I look up the station’s platform and once behind me before taking a whiff beneath my off-white t-shirt, a whiff under each armpit, followed by one final sample of my ponytail. Beyond the potent chlorine, I detect fryer oil, a hint of paprika -smoked, cayenne pepper, a sandalwood body scrub and exotic coffee beans being ground into a powder from the cafe behind mixed with the salty breeze coming off the bay, nothing that pongy as far as I can tell.
Last night you said to my horizontal body it’s going to be nice when you don’t work there anymore, you can reclaim your scent. This comment made my pores feel extra soggy; the dreams that followed murky, like oil on top of water. Steel wool has made tiny incisions in my fingertips to ensure it sinks all the way in; tens of hairline fractures map the skin of each digit. Showers are redundant.
Pongy, is it a word, a feeling or a state of being? It corresponds with a canola oil kind-a fragrance, I think. I depleted my Joe Malone perfume a long time ago. I am seldom orange and at no time blossom. If there is a flower in there it has disintegrated so all that remains is dirty flower water, drowned and drowning insects. I ask people to describe a pongy smell: dead flower water, bin juice, egg-y farts -hard boiled, wraths of beached seaweed, these all come up.
Today is a public holiday. As I severed my boiled egg this morning, you told me what it is the public is celebrating but I’ve already forgotten. People trickle on board with no indication of where they are going, relieved to be out of the day’s moody swings for a moment or two. Warm gusty wind is pushing around spring, shoving pollen up noses and anything not heavy enough to stay put on the ground. The sky is full of various dull greys, greys that don’t promise rain, greys that will marinate into the evening rather than dissipating into another person’s sky.
I try to grab hold of my old scent from my bank but it’s not there. I type ‘Joe Malone fragrance’ into a search engine. The results are desolate. I try ‘discounted Joe Malone’ into Google’s engine and then just ‘Joe Malone’ into Ebay’s. Apparently such things don’t exist. If I were to concoct a fragrance it would be one of browning bread stirred with new-book-smell. This would mean two new jobs though. As I raise my index finger to the tip of my nose to ponder this, garlic and oil waft. Aioli. In just thirty minutes time I will have my neck craned to a black chopping board, preoccupied with the placement of the sheets of rare roast beef. On Monday’s people always order the Bucks Beef sandwich. I’m not sure about public holidays though.
The train’s reflection is kind; the dark tint of it washes away any hindrance of fatigue on my face. I tell myself this is what I look like in real light, through sunglass-less eyes. Two rows in front of me and slightly to the right is a spindly woman, gawky looking, with high cheekbones and deep sockets that beset two dark eyes. She is rugged up in a grey scarf and familiar cropped down jacket of the most spectacular orange colour. The woman is staring past me at a travel advertisement for Thailand. Her dark bushy brows are so contorted they almost cast shadow on her face. At each stop, when the doors slide open and the wind floods in, the hairs along her tensed jawline stand while she scolds so hard I wonder if her teeth chalk. It’s as if the wind is insulting her, as if spring, or any weather under her thirty-degree threshold, has an agenda.
Between stops, she writes in a green notebook. She is writing as fast as she can, trying to keep up with the sentences as they fall on her head. Every now and again she lifts the pen so it’s tip hovers above the page to then strike through something, some word or phrase that didn’t quite do what she wanted. With the tip hovering, she’ll then look up, her eyeballs rolling inwards to see as far inside as she can, digging to find the right way to put it, to exalt how she really feels taking this train on this windy spring public holiday. She has issues that the public is on holiday, I think, and that maybe she is not.
The woman is so completely within her slender body she doesn’t notice the spilt coffee cup at her feet, the milky brown liquid staining the soles of her white sneakers. Approaching Richmond I am surprised to see her packing up her things, her eyes still fixed on the sentences committed so far. This also happens to be my destination. I glare into the train’s tinted window to realize my orange puffer jacket has a stain on the left breast and down the side of my left hand is blue ink from the gel pen with which I write so profusely.
Yellow Days 