My own identity, the one that once appeared as clear-cut as my father’s, now has softer edges, reminiscent of my mother’s. That is one of the reasons, I think, why I haven’t been able to make as much progress with my perfume: I lack hard edges.

I’m frustrated, too, that my strongest links to scent continue to be associated with memory rather than the here and now. Truly the only place that speaks to me as strongly as the places of my youth is my home. That and Archer, and he’s gone.

What have I really learnt about myself since being kicked out of the university? I’ve learnt that I was ashamed to have lost my job and yet believed in myself enough that I expected to land something new. I’m alone, not only in the sense that I have no one to talk to, but to the extent that the world has become quiet, and empty. And yet I still believe that something is out there. So do I continue to look inwards, defining myself by what I’m not or what I’ve lost, or do I reimagine myself as what I could be, my potential self?

First thing the next morning, I found my old notebook with the recipe for Thora’s perfume. It took less than thirty minutes to gather together the ingredients and blend her scent. To start, I dipped a clean blotter in each of the oils and passed them slowly in front of my nose in order to reacquaint myself with each note. I decided not to alter the perfume but made it exactly as it had been, filling a 30ml bottle with the result. It was better than I remembered. If I’d been making it for the first time today I probably wouldn’t have felt the need to dress it up in the uranium glass bottle. I’d have been happy enough using a dark amber glass bottle, the type that contained most of my blends. I made a second, smaller batch of the perfume for myself. Half of this featured the original formula, but with the left-over juice I substituted my new-found love, benzoin, for the original frankincense. This instilled the perfume with a hint of caramelised-amber sweetness. The benzoin brought out the raspberry jam aspect of the boronia in a way that frankincense had not. I’d created a perfume I would wear myself.

It was close to ten when I made my way towards the museum, intending to spend the day in the reference library. During my sleepless night of Googling ‘Taylor’ I’d discovered that his journals from the 1830s to the 1870s were held in the museum, and I believed that one of them contained the recipe for the grand Māori perfume. As I was still a few minutes early, I passed some time in the small sensory garden, which contained many common herbs as well as some plants I didn’t recognise. Fennel was the most prolific. I picked a few strands of its feathery leaves and crushed them in my fingers, enjoying the aniseed sweetness on my skin. A peppermint-scented geranium caught my attention, and after smelling it I stuffed a palm-full of leaves into the pocket of my trousers to return to later. In fact, I might have paid closer attention to the geranium, a smell I enjoy for its bitter green, stalky note, had I not already spotted the plant next to it: wormwood.