Care of Wooden Floors

by Will Wiles

  She was on me, this time stabbing upwards, and again I parried with the mop, blocking her with the middle of the handle. Our eyes met – I expected animal savagery, but instead found angry puzzlement, as if my refusal to passively accept a frenzied knifing was a cause of dismay and disappointment for her. A dark-red flower was blooming at the back of her thigh – I saw its creeping edge, and imagined blood trickling downwards, lured by gravity towards the floor. We circled each other, eyes locked, her expression not even flickering. Surely, I thought, there would be pain – she could not be that well padded.

  A noise, vast and astonishing, broke into the space, and repeated. As one, we started, and turned to its source: the telephone, ringing. Oskar? It seemed unlikely – it would be midnight, or the tiniest hours of the morning, in California. It continued to ring, an insistent electronic baby yelling for attention.

  In that moment of distraction, the cleaner disengaged from me and arced the knife around, aiming for the left side of my ribcage. I struck out with the mop head, intercepting the blow, making it easy to avoid. She yelled, not a word, just a cry of frustration. I tried to manoeuvre the mop so that I could repel my adversary with one end and clean the blood scattered by the flailing blade with the other. But it was impossible, there was no way of reaching the floor without lowering my defences. The cleaner also changed tactics, this time targeting my hand with the knife. Surprised, I squealed, and tried to step back. My retreating feet met the kitchen step, and I toppled over backwards, hitting the floor hard.

  I was sprawled on my back on the kitchen floor, arms and legs flailing. My pelvis felt like it had dislocated. For once in my life I wished I were fatter. My head must have missed the still-open door of the dishwasher by inches. Blood rushed into my mouth from a bit lip.

  The cleaner, despite her modest height, somehow managed to loom over me. She was breathing heavily and muttered at me. My eyes flicked from her face to the sliver of metal in her hand. As if following my gaze, she too examined the knife, holding it as if she had just found it on the floor. Muttering again, she walked towards me, stepping up into the kitchen. Still on the floor, I flinched to one side, pressing up against the cold steel doors of Oskar’s cabinets. This was it – she was moving in for the kill. But instead of plunging the knife into me like an Aztec priest, she walked past and dropped it into the dishwasher, point down. I eased myself back onto my feet. The cleaner was still mumbling to herself between hard, uneven breaths. As if in a trance, she moved to the sink and washed her bloodied right hand. Then she turned back in my direction, looking down at her feet, at the stained floor.

  ‘I can fix it,’ I said. ‘I can make it like it never happened.’

  Shaking her head, keeping up the monologue that only she could hear or understand, the cleaner sank to her knees and spread her hands flat against the wooden boards. Her face was very red, and her breathing was faster now.

  ‘Seriously,’ I said, my voice high in my ears, ‘it’s really nothing to worry about. I can fix it. It’s not worth getting upset about.’

  The muttering stopped, and so did the rapid, whistling breathing. The bent-over figure of the cleaner appeared to relax. It sagged like an inflatable losing its air. She slipped forwards slowly and kept moving until she was face-down on the floor, arms outstretched.

  There was silence. The cleaner was very still. I could hear my own breathing, my own heartbeat, but nothing from her.

  With great care – my muscles cracked as if they had not moved in years – I reached out with my foot and nudged the cleaner’s shoulder with my toe. Nothing happened. The roundel of blood on her thigh was already drying. With relief, I saw that it was off the floor – there wouldn’t be any more damage as a result of the fight. But – I stopped myself. That was hardly the most important thing at the moment. Enough damage had already been done.

  Crouching, I picked up the cleaner’s right hand by the wrist. The skin was pale and wet. I could not find a pulse.

  ‘Shit,’ I said to myself, a sudden, hissing exclamation – I had been holding my breath without thinking. My lungs burned.

  ‘Shit,’ I said again. The cleaner’s face, pressed against the floor, was turned slightly away from me. I walked around her to see it. Her eyes were open and glassily stared at nothing.

  Beside the phone was one of the sheets of Oskar’s welcome note, the sheet that gave the numbers for his hotel and emergencies. Was this an emergency? Was there anything to be gained by acting quickly?

  There was a number for the police. I let time drift by.

  My pelvis ached from the fall onto the floor, and my legs were weak. I sat on Oskar’s sofa, which sighed under me. Sitting down, I could no longer see the body in the kitchen. That was good.

  Was it a body, then? Had I killed someone?

  I had killed someone.

  These words meandered through my mind in a disconnected way. It was like watching an advert on television – a random little claim on my attention. Wrong, of course. Impossible. I had killed no one. It was an accident. She was old. It was natural causes. I had tried to be reasonable. It was bad luck, as much my bad luck as hers. A mistake. No – not a mistake. An accident. If she had put the cork more firmly in the bottle...and now look what had happened.

  But I didn’t look at what had happened. Instead, scenarios played in my mind. In one, I call the police, and explain...and then it gets hazy. They understand, or I go to prison. Even if I am spared prison – and I was not confident that my explanation had the clear complexion of truth – I would be in an uncomfortable position for some time. Oskar would know. How much did I have to tell the police? An explanation of the fight would be needed, but would they want to know about the floor? How did it look? Hours would be spent talking patiently with people, or waiting, staring at the worn surfaces of institutional desks or tiled floors under unkind fluorescent lights – hospitals, morgues, police stations, embassies, who knew?

  If I called Oskar now, what would he say? What could he say? Perhaps it had been him on the phone earlier, during my grappling match with the cleaner. He was still innocent of all this – in his universe, nothing had happened to the floor, both the cats were alive, the cleaner was alive. I wanted very much to be back in that universe. Calling Oskar would not help me. The only person who could help me was me.

  For some minutes I had been sat on the sofa, elbows on knees, thinking and listening to the sounds coming from beyond the window. I wanted to hear a sound behind me, from the cleaner – a groan or a sudden cough of breath. Even some kind of cry would have been welcome. I closed my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose, tried to focus. The hum of the city mingled with the seething disorder in my mind, a chaos that parted here and there to reveal a frozen, irreversible moment of violence. My memory of what had happened was a burst of nonsense, a fumbling multilimbed anarchy rather than a clear order of events. I wanted a coherent picture of what had taken place, laid out like dance instructions – but I was getting a frame of film exposed many times, many slices of time layered into one meaningless image. She pushed, I pushed, an instant like a thread breaking, and I was here. Behind me in the kitchen was the problem, the problem that raved and crashed around in my head, demanding my attention, threatening to destroy everything. The fact of the cleaner’s death was growing in my mind. It was as if her body was swelling, inflating like the bag of an antiquated hoover, wrapped in that same taut, waxy fabric. I thought of what happens when we die, the bacterial banquet and the gases it creates, gases that blow up our bodies like balloons...and the cat in its black sack at the bottom of the canal, and everything that had happened and could not be undone, thirty years of life spooling out uselessly up to this dismal moment in another man’s flat with a dead body that had nothing to do with me – it was none of my business! I wasn’t responsible for her death, and I wasn’t responsible for her now! I hadn’t done anything!

  A noise escaped my mouth, something between a sob and a cry of frustration and anger. The sound, loud and
shapeless, and its roughness in my throat, startled me, and I opened my eyes. Taking a deep breath, I tried to clear my mind. The problem, the question of what to do, had tangled itself into a knot of abstractions in my racing mind. I had to see it for what it was, which was a dead body on Oskar’s kitchen floor.

  I got up and went to have a look at this body. It was still there, I noted with a little disappointment. So this was a dead body. It was the first I had seen. My family favoured closed caskets and cremations. It – the body – seemed smaller than I remembered, but its appalling stillness gave it an air of solemnity. Very, very still. I squatted and placed a hand on the cleaner’s shoulder. It was warm – or, at least, it was not cold, not the chilly, creepy thing I expected. I pushed, shook her, trying again to rouse her.

  ‘Wake up,’ I said, and immediately I felt foolish, childish, for failing to face facts. Not cold, then, yet; there was a person there, or their remains. Dying warmth.

  I stood. ‘Shit,’ I said again, and the word ended in a choke, the cracking of something inside. The possibility of tears, a sudden hot emergency around the eyes. I blinked furiously, inhaled hard and held the breath in, thinking over and over Don’t think about it, don’t think about it. The crisis passed. It was fine – everything was fine.

  Nevertheless, it didn’t look good. This question of appearances gnawed at me. I fretted over the possible reaction of hypothetical observers – their imagined train of thought always took an ugly turn towards blame, wrongdoing, crime, murder. The cleaner lay face-down on the floor, arms splayed out. Her body was orbited by wine stains, which inevitably suggested a spectacular eruption of gore, although the only actual blood that could be seen was on the knife, point down in the dishwasher tray, and the dark patch on one of the cleaner’s thighs. But the wine, the knife, the dead body – it did not look good.

  Maybe it could be improved a little. I edged around the body to the dishwasher and rolled the wire tray into the machine. A couple of drops of blood had fallen onto the inside of the dishwasher’s steel door. Thinking of the single black drop the cat had left inside the piano, I shut the door and started the machine. It clicked and whooshed. I smiled. A self-cleaning crime scene. So convenient. Just a couple of simple movements and the evidence was gone, blasted away in a secret, lightless world of powerful detergents and above-boiling water. The television criminalists would be baffled.

  If only everything else were that simple. The body was still there, unavoidable. I wanted to wipe it away too, obliterate it at the touch of a button.

  Maybe that wasn’t so unrealistic. The knife had been dealt with. I had been quick enough with the mop, so there was no visible blood on the floor. What other traces had she left in the flat? Besides the body, there was the bucket of cleaning products, the mop, and the bunch of keys on the worktop. These items, at least, could be removed without a problem.

  Which, of course, left the body, the elemental problem. I had to get rid of it. She had died of natural causes – it was just a matter of removing her corpse from Oskar’s flat, where it had the unfortunate effect of implicating me in her demise. What crime had been committed? There might be laws against failing to report a death, or something similar – but removing her would prevent a miscarriage of justice that might tragically entangle an innocent man.

  A chaos of ideas, from the unpromising to the disastrous, fought for my attention. Just dumping the body somewhere was not feasible. She was short but stout, and moving her any distance – such as beyond the building – would be impossible. She would not be joining the cat in the canal. I thought of the garbage chute and winced – a dumpster burial seemed grotesquely cold and I hated myself for the idea. Besides, I doubted she would fit, and the lithe body of the cat had been problematic enough. Similarly, destroying the body – fire, dismemberment, an acid bath – was altogether too grisly and too difficult. Whatever I did, I vowed, I would do it with some respect.

  My eyes turned to the cleaner’s keys, a hedgehog of grimy metal on the mirror-clean steel counter. There were a lot of them – enough to open every door in the building, I imagined. And, of course, they would include the keys to her own flat, on the first floor, directly below Oskar. If I moved her there, her death would look like an accident.

  It was already an accident – it just had to look like one, one that didn’t involve me.

  I took the washing-up gloves from their clip above the sink and stepped back over the cleaner’s body. The more time I spent in the company of the corpse, the more comfortable I felt around it. To my relief, it was easier and easier to think of it as a thing – easier, in fact, to not think about it too hard at all. As I put on the gloves, I thought again of the murderer in the horror comic, obsessively polishing pottery shards and attic junk because he cannot rid himself of the fear that his fingerprints have been left somewhere – that could not be allowed to happen to me. I had to be careful from the start. There had been no murder, but I was committing a crime for sure – I just had to make it an invisible, unnoticed crime. I had to prevent traces.

  Oskar’s front door opened with a soft click and I peered out onto the landing. It was deserted. How many apartments were there in this building? A dozen, as many as twenty? And yet the cleaner was the only other inhabitant I had seen. Still, there was an undeniable risk that one of Oskar’s neighbours might make a surprise appearance while I was shifting the body.

  The cleaner’s flat seemed tantalisingly close – indeed it was close, only one or two feet away, straight down. The floor’s solidity taunted me. Even if I removed more boards in the kitchen, enough to lower a body through, there would be some other layer to breach. I looked up. The ceiling was plain white plaster. It would be necessary to hack through that, then clear away the dust and debris, re-plaster and re-paint the ceiling – impossible. A better man, an Oskar or Novack among men, would have trouble with that job, and I was thwarted by floor maintenance they found simple.

  Back inside the flat, I paused by the bedroom door. Perhaps the body could be wrapped in a sheet, like a shroud, somehow disguised...but a corpse has a distinctive profile, weight and awkward bulk, and cinema and television have trained us well to identify them. If I transported her as she was, it would look less suspicious in the event of being surprised – of course there would still be an unpleasant scene, and many questions to answer, but I would look less like a man attempting to avoid detection, and I could perhaps claim that I was dragging her to the street in order to seek help. It was better to remain undetected, though. If I was put in the position of having to explain anything, it was already too late. The point of the exercise was to avoid explaining anything.

  I scooped the keys from the counter and put them in the bucket with the sponges and the bottles of bleach. Then I carried this bucket down the two flights of stairs to leave it outside the cleaner’s flat. It looked unimpeachably innocent there, left momentarily in the hall outside its owner’s home while she attended to something. There was nobody to be seen. It was time to move the body. There would be no better time.

  The etiquette of corpse-handling is not widely known, but some of its basics were obvious. It was more seemly to take the cleaner by the shoulders than by the ankles. She was heavy, but slid easily on the smooth wood of the floor, and I had her out of Oskar’s flat and onto the landing quicker than I had hoped. Descending the stairs was more difficult and I proceeded slowly. The cleaner was still face-down, the same way she had slumped to the floor, and her feet turned and twisted on their toes as we bumped down each step. Her head hung horribly from her shoulders, swinging loosely from side to side with each jolt. For a moment I feared the rough ride might wake her, that she might suddenly lift her head and look at me, but she did not. I was glad that I could not see her face.

  On the cleaner’s floor, the sounds of the street were louder and clearer. Car brakes squealed at the junction and a tram rumbled by. The footsteps of passers-by rang clearly on the pavement. I took the keys from the bucket and froze. There were
maybe three dozen keys on a series of linked rings, with no apparent hierarchy or organisation. Some were marked with twists of wool, blobs of paint, numbers scratched into the metal or written in fading marker pen. I looked at the door – shut, locked, robust. The keyhole was almost identical to Oskar’s, highly polished brass, but here years of polish had blackened the wood around it and worked grey-green residue into its cracks. There were numerous keys that resembled Oskar’s in the bunch. I tried one at random. It slid neatly into the hole, but refused to turn. The second I tried would only go in halfway.

  I felt a vein throbbing in my neck and swallowed. Sweat moistened my fingers inside the gloves. The passing footsteps in the street seemed louder and louder and as each set ascended my throat constricted, waiting for the moment when the walker would pause and I would hear the building’s heavy door being pushed open. I hunted for a third key to try and my fingers slipped – the bunch fell to the tiled floor with a crash. The sound went straight through me and resounded against the hard edges of the stairs. And as I bent to retrieve the keys, clumsy and ridiculous in the yellow gloves, I saw with fresh revelation what lay on the floor at my feet – the body, a dead thing, a great indivisible final fact. Its reality and unreality struck me. An actual human corpse – a silent tumulus with extraordinary power to overturn my life and evaporate my freedom if I was discovered in its presence, or an investigation even associated me with it. And yet it was so little, barely more trouble than a heavy trunk or more awkward than a double mattress. Maybe that was its awful secret, the thing that we all turn from: that time in the company of the corpse of a stranger isn’t a ceaseless nightmare; it could even feel normal. Just don’t think about it too much, I told myself. I won’t think about it.