Care of Wooden Floors. Will Wiles
for what I imagined was a considerable profit.
That mark … I went to the sink and wetted a sponge with a scrubbing patch on top, then dripped a drop of washing-up liquid onto it. Then, I attacked the mark with the ferocity of a wronged man. It was maddening, truly, to have a floor that could not stand the slightest flaw. A floor was made to be trodden on! It was where things inevitably fell. I scrubbed and scrubbed. That dinner party had been an odd evening. One of the reasons I liked Oskar was his truth-telling instinct, his directness about the failings of others, often without concern for social niceties such as their feelings. Really, it was only a surprise that he didn’t apply his frightening insight and uncompromising honesty to me earlier. But then I thought of his open contempt for my housekeeping abilities at university. And he later apologised, made a point of apologising, to me in person; in fact, that dinner party had been the beginning of a chain of consequences that had led to Oskar asking me to look after his flat.
Once my elbow and shoulder began to ache, I stopped scrubbing at the floor. I rinsed the sponge, squeezed it thoroughly, and wiped away the suds. Was the blemish still there? The floor was wet – it was hard to tell. Besides, I was beginning to feel that this blemish was like a flash-shadow left after a photograph has been taken, a blob imprinted on the back of my eyes and nowhere else. I thought of Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Tell-tale Heart’, in which a murderer is driven mad by the imagined audible beating of the heart of his victim, concealed under the floorboards of his room. But I was no murderer, I thought, and it would take a lot more than a tiny mark on the floor to drive me insane.
DAY THREE
I was lying in Oskar’s bed, not even slightly awake, when I realised that my surroundings had performed an unhappy transfiguration in the night. The bed now seemed to be of unlimited size. At first I feared that I had shrunk, but that theory did not stand up to close examination. The white duvet was as thick as it had been when I went to sleep, all the stitching and weave of the cotton was the correct scale, but the mattress and its coverings no longer had a visible end in any direction. Everywhere I looked, it stretched out to an invisible vanishing point, a white cotton horizon against a plaster-white sky. Sky, or ceiling? It was impossible to tell, and the answer did not seem to be important. Beneath me, I imagined a fathomless underworld of dusty springs. Above was the irrelevant nothing.
Slow panic. To crawl or walk out onto that trackless desert of duvet, or over the treacherous footings of boggy pillow-down, would mean losing my way, succumbing to snow blindness, and ultimately (in the boxer shorts and T-shirt I slept in) death from exposure. To worm my way under the duvet at first seemed a better plan; not so exposed to cold, at the very least. But a duvet that size must weigh thousands, millions, of tonnes, I feared, whatever its tog count. To crawl too far underneath it would be death – I would suffocate in the dark before the first mile was up.
It really was unfortunate. My immediate surroundings, in their proper place in the world and at sensible proportions, could not be more comfortable – I was simply in a bed. But as this bed had grown to encompass the whole world, it had become a deathtrap as alien and unforgiving as an Arctic waste or Asiatic desert. Any place, I realised, no matter how temporarily comfortable or inviting, is only rendered habitable by the promise of other places beyond it.
For want of anything else to do, I turned over. The horizon, a greyness that was really only a fresh, distant, horizontal quality of whiteness, swung into view. A tiny pang of seasickness came and went. Seasickness without the hint of an ocean; not so much as a drop of water. How long could one survive without water? Not that I could measure time – I did not believe that this ash-white dome above me varied its appearance according to night and day. I would have to conserve and ‘recycle’ my own fluids, I thought. The idea of drinking my own urine did not appeal. And I had no way of … decanting it. Would I be reduced to using a cupped hand, or somehow … aiming? The mechanics of the whole operation were not at all pleasing. Afterwards, I would have to move to a new place on the frontier, no doubt about it. I was not going to lie in the damp patch. Certain death in a prosaic wilderness was one thing, lounging around in my own waste was quite another. Fortunately, and this was the one bright spot that I could see: there was no shortage of identical spots to move to.
Incredible – I could not have been in this new situation for more than ten minutes, and already I was figuring out the practicalities of pissing all over myself. And right on cue, the question of fluids arose, and a mild complaint issued from the fleshy lower part of my abdomen. It was unmistakable, and it would only become more urgent. And there was something else wrong. A darkness was advancing in the distance beyond my feet. Maybe I had been wrong about the days and nights here, and this was dusk. But it was not dusk or gathering bad weather. It was spreading below the horizon, just a storm-like far darkness at first, but more resembling an incoming tide as it advanced. Storm-like, yes; it was the bruised blue colour of spilled red wine, a purple, thunderhead hue. It was Homer’s wine-dark sea, seeping into the white cotton of the acres of duvet, darkening as it grew deeper. At first, it seemed to be a growing lake that was approaching my feet, but then, in a dreamy instant, I realised that it was to my left and right as well, cutting off escape. I did not want to look behind me. It was no growing lake, I was a shrinking island.
At this moment of intensifying crisis, my bladder also wanted attention. What had been naught but a twinge from the early-warning system a few second ago had now, unfairly, escalated into a full-scale case for immediate action. I was facing imminent peril of an unknown nature on all sides, thanks to the Wine Stain from Beyond, and the need to go to the toilet. I had two top priorities, both of them evacuation. But there was also something strangely reassuring about this sudden desire to urinate. It was the most familiar thing about these circumstances. It was a factor that appeared to come from beyond this contrived terrain of duvet and mattress and threatening darknesses. It was real; I was certain of it. I really did need to go to the loo – it was something that I could measure empirically and had experienced before. I began to suspect, very strongly, that everything else might be a dream. And as if detecting my lack of confidence in it, my new reality all at once felt far less substantial.
The stain had advanced to within two feet of my two feet. And with that, consciousness fell hard around me like a cookie-cutter stamping out the rectangular shape of a king-size bed in the cotton savannah, and then lifted to reveal the walls of Oskar’s room beyond. Oskar’s room! I was sitting up, unexpectedly, and my heart started to beat like a rubber ball dropped on a hard surface from a great height. It was morning; there was sunlight and street-sound. I was awake. I needed to go to the toilet. Outside, beyond the French windows, I could hear the cats whingeing. The demanding little beasts would have to wait.
I pivoted on my rear, swinging my legs out from under the duvet (which, although it had resumed its conventional proportions, I felt it would be prudent to treat with some suspicion) and put my feet on the floor. This manoeuvre provoked a hollow bong from the mattress. Something in its echoes brought to mind whales calling in the ocean depths. The floor was rugless and cool; hours of bed warmth seeped from my feet into the boards. I stood, stretched, and trotted off to the lavatory, crossing as I did so a rhombus of sunlight. Its heat surprised me.
An inexplicable misery had overtaken me at some point in the night, and the promise of a day of brilliant sunshine seemed only to sharpen the sensation. Maybe the desolation of my nightmare had followed me out of sleep.
It felt most likely, however, that my low mood came from the following apprehension: I had nothing to do. Of course, this wasn’t strictly, technically true – there were various things to be ‘getting on with’; I needed to shower, the cats needed to be fed, I needed to be fed as well. But beyond these quotidian tasks, no activities were planned. This empty time – I had mentally categorised it as ‘relaxing’ or ‘pottering about’, both of which names imply some activity other than just standing stock-still or going back to bed – had been deliberately introduced into my rudimentary schedule in vast quantities, and I had eagerly anticipated it when thinking about my trip before setting off. This, I thought, would be the point at which my better self, the improving-book-reading, poem-writing self, would emerge; the time when I had removed from my path all the obstacles that I considered to be the source of my lack of creativity and self-improvement back in London. I had no work to do, I