The queue moved slowly, but as we edged closer to the entrance the anticipation increased. Now we could see and hear people leaving the garden; some of the children held T-shirts over their noses while others, even more dramatically, fanned their hands in front of their faces and made spluttering noises. I heard one woman complain that she thought she was going to faint from the stench. Another complained that it wasn’t as bad as she’d thought it would be, that if she’d known it was just going to smell like a dead rat she wouldn’t have bothered coming all this way.

‘Did you come far?’ I asked the man who’d spoken to me earlier.

‘Just from across the harbour.’

‘Are you interested in smells?’

‘No, not really,’ he said. ‘But this is special.’

As we took a step forward I realised how infrequently I’d found myself in the company of a group of strangers smelling things. Usually sniffing was a furtive exercise, as shameful as looking at your reflection in a store window or, God forbid, picking your nose. The perfume counter, the rose garden, the sensory garden and the odd flower show … that was the limit of my communal smelling experience. I imagined a sniffing club, where people simply sat outdoors, taking in their scented surroundings. It was odd that so many people should line up to sniff something known to be ‘bad’, given that many of them wouldn’t pause in their daily life to smell anything pleasant, unless, of course, it was presented at the table as a tasty meal or a glass of wine.

‘What do you think it will smell like?’ I asked my companion.

‘Everyone says it smells like a dead body,’ he said.

‘Have you ever smelt a dead body?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Lots.’

I took a step back to see if he was joking, but his expression remained impassive.

It was our turn to enter. The change in temperature from the fresh outdoors to the warm, humid interior was the first thing to grab my attention, but within seconds I caught a wave of odour, a fetid mixture of flowers rotting in stagnant vase water combined with mouldy carpet. I tried not to look at where the corpse flower stood, preferring to let my nose rather than my eyes guide my sensory response. As I stepped closer, the smell became more pungent, reminding me of the blood-soaked pads that line supermarket meat trays. It seemed well past its use-by date, and then it transformed and became more rotten, as if a rodent or some neighbourhood pet had died in the roof or under the floorboards. The smell wasn’t quite as strong as I’d imagined it would be but I could see how it might attract pollinating flies and beetles. Now I looked at the plant, and the strangeness of its purple-red flower and elongated spadix created such a powerful impression that the smell seemed much louder than when I had blocked the image from my mind. Connecting the smell to its source made it easier to make sense of the stink; it was now less abstract, easier to define, just as discovering dog shit on the sole of a shoe provides a context for that particular unwanted odour.