Ardours

            1

A friend who has probably had a dozen girlfriends over twenty-five years always seemed to me to exaggerate how bad he felt after each break-up, as I became well aware that only a few months after he was devastated by one person he would find himself with another. The routine was familiar. He would be in a relationship for a year, offer little commitment, and they would leave him. He would become desperate and try to win back their affections, and they would distance themselves from him further, often ceasing contact after he was more persistent than they would like. 

     I suppose I always saw him as a loyal friend and a poor partner, with some wondering why I chose to keep in touch with someone who wasn’t equally agreeable with others as he was with me. It isn’t the worst rule to judge the quality of a friend not only on how they treat you but also others around them, but he often treated me very well indeed and I never saw him treat anybody badly. It was more as if the notion of a relationship was beyond him, yet he kept getting involved. He wasn’t a womaniser, he didn’t cheat and his biggest problem may have been that he wasn’t given to casual assignations, ones that wouldn’t take up much of a woman’s time and energy. Instead, he created resentment and irritation by involving himself with each person for many months, without creating the contours of what most might regard as a relationship. Out of this came arguments, and out of that came a break-up, and out of the break-up came desperation on his part, and disdain on theirs. 

      There is a book by an American philosopher I would sometimes teach where he talks about people getting back together, says they can’t not not part. My friend it seems has never been in that position: for the women it has been easy to part indeed, or at least nowhere near as difficult as it has been for Jason. 

                                                            2

    Jason has never been handsome nor would I be inclined to think of him as charming or charismatic. I have rarely found people initially drawn to him but, once they know him, most find him kind, generous and sensitive. It seems that what women find isn’t so different from what anybody else would: qualities of decency. I first knew him when I became his near neighbour. My partner and I arrived in a van, full of items rescued from the rented flat we were staying in on the other side of town. We’d been asked to vacate with as short a notice the owners could legally get away with. We had nobody to help us on this particular weekend. We had only been in the city a year, and most of our friends were from the Highlands and we were in Glasgow. They offered to help us move, but nobody was at that moment available. The one who looked like he was, pulled out after straining a muscle a couple of days prior. One of the appeals of the new flat was that it was unfurnished and in the dozen years in our previous ones we had replaced almost everything with our own stuff and were happy to find a place described as semi-furnished: a washing machine, a cooker, a fridge. That was about it. Perfect. Except for the move, as we knew that the two of us would struggle to carry a wardrobe, a bed and a chest of drawers up to the top floor. When our friend couldn’t make it we tried to get a removal firm but nobody was free at such short notice. Janice and I started on the lighter items and after twenty minutes we saw, coming out of his flat, Jason, who was on the floor below us. He was dressed as though he planned to do a long cycle but wondered if we needed any help. I looked back to Janice as he asked and saw on her face that this was one of those moments of inconveniencing someone which might seem rude but did feel necessary. I hesitated for a moment before saying that in all honesty help is exactly what we needed. 

         I was carrying a box of books and these were heavy enough for me to feel I should put them down for a moment to tell this neighbourly samaritan that we had to vacate our flat at short notice, our friend had picked up an injury; nobody else was available; we couldn’t get a firm to help. I added our previous flat was on the first floor and it was hard enough getting the furniture out from there. We were already running at least an hour late and we had to get the van back by five. Any help would be enormously appreciated; even for half an hour if he could spare it. He said he would be with us in a couple of minutes and, as we once again took stuff from the van and worked our way up the steps, so he came out wearing jeans and a T-shirt, taking the suitcase Janice was carrying and bounded up the final stairs with it. We all agreed it was best if Janice took stuff from the van to the bottom of the stairs and Jason and I would take things up from there. We left the furniture till last and managed to have enough strength between us and still in us to negotiate a tricky and narrow stairwell. We were finished by three in the afternoon and were in no hurry to return the van as we insisted on inviting Jason in for tea. I unpacked the kettle, found some mugs and, after a failed search for tea bags, Jason popped down and returned with a handful. It was an instant friendship forged out of modest adversity and only soured a little by a remark later that night as we lay in the bed that Jason had helped me reassemble. Janice said he seemed like a lovely person, but he did have quite a strong odour. I said a little sternly that this was understandable given all the strenuous activity but she said no, it wasn’t that. She snuggled up to me and said even without taking a shower I would have smelled nice. Jason, she said, his smell was distinctive.

                                                         3

              When we moved into the flat, Jason was seeing a woman I was to meet only twice. The first was on the stairwell and the other was in the park near the apartment. My memory was of someone pleasant but recessive, a person whose priority appeared to be to avoid imposing themselves upon a situation rather than to announce their presence. On the stairwell, I said hello and the three of us chatted for two minutes, with most of the couple of hundred words spoken between Jason and me. In the park, I joined them for fifteen minutes as I took some sun in during my lunch break, while their jobs allowed them to make more of the afternoon. Again, Jason and I did most of the talking but what I did notice was that she appeared to resent my presence and would later find out that this wasn’t a paranoid thought. He told me a couple of months later, after they had broken up, that it was their first afternoon together for a while and she wanted him all to herself. He said it within the context of her unwillingness any longer to see him at all, saying I shouldn’t be offended. All or nothing, he said. I asked him if when they were together he had given enough. 

          I heard a lot about this partner and might have assumed she was the one who got away, but over time I would find that they all got away; the ones before I knew Jason and the ones who left him when we were friends.  They were also people I never quite felt I got to know until retrospectively; that his enthusiasm within the relationship wasn’t matched by his nostalgia for his absence after they were gone. Yes, I would meet them, occasionally Janice and I would have dinner with them, or go out for a drink. Yet they never became very present in our lives because I felt they were never given the chance to become present in Jason’s. He rarely talked about them and so when we were at dinner it was difficult to get to know them since Janice and I didn’t want to ask the sort of questions we probably would usually have known the answer to with anybody else’s girlfriend: the job they did; where they lived; their interests. If we had met them shortly after Jason and the girlfriend got together that might seem acceptable — but when you meet them after several months, and when to reassure them you would like to say that Jason had told you a lot about them, then to ask those basic questions would make the earlier statement appear like a lie. The irony was that I got to know them very well afterwards as I pieced together my memories of the person no longer in front of me with the person Jason would offer up as regretful recollection. He might say did he ever tell me when they went to Venice, or to Barcelona and he would speak of the wonderful time they had together, though he hadn’t told me how wonderful it was when they got back. I wouldn’t have been surprised had he not told them how wonderful it was either. 

      I may be sounding cynical but it was hard not to feel exhausted, and to feel too that Jason couldn’t find a way out of this pattern because he had no great interest in doing so. He was my friend, but my sympathies were often with the women I barely knew and who oddly garnered it through the eyes of a man who claimed he still loved them rather than anything that I actively witnessed. But this was different with Reina. 

                                                       4

      He had met Reina as he seemed to meet others, out of a kindly deed. He was in a cafe on what looked like a bright afternoon when clouds gathered and rain began to spatter against the windows. It was around five and there was a couple in the corner, two people working together on laptops, Reina was reading a book and he was preparing for a class he was to teach at 630. The others left before the rain became much heavier, and he supposed Reina was hoping it would ease off before they closed. When it was ten to six he looked across at her with a sympathetic look that suggested she wouldn’t escape the rain, and she looked back as if assuming he would be no luckier. Six o’clock arrived and the proprietors said it appeared the rain wasn’t going to stop anytime soon otherwise they would let them stay a little longer, and Jason watched Reina put on a coat that was inadequate for the conditions. He put on his waterproof jacket, which also had a hood, went over to her table and offered her the umbrella he usually carried in a compartment in his rucksack. She asked if he was sure he didn’t need it and he pointed at his jacket and hood, saying he didn’t have far to go. She thanked him, asked for his number and said she would get the umbrella back to him very soon. They met up a couple of days later and that was that. Janice and I heard the story from Reina; usually, I’d hear how he would first meet his partner from Jason and only after they had broken up. This seemed like progress. 

      We saw more of Reina than any of his previous girlfriends, and we couldn’t quite work out whether this was due to Jason’s much greater interest in her than those earlier partners, Reina’s more forceful personality as she probably pushed Jason into agreeing to meet his friends regularly, or that he was aware that his initial reluctance was partly why girlfriends had left him previously. Whatever the reason, we were pleased to see Reina, often saying hello on the stairwell as she seemed to be staying over at Jason’s flat far more often than other people whom he’d been seeing.  Yet when I said everything seemed to be working well, that they appeared happy together, she was more integrated than usual in his friend circle, and that he appeared to have broken out of a pattern, Jason didn’t look like he quite agreed. I said maybe he was superstitious; that if he accepted all was great it allowed fate to propose that it soon wouldn’t be. He said mysteriously that it wasn’t fate that bothered him; more biology. 

     I didn’t know how to take the remark and when I spoke to Janice about it she guessed that he meant the question of children. Perhaps Jason didn’t want them, she proposed; or that Jason did but Reina didn’t. It was a conversation that contained within it not just a discussion over Jason’s relationship, but also our own. I wanted children; Janice was reluctant. We rarely talked about it and this time, as she did so in the context of Jason, I thought about bringing up our different desires but chose not to do so. Janice was thirty-two and I was two years older; I hoped that over the coming years that dormant biological clock would start ticking and no persuasion on my part was of any use next to the body’s imperatives. 

                                                           5

     The pressing problem Jason and Reina appeared to face was that she was offered a job for six months in North Africa. She was an architect and they wanted her on site. Jason was due a sabbatical but she would have to go out alone for about eight weeks; then he could join her for the rest of her stay. When he told me this I said that is great news; it was furthering her career and that it almost coincided with him having time off. At first he tried to claim he was worried because of course a sabbatical wasn’t a holiday; he would need to do research and perhaps he should stay close to the library, even though he had told me before that he rarely used it, and relied more and more on accessing material online. He would find the library too hot, he would say, and this time, when I said he rarely used the library anyway, he announced he was also worried about the Moroccan heat. Janice and I were not good in the sun; whenever we travelled we wore factor fifty, hats and long-sleeved shirts. Jason was olive-skinned and tanned easily; he liked nothing more than going out into the park and sunbathing. As I questioned both reasons, he looked uneasy, as though he was about to confess something but instantly changed his mind. I didn’t pursue it and sure enough, he went out and stayed with Reina in the apartment the company had provided. 

     While he was away, I heard from him only occasionally in short emails that suggested almost everything was alright. He described the flat he was in, built in the 1920s, and was relieved that they were not responsible for the bills as he would put the air-conditioning on for much of the day and also during the night. Reina wasn’t so happy; there she was working on an architectural project constantly attentive to green issues and Jason was in this older building using up energy constantly. I could see her point and couldn’t quite see Jason’s; perhaps because I knew that in Edinburgh he rarely had the heating on and would carefully recycle his boxes, tins and bottles. He hated getting taxis and didn’t drive a car. He cycled or used public transport where possible. He was as concerned with the environment as anybody I knew and there he was pumping out CO2 emissions to keep cool; all the while his partner was working to improve the energy efficiency of the country. I said as much in an email and Jason went quiet for a while. When he did get back in contact, he didn’t mention the content of my email at all. 

        When they returned I sensed a new tension between them when seeing them together on the stairwell. We invited them for dinner and the first time Jason declined, saying that he didn’t work as much as he should have while away and needed to focus on his research for a few weeks, as well as concentrating on the start of term. Yet whenever I saw him on the stairwell he was keen to chat and never seemed in a hurry. He even proposed we should go for a drink at the weekend and I concurred, though wondered if it might be for a conversation about a subject I knew well: that he was single once again and he would wish to discuss why it had gone wrong. But the following evening, the night before we were to head for the pub, I heard Jason and Reina leaving the flat and assumed all was well. They were laughing as they went down the stairs and I proposed to Janice that we offer another dinner invite; I would mention it to Jason in the pub. 

                                                              6

    I met Jason outside the university building where he had an office. It was Friday evening, at the end of October; a pay weekend and as we searched for a pub the mood was hectically genial, with many restaurants full and most of the pubs as well. We found ourselves standing for a while at the bar in a pub on Buccleuch Street and I’ve always known Jason’s dislike of busy bars. Hot and sweaty he would say; even the walls looked like they were perspiring. He said it again and he was relieved when a group of four who probably arrived after finishing work early and were either going home or on to dinner vacated a table by the door. It was a compact pub but had two entrances and we sat next to one of them, with the door opening and closing enough, as people popped their heads in to see if there was a table, or popped out for a cigarette, for it to have the feel of a breeze without quite suggesting a draft. I was more inclined to worry about the cold rather than the heat, and even after long cycles I would hardly break into a sweat. I might be exhausted; my heartbeat might have quickened, but I could wear the same cycling T-shirt again without it getting smelly. What I didn’t like was staying still and getting cold. I often wondered when visiting a shop that would keep its temperature low how the staff could tolerate it. Many wore fleeces and some wore gloves, which made sense when putting frozen food into the freezers, but surely an annoyance when trying to handle change from customers. I mentioned this while sitting there with Jason and he said he never really fretted over the cold, only over the heat. There was a long silence as if he had more to add but chose not to, and we continued chatting about his research. 

      Yet when we left the pub after a couple of hours I had the feeling that while the conversation was engaging enough it was sitting on top of a thought that was on Jason’s mind but that he hadn’t chosen to express. I sensed it most strongly when we talked about temperatures and there was the extended silence, but believed it was evident throughout the evening. I wondered if he now regretted befriending Janice and me; that he felt obliged because we were his upstairs neighbours and this made it difficult for the friendship to be gently curtailed. I decided not to mention again the dinner invite and later at home said to Janice, when she asked if I’d brought it up once more, that I wasn’t sure if Jason wished for very much contact with us.

                                                         7

    I might have continued with this thought if a week later Jason hadn’t stopped for a moment as I was entering the building and he was exiting it. He asked when Janice and I were free for dinner and insisted we should dine at Reina’s place. On the couple of occasions we had eaten at Jason’s with Reina, she had brought dishes that we politely commented on liking, though that was an understatement, we later admitted to each other, as the dishes were so good that they made Jason’s cooking seem average. They were also different; neither of us had ever tasted food with quite the combination of ingredients she offered. When I told Janice that we were invited to Reina’s place she was doubly excited: she always liked looking into people’s homes and knew that if Reina was cooking we would be eating food that we couldn’t have even begun to cook ourselves. 

     Reina’s family was from Iran and she learnt to cook from her grandmother while her mum was out working. She told us this over dinner at her flat. It was the sort of story that was predictable in the telling but discernible in the eating: an immigrant mother working all the hours God gave in a small business she had created, while her husband was working no less hard at the corner shop he owned. The mother started with a property rental agency specifically focused on helping immigrants struggling to find places to live, and liaised with other already successful immigrants to rent them at reasonable prices to people new to the country. She earned enough money to buy the five-bedroom house they are still living in on the edge of London, but her mother was always happy getting a commission on the properties she rented without feeling obliged to start purchasing buy-to-let flats that she would rent out. Why? — Reina didn’t quite know, though it was probably linked to the notion of debt. She wouldn’t have been happy with mortgages, and when they did buy their own home it was with cash. 

     Janice and I knew a few details about Reina’s life through occasional remarks Jason had made, but this was the first time we had the chance to hear her talk about it herself — and during a meal that gave her anecdotes a proper flavour. It was as if the telling, competent enough, was made thrilling by the senses being activated by the food. Initially, she started telling us her story while we snacked on a dish made with olives marinated in pomegranate molasses and with mint and garlic. As we were eating the dish with Barbari bread, we were smelling what she said were two Ghormeh sabzi dishes in the oven. Both were made with kidney beans, she said, and red onions, black lime and black lime cooked from a base, but one had lamb and the other didn’t. She knew Janice and I were proclaimed vegetarians but Jason had probably informed her of our numerous lapses. That night was another of them as we couldn’t resist taking a small portion of the lamb along with our larger serving of the vegetarian option. Reina said that she wondered if in the three-bedroom council flat her parents initially stayed in after she was born, along with her parents, her grandmothers and three brothers, the family would have been so accepted if the smells that came from their apartment weren’t deemed so agreeable to the neighbours. If they were smelly foreigners, Reina joked, then luckily those smells were very agreeable indeed. Perhaps her grandmother’s cooking saved the family from persecution as anyone offering such an insult would have known that aromatically there was no nicer smell coming out of any flat on the estate. It also helped that sometimes her family would host a barbecue in the garden and invite all the immediate neighbours, who would enjoy Kabob Koobideh along with the marinated olives and the Barbari bread.  Kabob Koobideh was made with ground beef and people would eat it on skewers, Rina said, as we were finishing our main courses. 

     Over a dessert of Jasmine ice cream and what was called a pomegranate and pistachio chocolate bark (a little like a cookie), I noticed Jason seemed to have become uncomfortable, though there was nothing during dinner that was untoward and no exchange between Jason and Reina that had been tetchy. His mood lasted for about twenty minutes and by the end of the evening, a couple of hours later, as we left, we all agreed it had been a wonderful evening and nobody needed to have said it with insincerity. Janice and I both felt closer to Reina. We believed too that somehow Jason and Reina were closer than we had ever seen them before, though this may have been the nature of so convivial atmosphere amongst the four of us. 

    While walking home, Janice asked me what I made of the flat, and I admitted I hadn’t given it much thought but supposed I had been generally taken by its ambience. Janice said she liked that a compact space had been made larger by the distribution of light, mirrors, and rugs on the varnished floors rather than carpets. She liked that there were scented candles in the bathroom and that in the bedroom, where the door was slightly ajar, Reina left a lamp on that illuminated the area as if the whole flat needed to be lit appropriately - even the unused room. It was true that though the flat was smaller than ours or Jason’s, it didn’t feel cramped but instead intimate, a quality Janice couldn’t at all see in Jason’s place and admitted only partly existed in our own. We shopped too hastily when we moved in she told me as we lay in bed that night, even though many of the items came from our previous places. Everything in the flat lacked originality she said, and perhaps, for the first time in our years together, I sensed in Janice a yearning for something else, something more. It worried me for several days afterwards and I had the feeling that Janice didn’t want children because I wasn’t the man she wanted them with. I hoped she would say that this dissatisfaction had been present for some time, but only crystallised by seeing Reina’s place, and that she did want a child, and wanted me to be its father. 

                                                            8

    However, it seemed it wasn’t my relationship I needed to worry about, but Jason’s. When we met a month after the dinner, he told me that Reina no longer wanted to be with him. I expressed surprise and said they seemed happy when Janice and I last saw them together. He said he wasn’t so sure — that I might have noticed a moment when he looked perturbed. I thought for a minute and said I half recalled that he seemed subdued, perhaps even moody at one point in the evening, when Reina was talking about her childhood. He asked me if I remembered what she was talking about, as if he were trying to find out how good a friend I happened to be by how good an observer I had been that night, and how well I recalled his moment of discomfort. I said Reina was saying that her family managed to escape the racism she supposed they would have been exposed to by exposing the neighbours to smells they couldn’t but enjoy, and augmented that pleasure by sometimes inviting them around to eat. He nodded in agreement and said that she enjoyed telling them the story, just as she had enjoyed telling him it not long after they first met. But after Janice and I left, she said he appeared uninterested in the telling and hadn’t shown much curiosity when she had first talked to him about it. She wondered if he found the stories or her background of no interest. She said that she would tell it to people so that others would understand that she and her family wanted to fit in, and wanted to do so on terms that allowed them all to hold on to their identity, while giving the community to which they had become a part an experience of another region of the world. She told Jason that when she talked of this, others would respond with enthusiasm, even excitement. They would see not just a person telling them an anecdote about their upbringing, but also an emblematic tale of successful immigration. With the newspapers making much of tensions between immigrants and others, between newcomers leeching off the local’s taxes and using up too many resources and amenities, they would see in Reina’s tales about being brought up on a housing estate a wonderful counter-narrative. 

            She told him that evening she didn’t believe he cared much for her work, nor much for her cultural background. How could he have shown much concern for her job if he consistently put on the air conditioning as she was trying to help the environment, and why could he not show at least some enthusiasm when she talked about the wonderful food her family would make? He tried to counter her claim by saying he was always so responsive to her food, would never leave anything on his plate and constantly complimented her on her cooking. Jason said to me he was of course not lying, and I said how could he: I would be surprised if anybody failed to respond to such delightful flavours. Yet he admitted while he was telling her the truth about the wonders of her cuisine, he was withholding why exactly he didn’t react with as much eagerness as others to her story. He supposed it was in this inability to discuss what was on his mind, Reina took it to mean he wasn’t being honest towards her.  

                                                                9

      He added that in some ways he hadn’t been honest with anyone, even with me, whom he would exhaust with his talk of ex-girflriends, bringing up details that were somehow retrospectively relevant. Details that didn’t seem of any concern while they were together. I admitted I’d always found his need to talk about a woman after they had broken up, and whom he would rarely discuss before, and about a person I may never have met, not quite exhausting, but puzzling. However, I also added this appeared quite different with Reina. Janice and I met her on plenty of occasions; he usually showed affection towards her and would express his admiration for her to me as well. It seemed that the pattern had been broken; that Jason had found a person he could love without keeping it a secret, and someone he wouldn’t need to talk obsessively over even if they were to break up because he had lived the relationship itself as fully as he could. I didn’t mean to offer it so psychologically, but professional habits are hard to resist. He replied saying my take on things wasn’t incorrect. But it was limited, and that was not at all a fault of mine. He asked me if I remembered when we last went to the pub together; whether I sensed he wanted to talk about something. I said to him I wouldn’t have put it quite so clearly, but I did think that after we parted it was as if the conversation was more tepid than usual, as though we talked without quite engaging.

    Jason said this was entirely his fault and I initially protested, feeling that given his doleful state, he would be blaming himself for failures elsewhere, as if determined to exaggerate his despondent condition. But no, he insisted, it was his fault as he asked me if I had anything pressing to discuss that night which I’d chosen not to divulge. I thought for a moment, allowed to pass through my mind a fear that was becoming more prevalent: that Janice may have wanted a child but realised that for years she’d been living with a man she may have loved but didn’t see as the father of her offspring. Yet It wouldn’t have been pressing that night, or no more so than on any other occasion when I’d met up with Jason, including this particular one. It was on my mind but I didn’t feel the need to share it. 

             Jason said what he wanted to talk about was almost laughable and yet terrible, a problem he’d been living with for two decades and yet one he had kept entirely to himself, even if in other ways it was public knowledge — or had been when he was younger, and for many years since he’d tried to hide both its manifestation and the secret. As he spoke I remembered what Janice said the first time she met him and after he helped us move in. She had never mentioned it since and I supposed this was because Jason was usually so careful. It was only his insistence in helping us that day in a moment of need that he overlooked his usual concern to hide any hint of a strong odour. 

           He said that when he hit puberty he began to notice that if he exerted himself even without hard exercise he would convey a strong scent and, while he might have assumed this was a mild smell that he noticed and that adolescence made him self-conscious, it was made vivid by a remark another school kid made and that stuck for several years. A few of them were in the playground playing a game of tag when somebody said they shouldn’t touch Jason; that he ponged. Pongo, another shouted, and then others joined in, and by the end of the break it would become his nickname for the rest of his school years. He was careful to shower every day, to wash his underarms three times a day, and to change his T-shirt often more than once. He brought strong anti-deodorant and his mother tolerated the increased washing load, was happy to have a son so concerned with hygiene, and sometimes would say that she was proud to have a boy so keen to keep himself clean. Every time she offered it with a smile he couldn’t of course match, and he hoped one day he could talk to her about why he couldn’t. He felt ashamed to seem so unkind but much more hatefully aware of his nickname that at least she never knew about. Jason supposed that he very rarely smelt badly in school but it didn’t matter. No matter how much he washed, no matter how often he showered, and no matter how regularly he applied deodorant under his armpits, he couldn’t scrub clean the nickname.

        When Reina had talked about her family as potentially smelly foreigners, he knew that this was a remark they quickly dispelled with the pleasant aromas they created, and he envied Raina’s ability to speak so easily about smelliness while all he could think of was the shame of his nickname. I said telling me this made sense too of our email exchange, and his fall out with Reina while they were abroad. Of course, he wanted to make sure that he didn’t sweat too much and how better to minimise this likelihood than leaving the air conditioning on for much of the day? But I could see that for Reina this wouldn’t be how she would see it. How could she; just as I failed to understand what I saw as his selfishness without over the years seeing various moments that might have revealed it? He said that perhaps he hoped a partner would observe him closely enough, and perceptively enough, for there to be no need for a confession. His ideal he supposed was that they would instinctively know without quite comprehending the specific reason, so that his peculiarities would be touching, without his shame necessarily revealed. 

       I said he was asking for the impossible; it was much more likely Reina would have seen selfishness, moodiness and irritation, and that only open acknowledgement would lead them to get together again. He said he suspected even an explanation wouldn’t suffice, and for reasons that he supposed might seem like even more of an exposure than revealing to me the nickname he received. He believed that though his strong smell worked against him when he became an adolescent, it worked in his favour when he was at university and still did. He said he was lucky enough that women had always been attracted to him ever since he managed to escape his nickname by leaving the school, leaving the town and feeling no reason to return after his parents moved during his first year at university when his father took early retirement.  All he needed to do was make sure the smell never became overpowering as he believed it could become empowering. He believed it was an odd thing; a bodily odour that could attract yet potentially repulse. It was a smell he needed constantly to monitor and protect, and he supposed that in doing so he was creating an aloof secrecy that was also alienating the people he was with. 

                                                             10

    We were sitting in a cafe warmer than he might have liked, It was around 330 in the afternoon and when we arrived at 2 it was half-empty and the winter weather demanded a higher temperature than necessary before the cafe filled up. While I found it warm I imagined it was uncomfortably hot for a man who was ever fretful over breaking into a sweat. Yet this may have been one of the few occasions when he forgot about his smell as he was determined to explain the nature of it. 

        Jason continued, saying that he was sure that when in a relationship as long as he stayed cool and well-showered he was okay. The smell worked for him. But he reckoned that when a woman left him it was as if the pheromones changed. It was as though out of the despair, perhaps desperation overtook him, and his smell faded, and became neutralised. He no longer needed to shower twice a day, and could break into a sweat without the odour becoming overwhelming. He no longer had to worry about the malodorous; he instead fretted over his solitude. What he didn’t know was whether the smell began to fade through the relationship, as if the strength of the odour was predicated on the strength of the ardour. I admired the play on language, though wasn’t convinced by the science behind it, — yet what did I know about pheromones? He said that it was increasingly established that when people are attracted to each other they release chemicals that manifest themselves as smells; it is the way animals register desire and why wouldn’t humans be any different if we are part of the animal world? I couldn’t deny what he was saying and knew that oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin were evident when people fell in love. But it seemed he wasn’t quite speaking of science but hypothesising about his failed relationships in a way that might be closer to a philosophical argument over a scientific one. It seemed to me a problem of bad faith rather than good science. He was looking for excuses rather than finding plausible reasons. I felt ungenerous thinking this but how often can you listen to a friend speaking about breakups that seem to follow emotional patterns that he couldn’t quite acknowledge? However, perhaps I was feeling churlish because he was trying to explain what he couldn’t quite understand by confessing what he believed, as though the unconscious and the biological came together in an odd combination that could seem like a truth.  

     He said that I didn’t look convinced but he insisted that convincing me wasn’t his intention. He had no interest in proposing that his ideas were foolproof; they merely had to be subjectively plausible — ideas capable of explaining himself to himself, and perhaps also to others. Perhaps even to a future partner. I was about to ask him about Reina, wondered if he had resisted contacting her too zealously, and I hoped that, unlike the others, she hadn’t ceased all contact with him. But before I had the chance, Jason said he suspected he received his terrible school nickname partly through adolescent desire. All that term, he couldn’t stop thinking about a girl in his class and he supposed for the first time it released in his body a smell that already threatened to be overpowering into one that happened to be for the people who mocked him that day. Whatever chance he may have had with the girl was eliminated by the nickname. She was never unkind to him, and never became aware of his attraction — he felt he would have then been contending with her repulsion as well as his nickname. But he did sometimes fantasise that she would save him from his classroom nomenclature, telling everyone that she adored him no matter if he happened to have sweated strongly one day during the break. But no, she never knew of his fixation and, since she had never once addressed him by name, he had no idea whether she would have called him Jason or Pongo. He said to me even saying out loud the nickname was astonishing to him — for many years he couldn’t possibly have uttered the word that was commonly on others’ lips for several years while at school. 

                                                               11

   I came away from the encounter unsure whether Jason was beginning to find himself or was losing his mind and, at least when I got home, I managed to keep this insensitive thought to myself. I didn’t tell Janice anything about my chat with Jason that afternoon. All I said when she asked was that he seemed to be coping, and maybe better than usual — I added that he hadn’t been in contact with Reina since the parting. 

         Maybe I didn’t say anything to Janice because I found myself musing as much over my time with her as I did of Jason’s school years, and what that day he told me about them. I suffered none of Jason’s humiliation at school and even had two or three girlfriends. But they were tepid affairs, and so were a couple during my university days also. I would feel that there was no passion on their part or mine, no reason why we couldn’t have been with another partner rather than with each other. When I parted from them there was little sense of loss and only a modest amount of embarrassment when seeing them in the playground at school or the library at university. It sometimes seemed odd that I had been to bed with this person, sleeping next to them, kissing them, entering their bodies as they caressed mine. With Janice I never believed our relationship was arbitrary but neither would I be inclined to say it was passionate. We were together because we cared about each other and there is no person beyond my parents I have trusted more. I would tell her everything, I found myself thinking, but there I was not telling her about the conversation with Jason. It is true, what he told me was hard to explain, but I could have started with that comment Janice made when he first helped us move into the flat and how she liked how neutral my smell happened to be. I am not so sure now if I would take such a remark as a compliment, and think that Janice’s words weren’t only unjust; they were also complacent. 

          I didn’t see much of Jason in the following few weeks and might have resisted another meeting, believing that while Janice and I were hopelessly mired in a dull life, Jason revealed a belief that didn’t convey to me the wonders of science; more the bewilderments of a human mind. I suppose that is often the thing about pseudo-science; it neither fits the scientific need for objectivity nor the subjective awareness of the sort of perspectives one can claim as just as our own. Offering up his childhood traumas I might have been able to countenance; allying them to the nature of things made him seem crazier than I realised. Yet I knew too by thinking this I was attempting to dismiss the complexity of his life within the predictability of my own. I always knew there was an absence in my life and Janice’s, but thought this stale phrase captured the mundanity of what most of us accept as a purposeful, modest existence. In recent years I believed what was missing from our life was a child and waited for Janice to realise this as strongly as I had. But now it was as though what was missing was more than that: we both lacked a strong odour to our ardour, and the lack of ardour perhaps rested on that odourlessness. Was I becoming as crazy as I believed Jason might be?

                                                               12

      About a month later Jason sent me a message saying that if I hadn’t seen him in the stairwell for a while it was because he hadn’t been spending much time in his flat lately. He was back with Reina, staying chiefly at hers. He proposed we meet up soon; he was going to be away from late spring to the end of summer, following Reina on another sojourn, this time to Turkey. I said it was wonderful news that he and Reina were trying again; great news too that she had another big job abroad and that he would go with her. I made an excuse why I wouldn’t be able to see him before he went, and we would catch up on his return. He replied saying he was sorry to hear we wouldn’t have the chance to see each other, but that Janice and I would have a new neighbour for several months. A friend of Reina’s would move into his place while also looking after her flat.  

      When I said to him I hoped we could meet on his return, it wasn’t an empty wish — it was a delayed desire. I didn’t want to ignore Jason permanently; I merely wanted to avoid what seemed almost like a contagion — a crazy idea on his mind that was becoming a preoccupation of mine. If Jason had for many years fretted over the ferocity of his smell, I had been indifferent to my olfactory state. I suppose I had never given it a moment’s thought and now was giving it many hours. I could see I had never experienced great humiliation as Jason, but neither had I experienced anything close to great passion. I wondered if Janice’s resistance to having a child was that she hadn’t a great passion either and couldn’t countenance settling down without such an encounter. It seemed I could have, and when I thought about this I knew I was much more fearful that Janice would leave than hoping for a passionate affair of my own. 

         I never did turn these thoughts into actions, nor even into expressed thoughts; the type of conversation many couples would have when one partner wants a child and the other is reluctant. For a long time after we had that chat years ago, I thought she would change her mind and all I needed to do was wait for her to do so. That waiting possessed little anxiety; then, with the thought that she might leave, there appeared to be nothing but anxiety. 

      Yet during the next few months, everything proceeded as normal, with our habits of cooking alternate nights, watching a couple of hours of a series in the evening during the week, and watching a film or two at the weekend, either at home or in the cinema. If we were going to the cinema we would usually eat out; if watching a film at home, we would often get a takeaway. Some evenings we would also go for a walk after work and before dinner, and at the weekend go for much longer ones, sometimes out to Portobello, far along the canal, or down by Newhaven or the bottom of Leith.  On Sunday mornings we would buy a newspaper and croissants, and rarely leave the flat before lunchtime. Nothing in Janice’s behaviour supposed she was other than content, but I became sure she was constantly if very mildly dissatisfied. This may have been my anxious state speaking, and no doubt was, but I think it could have been assuaged if Janice had said to me that she was now ready to have a child, or even if she were to say that she didn’t wish to have one because she liked the life we already had. She said nothing and life continued as normal, but this was indeed a new normal if for no other reason than my feelings had become abnormal; infected as I had been by Jason’s confession. 

             Jason and I exchanged the occasional email during his months away, though it wasn’t until his return that I wished to talk to him about my absence of smell, which seemed an even greater and more absurd confession than his malodorous one. Perhaps such absurdities can only be explored and expressed in person: the email, the text message, and even the conference call, do not lend themselves well to the intricacies of the human mind at its most singular. I suspected I didn’t want to confess anyway; more to blame him for his revelation, even if I also knew that whatever the complacent stability of my life I could hardly claim was a problem he created. He merely revealed to me my dull odourlessness in explaining his odour.

         When he announced he would be arriving back in several days, I asked when he would be free. He said the first week he would need to get organised; that he was putting his flat up for sale, moving into Reina’s and they were going to look for a bigger place together from there. We could say hi when we would see each other on the stairwell and work from there.  

        And so Jason returned, and I knew it was him from the cluttering in the flat below and a faint odour of sweat in the stairwell. It was just himself and Reina loading up a van, with Jason saying, when I asked, that he was leaving most of the furniture in there aiming to sell it with the items if a new owner wanted them. It made moving out easier, he said, laughing. Not that easy, I proposed as I helped him with a few items while I noticed Reina was only carrying light ones for a reason: she was several months pregnant. Noticing it filled me with quiet dread and this was exacerbated when, twenty minutes later, Janice entered the apartment block after going out to pick up the paper and the croissants. She saw as she was coming up the stairs, a pregnant Reina descending. I was a few steps behind Reina, with a box of books in my hand, and I saw the expression on Janice’s face. It was one of terrible astonishment, of frightful realisation, of devastating despair, all offered within only a matter of a second or two but that would have repercussions for many months afterwards.

    I needn’t say too much about these repercussions except that Janice and I are no longer together, that Jason and Reina bought a flat in Portobello facing out on the beach, and where I have visited them, having long chats with Jason as he pushed the buggy along the promenade, and as we would sit looking out at the sea sometimes huddled in jackets, hats and scarves; on other occasions in T-shirts. I have had further encounters but they have resembled those of my youth, and I remain tepidly attached to Janice — as if the best I could have hoped for in life was the depth of companionship; nothing so grand as what I would now call a biological passion. One day I might talk to Jason about it, though I doubt it will have the same effect on him as his confession managed to have on me. 

© Tony McKibbin