jaw muscles are beginning to ache, and her throat feels sliced.

“Do you want to have a go?” says the young woman.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You can if you like.”

Startled, Binny looks up. She prods her knuckles into her eyes to clear the tears and finds the young woman offering the tiny silver cup and the yellow duster.

“Me?” she says.

“Try not to touch the surface. Then you won’t get finger marks and smudges. You want to do it properly. No marks.”

As abruptly as she’d started, Binny stops crying. She receives the small christening mug in the cradle of her open palm, her whole body tensed.

“That’s it,” says the young woman. She tucks the duster into Binny’s right hand and guides it to the pot of cream. “Gently now,” she urges, as Binny begins.

Binny takes a tiny spot of polish. She rubs it all over the cup. She takes the second cloth, the polishing one, and she rubs with tiny circular movements, all over, up and down, left and right, just as the young woman showed her. Binny thinks of nothing except the silver cup, how it was covered in white and how, as she polishes, the silver comes back again. She mustn’t drop it. She balances it between her fingertips, holding only the base and the rim. She mustn’t smudge.

“Five years ago I lost my baby,” says the young woman. “He was stillborn. He was so tiny I had to bury him in a neighbor’s doll clothes. They were pink and I didn’t want pink, I wanted blue. So I cried. But when he was dressed I didn’t care about the pink anymore. He was all I’d ever wanted, and I lost him.”

“I am so sorry,” murmurs Binny. “I had no idea.”

“It was Christmas. Everyone was happy. I felt like an alien. I felt like I didn’t belong.” The young woman guides Binny’s hand back to the cup. “A little more polishing,” she says. Then: “But you have to accept it. Don’t you? He won’t come back.”

Binny continues to wipe the duster in the smallest concentric circles. Suddenly she doesn’t know if they are talking about the stillborn baby or about Oliver. It doesn’t matter. It is all the same. Briefly she closes her eyes and breathes in the lemon smell.

A memory comes back. It is suddenly so clear that she sees it. It is herself as a girl. It is soap-on-a-rope. Of course it is. Vibrant yellow and shaped like a small dimpled balloon. It was there every year, the soap, the smell. She is pulling it out of a stocking, tugging the paper off, and everything,
everything
smells of lemon soap, even the orange and the walnut hidden at the bottom. The whole of Christmas will smell of it. “What do you have?” her parents laugh from the bed as if they have never seen such a thing as soap-on-a-rope before. It is that simple. And every year it is the same.

When Binny opens her eyes, the young woman is watching. Binny holds the mug very still. “I am sorry you lost your baby,” she says.

“Yes,” she says. “But there it is.”

“Do you hate Christmas?”

“No. I like it very much.”

Binny doesn’t move. In a place beyond words, they stand side by side, the two women: one tall, one small. Their breathing falls into step.

“My partner left me,” Binny says at last.

The words land in the silence.

The young woman nods.

“At least I have my kids.”

“Did they like him?”

“Very much.”

“That is sad, then.”

“But they will be OK.”

“You love them. They will be fine.”

Binny thinks again of the people she has lost. She thinks of her parents and the soap-on-a-rope. She thinks of Oliver and Sally and their baby. No matter how much she rails, there are some things that are gone forever. The young woman is right. We had once what we can never have again. So why, then, do we behave as if everything we have connected with, everything we have blessed with our loving, should be ours for keeps? It is enough to have
tiptoed to that space beyond the skin, beyond our nerve endings, and to have glimpsed things that beforehand we only half knew.

“I’m not saying cleaning is the answer to everything,” says the young woman. “You could try something else. Chop wood or something. Or maybe make a sandwich. Sometimes you just need to do something very ordinary.”

Binny will get a tree for the children. She will buy cards and write messages. She has missed the Christmas post, but what does it matter? She will send the cards anyway. She will join the ritual of acknowledging what she has loved, either with an email or a sparkling snow scene. She will remind herself and the people who are left that they mean something to her, even after all these years, even after all this separation.

“Gently, gently,” smiles the young woman. “Look, you’ve missed that tiny bit just inside the handle.”

BOOK: A Faraway Smell of Lemon
12.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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