Snow Garden Read Free

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