Cast
John: an adult male with a heightened sense of smell.

Scene
There’s one thing I can tell you about superheroes. No matter which one you’re talking about – Spiderman, the Hulk, Catwoman – there’s no doubt I have this right. Even if you created an entirely new one, this would still be true: superheroes don’t have super smell.

That might sound funny, but think about it. What separates a superhero from an ordinary person? Powers, right? Most are incredibly strong, some can fly, others have laser beam eyes. But can you imagine one with super smell?

Superman’s flying through LA on his way to pull a drowning girl from a sewer. His eyes are blistering from the millions of smog particles he’s inhaling per second and the stench of a million people’s shit smacks him in the face like a fist. “Ah, fuck this.”

I was born with an incredibly heightened sense of smell, but alas I cannot fly nor lift a truck above my head. Wherever I go I am assailed by odours.

When I was young I wanted to swap my sense of smell for better sight. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes by ordinary standards, but compared to what my nose can do I’m effectively blind. Instead of X-ray vision I had X-ray smell.

I didn’t have a large number of friends. It wasn’t as if I was socially inadequate, I just couldn’t stand the smells of other kids. There was Donny Parkins, a popular kid, who smelled of dough and flour in the morning and acrid sweat from recess onwards. I could bear him until ten thirty, then the games of tag turned him into a stale change room two hours after a big match. The first girl who ever liked me, Judy Bloom, was an evening showerer and had nightmares. She never told me this but fear caused hormones to leak on her clothes and skin. She was stale by morning and fetid by lunch time. She tried to kiss me once but her halitosis mixed with peanut butter and white bread made me gag.

I hid my distaste a little better in high school but many odours made me vomit, and the lingering, off-carroty smell of bile in my mouth kept me in a state of perpetual weakness. Wafts of perfume came out of her armpits each time Miss Baker turned or wrote on the board. The musty book-smell would make me gag and turn my head to the side, only to catch a mouthful of rotten timber from beneath the carpet. Teachers said I was distracted. To eat, I would hold my breath and choke down sour, overripe fruit or sandwiches made from festering bread and bitter, leathery vegemite.

I was compared to Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the murderer from the novel Perfume. Totally unfair. I’m not a serial-killing toad. He dedicated his life to distilling pheromones from dead redheads. All I wanted was to silence the screaming stench of life. I experimented with booze and tobacco. My first cigarette was like putting my head in an old fireplace filled with burning plastic. I still remember the searing in my eyes and the agonising pressure in my head...

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