Free Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles

mark then was an expression of how deeply we longed to see the signs of others.
    Idly, I struck a piano key (I do not know which one – it was near the middle) and listened to the note ring in the air. On the far side of the door, the television was still on, near-inaudible, a soft rhythm of speech and jingle, and there was the street, cars (not so many), trams (regular) and feet.
    The trams dislodged a thought in my mind. I looked over the shelves of CDs, with their serious, wordy classical spines, and found a small section of works produced by the local Philharmonic. Oskar must have had some role to play in many of these recordings and, sure enough, there were some copies of
Variations on Tram Timetables
. Lou Reed was still in the CD player; I evicted him and opened the case containing Oskar’s
Meisterwerk
.
    There was a slip of paper inside the case.
    I hope you enjoy it! – O.
    (There is better to come when Dewey is finished.)
    How nice of him
, I thought, or at least began to think as the sentiment stopped dead in my mind, like the needle being ripped off the surface of an old vinyl LP. This wasn’t
nice
, or if it
was
nice it was nice in a sinister spectrum of nice that I did not have the ability to see. How many of thesenotes were there? Briefly, the thought of ripping the place apart occurred to me, before I shook it from my head. It was just creepy, not threatening, and no reason to go insane. And if you must go insane it’s best to have a reason. If anything, Oskar was exposing a mental weakness of his own. I should feel superior.
    The CD tray of the stereo was still sticking out, pornographically exposed. A tongue, a seedy player. I put in the disc of
Variations
and closed it, then scrumpled up the little note and dropped it in the bin. Was that a mistake? Perhaps I should have left the note in situ, so that Oskar would not know that I had been listening to his music. But the note had made clear that he welcomed my listening (‘I hope you enjoy it’), so maybe it was good to show interest. Also, if I put the note back now, I would have to smooth it out first, and it would be obvious that I had opened the case, screwed up the note, and then returned it, an obviously lunatic course of events. In any case, maybe the notes were Oskar’s way of keeping track of exactly where I had been in the flat. Faced with control-freakery of that order, what was the polite course – conceal traces, or helpfully leave them where possible?
    But it was impossible to second-guess tactics of this kind. If they really were tactics; there was the strong possibility that Oskar’s actions were entirely guileless and friendly, and my reaction was the aberration. ‘Crazy,’ I said to myself softly.
    Play. Oskar’s composition whizzed up in the player – his talent began its exhibition. The opening was very simple, a low metronomic note; then, with a higherdouble-note that sounded almost exactly like a tram bell, the piece suddenly became far more complex. What appeared to be three, or even four, different elements within the tune headed off in various directions, obscuring the composition with apparent chaos, then meeting and intersecting. They were simple, repetitive building blocks, like the beating of metal wheels over points, but at some moments it was difficult to tell how many pianos were involved.
    Originally, of course, only the piano in this room had been involved. How did one do that – hear music that is nowhere but inside, and snare it, note by note? Was Oskar a genius? I had no way to tell. Being un-musical, a six-note advertising jingle is a work of alchemical, transcendent skill to me. But Oskar was clearly gifted, set apart from all but a tiny fraction of men and women. An agonising wash of inferiority swept over me – what had I ever done? Here was Oskar’s skill, picked out in Dolby clarity. Thanks to my work, many London residents now knew the phone number of their borough pest control officer, and what to