Care of Wooden Floors

by Will Wiles

  It was easy to prise the remaining nails out of the joists they were lodged in, freeing the floorboard. Disappointment lay beneath – a thick layer of insulating material, and a wire stapled to the joist. It wasn’t even pleasingly filthy – the insulation looked new.

  I turned my attention to the lifted board, wondering if it could be flipped over, regarding its streaks of red wine with dismay. It was puzzling – they were in the wrong place, not where I remembered. The streaks appeared on the side of the board that had nails sticking out of it – the underside. I turned it to check the topside. It too was stained with wine.

  This was alarming. Could the wine have penetrated the floor, seeping through the cracks like groundwater into a lightless cavern? The boards were tightly fitted together – it didn’t seem possible that any more than a tiny amount could drip through, if that. It looked as if the boards were the same on both sides, meaning that they could be flipped – unless they were ruined on both sides.

  After a gulp of wine, I set to work on the next board, gently working the palette knife under it and levering it up. Again, the nails relinquished their grip with surprising ease, and the board lifted out of place. If this one couldn’t be flipped, then it was time to give up. I pulled the other end of the board free with my bare hands and turned it over.

  It was over. The underside of the board was, if anything, worse than the top, branded with a great slick of a stain. Beyond the stain, there also seemed to be physical damage, a scar that looked like the result of impact by a heavy, hard object. I sighed, put down the board, and sat cross-legged on the floor. No longer nervous, I placed the open wine bottle and glass on the stains beside me. The removed board was laid across my lap and I inspected it closely.

  The damage didn’t make any sense. How did so much wine infiltrate the boards? And why did it spread across the bottom of the board, rather than just dripping down onto the insulation? I knew of little miracles like surface tension and capillary action, and even if I didn’t understand them, I had some idea of their capabilities. But this seemed totally beyond such miracles.

  Something else had been troubling me, something that seemed vaster even as I struggled to get a clear view of it. Then I saw it in a moment of total revelation that made it seem bizarre to me that I had not seen it earlier. The stains had identical qualities on both sides of the boards.

  Someone had tried to clean the other side of the floorboard.

  Just as I had wiped, they had wiped, and just as I had scrubbed, they had scrubbed. No doubt they had cursed. My despair had been their despair. They had been here before.

  And I knew that they had a name: they were called Oskar.

  Oskar had ruined his own floor.

  I pulled up a third board and it told the same story: a spectacular red-wine disaster. The familiar patterns of splash and slick, and variations: a footprint from a man’s shoe. On the fourth board I lifted, there was an area that bore the rough signs of sandpapering and an attempt at re-finishing. It had been badly botched. My own efforts, for all their failure, and been more successful. A smile formed on my face and powerful feelings rose within me – not elation, but a kind of mania, a dizzy gleeful sense of upset. These boards had really been messed up – the fourth one also showed signs of bungled acid treatment, which had bleached the wood and caused the grain to rise like an allergic reaction. Of course Oskar had feared damage to the floor. He knew first-hand how difficult it was to clean, and he knew that some of the boards had already been flipped over once, using their get-out-of-jail-free card. Something inside me writhed in delight, and I wanted to laugh.

  A wide trench had now been opened in the floor, shattering its insolent, seamless beauty. Its mystique was gone. I leaned over to pull up a fifth board – and stopped.

  Under the floorboards, resting on the puffy insulation, I could see a sheet of paper. Oskar’s handwriting covered it. I reached in and retrieved it.

  My dear friend,

  The book, Care of Wooden Floors, says that very damaged floorboards can be simply turned over. Very easy – like a second chance. But there is no third chance. If you damage those same boards, then the floor is destroyed. So if you find this letter – it will be clear now. You see the damage.

  Maybe it gives you pleasure. I remember how you used to roll your eyes when I asked you to remove your shoes or to use a coaster – all of you did it, everyone. You thought I was being unreasonable. It all seemed quite reasonable to me – to keep everything perfect.

  I must now disappoint you: I did not break the wine bottle, I was not the one who damaged the floor. It was Laura. There was a terrible fight. One time when she visited she spilled a small amount of wine. I was unable to clean it, and I think maybe I talked about it too much.

  This was easy to imagine: Oskar endlessly moaning about the damage to the floor, bringing up the subject again and again, sighing and tutting.

  When she returned, she brought the book, Care of Wooden Floors. It was the cause of a huge fight. I believed that she was mocking me, and she swore that it was an honest act. We were both very angry, and she smashed a bottle of red wine on the floor at my feet.

  She left the same day, back to America.

  What was it like to be with Oskar at his most angry, and to be the focus of that passion? All this time I had feared Oskar’s ire, and yet I realised that I had rarely seen him openly angry. His anger had always been directed at other people, and it had been terrible, but hidden, like the fires that can burn in deep coal seams. Was it so bad to be exposed to it? I had never seen the kind of fight that involved thrown wine bottles, something I reflected on as I sipped my own drink. The noise, the concussion of it against the wood, the radiating blast of wine and shattered glass.

  The floor could not be fixed, of course, and the boards had to be reversed. She refused to come back to the flat. We had argued often over this flat – my orderliness. She did not feel it was welcoming. Her home in Los Angeles is beautiful, but much larger, and they have people for everything. Our cleaner here is not very cooperative.

  My elation dissipated.

  People say that it is difficult, disorderly, to live with cats. I have never found them troublesome. People are the source of all chaos in life.

  I insisted to Laura that it was not difficult to keep the place perfect, if people just took certain precautions, and did everything the correct way. I said that no one could find it difficult if they followed the correct procedures, and lived with care. She did not agree. She laughed at me. She said it was impossible to keep everything perfect. She said that it was inevitable that the floors would be damaged.

  Did you find it difficult? If you are reading this, you are under the floorboards now. You should call me.

  You are my dear friend.

  Oskar

  I looked across at the uprooted and disarranged floorboards. It was difficult at a glance to tell who had caused what stain, and when. The wine and the blood all looked the same. The hole in the floor caused my thoughts to drift to the Telltale Heart, the secret beating away beneath the boards – of course, there is no sound, just guilt. And the pulp comic tale, the murderer obsessively cleaning the tiny shards of broken china, fearful of the smallest fragment of a fingerprint. I knew that killer, but now I saw it could equally be Oskar, seeing a wholeness shatter into a thousand possible outcomes, trying to hunt down and control every last piece of life as it continued to splinter and subdivide in his hands.

  You should call me.

  With a little trouble, I stood up. Red wine on an empty stomach. What time was it there? Past two in the morning? Three?

  They sounded hourlessly breezy at the hotel reception. It would be dark over the Pacific. I told them I wanted to leave a message.

  There was still a little wine left in the bottle. I opened a second one anyway.

  DAY EIGHT

  A concussion. A burst of noise in my head, doubled up, blood pressure in the ears surging, heart starting or stopping in a single momen
t. I had been falling, and then I landed, on the floor.

  The floor.

  The floor stretched out in front of me, a vast expanse of plain, the lines of floorboards converging, the surface dappled with stains like the shadows of clouds passing over razed fields. It was all at an angle and I was pressed up against it. My head throbbed with wine and dehydration, and when I raised it, I found that my cheek was stuck to the floor. It peeled off like the free CD attached to the cover of a magazine. Levering myself further up, I found most of the feeling had gone from the arm I had slept on, and my neck and shoulder hurt, yanked tight by my sudden waking. The clock on the kitchen wall said it was a few minutes before 9 a.m.

  A double concussion, bang-bang, incredibly loud to me, heard by the ears but felt as ice in the jaw, the chest. A man’s voice, raised to carry through the thick polished wood of Oskar’s front door, saying something I didn’t understand.

  Again, fist heavy on wood, vibrations in the doorframe, through the walls, the floor, me. Three, four times. I jerked like a kite string, scrambling to my feet. Around me were the loose boards levered up from the kitchen floor, splashed with red. The cleaner! It was the cleaner. No – I remembered the weight of her, moving that bulk, our unexpected, unwelcome, intimacy. She was dead. She is dead. The past, present and future had all flattened out into that unchanging fact. The world’s possibilities diminished. I remembered details, circumstances.

  A man’s voice behind the door.

  Police.

  I imagined a gloved fist on the door, a cap, creased trousers, no smiles, the squawk and burble of a radio. A clattering gurney and pulsing blue lights. Neighbours standing in their front doors, arms crossed, grim, fascinated. Questions.

  As softly as possible, I stepped across the living room to the window. I had slept in my shoes and the floor creaked under me. Another volley of banging from the front door.

  There were no police cars in the street. But this was the street to the side of Oskar’s building – they would surely have parked at the front, by the main door, beneath the bedroom window.

  The man’s voice again, gruff, serious. None of the words meant anything, but it was clear that he wanted to come in.

  Trying to be catlike, I went through to the study, opened the window, and looked out. A couple of cars and a van were parked outside – no police cars. Detectives? Unmarked cars? The cleaner’s bedroom window was closed and nothing stirred beyond.

  I could climb down. Escape. Go out onto Oskar’s balcony, climb down to the cleaner’s below, then drop to the street, just as I had done yesterday. But if they had found the cleaner’s body, they would be in her flat – I would have to go right past them. If it wasn’t the police, who could it be? Angry relatives? Oskar? No, not Oskar, it wasn’t Oskar’s voice, and he had a key.

  Bang. Bang. The jingle of the door chain, disturbed by the impacts. Another loud enquiry from the far side of the door. Maybe not angry, but certainly determined. He was – they were? – not going away. I speculated about the strength of the door chain – enough to protect me if I relied on it? What kind of muscle mass went with that voice?

  ‘Wait,’ I called out, trying to make it loud but finding my voice crack under the sudden exercise. Then, with more confidence: ‘Wait! I’m coming, wait a moment.’

  Back in the living room, I looked down at the floor where I had spent the night. It bore no signs of my presence, no extra stains or marks. For some reason I had expected at least some impression from me, as if it could crease and rumple like bed sheets. Two bottles on the floor, one empty, one mostly empty. A glass with an inch of wine left in it stood by the note I had found under the floorboards and some other sheets of paper with my handwriting on them. The floorboards were still up, still stained liberally on both sides. It didn’t look good, but there was no quick way of making it all go away. I ran my fingers through my hair, tentatively sniffed an armpit. Old sweat.

  With the chain firmly secured, I opened the front door.

  Two men in brown overalls stood in the hall. One was short, bulky and had been in charge of the knocking. He carried a clipboard and raised his hands in a what-kept-you gesture when he saw my face behind the chain. His colleague, younger, slimmer and taller, with a pointy nose and steel-framed glasses, hung back in the hall, holding a toolbox.

  Clipboard man said something that sounded like the set-up of a joke and looked at me expectantly, waiting for the punchline, eyes mischievous. Then he repeated the line, slower, waiting with mouth open for me to reply.

  The tall man stepped forward. ‘He want...know...if you have good sleep,’ he said. ‘You have good sleep.’ His colleague smiled, an action that vanished his eyes behind a concertina of lines pushed up by chubby, unshaven cheeks.

  ‘Sure,’ I said vaguely. ‘Can I, er, help?’

  Clipboard man nodded in the direction of the chain and said something, a question. He raised the clipboard meaningfully, patting it with his free hand. The clipboard was important. This was all about the clipboard. I didn’t say anything; instead I examined the men as closely as my sleep-slowed mind would allow, looking for clues to their purpose. Their overalls were clean, but worn. Each had a green logo on the breast pocket, a stylised house. It seemed very unfair to have to put in all this mental effort first thing in the morning. I wanted the men to go, to leave me alone.

  ‘We go in?’ the tall man with the tools and the developed language skills asked. Clipboard man glanced back at his colleague and flashed a smile at me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I really didn’t. The end of the door’s guard chain was taking more and more of my attention, this little metal knob in its slot. It was an absurdly small thing, such a tiny ally, no obstacle. A hard charge with a shoulder could break the chain, surely. Maybe not my shoulder, but clipboard man looked like he could have broken a few doors in his career.

  ‘Does Oskar know about this?’ I asked.

  A fractional turn of the planet, then much nodding, affirmative noises, ‘Oskar, Oskar’. Clipboard man reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a gnawed biro, which he tapped against the forms on the clipboard. He looked at me, wide-eyed, still expectant, and mimed a flourishing signature in the air between us.

  Was Oskar being evicted? I was sure that he owned this flat – he had redecorated, and replaced the floors. But I wasn’t really familiar with the workings of property law in my own country, let alone this place. I could imagine Byzantine apartment block covenants that restricted lease-holders’ natural rights to dispose of dead cats and engage in knife fights with the concierge...I could imagine that easily. For now, the workmen seemed benign, even sympathetic, but I was sure they could quickly become impatient.

  I released the chain and opened the door. The clipboard was immediately thrust at me. Yellow sheets of flimsy copy-paper, covered in smudged fields and boxes. Most of the areas had been ticked or filled in by another hand and a large X indicated the empty dotted line at the bottom. None of it was remotely comprehensible. The only part I came close to understanding was the logo, the same as the insignia on the overalls, a house simplified down to the most basic house-ness.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, ‘what’s this?’

  The two men in overalls looked at each other uncomfortably and then shrugged as one.

  ‘I can’t sign this,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what I’m signing. I need to speak to Oskar. He owns the flat.’ Clipboard man gave no indication that he had understood any of this. He was still holding out the biro. ‘One moment, one minute,’ I said, raising a finger. ‘I am going to make a phone call.’ I mimed ‘telephone’, holding a fist to my ear with thumb and little finger outstretched.

  When I returned to the living room, the sight of the stained, pried-up floorboards hit me as if I was seeing it for the first time. It was as if someone else had done it, and I was now discovering the disaster. But for someone else, this shock and amazement at the damage done to the flat might turn into anger; for me it had nowhere to go but remor
se and self-loathing.

  Standing amid Oskar’s designer furniture, I closed my eyes and held them closed. Perhaps, I thought, all this might recede and I would wake up elsewhere. But my sense of my situation remained like the lingering blotches of light left on the eyes by a camera flash. I could get no more conscious – this was it, awakeness. When I opened my eyes again, the men had followed me into the living room. They had seen the floor and were talking quietly, seriously, to each other. Together, they shot a glance at me – no anger or judgement, but a curiosity that could have been wariness. Did they know I was dangerous? Did they know I had killed someone?

  And it occurred to me that I could kill them. Then I would be left alone to deal with the floor.

  But I hadn’t killed anyone.

  ‘There was an accident,’ I said, acknowledging the floor.

  The taller, bespectacled man nodded wisely. ‘Accident,’ he repeated, carefully, trying out the word.

  I tried to do the mental arithmetic that would give me the time in Los Angeles, but it came apart in my mind like wet tissue paper. The number of Oskar’s hotel was a row of nonsense when I first looked at it, and I had to blink to make it legible. Time felt stretchy and sticky; I wondered if I was still drunk. It seemed like a safe bet.

  A Californian accent said the name of the hotel. At that moment, that voice seemed like the only real thing in the world. She connected me to Oskar’s room; there was a harsh beep and a sequence of electronic clicks and chatters before recorded music took over; solo piano. I tried to clear my head, to arrange the words I wanted to say, to picture Oskar’s face. But all I could see, all I could think about, was his flat, the precise picture of what Oskar wanted to be, which I had ruined, and which was now invaded, compromised. For a moment I wanted to cry, but the music cut out with a dead star crackle.