March 16, 2009

"Crisp white snow that crunches beneath your feet."

"No! Leaves."

"No chance. That first sparkler you ever held as a child, fizzing and biting while the sulphur ruins the air."

"I like the crunch of an apple. You can hear it crack."

"I’m sure you do. But the crack and collapse of a honeycomb is better, surely?"

"Bees. They make honey. And they sound lazy and summerish."

"But so do ice-cream vans. And lawn mowers. And laughter late at night."

"Seems like months since I smelt freshly-mown grass. I can smell it now. It actually smells green."

"Ever smelt a tree? They’re faintly woody, of course, but musty, too."

"Musty is old houses. Forgotten wardrobes. Little old sheds with bizarre drawers people haven’t looked at for years."

"No – musty is dry, and faint, but real, the smell of the badly washed. The poor."

"Poor people don’t smell. Smelly people smell. Poor people smell the same as the rich in the raw. Pink, or brown, bright, and clean. Flesh smell. A nothing smell. But a smell itself."

"But the rich smell of finery. Perfumes and scents. And they sound just like they smell. Haughty and high."

"Rubbish! They sound the way we do. But we hear them differently. We’re envious, and we’re sad, and we want to hear vanity."

"Can you hear vanity? Surely not?"

"You can hear vanity, like hatred, like scorn, and like love. Just like you smell a colour like green grass."

"A hot day then?"

"Yellow, with burnt orange."

"The sea?"

"Ocean blue. With the smell of the shore."

"Town?"

"A mix of black and browns and whites and greens, and more. With fumes, and vegetable stalls, and the smell of a baker, with a noise all round you, from nowhere at all."

"What’s the colour of butter?"

"Mild, lazy yellow, buttercups, rape fields; and it smells of nothing but cold and dairy."

"If crisp white snow crunches, what about a loaded cream cracker?"

"Different. Teeth sinking into the thud of hard cheese, exploding through a small tomato, nestling into a smear of butter, smashing the cracker itself. I can hear it as much as taste it without doing it."

"Swimming pools?"

"Blue, and chlorine, and shrieking, and rapid echoes, and rubber bands on your wrist that hurt to pull off, and cheap shampoo and rubbish chips, in snappable trays and with wooden forks."

"Breaking metal. Wrenching and creaking and screaming and dying. Sullenly grey, and profoundly dangerous."

"Padding over new carpets – you almost hear it, you always feel it."

"Or thunking shut a window."

"Or drenching the plants with the kids' paddling pool water."

"We could do this all night."

They won’t be, though.

They’ll go home, rightly, and forget what they have, not because they’re bad people, but simply because they can.

We can no more guarantee the smell of bacon than we can the noise of a telephone call.

It’s there to enjoy, very much to savour, everything to appreciate. And everything to lose.