Care of Wooden Floors (15 page)

The tide of alcohol was coming back in, dissolving these arguments, mushing them into short-circuiting feedback loops, eating away at ethics, at second thoughts, at broader contexts, at tomorrows and consequences. Amber bumped and ground, and the drink revealed a simple formula on the smeared palimpsest of my mind: seek pleasure. Connie slipped a hand between my legs and I suddenly felt self-conscious, embarrassed even, of my recent reverse down there, as if I had failed to leave a tip. And with that, its presence returned. I swigged my beer.

‘Not bad!’ Michael said loudly as Amber’s devotions drew to an end. It could have been either a statement or a question.

‘Great,’ I said, not very enthusiastically, tipping five euros. Connie leaned into me, and was now rubbing between my legs. She licked her lips. She smelled of a recent shower. She clutched the hair at the back of my neck with her free hand. I was caught in a dilemma, not wanting to appear either interested or uninterested. With some difficulty, considering my entanglement, I took another deep draught of the not very cold beer. As soon as the neck of the bottle was out of my mouth, however, Connie moved
in. Her lips clamped around mine, her hot tongue pushed in. I tasted beer, champagne, wine, smoke, metal, blood. My hand went to her waist, thin and fragile, and up to her breast. I was repatriated to a tyranny of desire. Stale fireworks blew in my head, and yeast stirred in my belly.

I disengaged. Connie was beautiful, and her lips sparkled with moisture in the complicated red light. She was so beautiful, and if this whole process was disgusting her, she was doing an excellent job of concealing it. I wanted to feel free. I wanted to feel an open spectrum of possibility. But instead, I felt bound by many threads, each tied to an action in the past and a result in the future. The beer was not helping me as I thought it had been – it had been lying to me. I thought of fermentation, of yeast, of gases, of microbial processes. The wine churned, and came close to spilling. Many of the threads pulled at once.

‘Oh, God,’ I said softly. ‘Michael, I think I have to go...’

Tiredness and the urge to vomit crashed through me. My bowels liquesced. ‘Love me, love me, say that you love me,’ the music implored cloyingly.

‘Oh, God,’ I said again. I stood up, and pushed out of the booth, past Connie. ‘I’m so sorry. I have to go. I’ve had a really good time. I’m very drunk. Tired, and I’m very tired.’ I didn’t want to talk. Talking, bringing forth things from within, felt risky. I fumbled through the scraps of paper I had dropped on the table and left some money there, more than enough. Then I turned and left at speed.

The entrance corridor smelled of bleach and water. It smelled of Oskar’s bathroom. I wanted to be in that bathroom right away. I collected my jacket in a frenzy of impatience,
and turned to see where the teasing sound of running water was coming from.

A stream was cascading down the concrete steps and into the club, where it flowed into a grate. The steps were a running gutter. The corridor was a sort of storm drain. And it was a storm up above – a biblical downpour, one that threatened to float away flagstones and snuff out streetlights. I was instantly drenched to the skin, and I did not care. I needed to get back to Oskar’s flat, urgently, a priority that cancelled all other considerations. The threads tugged and pulled; many of them appeared to be anchored to my stomach.

I jogged and stumbled through the streets, guided by instinct, soaked thoroughly, skidding and tripping over the sliding paving slabs. Then, my legs felt washed away from under me, and I staggered against a rough wall. A terrible battle was lost inside, and I belched awfully, then doubled over and retched. A red liquid stream splashed out and spread into the puddles. Then it happened again, hot and acid. And again. I was propping myself against an abrasive surface, surrounded by water, feet almost submerged to the ankles. I felt the sandy roughness of the wall with the same hand that had, a short time previously, been warm and dry on Connie’s waist and breast. Water was in my shoes and ears. Was it a short time previously, or hours? Another retch, I hoped the last. I was lashed to a rack of exhaustion, but the struggle was over, the threads now pulling me to bed, not pulling open my innards.

I looked up. Geometric forms in black and sodium orange meshed above me. It was the brutalist palace of
culture, a revelation that forced a yelp of happy recognition from me. I had been vomiting against its concrete wall, but the rain was rapidly destroying all traces of my disgusting lapse, dissolving the results into the enormous puddle I was standing in. This puddle, more a pond, surrounded the palace like a moat, and I remembered what Michael had said about its subsidence into the burial ground beneath.

Across the avenue, in a pool of light at a tram stop, a silent, static group of half a dozen human forms of shining raincoats stood, looking across towards me.

I remembered Connie’s face looking up at me, filled with bafflement and mild concern, when I had risen to leave. The long-dead planners, I felt, had cut their avenue, rebuilt their city, for me, for my convenience in that moment. The road stretched out ahead.

White noise. Indistinct sound, beneath hearing, the growl and whoosh of blood forcing through tight passages. A two-part beat, the slave-driver’s padded drumsticks rising and falling as an exhausted muscle trireme heaves across a treacle ocean. A heart, pumping hot, thick goo in place of blood. Cells striving and dying. The electricity of the brain whining like an insectocutor. A cascade of neural sparks, an ascending, crackling chain reaction, synapses firing. Sensation – the sensation of no sensation. Then, awareness.

A cosmos of pain, discomfort, sickness and weakness. I was awake. At first, everything seemed to be pain, but this was an illusion brought on by apparent damage to the sensory apparatus. The brain. The brain hurt. It was a sinkhole of pain, dragging all other senses in. Each beat of the drum, each stroke of the oars, simply scooped more sensation towards that pulsing black point of hurt. My heart was going to give up and get
sucked
into my head, it would explode, and I would die in bed.

In bed. So I was in bed. I realised that this was a good sign. In bed meant that I had got home all right. At the very least, I had made it to a bed before losing consciousness,
even if I was not home. This meant a degree of safety. It reduced the number of bad things that might have happened to me from infinite to a manageable few tens of thousands.

My heart was still beating. Whatever its troubles, I didn’t think it was likely to stop unexpectedly. It was bound by several hundred dirty rubber bands, though. Moving was bad, it seemed. Any movement set off the pain in the head like an earthquake in a bulk discount china store. The pain in the head was worrying. At a rough guess, there were fourteen or fifteen tumours in there, and they were fighting in the lubricating pus like angry meatballs wrestling in custard. The thought of pus and custard set off a shudder of nausea. I realised how precarious everything was, how delicate, everything interlinked with tendons in complicated, secret patterns, so that the slightest wrong move might set off some sort of catastrophic unravelling.

Sensory information was now arriving in an unsteady stream. The news was not good. Systems were coming back online one by one after some sort of florid and spectacular trauma, not fatal, but crippling. Some symptoms were identifiable – a headache, and nausea. I began, in a detached way, to speculate about what might be wrong with me. A headache, nausea, and comprehensive general wrongness. But it was all on such an epic, Technicolor, Ben Hur scale. Committees of investigation formed.

It was possible that I was hungover. Yes, that seemed plausible. To be hungover, I would have had to have been drinking. Had I been drinking? A salvo of memories. No
actual details or situations were entirely clear, but drinking was definitely involved. Yes, the committee agreed on that. There had been drinking, and other people.

Another shudder shook the plates in the china shop and they jangled, sending out waves of pain. I may have groaned. My body was made from wads of soggy material inexpertly lashed together with stringy sinews. The wads composed of the worst stuff possible – bad milk, wine turned to vinegar, chewed gum, earwax, the black crud that accrues on the bottom of computer mice. The connecting sinews all strained and ached. It was a bad scene.

My experience was expanding slowly outwards. Eventually it reached the gaping pores of my skin, oozing greasy sweat, and pushed into the world. The duvet of Oskar’s bed had been twisted into a rope by some nighttime exertions, and was coiled around my legs. My throat and lungs rasped with complaint, shredded by smoke. Chemists would have found it impossible to recreate the taste in my mouth without taking a sample jar on a trip to the zoo. A solution of lemon juice and envelope adhesive had been squirted into my eyes at some juncture in the night. I was neither dry nor wet, swaddled in evaporated perspiration.

The shell of perception around my body was continuing to expand, and I wanted very much for it to stop. The room was light, it was day, it was a day in a succession of days, it was the next day. I needed to know more about the previous day. More information was becoming available, sensory information, from the nose. It appeared to be bad, but I couldn’t really understand it.

There had been drinking. I had been out drinking with Oskar’s friend Michael. We had drunk a great deal. I had accompanied him to some sort of lap-dancing place. These were the preliminary findings of the committee that had been hastily assembled to determine the causes and nature of the recent calamity. The committee believed that further investigation was needed. The committee had reason to believe that I had been sick.

I inhaled sharply and my nostrils filled with the unmistakable smell of vomit. There was something very bad in the room. I jumped out of bed and a violent tremor hit the discount china store, setting the stacks of plates clashing and scraping. My brain pressed against my skull. I had to inhale again, and there it was, that awful smell.

There was no obvious pool of ejecta around the bed, where my clothes lay tangled. I explored my face with my fingers and found nothing on it but a thin residue of oil and sweat. The white sheets no longer looked quite so white after four nights of my presence, but they had not had an evening’s red wine consumption emptied over them. I must have made it to the bathroom. But the bathroom was even cleaner, and I stood there gratefully, breathing in its glacial air, letting it sweep out the badness within. If there had been puking in here, I had been very careful about it. The smell trickling in from the bedroom made my stomach lurch, but I felt less at risk of throwing up now – which suggested that I had done so already, at some point in the night. The smell was inescapable. There was no other explanation for it. It was the smoking gun. But there was no body.

A shower would help, I thought. A strange calmness had me. My head cleared as the water poured over it, and more memories returned. My clothes would be damp, because I had been caught in the rain. I had been sick in the rain, and if I had been sick in the rain, then I had been sick outside the flat. A concrete vastness loomed in my mind, chandeliers swinging, carried on the chests of the dead, and receded like a passing Channel ferry. I remembered digested wine swirling into a puddle. I raised my face under the shower head and let the water splash into my eyes. I was born anew, sin washed away. My sick headache improved; an angry, tar-covered octopus of pain became an ugly and badly positioned trunk in the attic.

There was still the matter of the smell, though, and it tricked its way into my nose again as I dried and brushed my teeth. Back in the bedroom, it was as strong as before.

I checked last night’s clothes for stains and, although the smell did seem to strengthen when I leaned to pick them up, I found nothing. They were still damp, though, and had left a patch of wetness on the floor. Could that damage it? I leaned over again to inspect the area, and again the stink swelled. The sheets, I thought. I would wash the sheets. Some nausea still stalked my system, and getting a nostril-f of the smell sent it scurrying. The laundry would have to wait until I recovered.

My shoes were sodden, brown leather darkened and fleshed with water. I picked them up and took them out to the balcony, leaving them in the bright, breezy day.

There were no cats on the balcony. A little landslip of memory fell, shifting the mental scenery and revealing...nothing. I had no memory of letting them out the previous night. They were still in the flat when I left for the concert – I had expected to be back before ten, in plenty of time to expel them. Was I composed enough to show them the door when I got back from the club? It seemed extremely unlikely. My mental image warped, expanding and narrowing like a reflection in a fairground funhouse mirror, when I considered that I had been to a lap-dancing venue the previous night. Guilt prickled. I felt smaller and less evolved. And stupid – why hadn’t I grasped the opportunity and enjoyed myself? Because, I thought, I would have been sick over that poor girl. I remembered the black-red fountain splashing into puddles in the impassive sodium light. And the state of the toilets in the bar, the eye-watering breath of old urine. My stomach flopped, and a black, bitumen-scented tentacle of pain pushed out of the heavy trunk in the attic. It was clear now – I was in for a day-long buzzing bolus of a headache, right behind the eyes, with an occasional icepick-blow to the back of the head. I groaned again.

The cats. Where were the cats? If not outside, then inside. I hurried into clean clothes, and went through to the living room.

In the later days of the recent spring, Oskar had been in London. He had been involved in a concert at the Barbican – a quartet, comprising members of the Philharmonic, had played one of his compositions. He called me and urged
me to attend the concert, and I put up a firewall of increasingly wild lies to get out of it. At the time, I reasoned that even the best classical music – Bach, say – was barely interesting to me, and so to make for an entertaining evening a composition of Oskar’s would have to be better than Bach, and even the most charitable guess at my friend’s talents left me with the feeling that this was unlikely. Supper with an imaginary and terribly frail relative quickly filled the evening in question. We were both most chagrined. Before I could suggest it myself, Oskar was insisting that we meet the day before the concert. I eagerly agreed, and suggested a pub in the neighbourhood, a shabby little place on Whitecross Street that I was reasonably sure would be uncrowded and quiet.