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.