image provided by John Hughes at SXC, 2007.

Lately, she'd started to notice smells: chips, grass, beef, vinegar; smells from shopping bags; dog smells; and a smell so strong from her childhood that she could taste it: Caramac chocolate. She could even feel the thin slip of the gold foil paper between her fingers.

Then the smells started to get complicated: salty roses; washing powder and jam; stewed apples and petrol. She didn't get it, it made no sense. Where could the smells be coming from?

One day, she brought her warm, downy arm up to her nose and breathed in, slowly. Skin, of course. She inhaled again: a faint smell of peach shower gel, and then something else. What? She screwed up her face in disgust: pigeons, she smelled of pigeons. Dry, dusty, filthy, light-starved, shitting pigeons...

Still gripping her arm, she saw herself as a child of six or seven following her Grandfather through the rank, dim, slatted shadows of his pigeon coup; him cooing and rattling dessicated corn around the edge of an enameled tin dish. She'd been fascinated but repulsed by the birds that'd looked at her sideways and whose white shit had stuck to the soles of her shoes. Then in the shadows, her unsmiling Grandfather had squeezed her flat chest and she'd let fall the handful of corn she'd been holding tightly in her small hand. She remembered his filthy fingernails and the startled, confined pigeons flapping violently, filling the air with choking dust. She rubbed her skin furiously: it flared red like a pigeon's eye.

She went to the doctor. He looked at her in a kindly, mildly alarmed way as she told him, more hurriedly than she'd intended to, that she smelled stuff; that she could smell pigeons on her. She knew that he'd not be able to help, but when he paused and told her that he could smell nothing passing her a questionnaire to fill in on depression, she'd looked back at him blankly and retorted: 'I'm not depressed'. She'd left then smelling, she was convinced, like a full, heavy raw liver, sliced in two.

One day she smelled of white rum and was eighteen again in Paris wearing a white cotton dress with broderie anglais layered to the hem at her knee and then up in a tight bodice to her neck. It was very, very pretty, she'd thought. But then, jammed in the Metro sometime later, she found herself with her back to some bloke, who spent the journey with his fist rammed hard against and between her buttocks, knowing that she couldn't move. That evening she'd got drunk on white rum and lemon juice and drank until she was sick. She never wore the dress again.

The smells got worse. People started to notice, she was sure of it. Young women, mainly, with perfect, peachy skin, their nostrils flaring. One day she'd smell like some old, dry potato with frantic white shoots trying to grow out of a fetid, plastic bag; the next the dried up smell of baby milk vomited up. She hated herself, and chaffed at her skin.

She wanted to smell clean, perfumed, somewhere between sandalwood and vanilla not bleach and blood. She tried a variety of costly dermo-facial creams with gently abrading micro-beads. Hopeless. Though she baulked at the cost, a skin peel that slathered her in trichloroacetic acid delivered on the promise to separate and peel away top layers of skin to leave her face 'regenerated' and 'thoroughly cleansed'. She glowed. But her skin was defiant, and that evening as she splashed cold water on her tender face she could smell fish where the water ran back through her cupped fingers.

Finally, she bought a pumice stone and scrubbed, needing to get right under her skin. She scrubbed and scrubbed until she bled, red raw shining patches flaring across her body. But still she scrubbed.

It couldn't go on. She woke one day in great pain in a hospital bed, swaddled in bandages, her abraded, flayed skin raw and sticky beneath the warm dressings. She felt strangely secure, and closed her eyes; was it a dream, or could she smell the faintest perfume of petrol-free, damask roses? Perhaps this was the last smell she smelled as she lay there alone as the sores on her festered and spread. A little more than two weeks later her exhausted body quite simply gave up.

When the porters came to remove her they found her in a small, stuffy annex at the end of the ward.

'Jeez, it stinks in here. What's that smell?' said one.

The other went to the window and flung it wide open, inhaling the fresh air deeply.

'Nothing but bad skin, mate,' he said, 'Nothing but bad skin. Believe me, you get used to it.'