A mystery smell with the power to fell
23rd March, 2007
|
It hit me between the eyes like a blow with a cricket bat, a farmyard smell that filled the nostrils and flattened my ears against my head. "Dead rat!" I gasped as I fumbled for the keys to the balcony. The keys were there, but my eyes were watering so much from the stench that I couldn't see them. Finally, I staggered to the far end of the room, opened the doors and weaved out into the blessed fresh air.
There was, of course, no way there was a dead rat in our apartment. We did not have rats, or even mice. I'd seen one cockroach in two-and-a-half years. Our place was a vermin-free zone in spite of the commercial quantities of potato chips and peanuts we regularly harvested from beneath the lounge cushions. In any case, I'd once lived in a house that had a dead rat in the ceiling. I'll never forget that smell, and this smell was different - equally revolting, but different. "Oh God," I moaned inwardly. "I hope I haven't left a fish in the washing machine again." I did this some years ago in what remain mysterious circumstances and am still haunted by the memory. This was not, however, a fishy smell. It was more a chookyard smell. It was some time since I'd been in a chookyard but once you've slipped over in one on a rainy Brisbane winter's day and landed bum-up among the chook poo, you never forget the smell. I consoled myself with the thought that the pong was so bad that it effectively masked the pungent odour of curry that often insinuates its way into our apartment's ventilation system around meal times, courtesy of our culturally diverse neighbours. Holding my nose, I edged back inside and started to sniff around the laundry. It was then I realised that sniffing while holding your nose is largely self-defeating. Further sniffing revealed that the laundry was not the source of the smell, nor were the bathrooms or bedrooms. The stink, it appeared, was concentrated in the living room. In fact, it seemed to be coming from... I suddenly remembered a friend who had held an engagement party in his backyard. He had also been engaged in a long-running feud with his neighbour, who chose that afternoon to strike a particularly telling blow by fertilising his lawn with chicken manure. It was a sunny day and the wind was blowing from the direction of the neighbour's yard. Those guests not rendered unconscious by the smell could be found dry-retching against the back fence. It was a social disaster on a grand scale and as I stared at our two indoor pot plants, I realised what had occurred. There are times, too many times, when I am seized by irrational urges and it had happened this very morning as I had been picking muesli off the kitchen floor, a ritual repeated every day and a sign, perhaps, that I either needed a bigger cereal bowl or should eat breakfast while standing in the shower. I happened to glance at our two indoor palms and decided that they looked rather poorly. "Plant food," I muttered as the madness seized me, "they need plant food." Finding a bottle in the laundry, I tipped its contents into the pots. Feeling the same degree of satisfaction as a farmer who has just sown several thousand hectares of wheat, I then wandered off to work, expecting the palms to have doubled in size by the time I returned that evening. Sticking my head out the door and taking a deep breath, I plunged back inside, found the plant food bottle and did what I should have done that morning, which was to read the label. Chook poo. I had drenched the indoor palms in liquid chicken poo fertiliser. I had turned our inner-city apartment into a chookyard. I keep waiting for the body corporate manager to start banging on the door and accusing us of keeping chooks. The only possible upside is that the noxious fumes filling our place could also be invading the apartment of the phantom curry cookers - wherever they are... |
