Care of Wooden Floors (29 page)

Now or never, while it was raining and there were few people out. After putting the marigolds back on – an act that now seemed horribly associated with criminality – I grabbed the mop and the keys and left Oskar’s flat. The hallway was of course empty; by now I expected it to be
empty. It rang with a sound of rain hitting skylights and windows. Drainpipes concealed somewhere in the building’s fabric gurgled.

I let myself into the cleaner’s flat in a rush – too quickly, in fact, without any preparation for what I would find in there. As soon as I was through the door, I saw the corpse where I had left it on the sofa, outlined in the grey light from the windows. It made me jump, like seeing a mannequin or a dressmaker’s dummy at the wrong moment in the wrong circumstances. The rain filled the flat with sounds and for a dumbstruck, nervy few seconds I stared at the body, its head at an uncanny angle, trying to tell if it had been moved or not since I had been here last.

But the plan was the plan. I hunted through the keys and, finding the right one, double-locked the front door. Now locked in, I took the mop through to the kitchen and left it leaning on the wall. The keys I put on the counter above the bucket of cleaning supplies. Passing back through the living room took me near the corpse again, and I found myself compelled to look at it. Its attitude, the position it took on the sofa, sickened me somehow – there was something foully unnatural about it, as if it were a caricature of something that had been alive. And its deadness, the fact that the life it was once home to was irretrievable, could never return to this vessel, seemed to mock me. There was no going back now, its inner renewal had ceased, it was on the path to decay and dispersal.

My mouth was dry; I swallowed. Outside, it was still raining, and although the body had not started to corrupt the air in the room, it felt distinctly unhealthy. Entering
the cleaner’s bedroom gave me a searing dose of guilt – an uninvited stranger, I felt I was perpetrating a further profanation. Moving the corpse was one thing – I knew the body, I had met it when it was alive, I had been involved (however indirectly and innocently) in its demise, and my transporting of it could be interpreted as an act of respect. But I had no business in this intimate space; I was an even greater intruder here. I hurried through the room, deliberately paying as little attention as possible to its contents, registering only details – the sheets on the bed tucked in hotel-tight, a cross on the wall, a dressing table, coats and dressing gowns on hangers on the wardrobe door. The window onto the balcony was not bolted, a good omen. Once on the balcony itself, I quickly shut it behind me to prevent rain getting into the bedroom.

As I had hoped, the rain meant that few people were on the streets. As I stepped out someone walked briskly underneath, umbrella up, oblivious to everything above eye level. I crouched down all the same, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. The street was clear. I stood and lifted a leg over the curved wall, resting it on a slender decorative ridge around the bottom of the balcony; then I brought over the other leg. Without anything protecting me from a fall, the street now seemed further down. My shirt was quickly soaked through. The cats had made it look so easy, so graceful, but there was no easy halfway stage for me between where I was and the ground.

I started to lower myself into a crouching position, still clutching the lip of the wall. For the first time, I was grateful for the rubber gloves – without them, it would have
been difficult to maintain a grip with cold, wet hands. I took one of my feet off the balcony and let it dangle free in space. I lowered my centre of gravity as far as possible, before letting the other foot slip, hanging, all my weight on my arms. My upper arms burned, taut; my shoulders strained and I expected for a sick moment the popping pain of dislocation. Swollen drops of water fell from the balconies above and splashed distractingly on me, trickling down my neck. The shining flagstones still seemed a long way beneath my feet. But every second I delayed was another chance to be discovered. I let go.

The landing jarred my ankles, winded me, and cracked my jaws together painfully. Water splashed my ankles and into my shoes. As I tried to recapture my breath, a tram passed by the crossroads on the perpendicular street. Inside it, the lights were on – a row of pale, blank faces stared out through condensation-streaked glass like baguettes behind a sneezeguard in a café. They stared at me, but I don’t know if they saw me in the moment they whisked by, a sodden figure in inadequate clothes and washing-up gloves, hair plastered to his head, standing dazed on a cross street. There was nothing to connect me with the balcony above my head, no way of knowing what was behind that window, and they would have no explanation for the grin of victory spread across my face.

The low throb of the dishwasher, steadily disposing of evidence, still permeated Oskar’s flat. Its gargling rhythm was a comforting domestic sound, and I thought of home, my own home. Restlessly, I turned the Earth in my mind,
watching its dark and light halves, conjuring flight times. If Oskar had departed in the Californian morning...if I left now...

Time passed and I fretted, fearing that at any moment I might hear a policeman’s gloved hand hammering on the door. My legs and arms shivered and twitched in the dry clothes I had put on, a delayed reaction to the earlier heavy lifting and my drop from the balcony – and, no doubt to the adrenalin leaving my system. I poured wine into a dirty glass, the same glass I had drunk from last night after clearing away the fragments of its shattered brother.

The floorboard in the kitchen was still loose, lifted out of its place. It was as if a secret switch had been found somewhere, pushed, and pop, up came the board, revealing a secret stash of gems or a hidden warren of forgotten rooms. A loose board like that exerted a powerful and mysterious appeal – the lure of an excavated road or a peephole in a featureless fence. And if there really was a simple way of just hiding the stains, of reversing all that had happened, I realised I could not let it pass by before I left. Fooling Oskar, leaving the damage almost in plain sight, but where he would never find it, was too tempting to resist.

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.