Care of Wooden Floors (25 page)

I searched for the patch that I had tried to fix, and found it far too easily. If all the sanding, scouring and re-finishing had worked, the repaired area would be imperceptible, a memory, its location only guessable from the relative position of its surroundings. Instead, there was a yellow blot on the floor, another colour in a spectrum that also included the blue of the dishcloth and the pink, red, purple and grey of the dried wine. It was as if I had tried to polish the floor with orange juice. The tin was useless, the wrong stuff. There was no other likely-looking substance in the flat, and I had zero chance of finding any
in the city. And all this could be determined from a distance. As I got closer—

—something happened, pricked and cut and flesh yielded. I stopped and pain started, a jabbing telegram from the sole of my left foot. I winced and steadied myself with a hand against the counter top, raising my foot to see what had hurt it.

A shard of thin glass was sticking out of the wrinkled skin of the arch of my foot. A small dark bead of blood winked at its point of entry. Awkwardly, I gripped this glinting blade with my free hand and pulled. Imagining it breaking off inside me, or scraping against bone, I felt my stomach lunge. But the splinter freed itself without argument – an inch-long stiletto of curved glass, clearly formerly part of the bowl of a wine glass. At the point of puncture, the bead of blood began to grow rapidly, swelling to become a black pearl and breaking loose of its anchor, sliding across the bottom of my foot at the head of a scarlet trail – sliding down towards the floor. A red drop filled and fell before I could move my hand to intercept it. It hit the wood, a perfect little sunburst.

My foot was bleeding freely – more drops were crowding to join the pioneer that had escaped. I clamped my right hand against the injured sole, feeling the pain. But I couldn’t form a good seal over the wound, as I was still holding the fragment of wine glass between thumb and forefinger. Blood lubricated my fingers. It crept along the lines and creases of my hand.

I had to get off the floor. The thought struck an absurd note, and I almost laughed – in fact, I made a strangled
noise, an abrupt little
huh
. How does one get off a floor? I couldn’t even move – putting my foot down would tread blood onto the boards. Instead, I was stranded on one leg, in the world’s least relaxing yoga position.

The bathroom. The tiled floor of the bathroom. I had to get to the bathroom. There would be plasters and running water and no risk of stains. But it meant a return down the corridor, through the bedroom – an impossible trek, given that I could not make a single step. I remembered the cats’ wall-mounting run down the corridor and into the kitchen, how easily they seemed to taunt gravity and dispense with the floor. For me, the only option was to hop.

Three hops later, I had reached the corridor, but the drawbacks of this form of travel had multiplied. Gripping my foot with my hand as I was, it was impossible to keep balance. And every hop threatened to dislodge the blood that was collecting under and around my clasped fingers. On that third hop, a drop fell; on the fourth, I almost fell. Both my arms shot out to try to regain balance, and I dropped my foot. My bloody hand, still delicately holding the glass, left a smeared print on the white paint of Oskar’s wall, and my injured foot slipped wetly on the floor. The pain made me gasp.

Speed, I decided, was more important than care. I hobbled clumsily towards the bathroom, using the heel of my injured foot. Once in the bathroom, I stepped freely, grateful for the cold tiles, not caring about my gory trail. The little wound looked pathetic, trivial, under the fluorescent light – it was a wonder that so much could pour from so small an aperture. Oskar, to my total
lack of surprise, was well equipped with antiseptics and sticking plasters. I quickly applied both and limped back through the flat, damp flannel in hand, to deal with the blood.

There were a couple of minor streaks on the bedroom floor, fresh and minimal, which lifted easily with a single swipe of the flannel. The hallway was more troublesome – crime-scene troublesome. Both the footprint on the floor and the half-handprint on the wall left subtle yellow-brown traces after a dose of the flannel. The footprint was insignificant enough to be forgotten, or at least excused – it almost disappeared into the grain of the wood. But the handprint was against the icily pure white paint of Oskar’s wall, and not far off eye level. It was also expressive, anatomical, a clear impression of most of the little and ring fingers over the broad curve of part of my palm. Recognition snares the eye, and this was recognisably part of a hand. The two drops that had oozed out in the kitchen also left spots.

Rinsing out the flannel in the bathroom, I looked again at the shard of glass sitting in the soapdish. It was still smeared with blood – with my blood. I was puzzled as to how it could have embedded itself so deeply into my foot. If it had been simply lying on the floor, it could have given me a nasty cut or scratch, but there was no way that it could have impaled me in the way that it did. Had it been stood up on end somehow, perhaps caught in a crack between floorboards? A paranoid shadow fell across me, the thought of the floor angry, vengeful, wanting blood. I wrapped the glass fragment in toilet tissue and threw it in
the bin. Returning through the bedroom, I put on my socks and shoes.

Back in the kitchen, I trod lightly, expecting at every step to hear the
crunch
of another fragment of glass. I remembered a story I had seen in a horror comic – a reprint of some 1950s American pulp crime series. After committing a murder a man realises that his fingerprints are all over the scene. He sets about wiping every surface he thinks he has touched, a laborious and time-consuming job. In frustration, he smashes a cup – and realises, horrified, that his prints could now be on any one of a thousand scattered shards. So he tries to find, and clean, every last splinter, unable to accept the risk of leaving even part of an identifying print behind. In the morning, the police find him, buffing the toys, frames and coins in the attic, quite mad. I was beginning to sympathise with that man.

Close up, the patch of re-finished floor looked worse than it did from afar. Not only was it clearly a different shade from the rest of the floor – too yellow, and too brown – specks of dust and hair had adhered to it during the night. Cat hairs. And in the centre of the test, there was a small area where its silky smooth surface was broken and rough. I studied this aberration – it was approximately circular, as if someone had pressed their thumb into the polish before it dried, but its edge was far too rough and uneven for a thumbprint...

It was a paw print; a cat’s paw print. I stood up rapidly, making myself dizzy. The quietness of the flat suddenly seemed unsympathetic, watchful. There was nothing on the sofa – the study door was ajar, with stillness beyond.

‘Here, puss,’ I said, self-consciously. ‘Here, Shossy...Stravvy.’ I clicked my tongue and made a succession of the little nonsense noises that people make when trying to catch a cat’s attention – clucks, whistles, kiss-kiss sounds. There was no response. Was it possible that the cat had returned in the night? Where was it? Had it slipped out again before I woke to close the window, or was it still here – somewhere?

I felt compelled to check the piano. It was as I had left it: closed, silent. Unable to relax, I lifted its lid. Nothing was out of place, save for the single drop of the dead cat’s blood, now dried black. How different the study seemed against the rest of the flat – the same minimalist décor, the same white walls and wooden floors, but with none of the anxious sterility that pervaded the kitchen and living room. It was restful, personal. This difference, I saw, did extend to the floor. A broad area near the desk was visibly worn, beaten by the rollers of the swivel chair. Now that I had become a connoisseur of floor conditions, I could see it. It did not surprise me – I too would spend most of my time in the study if this were my flat. That had been my plan at first, I now remembered – to sit in this room and write, to create something. The memory seemed to originate from another age, another season of my life. There might yet be time, I thought, but I would need to be calm and undistracted, and that would be impossible until I had exhausted every possible option with the floors.

For now, there was the question of the cat. It must have returned in the night –
a
cat had left its mark, even if it wasn’t
the
cat. A superstitious reflex caused the word
ghost
to manifest itself in my frame of thought – I shook it away like I was clearing an Etch-a-Sketch. Nevertheless, there was a moral symmetry to a spectral cat helping ruin my effort to repair the floor, even if it was doomed anyway. The flat now seemed tilted against me, perhaps even vengeful – certainly, no longer neutral.

But it had never been neutral. It had always been subtly against me. I saw it now, every little gemlike detail. I had been intimidated the moment I had walked in the door. Maybe that was the purpose of the flat. Perfection is aggressive. It is a rebuke.

The cat. Did ghosts eat? Cats ate, for sure, and after twenty-four hours in the wild, Oskar’s would be hungry. If it had made a visit in the night, perhaps it had eaten some of the food I had left out for it.

I turned to leave the study but, before going through the door, I felt compelled to turn again and check that the piano lid was closed. It was. The black-lacquer S-curve of its side turned reflected sunlight into shining vertical lines, helplessly orderly.

It was hard to tell if the cat food had been raided in the night. There was a lot left on the plate, but I was still leaving out a whole tin of the stuff, enough for two. The only way to be sure that some had gone would be to take the empty can out of the bin and scoop the plate’s contents back into it. I was not going to do that.

On the kitchen table was a third-full bottle of wine, a used wine glass, and the dirty plate I had eaten a light supper from the previous evening.
Care of Wooden Floors
lay beside the plate, Chandler Novack’s face grinning up at me from the back cover.

I looked back at the failed patch of re-finished floor. It was no less noticeable. If anything, it appeared to be getting more yellow. Its surface was too shiny, a trashy splash of glare against the silky sheen of the undamaged boards. What else did Novack have to say? He had not written a short book – it couldn’t all be about rugs and Yggdrasil and inner oneness. I knew there was more.

In cases of severe or extensive damage, it might be necessary to re-sand the whole floor with an industrial sander...

No, not possible. I scanned ahead, through paragraphs and pages about sanders and dust and facemasks and all the things I would not be doing. Then:

Alternatively, depending on the quality of the floor, it may be possible to simply lift a damaged board and flip it over, hiding the problem area.

That sounded possible. It sounded better than possible – it had the shape of the perfect solution, effective and elegant. The stains did not have to disappear – Oskar could live with them unaware. They might never be discovered.

But how to lift the floorboards? Oskar had the tools, but the boards were beautifully laid, without space between them for a sheet of cigarette paper. The small nails that held down the boards were more like surgical pins than
construction equipment – their dull silver heads were microdots flush with the surface of the wood. It was immediately obvious that the boards could not simply be levered up, nor could the nails be prised out, without gouging, denting or cracking the skin of the wood.

The problem perplexed me for a time. It was a question of finding an angle, some chink or flaw that would accept the claw of a hammer or the sharp end of a screwdriver or chisel. Before long, my eye fell upon the step that separated the kitchen from the living area. At the edge of this step was a simple protective wooden moulding held in place by unguarded cross-head screws – if these screws and the strip of moulding were removed, the end of the kitchen floorboards would be exposed and they could be safely prised up. I could then flip them over to reveal their undamaged undersides. Of course it was possible that the undersides might not have the same high-quality finish as the top of the boards. More than possible – however good the floor, surely it wouldn’t be sanded and polished on both sides of each board. But it was worth a try.

I gathered the tools I thought I might need on a sheet of paper on the floor next to the step and paused. Why I paused, I don’t know, but I stopped. Perhaps it was the fact that I was kneeling, but for a moment, I felt like praying. I wanted to ask for good fortune – I wanted this to work. If the boards could not be flipped, or the job fouled up somehow and could not be put right, I had exhausted the possibility of fixing the floor. I would have to surrender and either be honest with Oskar or flee the country. The first of those options was not very appealing, but the
second did have a certain allure. I had never fled a country before; I suppose few people of my background have. There was a glamour to it. The thought gave me the same thrill that sometimes came to me when I looked for my flight on the departure board of an international airport. Reading that endlessly refreshing list of names – La Paz, Riga, Lagos, Jakarta – I am filled with a sense of equidistance from every point in the world. The straight line of my planned journey scatters like a narrow beam of light shot through a prism, revealing its spectrum. I could go anywhere.

But I would not be going anywhere – I would be fleeing home, back to London, back to the off-white walls and hairline cracks I had left behind, with a fresh pile of bills on the mat. Strange how little choice we have over the rooms in which we live our lives – I was shunted into a barely satisfactory flat, with a toilet by the front door, by the clumsy mechanics of the market, and I spent my time toiling in that flat, or equally unappealing offices, in order to pay the rent. Oskar had had the – what? Talent? Skill? Cunning? Discipline? Dumb luck? –
good fortune
to exercise total control over his environment, to build this personal paradise. And when he had offered me the chance to look after it for him, it had looked like a chance to break free of the old patterns of my inadequate world. And now a week had passed and all I had to show for it was a trail of devastation. In spoiling Oskar’s flat, I had spoiled my own chance to use it as a springboard to self-improvement. If there was a chance that the situation could still be put right, I had to take it. And I wanted to know right away if
the plan could work. By the end of today, I vowed to myself, either the floor would be fixed or I would tell Oskar the truth. And I would not just tell him about the floor: I would tell him about the sofa, the cleaner, the cat...the cats, plural, if the other had not yet returned.