Care of Wooden Floors (20 page)

A tide of misery washed across Oskar’s face. It was as if its defining lines weakened and blurred. He looked so pale. Again, my stomach clenched and I silently pleaded with him,
Please don’t cry
.

I was crying. Why cry? Well, what else was there to do? The cat was gone, and I could not relate to the mysterious, reduced thing of skin and fur and pendulum weight that I had dropped in the chute. But the other one was looking at me, eyes glinting with thought and enquiry. The idea that it might be lonely struck me as unbearably tragic. My eyes burned and my throat tightened. Tears brought with them the delicious, terrifying temptation to simply let go and see where emotion took me. But I kept hold of everything, and brought myself back.

The cat, which had not let grief affect its appetite, was biting chunks of food off the plate before it had reached the floor. I still felt shaky, so I filled up my glass with wine and went to the sofa. On the way, I saw that the floor had dried, and that the stain was as obvious and vivid as ever.

Through the windows, I could see the buildings across the street caught in the rich, side-on light of the afternoon’s end. Windows looked back at me, all their greyish curtains hung in prehistory by an obscure and long-departed people. I tried to think what lay beyond the city – suede plains, mountains held up by rusting ski-lifts, creaking forests? – and I saw nothing. It would be morning on the West Coast. What was he doing? Was he considering calling?
The flat’s telephone quickly felt like a treacherous, explosive thing. I thought of Oskar drinking (and disliking) a black coffee over a plate of fruit in an American hotel breakfast buffet, the muscular, insistent, sweet smell of pancakes and waffles and maple syrup...I tried to remember that smell, and found myself thinking of the beeswax again, the clatter of that bucket of cleaning goods, its promise.

As long as Oskar did not know about the cat, and the wine, I had a few more throws of the dice. The cat, in fact, was not dead until he learned it was dead, and that moment could be postponed until I had made an effort to put everything right with the floor. If the floor could be fixed, then I could focus on making amends (if amends were needed) for the death of the cat, which would seem more like an isolated tragedy, and not part of a campaign of wrecking. To fix the floor, there were products to try, strategies to adopt. To tell Oskar about the cat now would necessitate telling him about the piano, and maybe even the wine as well. Also, I did not see how I could tell him without revealing that I did not know which cat was which – something I could have asked about, without risk, days ago, but the opportunity had gone. If I waited, it would be easier to tell Oskar that the cat had simply disappeared. There was the complicating fact of the cleaner, of course. If she told Oskar what she had seen – what she
thought
she had seen – then things would get more complicated. But she had no proof, I had some elements of the truth on my side, and the most important thing was not to appear guilty. That meant not attempting to pre-empt her, and
seeming calm and surprised at her allegations. After all, I had done nothing. I was guilty of nothing. The disposal of the corpse was a matter of hygiene. Oskar would surely understand a matter of hygiene. My hands were clean.

What made my position uncomfortable was the fact that my innocence was so slippery. I could not keep my grip on it. I would look, and it had oozed away, nowhere to be seen. All the facts were elastic.

A sound caught my attention, distinct, repeating. It was the soft smack, smack, smack of the cat eating in the kitchen, on its own.

A door slammed. The front door; definitely the front door, with the jingle of the guard chain. My senses pulled back from saturation, the crackling fade to true colour after the burst of a magnesium photoflash bulb. A dying white-orange sun. Not dying, but morning, bright and sanctimonious.

The cat and I looked up, and then I looked at the cat. It was lying on the foot of the bed, now a watchful sphinx. The previous night, I had given it the option of going out on the roam, and rather than immediately disappearing it had lingered in a way that had left me deeply uneasy. Drunk and tired, I decided to let it stay. And here we both were.

And someone else. Someone was in the flat. Certainly the cleaner, I had no doubt, and the thought appalled me. Had there been a time when our interactions had been comfortable? No – every time I had seen her, I had felt the worse for it. I was frozen, waiting for some sequel sound to come, but none did. The bedroom door was open a crack. A sliver of silent, still hallway could be seen.

I threw off the duvet, walked softly on bare feet across to the door, and listened. The silence popped and tightened
in my ears. Not perfect silence – there was the unending exhalation of the city. But no sounds from the flat. The stillness was surrounding, enveloping, seeping into the bedroom like dry ice.

On the bed, the cat closed its eyes in a meditative way. Then it opened them again, stood, jumped down to the floor and ran to the French windows that led out to the little balcony. There, it coiled around itself, rubbing against the window frame.

Feet cool against the floorboards, I tiptoed over to it.

‘Don’t you want breakfast?’ I asked, keeping my voice down. ‘Lovely tinned gubbins?’

It looked up at me in an insolent fashion. I twisted the cast-iron handles of the window, opening it a crack. Sticking slightly in its frame, the window vibrated in my hand. The cat jumped to the lip of the balcony and slipped over it – at first, I thought, to a two-storey plunge down to street level. I leaned out of the window to see that it had in fact landed on a generous concrete ledge between floors. Without pausing, it alighted from this foothold too, aiming at the balcony directly below Oskar’s. From there, its route to the ground was clear, via the building’s entrance, which protruded into the street a short distance away.

The fresh air on my bare legs made me aware of the fact that I was standing in a full-length window wearing nothing but boxer shorts, decency defended solely by the curve of the balcony. I quickly imagined a woman’s scream, sirens. There was a pair of shoes on the balcony, the pair that had been soaked in the rain. I ducked back into the bedroom and put on the trousers that were in a
crumpled heap on the floor, adding the socks that fell out of the trouser legs. Then I picked up the shoes and tried them on. They were dry.

Now, I had a clear recollection of the previous evening. I had been drinking, yes, but only a modest amount when set against the excess of recent nights. I had sat on the sofa, watching CNN, sipping wine and eating remains from the fridge. The cat had lain beside me, on its side, smiling a cat smile. Events in the past now rearranged themselves into a more legible narrative. There had been two cats. One had a white tip on its tail, the other did not. And one, I thought, was the hyperactive, inquisitive one that liked to play with corks, and drink; and the other was docile, lazier. It was only now that one was dead that I could see the difference between their personalities. It was only now, really, that I could see that they even had personalities, despite not being people: they were more than just automata. The way it, the surviving cat, had left just now – sudden, urgent, determined, at the wrong time of day – it was strange, and it had the undeniable stripe of personality.

Once the sun set yesterday, I realised that I was very tired. Without leaving the flat, I had exhausted myself. Before bedtime, however, I had remembered the pornography and the derangement of the bedroom. I spent a cathartic moment with one of the magazines, and then tidied them away, stacking them neatly, still in the date order I had arranged earlier. When I had heaved the bed back into place – guided by the indentations its feet had left in the floorboards – I was so tired that I wanted to fall
immediately into it, into the escape of sleep. But the cat needed to go out, I thought, so I invited it to depart. It came with me to the door, but once there would not leave, backing from the exit in that perfect cat manner of total avoidance, the way magnets repel each other. I had little appetite for a struggle, and no energy to spend cajoling the animal, which threaded itself through my legs round and again, teasing and pandering. I let it stay.

I was still tired, I realised, now that the burst of adrenalin from the slammed door had worn off. My joints and muscles felt hollowed out, like compromised paper straws. There had been no noise of any kind from the kitchen or living room. Either the cleaner had left, and I had heard her parting shot, or she was still there and deliberately staying quiet, waiting for me.

I opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hall. The flat was empty, I was sure of it. I walked towards the living room. Had she been here at all? There was no evidence of cleaning – my empty wine glass still sat on the coffee table in front of the sofa, next to a plate that held a litter of cheese rinds and little ribbons of pink plastic peeled from the edges of slices of salami, the debris of my supper last night.

But something was different – I had walked right past it, on the other side of the glass partition, in the kitchen. First, I registered sheets of grimy newspaper spread on and hanging over the edge of Oskar’s steel counter. It made such a slight profile, I almost missed what had been laid on top of these sheets – the corpse of the cat. Risen, if not from the grave, then at least from the rubbish chute.

In something like a trance, I walked up to the counter, and the body. It had now been dead for at least 24 hours, and I was nervous of the air around it. How far had decomposition progressed? Obviously it wouldn’t be falling to bits yet, but would it stink? I tested the air cautiously; a faint smell of garbage.

It wasn’t falling apart, but it no longer looked as if it might at any moment spring awake. It was dirty, with a brown stain on the large white patch on its side, sprinkled with coffee grounds. No longer subject to continual preening and adjustment, the cat’s fur was disordered, and the skin beneath was grey. One of its rear legs was bent up in an uncomfortable manner under its belly. Both its eyes and its mouth were a little open. The tail was a bedraggled mess. It looked smaller than I remembered, as if it had deflated. The bones of its shoulder were clear under thin skin, and the break in its spine was more obvious, a pronounced and sickeningly unnatural geometry. The blood around its nose and mouth had dried, and shattered into tiny black crystals caught in the cold hairs.

‘Jesus,’ I said. I thought of devotional paintings, with their pornographic attentiveness to the anatomy of the tortured Christ’s emaciated frame, or the buckling body of a martyr, or the contortions of the residents of hell. With a dead thing in front of me, I could understand that sadistic pedantry. A clutter of grotesque details – the angularity of the shoulder, the contours around the eyes and the sudden inadequacy of the hair to conceal the papery skin, and of the skin to disguise the broken structures inside – crowded out a clear conception of the whole.

The cleaner must have gone down to the bins at the terminus of the rubbish chute and – my imagination recoiled from serving up a mental picture of this part – searched around for the cat. Then she had wrapped it in newspaper and brought it up here to leave for me. Why? To confront me? Or because this kind of refuse didn’t belong in the chute? If she had wanted to confront me, why didn’t she hang around and make a real scene of it? Instead, she had simply dumped the body and fled. Normally it was cats that left dead things for people to find and puzzle over. How would a cat feel about being treated this way? Maybe this was exactly what it would have wanted.

There didn’t seem to be any way of interpreting this development as a benign act on the part of the cleaner. I did not believe that she felt she was doing me a favour (‘you dropped this’). Clearly, this was a rebuke – either for the murder of puss, or for the callous handling of the last rites, or for some unlikely infraction of a local waste-disposal ordinance. But – this realisation appeared by fractions – these considerations were for the time being a distraction from the fact that a dead cat, dragged out of a dumpster, was laid out on Oskar’s kitchen counter. And I had my doubts about the provenance and cleanliness of the newspaper it reclined on, let alone its effectiveness as a barrier. What if there was...oozing? Oskar’s steel surface had an autopsy feel to it, but whatever its aseptic air, you would not be happy preparing food on a morgue slab.

It (the cadaver was now clearly an
it
) had to go. Quickly. Processes, natural processes involving microbes
and gases and fluids, were advancing inexorably. I had no doubt that these processes were fascinating, perhaps even beautiful, when filmed by a BBC crew and then broadcast to me in my living room, but they could not be permitted to perform their magic in Oskar’s kitchen. For a brief moment, I pondered dumping the thing right back down the rubbish chute, a notion I quickly put from my mind. I could not tolerate the possibility, however slender, of the cat making another comeback tour. This second coming was irksome enough, a third coming could not be permitted. A more permanent solution, something outside the influence of the cleaner, would have to be arranged.

For the moment, the priority was getting the animal off the counter. I took a bin-bag from the cupboard and laid it out on the floor. Then, I picked up the sheet of newspaper by the sides, lifting the cat as if it was on a stretcher, and set it down on the bin-bag. It did not look much more at home there, diminished, wretched thing that it was, but I no longer feared seepage.

What to do? Some dark alley perhaps, a place already strewn with trash, where an extra bag would not look out of place. But this alley was abstract – I knew of only one actual place like that, the passage by the museum with the pockmarked walls. I did not fancy carrying the dead cat all the way into the centre. In fact, I had no desire to carry it anywhere at all, let alone to wander around with it, looking for a suitable spot to dump and run. And yet I realised that I knew pitiably little of this city; I had not yet fully seen its public face, let alone explored its hiding places.
My excursions now all felt like hurried affairs, without the leisure to observe and discover.