I shook my head.

‘I don’t remember anything else about him. Just that he was called Francesco Borone.’

As in the old days, it seemed we’d run out of things to say, and we both fell silent, smiling awkwardly at each other, hoping either for a new topic of conversation or for some way of politely exiting the situation.

‘I still have all my oils,’ I said. ‘I could try and make your perfume again, if you like.’

‘No, I wouldn’t ask you to do that. It’s too much trouble.’

‘Not at all. It would give me something to do. In fact, I can probably find the original formula in one of my old notebooks.’

Thora looked doubtful. ‘I’ll pay you.’

‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘If that makes you feel better.’

I walked home, my brain swarming with ideas, not for Thora’s perfume but for my own signature scent. As I strolled along I took sniffs of my arm, allowing the benzoin to warm me. Once, I accidentally raised my other arm and caught the scent of the strange toothpaste camphor in my nose. Now that it had dulled it was quite nice. In fact, I wondered if I could make the camphor, wintergreen note work with the benzoin. The latter might counteract the sharpness of the purple scent; it was worth experimenting with.

As I circled behind the museum I made a promise to sit down and begin making the perfume of myself. It was one thing to have scent notes circulating in my mind, and fragments of ideas in my head. Now I needed to organise my thoughts and work.

Notes of my collected selves: This is what my perfume is shaping up to be. I’m a bit disappointed that my character doesn’t show through more strongly, that I can’t point to it in the way you might gesture towards a statue and say, ‘That represents me.’ My scent, I realise, has as many negative spaces as positive. It shows what I am not, as much as it tries to embody what I am.

I am not my parents. But now that I have smelt benzoin I know I will include it for the memory it awakens of my father. And yet, if I’d asked him who he was, I’m certain he wouldn’t have replied ‘a doctor’. That was his occupation, not his identity. So, by focusing on benzoin I am, in a way, misrepresenting him.

My mother is more difficult to reduce to a single note. I cherish the memory of our jogs by the river and will stick with willow, but I’m reminded that ‘mother’ is a more generic description than ‘doctor’. It’s the everythingness of it, the way she appeared so often to be a reflection of what we wanted or demanded. I never asked my mother, ‘Who are you?’ That wasn’t a question anyone ever asked mothers and housewives. We always assumed we knew, Carrie and I. In some ways it would have been simpler for me now if my mother had rebelled at some stage in her life and gone off to do her own thing. Then, at least, I could have summed her up in a word.