She drove him crazy, over fifteen tormenting years.
Early mornings, before rushing to work, she smelt . . . synthetic. That was the only word for it. It was the smell of polymers and plastic. What interested him was the crispness of that smell, the refusing-to-be-weather-beaten smell of her. It excited him to know that by the end of the day that smell would be overlaid by another, more animal smell. The smell of an animal in heat, the distinct pong of her sweat, seeping through the nylon sheen of her clothes, her hair, her umbrella as she shook it out before stepping in through the door. Sometimes when she threw her arms around him it came to him like a gust from one of those gratings, the salty, acrid knowledge of her body.
You could call him her most faithful archivist. Oh, faithful in other ways too, the way a dog might be.
In the afternoons, she smelt of rotting vegetation. These afternoons were weekend afternoons, and with the roads flooded and the skies pouring there would be no place to go but the boxed window seats in the flat. She smelt, not of the watered plants with their glistening leaves, but of the uncut tangle below, bordering the drains—weed and leaf, mixed with rubbish thrown from the other windows, never theirs. Sometimes, on those same afternoons, when they lit the lamps early and snuggled up to their teacups, she smelt of houses.
Why, you might ask, would a man be proud of such a disgusting love? Such a questioner has obviously never lived. Never known the love that engulfs you, like a swamp, when you enter the body of your best beloved.Miasma.How he loved that word! When she was angry and bothered, hurried and tired and late, it was her miasma that he loved, the whole enveloping fug of it, not merely her scent. Loved the hard, blasted dream she was beneath her own secretions.
They walked everywhere, she and him. It was when they were cutting through—a shortcut, a by-lane—that her secretions became most vividly real to him. Armpit, he would note. Groin. He always smelt the blood, she couldn’t hide it. He could tell, just by sniffing, when it was fresh and thick, when brown and stale. He could tell when there was more than one source of blood. She was never ashamed of anything, the smell of garlic, raw onions, fried onions, frying butter, piss. Behind the knees, between the toes, the legs. Sometimes, the wind would change and he would smell other, earthier smells.
If you’re too delicate for this, perhaps it’s time you moved on. Secretions are unmentionable, mostly. He knew this. But why would hers be secret? Sometimes he felt every other man smelt her just as vividly as he did, and longed to possess her. There were times, on a Saturday evening, couples jazzed up on their way to parties, when she smelt, not of the intense night perfume he knew she had doused herself with, but instead . . . of sulphur. It was the smell of the unburnt match, the one you strike repeatedly against the strip, the one that will not light. He wanted to bury his nose in the roots of her hair when she smelt that way. On those same nights, when they were returning, and the air was emptier, she smelt of chocolates. No, she smelt of an entire chocolate factory, the melted chocolate smell hardening into blocks, the curly edges of chocolate along the biscuit which you could only get off by licking.
I have fallen prey to your delicacy. It’s hard for me to acknowledge everything.
He brought her all her perfumes. He worked as a perfume consultant, he had always had a good nose. He was the one who decided that amber was ‘intense night’ and orchid ‘sunny morning’. It was a foolish, foppish job for a man. Or so his parents thought. He was single and living in. No, living in sin. On Sunday mornings, she smelt of car wash and cigarette smoke from many idling balconies. Air filling slowly in bicycle tyres, rubber balls bouncing off hard cricket bats.
Of course he had read the book by Patrick Süskind. When he drove past Reay Road station, he remembered how the first time he felt for her that stomach-churning desire, she had smelt of yesterday’s wilted cabbages, and that cabbage has no place in a perfumery, though cabbage roses do. Potatoes with too many eyes, soft and wrinkled skins. When she was sad she smelt of the starch that edges the knife that cuts a potato. When she was happy, she smelt of the starch of undrained, soft, boiled rice. When she was dissatisfied, she smelt of pomegranate chewed to a pulp. When she was ill, she smelt of fish.
There was nothing dirty about any of her smells. Dirty is as dirty does.
When she was guilty, she smelt of disinfectant. He hated her then, viciously, hated the pungent malodour of white fluids meant to cleanse, purge, purify. He would cough, his nose would sting, and his throat feel like it was closing. Noxious, the disinfectant smell of her would swirl through him as if he were a toilet bowl.
She was guiltiest in the rains.
Of course he knew she was promiscuous. She left her imprint, her changing, changeable smell on who knows how many beds. Before the guilt washed in, he smelt the beds on her. Foam mattress, tearing on the lower surface where the cast-iron rods had snapped and left their scars. Gadda on the floor, with dog paw or cat fur on it, stains of ordered-in meals.King-size, acres of flowers, potpourri. He smelt the size and shape of the bedside lamps, the snaking wires, the strength of the light. There was a terrifyingly provisional quality to her when she returned to him.
Of course she didn’t need a bed to be promiscuous in. He smelt the shaded red corners of restaurants, the pumpkin yellow of the soup, basil green light through the rainy afternoons.
***
He smelt wooden bench, leather sofa, shoes, restrooms, vanilla ice cream with lychees. He smelt cocktail stirrer, bar stool, brass button. He smelt cockroaches.
At times he wanted to damage her beyond recognition.
Love at first sight, they say. For him, it was love at first smell. They fucked her, he and those nameless others.
Only the lily-livered recoil at the smell of slaughtered meat beside an open manhole. The smell of four avid crows pecking at a dead bandicoot.
Everything smelt raw about her. Everything that is, that stayed unquestioned.
She hadn’t always been that way. She had been, like them all, innocent. That word puzzles him. Why has innocence always been so important? Perhaps he wouldn’t even have noticed her if he had met her in those days, a clean, sweet virgin. He was aroused by his knowledge of her corruption, her capacity to be coarse. One minute she would be the clear smooth surface of a lake, a fresh breeze plucking at her skirt, the next minute she would be a cesspool. Damn you, she said to him, smelling of spit and betel nut, damn you for turning me into a garbage dump. And he, wanting to kiss her foul, foul mouth would say, would want to say, for his courage failed before her invective, Let me pick it up, see my rubber boots, my orange gloves? I will wade in and clean it all up and throw it away. He never said it, or did it, and so the mounds grew, and the stench was unbearable to anyone who had never met her before.
It is hard for me to say the word ‘stench’ when I speak of her, my love.
Between her breasts, the smell of thick sweetened cardamom-flavoured milk was so strong. Sometimes the smell had a sour or burnt edge that no cardamom could hide, and he knew she had other things than him on her mind. When he worked his way down to her navel, it was the smell of very hot oil, a blistering griddle. Lower, he lost all sense of smell and regained, for a few shocking seconds, the clarity of taste, his tongue.
Along her thighs it came back, the exact smell of railway sleepers, around her ankles, the smell of broken flowerpots.
Sometimes out of the corner of his eye, he saw a little child peering past the door into the room where he sat, inventorying her smells. He made sure he never caught the little child’s eye. After a few minutes of perfectly still staring, the child, in its plastered-down hair and strappy frock, would run away.
He never smelt the child. Neither soap, nor powder, nor hair oil, nor toothpaste. She was a clean, bathed, brushed child and she failed to get through to him.
Later, he would find her in the kitchen, dangling her legs from the ledge next to the gas range, eating a very large chapati.
They left each other alone.
***
He dreaded losing her. Dreaded being exiled, ignored, evicted. When he smelt a whiff of empty warehouse, heap of smashed concrete, a metal girder in her bones as she walked by his side, he dreaded a loss so total, he would no longer have any reason to live. Why did he have to share her with so many others, who would never love her, yearn for her, the way he did. Not even hate her as he did, with such ferocity. He needed her more than she needed him. Needed her aroma of machine grease and charred rubber and roasted sing-dana, the lumpy, gluey smell of forgotten post offices, the smooth laminated smell of a train pass. Everything she touched flooded into him, until he could no longer tell where she began. Cunt, he wanted to say, softly under his breath, for he was never as bold as her. All he ever called her was darling and she blasted him with scorn. When she was scornful, she smelt of exhaust, of black smoke and new upholstery.
I have started smelling myself since she turned hostile. I smell of basement parking and giant rats.
Sometimes, to cheer himself up, he seeks out all the smells she never was. The smell of air conditioning, of deep-pile carpeting, of noisy frothy coffee machines.New books and very large, very fluffy soft toys. But it doesn’t really cheer him up. He feels scraped from the inside out as these other, not-her smells come crowding in through his nostrils. He does it to forget her for a few minutes, or hours, but all it does is remind him, acutely, of the pungency he misses until he is sick with longing. And because she is too proud, too big, too busy, too spread-wide, too sought-after to come back to him, it is he who must go back to her, seek her out again and beg, grovel, muddying his hands, his face. You think I’m filth, she once shrieked at him, but you’re the one who likes wallowing in filth, you pig!
I do, I am, I will. Your fat pig, your pet dog, your scavenger.
All I ask is that you love me in return.
They operated on her the other day. Cut her open and stuck pipes in her heart. The stink was overwhelming as she lay there, open. But now, when she breathes, you can see something is wrong. They stitched her up all right, and tamped the places where she leaked, but as he watches her sleep, her chest doesn’t rise and fall like it used to. On the surface she looks shinier, prettier, she glows in the dark. He should be happier with this made-over body of hers, repaired and renewed. Instead all he feels is the crushing melancholy of a man who will never know excess again. Unless—and so this is what he must do—unless he tears along the fresh stitches, rips her open again, plunges his hand right in, and follows.
Inside, with a great unearthly rumbling rolling over him, she smells of a flooded subway, low, dark and narrow, fumes rising from the water, hellish, and wonderful. I’m home.
