Care of Wooden Floors. Will Wiles

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ