Care of Wooden Floors. Will Wiles

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СКАЧАТЬ the dishes into the kitchen for S. and S. to dine, and then when they have finished clean the dishes and return the tray to the cupboard.

      O.

      That was fine. The general list of instructions had contained nothing specific as concerned the feeding of the cats, and this job was clearly more important than the making of tea or coffee, hence the fact that it had been honoured with a full sheet of notepaper. Oskar was the most attentive absent host I could imagine, even across half the world. The conductor, the composer of precise, clipped piano pieces, the lord of a minimalist and restrained realm, would not have left things to chance. My liaison with his flat, his world, had to be organised with far more care than he had arranged his liaison with a Marlboro-blonde art jockey from the history-less West Coast.

      I freed one of the cans of food from the shrunken plastic and carried it with the tray through to the kitchen, where I set it down on the floor.

      This must have been the auditory clue, the Pavlovian bell – the soft sound of tray with dishes meeting the dull glow of the kitchen’s wooden floor. At once, before I had even straightened up, there were two dull thuds from the bedroom and the unmistakable skitter, slip and scratch of claws against shining plank. Turning towards the source of the sound, I saw something I never expected – heading full pelt through the glass-partitioned corridor separating the bedroom from the kitchen, the cats had accelerated so much in such a short time that as they rounded the corner they left the floor, pacing the white wall like a wire-assisted Jackie Chan in a medium-budget kick-’em-up, flipped and held by the invisible hands of momentum and centrifugal force. As the wall ran out, so they ran down, not seeming to lose a joule of energy, only to stop dead in the middle of the kitchen, at least four feet short of the tray. But they didn’t stop – they slid with practised elegance along the trajectory they had set and wound up, kinetic energy burned off against wood, a neat few inches from their proposed supper, circling and making plaintive noises.

      My jaw hung flaccidly, its tendons sliced by this display of athletics. As Shossy and Stravvy mewled and arched their warm backs against my legs, I fought the urge to try and recreate what I had just witnessed, to move them back to the bedroom and the tray back to the cupboard, to recreate the phenomenon, but it was clear that it would not work. The butterfly’s wings could not be unflapped, the cloud would never again assume the same shape. Perhaps they would do the same thing tomorrow, but it would never have the same effect as it just had. It had been done. The moment had broken and could not be reassembled.

      Still adrenalised, I hefted the sack of dry food from the larder, fetched a fork (the obvious drawer, obviously), raked the lumpy brown treats into the bowls, and sprinkled the biscuit bits over the portions. The cats were already tucking in as this finishing garnish was applied.

      With the recent feline acrobatics still on my mind, I wandered over to the scene of the feat. The floor glowed in golden perfection – it was clearly necessary for the stunt. On a whim, I walked to the front door and kicked off my shoes. Toeing the floor, its silken finish betrayed only the tiniest natural imperfections of grain and warp; it felt almost frictionless.

      The decision was made by some over-ambitious subcommittee in the lower portions of my brain and failed to pass through the proper scrutiny procedures before the action it outlined was already under way. I braced, devoted the slightest of moments to a complex calculation of forces in motion, and launched myself down the corridor. After four and a half paces at the maximum acceleration I could muster, I braked, laid my stockinged feet flat on the wood and locked into a slide to the far wall.

      Some twenty or thirty minutes later, the pain in my left knee and big toe had – aided I believe by a broad-ranging swear-word monologue – subsided from crippling agony to merely irksome.

      By the time I had recovered from my pratfall and unpacked my bags it was early evening. The light had yet to die in the sky but the sun was low. I made a sandwich with some cheese and salami from the fridge and opened the bottle of wine that Oskar had left for me. I ate on the sofa with the TV on BBC News 24. The rhythm and jangle of rolling global news is an odd comfort, but the flat was filled with British accents and familiar branding. The repetition of bulletins and headlines was soothingly metronomic, a lullaby more than an alert. Rolling snooze.

      I don’t know how long I slept on the sofa, or the exact time I woke, but it was night in the city outside and the room was washed with the Lucozade orange of sodium street lighting. Travel and unfamiliar places can be exhausting, and I was more tired than I had realised. One of the cats was standing on the sofa next to me, regarding me with a quizzical air.

      ‘Meow?’ it said, tilting its head to one side.

      ‘Yeah,’ I said, rising slowly to my feet and stretching. ‘You want to go out. Time for bed.’ Several joints complained as I twisted to free my watch hand from its awkward position. I was neither sitting nor lying; just sort of slumped. I must have dozed off. Struggling to my feet, I scooped the puss off the sofa and walked it over to the front door where its partner was waiting like a partygoer holding a taxi for a friend. They needed no encouragement to disappear into the night.

      DAY TWO

      There is a moment between sleeping and waking where one is free. Consciousness has returned, but awareness has yet to rip away the thin screen between the waker and his surroundings, his reality. You float free of context, in no place – not sleeping, not fully awake, not at the mercy of the unknowns of the subconscious, and not yet exposed to the dull knowns of care and routine. It is at this point, between two worlds, that I think I am happiest.

      For a second, I was disoriented, uncertain of my location. I was surrounded by white, a bubble in an ocean of milk. Then, the details began to resolve. I remembered that I was in Oskar’s flat, under his white ceiling, under the peaks and troughs of his white duvet, on his white sheets and pillows.

      The regime in Iran tortures with white. Its jailers dress a prisoner in white clothes and place him in a featureless white isolation cell, filled with white light. Food – white food – is served on white paper plates, brought in by guards all in white, wearing white masks. This becomes unbearable for the prisoner, an almost-total deprivation of the senses. Snow blindness. A disconnection from the limbs, from scale and perspective – freedom from context as hell, not bliss.

      It was a perverse torment for an Islamic country. I had heard that, under Islam, perfection is the preserve of the Divine. Striving for perfection is sinful pride. Imperfections are deliberately introduced in artworks as a gesture of humility. In each of those fabulous abstract Islamic decorative patterns, there is a piously deliberate mistake, a flawed iteration.

      How those prisoners must crave that imperfection. A mark on the wall, a shadowed crevice, a stained ceiling tile. Apparently it is enough to unhinge the mind – enough to make one do anything to escape that featureless room.

      ‘Why do they dislike me?’

      ‘Oh, Oskar, they …’

      I wanted to say: Oskar, they don’t really dislike you, they just don’t really like you, you’re not like them, and you’re not an easy person to like. I didn’t say that.

      ‘… What sort of question is that?’ I said at last. ‘They’re not out to get you.’

      ‘I just do not understand the stealing of the vodka,’ Oskar said, gesturing at the bottle he had brought with him, which was now heavily depleted. We had been drinking for hours, and my guest was showing worrying signs of being a maudlin drunk.

      ‘You should know better than keeping it in a shared fridge,’ I said.

      ‘It СКАЧАТЬ