Katherine Tate was a square type of woman. She’d once been told she was Rubenesque and had bought a lot of red lipstick to complement her hippy, booby shape, but that was years ago. That was years before she was going to Change. The Change. What a nonsense.

As a woman in her fifties she had bought a cardigan with a dog stitched into it. Her perm had been falling out for the better part of six months. She could see the grey along her part line. Hell, she could even see her scalp. She peered at her scalp in the mirror like it was someone else’s as she brushed her teeth. Katherine was wrapped in a threadbare pink towel. Damn, even her teeth were a kind of brown.

She tried to care, but it was hard. Katherine knew that as she had aged her body had turned into a cube, and the pink towel did nothing to alleviate this image. All square shoulders and a disappeared waist. The Change was known to do that to a woman, if that’s what you were when the Change was upon you.

Katherine was brushing her teeth after she’d been to see her mother. If Katherine was ageing then her mother was almost dead, as far as she could see. She saw her mother today, lying underneath the crisp cold sheets and the light overhead of the hospital bed. In that feeble room there was the sound of her mother’s breathing and the smell of antiseptic that never quite covers the scent of dying.

Katherine had held her mother’s hand and had wondered at it. There’s not much to say to an old woman whose mind is eaten away and whose body is close behind. So Katherine just sat and wondered. Those hands. Crabbed and bent with arthritic pain. My God, those hands. They had wiped tears and held faces, washed and ironed endless school uniforms. They’d cut sandwiches and toast soldiers. Now they couldn’t even bend to fit her daughter’s own meaty fist.

Katherine kissed the warped hand, the papery feel of skin against her chapped fifty-something lips.

As she stood to leave, the taste of her mother’s skin filled her mouth with a wet and permanent sensation. The flavour that burst across her tongue was undeniable, was thorough and was complete. It was the taste of desire. A desire Katherine had never seen or heard before, but knew it the minute she tasted it. It was the wish and the want to die.

Katherine scraped the back of her hand across her mouth and coughed impolitely, almost gagging. Katherine tasted the sincerest want her mother could not speak. ‘Let me go’, the flavour had said. ‘Please let me be.’

Katherine walked quickly to the exit, wiping her mouth.

She drove sensibly and politely home past the Shell service station, stopping to fill the car that was nine-tenths full. Katherine added a bottle of water to her purchase. She drank to drown the flavour of the skin of the back of her mother’s hand, to mask it, to wash it away. As she pulled out of the service station driveway her mouth felt as if it were filled with nails, their sharp metallic points gently pressing into her tongue.

Katherine arrived home, first shouting her hellos into the television filled house and kicking off her comfortable shoes. The carpet was wearing thin, she noticed, as she stepped into the bathroom. Her threadbare pink towel looked like a forgotten intestine draped over the rail. Standing under the pinprick heat of her shower she hung her head, letting the water drain over her veins and between her neglected toes.

Katherine’s daughter arrived an hour later when Katherine was still scrubbed pink from the heat, and the taste of red wine had washed her mouth clean. Her married daughter carried Katherine’s genes, those familiar full shaped hips and the chest of breast. In the ‘hello darling, how are you’ moment, Katherine held her daughter close. They matched boob for breast, hip to cube. Katherine took her daughter’s face in her hands and kissed her softly on the cheek.

“Hello mum,” said Katherine’s daughter, travelling forward and away into the noise of the television filled living room, across the thin carpet towards her occupied father.

Standing stock still in a doorway, Katherine’s mouth drooled wet and full. Her lips smacked against one another. That taste! The flavour of her daughter’s cheek swelled throbbing and full of life through her mouth. This taste was a complicated one but oh so familiar. It was like salt, but long forgotten.

Katherine tasted on the kiss she received from her daughter the flavour of loathing.
This flavour was a deep and unrelenting hate, it lay unclassified and unspoken. It was a rounded sensation, like blackberries full and plump. Sharp, like thistles in your cheeks. Katherine’s mouth filled with the taste of watching yourself in a mirror and hating what you see. The kiss tasted like a thousand sharp eyes judging you and finding you wanting. Her daughter’s curves and the shape were out of place, and Katherine tasted the furious wishing for a different me and a different place.

Katherine swallowed her wine hard.

She watched the mouth of her only daughter move as she spoke of work and bosses, of bus rides and husband. She didn’t hear a word, she only thought of what she could have done, should have done. Katherine drank another glass of wine, more than she intended, anything to mask the flavour of her daughter’s well of unhappiness.

Later Katherine stood in front of her mirror and scrubbed her teeth again (oh, those brown teeth). She regarded the face of the older woman in the mirror. How had this happened, this ageing thing? This Change? Everyone said that you went through different sensations – hot and cold flushes, changes of libido, flavours suddenly jumping about.

But no one mentioned that you might be able to taste the hidden fears on the kiss of another. ‘Don’t be ridiculous’ said the ageing woman in the mirror, frowning severely and stressing the lines that were already there. Katherine rinsed her brush for the second time that night and gargled with the flavoured mouthwash her husband favoured.

He rolled over in bed to greet her in their usual way as they had for over twenty years. The mattress sagged obligingly as he ran his hands perfunctorily down her almost invisible Rubenesque curves (“You’re so incredibly sexy,” he’d muttered to her once through his almost lipless smile so many years ago). He turned to her and ran his lips over her own and missed, the wet inside of his smile meeting her cheek and ear.

“Goodnight love,” he yawned mightily, creaking away on the mattress that spoke more than they did.

Katherine lay rigid.

She saw in the half-light her nightdress, the cotton kind that rides up too bloody easily. She saw her ham like upper arms. She glanced about the lights as they moved across the ceiling, courtesy of the cars that tore too fast up the road outside (“damned hooligans,” her husband would mutter).

And then she tasted it.

In the movement of her husband’s lips that had burnt a path from her own to her ear, she tasted it. More correctly she tasted them.

Katherine tasted five women, varying in age and prettiness. She tasted the young secretary who had eagerly, too eagerly, turned her face to Katherine’s husband’s own in that side alley off from the office where he worked. She tasted the prostitute off Bourke Street, the one who later turned up dead in the squalid apartment where her husband had met her. Then Katherine tasted the young intern who had protested at the presenting of the lipless face and the curling smirk. And there was her good friend Karla, the flavour of her unmistakable at a family barbecue in the quiet of the bedroom where no one would see. Finally there was the taste of Katherine herself. The flavour of her on her husband’s lips was one of faint praise, tolerance and only just getting by.

Katherine lay awake for a long time as a result.

In the end it was too much to bear. Katherine turned her head and lifted her arm to herself. She considered for a moment and then sank her lips fully, wetly and completely onto her own flesh. She kissed herself quietly on the upper arm.

Katherine tasted the regret with a sigh.