There, that was the last of it. She poured the bleach down the sink, the bottle giving a few asthmatic wheezes as she emptied it. She hoped that would do it, but it had been a couple of weeks since moving in and she still couldn’t get rid of the smell.
It had intruded on her notice by degrees, the olfactory equivalent of seeing something in the corner of the eye. Just a whiff every now and then as she walked past the kitchen door, or in the hall, or the bathroom. The suggestion of overripe cabbage, or a piece of fish left too long or spoiled meat. She had tried white vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, down the plugholes but that didn’t do anything. She graduated to bleach which seemed to work, at least at first. She had checked the kitchen, the fridge, the most obvious culprits for rotting food, then the oven, which she scrubbed so thoroughly she broke through the baked-on crust to the shine of metal. She thought that had solved it, but over the next few days, the smell had grown more persistent, evolving from a faint hint to a definite statement. The smell evoked childhood memories – the dead mouse found under the stairs; a bird, lying broken among its scattered feathers; a sheep in the fields near the house, that announced its presence on the wind long before the encounter with its wretched woollen carcass, the cavernous stomach putrid with ooze…
