“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 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, though.”
Binny did not purchase a Christmas tree or get out the box of decorations from the loft or fill the kitchen with mince pies and jars of pickle. It was all so futile. So lacking in meaning. But she’d catch her daughter silent at the window, waiting for the person Binny knew she couldn’t make appear, and she was overcome. It was worse than hoping for Father Christmas. She’d kick the washing. Slam the doors. Rail at the thick mass of cold winter sky. But nothing, nothing eased her fury.
Last night she’d finally given in. When the children were safely in bed, she had watched a program showing the hundred funniest moments in television—she’d laughed at none of them—and drunk a bottle of red wine. After that she had phoned Oliver. Why shouldn’t she? She didn’t even know what she was planning to say. And when he didn’t answer (as she knew all along he wouldn’t), she tried again and then again, pressing REDIAL over and over. Now that she had started this thing she hadn’t wanted to do in the first place, this unashamed self-humiliation, this willful pecking of her bare wound, she couldn’t leave it. She tried maybe a hundred times in all. And every time he fai
led to answer she felt increasingly diminished and increasingly betrayed.
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.”