Care of Wooden Floors (24 page)

If the stain has had time to set, then you’ll need to remove it with an abrasive. The best is called ‘rottenstone’, or ‘tripoli’, a fine powder that’s used for polishing rocks. Mix some rottenstone with linseed oil to make a fine paste, and then use it to rub away the stain, always following the direction of the grain of the wood.

Book in hand, I walked to the kitchen, where I had left the box of cleaning products.

‘Rottenstone,’ I murmured to myself. ‘Rottenstone or tripoli.’

I did a quick inventory of the box – some cloths and dusters, an aerosol of wood polish, sheets of fine-grain sandpaper, three dusters (one of which was scarred by use and chemicals), a pair of washing-up gloves, a couple of clean paintbrushes, a tin of polish or varnish of some sort and a small, sinister brown glass jar filled with a fine white crystalline powder and covered in warning triangles and hazard signs. Before I had finished looking, I knew there would be no rottenstone. It even sounded invented, made
up, a cleaning product favoured by magic elves. I had no confidence in it. Novack would have to do better than that.

If you have no rottenstone, then ground pumice will do, or even a sheet of fine sandpaper.

Sandpaper – that was more like it. A treatment that came from the hardware store, not the Body Shop. I selected a clean sheet of sandpaper from the plastic box and examined the stain. What I needed was a test area where a fix could be tried out before risking it over a larger expanse of floor. There was an outlying splash the size of a five-pence piece that would do nicely.

Sand the floor gently but firmly, in smooth strokes that travel in the direction of the grain.

This almost immediately made a difference to the satellite stain, but also to the floor around it. The stain receded to a stubborn blush, a shadow of what it had been. But this ghost floated in a frighteningly pale oval of naked wood. This snowy patch jumped out at even a passing glance – its interruption of the floor’s quiet shine with a matt interval would be enough to catch the eye even without the colour difference. I was also now painfully aware of how vulnerable this patch was – stripped of even the most cursory protective finish, it was a magnet for dust and defenceless against further spills. And the stain might be seriously diminished, but it was not gone. I sanded for as
long as I dared, conscious that I was eating into the substance of the floor, but still a rosy trace lingered. The light from the windows, slashing low and deep into the room, fell across the kitchen floor. In its brightness, sometimes I thought I had finally eliminated that last blush, only to see it again – and blink it away, to find that what I had actually seen was a reddish blob floating behind my eyes, the retinal impression of staring at a shining spot for too long.

My head throbbed. The litre bottle of water I had bought was now empty. Employing the sort of care that nuclear technicians call upon when handling unstable fissile materials, I opened a bottle of wine and poured a glass. It was most welcome. Leaving the glass on the shaped steel draining board by the sink – I didn’t want to risk it anywhere else – I consulted Novack again.

You might not be able to remove a really deep stain through abrasion alone. But don’t panic. Make up a solution of oxalic acid crystals in water, soak a clean white cloth in it, and apply it to the stain for about an hour. EXERCISE EXTREME CAUTION – oxalic acid is very hazardous to skin. Wear protective gloves throughout preparation and application of the solution. When you’re done, neutralise the acid with household vinegar.

Novack, you magnificent Californian loony, you’ve pulled it off. This proposal didn’t necessitate a trip to Homebase, it needed a trip to the periodic table. Oxalic acid – that was the kind of plain-speaking substance I could have faith in.
My confidence surged as I immediately thought of that medicinal brown jar in Oskar’s box, its festive display of hazard icons, and the crystalline matter inside. I looked at its label again, and my trust was redeemed – oxalic acid crystals.

In a past life, I might have paused at this point and given a thought to the environment. The ocean or the aquifers might have selfishly competed for my attention. Not now. At that moment, if there had been a button I could have pressed that would simultaneously obliterate every stain on the floor and every living panda, I would have pressed it without hesitation. I was very serious about cleaning this floor.

Wearing the rubber gloves, I made up a small glass of the acid solution and poured it onto a clean, new dishcloth from the cupboard. Then I placed this cloth on the bare patch of floor, coiled into a tight mound to expose as little undamaged wood as possible to the acid. There was no satisfying hiss or burst of flames, no acrid odour – the floor looked as it had done before, only with a blue washing-up cloth balled up on it. I took a careful sip of wine and looked at the clock. It was more evening now than afternoon. An hour seemed like a long time; dead time, too, the time between trips to the oven when preparing a complicated supermarket curry in many plastic trays.

I ran the gloves under the tap, took them off, and went into the utility cupboard to find a bottle of vinegar. When I came back a couple of minutes later, carrying a suitable bottle, something didn’t look right.

Kneeling, I examined the cloth on the floor. It was
covered in a simple pattern, a grid of blue lines, just like every dishcloth I had known. But the pattern had changed. The lines had lost much of their definition – they were blurring into one another. And the shadow at the edge of the cloth wasn’t a shadow. It was a ring of blue dye, leeching out of the cloth and into the floorboard underneath.

‘Shit!’ I cried. ‘Shit, shit! Shit!’ My arm tensed to snatch the cloth from the floor, but I remembered the acid. I pulled on the gloves with flailing fingers, grabbed the cloth and dropped it into the sink, turning on the tap above it.

There was a mottled blue circle on the floor, seeped into the wood, darker at the edges than at its centre, where the bastard remainder of the wine stain could still be seen. I ran my hands under the tap again and pulled off the gloves. Vinegar, vinegar, neutralise the acid with vinegar. The cap of the vinegar bottle was stiff between my fingers, which seemed to have lost all power to grip. The bottle slipped, almost fell. Holding it with white knuckles, I sloshed its contents over the blue lagoon. Pale bluish liquid flowed freely over the floorboards. Cursing, I passed a new cloth under the still-running tap and started to mop up the spreading spill.

What remained on the wet floor was a varied bruise the size of a coaster in place of a near-defeated blush smaller than my thumbnail. With numb interest, I noticed the many qualities of this new blue presence – its slightly darker outer edge, where it had interacted with the finished floorboard, the paler, dappled blue where it had enjoyed
free access to the sanded wood, and the violet birthmark at the centre, where it lay over the wine without having the time to dissolve it. In a couple of places, I noted, it was possible to make out the grid-pattern of the cloth, transferred onto the floor.

Novack, I thought, you son of a bitch, why didn’t you warn me? He had, of course – he had specified a white cloth, un-dyed, without making the importance of that instruction clear. The floor would have to be scrubbed again, left to dry, sanded again – a larger area than last time – treated with the acid again, and then, maybe, barring further mishaps, polished. It was going to be a long evening. Thank heavens I had bought that second bottle of wine, I reflected as I reached for my glass.

Later, I would carefully replay earlier events in my mind to identify the point when I had picked up the wine glass while wearing rubber gloves that had oxalic acid on them. The glass was barely a third of the way between the sink and my mouth when my thumb and forefinger prickled with intense heat. I had barely a fraction of a second to register this oddity when the heat was replaced with scorching pain.

My lower brain instantly took control and did what, in its estimation, was the sensible thing to do. I dropped the glass. In fact, it wasn’t so much dropped as flung away like a venomous snake. Its contents arced in the air; it smashed against the boards. It had been almost full.

But that wasn’t the most important thing in my life at the moment. At three points on my left hand, the skin had
turned scarlet and was puckering up. I let out a low sound, two parts moan to one part scream, and threw myself at the sink.

Of course – as the later mental replays made plain – in order to wash acid off one’s gloved hands, one must first turn on a tap with a hand in a glove that is covered in acid. And that acid, unless one was thoughtful and diligent, will be left on the tap. Once the water had soothed my left hand, this was the tap I reached for with my unburned right hand.

Meanwhile, in a hundred places, red wine trickled and dripped over broken glass.

It had been a restless night. What little sleep I managed to get was broken at 4 a.m. by the banging of the French window. When the time had finally come to call it a night, after an evening of disaster relief, the cat had not returned. I laid out a fresh plate of food and left the bedroom window ajar, in case it reappeared on the balcony in the night. But a modest summer storm had struck in the small hours and gusts of wind had thrown the window back with a crash. I was obliged to bolt it to prevent rain blowing in. Of the cat, there was no sign.

The living cat, I mean. Its late colleague did make an appearance, in a dream, whiskers dripping with muddy water, coat matted with filth. It loomed over me accusingly like Banquo’s ghost. Then it was gone. Some rain did penetrate the room – I barely cared. I considered letting it stay there, on the floor, not concerned that it could degrade the finish and warp the wood. But the vestiges of my sense of responsibility stirred themselves, and I mopped up with the hand towel from the bathroom.

Despite my exhaustion, when I returned to bed, sleep did not come. The pain from my burned fingers had subsided to mild stinging – but this was enough to keep
my mind on the situation in the kitchen. The glass I had dropped – thrown, almost – had exploded on the floor, and the wine inside had spread over a barely believable area. After I washed the acid off my hands – blisters were rising on three fingers and both thumbs – I was shocked by the extent of the splashing, and alarmed to see that it had reached as far as the bookcase. Fat drops of purple-red were rolling down the spines of half a dozen of Oskar’s large hard-cover art books. These became my highest priority. Their susceptibility to stains made the floors look like Teflon-coated PVC.

Getting the wine off the books was a delicate task, made agony by the knowledge that everywhere the floor was under attack. A damp cloth, wrung out as hard as possible; tiny, feathery motions. A couple of the books had glossy dust covers that resisted the stain; another couple had dark covers that made any remaining traces near impossible to see. But on two books, purple spots persisted, and could not be budged without wearing a hole in the pale, creamy paper of their jackets. They were small marks – but on otherwise perfect books, they seemed a vast and tragic violation.

I then set about the rest of the floor with many cloths. The wine had not been on the boards long, only minutes, and in some places came away immediately without leaving a trace. But elsewhere it remained, and quick removal was complicated by the scattered shards of glass. I worked from the outlying, suburban splashes inwards towards the metropolitan core, an eyebrow-shaped streak of red a foot long. There was certainly less damage than from the spill
that had been left overnight; but nevertheless, that original darker jellyfish had now been joined by the burst of a rosy firework.

Despite this new turn of events, I was not ready to despair. Excluding the outer drips and splatter, the bulk of the damage was concentrated on only five or six boards. This was extensive, but not beyond control. Novack’s instructions had not yet been followed through and, I saw, he had more to say beyond oxalic acid. I selected a new test area – a short streak near one of the kitchen cabinets – and again set to work with the sandpaper and the corrosive crystals. There were no suitable white cloths, so I had to sacrifice one of Oskar’s linen napkins to the greater good, figuring that he was unlikely to miss one. And it worked – in the first and only positive development of that whole day, the acid did what it was supposed to do. The stain had gone.

After waiting another hour for the cleaned patch to dry, I applied a layer of the wood finish from the tin that was among the items in the box. The result, wet, looked pretty good, but it had to dry before I could be sure. It was late by then, past eleven, and there was nothing left to do but go to bed.

My first waking thought was of the vengeful dream-cat, whiskers bent under the weight of polluted water-drops. My second thought was of the floor. It would be dry by now – how did it look? I rose from the bed and pulled on my trousers. The bedroom was stuffy, with light filtered through a thick milkshake of cloud. There was no cat on the balcony, but I opened the window anyway, trying to
stir a breeze. The skin of the soles of my feet clung a little to the polished floorboards like the grip of an insect.

Seeing the kitchen floor again with more objective eyes, separated from the panic of the previous day, was a reminder of exactly how serious the situation was. A constellation of stains, a new and unfriendly landscape I had given birth to in Oskar’s paradise. It had advanced beyond the kitchen with that last smashed glass, into the living room, stretching to the bookcase. The inner variety of this sprawling system made it far worse. If it had all been brought about by a single accident, then it could be explained and understood in isolation – a one-off, a quirk of fate, an outlying mischance, something from the thin parts of the bell curve of the human experience. But here were two or three incidents to explain, a great shipyard of rusty chains of cause and effect. It looked too much for mere misadventure – it looked like a storied history of neglect, or even vandalism. Drunken rages. Botched parties. Paralytic pratfalls.