At that stage in my childhood, fragranced products either smelt bad (Veet) or nice (Fenjal), and I didn’t understand the difference between being pleasant and being interesting. Fenjal was strangely characterless, as if the jasmine had been scrubbed, dressed up, and told to behave – like the kittens in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Tom Kitten. Like polite kittens, Fenjal lacked spirit; from beginning to end the scent didn’t transform, it merely faded.

Sometime around the late seventies my parents’ close friend became manager of the Christchurch duty free shop, the closest thing to overseas travel that I knew. As a result my mother became the recipient of unwanted perfume samples, including a number of Guerlain mini perfume bottles. Inside geometric patterned black and white boxes, each small bottle was crowned with a rounded, cabochon-style cap of deepest sapphire blue. Within each bottle was a millilitre of golden-amber juice. The perfumes were called Mitsouko, Nahema and Shalimar. My mother shoved them, like everything else, into the basket beneath the sink.

With its absence of floral or feminine imagery, the plain zig-zag design on the packaging gave no indication of what to expect from each perfume. The names themselves meant nothing to me and so, with nothing to guide me, I carefully uncapped and sniffed each bottle. The first, Nahema, seemed rose-like. But, more than that, it conjured up a colour and texture, a very deep crimson velvet. I carefully placed the bottle on the edge of the bath and reached for Shalimar. This time, no colour came to mind. Now my thoughts went to food. I could almost taste this scent: it was like burnt custard poured over tinned apricots. Custard and apricots, that was Shalimar.

Mitsouko was next. Once again I went through the ritual of carefully unscrewing the cap and bringing it up to my nose to inhale. This time I sneezed, almost spilling the contents over my hand. I sniffed again and nothing came to mind: no colour, no food, no texture, no shape, nothing I could locate within my experience or put a word to. It was as if someone had created a smell that hadn’t existed before. It was abstract, but structured. I placed my middle finger over the opening and tipped the bottle, capturing a small drop on my skin. I sniffed again. The perfume changed with each sniff and this time I thought I could detect dead flowers, stale orange juice that had been left out on a kitchen bench, and something dark and fusty. Its overall ugliness repelled me, reminding me of the rotting brown shagpile at the foot of the bath. Although it didn’t strike me as something I would want to wear, I dabbed a bit on my wrist and neck.

I remember I pocketed the Nahema and Shalimar but threw the Mitsouko back into the basket under the sink.