I have edited this poem into prose, as it probably better suits this format. It is the actual prequel to "Sweet Painted Ladies" which I posted last week.

SICK SCENT


On summer Sunday evenings, I would sit with my legs dangling from my mother's dressing-table stool and paint again her face upon my own: burning-red lipstick shaping a mouth of defiance; pinking my cheeks with a sweating, greasy rouge of shame. And, to change my status from Cinders to Princess, I would adorn the brunette stubble of my head with a white, silk evening-scarf, attempting to create the flaxen tresses that might crown my fantasies of grandeur.

The linger of my mother's scent would speak of both freedom and agony. Contained in a little plastic jar of heavily perfumed cream, called "Topaz", it reminded me of what I was there trying to forget: the weekly trip to the red-brick Victorian psychiatric hospital; being tossed about in the back of the Riley on the way; arriving car-sick with the heady smell of walnut-fasciad dashboard and cheap perfume. Then made sick again by the taint of institution, crazy women - and the stench of biological decay staining my father's clothes. I was confused by his relationship with these strange females - and what was he to me?

"Topaz" wasn't the same on a child; couldn't magically transport me to the Grown Zone in the way that I had hoped. On a body that had not yet learnt to sweat or bleed, the rosy smell of Johnson's still lingered. I could not replicate the scents of those courtship evenings my older brothers so enjoyed, practising their pre-nuptials long into the night; breaking through into adult worlds of their own. And I knew that they had found their freedom, for the smell of afterbirth is strong.

Red was the colour of pain and control - and of the full-grown world I so wanted to enter. I longed to be myself and self-sufficient; not connected at the wrist to all these messy grown-ups.

When the scratched vinyl went on, those summer Sunday tea-times - playing songs of bondage and of search for love - I would get down from my throne and go out into the garden.

There I would stand and systematically pull the wings off butterflies: those Sweet Painted Ladies coloured red... Who would never fly again - or who had not yet begun.