Care of Wooden Floors. Will Wiles

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      Time trundled on, trams rumbled by. No wonder they had served as muse to Oskar. They informed the air like the lowing of cattle, the same air of unthinking service of unknown needs. A tram is unaware of its timetable; even its driver, its guiding intelligence, is concerned only with his route. I decided that I would do at least one culturally improving thing today, if nothing else – I would find and listen to Variations on Tram Timetables, Oskar’s great success.

      Noon passed. The day was broken, cracked down the middle like a paperback’s spine. I made a simple lunch, thick slices of Routemaster-red sausage, Land Rover-green cucumber, slices of cheese and bread, a sliced lunch conducted by a sharp, pointy little paring knife, a most surgical instrument from Oskar’s surgical kitchen. Consciously avoiding thinking about my actions and their implications, I pulled the cork out of the half-full bottle of wine on the kitchen table and poured myself a glass. A glass at just past midday, only an hour from rising, not a healthy thing. But this was a holiday, of sorts, not a time to be concerned with the formalities of everyday life. I would have to be careful, though, not to spill anything.

      The stain was still there, of course, that damn little mark. It was so small and pale, nothing at all. I was now worried that my fierce cleaning yesterday had, if anything, made it more noticeable. The scrubber surface of the sponge had left tiny scratches in the thin polish of the floor – an oval matt patch, with that cursed little blemish at its centre. The message was clear – no more scrubbing at it. There was nothing more I could or should do about it. I had to put it from my mind, ignore it. There was no way Oskar would notice it.

      What was I thinking? Of course he would notice it. I knew that he would. I chewed on a slice of sausage ruefully, and remembered the effort I had made to clean my flat before Oskar had come round to dinner that time. It had made little difference.

      What did he want, after all? Even he could do nothing about the inevitable degradation of all things, the scuffs and scratches, the smuts and drips, the fingerprints and dust. Fingerprints are universal, the calling-card of humanity. I loved those forensics shows, the television police procedurals in which criminalists painstakingly reassemble human incident from smudges and residues, the blood drop and lipstick trace, the soiled tissue and shed thread. In those, the most evil criminals were always the ones who left the fewest clues. When a killer left no trace, not a hair, not so much as a single helix, you knew that you were dealing with a real bastard, a psychopath, calculating, emotionless, outside the human. An intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic. As for dust, that was more human than anything. It is primarily dead skin cells. We are walking dust factories. However futile it was, Oskar’s resistance to this inevitable grime was magnificent.

      It was too early for wine. I sipped it with care. It clung to my lips, and to the sides of the glass. Winemakers call this the ‘legs’, and it’s a measure of the alcohol content of the wine – the ‘stickiness’ is caused by the spirit overcoming the liquid’s surface tension.

      Surface tension – not a bad description of my fears for the floor, and Oskar’s other perfect planes. His other plane of existence. What was he doing right now? Approaching 3 a.m. in California – he would be still asleep in a hotel room, in that city of hotel rooms and freeways. My mental image of Los Angeles was a sun-baked tangle of asphalt clichés. LA was the nest of his wife, his soon-to-be-ex wife, Laura. I had met her only that once, when she came to dinner, and I had taken an instant dislike to her. She worked for a large American firm of auctioneers, and made extravagant amounts of money overseeing the transfer of fine art masterpieces between members of the super-rich. A perfectly legitimate line of business, but my muddy leftism caused me to regard it as somehow discreditable. She drank spirits, Oskar said (neat vodka, perhaps), and I had the strong impression that she did not think very highly of me, that my dislike of her was reciprocated. But my impression of her was fair, of course, and hers of me was a monstrous error based on snobbery.

      A discreditable profession, exhibit A: she had described herself as an ‘oil trader’ when we met. Commodities, I assumed, but it was her idea of a joke. Not an icebreaker – it was a ploy to put me off balance and seize the initiative. The art of conversation according to Sun Tzu.

      It didn’t help that this exchange took place just inside the front door of my flat, an area that reeked of chemicals from the bleach onslaught I had deployed in the bathroom. The bathroom was next to the front door, as is strangely common in small London flats carved out of Victorian terraces. Welcome to my home – it may smell like a gassed trench, but that’s preferable to it smelling like a latrine. When I consider the placement of that loo, outhouses at the bottom of the garden start looking like a smart move.

      Oskar’s toilet did not smell of chemicals or latrines. His bathroom smelled slightly of soap, but mostly it smelled of water. Not the marshy, damp smell that sometimes builds up in bathrooms. Water, the smell of a pristine glacial stream splashing onto rocks, the smell of ice. What is one actually smelling when one smells that smell? Ozone or ions or something. Perhaps if I paid more attention to shampoo adverts I would know.

      I ran water over the plate and the paring knife and left them in the sink. Then I drained my glass, hovered over the taps, and turned back to the kitchen table. Again without allowing my actions much thought (another glass? And not yet 1 p.m.?), I took the wine bottle and thumbed the cork out of its neck. With my glass recharged, and my spirits recharged by its contents, I decided to take another look at Oskar’s study as a prelude to maybe doing something constructive, something worthwhile. It drew me because it was so perfect an environment for work.

      It was as I had left it, of course; it was almost exactly as Oskar had left it. There was a subtle, near-imperceptible change in the air in here, the smell of paper, of newspaper clippings slowly turning brown (the printing press autumn), the smell of dust. I could hardly see any dust, but it had left its infinitesimal aroma, a ghostly trace in the air. Those motes in their lazy but restless diurnal migration of convection. A dust diaspora, banished from the surfaces. But Oskar had been away, now, for two days – it was settling. The finest sprinkling could be seen on the lid of the baby grand piano. The cleaner would be coming soon to move it along again. Cleaning products often have violent names – Oust, Raid, Purge. One could easily be called Pogrom.

      I set my glass down on the blotter on the desk and drew my finger across the top of the piano. It trailed a path in the traces of dust. Next, I attempted to write my name amid the particles, but there were too few to make it out clearly, and I wiped it away. It’s a strange instinct, to want to sign one’s name in misty windows, wet concrete, snow. It is like animals marking their territory, particularly in the case of men inscribing snow. But I do not think it is a possessive, exclusive act: ‘This is mine, keep out.’ When we were a young species, the world must have seemed so unlimited and trackless, and to leave traces of oneself must have been to reach out, wanting to connect with others, strangers who would always remain strangers. To make one’s mark then was an expression of how deeply we longed to see the signs of others.

      Idly, I struck a piano key (I do not know which one – it was near the middle) and listened to the note ring in the air. On the far side of the door, the television was still on, near-inaudible, a soft rhythm of speech and jingle, and there was the street, cars (not so many), trams (regular) and feet.

      The trams dislodged a thought in my mind. I looked over the shelves of CDs, with their serious, wordy classical spines, and found a small section of works produced by the local Philharmonic. Oskar must have had some role to play in many of these recordings and, sure enough, there were some copies of Variations on Tram Timetables. Lou Reed was still in the CD player; I evicted him and opened the case containing Oskar’s Meisterwerk.

      There was a slip of paper inside the case.

      I hope you enjoy it! – O.

      (There is better СКАЧАТЬ