In August 1993 I took a coach to Bristol to see Jurassic Park. I bought the fragrance first, a 50ml refillable bottle of Pasha de Cartier from the counter in Debenhams, then carried it in its bag to the long queue on Frogmore Street, where the cinema was a Cannon in those days. The bottle was expensive in the way that turns a purchase into an event. Silver metal over thick glass, gold fittings, a blue cabochon at the cap, and the promise folded into the word refillable: buy the vessel once, renew the contents for years.

I tried it in the shop and thought I liked it. At about eight that evening I smelled it again in the kitchen, decided I didn't care for it at all, and put the bottle and the box in the bin.

Cartier had launched Pasha the year before, in 1992, with the refill built into the design, and had the shape registered as property: US design patent D348,333, filed in April 1992 by Alain-Dominique Perrin and Jacques Diltoer. A design patent guards ornament against copying rather than promising durability, but nobody files one unless they expect the object to matter for years. Mine lasted about nine hours.

The money isn't the hard part. The bottle was destroyed while the world it came from still looked permanent. Debenhams was simply Debenhams, Pasha was a current fragrance rather than a vintage one, and August 1993 wasn't August 1993 yet. It was now, and nothing around me announced itself as temporary.

Twenty years later, in 2013, I found another full refillable bottle on eBay in Florida and bought it. It arrived across the Atlantic improbably intact, and for a moment the logic was seductive: the mistake corrected, the lost thing returned. Same architecture, same weight, the same gadrooned silver and gold. But it wasn't on the counter in Debenhams that day, it didn't go into the queue on Frogmore Street, and it has no memory of August 1993. It carries instead twenty years of unknown existence in Florida, a parallel biography, while the bottle I actually bought went into a kitchen bin.

Both buildings have stopped being what they were. Debenhams closed its last 49 stores on 15 May 2021, Bristol among them after fifty years on Broadmead, and the site is becoming flats, which is at least a definite ending rather than a slow one. The Cannon stopped showing films before the decade was out, so the room where I queued is an O2 Academy now.

I remember it being dark outside when I dropped the bottle in the bin, and it cannot have been, which unsettles the whole account. Bristol doesn't lose the light in early August until around a quarter to nine, and I was finished by eight. The dark is something the memory added later, and once I noticed that I stopped trusting the rest of the scene. Had I known what the bottle would come to mean I'd have kept it obsessively, but holding that knowledge would have meant not living in 1993 at all, only visiting.

I still don't like the fragrance. What I bought back from Florida was never the smell, it was the afternoon, and the afternoon isn't in there. So the second bottle sits in its sealed box, an object I don't want to use and can't throw away. The one promise the design kept is the one I'll never take it up on.

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