It’s a particularly loud smell, the smell of dead rat.

Every now and again Phil would walk around the apartment, trying to see if he could isolate the source of the smell. He could not. Because dead rat is everywhere. And everywhere is dead rat.

He often thought of his friend, who smelled a dead rat one summer, and four weeks in saw a body bag being taken down the stairs of her apartment as she was coming back from the store. She arrived back upstairs to a fresh and clean smelling room, and initially concluded that the dead rat, with its little dead legs, must have scuttled away to move in with its dead rat family in some other apartment block. Or something. And then of course she connected the dots, and immediately gave her notice and fled across the Atlantic.