1 June 1996

Johannesburg

I was just 16 when I received the gift of time travel. Of course, I didn't realise it then. It was just a piece of advice, the kind of knowing-thing one should expect an older girl, like my 19-year-old friend Sarah, to relish passing on to a younger one, like me. Recalling it now, her words sound so flimsy; just a girlish idea gleaned from some glossy magazine. But at the time, I didn't ask any questions. I assumed she was telling me something every grown woman must know. So, I nodded along, and – in stark contrast to just about every other piece of well-meaning advice offered to me as a teenager – I followed it.

"You know, you really should change your perfume every time you get a new boyfriend," Sarah told me.

It was a matter-of-fact statement. Looking back, I don't believe I reflected on it for very long. I don't remember consciously committing to it either. Besides, I was hardly racking up new boyfriends. I didn't know the purpose of the advice, so it was expedient to bend the rules and wear a new fragrance for every new situation instead – changing schools, going to university, my first trip abroad, a holiday with friends. And just occasionally, a new boyfriend. They all seemed to be equally good moments to wear a new scent.

At first, it was a bit of fun; a way to treat myself. The true gift of her advice was only revealed much, much later. I haven't fully unravelled it yet. But, like all great technology, you don't need to understand how it works to experience the magic. Is technology even the right word? Because I'm not talking about science-fiction here. This time-travel gift did not come in the shape of a machine. It didn't involve spacecraft, black holes, wormholes or a souped-up DeLorean to transport me to another dimension in the blink of an eye. The gift of time travel – at least in my experience – is not fuelled by the speed of light, but by the potency of scent.

Of course, the gift Sarah gave me is not the ability to be transported by smell. After all, it's a pretty common experience. Even the faintest whiff of a familiar scent from the past releases a cascade of memories and feelings so direct and immediate that you feel transported right back into a moment as if no time had passed at all. Your heart is suddenly gripped by inexplicable grief and sadness, only for you to realise – someone has passed you on the station platform wearing the same perfume as a long-lost love. Baking your mother's chocolate cake draws you back to her kitchen. Burying your face in your partner's pillow momentarily eases the pain of their absence.

No, the gift was not the ability to be transported by smell. The gift was the advice to deliberately, purposefully change my fragrance every so often. Little did I know, I had been marking the chapters of my life. And now I can revisit them at will. Those pretty little bottles tucked away in drawers and boxes, each a portal onto a different period of my life. Scents do what memory cannot do alone. Nor photos. They hold feelings – my feelings.

Photos insist that I look back, and ask that I reflect. There's always a sense of distance felt across time. I-now sees me-then. Of course, it can be enlightening to see the distance between the different versions of myself. I can see how much has changed; how much I have changed. That distance has sometimes helped me feel more compassionate towards my younger self, as though I were looking at another person. Photos allow me to view myself then, from the perspective of the new person that I am now. But they don't put me back in the moment. And any feelings that arise, arise from this new perspective – from reflection.

Smell is something quite different. Scent memories are not reflections. They are – more accurately – recollections. Smelling a familiar scent gathers up long lost parts of myself and brings them into the present. I become a unified whole, a self that transcends time and change. There is no distance between I-now and me-then. Instead, I stretch across time to experience the intimate vastness of self. I guess that's what I mean by time travel. I experience myself across time. I have enchaptered milestones, moods, milieux. Just one spray of a previous fragrance recomposes the whole context of an experience, or personal era: each delicate spray, a flood of feelings.

Coming to appreciate the power of this extraordinary gift, I've purposely sought out fragrances to enchapter my experiences. I've had to find more unusual, interesting, challenging scents to make the memories sharper and clearer. I've had to stretch myself and my preferences to wear something distinct from what I've worn before. It's made me brave. Nomvikeli – a dramatically spicy concoction of cloves and frankincense, a sharp green scent called Lawn, and one of my favourites – Jasmin et Cigarette – a dirty white floral with just a hint of ashtray.

In the process I have discovered I don't just love particular smells; I love smell: the ability to smell, the experience of smelling and of imagining the smells of perfumes to wear in as yet unexperienced futures. Smell has become a deep thread connecting me to my own experiences, stretching undiminished across time, an instant connection to the loves and losses in my life.

Twenty fours years have passed since I first followed Sarah's advice. More than a hundred glass bottles of different hues have graced my dresser. Nowadays, I'm able to return to the perfumes of my past. I sometimes use them therapeutically. Each bottle is a complex composition of mood and atmosphere created somewhere in my past, ready to be called on when needed.

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18 December 2016

Melbourne

My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's when I was 28. She was in her early 60s. As the disease progressed, it didn't just ravage her memory. It ravaged mine, too. It was hard to remember who she had been before the illness. Ten years of slow, sad decline faded my memory of the witty woman and the wise, affectionate mother that she had been. She passed away just before Christmas 2016. My Dad called me from Melbourne to deliver the news. The day after, I sat down to search for her in our family photos.

I particularly like the pictures of her as a young woman, from before I was born. They hold the promise of youthful potential, even though I know how the story turns out. There are some from my childhood years that make me realise how young my mom was, younger than I am now. I feel compassion for her. And understanding. There are snaps of happy times - Christmases and birthdays and family holidays. But I don't feel happy looking at them. They're all tinged with loss. Then there are the later ones, where I can see her fading away. I don't look at those at all anymore.

Despite my growing obsession with perfume throughout my twenties I'd never thought to ask my mother what she wore. Perhaps it was because we were so very different. I was tomboyish, outspoken and rebellious. My mother was a lady. Perhaps because no young woman thinks she wants to smell like her mother. After she had passed, I asked my Dad.

I was lucky to find an untouched, vintage bottle of Christian Dior's Dune on eBay. It arrived a few days later. I opened the box carefully, to reveal the rose-tinted glass flacon. I turned the bottle over in my hands, hoping to recognise it. But it didn't look familiar at all. I gently tilted the bottle to wet the stopper, then pulled it out and dabbed the liquid on my wrists. I breathed in.

There she was – my mother – sat at her dressing table, fixing her hair and putting on her makeup. I vividly recall the beautiful mid-century dresser with swing mirrors and the small bench she perched on – upholstered in textured cream fabric – that she tucked away neatly when she was done. The drawers, filled with brightly coloured boxes of eyeshadow and blush and gold tubes of lipstick. I breathed in again, now awash with little girl-awe, seeing my mother ready herself for the day.

I'd never thought much of signature scents. By wearing one fragrance for decades, you mark yourself for the memories of others. I had been changing perfume frequently to mark memories and moments for myself. But now I have this gift; I can revisit my mother. I wear Dune to call on her.

21 March 2020

London

I was standing in the lobby of the Royal London Hospital when my phone buzzed with a WhatsApp message from my friend Lara. "Can you smell anything?" she queried. I breathed in gently, tentatively sniffing the air around me. I couldn't tell one way or the other. I was waiting my turn to be allowed into the hospital pharmacy. They were restricting entry to six customers at a time because of coronavirus. Abiding by the restrictions, I wasn't standing anywhere near anyone. The lobby was fairly empty, and I didn't expect to be able to notice any distinctive smells just standing there. I couldn't smell 'hospital'. Nor did I want to. I didn't want to be there, at all. The sight of people with blue protective face masks in the queue ahead left me hardly wanting to breathe at all, let alone pick out a discernible smell.

The virus was, in fact, the point of Lara's question. It had just been reported in the news that smell loss is one of the most common symptoms of COVID-19. Both Lara and I had been ill with what we suspected was COVID and had been sharing notes on our otherwise mild, flu-like symptoms. In the absence of any available testing, I was both curious and eager to know if I had been infected or not. But, being in public, I didn't want to get close enough to anything to really test my nose. Bringing my wrist up to my face was a no-no. I had only just managed to drill it into myself not to touch my face. Left without stimulus, I put the question out of my mind until I got home.

The newly routine act of washing my hands as soon as I stepped through the front door reminded me of Lara's now looming question. As I lathered up my hands at the kitchen sink, it was immediately obvious something was amiss. The soap had no scent. Nothing. I rinsed and brought my clean hands to my face. I sniffed. Then sniffed again. I picked up the bottle of dishwashing liquid - chamomile and clementine. I brought the spout so close to my face a snot of suds wet the tip of my nose. My grip tightened on the soft plastic letting out a sudden whoosh of air from inside, straight at my nostrils. Still, I couldn't smell a thing.

For a fleeting moment, I wondered if the washing up liquid really had a scent at all. Could I recall smelling it before? Blank. It was near impossible to imagine the smell. Chamomile and clementine? I looked around the kitchen for other, more familiar things to trial - peanut butter, coffee, a block of cheddar from the fridge, peaches on the counter. Again and again, nothing. Each item of food, now a useless object. Shape and mass unchanged but suddenly devoid of meaning, they seemed unreal, like plastic playthings, like wax fruit.

What had started as a strange curiosity turned into a sense of dread. Lockdown had just commenced across London. Two days had passed since the spring equinox. The garden was starting to bloom, and I was starting to panic. I had lost my sense of smell. How long would it last? Would it ever come back? I felt otherwise well. Whatever illness it was I had suffered the week before had only lasted a few days. I’d had muscle aches, fever, night sweats and a dry cough. But I had no sinus or nasal congestion at the time of being ill, or after. I could breathe easily through my nose. Now, more than a week after recovering, I couldn't smell a thing.

I confirmed with Lara that I, too, couldn't smell. "It's so depressing," she replied, "I'm eating chocolate even though I'm getting no pleasure from it." I thought of all the meals I'd carefully planned to cook that week. I had made a special trip out to buy curry powder and cumin, to replicate my mother's 'bobotie' – a classic South African dish I hadn't cooked for years. Later, as I stood over the hob, cupped hand coaxing the scentless steam toward my nose, I felt utterly defeated — hunger displaced by distaste. I didn't bother baking the apple ginger pie I'd been craving.

Each morning I woke, my nose was the first thing on my mind. It became a ritual of sorts – I'd jump straight out of bed to test the perfume I'd bought from my friend Leigh-Anne in South Africa. She had launched her range of fragrances a month earlier. The one I'd selected was called "Please Wait Here", which seemed rather fitting to wear through the lockdown. But the main reason I'd chosen it was because it brought me back to the wonderful summer trip I had taken there to visit her. Each morning, I'd see the fine mist spray out from the bottle. I'd feel the wet on my wrists. But the fragrance - quite gone. It was as though someone had snuck into my bedroom and knavishly swapped this cypress-scented potion with tap water.

In the days that followed, I realised just how often I would tuck my nose into my partner's hair without even thinking about it. This unconscious, intimate habit suddenly revealed to me through the experience of absence; the absence of Tony's scent. It threw me. It felt as if there was something wrong with him, rather than with me. Had I woken up unable to see or hear, would I have assumed something was different about him? It was unsettling – like Tony wasn't really Tony anymore.

Then there was my perfume collection. I keep the really special ones in the bathroom drawer. These are the fragrances I purposefully return to, to relive moments, to reconnect with memories. I hovered over the drawer, unsure whether to pick one up and put it under my nose. Bois des Iles by Chanel - I bought it at the airport when I returned to Australia to be with my family after my mom passed away. Cool Water by Davidoff. My Dad had given me this when I was still a teenager. It was the soothing fragrance I chose to wear when I underwent 8-hour spinal fusion surgery far away from family. Anima Dulce by Arquiste. The warm spice of chilli and cacao that I was wearing when I fell in love with Tony on a cold December night. These bottles, usually jammed with emotions, were entirely emptied. The memories had evaporated. The portals were closed. I stared anxiously at Dior's Dune and thought of my mother. I couldn't bear to pick it up.