AustLit

'You’d want one for the scent alone: camphor, menthol, Dettol. Band-Aids and cherry-flavoured cough syrup. The scents of medicines in brown bottles, ointments in tubes, gauze bandages. The tang of discarded bath salts. Fifty other scents that can never quite be named. This medicinecabinet scent embeds itself, no matter where you keep your stash – in the cupboard above the stove, perhaps, or in the shelves behind the mirror in the bathroom. It embeds itself in your memory, too, and activates when you least expect it. Open a friend’s vanity unit looking for floss and you might just find yourself in 1989 or 2002, bleeding or fevered and searching for a cure. ' (Author's introduction)