by Will Wiles
Regurgitated cat food. The thought of it, the idea and look and smell of it, brought another clench of nausea. The smell of it, though, I felt I knew exactly. I knew it.
There it was, in the bedroom. It seemed to have been gathering strength behind the closed door, waiting to assault me when I walked back in. A cat had been sick in here, I thought. But where? The results were not in plain sight.
Such was my burgeoning paranoia about the apparent malice of the cats that my first instinct was to check my shoes. But they were airing outside, and I would have noticed that they were full of cat vomit when I moved them. The wardrobe seemed, briefly, to be a possibility – the memory of the piss-filled welly may have guided me there – but even in the unlikely event that the cat had been able to open the door to get in, I doubted that it could have closed the door on its way out. Besides, the stink wouldn’t be half as bad if the source was shut up in there.
No, I knew where the smell was coming from. I dropped to my knees to look under the bed. The blood rushing to my head as I brought it to floor level triggered a heavy throb of pain, a wet sandbag dropped onto my brain. It was dark under the bed, too dark to see clearly – I could make out a stack of papers, nothing more – but the force of the stench that hit me confirmed my suspicions. One of the cats had been sick down there.
I stood up again, and was rewarded with a bout of dizziness that ignited stars in my field of vision. Tension was spreading over my body, tightening up muscles and locking bands around my chest. I had spent the past few minutes – a tiny span of time that now seemed to stretch to encompass weeks and months, so distant was the era before this morning – in a state of total, unreal, peace. Nothing could be done to undo these events. But nevertheless, something had to be done. I had to respond somehow to what had happened. Reality was crowding in on me.
Kitchen first. Maybe the stain wasn’t so bad, I thought. The bed situation could wait; it was, at least, out of sight.
The sight of the wine lake at once filled me with dismay. How could I have looked upon this calmly? It was more than a lake, it was an ocean. The pre-spill, antediluvian, age was so recent, and already it was an entirely vanished epoch, a golden age that I had dwelled in unconscious.
Acting with the extreme care that seems to come naturally to the hungover – for whom every movement must be made to count – I tilted the neck of the open bottle upwards, so that no more wine might spill out, and slid it out of the rack. Setting it on the counter, I pondered finding the cork and putting it back in. But instead petulance and regret hit me, and I poured the remaining wine down the sink.
I soaked a tea towel under the kitchen tap, wrung it out, and used it to mop up the still-wet central puddle. A lot of the dried wine yielded as well. However gratifying that fact was, there would be no miracle escapes, the stain was permanent. I rinsed the towel, squeezed it out over the sink, and went back to cleaning. The second bout made a pathetic amount of difference. I wiped down the long, spindly trails drawn along the boards by gravity over imperceptible gradients, traced along invisible valley floors defined by incredibly subtle changes in elevation, nudged, flicked and halted at points by the arcane whims of surface tension. Whatever wine that could be removed by a damp cloth had now been removed. What remained was the substratum, the stain. There it was, the stain, the physical manifestation of an event that by now felt almost metaphysical – the chalk outline around the corpse of my friendship with Oskar, the shadow cast on today by the confrontation that now loomed in the future.
And yet the stain itself – its proportions and intensity still obscured by the drying damp patch around it – did not seem, in itself, malevolent. Instead, I felt hostility radiating towards me from the floorboards themselves, seeping up from beneath like radon or fungal rot. They, not the stain, were against me. They lay there, welcoming the red deeper and deeper into their substance, like self-conscious, passive-aggressive martyrs. If they had been lino, or even sealed wood, this would never have happened. But Oskar had to have everything just so. He had to have everything perfect. He had to have this one kind of wood; any other kind would have been as ruinous as an incorrectly struck note. Everything had to be balanced, perfectly, always, on the edge of disaster, without the slightest margin for error. Wasn’t this kind of calamity inevitable, given enough time? Didn’t he realise that? His precious, delicate floorboards had their fate written into their absorbent grain.
It was, at least, not getting worse. The still-liquid pool had been mopped up, and no more could merge irrevocably with the wood. There was the matter of the bedroom, though, and whatever lurked under the bed. Kitty binge, kitty purge. But I still could not find the effort needed to confront that. A heaviness was holding my legs. I moved, a shamble, over to the sofa, and sat down.
The headache stirred inside me, and the nausea moved like custard under a skin. I felt tired; I wanted to sleep. But that would mean confronting whatever was under the bed. I was exiled. My head drooped, and settled into my hands. There was a long list of things that had to be done, a list that seemed to be continually growing, actions that were needed to go a little way towards setting things straight. The energy was, however, wanting. And there was something else going on, a psychological barrier to action, like a bulkhead door sealed tight by the pressure that had built up behind it. I didn’t want to do anything more. I wasn’t the one who caused this destruction, and I did not want to be the one to clear it up. Even if I tried, even if I invested my best effort, there was no way that I could wholly succeed. The damage was done, the bridge was cinders. I was exiled, from the bed, from Oskar, from the flat’s state of grace.
I could call him. There was still that. I could call Oskar and explain what had happened. Oskar, there’s been an accident...
‘Thank you so much for this; you’re a real friend for helping out.’ Oskar’s relief at my agreement to look after his flat had been palpable, an effervescence cutting through his dour mood. ‘I don’t feel comfortable leaving the flat for so long, not with the cats...’ he was momentarily transported elsewhere at the thought of the cats; I wondered how much trouble they could be.
I smiled modestly, enjoying the flattery I was receiving for what seemed to me to be a pretty good deal. ‘I’m happy to help,’ I said. ‘Are you going to see Laura?’
At once, the light vanished from Oskar’s manner like a bulb blowing. ‘Yes,’ he said, sharply.
His sudden reversion to gloom alarmed me. I had missed some subtle cue and fouled up, I thought. I had said something out of place. ‘I’m sorry...’ I began, automatically, not yet certain what I was sorry about.
‘No, no,’ Oskar said, waving his hands and flashing me a pale smile. ‘I am sorry. I will explain. I am going to Los Angeles to be divorced. We are getting divorced.’
For a moment, I didn’t have anything to say. Then: ‘Oskar, that’s terrible, I’m so sorry.’ In fact, my emotions were a logjam. It wasn’t that I was happy to see Laura excised from Oskar’s life. Instead, it was a combination of fellow-feeling for Oskar and the sort of wild, exhilarating interest that comes with something bad happening to a close friend – a mad glee at the opportunity to go on emotional safari in a passionate place for the span of a conversation, and then step back into a milder climate with no lasting implications. These feelings were overlaid with an acute fear that I might not be seen to be reacting in the correct way, and the usual British horror at the possibility that someone might start crying.
‘I do not know if it is terrible,’ Oskar said. ‘It is very sad for me. Of course. But it was too complicated. Her in one country, me in another. And the distance makes life difficult when we are together. We argue. I do not like Los Angeles. It is unruly. And she hates my flat. This I do not understand – you will see, it is a very nice flat. And it is big! Too big for me alone, so I have the cats. And now I discover that it is too big for me but it is too small for two of us. One is lonely and two is crowded. Maybe it is like life.’
‘I’ve never
had a long-distance relationship,’ I said, ‘but I know that living together can be difficult.’
‘Difficult!’ Oskar appeared incensed by the word. ‘Yes, I hear this. Why should it be difficult? People say, this is difficult, that is difficult. It is an excuse for failing, for doing something wrong. It is not difficult – it should not be difficult. As long as there are some rules, some agreements, people know how to do things, then everything should be easy.’
There was a bout of Dickensian coughing and throat-clearing from one of the hopeless cases at the bar. Oskar had finished his pint, and what remained of mine was warm. I offered to buy him another, and he agreed.
‘Oskar, there’s been an accident,’ I said, out loud. The cat lying on the chair across from me looked up, as if to say: ‘Oh? What’s happened?’
‘Oskar, there’s been an accident,’ I said. ‘Some wine...quite a lot of wine...was spilled...’ No, that was no good. The passive voice would not do – he would automatically attribute blame to me. And this was unfair – it was not my fault.
‘Oskar, there’s been an accident,’ I said. ‘The cats spilled some wine on the floor.’ But that was no good, either. It sounded absurd. I could see the eyebrow raising in response, the migration of tension in the upper lip, I could imagine the sound these things would make over the phone line from Los Angeles. I could hear the sceptical ‘Oh?’ – a syllable with so much acid that it would strip the insulating plastic off the communicating copper cords all the way to here. He would think I was lying. I would have to explain the details – the cleaner not pushing the cork in firmly enough, the fact that I was kept out late. I would have to blame everybody but myself, like an adolescent unable to take responsibility for their actions. But it was their fault! I was not responsible!
It was just all so unfair.
I straightened my back, and flexed my shoulders. Whoever was to blame, now it was my responsibility. I was the adult here. The cats weren’t about to put on the Marigolds and muck in. Besides, if the mess under the bed was as bad as the mess in the kitchen, only so much could be done. At least it was out of sight there.
Standing up, I saw that the cat on the chair had followed my lead and was stretching; when it saw me stand up, it too stood up, and did a little pirouette. The anger in me ebbed back, and I ran my hand along its spine.
‘You’re still cute,’ I said. The cat squinted and wiggled with pleasure. ‘Where’s your little buddy?’ I asked it. The cat didn’t respond, and squirmed happily under my hand.
I fetched together some sheets of newspaper, a pair of rubber gloves, the damp tea towel and a bowl of warm water with a squirt of washing-up liquid in it. The smell was waiting behind the bedroom door like a mugger. I crossed the room to the French windows and propped them open, something I realised that I should have done earlier. But earlier I was dying, not thinking. The city air rushed in, fresh and invigorating, its rain-washed exhaust fumes as sweet as Chanel No 5. I put on the gloves and took hold of the foot of the bed. It pulled away from the wall easily, not too heavy, moving smoothly along the floor without threatening to scratch it. Once it was clear of the bedside tables, I pushed it to the far wall.
Underneath, to my surprise, was a bright pool of happy, guileless colours – blues, yellows, reds, purples, and many pinks. A breath from the street, and papers rose up like jaunty wind-breaks on a festive, polychromatic beach. I was looking at a disordered heap of maybe four or five dozen pornographic magazines.
Inane smiles winked up at me from a mass of flesh tones, bad page layout and probing fingers. I stood there, gawping, full of a completely unexpected fear, unknown since my teenage years and now quickly back, as fresh as ever – the fear my parents might walk in. Then, another sensation, more familiar and commonplace, but every bit as unexpected: mirth. I laughed.
‘You old dog,’ I said, chuckling. Flirty smiles shared the joke, not understanding it.
There was the vomit, a fairly neat and discrete purple-grey pool affecting only four or five of the magazines. A very precise bit of journalistic criticism. With a little care, I was able to wrap up the mess in the skin-zines it had reached, before ushering it away to the bin in the kitchen. Walking with it, however, held in hands at the end of maximally outstretched arms, I found myself downwind of a fresh assault from the odour, curling out of its swaddling of sexual display. I stuffed it deep into the bin, coughing with nausea. Then, fearful of the reek polluting the kitchen, I pulled the black bin-liner out, twisted its neck tightly, and tied it off.
I looked at the knot of the bag, and the crushed black flower opening slowly above it. The taint lingered in the air. That knot did not look all that tight, already it was teeming with intestinal molecules tunnelling their way determinedly outwards to the air, the designer coffee-scented steel-edged air of Oskar’s decreasingly pristine kitchen. And then I remembered the rubbish chute in the hallway.
It was cooler in the hall than in the flat, and opening the front door brought a conscious sense of decompression. I half expected the door to hiss like Tupperware. The inside-outside air, the drab ocean tones of the painted walls, and the hard, echoing sounds generated by tiled floors and stone steps put me in mind of school, in an age before high-tech composite fibreboards and brightly coloured laminates. There was something infantilising about the garbage chute, too – the way it seemed designed for taller, stronger beings, its grinding squeak like the complaint of an old man, and the vicious slam, which made me want to check my fingers. It was the sort of thing that parents warn their children not to play with. And as with all those forbidden things it performed magic, a disappearing act. Even the sound of the falling bag, if there was any, was lost in the groan and bang.
But there was one other sound, in that quiet hall, as I turned back to the open entrance of Oskar’s flat. On the floor below, a handle turned with the minimum noise, and a door opened. I halted, waiting for footsteps, voice, a jingle of keys, neighbourly sounds. There were none. I became aware that I was not breathing. And then there was a faint note of a hinge, and, softly, the door closed. I shut Oskar’s behind me firmly, with a slam, like a warning shot.
Back inside, the air was clearer. In the bedroom, the bed was still shunted to one side, and the low pile of pornography was naked in the middle of the room. Naughty boy, Oskar, I think. It felt good, very good indeed, to have come across this stash. Normally, a chance discovery of something like this in the possession of a friend would have embarrassed me, and made me eager to clear things away again and beat over my traces. But I felt no embarrassment, not for Oskar. I was delighted; he was human after all. His nightclub excursions with Michael could be read as the product of peer pressure, but this was undeniably private desire. So private, in fact, that it did not really feel as if I was dealing with Oskar. The whole situation was un-Oskar-like. It was strange that he should keep physical magazines at all, in the pixelated, diverse bounty of the Internet age. Even though there was no computer in the house, I had no doubt he had a laptop of some kind, something discreet and portable. That aside, the collection itself was just so untidy. The publications were a disordered sprawl on the floor, and individually they were dismally trashy – cheap, noisy, unappealing. Oskar’s pornography had never figured in my imaginary inventory of his possessions, but I knew exactly what it should be – exquisite models decorously draped over carefully chosen pieces of designer furniture, photographed in black and white by skilled men (women, even) treating their subjects with the same professional detachment that they would accord the Eiffel Tower or a flower arrangement. At the very most, taking a creative leap, I could see Oskar hunched over glossy photographs depicting smuttified stagings of the raunchier moments from great opera.
Not this eager, explicit junk. I squatted to get a better look at it, picking up a nearby title with the tender caution of a naturalist selecting a specimen of a new, exuberantly ugly and possibly venomous species for examination. The paper was thin and shiny, and stuck a little to my fingers. It was a s
lippery, loathsome thing, seemingly eager to escape my grip. I could see why it was said that this sort of publication treated women like pieces of meat. It wasn’t a figure of speech, it was literally true. They were simply the fastest route between two points, an attempt to make flesh instantaneous, stripped of society and individual agency, reduced to its simplest form. Not just any flesh; only the cuts considered choice. These were unfailingly angled directly at the camera and made blatant, a simplified vocabulary of sexual display. Two expressions were almost universal: smiling and bored. When another cast of face appeared, sneaking past the picture editor’s veto, it was a rare surprise – a flash of candour far more revealing than any nakedness. Quizzicality. Bashfulness. Doubt. Concern.
Where the eyes of the girls actually met yours, and had something in them to communicate, their gaze was uncomfortable to hold. Even with the expressionless ones, I did not like to stare. With the same pink poses repeated monotonously, they became invisible, lacunae on the page. The eye slid to the side, and background detail jumped to the fore. And the background features were far worse.
These brash beauties frolicked in the graveyard of good taste. The sets they reclined against were jammed with wickerwork, velour, padded headboards, animal prints, artificial fur, artificial plants and artificial leather. Around the images was a slaughterhouse of page layout. Working as I did in local government publications, I thought that I had seen all the evil that could be done when powerful desktop publishing tools were placed in inexperienced hands. I had, it seemed, been living in a fool’s paradise. An insipid, spindly, badly spaced, machine-default sans-serif type predominated, in places tracked in so tightly that letters, words and sentences joined together into single streaks of text, and elsewhere justified so that a single short word stretched across a whole column. Headlines were set in a kitschy salmon-pink cursive that was merely ugly against white, and actually illegible against pictures. These typographic elements flowed into a jumble of wonky, garish boxes. The sheer artlessness of the arrangement commanded a kind of perverse respect; it was hard to comprehend the kind of inverted genius it took to get every element of the composition so perfectly wrong down to the last lost margin and grinding ligature. Maybe, for Oskar, this was the truly pornographic part; the loveliness of the unclothed lovelies tuned to a pitch by the overwhelming ugliness of their surroundings. Maybe this was Oskar’s kink – the blush of sweat on an avocado-green vinyl sofa.