There is no need whatsoever for anyone to read this revolting post UNLESS you have specifically been asking for an update on this. And even then, I wouldn't if you’re eating.
So I was partly right. Lupin had stolen a dressed crab on New Year’s Eve and cleverly stashed it outside. This finally became clear when the skip (how I love a skip) was collected. In the narrow space behind it was one empty crab shell. Much self-congratulating and celebrating by me.
Crab binned, job done. The next day was a joy. Everyone smelled lovely. Letting Lupin out was no longer a game of Russian roulette. I can’t tell you the relief - I felt like putting out bunting.
The day after that was also fine.
The day after that, Lupin went gaily trotting off and came back smelling like death and decay and fish and the Plague. Worse than Crabgate, which as we have seen was already catastrophic. A realistic comparison would be that he now smelled like the not-fresh corpse of a corpulent person in a fish gutting plant (before the fish guts have been cleared away) with no windows after a long weekend during a heatwave.
We washed him, and everywhere he’d alighted on before being intercepted. We looked in vain for the tracker collar that is somewhere in this house but that is also tiny and out of charge. Then we roamed the land, again, looking for a second, non-crustacean culprit.
During the roaming my partner was rather breezier than I would have liked, pointing out interesting birds and not being nearly forensic enough. I was really after the full fingertip search, and I grew hostile. He’d been away when I was having to wash Lupin three times a day. It wasn’t his nice jumper that got sodden with the highly insistent scent of crab - if it had been crab. By this stage I was reconsidering.
Also he could sit on the sofa without gagging, because his sense of smell is normal. As previously noted, mine is extremely overdeveloped, and by this point the smell was permanently TRAPPED IN MY NOSTRILS. You know how that can sometimes happen? You smell something gross and then you go somewhere else but you can still smell it? I could smell crab (?) wherever I went, wherever I sat, wherever I tried to work. I could smell it outside, in the car, in bed, everywhere. Including, most distressingly, on me.
This went on for days - nearly a week, give or take the two respite days. I became extremely unhappy, and also crosser and crosser at the investigation’s lack of progress. None of it was helped by the fact that I got the feeling my partner thought I was being princessy about the whole saga. I admit that on rare and justifiable occasions I am capable of being a tiny bit princessy, but this wasn’t one of them. This was a crisis, pure and simple.
Then last Saturday morning I came downstairs and nearly passed out. The whole ground floor reeked. Not trapped-in-nostrils-ghost-smell reeked, but truly, actually reeked, of death, fish and extreme decay. The one tiny mercy had been that until now, Lupin had been the only reeker. Now Brodie, a large wheaten terrier, was sitting on the sofa, reeking contentedly. Tails, a small Norfolk terrier, was stretched out in the kitchen, sighing with pleasure in a cloud of stink. Lupin was dozing in an armchair, most likely dreaming of being an outstandingly good boy, what with leading his siblings to the site of truly first class disgustingness.
The smell was so bad that I had to leave the house.
When my partner came back from the shops, I was sitting outside in the freezing cold, furious and retching. At this point I started shouting that I COULDN’T LIVE LIKE THIS and WHAT WAS THE POINT OF EVEN EXISTING IF JUST BREATHING THE AIR MADE YOU WANT TO BE SICK and also that IF ANYONE LOVED ME THEY WOULD MAKE IT THEIR LIFE’S WORK TO MAKE THE SMELL STOP and ALSO THE FURNITURE IS GOING TO HAVE TO GO TO THE DRY CLEANER. I mean, complete and utter sense of humour failure. I was very nearly rage-crying. When he said that furniture couldn’t go to the dry cleaner and that he’d got croissants, I said he was a stupid pedant and also FUCK YOUR CROISSANTS. I may even have said I AM SICK OF HAVING DOGS, which obviously I didn’t mean, God forgive me, but which gives you the gist of my despair.
We went inside. He said, ‘Okay. Woah. WOAH. Okay. Christ, that’s bad. Hooo. I see what you mean,’ and some other more vigorous things. Then he gagged (twice) and I started to feel a tiny bit happier beneath the scarf I had wound round and round my face like a Berber tribesperson, because really all anybody wants is to be heard and for their pain to be felt.
Turns out - we’re fast forwarding by about six long hours - that the culprit, though not really a culprit as such, poor thing, was a very very very dead, very very very badly decomposed muntjac, completely concealed in a deep and thorny ditch between fields. It had been comprehensively dismantled from the inside. Its innards had been both eaten and rolled in. The death/fish smell was fetid, agèd entrails. We’ve had dead muntjac situations before, but believe me - never like this.
I’ll spare you the saga of having to dispose of the poor corpse.
We’ll never speak of this again and I’ll be back on Friday with something really charming and fragrant. Have a lovely Wednesday!
I needed this. You have my every sympathy, but I feel reassured that I’m not the only person who totally loses my sense of humour and rage cries when my husband doesn’t intuit what is called for, let alone accuses me of princess behaviour (including, infamously, when he removed the only loo in our old flat and thought I’d be fine with pissing in a bucket for several days - that was NOT being princessy). Dogs and small children are designed to be adorable because they are utter fucking monsters sent to try us. So glad the source of the stink has finally been located.
Did you also say “AND my hair is a mess, And I’ve got a spot, and I completely hate everything ever in my life ….” I had to explain to someone recently that it is entirely acceptable to escalate a drama to catastrophic levels, and that this requires acknowledgement and LOTS of empathy. FAKE IT. Don’t analyse.