Care of Wooden Floors - Will Wiles

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We make our rooms, and then our rooms make us.’

      I wanted to say: There you go. That’s why they don’t like you. I did not. I quit smoking. Much of the contents of the room would go into black bin-liners at the end of the term. After that room, there were other rooms, then shared houses, then a string of one-bed flats. I have regarded them all with the same dissatisfaction. This was Oskar’s gift to me.

      Gazing up at the ceiling of Oskar’s bedroom, splashed by a fantail of sunlight from the windows, I felt most satisfied. I listened to the city edge its way in. A tram grumbled and clanked its way past, tinny leper’s bell sounding, a protesting squeal at the points in the crossroads. The sound of duty also penetrated my sleepy mind, a scratching and mewing at the balcony windows. Shossy and Stravvy were hungry.

      I flung open the French windows to the chattering, brilliant city air. The cats snaked around my legs in that odd feline way – why do they pass so close when there is plenty of room? – and headed straight to the kitchen with the expectant purposefulness of factory workers at the lunch whistle. I followed, stretching.

      Shreds of the previous evening lay by the sofa – the papers, the wine glass. I attended to the cats and then filled and switched on the kettle. As it boiled, I tidied away my mess, the depleted bottle – with its note from Oskar – the newspapers and magazines, the glass—

      I stopped. A drop of wine or two must have made their way to the base of the glass on one of my many refills. There was no coaster beneath it. (In my mind’s eye, Oskar winced.) A 45-degree arc of red wine marked his precious floor, a livid surgical scar on pale flesh.

      This stain held my attention for a moment or two, ice running through my veins. Red wine stains, I thought. I thought of Oskar’s injunction. From nowhere came the memory that speed of response was the crucial factor in dealing with that sort of thing. Action was imperative, my brain insisted, disregarding the fact that I had been asleep for several hours.

      Without panic, I turned to the kitchen and ran a dishcloth under the tap, then returned to the scene of the crime. Kneeling as though in supplication, I started to rub and scrub. Satisfying; the mark seemed to shift quite quickly. After five minutes or so of work, I could not detect a trace of the wine. I waited a while for the floorboard to dry, and then inspected it, aided by the late-morning sun.

      There was still a mark. The slightest, faintest curved blush, hardly noticeable in the natural grain of the wood. A birthmark awaiting its final laser treatment. But now my eye was unstoppably drawn to it – as if it was as large, as black, as inescapable as the sofa.

      Clearing my mind, I attempted to appraise the area objectively, as if I was in the room for the first time. This was obviously not going to work. My work – my illustrious writing career – mostly involved composing and editing brochures for local authorities. Residents of Ealing may remember my acclaimed Know Your Library Service, but I consider my masterpiece to be Bin and Gone: How, What and When to Recycle, now in its fifth reprint in Southwark and translated into nine languages. (Want to know the Somali for ‘compost’? I can tell you.)

      Whenever one of these towering works hit the presses, there would almost inevitably be an error. Colossal, humiliating, Private Eye-worthy errors (‘Council Launches Literasy Initiative’) are very rare. But nearly every piece of printed matter contains an error somewhere. Most are invisible to the inexpert eye – a double space here, a full stop incorrectly italicised there. Only the editor will see these. But once he or she has seen such an error in the final printed product, that is all they will ever see. The beautiful clarity with which they explain the law on fly-tipping will be invisible to them – they will notice that a simple hyphen has been used where an en-dash was needed.

      And so it was with Oskar’s floor.

      I was fixated on the damaged sliver of wood even when standing at an absurd distance from it. It was nothing, barely visible – if it was noticed, it could be taken for a natural variation in the colour of the wood. But to me, it stood out like the European wine lake.

      The kettle had long since boiled and I made myself a coffee. The cats ate noisily. Again, I found myself trying to work out which was Shossy and which was Stravvy. It was impossible, of course. Even if I could somehow judge the personality of the cat, whether that better fitted a ‘Shossy’ or a ‘Stravvy’ was beyond me.

      I decided to compress all of my sightseeing for the trip into one day, saving myself the mental and physical effort of trying to find something different to do every morning, when I could be writing. Such was the indistinction of this country that I had been unable to find a guidebook for it in the bookshop at Heathrow, but did manage to find a Lonely Planet that included this scrap of pointless autonomy as an afterthought and dealt with everything of interest in the capital and beyond in just forty pages.

      Walking from the flat towards the Old Market – ‘the city’s ceremonial centrepiece’ – I began to feel that forty pages was rather generous. The city may well have been of Roman foundation with an illustrious Medieval heyday, but the vast majority of this heritage had been ripped down in the middle and late nineteenth century to make way for endless mock-gothic and baroque buildings of such lumpen construction and poor repair that they all resembled Miss Havisham’s wedding cake with an added layer of antique soot. The Second World War and the Eastern Bloc had also made their luckless debits and credits. I passed by the National Museum’s Acropolis-with-gigantism façade, saving it for later, and pushed on into the Old Market.

      In London, I was never alarmed by crowds, instead feeling that they were my milieu, the pressing discourse of humanity, the language of the Tube, the very soul of the city. Here, they were different; perhaps my nervousness was a product of not knowing the language (the phrase book in my pocket felt like a lead weight) or possibly of being such an obvious tourist. ‘The bustle of the market is a charming counterpoint to the grandeur of its surroundings,’ Lonely Planet informed me. However, it seemed that the enthusiasm of the commerce conducted at the market was a charming counterpoint to the utter worthlessness of the goods on offer. Meagre clumps of limp, filthy root vegetables were spread out next to mounds of Tupperware that seemed to have already seen one or more decades of heavy use; obsolete, tatty paperbacks jostled with worthless candelabra covered in peeling gold paint.

      Unbothered by this absence of any clearly desirable merchandise, the market square was filled by what seemed to be the city’s whole population. Never before have I truly understood the full significance of the word ‘heaving’ in relation to masses of humanity, but the market was heaving; one’s direction of travel was utterly limited by crowd consensus, so that whole quarters were closed off by contrary flows of traffic, and often your course was entirely away from your intended direction, dictated only by a new shudder of peristalsis in the folds and crevices the stalls left for their wretched consumers. Godlike above all this, the first-floor windows of what I believe was once the state department store had been given over to titanic posters for a Western cosmetics firm, and the six-foot-high faces of beautiful screen actresses and models gazed down smugly on the teeming hordes. The new, free men and women of Europe were as far from this ideal as they had been from the ruddy-faced perfection in the propaganda of the old state. I swear I never once saw anyone under the age of sixty – a charitable estimate – and they were all hunched and aggressive of demeanour with eyes that gleamed, as I saw it, with some unspecified, unneeded, unmotivated malice towards me in ways that I couldn’t even begin to quantify.

      If only I had something to buy, I considered, some purpose to be moving around, then perhaps I wouldn’t be so keenly aware of this sense of being, very literally, a foreign body. But what did I need? What could I possibly want from this place? Nothing occurred; and as I struggled towards the other side of the market the idea that I was simply there to take in the scene began to feel as absurd a notion to me as perhaps it did to the natives. It was not warm, but my skin thistled with sweat; I have rarely been less comfortable. Tube trains in stygian rush hours, supermarkets on the eve of national holidays; never have I felt so prickled and alarmed.

      I pushed through the throng, shakily counting suspicious glances, leers and glares, to find my way to the National Monument, where the crowds eased. As if answering the moisture gathering in my armpits and at the small

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