Scented

by Laurence Fearnley

  Once, around Mother’s Day, Mr Bumstead decided to stock orchids, but they were too expensive for our regulars and they didn’t sell. As a treat, I was allowed to buy all the wilted flowers for 50 cents a bunch once the petals started to drop. I always took them home, mostly because I felt sorry for them but also because I liked to give them to my parents, who rarely treated themselves to luxuries.

  In general no one really valued the flowers or paused to sniff them on their way in or out of the shop. They seemed to be an afterthought, a token symbolising care and attention to compensate for neglect. Women grabbed them on their way to visit sick relatives or friends in hospital while men gripped the bunches firmly, carrying them at arm’s length, intent at putting as much distance between themselves and the blooms as possible when they reluctantly bought them late on a Friday evening. There appeared to be a certain shame attached to buying flowers, and taking pleasure from their scent was unimaginable. Smelling flowers was strictly for the sick and girls.

  Notes from a lost neighbourhood tainted by narcissism: I don’t want any of the corner dairy scents in my perfume. I’m not a fan of food or sweet perfumes; I can tolerate vanilla but only when it’s dry rather than milky or caramelised. Strawberry, banana and raspberry don’t interest me as notes, nor does the smell of mince and sausage grease. Carnations remind me of cloves, and I find the scent overpowering most of the time.

  Daffodil – narcissus – is the only flower I’d consider from the corner dairy. I love the smell of the stalks, the way they conjure up the cool interior of a florist shop. And recently I’ve spent an awful amount of time focusing on myself, becoming more and more self-absorbed with each passing day. Fortunately, however, I’ve never fallen in love with my own beauty reflected back at me from the water at the bottom of a plastic flower bucket.

  Oakmoss, oak and daffodils. The trees and flowers of England and Wales. But with the memory of the old corner dairy in the back of my mind I wonder if I could construct a lexicon, a chronology, of New Zealand scent.

  I wasn’t offered the job at The Corner Dairy. Anna texted to say I had some great ideas and showed lots of enthusiasm. She congratulated me on how well prepared I was, claimed it had been a pleasure to meet me, wished me well and offered me a $20 discount code on my next purchase.

  I kept thinking about the processes we went through last year as part of the management for change. It was one of the most dehumanising experiences of my life. Week after week we requested updates about the future of our department, our positions, any information that might help us get our bearings during restructuring. And week after week we heard nothing. Then, once in a while, pages of detailed but meaningless nonsense would be circulated around the university and we’d spend hours trying to figure out what was actually being said. The language was impenetrable, even by academic standards; it obscured facts. No one would take responsibility or answer our questions. No one would tell us what was going on. Even the union representative found the situation impossible to navigate. It was all ‘wait and see’ and ‘holding pattern’ and we were asked to remain patient. We were assured that our concerns were being listened to. But they weren’t. No one listened to us. Our union representatives did their best, of that I’m sure. And I’m certain, too, that the head of department did everything in his power to keep American studies afloat. I can barely imagine the stress he must have been under. In the end only one sentence really mattered: the one telling us that the employer had the right to manage, organise and make final decisions about the operation and policies of the university. We were history.

  I remember arriving at work at the end of it all and knowing instinctively that something terrible had happened. There were a number of staff members standing around the office area as I stepped towards my pigeon hole. I flinched when I saw the brown envelope inside, then turned back to face Archer, who was reading a sheet of paper balanced on top of a white envelope. I read my letter and felt sick to my stomach. Not because it came straight out and said I had lost my job but because it was an invitation to meet with various representatives to discuss my ‘future forward’ or something like that. And that was it. Not once did I get a call from the vice-chancellor, her office or the dean. Just the brown envelope in my pigeon hole and a horrible, sickening dread.

  I followed Archer into his office and sat in one of the armchairs he had brought in to make his students feel comfortable during meetings.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Have you seen Jerome?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Yes. He’s going across to the English department.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s been absorbed.’

  ‘Teaching American literature?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’ I paused for the longest time, processing the information before responding. ‘Good. That’s good. Good on him.’

  I sat in silence, wondering if I would get sent over to the English department. But I hadn’t heard anything. Still, there was a chance, wasn’t there?

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked Archer, again.

  ‘Yes. How are you feeling?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Sick, I suppose. Like I failed an important exam.’

  Archer offered to fetch me a drink, and I waited in his office while he went down the hall to the small kitchen then returned with chamomile tea in a cup and saucer. I remember turning the cup around and around but I don’t recall drinking it.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Archer let out a long sigh. ‘I guess I’ll go home and talk to Renate.’

  ‘Good idea. You’re lucky to have someone …’

  And then I stopped because at that moment it hit me hard that I didn’t have a wife, a partner, anyone waiting for me at home. I didn’t even have a father or mother; they were both dead. My home might offer sanctuary, but it wouldn’t provide me with a comforting hug or words of reassurance. There was only me. God, it was a feeling of such desolation I almost cried.

  Jerome called in again on his way home from university. Maybe the traffic was heavy and he wanted to wait it out at my place or perhaps he wanted a rest before going home to his family. He loved his daughter, Scottie, but I’d heard him complain about the disorderliness and the loss of autonomy that came with parenting. He was so fastidious that he had trouble coping with Scottie’s liveliness, loudness and mess. It was only when she behaved like a small adult and sat quietly, her attention fully focused on her iPad or activity book, that Jerome was able to relax and fully enjoy her company.

  Sometimes, too, though I had no proof on which to base my observation, I got the impression that Jerome felt undermined by the fact that he earnt less than his wife, Desna. I believed that his ambition, his drive to reach full professorship and head of department, was at least partly motivated by an old-fashioned need to provide for his family, to be acknowledged – and revered – as the head of the house.

  I was glad I still made an effort to dress up in the morning. I might not have bothered but one day I caught sight of my reflection in the spare bedroom mirror as I was tidying away a stack of books and was taken aback. As I looked at myself for a full minute it occurred to me that I was on the brink of becoming permanently rumpled. The line between casual and dishevelled had been crossed, and if I weren’t careful I’d soon be spending the day wandering about the house in cardigans, trackpants and slippers. Extreme measures were in order. I pulled out a selection of my work wardrobe, trouser suits and chic pencil skirts combined with fine V-neck cashmere sweaters or blouses. I looked good, and when Jerome turned up in his waistcoat and navy chinos I thought that if we stood together and waved towards an imaginary crowd we might have passed as Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron. Of course, I kept that to myself.

  It was nice to see Jerome. Life was becoming far too quiet, devoid of reassuring chatter. I still started each morning well. I got u
p early and searched the job vacancies and sent off a couple of applications, but by noon I was bored, and by two I was often lonely. I’d become one of those people who went through their days speaking to no one. It was only a matter of time before bumping into a neighbour while putting out the rubbish or chatting to someone on the supermarket checkout was the social highlight of my day. In order to fill the void I might start talking to myself, just for company. That thought unsettled me because I didn’t see myself as a ‘living alone with no one to talk to’ person. In my mind I was still a member of the ‘contribute to society’ group. I was capable of holding down a good job. I had ideas to share, projects to pursue, a future … somewhere. Day by day, however, I became less of myself.

  Jerome, on the other hand, was doing well. He had made plans to present at a conference in Melbourne and had applied for funding to visit the Ransom Center in Austin for a few weeks in order to go through the James Salter archives.

  ‘I don’t suppose you need a research assistant in Austin?’ I asked.

  ‘Excuse me? You want to be my assistant?’

  At first I thought Jerome was surprised by my offer but then it dawned on me that no, he wasn’t surprised, but flattered. The idea of having an assistant appealed to his vanity. I hadn’t realised that he carried his self-importance so close to the surface.

  ‘You know, someone to go through the scraps of paper and order them for you?’

  He blushed, a little. ‘I think I’ll be able to manage, thank you.’

  ‘Well, if it gets too much … what with teaching and marking, conferences and overseas travel. Etcetera.’

  He caught my eye, and I could see that being flattered had developed into being annoyed. My offer to help had been interpreted as a dig at his previous habit of offloading work onto me. He suspected that, deep down, I thought he was lazy.

  ‘James Salter,’ I said, to steer the conversation back to safer ground. ‘The famous frotteur of words.’

  Jerome relaxed. He was the one who first brought the frotteur reference to my attention. It originated from an interview with Salter in the Paris Review, and the only reason I knew about it was because Jerome had his copy signed by Salter himself and had shown me the author’s spindly signature, fine pen strokes that looked on the verge of disappearing.

  ‘Have you seen Archer?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  Jerome’s response surprised me because he tended to keep his distance from Archer at work. I think Jerome knew he couldn’t compete, that, by comparison, he was a lightweight.

  ‘When did you see him?’

  ‘Yesterday. I called in after work.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jerome. ‘Renate’s working overseas so I’ve been going over to see him. Just like I check in with you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Hours and days slipped by. First evenings, then weekends, lost their relevance. I fired off more and more emails to potential employers, careful always to maintain a tone of enthusiasm and optimism. I placed a notice in the university online bulletin, offering tutoring, editing and proofreading services to international students and graduates. I realised that my initial success in scoring an interview at The Corner Shop was far from ordinary and that it had given me a false sense of hope. More and more my applications went unacknowledged. I haunted my inbox, checking and rechecking notifications in case a reply had slipped through. Once or twice I received rejections to my morning emails by noon the same day. Though uniformly polite, they were frequently careless with details. One rejection got my name wrong, turning Siân into Sin. If I had a well-paid job that mistake might have made me laugh, but as it was I couldn’t even summon up the energy to flick back a grimacing or disappointed emoji.

  I had been sitting at my table for hours, wondering if ‘unemployment’ or, more specifically, the ‘unemployable’, had a distinct smell, when my thoughts turned back to Jerome. I recalled what he’d said about checking in on me. I’d always regarded us as colleagues, or friends and equals, but now he clearly viewed me as one of the less fortunate, a kind of pity project. He wasn’t so much visiting as carrying out a service.

  One summer when I was about seventeen I’d helped my best friend’s mother deliver meals on wheels to the elderly in Wainoni and New Brighton. I don’t know where my friend was at the time, why she wasn’t with us, but I recalled several things about those afternoons. The first was the constant presence of cigarette smoke. My friend’s mother was very glamorous and a smoker, and as we drove along she used the cigarette lighter in the Holden to light up. I’d never seen anyone do that before and was enthralled with the way she pushed in the button, allowed the coil to heat and then raised the red-hot tip to the cigarette in her mouth, all with one hand and without moving her eyes from the road ahead. She then replaced the lighter in its slot, again without shifting her gaze from the windscreen. She was so poised that she didn’t have to tap the ash but allowed the cigarette to burn until almost all the white paper was gone, perfectly replaced by a smooth stick of ash. Only then did she take the cigarette from her mouth and stub it out in the vehicle’s ashtray. How she managed to do that, given the motion of the car and the bumps of the road, I never knew.

  The meals were stacked in the back of the car, kept warm under tinfoil. The plates were ceramic, not plastic, and the cutlery was stainless steel. Most often we served meals of mince and veggies, pork and veggies or fish and veggies. Always potatoes. And dessert was something steamed: doughy jam, butterscotch or apple puddings. While I served the meals, my friend’s mother would go into the kitchen and collect the plates from the previous day and put on the kettle for a cup of tea. The ritual never varied from house to house.

  Another ritual was peeling back the layer of foil from the plate. There was always condensation on the underside, and often a film of moisture had settled over the meat and vegetables, making them look damp and slightly grey. The smell incorporated this dampness, so rather than the individual earthiness of carrots, the sweetness of garden peas or the richness of beef gravy, there was a muddled fug of aromas. Every single meal smelt like leftovers, as if it had already been served the previous day to someone wealthier or luckier than the present diner.

  As the meal was uncovered and the smell released, the recipient would lean forward and inhale. They would then raise their clouded or watery eyes and look at me and, with an expression that registered as cheeriness, thank me. Only then would their expression falter. As they looked back at their plate, you could see their mouths quiver slightly, the resigned look on their faces.

  I’ll never forget that look. A look that said, This is my life now. This is all I can expect. Be grateful and get on with it.

  The scent of being discarded: meat and potatoes, sticky steamed stodge. If I add meals on wheels to my memory of working in the local dairy it begins to look like mince, sausage and greasy mutton were central themes, or heart notes, of my adolescence. Perfumes built around vetiver – harvested from the roots of a grass grown in India – often smell of sausages to me. Vetiver is not a note I enjoy, for that reason. I remember that Charles had a bottle of Guerlain’s Vétiver and that once, when he wore it, I spent the day thinking someone had brought nutmeg-spiced pork buns into the room. I kept swivelling around in my chair, thinking, where is that smell coming from? Charles didn’t suit vetiver. In fact, Charles didn’t suit many perfumes that I can think of. If I were to match him to a scent I’d go with something floral, something with hyacinth or lily of the valley, or even lavender. I can imagine Charles in lavender.

  I needed to do something with my time, so I blended a perfume for Archer.

  Physically, he was a little under six feet and slim. He was neatly dressed, without being stylish. He preferred dark suit trousers and plain cotton shirts. These could be worn with a tie, but he usually left the top button open. He wore rectangular, metal-framed glasses for reading and, like his fountain pen, they were tucked in his breast pocket when not in use.
He was balding and had no hair at the front or on the crown of his head. Rather than shave his remaining hair, however, he trimmed it. At staff morning teas he generally stood alone, a glass of tap water in his hand, and to tell the truth, his appearance and manner put me in mind of the straight guy from a seventies American sitcom: a cross between Bob Newhart and Murray from The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

  If I were to match a perfume solely to Archer’s appearance, I would probably veer towards something predictable like tobacco. It was the smell associated with middle-aged men who had a favourite chair and spent their evenings by the fire, knocking dottle from their pipes. Tobacco was manly but unpretentious, comfortable yet lacking in style. But in Archer’s case there was an unexpected twist: it turned out he had a crush on Susan Sarandon. He’d watched all her movies, owned many of them on DVD and, a few years ago, hosted a Thelma & Louise twenty-fifth anniversary cocktail night for the department at a rented weekend cottage near Matakana. During the screening of the film he plied us with a variety of cocktails mastered during his student bartending days and then, as we became increasingly tipsy and giggly, he started shushing us – which only made matters worse. When we became too rowdy he pressed pause and replayed pivotal scenes over and over again. After three hours of heavy drinking and excruciating stop-start scene analysis, most of us lost the will to live and wandered off to bed before the car went over the cliff.

  I didn’t want to revisit Thelma & Louise with my blend of essential oils. I was worried that if I did I might have to sit through the whole film again, and that was more than I could handle. Instead, I went with a more interesting film, Atlantic City. In this Sarandon plays the part of Sally, a waitress in an oyster bar who dreams of becoming a croupier and escaping the grim reality of life in a run-down city. At night, she returns to her dreary apartment and stands at the sink, rubbing half-lemons over her hands, arms and breasts. A neighbour, Lou, played by Burt Lancaster, watches, unobserved. Later, Burt admits to spying on Sally and describes what he has seen: the ritual of cutting the lemons, placing a bottle of ‘gold perfume’ on the counter and taking a bar of ‘blue soap’ from a box.