And immediately I am back in a dressing shed before a rugby match. The place is built of concrete block and free of decoration. It’s cold and dank. A wooden bench runs around the walls and there are metal hooks for clothes, and an open showering area and the place resounds to the noise of metal studs on the concrete floor. We take it in turns to scoop Deep Heat from a plastic tub and smear it on our legs and arms. It’s cool on the skin but somehow generates a sensation of warmth beneath the skin. It’s almost 30 years since I played rugby but I feel, right now, the pre-match nerves, a salt tang of excitement and of fear. And none of this stuff is actual. It is all a mental phantasm, all generated by synapses awakened by a smell.
Anything can trigger synaptic connections. I see from the tube that there are two active ingredients in Deep Heat, the first of which is menthol. And just that word evokes another little flood of buried thought and memory.
Do they still make menthol cigarettes? By cooling the mouth, menthol reduced the harshness of tobacco, and they were marketed as cigarettes for women. I knew only one woman who smoked them, a reading teacher of unlimited kindness and patience. I see her now, with the long skirt she always wore, and a slight stoop, and her gentle self-effacing smile. Her almost secret vice, after a day of patient teaching of the slower learners, was to sit back in the evening with a menthol cigarette. I can see the green and grey packet they came in, though I don’t recall the brand name. The habit killed her. But she lives on among my synapses and those of all the kids she taught.
Deep Heat’s other active ingredient is methyl salicylate. Fizz go the synapses and via a series of connections that few would make, I think of a cricket bat.
I was a cricket fanatic as a child. Everything about the game fascinated me, including the willow from which cricket bats are made. The Latin for willow is salix, which is the root of salicylate. (I’m guessing that methyl salicylate has something to do with aspirin, which was first derived from willow bark.)
The bat that comes to mind was a present for my 11th birthday and the only bat I ever owned from new. My father took me to Wisden’s sports shop to choose it. The thing was made by Stuart Surridge Ltd and had the autograph of PBH May, a former England captain, stamped into the wood. I cherished that bat, tended it, sandpapered it, oiled it and kept it in a cupboard long after I’d outgrown it.
Where is its honey-coloured wood now, where its worn rubber grip, its splice and handle of sarawak cane? In a single skull is where, in a random cubic millimetre of wet matter.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I shall ease my back.
