Care of Wooden Floors

by Will Wiles

  The door buzzer sounded, making me jump. At the other end of the intercom, a hoarse voice said ‘Taxi’. I told him I would be right down.

  For the last time, I ran through a mental checklist of things I might have forgotten. It occurred to me that I had left the bedroom window open, so I went through to close it.

  In the bedroom, the cat was lying on the bed. Hearing me come in, it looked up, and rolled onto its back, wriggling comfortably. I smiled at it and moved to stroke its stomach. It purred happily.

  ‘Hello again,’ I said to it. ‘Thanks for coming back.’

  I closed the bedroom window and addressed the cat again. It regarded me with complacent semi-interest.

  ‘I’m leaving now,’ I said. ‘Michael will be here later. I’m sorry about your friend. There’s food in the kitchen, if you want it.’

  It blinked and hopped off the bed as I left the room, and followed me through to the kitchen. Shossy, I thought, watching it – him – tuck into the heaped dish of food, once again oblivious to me. ‘Goodbye, Shossy,’ I said. I dropped the keys on the kitchen table, took a last look at the living room and walked out, shutting the front door firmly behind me.

  The old fabric of the city gave way quickly, and the taxi rocked along a rough-skinned expressway flanked by fading yellow blocks of flats. The bodywork of the cab rattled and squeaked, and Jesus dangled nervously from the rear-view mirror, swinging and twisting. In the sky were huge, unlikely, weightless clouds.

  I watched the blocks of flats pass one after the other, like pages turning in a book. As each moved by, it revealed a new random selection of life inside: washing hung out, satellite dishes, flags in windows, children’s toys on balconies. The reflected sun raced across the façade of each block, flashing from many windows, and the block was gone, maybe never to be seen again. I thought about how I left Oskar’s flat, empty and quiet, tidy but ruined, and wondered how many people would glimpse it today from the rolling trams and traffic. Tidying the flat in those last moments had been like re-setting a trap, I now realised. Oskar’s psychological experiment, which would establish whether dumb, chaotic humanity could rise to his expectations. Conclusion: no. It was like a complicated mousetrap, with one-way doors and buttons to press and electrified floors.

  But I wasn’t the only one trapped. My flat, with the black freckles of mould on the ceiling above the bath and the grey marks on the walls around the light switches, did not feel all that bad now. It was at least absent from my mind. It made few demands on me. What had obsessed me, sitting in its magnolia spaces, staring at the smudges on its window panes, was not the actual flat, it was another, imaginary flat, the possible flat, the ideal flat. It was the idea of perfection – that if I had a better place, I could be a better person. And I was similar to Oskar in that; he thought that way, and he had built his place. Laura had been right – in making a home for himself, Oskar had excluded everyone else. The trap snared him more fiercely than anyone. He had been obliged to find someone to cut him loose. But I, I was free. I had always been free, but in love with the idea of bars. I was at peace with being in chaos.

  Beyond the window, the city had undergone another change, almost disappearing. We were on a newer stretch of expressway which hissed contentedly under the wheels of the taxi. Around us were the quasi-urban shed territories, giant grey distribution warehouses and container farms behind quivering razor wire; outposts of American fast-food franchises, with twenty-four-hour neon and low-pitched roofs barely distinguishable from the beetle-backed cars sunning themselves around them; giant plots of dead land, vacant but for litter and Martian plant-life, billboards at their side promising thousands upon thousands of square metres of new space, to open one year, two years hence. New space, a world made over. Brown mountains piled up against the horizon. Jets pointed themselves at the sun. The world was unlimited.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book would never have been completed without the advice and encouragement of my agent, Antony Topping. Clare Smith, my editor at HarperPress, has been a passionate champion of the book. Fatima Fernandes’ sympathetic ear kept me going. Peter Smith made perceptive remarks on an early draft. Hazel Tsoi-Wiles helped me in innumerable ways.