“I am so sorry,” murmurs Binny. “I had no idea.”
“It was Christmas. Everyone was happy. I felt like an alien. I felt like I didn’t belong.” The young woman guides Binny’s hand back to the cup. “A little more polishing,” she says. Then: “But you have to accept it. Don’t you? He won’t come back.”
Binny continues to wipe the duster in the smallest concentric circles. Suddenly she doesn’t know if they are talking about the stillborn baby or about Oliver. It doesn’t matter. It is all the same. Briefly she closes her eyes and breathes in the lemon smell.
A memory comes back. It is suddenly so clear that she sees it. It is herself as a girl. It is soap-on-a-rope. Of course it is. Vibrant yellow and shaped like a small dimpled balloon. It was there every year, the soap, the smell. She is pulling it out of a stocking, tugging the paper off, and everything, everything smells of lemon soap, even the orange and the walnut hidden at the bottom. The whole of Christmas will smell of it. “What do you have?” her parents laugh from the bed as if they have never seen such a thing as soap-on-a-rope before. It is that simple. And every year it is the same.
When Binny opens her eyes, the young woman is watching. Binny holds the mug very still. “I am sorry you lost your baby,” she says.
“Yes,” she says. “But there it is.”
“Do you hate Christmas?”
“No. I like it very much.”
Binny doesn’t move. In a place beyond words, they stand side by side, the two women: one tall, one small. Their breathing falls into step.
“My partner left me,” Binny says at last.
The words land in the silence.
The young woman nods.
“At least I have my kids.”
“Did they like him?”
“Very much.”
“That is sad, then.”
“But they will be OK.”
“You love them. They will be fine.”
Binny thinks again of the people she has lost. She thinks of her parents and the soap-on-a-rope. She thinks of Oliver and Sally and their baby. No matter how much she rails, there are some things that are gone forever. The young woman is right. We had once what we can never have again. So why, then, do we behave as if everything we have connected with, everything we have blessed with our loving, should be ours for keeps? It is enough to have tiptoed to that space beyond the skin, beyond our nerve endings, and to have glimpsed things that beforehand we only half knew.
“I’m not saying cleaning is the answer to everything,” says the young woman. “You could try something else. Chop wood or something. Or maybe make a sandwich. Sometimes you just need to do something very ordinary.”
Binny will get a tree for the children. She will buy cards and write messages. She has missed the Christmas post, but what does it matter? She will send the cards anyway. She will join the ritual of acknowledging what she has loved, either with an email or a sparkling snow scene. She will remind herself and the people who are left that they mean something to her, even after all these years, even after all this separation.
“Gently, gently,” smiles the young woman. “Look, you’ve missed that tiny bit just inside the handle.”
Binny stays beside this woman she doesn’t know and polishes her christening mug. Briefly, rain falls on the streets outside. There is much to do, much to prepare, much to mend, but it cannot be done in a day, and sometimes it is better to do one small thing. She will stay a while longer.
The angel sits with her tinsel wings. Binny wipes and she wipes and she wipes.
Photo: © Fatimah Namdar
RACHEL JOYCE is the author of the international bestseller The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and longlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, and for which she was awarded the Specsavers National Book Awards New Writer of the Year 2012. Rachel Joyce lives in Gloucestershire with her husband and four children.
www.racheljoycebooks.com
Also by Rachel Joyce
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Perfect
Read on for an excerpt from Rachel Joyce’s
Perfect
The Addition of Time
In 1972, two seconds were added to time. Britain agreed to join the Common Market, and “Beg, Steal or Borrow” by the New Seekers was the entry for Eurovision. The seconds were added because it was a leap year and time was out of joint with the movement of the Earth. The New Seekers did not win the Eurovision Song Contest but that had nothing to do with the Earth’s movement and nothing to do with the two seconds either.
The addition of time terrified Byron Hemmings. At eleven years old he was an imaginative boy. He lay awake, picturing it happen, and his heart flapped like a bird. He watched the clocks, trying to catch them at it. “When will they do it?” he asked his mother.
She stood at the new breakfast counter, dicing quarters of apple. The morning sun spilled through the glass doors in such clean squares that he could stand in them.
“Probably when we’re asleep,” she said.
“Asleep?” Things were even worse than he thought.
Rachel Joyce, A Faraway Smell of Lemon
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