What was that smell?
He leaned across towards the driver’s side seat and sniffed. Again he smelt it, but not noticeably stronger. He looked into the back seat. There was nothing in there. He sniffed again, and again there was the smell but again not noticeably stronger.
What was it? It was definitely unpleasant and somehow human. Was it the smell of the man who had smashed the window of his car and sat, presumably, on the driver’s side seat on top of the glass? Yes, he thought, it was the smell of perspiration, unwashed clothes, stale cigarette smoke, and perhaps, he sniffed again, the slightest suggestion, somewhere in there, of human or animal faeces. Dog shit?
Walter got out of the car rather rapidly and returned to work. There, he went directly to the toilets and washed his hands— thoroughly. After a while of scrubbing he dried them under the air drier, wiped them together a little, then gently sniffed them. Sniffed again. They seemed OK but …
He sniffed at the cuff of his suit jacket. Oh crap.
*
Back at his desk, in his shirt sleeves, Walter got on the phone and began all the necessary arrangements with a definite sense of ennui. First he called the police and reported the break-in. After being placed on hold for some time, a constable asked a lot of questions in a desultory manner and didn’t seem, Walter thought, all that hopeful of any outcome other than a lot of paperwork. Then Walter rang his bank to arrange the cancellation of his credit card and VicRoads to notify them of his stolen driver’s licence. Both also put him on hold, but at least his bank notified him of his ‘place in the queue’ and how long the wait would be. This didn’t serve to cheer him up any.
While on hold this last time, Dev put his head up over Walter’s carpeted cubicle wall.
‘You do work here, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘I mean, for us?’
*
Driving home after work was, to put it mildly, a bit of a challenge for Walter. Usually he enjoyed being alone in the car—it gave him at least the pretence of isolation from everything else, from other people, from other road users. Sure, in peak hour he was hemmed in amongst his fellow man, bumper to bumper, but at the same time he felt completely separate from them all, removed, like a child who puts his hands over his eyes in order to hide, because if he can’t see you, well obviously you can’t see him. That morning, after the incident at the train station, his car had been a welcome little cocoon for him, a hermetically sealed environment where he could control the climate at the press of a button, contact whomever he wished via mobile phone, listen to whatever music he liked. It was so gloriously private and isolated and, the word came unexpectedly, safe.
But now things were different. The window had been smashed, there was a gaping hole instead of a driver’s side window, and thus no way he could seal himself in. There was no CD player and no CDs, so there was no music. More, there was that smell—that foreign, dirty, alien smell of someone else, some unwanted intruder now gone, but who had left his stink.
He turned his head towards the open window and took a good long sniff of the outside air.
*
Maggie didn’t have a job as such. Well, she did, but it wasn’t the same sort of eight to five grind in the city that Walter endured. She worked in a fashion boutique on a small shopping strip in Fitzroy North, a suburb a good hour away from Wintergardens by car, an inner city suburb more wealthy and artsy. Her hours weren’t as prescribed as Walter’s and her income was erratic. Walter was never sure, to be honest, how often she worked or how much she made. It wasn’t, he thought to himself (very definitely only to himself) a real job, as the boutique was owned by a friend of hers from school, and he suspected the arrangement was more an excuse for them to spend time together and go on the occasional trip overseas. They called them ‘buying trips’.
Maggie’s closet was packed tight with clothes, although she usually seemed to Walter to be wearing the exact same thing. She looked stylish and very finished, but also sort of simple and severe. Black and grey featured prominently in her wardrobe, although that was not unusual for Melbourne women. She also wore small patterned scarves tied tight around her throat, a look that Walter had always admired—it seemed to him vaguely 60s and even a little bit airline-hostess. He hadn’t shared this with Maggie—he wasn’t sure she would appreciate it.
When Walter got home that night, Maggie was there, which wasn’t always the case, and was cooking dinner, something else that wasn’t always the case. Often she stayed late at work, or was out a little late doing errands or perhaps visiting with friends, or with Arlette, but the arrangement was that whoever arrived home first began dinner. It was usually him—he was a competent if unimaginative cook. It was a simple, common-sense, domestic understanding, but sometimes it felt to Walter as if their home life was slightly disjointed, as if their lives overlapped like a Venn diagram, rather than were lived together.
He told her immediately about the car being broken into, confessed it almost like a penitent school-boy. He was remembering her phone call of that morning—she had needed the car as her little runabout was in having body-work done. She had ticked him off about it. He expected her to say something about that, perhaps say that if he hadn’t taken the car it wouldn’t have happened. It would be the sort of thing she might bring up, but she didn’t. She was annoyed about the car being broken into, certainly, but nothing more. She was not dismayed as Walter had been. Her annoyance seemed to be about the inconvenience of fixing the car, the time it would be off the road, the bother of claiming insurance, not because she felt it in any way an affront or a worry. She seemed to be of the opinion it was just the sort of thing that happened, annoying of course, but a fact of life. Little bingles and scratches and fender-benders—they happened. She herself was the kind of driver to park by touch.
It was only later, during dinner, that Walter mentioned the smell.
Maggie stopped chewing and looked at him, really looked at him for the first time since he’d walked through the door. It made him realise how little she actually did look at him these days—only when he’d done something surprising, and perhaps he didn’t surprise her much any more.
‘A smell?’ she asked. ‘What smell?’
‘There’s a smell.’
‘Is there? What’s it smell like?’
‘I don’t know,’ Walter said. ‘I don’t … know. It just smells dirty … unclean. I don’t know …’
Maggie wrinkled her nose.
‘I thought I could smell something.’
Walter’s face froze. After a second he put his fork down, swallowed and tensed his neck muscles in his collar. His nostrils twitched. Was it still there? The smell? Was it? He couldn’t smell anything—but what if he had got used to it and no longer smelt it on himself?
‘Excuse me,’ he said, then got up from the table and left the room.
*
A couple of minutes later Walter was in the shower, the warm water streaming over him. He scrubbed his body with a face-washer that was foaming with too much soap.
In the middle of his shower the water went suddenly cold and he stepped gingerly out from under it, bashing his shoulder and forehead on the glass of the shower-screen.
Maggie must have turned on the hot water to do the dishes or something. Surely she knew that it affected the temperature of the water in the shower when she did that? Walter suspected that she knew alright, that she must know, and that she did it anyway, in fact on purpose, specifically when he was in the shower.
He adjusted the hot water, waited, tested the temperature, then stepped cautiously back under.
‘Bitch,’