They say the part of your brain which stores memory is so intertwined with your sense of smell that it’s impossible to separate the two. I’ve struggled with it all these years, how the warm, homely stench of a place, the nauseating stink, can pull me back to somewhere I don’t want to be. Most other things I can find a way around: music and thoughts and feelings. But the smell, the molecular aroma of a person or time or place, I still haven’t figured out. It’s one of the reasons I don’t drink, although it’s not the only one. Pubs smell too much like when we were kids. Cigarettes and chip fat and beer-stained carpets, Danny and I at the table in the back bar by the window pretending to do homework, keeping an eye on the punters to see if any of them were far enough gone that we might be able to lift their cigs, sneak the change they’d left on top of the bar. Spray-on deodorant and alcopops and cut grass in the beer garden. The pair of us sitting on the bench out the back, minesweeping half-empty drinks, smoking dock-ends out of the ashtrays, laughing at all the pissed-up idiots stumbling over each other and throwing punches they couldn’t land.
Those years living in the pub turned out to be the happiest of my whole life, although I couldn’t have known it then. All those afternoons in Barry’s apartment, Danny sneaking up the back stairs with a school bag full of scratched CDs that he’d play on the old stereo while I lolled on the cushions of the overstuffed sofa, watching him move to beats unfamiliar to me. Smiley Culture, Bunny Wailer, Jimmy Cliff. Reeling off the names, looking at me incredulously when I’d shake my head blankly. All we ever listened to at the flats was dance music, Liquid and Strike and Livin’ Joy blasting out of Chrissy’s boombox night after night.
Every so often Mary would yell from the bottom of the stairs, checking on us, making sure we weren’t up to no good. You’re to stay in the front room, don’t be slidin an inch off that sofa, the pair of yer, and no disappearin off into the bedroom, d’yer hear? she’d bawl, wise to us before we were even wise to ourselves.
Much later, in those early years of discovering one another, we found ways to sneak under the covers of my bed, despite Mary’s warnings. It was easy when she wasn’t around—Chrissy didn’t care, and Barry was mostly too pissed up to notice. We’d lie there together, amid the pink and the lilac and the glitter, exploring each other, taking it in turns to gasp up at the glow-in-the-dark stickered ceiling, our bodies barely out of childhood, already entwined.
I’ve never felt anything for another person since Danny. I pretended, once, just to get under his skin. To hurt him the way he’d hurt me. But it was a lie and he knew it, I hope. Danny is the only person whose touch I ever welcomed.