Care of Wooden Floors (6 page)

‘Pan!’ the woman said, quite suddenly, a short, explosive syllable. ‘Pan! Pan!’ She was pantomiming firing a rifle. Maybe in other circumstances the sight would have been comical. But not now.

‘Pan!’

I saw now, and whipped out my finger as if it had been burned. These pockmarks were bullet holes. The side of the museum had been riddled with bullets. From what war or revolution? Who had been fighting whom? Was it even fighting? They could have just lined people up in this alley and shot them. Revolutionary justice. Counter-revolutionary justice.

The museum guide was still grinning at me. She could see that I now knew what I was looking at, I was sure. Maybe she thought that this was what tourists wanted to see, the real history. She clearly had me pegged as a foreigner – maybe she thought, or knew from experience, that Westerners were likely to be unenchanted by the displays inside the museum and instead had a ghoulish fascination with the story drilled into its stone, its guts, the real thing. I still did not know if these scars were recent or not. But it seemed to me that most of the history here was recent. I doubted that their television schedules were cluttered with
I
♥
the 1980s
. Strikes and shortages, curfews
and disappearances. The holes were a presence, not an absence. They awed and chilled me.

I ran my fingertips over a hole at chest level. Dug into solid stone at the bottom of that hole was a chunk of lead. What did it pass through before pitting the wall? The air, alive with shouts and commands and terrible noises; and skin, and muscle and sinew, and bone and blood? Had the blood been washed off, or was it now a component of the black filth that coated every inch of the wall? From blood to crud; vital motivating fluid one moment, dirt the next. Whose blood, though, if it was indeed there at all? Why spilled? What for? Fascist? Communist? Nationalist? Dissident? Loyalist? Monarchist? Collaborator? Resistance? Might this have been a freedom fighter’s corpuscles, or were these terrorist cells? Whoever had won would now decide that. Faceless idealists flitted in my imagination. Or no one, nothing – a bullet hurled through air ringing with forgotten slogans only to embed itself in this dead rock, which remembers it still. And the slogans echo to silence, and a man from an indifferent country sees the mark but not the maker, his time, his cause. All gone, and damage and trash is left behind.

The woman from the museum, that strange creature who brought me here, wrinkled her nose as if to indicate
Ooh, isn’t this fun?
and turned back towards the street, talking merrily to herself. I waited a couple of minutes until I was certain that there was no possibility of awkwardly re-encountering her around the corner, and then followed.

My stomach pinched and I realised with unwelcome timing that I was hungry. It was past lunchtime, the bulk
of the afternoon was already gone, and my lower back ached from the walking. Doubly unwelcome was the realisation that I had a chore to run. I needed to buy groceries. Either I had to shop, or I had to eat out every night, and as I didn’t know how long I would be here, eating out could become expensive. But the notion of shopping for groceries while technically on holiday was repulsive to me.

There was a small supermarket on the way back to Oskar’s flat – I had seen it on my way out. But at some point in its history, a thunderingly incompetent acolyte of Baron Haussmann had had his way with this city. Its historic street pattern had been almost obliterated by an attempt to systematise it into a grid. This almost-grid had then been further complicated by a series of non-orthogonal avenues that stretched out from two focal points, the Market Square and the National Assembly. This carved the plan into dozens of flatirons, splinters and sawteeth. On the map, it looked a little like a sheet of reinforced glass that had two bullet holes punched in it, radiating fractures. On the ground, my path back to Oskar’s via the supermarket zig-zagged in an uneven W.

The supermarket occupied the ground floor of one of the spearhead-shaped blocks, a wedge like the prow of a ship. A heavy antique iron clock was cantilevered out from the sharp point of the block, above the store’s front entrance, layers of cellulite-lump black paint and hefty Roman numerals speaking of another age. And now it surmounted a buzzing mass of strip-lighting and ready meals. It was a purgatory of sticky linoleum and radiumblue
insectocutors. I bought what I needed and left as swiftly as possible.

As I uncomfortably backed my way through the resisting front door of Oskar’s building, I heard a disconcerting noise. At first I thought the door was creaking, but that was not the source. It was a sort of creak, though, but also more than that. It was the sound of the blade of a spade being dragged along a pavement, only changing in pitch, rising as it went. There was then a fraction of a beat of bright silence, a bit of rustling, and a savage metallic slam. It was the sound of a mechanical giant with a lame foot, limping towards some malign goal. The twin sounds repeated, rusted yowl and mantrap slam. They were coming from upstairs.

On the landing between the ground and first floors was a woman, hair tied back in the ubiquitous headscarf, her age an irrelevant point somewhere between forty-five and seventy. A life of poor diet and hard work had turned her into a huge callus, and her nose was pushed up in a way that inescapably reminded me of the squashed face of a bat. She was dumping rubbish-filled plastic bags into a metal-doored hatch in the wall of the landing, a rubbish chute with an age-degraded but still powerful spring on its opening. The effort needed to pull it down was clearly considerable, and it snapped shut with swift viciousness. Creak, slam. Hearing me climb the stairs, she turned and confronted me, demanding something I did not understand.

I took an instant dislike to this new person in my life, blocking my way. After the troubling interlude in the alley,
I did not care for further crone encounters. Also...I look like nothing myself, and try not to judge on appearances. But this woman’s physical ugliness seemed in my snapshot opinion to be matched by an ugliness of nature. Hair tied back under the ubiquitous headscarf, that nose of the order chiroptera, and the unforgiving gleam of the eyes behind it...and she was fat, not the pillowy fat of overindulgence, fat like an armadillo. The bags of groceries I carried should have indicated that I was not some sort of burglar or rapist, but I felt like an intruder nevertheless. I put them down on the stone floor – the two bottles of red wine I had bought clinked and drew her disapproving attention – and pointed upstairs, pulling Oskar’s keys from my pocket with my other hand.

‘Oskar, upstairs,’ I said, more than once, as I dangled the keys like a hypnotist. She stared at them with what seemed like scepticism, then slightly grudging acceptance. Then, pointing upstairs with an expectant look on her face, she said a word that I (obviously) did not understand. I adopted a quizzical look and pointed upstairs. She repeated the word, nodding the while. Then she said it a third time, this time adding a questions mark. Baffled, I smiled and repeated the word as best I could. She smiled and looked intensely satisfied. Smiling and nodding like a Japanese businessman, I fled upstairs.

At least modernity had taken firm hold in Oskar’s apartment. The kitchen gleamed like a surgical instrument. The cats lay entangled and becalmed on the sofa – I shooed them off and sighed, then brushed at the hairs they had shed with my hand. It was obvious why they liked the
sofa; direct sunlight warmed the black leather beautifully. They were hungry, and they orbited me, carefully making practised shows of being pitiable. I looked down at them, prowling around between the sofa and the coffee table, and my eye was drawn to the small blush on the floor my wine glass had left. The light was different now, and there was no escaping the mark – it was certainly there, undeniable, and I could not imagine that Oskar would not see it. I was an expert at deluding myself out of responsibilities, but this was beyond my powers. Oskar would see it, I was convinced. It was a blemish on my record, and made less than twenty-four hours into my custodianship of his home. Once, Oskar had astonished me at a dinner party by holding forth on my shortcomings with an exceptional eye for detail. My girlfriend at the time had been less than impressed, and I believed that the evening had contributed to the breakdown of that relationship. Oskar’s girlfriend back then was the woman who later became his wife, a relationship that a dozen Californian lawyers were at this moment dismantling for what I imagined was a considerable profit.

That mark...I went to the sink and wetted a sponge with a scrubbing patch on top, then dripped a drop of washing-up liquid onto it. Then, I attacked the mark with the ferocity of a wronged man. It was maddening, truly, to have a floor that could not stand the slightest flaw. A floor was made to be trodden on! It was where things inevitably fell. I scrubbed and scrubbed. That dinner party had been an odd evening. One of the reasons I liked Oskar was his truth-telling instinct, his directness about the failings of
others, often without concern for social niceties such as their feelings. Really, it was only a surprise that he didn’t apply his frightening insight and uncompromising honesty to me earlier. But then I thought of his open contempt for my housekeeping abilities at university. And he later apologised, made a point of apologising, to me in person; in fact, that dinner party had been the beginning of a chain of consequences that had led to Oskar asking me to look after his flat.

Once my elbow and shoulder began to ache, I stopped scrubbing at the floor. I rinsed the sponge, squeezed it thoroughly, and wiped away the suds. Was the blemish still there? The floor was wet – it was hard to tell. Besides, I was beginning to feel that this blemish was like a flash-shadow left after a photograph has been taken, a blob imprinted on the back of my eyes and nowhere else. I thought of Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Tell-tale Heart’, in which a murderer is driven mad by the imagined audible beating of the heart of his victim, concealed under the floorboards of his room. But I was no murderer, I thought, and it would take a lot more than a tiny mark on the floor to drive me insane.

I was lying in Oskar’s bed, not even slightly awake, when I realised that my surroundings had performed an unhappy transfiguration in the night. The bed now seemed to be of unlimited size. At first I feared that I had shrunk, but that theory did not stand up to close examination. The white duvet was as thick as it had been when I went to sleep, all the stitching and weave of the cotton was the correct scale, but the mattress and its coverings no longer had a visible end in any direction. Everywhere I looked, it stretched out to an invisible vanishing point, a white cotton horizon against a plaster-white sky. Sky, or ceiling? It was impossible to tell, and the answer did not seem to be important. Beneath me, I imagined a fathomless underworld of dusty springs. Above was the irrelevant nothing.

Slow panic. To crawl or walk out onto that trackless desert of duvet, or over the treacherous footings of boggy pillow-down, would mean losing my way, succumbing to snow blindness, and ultimately (in the boxer shorts and T-shirt I slept in) death from exposure. To worm my way under the duvet at first seemed a better plan; not so exposed to cold, at the very least. But a duvet that size
must weigh thousands, millions, of tonnes, I feared, whatever its tog count. To crawl too far underneath it would be death – I would suffocate in the dark before the first mile was up.

It really was unfortunate. My immediate surroundings, in their proper place in the world and at sensible proportions, could not be more comfortable – I was simply in a bed. But as this bed had grown to encompass the whole world, it had become a deathtrap as alien and unforgiving as an Arctic waste or Asiatic desert. Any place, I realised, no matter how temporarily comfortable or inviting, is only rendered habitable by the promise of other places beyond it.

For want of anything else to do, I turned over. The horizon, a greyness that was really only a fresh, distant, horizontal quality of whiteness, swung into view. A tiny pang of seasickness came and went. Seasickness without the hint of an ocean; not so much as a drop of water. How long could one survive without water? Not that I could measure time – I did not believe that this ash-white dome above me varied its appearance according to night and day. I would have to conserve and ‘recycle’ my own fluids, I thought. The idea of drinking my own urine did not appeal. And I had no way of...decanting it. Would I be reduced to using a cupped hand, or somehow...
aiming
? The mechanics of the whole operation were not at all pleasing. Afterwards, I would have to move to a new place on the frontier, no doubt about it. I was not going to lie in the damp patch. Certain death in a prosaic wilderness was one thing, lounging around in my own waste was quite another. Fortunately,
and this was the one bright spot that I could see: there was no shortage of identical spots to move to.

Incredible – I could not have been in this new situation for more than ten minutes, and already I was figuring out the practicalities of pissing all over myself. And right on cue, the question of fluids arose, and a mild complaint issued from the fleshy lower part of my abdomen. It was unmistakable, and it would only become more urgent. And there was something else wrong. A darkness was advancing in the distance beyond my feet. Maybe I had been wrong about the days and nights here, and this was dusk. But it was not dusk or gathering bad weather. It was spreading below the horizon, just a storm-like far darkness at first, but more resembling an incoming tide as it advanced. Storm-like, yes; it was the bruised blue colour of spilled red wine, a purple, thunderhead hue. It was Homer’s wine-dark sea, seeping into the white cotton of the acres of duvet, darkening as it grew deeper. At first, it seemed to be a growing lake that was approaching my feet, but then, in a dreamy instant, I realised that it was to my left and right as well, cutting off escape. I did not want to look behind me. It was no growing lake, I was a shrinking island.