Care of Wooden Floors (16 page)

Oskar was there before me, and I was there ten minutes early after putting a huge logistical effort into being punctual. Despite my earliness, I felt certain that his eyes would drop to his watch as soon as he saw me enter. I was wrong. He was staring at his pint, which he twisted to and fro with his thumb and middle finger, causing the remaining half of his lager to slop against the grey marine foam that adhered to the sides of the glass.

I had seen Oskar dejected before, but not since university. The memory of his forensic examination of my flaws over dinner was no longer fresh in my mind, but we had had little contact in the year since then, so it remained the most recent major development in our relationship. However, this was the insecure Oskar I remembered from the earliest days of our acquaintance; seeing him like this, I forgot more recent events and was taken back to those
early intimacies. We had been friends for almost a decade and I realised that my affection for him had survived the ugliness at dinner.

‘Is everything OK?’ I asked. There was – as had been normal at university – something demonstrative in his depression, something that called out to be noticed and remarked upon. It was meant to be seen. In answer to my question, he shrugged, palms upward.

‘The rehearsal goes OK,’ he said. ‘They know the piece. They are perfect. And now it sounds...I don’t know. Maybe they know it too much. But...’ He paused. It was not one of his typical laconic breaks, used for effect; this was a genuine inability to find the words for what he wanted to say in any of the languages he knew, a void betrayed by the panic that quickly gleamed in his eyes. He opened his mouth, and nothing happened. One of the hopeless cases at the bar coughed, and Oskar glanced over, jaws snapping shut. Then he said, firmly: ‘I do not write
jazz
.’

I didn’t know what he meant, and was myself momentarily at a loss. ‘I’m sure it’ll sort itself out,’ I said.

He looked at me. There was something quite fragile in his expression, an atypical wateriness. Either he had been drinking or he had been crying. Perhaps both. ‘How is your work?’ he asked.

‘Not bad,’ I said, carefully measuring out a tiny portion of candour. ‘Quite slow, actually. Not very busy.’ In truth, my professional boredom was starting to manifest itself as a lack of dynamism in generating new work.

Oskar nodded. ‘In your work...’ he said, carefully, ‘...how do you have holidays?’

‘Well, I’m freelance,’ I explained. ‘So it’s pretty easy to arrange time off, but I don’t get paid holidays. Any time off is essentially unemployment.’

Again, Oskar nodded. ‘Do you have a holiday planned for this summer?’

‘No,’ I said. I was anticipating a holiday on my own, and was not enthusiastic about the prospect, forcing my way through sensible books in a worthy northern European city, drinking expensive coffee and beer in expensive cafés or bars in order to get out of my expensive hotel room. Dutiful trips to cathedrals. Prix fixe. ‘Not yet.’

Oskar spread his hands on the grimy table and looked into my eyes. Seriousness glittered in place of vulnerability, which had for the minute evaporated. ‘I need someone to look after my flat for a couple of weeks, maybe three weeks, maybe a month. In the summer. Flights are cheap now. Are you interested?’

I was interested.

A miasma of evaporated alcohol hung in the living room’s air, a haze of expended volatiles, the unquiet memory of long-dead sugar. The living room stank of stale wine. This wasn’t the sweated trace of last night’s drinking, it was something else – direct exposure to the atmosphere, with no human mediator. I moved swiftly, but as if caught in a dream, my sense of self shrinking back, reduced to a spectator as my body explored what had happened. There was no chaos or mystery – as I saw the disaster in the kitchen, it was immediately clear how it had come about. It was like seeing the scene after it had been dissected by the
forensic experts, seeing the coloured string that linked the bullet holes with the position of the shooter, strands of narrative that connected everything I found with an instantly obvious explanation of its cause, its meaning.

There was a puddle of red wine, about one foot by two feet at its greatest extent, on the kitchen floor, with dark rivulets running down the bottoms of the cabinets and along the joins between the floorboards. It occurred to me, from afar, that the shape resembled a jellyfish – a bloated, formless body of hostile intersecting shapes, trailing long tendrils, seeking out weak points. Around this shape, this pool, this reservoir of disaster, radiating out in all directions, were purple paw prints. There were so many, it seemed impossible that they could have been made by only two cats.

The scene was static. The open neck of the bottle, on its side in the rack on the counter, was not dripping. The wine lake was already half dried, a reduced Aral of pink far behind the black-cherry coast that marked its one-time greatest extent. The strength of the alcohol odour was proof that a good part of the liquid was already in the atmosphere, leaving only pigment behind. It must have been like this for hours already.

I had a clear picture in my mind of how this had come about. After I had left the flat yesterday evening – in my imagination, as soon as I had closed the door – the cats had decided to resume the cork game that we had played on the previous day. One or both of them – in my imagination, again, both of them cooperated efficiently in this – had chewed or clawed the stopper from the bottle on its
side in the rack. It can’t have been pushed in that firmly; that was the cleaner’s lapse. Then, a gout of wine, a splash, a glugging torrent as the bottle lost about half of its contents. I thought of the gush of wine, and a tight glass ring of nausea slid up and down my oesophagus. The rest of the scene plays out: the cats, startled, darting away, maybe being splashed; cleaning themselves, circling on the floor, reeling their nerves back in, and padding back to the newborn red lake when the effluxion of wine has diminished to an occasional drip, drip, drip.

Where was I at the crucial moment, when the grip of the cork against the walls of the bottle neck was diminished to the point that it was pushed out by the weight of the liquid stopped up behind it? In the concert hall? Afterwards, in the bar, pouring wine down my throat? After that, in the lap-dancing place, or when I was spilling out wine on the street? It was not impossible that everything had still been perfectly orderly when I had returned to the flat, and the flood had taken place when I was asleep. That seemed worse, somehow; that scenario suggested that there was something I could have done to prevent disaster. I doubted that there really was anything I could have done. I would only have picked up that bottle if I wanted another drink. That didn’t seem likely, so nothing could have been done to stop this from happening.

I stared at the ruined floor. It was certainly ruined. The wine had had plenty of time to soak in, to dry, to work into the wood, the stain. Around the great lake were those paw prints. What had the cats been doing? Paddling in the
stuff? An image suggested itself to me: the trampled dirt around a watering hole in a parched scrubland. Had the cats been
drinking
the wine? Did cats even drink wine, or any alcohol? It didn’t strike me as something cat-like to do, but I could not think of any reason why a cat might not drink wine. I pictured two drunken cats, sliding around in the wine puddle, singing at each other as they haphazardly kicked about the mangled cork. Pissed louts skidding about on the wet, washed floor of a deserted London railway terminal in the early hours of the morning. The whole scenario started to take on the complexion of a student prank, an inconsiderate and calculated gesture of vandalism and theft topped off with an alcoholic debauch. They were probably sleeping it off somewhere. I fervently hoped that they were both suffering terrible kitty hangovers.

I walked from the kitchen to the sitting room, and sure enough there was a cat there, asleep on the chair. I woke it with a forceful stroke. It eyed me lazily. I half-expected there to be a telltale purple stain on its paws and around its mouth, but there was nothing. The fur around its paws was black, anyway. There was no evidence of a feline morning-after, no pained look, no tremors, no retching or pools of regurgitated cat food.

Regurgitated cat food. The thought of it, the idea and look and
smell
of it, brought another clench of nausea. The smell of it, though, I felt I knew exactly. I knew it.

There it was, in the bedroom. It seemed to have been gathering strength behind the closed door, waiting to assault me when I walked back in. A cat had been sick in
here, I thought. But where? The results were not in plain sight.

Such was my burgeoning paranoia about the apparent malice of the cats that my first instinct was to check my shoes. But they were airing outside, and I would have noticed that they were full of cat vomit when I moved them. The wardrobe seemed, briefly, to be a possibility – the memory of the piss-filled welly may have guided me there – but even in the unlikely event that the cat had been able to open the door to get in, I doubted that it could have closed the door on its way out. Besides, the stink wouldn’t be half as bad if the source was shut up in there.

No, I knew where the smell was coming from. I dropped to my knees to look under the bed. The blood rushing to my head as I brought it to floor level triggered a heavy throb of pain, a wet sandbag dropped onto my brain. It was dark under the bed, too dark to see clearly – I could make out a stack of papers, nothing more – but the force of the stench that hit me confirmed my suspicions. One of the cats had been sick down there.

I stood up again, and was rewarded with a bout of dizziness that ignited stars in my field of vision. Tension was spreading over my body, tightening up muscles and locking bands around my chest. I had spent the past few minutes – a tiny span of time that now seemed to stretch to encompass weeks and months, so distant was the era before this morning – in a state of total, unreal, peace. Nothing could be done to undo these events. But nevertheless, something had to be done. I had to respond somehow to what had happened. Reality was crowding in on me.

Kitchen first. Maybe the stain wasn’t so bad, I thought. The bed situation could wait; it was, at least, out of sight.

The sight of the wine lake at once filled me with dismay. How could I have looked upon this calmly? It was more than a lake, it was an ocean. The pre-spill, antediluvian, age was so recent, and already it was an entirely vanished epoch, a golden age that I had dwelled in unconscious.

Acting with the extreme care that seems to come naturally to the hungover – for whom every movement must be made to count – I tilted the neck of the open bottle upwards, so that no more wine might spill out, and slid it out of the rack. Setting it on the counter, I pondered finding the cork and putting it back in. But instead petulance and regret hit me, and I poured the remaining wine down the sink.

I soaked a tea towel under the kitchen tap, wrung it out, and used it to mop up the still-wet central puddle. A lot of the dried wine yielded as well. However gratifying that fact was, there would be no miracle escapes, the stain was permanent. I rinsed the towel, squeezed it out over the sink, and went back to cleaning. The second bout made a pathetic amount of difference. I wiped down the long, spindly trails drawn along the boards by gravity over imperceptible gradients, traced along invisible valley floors defined by incredibly subtle changes in elevation, nudged, flicked and halted at points by the arcane whims of surface tension. Whatever wine that could be removed by a damp cloth had now been removed. What remained was the substratum, the stain. There it was, the stain, the physical manifestation of an event that by now felt almost
metaphysical – the chalk outline around the corpse of my friendship with Oskar, the shadow cast on today by the confrontation that now loomed in the future.

And yet the stain itself – its proportions and intensity still obscured by the drying damp patch around it – did not seem, in itself, malevolent. Instead, I felt hostility radiating towards me from the floorboards themselves, seeping up from beneath like radon or fungal rot. They, not the stain, were against me. They lay there, welcoming the red deeper and deeper into their substance, like self-conscious, passive-aggressive martyrs. If they had been lino, or even sealed wood, this would never have happened. But Oskar had to have everything just so. He had to have everything perfect. He had to have this one kind of wood; any other kind would have been as ruinous as an incorrectly struck note. Everything had to be balanced, perfectly, always, on the edge of disaster, without the slightest margin for error. Wasn’t this kind of calamity inevitable, given enough time? Didn’t he realise that? His precious, delicate floorboards had their fate written into their absorbent grain.

It was, at least, not getting worse. The still-liquid pool had been mopped up, and no more could merge irrevocably with the wood. There was the matter of the bedroom, though, and whatever lurked under the bed. Kitty binge, kitty purge. But I still could not find the effort needed to confront that. A heaviness was holding my legs. I moved, a shamble, over to the sofa, and sat down.

The headache stirred inside me, and the nausea moved like custard under a skin. I felt tired; I wanted to sleep. But that would mean confronting whatever was under the bed.
I was exiled. My head drooped, and settled into my hands. There was a long list of things that had to be done, a list that seemed to be continually growing, actions that were needed to go a little way towards setting things straight. The energy was, however, wanting. And there was something else going on, a psychological barrier to action, like a bulkhead door sealed tight by the pressure that had built up behind it. I didn’t want to do anything more. I wasn’t the one who caused this destruction, and I did not want to be the one to clear it up. Even if I tried, even if I invested my best effort, there was no way that I could wholly succeed. The damage was done, the bridge was cinders. I was exiled, from the bed, from Oskar, from the flat’s state of grace.