Care of Wooden Floors (7 page)

At this moment of intensifying crisis, my bladder also wanted attention. What had been naught but a twinge from the early-warning system a few second ago had now, unfairly, escalated into a full-scale case for immediate action. I was facing imminent peril of an unknown nature on all sides, thanks to the Wine Stain from Beyond, and the need to go to the toilet. I had two top priorities, both
of them evacuation. But there was also something strangely reassuring about this sudden desire to urinate. It was the most familiar thing about these circumstances. It was a factor that appeared to come from beyond this contrived terrain of duvet and mattress and threatening darknesses. It was real; I was certain of it. I really did need to go to the loo – it was something that I could measure empirically and had experienced before. I began to suspect, very strongly, that everything else might be a dream. And as if detecting my lack of confidence in it, my new reality all at once felt far less substantial.

The stain had advanced to within two feet of my two feet. And with that, consciousness fell hard around me like a cookie-cutter stamping out the rectangular shape of a king-size bed in the cotton savannah, and then lifted to reveal the walls of Oskar’s room beyond. Oskar’s room! I was sitting up, unexpectedly, and my heart started to beat like a rubber ball dropped on a hard surface from a great height. It was morning; there was sunlight and street-sound. I was awake. I needed to go to the toilet. Outside, beyond the French windows, I could hear the cats whingeing. The demanding little beasts would have to wait.

I pivoted on my rear, swinging my legs out from under the duvet (which, although it had resumed its conventional proportions, I felt it would be prudent to treat with some suspicion) and put my feet on the floor. This manoeuvre provoked a hollow
bong
from the mattress. Something in its echoes brought to mind whales calling in the ocean depths. The floor was rugless and cool; hours of bed
warmth seeped from my feet into the boards. I stood, stretched, and trotted off to the lavatory, crossing as I did so a rhombus of sunlight. Its heat surprised me.

An inexplicable misery had overtaken me at some point in the night, and the promise of a day of brilliant sunshine seemed only to sharpen the sensation. Maybe the desolation of my nightmare had followed me out of sleep.

It felt most likely, however, that my low mood came from the following apprehension: I had nothing to do. Of course, this wasn’t strictly, technically true – there were various things to be ‘getting on with’; I needed to shower, the cats needed to be fed, I needed to be fed as well. But beyond these quotidian tasks, no activities were planned. This empty time – I had mentally categorised it as ‘relaxing’ or ‘pottering about’, both of which names imply some activity other than just standing stock-still or going back to bed – had been deliberately introduced into my rudimentary schedule in vast quantities, and I had eagerly anticipated it when thinking about my trip before setting off. This, I thought, would be the point at which my better self, the improving-book-reading, poem-writing self, would emerge; the time when I had removed from my path all the obstacles that I considered to be the source of my lack of creativity and self-improvement back in London. I had no work to do, I was not going to be interrupted, my surroundings were congenial and my mind was (mostly) at ease. My sensitive soul was no longer held down by heavy chains of duty and distraction – it would now (I had theorised) take wing. But I was gripped by a kind of dull
horror. Even in perfect conditions, I couldn’t muster the perfect mood to be all that I wanted to be. I simply could not do it. If nothing was stopping me, then what was stopping me? Because I was certainly stopped. Something had me by the entrails.

Unfair friends of mine saw my ambitions as pretensions. They, I was sure, were wrong. Oskar had been worse than unfair – he had been savagely fair. I did not know what to think. ‘I want to be a writer’
sounded
right to me, but with it came a kick in the guts from the you’re-telling-a-lie goblin. That was my ambition presented as a proud thoroughbred when in fact it was a spavined, half-blind mule. Certainly, riding it had not got me far. I had never even left the stables. For pity’s sake, I had roughly planned that I would be at least a proper journalist of some sort while attempting to write whatever it was I wanted to write, but I hadn’t even managed that! What did I do? I wrote council documentation. I explained your bin collection schedule. The shower, at least, managed to refresh me and slough off some of these fears.

Household rituals. I put out the cats’ food while the kettle was boiling for my coffee. What did they do during the night? Whatever it was, it gave them an appetite, and they chugged down their chunks of brown flesh with gusto. What did they do in the sleeping city...fuck and prowl, no doubt, glory in streets without trams and human feet. They were active, most active, in the dark and cold corners of the night and then sought out the brightest parts of the room in which to sleep. It was as though they stored up
the energy that fell on them during the day and released it at night.

Coffee for me, my energy source. I was hungry as well, lazy hungry. Breakfast would have been the obvious way out, but it was past eleven already, and too close to lunch. I switched on the television, and again had to chase the cats off the sofa in order to watch. Why did Oskar banish them from a spot they clearly loved? It seemed arbitrary and cruel. CNN prattled its anytime monologue. Television news, especially rolling news, especially
American
rolling news, is criticised for its incessant preoccupation with novelty, crisis, overthrow and calamity, lives violently stopped and systems at bay, but to me it seems to be a mantra of imperturbable continuity, the reassuring (to some) humming of the great wheel continuing to turn. All these horrors, it says, all these revolutions and tumult, they do not matter, my children, they have not altered the hourly bulletins, the opening and closing of markets, the drumbeat of the global system. It goes on with the supreme, hermetic self-confidence of the medieval monastic orders. It sings the hours heedless of day or night, matins and compline, business report and planetary weather. No wonder it seemed so suited to the international, interstitial spaces, the airport lounges and hotel rooms. These places are called bland, but they are not. They are the default, the canvas, the underlay, the transmission test card. Everything else is a localised aberration.

It seemed so unfair to stop the cats from sitting on the sofa, and in my low mood I felt that I would appreciate the
proximity of their warm little minds. I lifted the nearest one – the one whose tail bore a white tip, the only distinguishing feature I could discern so far – onto the sofa beside me. It circled once, and then jumped back off again, apparently just to be bloody-minded. Fine. Be like that, see if I care.

Damn – I
did
care. I had been snubbed by a lesser mammal. Nothing snubs quite like a cat. What evolutionary purpose did it serve, this inherent disdain, this artful blanking? International weather revealed, to my chagrin, that London was also sunny. I wanted it to be raining there, and sunny here, so that I could properly enjoy the
Schadenfreude
of the holiday-maker. But they would be sweating on the Tube, and when lunchtime came not an inch of grass in the central parks would be spared the imposition of a secretary’s pasty arse.

Time trundled on, trams rumbled by. No wonder they had served as muse to Oskar. They informed the air like the lowing of cattle, the same air of unthinking service of unknown needs. A tram is unaware of its timetable; even its driver, its guiding intelligence, is concerned only with his route. I decided that I would do at least one culturally improving thing today, if nothing else – I would find and listen to
Variations on Tram Timetables
, Oskar’s great success.

Noon passed. The day was broken, cracked down the middle like a paperback’s spine. I made a simple lunch, thick slices of Routemaster-red sausage, Land Rover-green cucumber, slices of cheese and bread, a sliced lunch conducted by a sharp, pointy little paring knife, a most
surgical instrument from Oskar’s surgical kitchen. Consciously avoiding thinking about my actions and their implications, I pulled the cork out of the half-f bottle of wine on the kitchen table and poured myself a glass. A glass at just past midday, only an hour from rising, not a healthy thing. But this was a holiday, of sorts, not a time to be concerned with the formalities of everyday life. I would have to be careful, though, not to spill anything.

The stain was still there, of course, that damn little mark. It was so small and pale, nothing at all. I was now worried that my fierce cleaning yesterday had, if anything, made it more noticeable. The scrubber surface of the sponge had left tiny scratches in the thin polish of the floor – an oval matt patch, with that cursed little blemish at its centre. The message was clear – no more scrubbing at it. There was nothing more I could or should do about it. I had to put it from my mind, ignore it. There was no way Oskar would notice it.

What was I thinking? Of course he would notice it. I knew that he would. I chewed on a slice of sausage ruefully, and remembered the effort I had made to clean my flat before Oskar had come round to dinner that time. It had made little difference.

What did he want, after all? Even he could do nothing about the inevitable degradation of all things, the scuffs and scratches, the smuts and drips, the fingerprints and dust. Fingerprints are universal, the calling-card of humanity. I loved those forensics shows, the television police procedurals in which criminalists painstakingly reassemble human incident from smudges and residues, the blood
drop and lipstick trace, the soiled tissue and shed thread. In those, the most evil criminals were always the ones who left the fewest clues. When a killer left no trace, not a hair, not so much as a single helix, you knew that you were dealing with a real bastard, a psychopath, calculating, emotionless, outside the human. An intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic. As for dust, that was more human than anything. It is primarily dead skin cells. We are walking dust factories. However futile it was, Oskar’s resistance to this inevitable grime was magnificent.

It was too early for wine. I sipped it with care. It clung to my lips, and to the sides of the glass. Winemakers call this the ‘legs’, and it’s a measure of the alcohol content of the wine – the ‘stickiness’ is caused by the spirit overcoming the liquid’s surface tension.

Surface tension – not a bad description of my fears for the floor, and Oskar’s other perfect planes. His other plane of existence. What was he doing right now? Approaching 3 a.m. in California – he would be still asleep in a hotel room, in that city of hotel rooms and freeways. My mental image of Los Angeles was a sun-baked tangle of asphalt clichés. LA was the nest of his wife, his soon-to-be-ex wife, Laura. I had met her only that once, when she came to dinner, and I had taken an instant dislike to her. She worked for a large American firm of auctioneers, and made extravagant amounts of money overseeing the transfer of fine art masterpieces between members of the superrich. A perfectly legitimate line of business, but my muddy leftism caused me to regard it as somehow discreditable. She drank spirits, Oskar said (neat vodka, perhaps), and I
had the strong impression that she did not think very highly of me, that my dislike of her was reciprocated. But my impression of her was fair, of course, and hers of me was a monstrous error based on snobbery.

A discreditable profession, exhibit A: she had described herself as an ‘oil trader’ when we met. Commodities, I assumed, but it was her idea of a joke. Not an icebreaker – it was a ploy to put me off balance and seize the initiative. The art of conversation according to Sun Tzu.

It didn’t help that this exchange took place just inside the front door of my flat, an area that reeked of chemicals from the bleach onslaught I had deployed in the bathroom. The bathroom was next to the front door, as is strangely common in small London flats carved out of Victorian terraces. Welcome to my home – it may smell like a gassed trench, but that’s preferable to it smelling like a latrine. When I consider the placement of that loo, outhouses at the bottom of the garden start looking like a smart move.

Oskar’s toilet did not smell of chemicals or latrines. His bathroom smelled slightly of soap, but mostly it smelled of water. Not the marshy, damp smell that sometimes builds up in bathrooms. Water, the smell of a pristine glacial stream splashing onto rocks, the smell of ice. What is one actually smelling when one smells that smell? Ozone or ions or something. Perhaps if I paid more attention to shampoo adverts I would know.

I ran water over the plate and the paring knife and left them in the sink. Then I drained my glass, hovered over the taps, and turned back to the kitchen table. Again
without allowing my actions much thought (
another
glass? And not yet 1 p.m.?), I took the wine bottle and thumbed the cork out of its neck. With my glass recharged, and my spirits recharged by its contents, I decided to take another look at Oskar’s study as a prelude to maybe doing something constructive, something worthwhile. It drew me because it was so perfect an environment for work.

It was as I had left it, of course; it was almost exactly as Oskar had left it. There was a subtle, near-imperceptible change in the air in here, the smell of paper, of newspaper clippings slowly turning brown (the printing press autumn), the smell of dust. I could hardly see any dust, but it had left its infinitesimal aroma, a ghostly trace in the air. Those motes in their lazy but restless diurnal migration of convection. A dust diaspora, banished from the surfaces. But Oskar had been away, now, for two days – it was settling. The finest sprinkling could be seen on the lid of the baby grand piano. The cleaner would be coming soon to move it along again. Cleaning products often have violent names – Oust, Raid, Purge. One could easily be called Pogrom.

I set my glass down on the blotter on the desk and drew my finger across the top of the piano. It trailed a path in the traces of dust. Next, I attempted to write my name amid the particles, but there were too few to make it out clearly, and I wiped it away. It’s a strange instinct, to want to sign one’s name in misty windows, wet concrete, snow. It is like animals marking their territory, particularly in the case of men inscribing snow. But I do not think it is a possessive, exclusive act: ‘This is mine, keep out.’ When we
were a young species, the world must have seemed so unlimited and trackless, and to leave traces of oneself must have been to reach out, wanting to connect with others, strangers who would always remain strangers. To make one’s mark then was an expression of how deeply we longed to see the signs of others.