Imogen Clarke hasn’t drunk it in over ten years.
She avoids it. The way you avoid old wounds. The way you don’t go back to a café where someone gave you a ring and then took it back. The way you don’t watch films you once watched together.
Lemon water had become a symbol of loss. Of someone who wouldn’t come back. Of someone she didn’t want back.
***
She remembered all of it as if it had happened yesterday. Down to the smallest detail.
Spain…
They landed in Malaga at the end of May. Oliver Hartley said:
‘This is going to be the best holiday of your life.’
She was twenty-eight. He was thirty-two. They had been together for eight months. She already had a toothbrush at his flat. He knew all her friends.
Everyone was sure a wedding was coming.
Hotel Las Olas wasn’t the most expensive, but it was charming. White walls, blue water in the pool, palm trees looked after by a gardener with sad eyes.
A room on the third floor with a sea view.
Admittedly, rusty water ran from the tap, the air conditioner only worked every other day, and the neighbours upstairs made noise at night.
Even so, they were happy!
At least, that was how it seemed to her.
On the first day, he ordered sparkling water with lemon.
‘Have you tried it?’ he asked, squinting.
‘No.’
‘It’s the taste of love.’
She laughed.
He wasn’t joking.
He genuinely believed in signs, in omens, in the idea that if you drank that water at sunset, love would last for ever.
And they drank. Straight from the bottle, sharing one between two.
Sour, sweet, bubbles tickling the tongue.
He looked at her with adoring eyes, and she let herself drown in them.
‘Let’s always drink lemon water,’ he said dreamily.
‘Let’s,’ she agreed, not suspecting that this taste would become her curse.
***
Back home, everything went wrong from the start. He went cold. He cancelled one meeting, then another, then stopped calling, then answered only every now and then.
She put up with it. She thought: work, a crisis, depression.
After a month, he said:
‘I need to be alone for a while, to think.’
After two:
‘Don’t call me anymore.’
After three, he vanished without a word.
His phone was silent. His friends said they didn’t know where he was.
His mother said through clenched teeth on the phone:
‘My son doesn’t want to talk to you. Stop calling. Stop torturing him and yourself.’
She didn’t call. She waited. For a year.
Then she married someone else. A good, reliable, utterly ordinary man.
He didn’t drink lemon water, didn’t look at her with adoring eyes, didn’t say ‘You are my life.’
He was simply there. He brought home his salary and did things around the house when she asked.
And she decided this was love. Calm, domestic, grown-up. Neither one thing nor the other.
She gave birth to a daughter, Evie. Her husband was pleased, but in a detached way—as if the baby were a piece of flat-pack furniture from IKEA.
After five years, they divorced.
She couldn’t live in the swamp anymore. That was how she put it.
Not because of the lemon water, not because of Spain, not because of memories. She had simply understood: a dull marriage is a cage. She wasn’t a bird. She was just a woman. And she wanted to live, not merely exist.
She was left on her own. With Evie, with a cat, and with the feeling that life had not worked out.
She worked as a bookkeeper in a small firm, had a flat on a mortgage, and a car that kept breaking down. Friends had scattered, her mother had died, she had never known her father. A daughter. And a cat.
She didn’t drink lemon water. Or anything that even faintly reminded her of that cursed taste.
In restaurants she ordered cola, juice, still water. She told everyone she had an allergy to lemons, even to their smell.
‘Since when?’
‘A long time.’
Nobody knew the truth. The truth was too ridiculous for a forty-year-old woman.
The real truth was that she was afraid of the water. The lemon. The bubbles. And the memories.
***
One day she caught herself realising that she could not remember his face.
She was sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea, looking out of the window. Evie was doing her homework. The cat was asleep on the windowsill.
And then she suddenly thought: what was his nose like? Straight or aquiline? His eyes: brown or green? His hair: dark or light?
She couldn’t remember!
She remembered only the lemon water.
One evening she popped into Tesco. Bread, milk, eggs, cat food. And then—on the drinks shelf—she saw it.
Lemon water. The same as in Spain. The same yellow label, with a lemon cut in half. The same bubbles dancing inside.
She picked up the bottle. Held it. Put it back. Walked away. Came back. Picked it up again.
‘Are you going to take that?’ asked a shelf-stacker in a uniform, unloading crates.
‘No,’ she said, and left.
All the way home she thought about the water. About him. About Spain. About how stupid it was to be afraid of something that no longer existed.
That night she didn’t sleep. She lay on the sofa, staring at the ceiling, listening to Evie toss and turn in her room. The cat came, settled on her chest, and purred. Silence.
Suddenly she got up, threw on a jacket, shoved her feet into shoes, grabbed her keys and ran out.
At Tesco she bought the same lemon water. One bottle. Nothing else.
Back home, she went into the kitchen and took out a glass. The most ordinary glass, plain, with no pattern.
She took a deep breath. Opened the bottle. It hissed as the bubbles escaped.
She poured half a glass. Smelt it. It smelt of Spain. The sea. Youth. Pain. That sunset when he had said, ‘It’s the taste of love.’
She drank.
And … nothing happened.
The memories didn’t return. The tears didn’t come. Her heart didn’t clench. It was just … fizzy water with lemon. Utterly ordinary.
She finished it, threw the bottle in the bin, washed the glass and set it on the draining rack. She went to bed and, for the first time in years, fell asleep without sleeping pills.
In the morning she woke with a smile.
‘Mum, what’s up with you?’ Evie noticed the change in her mother.
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re acting weird.’
‘I’m fine. I just slept well.’
All day she felt good. Not her usual: heavy by morning, tired by lunchtime, silently hating everyone by evening.
Today she felt light. Free. As if she had put down a backpack she had been carrying for more than ten years.
In the evening she bought another familiar bottle. Drank it. Smiled.
‘Silly woman,’ she told herself. ‘What were you afraid of?’
She understood: the lemon water had never been her enemy. The enemy had been in her head, whispering: ‘Don’t drink it, or you’ll remember everything, you’ll never manage to forget, and you’ll suffer all over again.’
Well, she had drunk it, and she was in one piece. More than that—completely calm and happy. She had let go.
***
A week later, she met up with Tamsin Reeve, an old university friend.
‘Tamsin, I’m drinking lemon water again,’ she said.
‘What?’ Tamsin choked.
‘Almost every day.’
‘And the allergy?’
‘There never was any allergy.’
‘So what now?’
‘Now I’m free.’
‘Don’t you want to message him?’
‘Why would I?’
‘Maybe he still remembers you. Maybe he’s still in love with you.’
‘Let him remember. I’ve forgotten.’
She chose to forget. Now lemon water isn’t about the past for her. It’s about life moving on—in spite of everything, or because of it. The fear had never lived in the bottle. It had lived inside her. And the moment she understood that, it was already gone.
