The perfume thing

The perfume thing

 

It happened first when I was pregnant. In a drab store where I'd gone to choose fabric, paint-smell bit at my eyes and invaded my brain so sharply that I blundered, reeling, out of the building.

Since then I have recoiled ever more frequently from the chemical extras of civilised life. I whimper in lighting departments from the halogen. A teenager with deodorant is more frightening than a mugger round a street corner. I cower in terror when passengers are force-sprayed with disinfectant. I cannot walk through the woods where a shower-fresh morning jogger has run.

The thing has meant that from the downstairs kitchen I could tell that only two of my three children in a bathroom on the other side of the house had followed orders to go upstairs and clean your teeth, now.

I am turning into a dog.

I watched the rest of the film of Perfume from behind the sofa when I realised I could smell the cordite from the fireworks in eighteenth century France.

I am turning into a dog.

Lucozade

 

Lucozade is sick-bed time. It's sticky orange rings on the tray. It's visits upstairs and then being abandoned for hours on end. It's chicken-pox itch and calamine lotion. It's a fizz on your tongue and laying your head back exhausted on the grubby pillow. It's soldiers of toast with butter. It's someone a bit bothered about you. Perhaps you won't last the night. It's something to sip when you are on your last sips. When you can't even swallow a peeled grape. It's being in your parents' bed in the daytime, curtains closed and a box of Fuzzy Felt untidy on the eiderdown. You don't have the strength to put the lid back on. It's an open volume of Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia weighing down your legs with whales and steam trains and hot air balloons. If they give you Lucozade and Fuzzy Felt and Arthur Mee and then go downstairs and leave you, they think you are going to die.

Wind poem

 

I took my notebook into the garden

thinking the writing might come easier there.

The breeze is inspired:

one page after another flips itself over

from right to left

as the wind pours out its story

and fills my book

WINTER TRAVEL FOR THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE

 

It is 5.30 a.m. and a freezing dark morning. I have acres of documents that must stay as hand-luggage. I now also have a Russian full-length overcoat, three layers of cardigans to fling off with the hot flushes, and a shawl that could double as a family hammock for half a tribe of Colombians. And a wheelie-bin case. And a handbag. And a hat and gloves.     The taxi bit went fine. So I'm early enough to be told I have to wait even longer because they have decided to cancel the flight. Desk lady is uncharming and tells me there was no demand for the 09.10. I contradict. I go through to x-ray. I take off the coat, the shawl, the three cardigans - for by now I am fuming hot. I put them through. And the case. And the handbag. They do no body-search. Obviously I am no longer attractive even to Rosa Klebb. This flusters me. I take my coat. My cardigans. My shawl. My case. I go. I find a seat, quite some way off. I take my paper. I read the paper. I attempt the crossword. I need a pen. I turn to the handbag which must be under the shawl. Or the cardigans.

    I go back to the x-ray where my cumbersome handbag, containing the pen, keys to house and bank vault, wallets of money, credit cards, tickets and passport and mobile phone and contact lens paraphernalia and spectacles and the manuscript of the book about female suicide bombers I have been asked to review, is sitting on the machine belt and no-one has bothered to isolate it yet.

    I sit, I read some more. Now it's loading time. Oh, no, it's not. The 09.10 was cancelled and the 10.30 is delayed. As I stand tutting at the monitor a middle-aged foreigner brings me my freshly–inscribed Lufthansa luggage labels and says accusingly, "I sink you haff lost it." "You should see me on a bad day," I tell him.

     A Chinese lady sees I am writing furiously and approaches. "Can you borrow me pen?" No, lady, I am using pen. Am doing very important calligraphy.

    A tall African in a slim-fitting camel coat strides past, wearing Rupert-the-Bear check trousers and smart shoes. The lining and hem of his coat are hanging down, dangling threads. I want to sew it for him. I suppose his need to be admired was stronger than his need to wait until the tailor had finished. He is able to look regal while frayed.

I fear I am not.

    
 

 

    
 

        
 

    
 

    

Balsa, paper, glass

Balsa, paper, glass

In fragments on the rug lay brittle pieces of coloured wood,a fret-sawed frame for a circle of glass. Stencilled onto the back was a picture of a Grecian vase in yellows, green and red. The mirror itself was intact, slightly fly-blown, slightly unsilvered.

Only the wood had not survived the fall. Cheap wood, expensive padding. Four small sheets of cream vellum, corners turned down, sixteen stepped triangles, a fortune-telling game.

Open the corners slowly, one by one.

No future was waiting under the folded corners of this soft octagon but the four sheets could be prised apart. Tiny precise grey pencil with open-ended syntax:
"When you break this intentionally fragile mirror"

"you will know"

"how much you are loved"

On the fourth sheet an initial and date from before the war.

The girl took the pieces all in her hands and carried them to her mother, who took them and turned them over, slowly, one by one, laying them out like a game of patience.

Balsa, paper, glass.

"We will glue it back together," she said.

"We need never know."