Care of Wooden Floors (12 page)

The crowd was also unclotting. A few concert patrons had bought drinks and settled at tables, small groups, husbands and wives, and a line of men had taken up positions along the bar, in pairs and threes, adopting the slight deviation from the vertical that indicates that they were there to stay, not simply to purchase refreshments. The mood was intelligent and self-satisfied, two things that I did not feel. I felt self-conscious, a lone drinker. Not a rare sight in this country, perhaps, a state of alone-ness. It was a state of alone-ness. It was the kind of place that started shooting political prisoners because it suspected that they would enjoy solitary confinement and internal exile too
much. The zinc surface of the table at which I sat was covered in little dents, as if it had been used for target practice by a Lilliputian firing squad. These little dents in the pinkish metal pulled my reflected face this way and that, obscuring my eyes, pulling my jaw into a John Merrick parody, making it look as if a whole second head was swelling up behind mine...

My name was spoken. Clearly, very close behind me. I didn’t even hear it as a word – I simply started at the sudden knowledge that I had been identified.

I turned. There was a tall man standing behind my chair, the owner of the second head I had seen swelling from my reflection. It was a long head, and prematurely balding, with wisps of incredibly pale blond hair arranged over an inescapable pink dome. An intelligent forehead presided over an assortment of young, pink features, animated with a liberal smile. Underneath this affable face was a black dinner jacket and a white dress shirt, open at the collar. Sweat gleamed on an equine neck.

‘Ha ha!’ said the dome. ‘I made you jump!’

‘Uh, yes, miles away,’ I said, twisting out of my seat and standing with the easy grace of a newborn giraffe.

‘I am Michael,’ said dome in German-accented English. His smile did the impossible and broadened, revealing a parade of white teeth of American splendour. He extended his hand, and I shook it.

‘Would you like a drink?’ I asked, gesturing towards my glass in case he was unfamiliar with the concept.

‘Yes, yes!’ Michael enthused, before his features darkened: ‘But not here.’ He scowled in the direction of the bar.

‘OK,’ I said, feeling a little dazed. I had been moving in the direction of sitting back down, and I straightened instead.

Michael stared intently at me for a moment, as if fascinated. Then he pointed at my glass on the zinc. ‘Finish, finish.’

I picked up the drink and drained it. The ice hurt my teeth.

‘How much money do you have with you?’ Michael asked.

‘About a hundred euros,’ I said.

‘OK. We can get more.’

‘OK,’ I said, pulling on my coat. ‘Uh, what?’

Out, out through the ventricles of the lobby, out into the rain-soaked street.

‘He owes me money,’ Michael was saying, ‘and he is being fuck about it. How is it said? He is being a fuck about it. Or he is being a fucking thing, a something, about it? A fucking something. Noun and verb and adjective – very useful, the English fucking; fucking useful.’

This monologue had been kept up since we left the bar, but as Michael had charged ahead of me, I had not been able to follow much of it.

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘Who? Victor!’ Michael said. We were passing the cathedral, crossing the great square. ‘He owes me money, and is being a fuck about it. So I will not drink there. I do not want to look at him. No more money for him!’

‘The barman,’ I said, filling in the blank for myself.

Michael stopped at the avenue’s edge, to my relief – I had been worried that he was going to march straight into the hurtling chasm of traffic, such was the momentum of his trajectory from the concert hall.

‘Yes, the barman,’ he said, looking at me as if I were a cretin. ‘The bar, man.
CHANGE!
’

This exclamation startled me, but it was not directed at me. Instead, Michael was apparently addressing the torrent of cars. It was past nine, and rush hour was long over, so that the city’s motorists were now able to pick up speed along its triumphal axes. This increased velocity added to my sensation that the pace of the evening was, if anything, picking up. I wanted to relax, not pick up the pace. It was an anxious experience, meeting a stranger in a foreign city – by now we should be making awkward chit-chat over a modest supper, but instead I was being startled by this frankly startling individual, Michael.

‘
CHANGE!
’ Michael bellowed. The city did not listen. The traffic continued to race past, tyres hissing on the drenched asphalt, beating up mist. Across the avenue, water was gouting from several points on the concrete monster where its gutters and drains had failed. I wondered that it hadn’t dissolved entirely, like a grey sugar cube. The lights of the pedestrian crossing changed and the traffic grudgingly halted. I now realised what Michael had been yelling at.

‘Interesting building,’ I said as we drew nearer the brutalist lump.

‘Horrible,’ Michael said, jerking out his left arm in the direction of the structure as if he sought to waft it away. ‘A
gift from the Soviet allies. They built it on the graveyard of the church. On the bodies of the dead! But the bodies, they had their revenge. It is too heavy. It is sinking.’ He stopped abruptly, and I almost ran into him. ‘Big cracks in the floors,’ he said with a grisly grin. ‘You can smell death.’

Unaccountably, I felt drawn towards Michael. I was starting to like him. He had flicked off the safety catches of the evening.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, joining his smile.

‘Near,’ he replied.

The bar was a brick vault below ground level, unexpectedly dry and not too stifling. It was filled with cacophonous jazz from a CD player with a stutter, noisy chatter, and cigarette smoke. The lighting was jaundiced and inadequate; with the smoke, it killed depth. Back in the bathysphere, sinking. We sat at a table in a vaulted booth, and a waiter brought us a bottle of red wine on the basis of a raised index finger from my host. No money changed hands, no price was indicated. The thought that Michael might consider a hundred euros inadequate funding for this evening nagged at me. Did he want me to pay for him, as well? Was this my treat? I detested my meanness.

‘Now, Oskar’s friend,’ Michael said, pouring the wine. It irritated me that he didn’t use my name. ‘Tell me about you.’

‘Well, I’m a writer,’ I said.

‘Aha! You write books?’ Michael said, eagerly.

‘Um, no,’ I said. I hated conversations that progressed in this pattern. ‘I write leaflets, press releases, that sort of thing.’

Michael’s brow knotted up. He had an expressive forehead. It would be an impressive feature even if he still had all his hair. ‘What are “leaflets”?’

‘It’s...like little books,’ I said.

‘Short stories?’

‘No! no...like...information sheets, eight, twelve pages...for local councils.’

A blaze of light issued from that articulate face. ‘A-ha-ha! Pamphlets! Political, yes? Jonathan Swift, Tom Paine...’

‘No, no,’ I said, exasperated, ‘leaflets...about recycling, and environmental health, and noise nuisance, and how to pay your council tax in instalments by direct debit, how to vote...all the things a council does.’

‘This is writing?’

‘It’s called copywriting,’ I said, emphasising the -
writing
.

‘You are copying it?’

‘No, the writing is called copy. But it’s very samey stuff. It might as well have been copied. You notice that the leaflets from one council read much the same as leaflets from another council. It’s all the same bollocks. Online is worse. But online it’s not called “copywriting”. It’s called “content provision”.’

‘“Content provision”,’ Michael echoed. A smile spread across his face. ‘This is writing. “Content provision.” You provide “content”, yes? This is fantastic. Then I am not a musician. I am no longer a musician. I am a “noise organiser”, yes?’

I laughed, and raised my glass. ‘To noise organisation!’

Michael returned the toast, and we drank, and he topped up our glasses. ‘The concert was good,’ I said.

‘Uff,’ Michael said, wrinkling his nose. ‘Some of it...I drink to forget.’ He drained his glass with amazing speed, refilled it again, and poured more wine into my alreadyfull glass, bringing it to the brim.

‘Well, I liked it.’

‘When we play, we are imitating the dead,’ Michael said. He had darkened with astonishing speed. The rapidity of these emotional oscillations reminded me strongly of Oskar. ‘Noise organisation after the fashion of the dead.’

I decided to disregard this. The English model of conversation – in which death either did not exist, or was a very limited phenomenon happening only to absent third parties – seemed far preferable to me. ‘What’s it like working with Oskar?’ I asked, with what I hoped was a devilish expression. I gulped at my wine, eager to keep pace and nervous of being seen as a lily-livered Westerner.

‘What is it like working with Oskar!’ Michael replied, with what seemed to be delight. ‘Ha ha! What is it like being
friends
with Oskar? I like Oskar, Oskar is a very good man, he...in music...he is a genius. He is fantastic, superb. It is good that he goes to Los Angeles. It is the correct horizon for him. He will be famous there.’

‘He’s only there for a couple of weeks,’ I said. ‘For the divorce.’

‘Yes, divorce...’ Michael said. ‘Did you meet her?’

‘Laura? Yes.’

Michael wrinkled his nose, again. ‘And what did you think of her?’

His expression made it clear that I was safe to tell the truth. ‘I didn’t like her.’

‘Yes! Yes...’ Michael beamed. ‘My God...She is a
bitch
, yes?’

Such was the savage, savouring joy that Michael put into this word, he forced a laugh out of me. ‘Ah, ha, yes, well, I didn’t like her.’

‘She came here and she was rude about everything, the food, the wine’ – he tapped the bottle – ‘We have Italian wine here, we have French wine! This isn’t Communism now! We have Australian wine and the’ – the vitriol reached a corrosive crest – ‘Californian fruit juice. Chateau Minute Maid, Cuvée 7-Up! She was rude about everything. I think she thought the city was very dirty, and she did not like the people here.’

I was beginning to feel guilty about my own private musings on Oskar’s home, but at least I had kept them to myself. And Laura had clearly considered Britain to be an unwashed, anarchic backwater, sliding backwards into dereliction and despair, so what she made of this place, well, the mind boggled.

‘I did not like her,’ Michael continued. ‘But Oskar, I like Oskar. But I work with Oskar. You are friends with Oskar? Because I think perhaps we all work with Oskar. We are all his co-workers. He lives his life like a job. He does this job very well, he is very efficient and successful. You are his colleague, too. He does not go home from this job. He is working when he is sleeping. You see?’

‘I think.’ I noticed, with a degree of horror, that my glass was already halfway empty again; it wasn’t this fact that
horrified me so much as the fact that Michael had also seen the approaching dearth, and was reaching for the already heavily depleted bottle. But then all the horror dissipated suddenly and totally, so totally that I was left wondering if I had felt it at all; instead I felt...good. I felt warm and relaxed. The atmosphere in the bar appealed to me, it included and enveloped me. The smoke and hubbub cushioned me. Some music was playing, appropriately Weimar-decadent, all accordions and clarinets and a sense of civilisation sliding towards catastrophe and the fact not being too important. I felt as if I could be a poet or an intellectual here, sharing a drink with a musician friend.

‘What is it like to be Oskar’s friend, then?’ Michael asked.

‘I haven’t seen him very much recently,’ I said, ‘since he’s been living here. Only when he has come to London. I’ve known him since university, though. We were quite close at university.’

‘Why do you like him?’ Michael asked. At first the question sounded perfectly straightforward. I opened my mouth and suddenly the answer skipped out of view. I was left with an inarticulate knot of intangibles and contradictory emotions. Then I realised that I had to say something, anything, just to break what was becoming an embarrassing pause. I had to start talking.

‘Uh, I, well...’ I attempted. Then: ‘Why do we like anyone? I like him because he’s different to me...he’s very intelligent and, I don’t know, I like his loyalty. Not his loyalty, that makes him sound like a dog. Maybe what I mean is that I like that he seems to like me despite the fact
that there’s no reason he should like me; at least, no reason that I can see. You know, he makes me believe I have likeable qualities. And maybe that’s what I do for him. I think that mutual reassurance is probably a big component of all friendships, really. I mean, I don’t choose to like him, I don’t think you really choose who you like, who you’re friends with. There may be reasons for your friendship, but they are never wholly clear to you. You can like someone without knowing why.’
Like you, for instance
, I thought –
I like you, Michael, but I cannot think why that might be
.

I stopped talking, concerned that I was rambling. Michael seemed to be mulling over what I had said. Either that or he hadn’t been listening and was trying to figure out what he could without making his inattention obvious. I sipped my wine, which was a little harsh, but growing on me fast.

‘Why do you think he likes you?’ Michael asked.

‘Maybe he doesn’t,’ I said, figuring that self-deprecation rather than honesty was the quickest way to end this little analysis session.
I’m sorry, our time is nearly up
...

‘Clearly he does like you,’ Michael said, intently. ‘You are here, after all, are you not? He has given his flat to you.’

This was true. I shrugged. ‘Only while he’s not here,’ I countered. ‘He has not sought my company.’

‘But here you are, after all,’ Michael persisted. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable again, but not threatened or under pressure, simply outside my comfort zone of thought. It was a sensation that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. ‘You must have some quality, Oskar has trusted you with his home.’