Extract from "Painting Bertha - A Novel"

As Anne was stripping the doona from its cover, she couldn't resist the urge to smell the old cotton sheets. She made sure no one was watching her bend down to the empty bed, least of all her husband Bob. She closed the door behind her and drew the curtain so that the smell could envelop her, so that it could enter her, consume her - the sleep and the dreams and the soft skin.
Perhaps she hoped to recollect memories of Paul's baby skin or find a piece of hair short enough it could only be his? This, she told herself, was a necessary act of recognition, something every mother needed to do to familiarise herself with her grown-up son who now shared his life with a woman other than his mother.
How unfortunate then that her nose failed her! There was nothing. Nothing that could be vaguely construed as Paul-remnants. To her disappointment she had to conclude that it could have been anyone, even a stranger, sleeping in that bed. There was just the anonymous smell of sleeping bodies and greasy body hair. His was just a body like anybody.
As she was about to give up this futile attempt of turning back time through the act of sniffing sheets, her nose got a whiff of something else. She looked around to double check that no one had entered the room and then she picked up the doona to press her nostrils deeper into the sheet. She took a deep breath. The exercise was so strenuous that she had to throw the doona aside as she snorted and gasped for a gust of fresh air. She found a new unsniffed spot on the doona. She tried the pillows, too. Slowly and painfully she began to discern a smell. She inhaled deeper. And deeper. The smell began to take on a shape. Something tangible, manly. She had a vision of a throbbing amoeba washed ashore on a barren beach. At first she mistook the smell for herself until she realised that as much as it might have belonged to her once upon a long, long time ago, it was now the exclusive property of her husband.
She pictured him kneeling against the empty bed of the young woman who was to become his daughter-in-law. Now, his moans were almost audible. Her younger self would have thought the idea quite comical, the ageing taking turns at the altar of youth. Now, all she could do from stifling her scream was to bury her head in her hands and sob.