I worked at a circus for the first part of this summer, as April unfurled itself into the hotter months of May, June and July. I wore two pairs of nude tights underneath a leotard and knee high boots as I built tents in the sweltering heat. My manager – I’ll call her Juniper – had a dirty mind and immaculate dark hair that bounced in the stage lights of the ring. She wore cowboy boots and a scowl that bore its way into any man who had slimy tendencies and wandering eyes. She was like a steam train – powerful and loud and a hurtling force. She cared intensely about things that mattered more to her than the job she had, and I liked that most about her. She cared about friends, and ambition, and music, and romance and sex and jokes and having a good time. She was a person before a manager – and although she knew she would face an inevitable bollocking for letting me leave without warning, she let me do exactly that when I realised I had to leave the circus, immediately, one morning. She jumped up in excitement, let me pack up my car that night, made me pasta to celebrate, and nodded as I drove away. There have been countless characters stomping the scenes of this summer, but she was the leading lady I think – because she let me leave and allowed no room for doubt or guilt. Not many people let someone leave without consequence.
Juniper was fantastic.
Not necessarily separate to these qualities and stories, but more adjacent or alongside or supporting them – was the way she smelt. She smelt like those houses with oak floorboards and rattan rugs and sexy feminist posters. Sculptural vases with wild flowers. Subscriptions to Kinfolk. Money. Sometimes we would talk between mouthfuls of popcorn about shoplifting Neal’s Yard moisturiser from Waitrose and conditioning our hair with lavender. My truest memory of her is one not of sight or sound but smell – gin, tonka bean, cedar, jasmine. I always wanted to smell exactly like her, as though, by managing that, I could some how incorporate her qualities I admired most, into my own personality. I think perfume mimicry is one of the closest ways we can almost become someone else, because when we close our eyes – they’re basically there in front of us, all around us, heady and invisible. A shadow.
Anyway, one night while touring with the circus, I took a drive to the nearest petrol station to fill up my new car. (A Suzuki Jimny I bought for myself from an Essex man online, in the thick of night). I drove to this petrol station in my pyjamas, dazed from a full day of serving customers and dancing at the entrance of the tents, to fill my car with fuel. I dawdled the aisles for snacks, paid, and then opened the door to leave. As I started to walk across the petrol station forecourt, a screech came hurtling down the hill towards the pumps, followed by this silver heap of a car that was rushing towards me, with six or seven men in balaclavas rammed into the back and a woman screaming angrily out of the window from the wheel. These men jumped out, some with baseball bats, others with gloved fists, and started to bash against the doors of the cars around me.
I walked towards mine, opened it, and got in. I turned the ignition. My car radio connected to my phone and started to play Pelican Narrows by Caribou. I drove away. I didn’t have time to turn the music off, and it punctuated the beat of their firsts against my bonnet and bumper. These men were bashing against the metal with their elbows, and some were hugging the front of my car, holding onto my wing mirror and cursing through the glass – but I kept on, and drove up the hill they had just free-wheeled down. They chased me for a while, yelling indiscernible words at me, and they looked beautiful almost, under the light of the moon and my yellowing headlights – these weird amorphous blurs against the dark of this rural street.
Eventually, they stopped running behind me, and turned to intimidate another driver. I pushed on, up this hill, away from the streetlights and into the dark of this unknown country road, when only a moment later, another group of bodies in balaclavas jumped out from the greenery of the secluded road. All covered in night, shrouded, with only their eyes visible to me, their bodies moved like rippling shadows under the moonlight. They were white echoes on the tarmac. They made me jump, but I kept on driving forward, on, out of there.
Juniper let me take the next day off work, to breathe through the whole thing and get my nails done. I chose a deep red to match my leotard. I listened to Pelican Narrows by Caribou over and over. I couldn’t get the moment out of my head. It was like I was living in it still, and I didn’t mind that really. It kind of felt like a room I was happily locked in for a while. Then, I went into the nearest town. I thought it made sense to find a perfume that could mark the night and remind me of the way it felt to get away from something all on my own, without a plan or a moment to think, in an unfamiliar night and place. I wanted to remember the way it felt to be confused by my own response to something, and proud of it too. I hadn’t wavered. I hadn’t panicked. I hadn’t turned to someone else and asked – ‘What do I do?’ I just walked towards my car, got in it, and left. I had taken myself to where I needed to be, despite the threat of someone other than myself pulling me from my own course.
So I was standing in this shop and I found this perfume. It was in a rounded bottle with a black lid, a hand illustrated label and white writing. It looked a little bit like a grenade in its bold lines and bulky glass. I went to pick it up and sprayed a little on a piece of paper – and Juniper was there. Powerful, flippant, scowling, cackling, smirking. I really wanted to cover her in me forever and wear her like a cloak or disguise, wear her as myself, pretend I was her. I couldn’t believe I’d found her in there, and that I could keep her in a bottle forever, if I wanted to. Be her, if I felt like it – but I couldn’t do that. A violation. Like missing the point of perfume entirely.
Why would I want to be someone else when I close my eyes? Why would I want to cover myself in someone else?
I put the perfume down but promised myself I’d always remember what it was called.
What about this one?
said the sales assistant, as I ws handed a bottle of the same thick glass, grenade-like, heavy – but this time with a swan gracing its front, small and pale and downward facing.
L’Ombre dans l’Eau
or
The Shadow in the Water.
Daydreams. A river. Summer under a weeping willow tree. Roses. Blackcurrant berries and dried up leaves. Acidulated fruit buds and smoke.
I closed my eyes and felt like I was shooting through a country lane, terrified – not by the shadows in the murky night but by my own response to them – a response that kicks in before I can even figure out what’s happening. I kick in. I closed my eyes and I was hurtling towards a new place. I was taking myself to somewhere better.
I paid.
And tonight, as the sun sets on the season and the stories I’ve let myself tell, I surround myself with this perfume. It reminds me of myself and the strength I know I have somewhere but can’t feel at all times– until it arrives like a static shock in a supermarket. Out of no where. Buzzing. Electric – it tells me that I am the grenade. It tells me that I will take myself somewhere better.
So, I lie here in my new bed in London, where I have moved to tread a new path. Behind me, on my bedside, sits L’Ombre dans l’Eau, and every morning I wake up and I look at it and I put it on and I remember that I’m not scared of shadows in the water.
Why?
Because I know that I can fucking swim.
Yesssssss you can!
I have worn many different perfumes in my 50 years and smelling them takes me right back to the person I was at that time.