Scented

by Laurence Fearnley

  Eventually, the house I grew up in, and returned to frequently during my student years and months of unemployment, was sold to a wealthy neighbour. No one lived in it, and it fell into a state of disrepair. It was damaged in the earthquakes, and demolished. Nothing remained. The land reverted to wilderness, the growth so dense that the garden was not only unrecognisable but impassable. Even the row of lime trees gracing the driveway fell down and landed in a heap.

  My father’s bag sat on a shelf in my mother’s new garage. As a kid I used to play with the bag as if it were a kind of doll’s house. It was made to stand upright, and its main compartment was divided into drawers of various shapes and sizes, each with a small leather pull tab. I would ease open all the drawers, removing the stethoscope, the reflex hammer, the blood pressure gauge and the otoscope, examining them carefully. My father taught me how to take blood pressure, how to watch the gauge and mark the slight hiccups as the gauge dropped, and to listen to the change in volume of the heartbeat. One small drawer in the case contained disposable syringes; another flat drawer was lined with thick sponge, glass vials arranged neatly in the perforated spaces. There was a drawer full of pills, numerous small golden cylinders labelled with patients’ names. Another drawer was filled with bandages, gauze and rolls of beige cotton tape. For a reason I never worked out, this drawer had a very particular smell, warm like amber or leather but somehow sweeter, as if caramelised. It was a smell I could never quite identify, though I often tried.

  The last time I visited my mother, not long before she died, I brought the bag home with me. Inside were all the bandages, pills and instruments that I remembered, all there exactly as Pete had left them the day he went from doctor to patient. I opened the drawers, inspected everything as I once had, then inhaled, and in that moment my father returned to me. Not as the handyman who had renovated the bathroom, nor as the wax-pale invalid curled up in pain on a hospital bed. He returned to me as the father who had smeared sooty grease over his wrists just to make me happy.

  A doctor’s note: amber.

  I enrolled in American studies at Canterbury University in the early 1980s, a period that’s imprinted on my mind for its protests, collective energy and momentum towards creating a better world.

  When I think back to that time, one of the first things I remember is the smell of sewage. I was living with my boyfriend in his rented flat on Breezes Road in Bromley, a kilometre or two from the sewage treatment station and settlement ponds. Whenever the wind blew from the east we would be enveloped in the smell of shit. The scent was not entirely unpleasant. Sometimes it was like manure or silage, at other times like bananas rotting in a fruit bowl, and every so often like jasmine.

  Our flat was tiny, comprising three rooms: a kitchen that had been knocked through to the dining and living room, a bedroom and a bathroom. The laundry and toilet were in a lean-to accessed through an outside door next to the garage. Through necessity we learnt to store our toilet roll in an old bread bin for protection from the rain that entered the room through a small, paneless window above the cistern. If we forgot we would have to drape lengths of sodden two-ply over the clothes-horse in an attempt to render them useful once more.

  Because my boyfriend was a window cleaner, our evening ritual was taken up with doing laundry. His pile of damp, meths-scented cloth nappies had to be washed and dried, ready for work, and for that reason we had an almost new automatic washing machine, the only truly functioning appliance in the house. In winter we arranged drying racks around the potbelly stove in the living room. Some nights the stove would begin to glow red-hot and smell of molten iron, and the room would fill with cold mist as the moisture from the rags evaporated. On still winter evenings smoke would seep through the joints on the stove and spread through the house in a dense grey haze. Then we’d have to open the windows and swing the doors on their hinges to fan the air and clear the rooms. The fact that we lived in a house with damp, wrinkled toilet paper, freezing fog or gritty smog never struck us as odd.

  With the memory of my mother’s stern reprimand lingering in the back of my mind, my desire to make amends steered me towards the anti-nuclear movement. Christchurch had been declared the first nuclear-free city in the world in 1982, and my real introduction to anti-nuclear protests came not long afterwards when the USS Whipple visited Lyttelton Harbour two years later.

  My thesis supervisor, a somewhat laconic professor named Bob Strauss, was instrumental in my involvement. Originally from Nashville, he had played a significant role in the Freedom Rides and voter registration campaigns of the 1960s, and despite his reserved demeanour was a powerful presence in the local peace movement. One afternoon as I was passing his office, he caught me in the corridor and asked if I was looking forward to ‘the big day’. I knew he meant the protest because we had discussed the Whipple’s visit during our last meeting, and I had mentioned my intention to kayak out on the harbour with my boyfriend and some other friends.

  ‘Could you give me a lift?’

  ‘You’re not driving?’ I asked.

  ‘No. I anticipate being arrested so I’d rather leave my car near the police station so I can get home after.’

  We gave him a lift out to Lyttelton but didn’t see him afterwards because he was taken away and charged with trespass and disorderly behaviour. Meanwhile our small group had paddled out on the choppy harbour and braced ourselves against the wind for a day at sea. I’d been in a kayak before but had no experience of dealing with the constant harassment of the police and pro-American supporters who swept in with a roar of engines, circled our group and then accelerated away at speed. The wash from the powerful launches hit us from all directions and time and time again I thought I was going to be swamped or capsize. As the protest wore on I became not only increasingly tired from the emotional and physical effort of anticipating the next attack but also seasick. So while my male friends grew more and more emboldened, attempting to place themselves between the warship and the inner harbour, I slipped beneath a wharf and waited for the afternoon to end.

  I was cold and my hands were frozen, wet and sticky from the sea. Every now and again while lurking beneath the wharf I bumped up against the piles and scraped my hands on the razor-sharp barnacles, causing my knuckles to bleed. The blood trickled in fast rivulets down the backs of my hands and I felt more and more miserable. It was gloomy beneath the wharf but every now and again, at odd angles, a strange light filtered through from above, casting streaks across the greasy, diesel-stinking water that slurped against the piers. Flotsam – bits of wood, polystyrene and cardboard – floated around me, adding to the ugliness.

  The smell of diesel, combined with the constant rocking of the sea, made me horribly nauseous. But worse was the overpowering sense of shame. It was hard to accept that I wasn’t as brave as I had anticipated. I had imagined being on the frontline with the other protesters, an anti-nukes Joan of Arc, but I had turned out to be frightened, unable to fight for a cause I believed in. What kind of protester did that make me?

  I kayaked back to where we’d left our car. As I shivered, pulling on dry clothes over my still damp body, I could see my friends way off in the distance, their canoes so small against the bulk of the Whipple. Beyond them, free from all police intervention, a jet boat trailing a long ‘welcome’ sign zoomed back and forth, clearing a path for the visiting warship.

  Not long after the protest, complaints started coming in to the university about the American studies department. Most of the criticism came from Americans and typically went, ‘American studies? More like anti-American studies!’ Bob, as head of department and resident expert on American foreign policy, was completely unfazed by the controversy and, to a certain extent, relished it. He gave interviews to the press and even wrote some articles for the student paper. When I asked if he was worried about possible backlash or losing his job, he shrugged.

  ‘They’re not going to touch me,’ he said. ‘There’d be such an uproar that half the university would wa
lk out in support.’

  In 1985, David Lange took part in the famous Oxford Union debate with the joke about smelling the uranium on his opponent’s breath. As the news clip was played over and over again, a memory was triggered for me and I fetched Granny Seren’s strange green bottle from my jewellery box, where it had been kept since I had inherited it following her death. I gave the bottle a rub and waited, as I had throughout my childhood, to see it glow. Though it was as vivid green as ever, it didn’t shine any more brightly than usual. I tipped the bottle and then uncapped it, peering inside at the tiniest hint of a brown viscous perfume within. I took a long sniff and there, still identifiable after more than ninety years, was the distinctive bitter, forest-floor, fungal smell of oakmoss, no longer permitted in perfume in its natural state because its toxicity caused skin allergies.

  Notes from a student flat: sewage, rubbish, methylated spirits, coal, diesel and oakmoss. Oakmoss again.

  My career path following my masters in American studies was haphazard, to say the least. Immediately after graduating I was persuaded by my boyfriend to leave Christchurch and join an alternative community of mainly anti-logging activists on the West Coast, not far from Greymouth. He quickly adapted to a life of cold, uncomfortable self-sufficiency and possum trapping, but I didn’t, and before long we parted company. I returned to the city, and all the comforts of home. Over the next several months I took on a number of part-time jobs before landing my first ‘real’ job, in an art museum, curating exhibitions.

  I was lucky. The job was in Wellington and my boss, Charles, the museum director, was something of a maverick, a man who preferred the company of outsiders and artists to that of art-world insiders. It didn’t worry him that I had no previous museum experience. In fact he preferred someone he could mould in his own image. Where his own staff was concerned, he rarely gave credit where it was due, but somehow it didn’t quite matter because working with him was exciting, full of drama, and I respected him.

  Apart from art, the thing Charles relished more than anything else was an audience. He rarely indulged in conversation, preferring to stand over people while proclaiming his latest discovery, obsession or pet peeve. He always enunciated slowly in an attempt to disguise his stutter and hesitation over long words. Like many people, Charles had favourite words, words that were touchstones, larger than life and non-negotiable. His most liked were ‘absolutely’, ‘wonderful’, ‘life force’ and ‘aroha’. I got to know these words well because part of my job involved ghostwriting his letters, and I learnt early on that it didn’t matter what I wrote as long as all these words appeared at least once on the page. As I wrote letters to artists, art collectors, museum directors and curators, the sound of his voice would be a constant racket in my ears. He was easy to mimic, and part of the fun was succeeding in making him think that he really had written each letter. His nose, usually pink, would have a way of turning blueberry-purple when he realised he had been tricked.

  During my first month on the job, Charles decided to take me on a trip around the North Island to visit the artists he admired. He was a terrible driver. He always started well, moving from first to second gear like anyone else, but once he reached third gear he became deaf to the sound of the engine and would forget to change up. I remember driving along the Desert Road, doing 100k in third gear when, over the sound of the straining engine, he suddenly announced, ‘When I die I want to be reincarnated as a bicycle seat in the Tour de France!’ I had no idea what prompted this but I began to wonder what he had been daydreaming about as we were driving along, and the image of his face looking up from the saddle at the crotch of a Lycraclad cyclist standing up on his pedals suddenly hit me with such force that I actually shuddered.

  That introductory trip was one of the most important events in my life. It made me aware of what it meant to be a creator of objects, of artistic process on an everyday, practical level. The imagination, skill and dedication of the artists earnt my deepest respect, but it was the sensory side of the studio visits, the smell of art, that touched me personally.

  One of the first studios we visited was that of a jeweller who worked with pāua. In one corner was a bench heaped with shells, all in various stages of being shaped and sanded into pieces of body adornment. As Charles held court, I went over and leant against the bench, waiting for him to finish. As I stood in my corner I began to wonder why I could smell sushi. The seaweed nuttiness of nori kept reaching me in waves and it took me a long time to realise that it was the dust from the pāua.

  The next studio belonged to a ceramicist, and this time the smell of clay was undisguised and permeated the whole space. This went on throughout the week as we visited flax weavers, printmakers, textile artists, woodworkers and painters. Every studio had its own distinct smell, something that added to the vitality and life force of the art works themselves, yet neither the artists nor Charles ever remarked upon it. This lack of scent acknowledgement was even more odd given that many of the artists ended each visit by offering us coffee or showing us around their garden, two things that did attract the attention of the nose.

  I spent years trying to persuade Charles to let me do a Stop and Smell the Art show. Most works were displayed in such a manner that they were almost impossible to appreciate except through sight. Touching was largely discouraged, sound was absent from all but kinetic objects, taste was irrelevant, but it seemed to me that we could communicate art through smell. I imagined walking visitors through darkened spaces that captured the odours of shell, clay or wood before they entered the gallery itself.

  ‘We could prime the senses and make visitors more receptive to the exhibition.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Charles.

  ‘Why?’

  He couldn’t answer.

  Stop and Smell the Art never happened and so, perhaps in compensation, I began to experiment with my own series of art scents. It was the first time I’d given thought to creating a range of perfumes based on medium and texture, and the five scents I chose were wood, clay, shell, paint and flax. I made them by infusing raw materials in various oils, and although I tested them on my skin I knew they weren’t meant to be worn. The paint scent, for example, simply mimicked a studio with its mix of oil paint, linseed oil and a hint of turpentine. But each perfume fascinated me and I spent hours in my bedroom, testing formulas, making notes of various quantities and dilutions, until I was satisfied.

  It was the thought and craft that went into making each blend that appealed to me. How a very slight variation in the dilution of one material could throw the balance of the entire perfume, turning a pale scent into a muddy one or, alternatively, a dull scent into a bright one. I learnt how to rescue a failure by going back to the place where it had begun to fall apart and starting again.

  In a final attempt to convince Charles, I took my samples to work for him to sniff. He hated them all but kept them nevertheless.

  Years later, after he died, I happened to mention this episode to a curator friend who was employed in an Australian museum. ‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ he said.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Charles phoned me out of the blue one day asking if I knew any olfactory wizards because he’d had an idea for a show matching weaving with smell. He even had a title: Whāriki: The Scented Mat.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I couldn’t help him, of course. Korean ceramics were more my thing back then.’

  Curated notes: wood shavings, cedar, pine resin, shell, seaweed, flax, oil paint, clay and a dose of bitterness.

  Random smells often enter my mind and stay with me. I daydream in scents and perfumes. Recently these scents have reached me with a clarity and sharpness I haven’t experienced before. Phantosmia is the word that describes olfactory hallucinations, and I have only to detect a whiff of L’Eau d’Issey, imagined or real, to immediately think of Thora.

  Thora must have bought L’Eau d’Issey as soon as it was released in the early nineties. She was certainly the first am
ong my acquaintances to wear it. I suspect that the association with the Japanese designer and the simple profile of the bottle might account for her initial attraction to the perfume, but I don’t doubt that the clean and minimalist nature of the scent itself appealed to her sense of aesthetics.

  Thora had started a chemistry degree and was the coolest woman I had ever met. Like me, she flatted in a large house in the Aro Valley and was part of central Wellington’s arty, politically engaged social scene. She was thin, with dark hair that was cut short at the back but had a long fringe that fell over her eyes. She bleached a section of hair by her side parting, and it was a kind of dirty, greenish blonde against the blackness of the rest. She had a long nose, slightly beaky at the tip, and a downwards-curling smile. She wore black, mostly, the only hint of colour coming from her bright red lipstick. She rarely talked and struck me as shy and intelligent. I don’t think we ever had a long conversation but I liked her enough to be gently teased by my two lesbian flatmates whenever her name came up in conversation.

  In fact, Thora, like Charles, belonged to the period of my life when, despite one or two short-lived relationships with both men and women, I first fully embraced the freedom and independence that came with being single. I had never been greatly interested in sex – though I had never completely shut myself off from it, especially during the years spent with my former boyfriend – but while living in Wellington I realised that sex, for me, was largely irrelevant. I’d given it a go but then moved on in the same way that I might test, and ultimately reject, a new hyped-up perfume. I didn’t long for intimacy and was quite satisfied with the broader social contact I enjoyed through colleagues at work, flatmates and friends. I didn’t want a partner and had never felt any maternal urge, and my dream, if I had one at all, was to save enough to buy a small home of my own, a place where I could live exactly as I wished. I suppose if I had to attach a label to myself it would be ‘spinster’, a word that is seldom owned or used with enthusiasm or pride. I became a single woman by choice rather than as a response or reaction to hurt and disappointment, failed relationships or lack of options.