Free A Faraway Smell of Lemon by Rachel Joyce Page A

Christmas, and Binny will want to swear. Binny slaps her hand to her head to suggest she has just remembered something important—a crucial last-minute piece of Christmas Eve shopping, such as the turkey, for instance—and then bounds toward the nearest shop. Like the boutique farther down that sells designer clothes for very small and very wealthy women, it is not a shop she has ever had cause to enter. The cuts in her hand smart like tiny prickles as she slams her palm against the door handle. “Tosser,” she grunts, hurting for Oliver all over again. Ting-a-ling , sings the shiny glass door. Binny stoops to avoid knocking her head as she steps inside.
    She has told no one what has happened, not even the children. When she tries, she is struck by the lightness of what is about to come from her mouth and feels betrayed. What she really wants is to deal the blow as violently as it was landed on her, and to watch someone else reel, someone else give way to the tide of burgeoning grief Binny herself will not allow. Why do all the words that are to do with feelings sound so ordinary, so full of not feeling? She shuts the door behind her, waiting for the jogging suit to pass.
    It is as if Binny has passed through a black curtain and discovered a new hemisphere. For a moment she just stands in this strange place, where the dust particles swirl like glitter. The silence is unearthly. There are shelves and shelves of cleaning products in jars, canisters, and bottles, some plastic, some glass, all arranged at regular intervals and in order of size. There are displays of brushes, cloths, scourers, dusters—both the feathered and the yellow variety. There are boxes of gloves—heavy duty, latex, nitrile, polythene—as well asKentucky mops, squeegees, litter pickers, and brooms. Binny had no idea cleaning could be so complicated. Right beside the till stands a small plastic angel, the only indication of the time of year. She has a halo and a crinkly white dress and two pointed tinsel wings. There is a clean smell Binny can’t put a name to, but it makes her think of lemon peel. Clearly there is nothing here for a woman like herself.
    Binny is about to retreat when a female voice chimes through the silence, “May I help you, madam?”
    It appears there has been an assistant in the shop all along. Now that Binny squints in the direction of the voice, she sees a slight woman coming toward her. The made-up face looks younger than Binny expected. The woman’s skin is smooth and soft, as if coated, and she stares with dark, liquid eyes that are rimmed with a pencil line. Maybe she is only in her twenties. She wears a crisp white dress that suggests a dentist’s but clearly can’t be, and she has scraped her black hair so hard from her forehead that it pulls at her temples. Everything about her is restrained. The young woman stands with her fingers clasped and crepe-soled shoes touching, as if even an untidy arrangement of her hands and feet is offensive.
    Coco is the only one who understands tidiness. (Her grandmother’s child.) Luke does not understand it, and neither does Binny. The daughter of a girdled woman who had people “who did,” Binny has made a point of embracing both chaos and abundance. Her house is bound in a thicket of ivy. Only small scraps of light squeeze through the leaves that flatten themselves against Binny’s windows, and the rooms are so full of her parents’ Victorian furniture (“Junk,” Oliver calls— called —it) that many 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 Binny has never bothered to answer. The carpet is thick with dust balls the size of candyfloss, screwed-up bras on their way to the washing machine, nuggets of Lego, and also a dead shrub Luke has been using for a Christmas tree. The children have decorated it with cutout paper animals and pigeon feathers and milk-bottle