A Faraway Smell of Lemon by Rachel Joyce Page B

tops.
    “Don’t you sell something that I could buy?” asks Binny. “Coffee or plasters or something?”
    The young woman is curt. Not exactly rude, but she isn’t friendly either. “This is a family business. We’ve never sold anything but cleaning products. We supply mainly to industry.”
    “Blimey,” says Binny. She gives a slightly foolish shrug of her shoulders, which is supposed to make the young woman laugh.
    It doesn’t.
    Unspeaking, the young woman stares with eyes as brown as chestnuts. This unsettles Binny. She often puts herself down in order to make people like her. It is her height that is her problem. She fears she dominates a room even when she folds herself into a chair.
    Binny examines the bottles that gleam from the top shelves like colored eyes. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF SMALL CHILDREN. PHOSPHORIC ACID. BENZYL SALICYLATE. IF SWALLOWED , DO NOT INDUCE VOMITING. “Is this stuff legal?”
    “We never sell a product if we can’t guarantee it will work. We are not like those supermarkets where the bleach you buy is water. For instance, some bathroom cleaners are specifically good for shower tiles, and some react badly with the grouting. You have to take these things into account.”
    “I suppose you do. I don’t have a shower. That is, I do, but it has no door. And the water doesn’t shower. It sort of dumps on you.”
    “That’s a shame,” the young woman says.
    “It is,” agrees Binny.
    “You should get it fixed.”
    “I won’t, though.”
    The shower is one of the things Oliver has spent the last five years offering to mend. The shattered pane of glass in the front door is another. Oliver is easygoing, slightly fuzzy at the edges, always wearing his T-shirt inside out and socks that don’t match. He can spend ten minutes untangling loose change from the lining of his trousers for anyone who happens to hold out a hand and ask for it. The rest of the time Oliver is so busy gazing at the sky that Binny has long suspected he will one day lift his arms and soar upward.
    It never used to matter that Oliver was a good ten years younger than Binny and had no regular income, because he was an actor who couldn’t get what he called “proper acting work,” only the odd commercial. It never used to matter that he left the keys to the van in the driver’s door and forgot about things like replacing toilet rolls. It never used to matter that he might go to fix the shower and notice his reflection in the bathroom mirror and drift straight back to the kitchen to ask Binny if she had some anti-blemish concealer because he was afraid he possibly might have a boil coming.
    The truth was, they had stopped looking after each other. Only a month ago he had asked if she was happy. “I don’t know,” she’d said. “I can’t remember.” She had begun to nag him. She couldn’t help it. She swore every time she banged into his guitar at the foot of the bed. Or: “Why must you always use the moisturizer?” she’d complain. “I didn’t thinkyou’d mind, Bin.” “I mind because you never replace it and you always leave the lid off.” “Well, I won’t use it then,” he would say with a shrug. “But if it were mine, I’d just share.” He would wander upstairs to play his guitar, leaving her even more irritated because now she felt not only disgruntled but also less than him.
    Playing his guitar was what Oliver did when he was sad. It offered escape to a land where girls had long hair and wept over Irish seas. Sometimes she listened to his milky voice, crooning at an upstairs window for what was lost, or had never been found, and she was envious even of a set of strings.
    However, the shop woman is still talking. She is still on cleaning fluids. Binny wonders if she has anything else in her life. She imagines the young woman’s Christmas shopping list. Pink emulsion disinfectant for Aunty Florence. Pine gel for Uncle Stan . The young woman is saying, “Of course, some materials you can’t