Care of Wooden Floors

by Will Wiles

  I looked up. Geometric forms in black and sodium orange meshed above me. It was the brutalist palace of culture, a revelation that forced a yelp of happy recognition from me. I had been vomiting against its concrete wall, but the rain was rapidly destroying all traces of my disgusting lapse, dissolving the results into the enormous puddle I was standing in. This puddle, more a pond, surrounded the palace like a moat, and I remembered what Michael had said about its subsidence into the burial ground beneath.

  Across the avenue, in a pool of light at a tram stop, a silent, static group of half a dozen human forms of shining raincoats stood, looking across towards me.

  I remembered Connie’s face looking up at me, filled with bafflement and mild concern, when I had risen to leave. The long-dead planners, I felt, had cut their avenue, rebuilt their city, for me, for my convenience in that moment. The road stretched out ahead.

  DAY FIVE

  White noise. Indistinct sound, beneath hearing, the growl and whoosh of blood forcing through tight passages. A two-part beat, the slave-driver’s padded drumsticks rising and falling as an exhausted muscle trireme heaves across a treacle ocean. A heart, pumping hot, thick goo in place of blood. Cells striving and dying. The electricity of the brain whining like an insectocutor. A cascade of neural sparks, an ascending, crackling chain reaction, synapses firing. Sensation – the sensation of no sensation. Then, awareness.

  A cosmos of pain, discomfort, sickness and weakness. I was awake. At first, everything seemed to be pain, but this was an illusion brought on by apparent damage to the sensory apparatus. The brain. The brain hurt. It was a sinkhole of pain, dragging all other senses in. Each beat of the drum, each stroke of the oars, simply scooped more sensation towards that pulsing black point of hurt. My heart was going to give up and get sucked into my head, it would explode, and I would die in bed.

  In bed. So I was in bed. I realised that this was a good sign. In bed meant that I had got home all right. At the very least, I had made it to a bed before losing consciousness, even if I was not home. This meant a degree of safety. It reduced the number of bad things that might have happened to me from infinite to a manageable few tens of thousands.

  My heart was still beating. Whatever its troubles, I didn’t think it was likely to stop unexpectedly. It was bound by several hundred dirty rubber bands, though. Moving was bad, it seemed. Any movement set off the pain in the head like an earthquake in a bulk discount china store. The pain in the head was worrying. At a rough guess, there were fourteen or fifteen tumours in there, and they were fighting in the lubricating pus like angry meatballs wrestling in custard. The thought of pus and custard set off a shudder of nausea. I realised how precarious everything was, how delicate, everything interlinked with tendons in complicated, secret patterns, so that the slightest wrong move might set off some sort of catastrophic unravelling.

  Sensory information was now arriving in an unsteady stream. The news was not good. Systems were coming back online one by one after some sort of florid and spectacular trauma, not fatal, but crippling. Some symptoms were identifiable – a headache, and nausea. I began, in a detached way, to speculate about what might be wrong with me. A headache, nausea, and comprehensive general wrongness. But it was all on such an epic, Technicolor, Ben Hur scale. Committees of investigation formed.

  It was possible that I was hungover. Yes, that seemed plausible. To be hungover, I would have had to have been drinking. Had I been drinking? A salvo of memories. No actual details or situations were entirely clear, but drinking was definitely involved. Yes, the committee agreed on that. There had been drinking, and other people.

  Another shudder shook the plates in the china shop and they jangled, sending out waves of pain. I may have groaned. My body was made from wads of soggy material inexpertly lashed together with stringy sinews. The wads composed of the worst stuff possible – bad milk, wine turned to vinegar, chewed gum, earwax, the black crud that accrues on the bottom of computer mice. The connecting sinews all strained and ached. It was a bad scene.

  My experience was expanding slowly outwards. Eventually it reached the gaping pores of my skin, oozing greasy sweat, and pushed into the world. The duvet of Oskar’s bed had been twisted into a rope by some nighttime exertions, and was coiled around my legs. My throat and lungs rasped with complaint, shredded by smoke. Chemists would have found it impossible to recreate the taste in my mouth without taking a sample jar on a trip to the zoo. A solution of lemon juice and envelope adhesive had been squirted into my eyes at some juncture in the night. I was neither dry nor wet, swaddled in evaporated perspiration.

  The shell of perception around my body was continuing to expand, and I wanted very much for it to stop. The room was light, it was day, it was a day in a succession of days, it was the next day. I needed to know more about the previous day. More information was becoming available, sensory information, from the nose. It appeared to be bad, but I couldn’t really understand it.

  There had been drinking. I had been out drinking with Oskar’s friend Michael. We had drunk a great deal. I had accompanied him to some sort of lap-dancing place. These were the preliminary findings of the committee that had been hastily assembled to determine the causes and nature of the recent calamity. The committee believed that further investigation was needed. The committee had reason to believe that I had been sick.

  I inhaled sharply and my nostrils filled with the unmistakable smell of vomit. There was something very bad in the room. I jumped out of bed and a violent tremor hit the discount china store, setting the stacks of plates clashing and scraping. My brain pressed against my skull. I had to inhale again, and there it was, that awful smell.

  There was no obvious pool of ejecta around the bed, where my clothes lay tangled. I explored my face with my fingers and found nothing on it but a thin residue of oil and sweat. The white sheets no longer looked quite so white after four nights of my presence, but they had not had an evening’s red wine consumption emptied over them. I must have made it to the bathroom. But the bathroom was even cleaner, and I stood there gratefully, breathing in its glacial air, letting it sweep out the badness within. If there had been puking in here, I had been very careful about it. The smell trickling in from the bedroom made my stomach lurch, but I felt less at risk of throwing up now – which suggested that I had done so already, at some point in the night. The smell was inescapable. There was no other explanation for it. It was the smoking gun. But there was no body.

  A shower would help, I thought. A strange calmness had me. My head cleared as the water poured over it, and more memories returned. My clothes would be damp, because I had been caught in the rain. I had been sick in the rain, and if I had been sick in the rain, then I had been sick outside the flat. A concrete vastness loomed in my mind, chandeliers swinging, carried on the chests of the dead, and receded like a passing Channel ferry. I remembered digested wine swirling into a puddle. I raised my face under the shower head and let the water splash into my eyes. I was born anew, sin washed away. My sick headache improved; an angry, tar-covered octopus of pain became an ugly and badly positioned trunk in the attic.

  There was still the matter of the smell, though, and it tricked its way into my nose again as I dried and brushed my teeth. Back in the bedroom, it was as strong as before.

  I checked last night’s clothes for stains and, although the smell did seem to strengthen when I leaned to pick them up, I found nothing. They were still damp, though, and had left a patch of wetness on the floor. Could that damage it? I leaned over again to inspect the area, and again the stink swelled. The sheets, I thought. I would wash the sheets. Some nausea still stalked my system, and getting a nostril-full of the smell sent it scurrying. The laundry would have to wait until I recovered.

  My shoes were sodden, brown leather darkened and fleshed with water. I picked them up and took them out to the balcony, leaving them in the bright, breezy day.

  There were no cats on the balcony. A little landslip of memory fell, shifting
the mental scenery and revealing...nothing. I had no memory of letting them out the previous night. They were still in the flat when I left for the concert – I had expected to be back before ten, in plenty of time to expel them. Was I composed enough to show them the door when I got back from the club? It seemed extremely unlikely. My mental image warped, expanding and narrowing like a reflection in a fairground funhouse mirror, when I considered that I had been to a lap-dancing venue the previous night. Guilt prickled. I felt smaller and less evolved. And stupid – why hadn’t I grasped the opportunity and enjoyed myself? Because, I thought, I would have been sick over that poor girl. I remembered the black-red fountain splashing into puddles in the impassive sodium light. And the state of the toilets in the bar, the eye-watering breath of old urine. My stomach flopped, and a black, bitumen-scented tentacle of pain pushed out of the heavy trunk in the attic. It was clear now – I was in for a day-long buzzing bolus of a headache, right behind the eyes, with an occasional icepick-blow to the back of the head. I groaned again.

  The cats. Where were the cats? If not outside, then inside. I hurried into clean clothes, and went through to the living room.

  In the later days of the recent spring, Oskar had been in London. He had been involved in a concert at the Barbican – a quartet, comprising members of the Philharmonic, had played one of his compositions. He called me and urged me to attend the concert, and I put up a firewall of increasingly wild lies to get out of it. At the time, I reasoned that even the best classical music – Bach, say – was barely interesting to me, and so to make for an entertaining evening a composition of Oskar’s would have to be better than Bach, and even the most charitable guess at my friend’s talents left me with the feeling that this was unlikely. Supper with an imaginary and terribly frail relative quickly filled the evening in question. We were both most chagrined. Before I could suggest it myself, Oskar was insisting that we meet the day before the concert. I eagerly agreed, and suggested a pub in the neighbourhood, a shabby little place on Whitecross Street that I was reasonably sure would be uncrowded and quiet.

  Oskar was there before me, and I was there ten minutes early after putting a huge logistical effort into being punctual. Despite my earliness, I felt certain that his eyes would drop to his watch as soon as he saw me enter. I was wrong. He was staring at his pint, which he twisted to and fro with his thumb and middle finger, causing the remaining half of his lager to slop against the grey marine foam that adhered to the sides of the glass.

  I had seen Oskar dejected before, but not since university. The memory of his forensic examination of my flaws over dinner was no longer fresh in my mind, but we had had little contact in the year since then, so it remained the most recent major development in our relationship. However, this was the insecure Oskar I remembered from the earliest days of our acquaintance; seeing him like this, I forgot more recent events and was taken back to those early intimacies. We had been friends for almost a decade and I realised that my affection for him had survived the ugliness at dinner.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ I asked. There was – as had been normal at university – something demonstrative in his depression, something that called out to be noticed and remarked upon. It was meant to be seen. In answer to my question, he shrugged, palms upward.

  ‘The rehearsal goes OK,’ he said. ‘They know the piece. They are perfect. And now it sounds...I don’t know. Maybe they know it too much. But...’ He paused. It was not one of his typical laconic breaks, used for effect; this was a genuine inability to find the words for what he wanted to say in any of the languages he knew, a void betrayed by the panic that quickly gleamed in his eyes. He opened his mouth, and nothing happened. One of the hopeless cases at the bar coughed, and Oskar glanced over, jaws snapping shut. Then he said, firmly: ‘I do not write jazz.’

  I didn’t know what he meant, and was myself momentarily at a loss. ‘I’m sure it’ll sort itself out,’ I said.

  He looked at me. There was something quite fragile in his expression, an atypical wateriness. Either he had been drinking or he had been crying. Perhaps both. ‘How is your work?’ he asked.

  ‘Not bad,’ I said, carefully measuring out a tiny portion of candour. ‘Quite slow, actually. Not very busy.’ In truth, my professional boredom was starting to manifest itself as a lack of dynamism in generating new work.

  Oskar nodded. ‘In your work...’ he said, carefully, ‘...how do you have holidays?’

  ‘Well, I’m freelance,’ I explained. ‘So it’s pretty easy to arrange time off, but I don’t get paid holidays. Any time off is essentially unemployment.’

  Again, Oskar nodded. ‘Do you have a holiday planned for this summer?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I was anticipating a holiday on my own, and was not enthusiastic about the prospect, forcing my way through sensible books in a worthy northern European city, drinking expensive coffee and beer in expensive cafés or bars in order to get out of my expensive hotel room. Dutiful trips to cathedrals. Prix fixe. ‘Not yet.’

  Oskar spread his hands on the grimy table and looked into my eyes. Seriousness glittered in place of vulnerability, which had for the minute evaporated. ‘I need someone to look after my flat for a couple of weeks, maybe three weeks, maybe a month. In the summer. Flights are cheap now. Are you interested?’

  I was interested.

  A miasma of evaporated alcohol hung in the living room’s air, a haze of expended volatiles, the unquiet memory of long-dead sugar. The living room stank of stale wine. This wasn’t the sweated trace of last night’s drinking, it was something else – direct exposure to the atmosphere, with no human mediator. I moved swiftly, but as if caught in a dream, my sense of self shrinking back, reduced to a spectator as my body explored what had happened. There was no chaos or mystery – as I saw the disaster in the kitchen, it was immediately clear how it had come about. It was like seeing the scene after it had been dissected by the forensic experts, seeing the coloured string that linked the bullet holes with the position of the shooter, strands of narrative that connected everything I found with an instantly obvious explanation of its cause, its meaning.

  There was a puddle of red wine, about one foot by two feet at its greatest extent, on the kitchen floor, with dark rivulets running down the bottoms of the cabinets and along the joins between the floorboards. It occurred to me, from afar, that the shape resembled a jellyfish – a bloated, formless body of hostile intersecting shapes, trailing long tendrils, seeking out weak points. Around this shape, this pool, this reservoir of disaster, radiating out in all directions, were purple paw prints. There were so many, it seemed impossible that they could have been made by only two cats.

  The scene was static. The open neck of the bottle, on its side in the rack on the counter, was not dripping. The wine lake was already half dried, a reduced Aral of pink far behind the black-cherry coast that marked its one-time greatest extent. The strength of the alcohol odour was proof that a good part of the liquid was already in the atmosphere, leaving only pigment behind. It must have been like this for hours already.

  I had a clear picture in my mind of how this had come about. After I had left the flat yesterday evening – in my imagination, as soon as I had closed the door – the cats had decided to resume the cork game that we had played on the previous day. One or both of them – in my imagination, again, both of them cooperated efficiently in this – had chewed or clawed the stopper from the bottle on its side in the rack. It can’t have been pushed in that firmly; that was the cleaner’s lapse. Then, a gout of wine, a splash, a glugging torrent as the bottle lost about half of its contents. I thought of the gush of wine, and a tight glass ring of nausea slid up and down my oesophagus. The rest of the scene plays out: the cats, startled, darting away, maybe being splashed; cleaning themselves, circling on the floor, reeling their nerves back in, and padding back to the newborn red lake when the effluxion of wine has diminished to an occasional drip, drip, drip.

  Where was I at the crucial moment, when t
he grip of the cork against the walls of the bottle neck was diminished to the point that it was pushed out by the weight of the liquid stopped up behind it? In the concert hall? Afterwards, in the bar, pouring wine down my throat? After that, in the lap-dancing place, or when I was spilling out wine on the street? It was not impossible that everything had still been perfectly orderly when I had returned to the flat, and the flood had taken place when I was asleep. That seemed worse, somehow; that scenario suggested that there was something I could have done to prevent disaster. I doubted that there really was anything I could have done. I would only have picked up that bottle if I wanted another drink. That didn’t seem likely, so nothing could have been done to stop this from happening.

  I stared at the ruined floor. It was certainly ruined. The wine had had plenty of time to soak in, to dry, to work into the wood, the stain. Around the great lake were those paw prints. What had the cats been doing? Paddling in the stuff? An image suggested itself to me: the trampled dirt around a watering hole in a parched scrubland. Had the cats been drinking the wine? Did cats even drink wine, or any alcohol? It didn’t strike me as something cat-like to do, but I could not think of any reason why a cat might not drink wine. I pictured two drunken cats, sliding around in the wine puddle, singing at each other as they haphazardly kicked about the mangled cork. Pissed louts skidding about on the wet, washed floor of a deserted London railway terminal in the early hours of the morning. The whole scenario started to take on the complexion of a student prank, an inconsiderate and calculated gesture of vandalism and theft topped off with an alcoholic debauch. They were probably sleeping it off somewhere. I fervently hoped that they were both suffering terrible kitty hangovers.

  I walked from the kitchen to the sitting room, and sure enough there was a cat there, asleep on the chair. I woke it with a forceful stroke. It eyed me lazily. I half-expected there to be a telltale purple stain on its paws and around its mouth, but there was nothing. The fur around its paws was black, anyway. There was no evidence of a feline morning-after, no pained look, no tremors, no retching or pools of regurgitated cat food.