Care of Wooden Floors (30 page)

There was still a little wine left in the bottle. I opened a second one anyway.

A concussion. A burst of noise in my head, doubled up, blood pressure in the ears surging, heart starting or stopping in a single moment. I had been falling, and then I landed, on the floor.

The floor.

The floor stretched out in front of me, a vast expanse of plain, the lines of floorboards converging, the surface dappled with stains like the shadows of clouds passing over razed fields. It was all at an angle and I was pressed up against it. My head throbbed with wine and dehydration, and when I raised it, I found that my cheek was stuck to the floor. It peeled off like the free CD attached to the cover of a magazine. Levering myself further up, I found most of the feeling had gone from the arm I had slept on, and my neck and shoulder hurt, yanked tight by my sudden waking. The clock on the kitchen wall said it was a few minutes before 9 a.m.

A double concussion, bang-bang, incredibly loud to me, heard by the ears but felt as ice in the jaw, the chest. A man’s voice, raised to carry through the thick polished wood of Oskar’s front door, saying something I didn’t understand.

Again, fist heavy on wood, vibrations in the doorframe, through the walls, the floor, me. Three, four times. I jerked like a kite string, scrambling to my feet. Around me were the loose boards levered up from the kitchen floor, splashed with red. The cleaner! It was the cleaner. No – I remembered the weight of her, moving that bulk, our unexpected, unwelcome, intimacy. She was dead. She is dead. The past, present and future had all flattened out into that unchanging fact. The world’s possibilities diminished. I remembered details, circumstances.

A man’s voice behind the door.

Police.

I imagined a gloved fist on the door, a cap, creased trousers, no smiles, the squawk and burble of a radio. A clattering gurney and pulsing blue lights. Neighbours standing in their front doors, arms crossed, grim, fascinated. Questions.

As softly as possible, I stepped across the living room to the window. I had slept in my shoes and the floor creaked under me. Another volley of banging from the front door.

There were no police cars in the street. But this was the street to the side of Oskar’s building – they would surely have parked at the front, by the main door, beneath the bedroom window.

The man’s voice again, gruff, serious. None of the words meant anything, but it was clear that he wanted to come in.

Trying to be catlike, I went through to the study, opened the window, and looked out. A couple of cars and a van
were parked outside – no police cars. Detectives? Unmarked cars? The cleaner’s bedroom window was closed and nothing stirred beyond.

I could climb down. Escape. Go out onto Oskar’s balcony, climb down to the cleaner’s below, then drop to the street, just as I had done yesterday. But if they had found the cleaner’s body, they would be in her flat – I would have to go right past them. If it wasn’t the police, who could it be? Angry relatives? Oskar? No, not Oskar, it wasn’t Oskar’s voice, and he had a key.

Bang. Bang. The jingle of the door chain, disturbed by the impacts. Another loud enquiry from the far side of the door. Maybe not angry, but certainly determined. He was – they were? – not going away. I speculated about the strength of the door chain – enough to protect me if I relied on it? What kind of muscle mass went with that voice?

‘Wait,’ I called out, trying to make it loud but finding my voice crack under the sudden exercise. Then, with more confidence: ‘Wait! I’m coming, wait a moment.’

Back in the living room, I looked down at the floor where I had spent the night. It bore no signs of my presence, no extra stains or marks. For some reason I had expected at least some impression from me, as if it could crease and rumple like bed sheets. Two bottles on the floor, one empty, one mostly empty. A glass with an inch of wine left in it stood by the note I had found under the floorboards and some other sheets of paper with my handwriting on them. The floorboards were still up, still stained liberally on both sides. It didn’t look good, but there was
no quick way of making it all go away. I ran my fingers through my hair, tentatively sniffed an armpit. Old sweat.

With the chain firmly secured, I opened the front door.

Two men in brown overalls stood in the hall. One was short, bulky and had been in charge of the knocking. He carried a clipboard and raised his hands in a what-kept-you gesture when he saw my face behind the chain. His colleague, younger, slimmer and taller, with a pointy nose and steel-framed glasses, hung back in the hall, holding a toolbox.

Clipboard man said something that sounded like the set-up of a joke and looked at me expectantly, waiting for the punchline, eyes mischievous. Then he repeated the line, slower, waiting with mouth open for me to reply.

The tall man stepped forward. ‘He want...know...if you have good sleep,’ he said. ‘You have good sleep.’ His colleague smiled, an action that vanished his eyes behind a concertina of lines pushed up by chubby, unshaven cheeks.

‘Sure,’ I said vaguely. ‘Can I, er, help?’

Clipboard man nodded in the direction of the chain and said something, a question. He raised the clipboard meaningfully, patting it with his free hand. The clipboard was important. This was all about the clipboard. I didn’t say anything; instead I examined the men as closely as my sleep-slowed mind would allow, looking for clues to their purpose. Their overalls were clean, but worn. Each had a green logo on the breast pocket, a stylised house. It seemed very unfair to have to put in all this mental effort first thing in the morning. I wanted the men to go, to leave me alone.

‘We go in?’ the tall man with the tools and the developed language skills asked. Clipboard man glanced back at his colleague and flashed a smile at me.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I really didn’t. The end of the door’s guard chain was taking more and more of my attention, this little metal knob in its slot. It was an absurdly small thing, such a tiny ally, no obstacle. A hard charge with a shoulder could break the chain, surely. Maybe not my shoulder, but clipboard man looked like he could have broken a few doors in his career.

‘Does Oskar know about this?’ I asked.

A fractional turn of the planet, then much nodding, affirmative noises, ‘Oskar, Oskar’. Clipboard man reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a gnawed biro, which he tapped against the forms on the clipboard. He looked at me, wide-eyed, still expectant, and mimed a flourishing signature in the air between us.

Was Oskar being evicted? I was sure that he owned this flat – he had redecorated, and replaced the floors. But I wasn’t really familiar with the workings of property law in my own country, let alone this place. I could imagine Byzantine apartment block covenants that restricted lease-holders’ natural rights to dispose of dead cats and engage in knife fights with the concierge...I could imagine that easily. For now, the workmen seemed benign, even sympathetic, but I was sure they could quickly become impatient.

I released the chain and opened the door. The clipboard was immediately thrust at me. Yellow sheets of flimsy copy-paper, covered in smudged fields and boxes. Most of
the areas had been ticked or filled in by another hand and a large X indicated the empty dotted line at the bottom. None of it was remotely comprehensible. The only part I came close to understanding was the logo, the same as the insignia on the overalls, a house simplified down to the most basic house-ness.

‘Wait,’ I said, ‘what’s this?’

The two men in overalls looked at each other uncomfortably and then shrugged as one.

‘I can’t sign this,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what I’m signing. I need to speak to Oskar. He owns the flat.’ Clipboard man gave no indication that he had understood any of this. He was still holding out the biro. ‘One moment, one minute,’ I said, raising a finger. ‘I am going to make a phone call.’ I mimed ‘telephone’, holding a fist to my ear with thumb and little finger outstretched.

When I returned to the living room, the sight of the stained, pried-up floorboards hit me as if I was seeing it for the first time. It was as if someone else had done it, and I was now discovering the disaster. But for someone else, this shock and amazement at the damage done to the flat might turn into anger; for me it had nowhere to go but remorse and self-loathing.

Standing amid Oskar’s designer furniture, I closed my eyes and held them closed. Perhaps, I thought, all this might recede and I would wake up elsewhere. But my sense of my situation remained like the lingering blotches of light left on the eyes by a camera flash. I could get no more conscious – this was it, awakeness. When I opened my eyes again, the men had followed me into the living
room. They had seen the floor and were talking quietly, seriously, to each other. Together, they shot a glance at me – no anger or judgement, but a curiosity that could have been wariness. Did they know I was dangerous? Did they know I had killed someone?

And it occurred to me that I could kill them. Then I would be left alone to deal with the floor.

But I hadn’t killed anyone.

‘There was an accident,’ I said, acknowledging the floor.

The taller, bespectacled man nodded wisely. ‘Accident,’ he repeated, carefully, trying out the word.

I tried to do the mental arithmetic that would give me the time in Los Angeles, but it came apart in my mind like wet tissue paper. The number of Oskar’s hotel was a row of nonsense when I first looked at it, and I had to blink to make it legible. Time felt stretchy and sticky; I wondered if I was still drunk. It seemed like a safe bet.

A Californian accent said the name of the hotel. At that moment, that voice seemed like the only real thing in the world. She connected me to Oskar’s room; there was a harsh beep and a sequence of electronic clicks and chatters before recorded music took over; solo piano. I tried to clear my head, to arrange the words I wanted to say, to picture Oskar’s face. But all I could see, all I could think about, was his flat, the precise picture of what Oskar wanted to be, which I had ruined, and which was now invaded, compromised. For a moment I wanted to cry, but the music cut out with a dead star crackle.

‘Yes?’ Oskar said.

‘Oskar, it’s me,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘Oskar, there are some men here – they look like workmen,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what they want, but they’re asking me to sign something.’

‘They’re early,’ Oskar said. ‘I did not think they would be this quick.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘Who are they?’

‘I called yesterday,’ Oskar answered, ‘but you did not pick up. They are removal men. They are here to estimate how much it will cost for me to move out of the flat.’

I swallowed. It was like gulping down a rusty ballbearing. My lips were dry. Oskar sounded very calm.

‘You’re leaving the flat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because of me?’

‘Yes.’

There were tiny noises on the line, perhaps the sound of Oskar switching the phone receiver from one hand to another.

‘I got your message,’ he said. I realised that I hadn’t spoken in a while. Wine-blurred memories shuffled around. I remembered leaving the message; I remembered asking the receptionist to be precise. But the details of its contents escaped me.

‘About the floors?’ I asked, partly a guess.

‘Yes,’ Oskar said. ‘I already knew. Michael mentioned it. So did Ada.’

‘Ada?’

‘The cleaning woman. I spoke with her yesterday evening.’ Yesterday evening? How was that possible?
Perhaps she wasn’t dead after all. Hope and terror rose in me, a jolt like the final moment of a horror film when the killer is shown to have survived. Then I remembered the time zones.

‘Right, yesterday morning?’ I felt pinned to the spot, surrounded by tripwires.

‘Yes,’ Oskar said with a hint of impatience. ‘I wanted to tell her that the workmen were coming, so she would let them in.’

‘Right,’ I said, my mind spinning. The knife, the blood. ‘She was, uh, quite upset about the floor,’ I added cautiously.

‘Yes,’ Oskar said, his voice plain, hard to read. ‘I don’t suppose it matters now. Since I am going.’ I willed him to elaborate, to say more, to give some sign of what he knew about the floor, the cat, the knife. ‘Are the men still there?’ was all he asked.

They were still there, silently watching me on the phone from across the room, both wearing the same expression of guarded affability, as if I were a potentially dangerous mental patient. I wondered how I looked; not good, surely, after a night on the floor.

‘Yes, they’re here,’ I said.

‘Sign the form. Let them work while we talk. There are things I must tell you.’

I walked over to the workmen, took the clipboard, and signed. The after-effects of last night’s drinking – of the week’s drinking – made my hand tremble, and I made a messy job of it. The unnatural scrawl was hard to recognise as my name, but it would do. The men smiled and started to discuss something between them, like statues
coming to life. Removal men – Oskar was moving, because of me. I sat on one of the soft leather chairs in the living room and picked up the phone again.

‘Oskar,’ I began, wanting the initiative in the conversation, ‘why are you moving out? What do you mean, it’s because of me?’

‘Because of you, yes,’ Oskar said. ‘There is a lot of damage to the floors, yes?’

‘Yes, but I’m sure they can be fixed,’ I said, hurriedly. ‘I can pay, if you want a professional...’

‘No, no,’ Oskar said. ‘I will have them sanded, but it’s not important. There was some damage already, I think you saw.’

I decided to play one of my cards. ‘I took up a board,’ I said, ‘to see if it could be reversed, to hide some damage. In the kitchen. I saw that the underside was damaged, too.’ As we talked, I was trying to analyse Oskar’s tone. It was a difficult job – there was a strange, suppressed quality to his voice, as if he was holding back from something. But it wasn’t the anger that I had expected, it was something else.

One the other side of the flat, the workmen were in the study, measuring the piano.

‘So you saw the note, then,’ Oskar said. ‘Laura threw a bottle at me...’ There was an unidentifiable noise on the line. It was not electronic – was Oskar crying?