Care of Wooden Floors. Will Wiles

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      ‘I don’t know, mix it with Coke or something.’

      Oskar wrinkled his nose. His lip kinked in disdain. ‘I prefer it neat.’

      I sighed. ‘It’s a shared kitchen. You have to compromise. Live and let live.’

      ‘But they do not “live and let live”, they leave a mess, they leave the dirty plates …’

      ‘They’re students,’ I said wearily. ‘So are you, so am I. Relax.’

      Oskar frowned. ‘And this is relaxing?’

      Fogged by vodka, it took me a moment to register that he had asked a question. ‘What?’

      ‘This,’ he said with a languid gesture around my room. ‘This is relaxing?’ I tried to see what he was indicating and failed. ‘Well, it’s relaxing to have a drink with a friend …’ I said. Oskar was unnerving me. I remembered that this was the first time I had seen him drunk. He was an unknown quantity.

      ‘No, no, no,’ Oskar said. His voice rose and he became energetic, rising from his chair, pacing the floor. ‘This! Your room! The way you live! This chaos!’

      This took me by surprise. In another frame of mind I might have been offended, but instead I simply found myself surveying the room again, trying to see through Oskar’s eyes. The open bottle of vodka stood on my desk, or rather stood on the small canton of desktop not lurking beneath a thick carapace of books, papers and assorted detritus. Bookmarks bristled like tattered standards from forgotten wars, or the books themselves lay prostrate, open, held in the middle of a thought that could never be retrieved. Paper was scattered everywhere, but little of it had been fully used. Instead, each sheet bore just a couple of discarded sentences, or an arcane note, its meaning lost. Tired biros lay like pick-a-sticks. A plate, scattered with crumbs and waxy traces of peanut butter, lay atop one heap. A Frisbee lay at the bottom of another, and I had a vague recollection that it had served as an ashtray before being covered in notes. Another impromptu ashtray, formerly the lid of a jar of gherkins, now spilled cigarette butts behind the desk, into the lair of a medusa of extension cords. Above it all, my angle-poise shone cyclopically like the fire brigade floodlights at a midnight motorway catastrophe. The rest of the room displayed variations of the disarray of the desk in clothes, books, posters, bedding and the worthless paraphernalia that early adulthood attracts – dancing Coke bottles, inflatable guitars, purloined pint glasses, incense holders, broken CD cases, novelty bottle openers, a crippled cafetière.

      I shrugged. ‘I know it’s untidy …’

      ‘It is not just the room,’ Oskar said. ‘A room is not just a room. A room is a manifestation of a state of mind, the product of an intelligence. Either conscious’ – and he dropped dramatically back into his armchair, sending up a plume of dust and cigarette ash – ‘or unconscious. We make our rooms, and then our rooms make us.’

      I wanted to say: There you go. That’s why they don’t like you. I did not. I quit smoking. Much of the contents of the room would go into black bin-liners at the end of the term. After that room, there were other rooms, then shared houses, then a string of one-bed flats. I have regarded them all with the same dissatisfaction. This was Oskar’s gift to me.

      Gazing up at the ceiling of Oskar’s bedroom, splashed by a fantail of sunlight from the windows, I felt most satisfied. I listened to the city edge its way in. A tram grumbled and clanked its way past, tinny leper’s bell sounding, a protesting squeal at the points in the crossroads. The sound of duty also penetrated my sleepy mind, a scratching and mewing at the balcony windows. Shossy and Stravvy were hungry.

      I flung open the French windows to the chattering, brilliant city air. The cats snaked around my legs in that odd feline way – why do they pass so close when there is plenty of room? – and headed straight to the kitchen with the expectant purposefulness of factory workers at the lunch whistle. I followed, stretching.

      Shreds of the previous evening lay by the sofa – the papers, the wine glass. I attended to the cats and then filled and switched on the kettle. As it boiled, I tidied away my mess, the depleted bottle – with its note from Oskar – the newspapers and magazines, the glass—

      I stopped. A drop of wine or two must have made their way to the base of the glass on one of my many refills. There was no coaster beneath it. (In my mind’s eye, Oskar winced.) A 45-degree arc of red wine marked his precious floor, a livid surgical scar on pale flesh.

      This stain held my attention for a moment or two, ice running through my veins. Red wine stains, I thought. I thought of Oskar’s injunction. From nowhere came the memory that speed of response was the crucial factor in dealing with that sort of thing. Action was imperative, my brain insisted, disregarding the fact that I had been asleep for several hours.

      Without panic, I turned to the kitchen and ran a dishcloth under the tap, then returned to the scene of the crime. Kneeling as though in supplication, I started to rub and scrub. Satisfying; the mark seemed to shift quite quickly. After five minutes or so of work, I could not detect a trace of the wine. I waited a while for the floorboard to dry, and then inspected it, aided by the late-morning sun.

      There was still a mark. The slightest, faintest curved blush, hardly noticeable in the natural grain of the wood. A birthmark awaiting its final laser treatment. But now my eye was unstoppably drawn to it – as if it was as large, as black, as inescapable as the sofa.

      Clearing my mind, I attempted to appraise the area objectively, as if I was in the room for the first time. This was obviously not going to work. My work – my illustrious writing career – mostly involved composing and editing brochures for local authorities. Residents of Ealing may remember my acclaimed Know Your Library Service, but I consider my masterpiece to be Bin and Gone: How, What and When to Recycle, now in its fifth reprint in Southwark and translated into nine languages. (Want to know the Somali for ‘compost’? I can tell you.)

      Whenever one of these towering works hit the presses, there would almost inevitably be an error. Colossal, humiliating, Private Eye-worthy errors (‘Council Launches Literasy Initiative’) are very rare. But nearly every piece of printed matter contains an error somewhere. Most are invisible to the inexpert eye – a double space here, a full stop incorrectly italicised there. Only the editor will see these. But once he or she has seen such an error in the final printed product, that is all they will ever see. The beautiful clarity with which they explain the law on fly-tipping will be invisible to them – they will notice that a simple hyphen has been used where an en-dash was needed.

      And so it was with Oskar’s floor.

      I was fixated on the damaged sliver of wood even when standing at an absurd distance from it. It was nothing, barely visible – if it was noticed, it could be taken for a natural variation in the colour of the wood. But to me, it stood out like the European wine lake.

      The kettle had long since boiled and I made myself a coffee. The cats ate noisily. Again, I found myself trying to work out which was Shossy and which was Stravvy. It was impossible, of course. Even if I could somehow judge the personality of the cat, whether that better fitted a ‘Shossy’ or a ‘Stravvy’ was beyond me.

      I decided to compress all of my sightseeing for the trip into one day, saving myself the mental and physical effort of trying to find something different to do every morning, when I could be writing. Such was the indistinction of this country that I had been unable to find a guidebook for it in the bookshop at Heathrow, but did manage to find a Lonely Planet that included this scrap of pointless autonomy as an afterthought and dealt with everything СКАЧАТЬ