I can't remember how old I was at the time. Twelve or thirteen, probably. Mum, Nick and I were living in our nice little house in Wembley Downs, Western Australia. It must have been some time around then because this was before we had cats.

For about a week we had been noticing a pretty bad smell in the kitchen. A sort of rotting-animal smell. As we leaned over to look behind the oven, the smell got stronger.

The house had a pretty regular history of resident rats and mice. Never an infestation, just the occasional scuttling sounds in the ceiling that led my mother to put poison in the roof. The poison was of the sort that made its victim die of thirst, so we could usually tell when one had taken the bait: it would end up floating in the swimming pool. After a while, the poison stopped catching anything. My brother and I surmised that natural selection had run its course, and we had unwittingly bred an uber-rat that would eventually take over the world.

My mother was pretty sure there was a rat hole behind the oven, and pretty sure that a dead rat was down there doing the natural, but unfortunately rather smelly business of decaying. Moving the oven to clean up the corpse would be an expensive affair involving the Gas company, and a lot of hassle. There were a few weeks of procrastination during which the smell got worse, and Mum decided that she would have it all taken care of while Nick and I were over in Sydney visiting our father.

As such, we weren't around to witness the truth. You see, in order to lean over to look behind the oven, one was inevitably leaning over the toaster.

A toaster containing a dead rat.

A toaster that we had continued to use regularly for at least a month of that rat's residence.

For the next year, my mother made toast in the grill.