by Will Wiles
‘No,’ he said. ‘It is mostly urine.’
He raised a supermarket bag; inside was a bottle of Absolut and a bag of supermarket ice. That night was the first time I saw him properly drunk.
Only Oskar could have been certain of producing absolutely clear urine.
Neat urine.
There was, among the various coffee specialties and special teas, a jar of Maxwell House. The kettle throbbed and phlegmed. Milk was in the fridge door. Brown sugar in a bowl on the table. Mugs were on the shelf above the beveragemakings. A spirit of efficiency ruled in the kitchen. It was easy to remember the efficiency and economy of Oskar’s music, and easy to imagine the exasperation and frustration of his wife, with her Californian outlook and kitchen that was primarily used as a platform from which endless boxes of take-out cuisine could be eaten. Look into these steel surfaces for as long as you want, you could never make out the blood-orange, blood-transfusion blaze of the Los Angeles dawn. Europe’s skies are older than America’s; Europe’s clouds start over there and by the time they reach here they are tired and ragged from their journey.
Boiling water over granules, a tilt of milk, and I stared into the result. Pale clouds lived and died by an unknowable rhythm under the surface, storms pulsating, growing and shrinking in the atmosphere of a gas giant, updraughts and sudden sinks pulling in a convective pattern. A spoon obliterates the system.
Billows of steam and condensation rose from the mug as it cooled on the side and I began to look for the cat food. Again, this was a short search; the cat food was in the larder-style utility room, along with a martial display of tinned foods and sacks of dried goods.
On the floor next to two water bowls and two spotlessly polished dishes was a pallet large enough for sixteen cans of diced mystery animal remains in a rich sauce of whatever, with the shrink wrap broken at one corner and fourteen cans remaining. Each can bore, next to the incomprehensible Slav-ese (probably containing the words ‘juicy’, ‘stronger teeth’ and ‘at least some % meat’), a picture of a feline with eyes that twinkled like taxidermists’ glass and a tongue that, captured in illustration, would now forever explore that same corner of its smiling mouth. Cat rendered as brain-dead consumer, trapped in lockstep with thirteen clones, licking tongues raised to the right in a bank of Heils, eyes fixed without focus on an endless future of more of this delicious food every day. Next to this band of brothers was a sack of the miniature biscuits that gave this gloop some texture. And a slip of paper, neatly folded on one of the surgically clean dishes, that I had not noticed at first; bleached paper on bleached china.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR FEEDING CATS, I read.
Half a can of food in each dish in the morning and the same in the early evening. Each time with a handful of their crunchy mix each, and be sure to refill the water bowls with fresh each time. Move the tray with the dishes into the kitchen for S. and S. to dine, and then when they have finished clean the dishes and return the tray to the cupboard.
O.
That was fine. The general list of instructions had contained nothing specific as concerned the feeding of the cats, and this job was clearly more important than the making of tea or coffee, hence the fact that it had been honoured with a full sheet of notepaper. Oskar was the most attentive absent host I could imagine, even across half the world. The conductor, the composer of precise, clipped piano pieces, the lord of a minimalist and restrained realm, would not have left things to chance. My liaison with his flat, his world, had to be organised with far more care than he had arranged his liaison with a Marlboro-blonde art jockey from the history-less West Coast.
I freed one of the cans of food from the shrunken plastic and carried it with the tray through to the kitchen, where I set it down on the floor.
This must have been the auditory clue, the Pavlovian bell – the soft sound of tray with dishes meeting the dull glow of the kitchen’s wooden floor. At once, before I had even straightened up, there were two dull thuds from the bedroom and the unmistakable skitter, slip and scratch of claws against shining plank. Turning towards the source of the sound, I saw something I never expected – heading full pelt through the glass-partitioned corridor separating the bedroom from the kitchen, the cats had accelerated so much in such a short time that as they rounded the corner they left the floor, pacing the white wall like a wire-assisted Jackie Chan in a medium-budget kick-’em-up, flipped and held by the invisible hands of momentum and centrifugal force. As the wall ran out, so they ran down, not seeming to lose a joule of energy, only to stop dead in the middle of the kitchen, at least four feet short of the tray. But they didn’t stop – they slid with practised elegance along the trajectory they had set and wound up, kinetic energy burned off against wood, a neat few inches from their proposed supper, circling and making plaintive noises.
My jaw hung flaccidly, its tendons sliced by this display of athletics. As Shossy and Stravvy mewled and arched their warm backs against my legs, I fought the urge to try and recreate what I had just witnessed, to move them back to the bedroom and the tray back to the cupboard, to recreate the phenomenon, but it was clear that it would not work. The butterfly’s wings could not be unflapped, the cloud would never again assume the same shape. Perhaps they would do the same thing tomorrow, but it would never have the same effect as it just had. It had been done. The moment had broken and could not be reassembled.
Still adrenalised, I hefted the sack of dry food from the larder, fetched a fork (the obvious drawer, obviously), raked the lumpy brown treats into the bowls, and sprinkled the biscuit bits over the portions. The cats were already tucking in as this finishing garnish was applied.
With the recent feline acrobatics still on my mind, I wandered over to the scene of the feat. The floor glowed in golden perfection – it was clearly necessary for the stunt. On a whim, I walked to the front door and kicked off my shoes. Toeing the floor, its silken finish betrayed only the tiniest natural imperfections of grain and warp; it felt almost frictionless.
The decision was made by some over-ambitious subcommittee in the lower portions of my brain and failed to pass through the proper scrutiny procedures before the action it outlined was already under way. I braced, devoted the slightest of moments to a complex calculation of forces in motion, and launched myself down the corridor. After four and a half paces at the maximum acceleration I could muster, I braked, laid my stockinged feet flat on the wood and locked into a slide to the far wall.
Some twenty or thirty minutes later, the pain in my left knee and big toe had – aided I believe by a broad-ranging swear-word monologue – subsided from crippling agony to merely irksome.
By the time I had recovered from my pratfall and unpacked my bags it was early evening. The light had yet to die in the sky but the sun was low. I made a sandwich with some cheese and salami from the fridge and opened the bottle of wine that Oskar had left for me. I ate on the sofa with the TV on BBC News 24. The rhythm and jangle of rolling global news is an odd comfort, but the flat was filled with British accents and familiar branding. The repetition of bulletins and headlines was soothingly metronomic, a lullaby more than an alert. Rolling snooze.
I don’t know how long I slept on the sofa, or the exact time I woke, but it was night in the city outside and the room was washed with the Lucozade orange of sodium street lighting. Travel and unfamiliar places can be exhausting, and I was more tired than I had realised. One of the cats was standing on the sofa next to me, regarding me with a quizzical air.
‘Meow?’ it said, tilting its head to one side.
‘Yeah,’ I said, rising slowly to my feet and stretching. ‘You want to go out. Time for bed.’ Several joints complained as I twisted to free my watch hand from its awkward position. I was neither sitting nor lying; just sort of slumped. I must have dozed off. Struggling to my feet, I scooped the puss off the sofa and walked it over to the front door where its partner was waiting like a partygoer holding a taxi for a friend. They needed no encouragement to disappear into the nig
ht.
DAY TWO
There is a moment between sleeping and waking where one is free. Consciousness has returned, but awareness has yet to rip away the thin screen between the waker and his surroundings, his reality. You float free of context, in no place – not sleeping, not fully awake, not at the mercy of the unknowns of the subconscious, and not yet exposed to the dull knowns of care and routine. It is at this point, between two worlds, that I think I am happiest.
For a second, I was disoriented, uncertain of my location. I was surrounded by white, a bubble in an ocean of milk. Then, the details began to resolve. I remembered that I was in Oskar’s flat, under his white ceiling, under the peaks and troughs of his white duvet, on his white sheets and pillows.
The regime in Iran tortures with white. Its jailers dress a prisoner in white clothes and place him in a featureless white isolation cell, filled with white light. Food – white food – is served on white paper plates, brought in by guards all in white, wearing white masks. This becomes unbearable for the prisoner, an almost-total deprivation of the senses. Snow blindness. A disconnection from the limbs, from scale and perspective – freedom from context as hell, not bliss.
It was a perverse torment for an Islamic country. I had heard that, under Islam, perfection is the preserve of the Divine. Striving for perfection is sinful pride. Imperfections are deliberately introduced in artworks as a gesture of humility. In each of those fabulous abstract Islamic decorative patterns, there is a piously deliberate mistake, a flawed iteration.
How those prisoners must crave that imperfection. A mark on the wall, a shadowed crevice, a stained ceiling tile. Apparently it is enough to unhinge the mind – enough to make one do anything to escape that featureless room.
‘Why do they dislike me?’
‘Oh, Oskar, they...’
I wanted to say: Oskar, they don’t really dislike you, they just don’t really like you, you’re not like them, and you’re not an easy person to like. I didn’t say that.
‘...What sort of question is that?’ I said at last. ‘They’re not out to get you.’
‘I just do not understand the stealing of the vodka,’ Oskar said, gesturing at the bottle he had brought with him, which was now heavily depleted. We had been drinking for hours, and my guest was showing worrying signs of being a maudlin drunk.
‘You should know better than keeping it in a shared fridge,’ I said.
‘It is the only way to keep it chilled,’ Oskar said. He looked almost comically morose, like Droopy the Dog, summoning up hitherto unsuspected jowls.
‘I don’t know, mix it with Coke or something.’
Oskar wrinkled his nose. His lip kinked in disdain. ‘I prefer it neat.’
I sighed. ‘It’s a shared kitchen. You have to compromise. Live and let live.’
‘But they do not “live and let live”, they leave a mess, they leave the dirty plates...’
‘They’re students,’ I said wearily. ‘So are you, so am I. Relax.’
Oskar frowned. ‘And this is relaxing?’
Fogged by vodka, it took me a moment to register that he had asked a question. ‘What?’
‘This,’ he said with a languid gesture around my room. ‘This is relaxing?’ I tried to see what he was indicating and failed. ‘Well, it’s relaxing to have a drink with a friend...’ I said. Oskar was unnerving me. I remembered that this was the first time I had seen him drunk. He was an unknown quantity.
‘No, no, no,’ Oskar said. His voice rose and he became energetic, rising from his chair, pacing the floor. ‘This! Your room! The way you live! This chaos!’
This took me by surprise. In another frame of mind I might have been offended, but instead I simply found myself surveying the room again, trying to see through Oskar’s eyes. The open bottle of vodka stood on my desk, or rather stood on the small canton of desktop not lurking beneath a thick carapace of books, papers and assorted detritus. Bookmarks bristled like tattered standards from forgotten wars, or the books themselves lay prostrate, open, held in the middle of a thought that could never be retrieved. Paper was scattered everywhere, but little of it had been fully used. Instead, each sheet bore just a couple of discarded sentences, or an arcane note, its meaning lost. Tired biros lay like pick-a-sticks. A plate, scattered with crumbs and waxy traces of peanut butter, lay atop one heap. A Frisbee lay at the bottom of another, and I had a vague recollection that it had served as an ashtray before being covered in notes. Another impromptu ashtray, formerly the lid of a jar of gherkins, now spilled cigarette butts behind the desk, into the lair of a medusa of extension cords. Above it all, my angle-poise shone cyclopically like the fire brigade floodlights at a midnight motorway catastrophe. The rest of the room displayed variations of the disarray of the desk in clothes, books, posters, bedding and the worthless paraphernalia that early adulthood attracts – dancing Coke bottles, inflatable guitars, purloined pint glasses, incense holders, broken CD cases, novelty bottle openers, a crippled cafetière.
I shrugged. ‘I know it’s untidy...’
‘It is not just the room,’ Oskar said. ‘A room is not just a room. A room is a manifestation of a state of mind, the product of an intelligence. Either conscious’ – and he dropped dramatically back into his armchair, sending up a plume of dust and cigarette ash – ‘or unconscious. We make our rooms, and then our rooms make us.’
I wanted to say: There you go. That’s why they don’t like you. I did not. I quit smoking. Much of the contents of the room would go into black bin-liners at the end of the term. After that room, there were other rooms, then shared houses, then a string of one-bed flats. I have regarded them all with the same dissatisfaction. This was Oskar’s gift to me.
Gazing up at the ceiling of Oskar’s bedroom, splashed by a fantail of sunlight from the windows, I felt most satisfied. I listened to the city edge its way in. A tram grumbled and clanked its way past, tinny leper’s bell sounding, a protesting squeal at the points in the crossroads. The sound of duty also penetrated my sleepy mind, a scratching and mewing at the balcony windows. Shossy and Stravvy were hungry.
I flung open the French windows to the chattering, brilliant city air. The cats snaked around my legs in that odd feline way – why do they pass so close when there is plenty of room? – and headed straight to the kitchen with the expectant purposefulness of factory workers at the lunch whistle. I followed, stretching.
Shreds of the previous evening lay by the sofa – the papers, the wine glass. I attended to the cats and then filled and switched on the kettle. As it boiled, I tidied away my mess, the depleted bottle – with its note from Oskar – the newspapers and magazines, the glass—
I stopped. A drop of wine or two must have made their way to the base of the glass on one of my many refills. There was no coaster beneath it. (In my mind’s eye, Oskar winced.) A 45-degree arc of red wine marked his precious floor, a livid surgical scar on pale flesh.
This stain held my attention for a moment or two, ice running through my veins. Red wine stains, I thought. I thought of Oskar’s injunction. From nowhere came the memory that speed of response was the crucial factor in dealing with that sort of thing. Action was imperative, my brain insisted, disregarding the fact that I had been asleep for several hours.
Without panic, I turned to the kitchen and ran a dishcloth under the tap, then returned to the scene of the crime. Kneeling as though in supplication, I started to rub and scrub. Satisfying; the mark seemed to shift quite quickly. After five minutes or so of work, I could not detect a trace of the wine. I waited a while for the floorboard to dry, and then inspected it, aided by the late-morning sun.
There was still a mark. The slightest, faintest curved blush, hardly noticeable in the natural grain of the wood. A birthmark awaiting its final laser treatment. But now my eye was unstoppably drawn to it – as if it was as large, as black, as inescapable as the sofa.
Clearing my mind, I attempted to appraise the area objectively, as if I was in the room for the first
time. This was obviously not going to work. My work – my illustrious writing career – mostly involved composing and editing brochures for local authorities. Residents of Ealing may remember my acclaimed Know Your Library Service, but I consider my masterpiece to be Bin and Gone: How, What and When to Recycle, now in its fifth reprint in Southwark and translated into nine languages. (Want to know the Somali for ‘compost’? I can tell you.)
Whenever one of these towering works hit the presses, there would almost inevitably be an error. Colossal, humiliating, Private Eye-worthy errors (‘Council Launches Literasy Initiative’) are very rare. But nearly every piece of printed matter contains an error somewhere. Most are invisible to the inexpert eye – a double space here, a full stop incorrectly italicised there. Only the editor will see these. But once he or she has seen such an error in the final printed product, that is all they will ever see. The beautiful clarity with which they explain the law on fly-tipping will be invisible to them – they will notice that a simple hyphen has been used where an en-dash was needed.
And so it was with Oskar’s floor.
I was fixated on the damaged sliver of wood even when standing at an absurd distance from it. It was nothing, barely visible – if it was noticed, it could be taken for a natural variation in the colour of the wood. But to me, it stood out like the European wine lake.
