Care of Wooden Floors

But coffee first. The person in this relationship needed sustenance before the animals. Besides, a quick poke through the cupboards would also establish if there was anything tasty-looking for supper, and there was the horrible possibility that Oskar only stocked coffee beans that needed to be ground and percolated and all that tedious rubbish. It was the sort of thing he was capable of, and there was a coffee-maker-percolator thing on the work surface, its gleaming chrome winking impossibility at me. Those twisty detachable wrench-handle-cup parts pointed accusingly.

Thinking along the lines of the ergonomics of the kitchen, I tried the cupboard immediately above the treacherous mercury-shine gadget. The payload – a waft of dried beans and leaves, pressure-packed, freeze-dried, connoisseur-approved, corporation-imported caffeine for a dozen delivery methods – was hit instantly, but also released with that relieving aroma was a slip of paper that, sucked out of the cupboard by the air-pressure difference created when I opened the door, flipped, looped and swayed down to the worktop.

It read, again in Oskar’s cramped black hand:

Please help yourself to all tea and coffee, but if it should run out please replace.

I stared at the note, just the tiniest strip cut from a pad, for a little while. It was thoughtful. It also felt unnecessary, perhaps; it was pedantic. Did he fear I would strip the flat of the materials for making hot drinks, leaving him thirsty and bereft on his return? Why did he feel another note was needed? The concert programme was still on that table, next to Oskar’s instructions, which had seemed to me to be very comprehensive. But then, this was his flat, he above all had very specific ways of going about the business of existing. The sense of Oskar’s very recent departure from the flat was a static charge in the air. Here was a man with very clear views on what should happen in his home. He had always been particular.

Perhaps it was appropriate that a composer should make notes. At university, Oskar had littered the staircase we shared with slips of paper, instructions, proscriptions, statements of intent, reminders, invitations and rebukes. In the first week of the first term, a little note appeared on the back of the door of the shared toilet: Please use the air freshener. O. On top of the cistern was a brand-new bottle of air freshener: pine. None of the other toilets had air freshener, but this was the one that Oskar used. He had bought it himself. As it was pinned to the back of the door, I was able to inspect this note at my leisure on scores of occasions. The O was hypnotic – a perfect circle, with no obvious beginning or end.

That was just the start of the notes. The emphasis was generally on the NOT. Please do NOT make so much noise after 1 a.m. Please do NOT leave dirty plates in the sink. On our staircase, eight people shared a kitchen. It was the scene and subject of endless disputes. Oskar was far from the only resident with a retinue of grievances and bugbears, and he was inevitably the most courteous in settling them. But his clipped, frosty demeanour, the formality of the notes and the pathological neatness of his room put people on the defensive. The others engaged in volcanic screaming matches that were forgotten within hours. They screamed shithead and bitch at each other and went to the pub together that evening. Oskar never lost his temper, never blew up. He was regularly angry, but his anger was as controlled and modulated and systematic as the music he would later write. Similarly, he never erupted into riotous geniality or helpless laughter. I only ever saw him drunk – properly drunk, that is, different-person drunk – on three occasions.

Q: What does Oskar drink?

A: Neat vodka.

Neat. Ha ha. He liked neat vodka at less than zero degrees centigrade – its high alcohol content means that it does not freeze. He bought a bottle, the best the off-licence had to offer, for himself and guests, and had no other place to store it than the freezer compartment of the communal fridge. This was a big purchase for a student, and the bottle monopolised the minuscule compartment, reduced to a letterbox by a thick sleeve of permafrost. The girlfriend of one of our neighbours failed to appreciate that vodka has to be stored at below-zero temperatures, and transferred the bottle to the main fridge when trying to find a berth for half a tub of chocolate ice cream.

Moved from its small and little-used nook and placed in the view of half a dozen thirsty, thirsty students, the bottle fared as you might expect. Most of it disappeared within three nights. Oskar discovered this on the fourth, when he had company. He took this badly, and having established the owner of the ice cream (‘Not even someone on this staircase!’) restored the vodka to its rightful place – with a note attached, saying Please do NOT put this out of the freezer.

This dispute somehow sparked off an impishness in the others. It became their mission to remove the bottle, drink some of its contents, and leave the depleted vessel in an unusual place. At this point, Oskar and I became friends: he recruited me to help look for the bottle. I was a nonentity to the others – not unpopular, just uninteresting, only there to make up the numbers at parties. My peripheral status made me an asset to Oskar: he knew I was not among the conspirators, and enlisted me to help search for the vodka.

So we searched together. The first time it turned up in the toilet cistern. The second time it was eventually discovered tied to a light fitting in the hallway. The third time we couldn’t find it for weeks. We had given it up for lost when Oskar found it. Somehow it had been duct-taped to the underside of his desk. The tiresome repetition of the theft did not enrage Oskar – if anything, he seemed to become calmer every time it happened. A few days after the bottle was returned to the fridge for the fourth time, Oskar knocked on my door and calmly informed me that it had disappeared again. Usually on these occasions he looked grim and disappointed – I often felt that he thought he could actually change the attitude of our peers with his little notes and chilly equanimity, an idea that was patently ridiculous, as I regularly told him – but this day he bore a small smile. I asked him if he wanted help recovering it.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It is mostly urine.’

He raised a supermarket bag; inside was a bottle of Absolut and a bag of supermarket ice. That night was the first time I saw him properly drunk.

Only Oskar could have been certain of producing absolutely clear urine.

Neat urine.

There was, among the various coffee specialties and special teas, a jar of Maxwell House. The kettle throbbed and phlegmed. Milk was in the fridge door. Brown sugar in a bowl on the table. Mugs were on the shelf above the beverage-makings. A spirit of efficiency ruled in the kitchen. It was easy to remember the efficiency and economy of Oskar’s music, and easy to imagine the exasperation and frustration of his wife, with her Californian outlook and kitchen that was primarily used as a platform from which endless boxes of take-out cuisine could be eaten. Look into these steel surfaces for as long as you want, you could never make out the blood-orange, blood-transfusion blaze of the Los Angeles dawn. Europe’s skies are older than America’s; Europe’s clouds start over there and by the time they reach here they are tired and ragged from their journey.

Boiling water over granules, a tilt of milk, and I stared into the result. Pale clouds lived and died by an unknowable rhythm under the surface, storms pulsating, growing and shrinking in the atmosphere of a gas giant, updraughts and sudden sinks pulling in a convective pattern. A spoon obliterates the system.

Billows of steam and condensation rose from the mug as it cooled on the side and I began to look for the cat food. Again, this was a short search; the cat food was in the larder-style utility room, along with a martial display of tinned foods and sacks of dried goods.

On the floor next to two water bowls and two spotlessly polished dishes was a pallet large enough for sixteen cans of diced mystery animal remains in a rich sauce of whatever, with the shrink wrap broken at one corner and fourteen cans remaining. Each can bore, next to the incomprehensible Slav-ese (probably containing the words ‘juicy’, ‘stronger teeth’ and ‘at least some % meat’), a picture of a feline with eyes that twinkled like taxidermists’ glass and a tongue that, captured in illustration, would now forever explore that same corner of its smiling mouth. Cat rendered as brain-dead consumer, trapped in lockstep with thirteen clones, licking tongues raised to the right in a bank of Heils, eyes fixed without focus on an endless future of more of this delicious food every day. Next to this band of brothers was a sack of the miniature biscuits that gave this gloop some texture. And a slip of paper, neatly folded on one of the surgically clean dishes, that I had not noticed at first; bleached paper on bleached china.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR FEEDING CATS, I read.

Half a can of food in each dish in the morning and the same in the early evening. Each time with a handful of their crunchy mix each, and be sure to refill the water bowls with fresh each time. Move the tray with the dishes into the kitchen for S. and S. to dine, and then when they have finished clean the dishes and return the tray to the cupboard.

O.

That was fine. The general list of instructions had contained nothing specific as concerned the feeding of the cats, and this job was clearly more important than the making of tea or coffee, hence the fact that it had been honoured with a full sheet of notepaper. Oskar was the most attentive absent host I could imagine, even across half the world. The conductor, the composer of precise, clipped piano pieces, the lord of a minimalist and restrained realm, would not have left things to chance. My liaison with his flat, his world, had to be organised with far more care than he had arranged his liaison with a Marlboro-blonde art jockey from the history-less West Coast.

I freed one of the cans of food from the shrunken plastic and carried it with the tray through to the kitchen, where I set it down on the floor.

This must have been the auditory clue, the Pavlovian bell – the soft sound of tray with dishes meeting the dull glow of the kitchen’s wooden floor. At once, before I had even straightened up, there were two dull thuds from the bedroom and the unmistakable skitter, slip and scratch of claws against shining plank. Turning towards the source of the sound, I saw something I never expected – heading full pelt through the glass-partitioned corridor separating the bedroom from the kitchen, the cats had accelerated so much in such a short time that as they rounded the corner they left the floor, pacing the white wall like a wire-assisted Jackie Chan in a medium-budget kick-’em-up, flipped and held by the invisible hands of momentum and centrifugal force. As the wall ran out, so they ran down, not seeming to lose a joule of energy, only to stop dead in the middle of the kitchen, at least four feet short of the tray. But they didn’t stop – they slid with practised elegance along the trajectory they had set and wound up, kinetic energy burned off against wood, a neat few inches from their proposed supper, circling and making plaintive noises.

My jaw hung flaccidly, its tendons sliced by this display of athletics. As Shossy and Stravvy mewled and arched their warm backs against my legs, I fought the urge to try and recreate what I had just witnessed, to move them back to the bedroom and the tray back to the cupboard, to recreate the phenomenon, but it was clear that it would not work. The butterfly’s wings could not be unflapped, the cloud would never again assume the same shape. Perhaps they would do the same thing tomorrow, but it would never have the same effect as it just had. It had been done. The moment had broken and could not be reassembled.

Still adrenalised, I hefted the sack of dry food from the larder, fetched a fork (the obvious drawer, obviously), raked the lumpy brown treats into the bowls, and sprinkled the biscuit bits over the portions. The cats were already tucking in as this finishing garnish was applied.

With the recent feline acrobatics still on my mind, I wandered over to the scene of the feat. The floor glowed in golden perfection – it was clearly necessary for the stunt. On a whim, I walked to the front door and kicked off my shoes. Toeing the floor, its silken finish betrayed only the tiniest natural imperfections of grain and warp; it felt almost frictionless.

The decision was made by some over-ambitious subcommittee in the lower portions of my brain and failed to pass through the proper scrutiny procedures before the action it outlined was already under way. I braced, devoted the slightest of moments to a complex calculation of forces in motion, and launched myself down the corridor. After four and a half paces at the maximum acceleration I could muster, I braked, laid my stockinged feet flat on the wood and locked into a slide to the far wall.

Some twenty or thirty minutes later, the pain in my left knee and big toe had – aided I believe by a broad-ranging swear-word monologue – subsided from crippling agony to merely irksome.

By the time I had recovered from my pratfall and unpacked my bags it was early evening. The light had yet to die in the sky but the sun was low. I made a sandwich with some cheese and salami from the fridge and opened the bottle of wine that Oskar had left for me. I ate on the sofa with the TV on BBC News 24. The rhythm and jangle of rolling global news is an odd comfort, but the flat was filled with British accents and familiar branding. The repetition of bulletins and headlines was soothingly metronomic, a lullaby more than an alert. Rolling snooze.

I don’t know how long I slept on the sofa, or the exact time I woke, but it was night in the city outside and the room was washed with the Lucozade orange of sodium street lighting. Travel and unfamiliar places can be exhausting, and I was more tired than I had realised. One of the cats was standing on the sofa next to me, regarding me with a quizzical air.

‘Meow?’ it said, tilting its head to one side.

‘Yeah,’ I said, rising slowly to my feet and stretching. ‘You want to go out. Time for bed.’ Several joints complained as I twisted to free my watch hand from its awkward position. I was neither sitting nor lying; just sort of slumped. I must have dozed off. Struggling to my feet, I scooped the puss off the sofa and walked it over to the front door where its partner was waiting like a partygoer holding a taxi for a friend. They needed no encouragement to disappear into the night.

DAY TWO

There is a moment between sleeping and waking where one is free. Consciousness has returned, but awareness has yet to rip away the thin screen between the waker and his surroundings, his reality. You float free of context, in no place – not sleeping, not fully awake, not at the mercy of the unknowns of the subconscious, and not yet exposed to the dull knowns of care and routine. It is at this point, between two worlds, that I think I am happiest.

For a second, I was disoriented, uncertain of my location. I was surrounded by white, a bubble in an ocean of milk. Then, the details began to resolve. I remembered that I was in Oskar’s flat, under his white ceiling, under the peaks and troughs of his white duvet, on his white sheets and pillows.

The regime in Iran tortures with white. Its jailers dress a prisoner in white clothes and place him in a featureless white isolation cell, filled with white light. Food – white food – is served on white paper plates, brought in by guards all in white, wearing white masks. This becomes unbearable for the prisoner, an almost-total deprivation of the senses. Snow blindness. A disconnection from the limbs, from scale and perspective – freedom from context as hell, not bliss.

It was a perverse torment for an Islamic country. I had heard that, under Islam, perfection is the preserve of the Divine. Striving for perfection is sinful pride. Imperfections are deliberately introduced in artworks as a gesture of humility. In each of those fabulous abstract Islamic decorative patterns, there is a piously deliberate mistake, a flawed iteration.

How those prisoners must crave that imperfection. A mark on the wall, a shadowed crevice, a stained ceiling tile. Apparently it is enough to unhinge the mind – enough to make one do anything to escape that featureless room.

‘Why do they dislike me?’

‘Oh, Oskar, they …’

I wanted to say: Oskar, they don’t really dislike you, they just don’t really like you, you’re not like them, and you’re not an easy person to like. I didn’t say that.

‘… What sort of question is that?’ I said at last. ‘They’re not out to get you.’

‘I just do not understand the stealing of the vodka,’ Oskar said, gesturing at the bottle he had brought with him, which was now heavily depleted. We had been drinking for hours, and my guest was showing worrying signs of being a maudlin drunk.

‘You should know better than keeping it in a shared fridge,’ I said.

‘It is the only way to keep it chilled,’ Oskar said. He looked almost comically morose, like Droopy the Dog, summoning up hitherto unsuspected jowls.

‘I don’t know, mix it with Coke or something.’