The Bottle My Grandmother Left Behind Smelled Like Nothing You Can Buy in a Mall

When my grandmother died in Pietermaritzburg, she left me three things that mattered. A butter dish with a chip on the lid. A photograph of her standing outside the Oriental Plaza in a dress I never saw her wear again. And a tiny glass bottle, no taller than my thumb, with a black screw cap and about half a teaspoon of dark amber liquid inside.

I did not think much of the bottle at first. It sat in the box with her costume jewellery for almost a year while I dealt with the estate, the arguments with my brother about the flat, and the general fog that settles over you after you bury someone you loved without ever telling them enough.

Then one afternoon I opened the box looking for a brooch, unscrewed the little cap by accident, and the smell knocked me flat.

The smell that was her

It was her. Not perfume in the way I understood perfume. Not the sharp cloud that hits you in a department store when a woman in a lanyard sprays a card at your chest. This was warm and low and a little bit sweet, with something woody underneath it that I could not name. It was the smell of her neck when I was small and she held me on her lap during load shedding, the two of us waiting for the lights with a candle burning on the kitchen table.

I sat on the floor of my spare room and cried like a child. Then I screwed the cap back on very carefully, because there was so little left and I was terrified of spilling it.

For weeks I rationed it. A single dab on the inside of my wrist on a Sunday, nothing more. I would hold my wrist to my nose during the day like a lunatic. My colleagues probably thought I had a nervous habit. I did not care. I was buying time with a dead woman.

Trying to find out what it was

The bottle had no label. No brand, no ingredients, nothing printed anywhere. I turned it over a hundred times hoping for a sticker that had fallen off.

So I started asking. My aunt, who is not sentimental about anything, told me my grandmother never wore what she called "spray perfume" because it gave her headaches and it evaporated off her by lunchtime. She wore oils. Little bottles she bought from a man at a market, and later from somewhere in town, dabbed on and left to sit against the skin all day.

That was the first time I really understood there was a whole world of scent that had nothing to do with the bottles behind glass at the till. I had spent my whole adult life buying whatever was on promotion, spraying it on my clothes, and wondering why it was gone by the time I got to work. My grandmother had known something I did not.

I went looking. I learned that what I was smelling was almost certainly one of the older style perfume oils, the kind that are worn neat on the skin instead of blasted into the air, and that they behave completely differently from what I was used to. They do not shout at you across a room. They sit close, they warm up with your body, and they change through the day.

Learning the difference the slow way

I am an accountant by trade, so my instinct was to research the problem until it surrendered. I read more than a grown woman should about the difference between an alcohol based fragrance and an oil based one. I learned that the alcohol is what carries the scent up into the air in that first big burst, and it is also what makes the whole thing vanish two hours later. Remove the alcohol and you get something quieter and far more stubborn.

I ordered a few small vials to experiment with, telling myself it was for research and not grief. Some were terrible. One smelled like furniture polish on me and like roses on my sister, which taught me the lesson everyone eventually learns, that a scented oil perfume does something slightly different on every person because it feeds off your own skin.

That was the part that undid me a little. My grandmother's oil would never smell the same on me as it did on her, because it was partly made of her. Whatever I found would only ever be my own version of it.

The Saturday I nearly gave up

There was a Saturday, months in, when I nearly threw the whole project away. I had spent a small fortune on samples that did not work. My wrist smelled like a chemist's shelf. I sat at my kitchen table with about ten little bottles lined up like soldiers and felt ridiculous, a grown woman chasing a ghost through a row of glass.

My daughter, who is nine, came and sat next to me and started sniffing them one by one with tremendous seriousness. She got to the fourth one, a warm amber thing, and she went completely still. She said, very quietly, "That one smells like Gogo's blanket."

I had not told her what I was doing. She was too small when my grandmother died to have any clear memory of her. But she had slept under that old blanket for years, the one from the flat, and somewhere in her the smell had lodged just like it had lodged in me.

We both cried at the kitchen table, and then we laughed at ourselves for crying, and then we ordered a proper bottle of that one.

What I wear now

I do not wear my grandmother's original oil anymore. There is a tiny bit left in the black capped bottle and I will keep it until it dries to nothing, because it is the last physical piece of her scent that exists in the world.

For every day I wear the amber one my daughter found. It is one of those oil based perfumes that you dab on and forget about, and then at four in the afternoon you turn your head and catch it and feel briefly held. It is not my grandmother. It is my own smell now, mixed with something that reminds a nine year old of a blanket.

People at work have started asking what I am wearing. I never have a good answer, because the honest one is too long and too sad and too happy all at once. I usually just say it is an oil, not a spray, and that it lasts all day.

What I have really learned is that a smell can be a door. My grandmother left me one accidentally, in half a teaspoon of oil, and it took me the better part of a year to understand that she had been trying to teach me something about staying close to people instead of announcing yourself to a room. I think about that every morning now, when I press a single drop to the inside of my wrist and go out into my day quietly.