A Faraway Smell of Lemon Read Free Page A

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,