Snow Garden (2 page)

At the age of ten, Coco is the only one in Binny’s house who understands tidiness. Luke does not understand it (because, he says, he’s only eight) and Binny doesn’t understand it either, although she is forty-seven. The daughter of a naval officer and a girdled socialite who had people ‘who did’, Binny has made a point of embracing chaos. Her home is bound in a thicket of ivy. The small rooms are so packed with her parents’ Victorian furniture (‘Junk,’ Oliver calls – no,
called
– it) that most of them have been reduced to passageways. Surfaces are felted with dust and piled high with old magazines and newspapers and tax returns and letters she has never bothered to answer. The carpet is thick with dust balls the size of candyfloss, screwed-up clothes on their way to the washing machine and nuggets of Lego, and in the middle of the sitting room there is a dead shrub that the children have been using for a Christmas tree. They have decorated it with cut-out paper snowmen and pigeon feathers and brightly coloured sweet wrappers.

‘Don’t you sell stuff for someone like me?’ asks Binny. ‘Paracetamol or coffee or something?’

The young woman is curt. Not exactly rude, but she isn’t friendly. ‘This is a family business. We’ve never sold anything but cleaning products. We supply mainly to hotels. And also corporate catering.’

Binny examines the bottles that gleam from the top shelves like coloured eyes.
Keep out of the reach of small children. Phosphoric acid. Benzyl salicylate. If swallowed DO NOT INDUCE VOMITING
. ‘Is this stuff legal?’

‘We don’t sell a product if we can’t guarantee it will work. We are not like those supermarkets where the bleach you buy is water. For instance, some bathroom cleaners are specifically for shower tiles and some react badly with the grouting. You have to take these things into account.’

‘I suppose you do. I don’t have a shower. At least, I do, but it has no door. And the water doesn’t shower. It sort of dumps on you.’

‘That’s a shame,’ the young woman says.

‘It is,’ agrees Binny.

‘You should get it fixed.’

‘I won’t, though.’

The shower is one of the things Oliver has spent the last three years promising to mend. The Hoover is another. Oliver is messy-haired, easy-going, slightly fuzzy at the edges, always wearing his T-shirt inside out and socks that don’t match. He can spend minutes untangling loose change from his trouser pocket for anyone who happens to hold out a hand and ask for it. The rest of the time he is so busy gazing at the sky that Binny has long suspected he will one day flap his arms and soar upwards.

It never used to matter that Oliver was a good twelve years younger than Binny and had no regular income because he was an actor who couldn’t get what he called ‘proper acting work’, only voice-overs or the odd commercial. It never used to matter that he always left the keys to the van in the driver’s door and forgot about things like replacing toilet rolls. It never used to matter that he might go to fix the shower and notice his reflection in the bathroom mirror and drift straight back to the kitchen to ask Binny if she had some concealer because he was afraid he might have a spot coming.

But their loving had become commonplace. They had stopped noticing the otherness of one another and now that otherness was no longer a source of wonder but instead an irritation. Binny cussed every time she walked into his guitar at the foot of the bed. Or, ‘Why must you always use the moisturizer?’ she’d complain. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind, Bin.’ ‘I
mind
because you never replace it and you always leave the lid off.’ ‘Well, I won’t use it then,’ he would shrug. ‘But if it were mine, I’d just share.’ He would wander upstairs to play his guitar, leaving her even grouchier because now she felt not only disgruntled but also less generous than him. Playing his guitar was what Oliver did when he was sad. His songs offered an escape to a land where girls had long hair and wept over Irish seas. They were beautiful in their way, even if they were childlike.

However, the shop woman is still talking. She is still on cleaning fluids. ‘Of course, you can’t use some materials 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 clean or not clean? And in her 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 my ex-husband’s aftershave and we divorced six years ago. Or other times I’ll get this overwhelming scent of my mother’s jasmine soap. Then there was a friend I had once when I was a girl. She was a few years younger than me but we did everything together, and then she got married after university and we lost touch. I still get a whiff of her rose-oil perfume once in a while. Do you think the memory of a smell can hang about in a room? Would you have anything for that?’

‘For the memory of a smell?’ The assistant frowns.

‘No, 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.

Her intelligence is not something she likes to flaunt. It’s the same with her body, and also her feelings. When her mother died a few years ago, hot on the heels of her father, Binny refused to cry. ‘You must let go,’ her friends urged. ‘You must grieve.’ She wouldn’t, though. To cry was to acknowledge that something was well and truly over. Besides, given the size of her, it felt dangerous. She might swamp the world. Instead she stopped seeing 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 the sort of person who could mend Hoovers, so he says the kind of things they would say.’

‘Does it suck?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Your Hoover?’ The young woman gives a small intake of breath to indicate what she means. It sounds like the tidiest 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 she is not laughing.

The real joke is that Binny believed things were beginning to look up for her and Oliver. About two weeks ago he’d bought her a Christmas present. She knew because he’d left it on the driving seat of the van (she discovered it when she was hunting for the keys). It was a bottle of her favourite perfume in a special gift box. They’d made love that night and again the next. It wasn’t abandoned, like at the very beginning, when the need for one another was like eating. 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 mouth opened over hers, as if he was giving a part of himself that was unavailable at other times. Silently he had moved within her until deep inside she opened like a flower.

A few days later he’d limped barefoot into the kitchen, dancing the weight from his left foot as if the sole was shot with invisible nails. ‘Ooh,’ he’d sighed like one of the children, waiting to be noticed. ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh.’

‘Morning, Ols.’

‘Where’s Coco? She said she’d find me a plaster.’

‘She’s at school, hon. It’s quarter past nine. 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 smiling. It’s not exactly very nice.’

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

And when she did, she saw his toenails. Silvery blue, they shimmered like mermaid scales, with little black hairs sprouting below the nails. ‘Hey, Ols, what’s with the nail varnish?’

‘Oh,’ he said, appearing to remember something insignificant. ‘Oh yes, Sally did those.’

‘Sally?’ she said.

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 a few months ago. She was in advertising. Hated it, of course.

‘Of course.’ Binny found herself siding with Sally as if she were a friend. And this was strange when she had lost touch with so many real ones. ‘But you’re not in love with her or anything?’ It was a joke. She was expecting him to say no.

Instead he said, ‘This is so confusing for me.’

She felt a ping of alarm.

‘Yes,’ she said; well, it was getting quite confusing for her too.

‘Sally is really excited about what she believes. 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 full. They’re amazed they’ve got their kids to school, for one thing. And that they’re dressed, for another.’ She laughed to show how fun she was.

Oliver continued talking earnestly to her fingernails. ‘Sally’s got so many opinions. She collects ideas like … I don’t know … like other women buy shoes. She keeps me 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. ‘Also, not
all
women buy shoes.’

‘I know I’m an arse.’

‘No, you’re not,’ she said.

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 secret smooth skin of his shoulders and the sprinkling of freckles. His back would be golden again by the summer and the freckles would be washed away. She longed to slip her hand down there, to touch the warm softness of him. She thought of lying naked at his side and then her heart took a plunge. She realized with a terrible, blank and absolute clarity that it was over.

‘What’s up, Bin?’ said Oliver. ‘You’ve gone a funny colour.’

‘I’m just trying to understand.’

She would never touch his bare skin again. From this moment onwards they must behave like two people who only knew one another in clothes. Her breath was snatched clean out of her. She felt hollowed.

‘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.’

‘No, no, you mustn’t,’ she said, groping 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 her that Sally loved all the words to his songs. (I love them too, thought Binny; I just didn’t tell you.) Sally said he was a gifted musician, as well as an actor. ‘It’s not just the sex,’ he added. They had only done it six times. Twice after the commercial, twice in the van—

‘Not
my
van?’ gasped Binny. 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 slumped as if she’d been walloped in the spine. Sex? Parents? Baby? There was not enough room in her lungs for the words and the breath and the emotions that were beginning to swell there in an amorphous gloop.

Oliver flexed his silvery-blue toes. His eyes melted. ‘I’m sorry, Bin. I’ve got to do the decent thing. I mean, I’m only realizing this as I say it. I kind of hoped the problem would go away on its own. But it’s because of you, Bin.’

‘What’s because of me, hon?’

‘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’s petrified. She needs me.’

Binny gazed at him, and tried to speak, but couldn’t. All she knew was that nothing made sense, as if someone had cut a space out of time and had failed to tell her.

Then, ‘
No!
’ she roared. She thumped the table so hard that the piled-up breakfast bowls jumped and chattered. ‘What about Coco? And Luke? What about
me
?’

‘I know, Bin, you’re right. And I’m heartbroken that I’ve lost you. But what would
you
do?’

So his mind was made up.
I’ve lost you.
Already Binny and her children existed in the past tense. She swallowed, but the lump in her throat stuck like a stone. ‘Well you’d better go,’ she said.

‘Shall I have my porridge first?’ he said.

It took barely an hour 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, along with his Asterix bowl, and she gave him a lift to Sally’s new council flat. He buzzed at the door and waited, rubbing his thick hair with his knuckles until a girl shape appeared at a high-up window. Sally looked tiny all the way up there, like a little bird framed with coloured fairy lights.

‘Bye, Ols.’ Binny lifted her hand to wave. It looked more like a ‘halt’ sign.

Oliver turned and his face was dark and tangled up. ‘Oh, I left you some perfume,’ he said. ‘In the bathroom.’

And that was the end of it. So straightforward. So simple.

Except, of course, it wasn’t. Binny found that what had seemed to be an acceptable level of pain that morning became searingly unacceptable once he was gone. She had been seduced by his kind, milky voice and the regular flow of his words into behaving as if what he had told her was bearable. But it was not. 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 on. No one made porridge at half past nine and no one left the saucepan on the worktop, or a sticky rim of honey on the table. She stared at the places where his things had once been and all she could feel was that they should still be there. His absence became a presence and she thought of nothing else. She binned the perfume.