Care of Wooden Floors

by Will Wiles

  Wearing the rubber gloves, I made up a small glass of the acid solution and poured it onto a clean, new dishcloth from the cupboard. Then I placed this cloth on the bare patch of floor, coiled into a tight mound to expose as little undamaged wood as possible to the acid. There was no satisfying hiss or burst of flames, no acrid odour – the floor looked as it had done before, only with a blue washing-up cloth balled up on it. I took a careful sip of wine and looked at the clock. It was more evening now than afternoon. An hour seemed like a long time; dead time, too, the time between trips to the oven when preparing a complicated supermarket curry in many plastic trays.

  I ran the gloves under the tap, took them off, and went into the utility cupboard to find a bottle of vinegar. When I came back a couple of minutes later, carrying a suitable bottle, something didn’t look right.

  Kneeling, I examined the cloth on the floor. It was covered in a simple pattern, a grid of blue lines, just like every dishcloth I had known. But the pattern had changed. The lines had lost much of their definition – they were blurring into one another. And the shadow at the edge of the cloth wasn’t a shadow. It was a ring of blue dye, leeching out of the cloth and into the floorboard underneath.

  ‘Shit!’ I cried. ‘Shit, shit! Shit!’ My arm tensed to snatch the cloth from the floor, but I remembered the acid. I pulled on the gloves with flailing fingers, grabbed the cloth and dropped it into the sink, turning on the tap above it.

  There was a mottled blue circle on the floor, seeped into the wood, darker at the edges than at its centre, where the bastard remainder of the wine stain could still be seen. I ran my hands under the tap again and pulled off the gloves. Vinegar, vinegar, neutralise the acid with vinegar. The cap of the vinegar bottle was stiff between my fingers, which seemed to have lost all power to grip. The bottle slipped, almost fell. Holding it with white knuckles, I sloshed its contents over the blue lagoon. Pale bluish liquid flowed freely over the floorboards. Cursing, I passed a new cloth under the still-running tap and started to mop up the spreading spill.

  What remained on the wet floor was a varied bruise the size of a coaster in place of a near-defeated blush smaller than my thumbnail. With numb interest, I noticed the many qualities of this new blue presence – its slightly darker outer edge, where it had interacted with the finished floorboard, the paler, dappled blue where it had enjoyed free access to the sanded wood, and the violet birthmark at the centre, where it lay over the wine without having the time to dissolve it. In a couple of places, I noted, it was possible to make out the grid-pattern of the cloth, transferred onto the floor.

  Novack, I thought, you son of a bitch, why didn’t you warn me? He had, of course – he had specified a white cloth, un-dyed, without making the importance of that instruction clear. The floor would have to be scrubbed again, left to dry, sanded again – a larger area than last time – treated with the acid again, and then, maybe, barring further mishaps, polished. It was going to be a long evening. Thank heavens I had bought that second bottle of wine, I reflected as I reached for my glass.

  Later, I would carefully replay earlier events in my mind to identify the point when I had picked up the wine glass while wearing rubber gloves that had oxalic acid on them. The glass was barely a third of the way between the sink and my mouth when my thumb and forefinger prickled with intense heat. I had barely a fraction of a second to register this oddity when the heat was replaced with scorching pain.

  My lower brain instantly took control and did what, in its estimation, was the sensible thing to do. I dropped the glass. In fact, it wasn’t so much dropped as flung away like a venomous snake. Its contents arced in the air; it smashed against the boards. It had been almost full.

  But that wasn’t the most important thing in my life at the moment. At three points on my left hand, the skin had turned scarlet and was puckering up. I let out a low sound, two parts moan to one part scream, and threw myself at the sink.

  Of course – as the later mental replays made plain – in order to wash acid off one’s gloved hands, one must first turn on a tap with a hand in a glove that is covered in acid. And that acid, unless one was thoughtful and diligent, will be left on the tap. Once the water had soothed my left hand, this was the tap I reached for with my unburned right hand.

  Meanwhile, in a hundred places, red wine trickled and dripped over broken glass.

  DAY SEVEN

  It had been a restless night. What little sleep I managed to get was broken at 4 a.m. by the banging of the French window. When the time had finally come to call it a night, after an evening of disaster relief, the cat had not returned. I laid out a fresh plate of food and left the bedroom window ajar, in case it reappeared on the balcony in the night. But a modest summer storm had struck in the small hours and gusts of wind had thrown the window back with a crash. I was obliged to bolt it to prevent rain blowing in. Of the cat, there was no sign.

  The living cat, I mean. Its late colleague did make an appearance, in a dream, whiskers dripping with muddy water, coat matted with filth. It loomed over me accusingly like Banquo’s ghost. Then it was gone. Some rain did penetrate the room – I barely cared. I considered letting it stay there, on the floor, not concerned that it could degrade the finish and warp the wood. But the vestiges of my sense of responsibility stirred themselves, and I mopped up with the hand towel from the bathroom.

  Despite my exhaustion, when I returned to bed, sleep did not come. The pain from my burned fingers had subsided to mild stinging – but this was enough to keep my mind on the situation in the kitchen. The glass I had dropped – thrown, almost – had exploded on the floor, and the wine inside had spread over a barely believable area. After I washed the acid off my hands – blisters were rising on three fingers and both thumbs – I was shocked by the extent of the splashing, and alarmed to see that it had reached as far as the bookcase. Fat drops of purple-red were rolling down the spines of half a dozen of Oskar’s large hard-cover art books. These became my highest priority. Their susceptibility to stains made the floors look like Teflon-coated PVC.

  Getting the wine off the books was a delicate task, made agony by the knowledge that everywhere the floor was under attack. A damp cloth, wrung out as hard as possible; tiny, feathery motions. A couple of the books had glossy dust covers that resisted the stain; another couple had dark covers that made any remaining traces near impossible to see. But on two books, purple spots persisted, and could not be budged without wearing a hole in the pale, creamy paper of their jackets. They were small marks – but on otherwise perfect books, they seemed a vast and tragic violation.

  I then set about the rest of the floor with many cloths. The wine had not been on the boards long, only minutes, and in some places came away immediately without leaving a trace. But elsewhere it remained, and quick removal was complicated by the scattered shards of glass. I worked from the outlying, suburban splashes inwards towards the metropolitan core, an eyebrow-shaped streak of red a foot long. There was certainly less damage than from the spill that had been left overnight; but nevertheless, that original darker jellyfish had now been joined by the burst of a rosy firework.

  Despite this new turn of events, I was not ready to despair. Excluding the outer drips and splatter, the bulk of the damage was concentrated on only five or six boards. This was extensive, but not beyond control. Novack’s instructions had not yet been followed through and, I saw, he had more to say beyond oxalic acid. I selected a new test area – a short streak near one of the kitchen cabinets – and again set to work with the sandpaper and the corrosive crystals. There were no suitable white cloths, so I had to sacrifice one of Oskar’s linen napkins to the greater good, figuring that he was unlikely to miss one. And it worked – in the first and only positive development of that whole day, the acid did what it was supposed to do. The stain had gone.

  After waiting another hour for the cleaned patch to dry, I applied a layer of the wood finish from the tin that was among the items in the box. The result, wet, looked pr
etty good, but it had to dry before I could be sure. It was late by then, past eleven, and there was nothing left to do but go to bed.

  My first waking thought was of the vengeful dream-cat, whiskers bent under the weight of polluted water-drops. My second thought was of the floor. It would be dry by now – how did it look? I rose from the bed and pulled on my trousers. The bedroom was stuffy, with light filtered through a thick milkshake of cloud. There was no cat on the balcony, but I opened the window anyway, trying to stir a breeze. The skin of the soles of my feet clung a little to the polished floorboards like the grip of an insect.

  Seeing the kitchen floor again with more objective eyes, separated from the panic of the previous day, was a reminder of exactly how serious the situation was. A constellation of stains, a new and unfriendly landscape I had given birth to in Oskar’s paradise. It had advanced beyond the kitchen with that last smashed glass, into the living room, stretching to the bookcase. The inner variety of this sprawling system made it far worse. If it had all been brought about by a single accident, then it could be explained and understood in isolation – a one-off, a quirk of fate, an outlying mischance, something from the thin parts of the bell curve of the human experience. But here were two or three incidents to explain, a great shipyard of rusty chains of cause and effect. It looked too much for mere misadventure – it looked like a storied history of neglect, or even vandalism. Drunken rages. Botched parties. Paralytic pratfalls.

  I searched for the patch that I had tried to fix, and found it far too easily. If all the sanding, scouring and re-finishing had worked, the repaired area would be imperceptible, a memory, its location only guessable from the relative position of its surroundings. Instead, there was a yellow blot on the floor, another colour in a spectrum that also included the blue of the dishcloth and the pink, red, purple and grey of the dried wine. It was as if I had tried to polish the floor with orange juice. The tin was useless, the wrong stuff. There was no other likely-looking substance in the flat, and I had zero chance of finding any in the city. And all this could be determined from a distance. As I got closer—

  —something happened, pricked and cut and flesh yielded. I stopped and pain started, a jabbing telegram from the sole of my left foot. I winced and steadied myself with a hand against the counter top, raising my foot to see what had hurt it.

  A shard of thin glass was sticking out of the wrinkled skin of the arch of my foot. A small dark bead of blood winked at its point of entry. Awkwardly, I gripped this glinting blade with my free hand and pulled. Imagining it breaking off inside me, or scraping against bone, I felt my stomach lunge. But the splinter freed itself without argument – an inch-long stiletto of curved glass, clearly formerly part of the bowl of a wine glass. At the point of puncture, the bead of blood began to grow rapidly, swelling to become a black pearl and breaking loose of its anchor, sliding across the bottom of my foot at the head of a scarlet trail – sliding down towards the floor. A red drop filled and fell before I could move my hand to intercept it. It hit the wood, a perfect little sunburst.

  My foot was bleeding freely – more drops were crowding to join the pioneer that had escaped. I clamped my right hand against the injured sole, feeling the pain. But I couldn’t form a good seal over the wound, as I was still holding the fragment of wine glass between thumb and forefinger. Blood lubricated my fingers. It crept along the lines and creases of my hand.

  I had to get off the floor. The thought struck an absurd note, and I almost laughed – in fact, I made a strangled noise, an abrupt little huh. How does one get off a floor? I couldn’t even move – putting my foot down would tread blood onto the boards. Instead, I was stranded on one leg, in the world’s least relaxing yoga position.

  The bathroom. The tiled floor of the bathroom. I had to get to the bathroom. There would be plasters and running water and no risk of stains. But it meant a return down the corridor, through the bedroom – an impossible trek, given that I could not make a single step. I remembered the cats’ wall-mounting run down the corridor and into the kitchen, how easily they seemed to taunt gravity and dispense with the floor. For me, the only option was to hop.

  Three hops later, I had reached the corridor, but the drawbacks of this form of travel had multiplied. Gripping my foot with my hand as I was, it was impossible to keep balance. And every hop threatened to dislodge the blood that was collecting under and around my clasped fingers. On that third hop, a drop fell; on the fourth, I almost fell. Both my arms shot out to try to regain balance, and I dropped my foot. My bloody hand, still delicately holding the glass, left a smeared print on the white paint of Oskar’s wall, and my injured foot slipped wetly on the floor. The pain made me gasp.

  Speed, I decided, was more important than care. I hobbled clumsily towards the bathroom, using the heel of my injured foot. Once in the bathroom, I stepped freely, grateful for the cold tiles, not caring about my gory trail. The little wound looked pathetic, trivial, under the fluorescent light – it was a wonder that so much could pour from so small an aperture. Oskar, to my total lack of surprise, was well equipped with antiseptics and sticking plasters. I quickly applied both and limped back through the flat, damp flannel in hand, to deal with the blood.

  There were a couple of minor streaks on the bedroom floor, fresh and minimal, which lifted easily with a single swipe of the flannel. The hallway was more troublesome – crime-scene troublesome. Both the footprint on the floor and the half-handprint on the wall left subtle yellow-brown traces after a dose of the flannel. The footprint was insignificant enough to be forgotten, or at least excused – it almost disappeared into the grain of the wood. But the handprint was against the icily pure white paint of Oskar’s wall, and not far off eye level. It was also expressive, anatomical, a clear impression of most of the little and ring fingers over the broad curve of part of my palm. Recognition snares the eye, and this was recognisably part of a hand. The two drops that had oozed out in the kitchen also left spots.

  Rinsing out the flannel in the bathroom, I looked again at the shard of glass sitting in the soapdish. It was still smeared with blood – with my blood. I was puzzled as to how it could have embedded itself so deeply into my foot. If it had been simply lying on the floor, it could have given me a nasty cut or scratch, but there was no way that it could have impaled me in the way that it did. Had it been stood up on end somehow, perhaps caught in a crack between floorboards? A paranoid shadow fell across me, the thought of the floor angry, vengeful, wanting blood. I wrapped the glass fragment in toilet tissue and threw it in the bin. Returning through the bedroom, I put on my socks and shoes.

  Back in the kitchen, I trod lightly, expecting at every step to hear the crunch of another fragment of glass. I remembered a story I had seen in a horror comic – a reprint of some 1950s American pulp crime series. After committing a murder a man realises that his fingerprints are all over the scene. He sets about wiping every surface he thinks he has touched, a laborious and time-consuming job. In frustration, he smashes a cup – and realises, horrified, that his prints could now be on any one of a thousand scattered shards. So he tries to find, and clean, every last splinter, unable to accept the risk of leaving even part of an identifying print behind. In the morning, the police find him, buffing the toys, frames and coins in the attic, quite mad. I was beginning to sympathise with that man.

  Close up, the patch of re-finished floor looked worse than it did from afar. Not only was it clearly a different shade from the rest of the floor – too yellow, and too brown – specks of dust and hair had adhered to it during the night. Cat hairs. And in the centre of the test, there was a small area where its silky smooth surface was broken and rough. I studied this aberration – it was approximately circular, as if someone had pressed their thumb into the polish before it dried, but its edge was far too rough and uneven for a thumbprint...

  It was a paw print; a cat’s paw print. I stood up rapidly, making myself dizzy. The quietness of the flat suddenly seemed unsympathetic, watchful.
There was nothing on the sofa – the study door was ajar, with stillness beyond.

  ‘Here, puss,’ I said, self-consciously. ‘Here, Shossy...Stravvy.’ I clicked my tongue and made a succession of the little nonsense noises that people make when trying to catch a cat’s attention – clucks, whistles, kiss-kiss sounds. There was no response. Was it possible that the cat had returned in the night? Where was it? Had it slipped out again before I woke to close the window, or was it still here – somewhere?

  I felt compelled to check the piano. It was as I had left it: closed, silent. Unable to relax, I lifted its lid. Nothing was out of place, save for the single drop of the dead cat’s blood, now dried black. How different the study seemed against the rest of the flat – the same minimalist décor, the same white walls and wooden floors, but with none of the anxious sterility that pervaded the kitchen and living room. It was restful, personal. This difference, I saw, did extend to the floor. A broad area near the desk was visibly worn, beaten by the rollers of the swivel chair. Now that I had become a connoisseur of floor conditions, I could see it. It did not surprise me – I too would spend most of my time in the study if this were my flat. That had been my plan at first, I now remembered – to sit in this room and write, to create something. The memory seemed to originate from another age, another season of my life. There might yet be time, I thought, but I would need to be calm and undistracted, and that would be impossible until I had exhausted every possible option with the floors.

  For now, there was the question of the cat. It must have returned in the night – a cat had left its mark, even if it wasn’t the cat. A superstitious reflex caused the word ghost to manifest itself in my frame of thought – I shook it away like I was clearing an Etch-a-Sketch. Nevertheless, there was a moral symmetry to a spectral cat helping ruin my effort to repair the floor, even if it was doomed anyway. The flat now seemed tilted against me, perhaps even vengeful – certainly, no longer neutral.