Care of Wooden Floors

by Will Wiles

  ‘What is it like to be Oskar’s friend, then?’ Michael asked.

  ‘I haven’t seen him very much recently,’ I said, ‘since he’s been living here. Only when he has come to London. I’ve known him since university, though. We were quite close at university.’

  ‘Why do you like him?’ Michael asked. At first the question sounded perfectly straightforward. I opened my mouth and suddenly the answer skipped out of view. I was left with an inarticulate knot of intangibles and contradictory emotions. Then I realised that I had to say something, anything, just to break what was becoming an embarrassing pause. I had to start talking.

  ‘Uh, I, well...’ I attempted. Then: ‘Why do we like anyone? I like him because he’s different to me...he’s very intelligent and, I don’t know, I like his loyalty. Not his loyalty, that makes him sound like a dog. Maybe what I mean is that I like that he seems to like me despite the fact that there’s no reason he should like me; at least, no reason that I can see. You know, he makes me believe I have likeable qualities. And maybe that’s what I do for him. I think that mutual reassurance is probably a big component of all friendships, really. I mean, I don’t choose to like him, I don’t think you really choose who you like, who you’re friends with. There may be reasons for your friendship, but they are never wholly clear to you. You can like someone without knowing why.’ Like you, for instance, I thought – I like you, Michael, but I cannot think why that might be.

  I stopped talking, concerned that I was rambling. Michael seemed to be mulling over what I had said. Either that or he hadn’t been listening and was trying to figure out what he could without making his inattention obvious. I sipped my wine, which was a little harsh, but growing on me fast.

  ‘Why do you think he likes you?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t,’ I said, figuring that self-deprecation rather than honesty was the quickest way to end this little analysis session. I’m sorry, our time is nearly up...

  ‘Clearly he does like you,’ Michael said, intently. ‘You are here, after all, are you not? He has given his flat to you.’

  This was true. I shrugged. ‘Only while he’s not here,’ I countered. ‘He has not sought my company.’

  ‘But here you are, after all,’ Michael persisted. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable again, but not threatened or under pressure, simply outside my comfort zone of thought. It was a sensation that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. ‘You must have some quality, Oskar has trusted you with his home.’

  And look where that has got him, I thought. In a way, I realised, I was pre-emptively ending my friendship with Oskar. I knew that there would be trouble over the floor, over the sofa, over the cats, and I was fairly certain it would have a malign effect on our relationship, and would change it always. Technically, our friendship was still perfectly intact, and Oskar felt the same way about me he always did. But my feelings towards him were changing as I stayed in his place, and there would inevitably come a time when he saw the results of my stay and his feelings would change. Our friendship was a dead thing that was still breathing. It was like Schrödinger’s cat, stuck in its box, neither dead nor alive. But when Oskar opened the box, opened the front door of his flat, the wave would collapse, and our friendship would be at an end. I was certain of this, and the certainty was liberating, refreshing.

  ‘We lived in close quarters in university,’ I said. ‘He knows my habits.’

  ‘Close quarters?’ Michael’s brow turned corduroy.

  ‘Um, close together. In crowded circumstances. You know, student digs. Lodgings. Dormitories.’

  Michael obviously wasn’t listening. He was signalling to a waiter, and indicating our depleted bottle. Concern rose in me – a bottle each? More? My companion had easily exceeded my alcohol intake, even counting my gin at the concert hall. But he seemed, if anything, to be becoming more incisive and articulate as the drink went down. By contrast, I felt befuddled and ready to ramble, a weakening dam holding back a reservoir of malapropisms and faux pas. The hangover was gone, at least, and I was loosening up.

  ‘What is Oskar like to work with?’ I asked. I didn’t want the conversation to revolve around our only mutual friend all evening, but this was a unique chance to find out more about my absent host’s carefully hypothecated existence. I was also keen to shift the focus from me.

  ‘He is very demanding, of course. He wants everything to be perfect. When things go wrong, he can be very angry. Very, very angry. When things are good...Perfect. You have heard Variations on Tram Timetables?’

  I nodded, silently grateful that my curiosity had overcome my apathy and I had played the CD yesterday.

  ‘Amazing work,’ Michael continued. ‘It must be played with great precision, or the effect is ruined. It is Oskar’s way of making other people play like him. You have to do it his way, see? Like a tram, it has to run along fixed lines, to a fixed timetable. If a tram misses a stop, it makes everyone late, and they miss the next tram. If a tram leaves its tracks...it is a disaster, there is destruction and death. So in the piece, you must do everything right or it is a disaster, there is no room to improvise or be...what is the word? Slopper.’

  ‘Sloppy,’ I said.

  ‘Sloppy, yes,’ Michael said. ‘Hm. Sloppy.’

  ‘He told me he is working on something new – “Dewey”?’

  ‘Yes. Ha. Oskar, he is always...He wants more. A symphony, on the Dewey decimal system.’

  I smiled. ‘A symphony based on the Dewey decimal system?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The library index system?’

  ‘Yes. Why do you smile? It’s not a joke.’

  ‘It just seems like such an odd thing to write a symphony about.’

  Michael shook his head, grinning indulgently at what he clearly saw as naivety on my part. ‘You are completely wrong. It is a system for the organisation of all knowledge. It is educational, dialectical. Every piece of knowledge that man knows, every fact, given a number, given a place: 200 is religion; 220 is the Bible; 222 is Genesis and 228 is Revelation and Apocalypse; 500 is science; 520 is astronomy; 550 is Earth science, and 551 is geology; 570 is biology, and 576 is genetics and evolution. Alpha and omega, in all different systems, without contradiction and in powers of ten. The Dewey system arranges everything. It is the perfect muse for Oskar. He will arrange the world. A symphony of everything. A Grand Unified Symphony.’

  Michael’s smile was positively messianic by this point. He did not strike me as a person who shared Oskar’s organising impulse, but he was clearly smitten with the ambition that the Dewey symphony represented. The dream was Oskar’s, but Michael had obviously become its servant. The world, ranked and classified in nesting subdivisions of ten. It was an encompassing vision, and at first it seemed generous and inclusive. But there was also a darkness to it. It excluded the possibility of thought outside the system. It imposed conformity. Bad ideas had taken root in beer cellars in central Europe, very bad ideas. The soil all around us was crowded and cold.

  ‘You see?’ Michael prompted. I had not spoken for a while. I raised my eyes, which had been fixed on the dark red liquid in my glass, to meet his.

  ‘Yes, it’s very clever,’ I said, manufacturing a smile that I hoped did not look manufactured. And I feared that my compliment sounded weak, or forced. It was a clever idea, after all. I wondered when it had occurred to Oskar. In a library, no doubt. But inspiration seemed too spontaneous an act for Oskar, a little chaotic and unplanned for him. Maybe he had always had the idea, he had always had all of his thoughts, numbered and planned, and he had just been waiting for the correct moment to deploy this one. He had arrived on Earth with a lifetime of thoughts already installed, like index cards in a file, and then took them out one by one when the circumstances suited. At times every act, every possession, every achievement, every friend of Oskar’s took on the appearance of an ornament carefully placed on the ascending curve of his life trajectory. Education, career, marriage...but...
r />   ‘’F course, he’s not doing his job so well,’ I said casually.

  ‘Who?’ Michael asked. ‘Oskar?’

  ‘Yeah, Oskar. I mean...You said he lives his life like a job. And I agree. It’s like he has it all planned. He likes timetables. But, like, the plan’s gone wrong. The job’s not working out. He made a bad hire. And now he’s firing her.’

  Michael, who had frowned through all of this, now fired off an affirmative laugh. ‘Yes, yes! Yes,’ he spluttered, turning suddenly matador red. ‘Yes, but I think perhaps she is firing him.’

  ‘Huh, yes,’ I said. I wasn’t clear on the details of the divorce, but I had the strong impression that Oskar was on the defensive. In fact, if proceedings had been filed in California, then it was clearly her doing – surely Oskar would file, or sue, or whatever it was one did, in Europe, and save the Los Angeles lawyer-hassle? Perhaps you had to file in the country in which you tied the knot. ‘Yes, I think she is firing him. But I think he was the employer in the relationship, maybe?’

  ‘What is it called in England when you sue your employer, when you quit, and they have been bad to you and you want money...?’

  ‘Um, tribunal,’ I said. ‘She’s taking him to an industrial tribunal.’

  Michael was disintegrating into purple-faced laughter – near-silent total laughter, the laughter that manifests as muscle spasms, paralysis in the lungs. He could hardly articulate the thought that had provoked this attack. ‘To a...a tribunal...for sexual harassment!’

  I also laughed, and it turned into laughter for its own sake, the laughter of simple pleasure.

  Michael recovered himself. ‘Do you know really why they are divorcing?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. I only knew what Oskar had told me the last time we met, on Whitecross Street, that awful drunken afternoon. ‘It was very hard on them, him here and her in California. They spent all their time on planes, and when they met all they did was fight. She didn’t like it here and, I don’t know, I think he didn’t much like California. You probably know better than me.’

  ‘That’s what I know,’ Michael said. ‘He was quite often away, and he did not like his work to be interrupted. He was most content without her around. When he was going there, or she was coming here, he was very anxious and agitated for a week before and after. At other times, she maybe did not exist for him, you could forget he was married. It got worse and worse. And it seemed to go on for so long, you could forget the time when they were happy together.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I forget that. I saw them once in London, and they seemed quite happy then.’

  ‘Maybe London would have been all right for them,’ Michael said. ‘Oskar did not like it much, though. But I think she would have liked it.’

  ‘She didn’t like it,’ I said. ‘Not much, at least. But maybe they would have been equally unhappy there – a good compromise. An equal sacrifice.’

  ‘I do not think Oskar was happy to make a sacrifice,’ Michael said. ‘I think he already saw everything, all his life, as a sacrifice to music.’

  ‘She didn’t strike me as the self-denial type either,’ I said.

  ‘But you are right,’ Michael said. ‘The plan has gone wrong. It must be very difficult for him.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said. Michael was absolutely right, more right perhaps than he really knew. It was obvious that it would be extremely stressful to see one’s marriage collapse. But I felt, somehow, that Oskar must have felt it particularly keenly. The disruption and lack of control that went along with it would strike directly at the kind of security he appeared to value in life. And to get married in the first place must have required a great deal of emotional investment from him. He must have been obliged to open himself up to another human being to a hitherto unprecedented degree; and now that investment had gone bust. It might suit my prejudices about Oskar to consider him a bloodless, ratiocinatory creature and to think his marriage an unemotional, businesslike affair based on cool analysis of the costs and benefits, but he was human after all, in pain. I was disgusted with myself for not appreciating this earlier. Sympathy and self-loathing welled up inside me and I felt, even, the heat of tears readying themselves behind the bridge of my nose. But then I recalled the amount I had drunk – a bottle of wine by now, perhaps, not counting the gin – and I recognised that the drunk’s emotional pendulum had swung to misery. I had to clear my head. I stood, and went to the toilet.

  The toilets stank terribly, the reek of shit and piss competing with the astringent odour – a flavour, almost, coating the back of the throat – of some low-grade cleaning product that scoured the sinuses and pickled the eyes. A couple were in the only stall, very much engaged. I breathed ammonia and chlorine. Gas, lads, gas. An ecstasy of fumbling. There was an ecstasy of fumbling going on in that stall, all right. Graffiti was, apparently, tolerated, and the walls were larded with it, interleaved with yellowing pictures clipped from newspapers or magazines and pasted straight onto the brick. The pictures were mostly of girls – swimming teams, starlets. There was an unsettling fetishistic air to some – girls in wetsuits, raincoats, gas masks. Over and under this collage, graffiti. Most of it was impossible to translate. The only parts that were understandable were arrowed hearts, the initials of English football clubs, and angry extremism: swastikas, hammers and sickles, JEW PIGS, FUCK ISLAM. These latter slurs were often blotted out or appended by criticism from later writers: FUCK THIS SHIT, and so forth. In some places, the accreted epidermis of posters and clippings was peeling away, revealing it to be many layers deep. Perhaps there was no brick beneath, and this crust had been plastered over the bare earth. The concave ceiling was exposed brick, though, and the graffiti continued there, scorchmarks from cigarette lighters.

  Holding my hands under a stream of cold water from the tap of the filthy sink, I began to feel a little more clearheaded. But as I wove my way back through the bar towards my seat I still felt distinctly unsteady, and oddly disconnected, as if I was actually elsewhere, steering my body with an unresponsive remote control. I had a morbid fear of barging into another drinker and receiving a beating. That did not seem very likely, though, as overall the atmosphere, oppressively thick as it was with noise and smoke and humid, human heat, was blearily friendly.

  When I approached the table, I saw that Michael had ordered another bottle of wine, our third.

  ‘Michael, this has to be the last one,’ I said weakly.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Michael said. ‘The last one here. After here, we’ll go another place.’

  ‘I don’t know...’ I tried urgently to think of a compromise. For a moment, I considered asking Michael if he wanted to come back to Oskar’s flat, so we could have a drink there – then I could safely go to sleep. But I did not want to invite back company, least of all when we were this drunk. The risk of another accident was too great. Nothing further could happen to the flat if I stayed out.

  ‘We will go dancing,’ Michael said. ‘Do you like dancing?’ He mimed a boogie in his seat, wiggling his hips.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. At least if we went to a club, the quantity of drink would drop. I could slip away in the melee. I detested clubs, and had not been in one for the better part of a decade. But still, this was meant to be a holiday of sorts, and if I got into the spirit of it, it might be fun.

  Michael leaned in towards me. He looked serious, even stern. I blinked at him, and suddenly feared that the wine and heat were making my face red.

  ‘You know,’ the musician said, ‘Oskar first asked me to look after his cats.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. What was this? Did Michael feel he had some sort of grievance with me? Even if he felt sore at being passed over for cat-watching duty, surely he couldn’t hold me responsible?

  ‘Yes. I would have taken them to my rooms. It is quite suitable. There is a little garden, a courtyard. Oskar thought this a good scheme. It has worked in the past.’

  He was obviously as drunk as I, and I feared it was percolating into bitternes
s and enmity.

  ‘Oskar didn’t mention this to me. He just asked me to come over, and I was able to, and so...’ I had nowhere to go with that sentence. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you, or anyone.’

  Michael seemed surprised by this. Incomprehension flashed over his face, and then a natural smile.

  ‘Oh no, I am not offended,’ he said. ‘It is, you know, a chore, I am happy to be saved from it. But it is strange, don’t you think? The cats are the only things that need help every day, and I am here and was ready to look after the little furry bastards. I love them. Without them, the flat is quite safe – the building has a caretaker, I think, who cleans...But in fact he says to you to come, he brings you all these miles from London, so that you can live in the flat. Why?’

  I blinked. ‘I, I don’t know.’ My lips felt dry, very dry, and I sipped my wine. ‘There is a caretaker,’ I confirmed. ‘A woman. A cleaner.’

  ‘Maybe he does not trust her,’ Michael said. ‘Sometimes they steal. But I could have come in every few days...And there are others, he has other friends in the orchestra. It is a mystery, no?’

  ‘Yes, it’s strange,’ I said, thinking on it.

  ‘So, as I said, he must certainly trust you,’ Michael said. ‘His precious flat!’

  Wine had splashed onto the wooden surface of the table in front of me. I dipped my index finger into a puddle, and drew it out into a line, connecting it to another drop. Join the dots.

  ‘I spilled some wine,’ I said, quickly, candour ambushing discretion. ‘On the floor, Oskar’s floor. Not very much, less than this, but I didn’t clean it up in time and it left a little stain.’