A Faraway Smell of Lemon Read Free

blue, they shimmered likemermaid 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