Charlie

"Charlie. By Revlon" Advertising image borrowed from www.yersterdaysperfume.typepad.com

The following is from a work in progress for my book 'The Sleeping Sense' due for completion in June 2015. 

It was an Autumn day in 1988 – cool enough to have my regulation bottle-green knee high socks pulled up and the sleeves of my matching green jumper pulled down. My best friend was Rebecca Williams. It was my thirteenth birthday.

Rebecca met me at our usual spot – by the exposed brickwork, under the cover of the passenger waiting room at Cheltenham station in Sydney’s north west. We met here Monday through Friday and caught the train together to our respective schools. She galloped into the waiting room, gave me a hug and presented me with a beautifully wrapped gift – about the size of a box of chocolates. As the red rattler train shuddered into the station I tugged at the silver ribbon, tore into the matching paper and revealed a box emblazoned with ‘Charlie’. Inside was a bottle of perfume. The print advertising at the time told the perfume-buying consumer market that Charlie was ‘The gorgeous, sexy-young fragrance. By Revlon.’ I kept the perfume for a year, before throwing it away. The atomiser had never exhaled a single molecule of the scent.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like or trust Rebecca Williams. She was, after all, my best friend in my thirteen year old life. We spent the first hours of most Friday nights curled up in front of thriller films like ‘The Black Widow’, and then slept together in a double bed in the spare room, listening to the possoms scream into the night and feel the windows shake as high speed trains thundered past, the tracks just a few metres from the Williams’ house. We watched Anne of Green Gables together, made up dance routines to John Farnham’s ‘Take the pressure down’ and camped out overnight in her front yard. I had every reason to believe in Rebecca Williams, her honest intentions and her good taste in perfume.

I threw the bottle of Charlie perfume away because it confounded me. I had realised about 8 years before that I could not smell. That when others were responding to scents, flavours, fumes and fragrances I could not identify the source. For years I had pretended. It was a pretty easy act to pull off.

Children learn from a young age, what the appropriate response is to good, bad and beautiful smells. Children also learn what is meant to smell good or bad. We’re told that dog poo smells bad, cake smells good and flowers are heavenly. To show that you don’t like the way something smells, you need to scrunch up your nose, turn down the corners of your mouth, squint a little, tuck your chin under, bring your shoulders forward and together, lean your torso backwards from the waist up. Wave your hands in front of your face, cover your nose, take a backwards step and shake your head for extra effect.

To show someone that you’re smelling something good – relax the muscles around your eyes, half-close your eyelids, smile softly, lift your ribcage upwards and inhale deeply. Bonus points for exhaling ‘Ahhhhh’ and stepping or leaning forward.

I learnt to listen to the slightest hint that there was something around that warranted a reaction. I waited until someone else responded, before calling on my arsenal of trickery and joining in the very social appreciation of the scent at hand. I leaned as they leaned. I waved as they waved.

My ruse would unravel whenever someone challenged me to smell something. Flowers, food or perfumes would be thrust towards my nose and the thruster would demand that I ‘Smell this’. I mastered the art of the non-committal hum – enough of a stalling device before the people around me started filling in the coloured scents of my monochrome world. A few people would catch me out, but given how subjective our interpretation of smell actually is, I was easily let off the hook.

I told my friends and family. It generated a little interest, which quickly faded once we had covered the basics of ‘How can you taste if you can’t smell’. As an 8 year old, I had no way to explain it. In fact, as an 8 year old I didn’t know how to explain a lot of things. But something happens to a kid when they’re about 8 or 9 years old. They start becoming ‘them’. They’re clearer about what they do and don’t like, and they have good reasons for it. They start forming logic and arguments. They find their own ‘voice’.

At about 8 years old I had found out one of the things about me which I hold as precious, a mystery and a new way of exploring the world.

By the time I was thirteen I was suspicious of any smell being applied to, or emitted from, my body. I would refuse to wear the same shirt two days in a row, even in the middle of winter. My mother complained that I put clothes in the wash that really didn’t need to be washed after one, or so few wears. I became suspicious of any food that was past its use-by date, by even one day. I was learning how to cope and defend myself in this unseen world.

Today, when I read about the Charlie perfume, I find out that I probably would have liked it. The thirteen-year-old me definitely would have aspired to become a ‘Charlie’ girl. Barabara Herman, author of Scent & Subversion: Decoding a Century of Provocative Fragrance, writes on her blog Yesterday’s Perfume ‘Created during the heyday of the women's movement in the seventies, Charlie, with its androgynous name, studiously carefree signature, and jaunty green/floral aldehydic personality, could be said to be one of the first feminist fragrances ever created’.

It would be years before I would apply perfume to myself without supervision.

NOTES: 

Also look up: Doves. Eternity. Jean-Paul Gaultier. 4711. YSL Rose.

Blogroll addition:

http://thefragrantman.com