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Shorts
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| Aromatherapy | |
| By Bernadette | ||||||||||||||||||
| 12 April 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||
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This is not my 'normal' style - I much prefer simple, plain vocab, but for the purposes of this day-dreamy, wistful, menopausal, melancholic and terminally ill MC, I thought this might just work. I would REALLYREALLYREALLY appreciate opinions negative or positive. Maybe cities just smell better as you get older. It must be the “Dirty Old Town…met my love by the gasworks’ wall...” syndrome, she supposed, all the swill and sourness rinsed away in the deodorising nostalgia of years gone by. She inhaled deeply on the rush hour fumes as though to prove the point. Images of her former selves kaleidoscoped, acrid spectres spun from the exhausts on the London South Circular. Above the traffic she could hear the shrill remonstrations of her ghosts: “This stinks.” “This journey stinks.” “This life stinks.” “This deal stinks.” “This relationship stinks.” “This city stinks.” The fetid, vapour phantoms laughed at her now like Marley’s ghosts. The silk scarf she wore, a precaution these younger versions of herself would have recognised at once as protection against the malodorous assaults on her mouth and nose, sailed, unemployed on the warm, pungent currents of the borough’s poorer streets. The fifty year old slowed to catch the aromatic subtleties of Greek and Turkish patisseries. At twenty she would have said these same outlets and their buttery confection smelt only of calories, slightly rancid, unappealing. In her thirties, the same doorways wafted oily warnings of impending middle-age, a penchant for caramelised sugar, cholesterol warnings. By the time she fled London at forty, the Greeks and Turks were covered by her universal dismissal: “This city stinks.” Today, though - was it really simply a matter of time and discernment? - today she thought she could detect even individual flavourings: cinnamon, aniseed, the faintest suspicion of violet. No matter. It was not why she was here, not the reason for her return to the vast, stinking city. She was back because it was only in a metropolis of these dimensions, this vastness, in this huge sluice, that she could lose the smell of the disease that clung to her; the sweetness that hung on her breath and came from her lungs. No-one had prepared her for the thick, honeyed quality of that terminal fragrance on her breath. Here though, outside these broad-bellied purveyors of middle eastern delicacies, she could almost bring herself to believe that the sugary fermentation on her tongue emanated, not from her decaying internal organs, but from the syrupy trays of exotic pastry. She could not stand here forever. She could not stand here a second longer in fact, for fear of being seduced by the lie. She turned toward the all-consuming stink she sought: the rush hour. The little green man on the traffic lights flicked to red: her cue. The last smell to reach her was the burning rubber as the tyres on the double-decker screeched. Only the medics would have to deal with the blood and the dog-shit that replaced the faintest hint of violets and butter still clinging to her scarf.
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