Because ever since that kitchen morning, Rachel tended to think of gooey fur when she heard about people dying. Like the subject of death clicked a little switch in her nasal cavity and released the strange scent of endings. The following year, her PE teacher got himself snapped in half on holiday, in a bike crash in Cardiff. Rachel could smell Pob in the assembly that morning, as the head, Mrs Dixon, clawed the podium and announced the news. Just before her voice went all wobbly and strange and the head of geography took over.
Or when that young guy on her sound engineering course at uni died of sudden death syndrome. It was during freshers’ week and she’d smelt Pob then, too. Especially during those drunken, ill-advised, midnight treks her friends had pulled her on, through the supposedly haunted corridor where he’d been found (half in bed, half out, todger dangling, so ‘the legend’ said). Then there was the intern at her first recording studio job. Brain cancer. Her grandma, her first boss. Stroke and stroke.
But of course, the worst time was the bad week, the horrendous week. Only a few months after Pob’s death when a teenage Rachel woke from sleep in her old house and the entire place had reeked of him. When all the police arrived. When the neighbours gathered on the pavement outside. The week she became one of ‘the Barley Street girls’.
Yeah, there’d been a lot of opportunities to smell that gooey fur over the years. A dull sniff at all those funerals. In her weaker moments, lying in bed at night, she’d think the reason she could still smell Pob was because he actually was still here. Just like Holly said he’d be. That through all these years, he was still following her into the bathroom like a long decaying spectre, slinking his invisible, matted fur around her legs whenever she stepped out of the shower.
But she knew better.
This was just how memories worked. The brain got branded with the senses. Mental associations ticked even after many years had passed and now she was almost thirty. As she got older she noticed she was smelling that cat less. Thinking of that house less.
Which was why it felt so odd to smell Pob tonight, here in a Yorkshire hotel.
It was strong enough to wake her at just around midnight. Pulled from an ocean dream into an unfamiliar room, with a creaky bed with a swollen mattress she was convinced she’d fall out of. Pob’s smell and the memories that came with it (of Holly … of the old house) were so pungent that Rachel sprang quickly out of the bed and nearly tripped on her suitcase on her way to the bathroom. She took a swig of mouthwash to see if the smell would go, even though she knew it was just her silly brain making her smell it.
She fumbled with her glasses and slipped them on. She drank a glass of water and went back to the main bedroom window to let some air in. As she popped the window she caught a reflection of herself in her I-bought-them-because-they’re-ironic Hello Kitty pyjamas. Her short black hair with the floppy fringe was sticking up in a pillow-prompted Mohican. Through herself she could see the Yorkshire moors outside. They still had wet-looking mist creeping over their curves. A bit like Hound of the Baskervilles country, this. There are animals on these hills.
You aren’t going to sleep for hours, Rach. Might as well do something else.
She perched on the end of the creaking bed and popped open her aluminium flight case. She checked that the batteries for her microphones and recorders were fully charged. She’d spent the day out on these moors, recording the wind for a sound effects library she was contracting for. She sat on the bed and listened to today’s work for five minutes through a pair of headphones that cost as much money as her first car. She really was impressed with the stereo separation on today’s work. The client was going to be pleased.
But the dead cat smell quickly devoured the air, and after a while the recorded wind in her ears started sounding too much like distant moans coming from deep in the cracks of the moors. She switched it off, pulled the headphones off and neatly packed the whole thing away.
She turned on the TV instead. Ate a complimentary packet of three custard creams while watching BBC News repeating the same stories every twenty minutes. Then when she was really bored with that, she did the last thing she could think of. She switched her phone on for the first time that day. In an ideal world, she wouldn’t even have one of these things. She envied the 1950s folk. She liked unhooking from the world. She had no interest in social media. Taking moody filtered shots of tonight’s pizza? No thanks. Plus, if she was honest, she despised talking on the phone. Hated the pressure of the ringtone, which always sounded like a social alarm clock going off telling her to get ready for articulation and professionalism. She wasn’t that bad face-to-face, but phones had a weird habit of lobotomising her.
The phone had no interest in her hang-ups. It buzzed with a voicemail and she had one of those mad, early morning thoughts. The type that had no basis in reality, but only in emotion. That maybe it was Debbie. Her first and only ‘proper’ long-term girlfriend who she’d met after uni. The one she’d actually fallen in love with. Maybe this would be her calling to say she’d been dumb to leave. That she’d finally admitted she’d been brainwashed into turning her back on her sexuality, because she’d
