A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

Scent of a woman. For the last couple of days, whenever I have got up early in the morning to shut Graham in the living room so I can get a few more hours' sleep, I have sensed a presence in the hall, as if a woman had walked through there seconds earlier. It was the scent of an unfamiliar perfume – not mine, and not my housemate's.

Because I was in that dreamy place between sleep and wakefulness, I wondered if I could sense a ghost.

This morning when I went to sit down at my desk, the scent was in my study, too, and I was wondering if someone has been in here when I've been out, 'getting up in my bidness'.

Then I realised that on Friday I went wandering around the shops in the city trying on makeup and perfume and had accumulated lots of perfume cards. The next day I threw the cards in my wastepaper basket. I realised that I had always scented the mystery woman at the point in the hall when I walked past my study doorway.



Much like Jason Salavon's Every Playboy Centerfold: The Decades, the perfumes' individual fragrances blurred and blended into this ghost perfume that suggested an idea of woman.