Free Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles Page A

do with discarded white goods. I like to think that I had invested my work with a little élan, but it remained the case that if I had not existed, those leaflets would merely have been written by someone else.
    I regarded the piano with a mixture of curiosity and awe. It was all bulk, mixed curved and straight lines, reticent surfaces and concealed capabilities, like a stealth bomber. Do not play with the piano, Oskar had said. That presumptuous ‘with’ – of course, you won’t be able to play the piano, the most that can be expected is that you willplay
with
it, like a child, and you shouldn’t even do that.
    With as much care as I could muster, I opened the top of the piano and propped it up. There were its workings, complicated but unmysterious, ranks of sleeping soldiers, a harp set on its side. I hit a key and one of the hammers leapt up like toast out of a toaster, a note that gatecrashed the still-playing CD. Such a clear sound from a congregation of clumsy elements – wood, string, felt. Another note, clear and anachronistic in the music.
    A strident machine bleat tore the calm, sending a jug of iced water down my spine. I came very close to dropping my glass, and had it not been empty, I would have spilled some of its contents. To be careful, I put it back on the desk, and as I did so the electronic shriek repeated. The phone was ringing. What does one do in these circumstances? Answer another man’s phone? It might be Oskar – what time was it in Los Angeles? My great fear was that, if I answered the phone, the person on the other end of the line might not speak English, and I would be taken for an intruder and the police would be summoned. How likely was this?
    Third ring. Ring? It was like the death cry of a robot seagull. Eastern Bloc engineering, no doubt modified from the radiation leak alarm on a nuclear submarine.
    Fourth ring. If it was Oskar, it was best to seem ‘in’, guarding the flat. If it was a non-Anglophone, I would just repeat Oskar’s name like an idiot. I caught the phone in the first half-second of the fifth ring, an assonant hiccup cut short.
    ‘Hello?’
    A crackling, long-distance pause, the hiss of dust-covered copper cables. ‘Hello, hello, it is Oskar.’
    ‘Hello, Oskar. How are you?’
    ‘I am fine, I think.’ Electric emptiness loomed behind his words, and threatened to overwhelm them. I started to do mental arithmetic; Los Angeles is seven hours behind London, and I was two hours ahead; it was past 1 p.m....this was wrong.
    ‘What time is it there?’
    ‘It is late. Or early. I am jet-lagged. Are you listening to my music?’
    Variations
was still on. There was no room for ‘no’ in Oskar’s question. ‘Yes. It’s very good.’
    ‘Hrm. Is everything OK in the apartment?’
    My eye strayed to the cats on the sofa and the stain on the floor. The stain was actually hidden from me by the coffee table, but I felt I could still see it; a flash burn on the retina, always in centre view until you tried to look at it, when it swam away.
    ‘Yes, yes, fine. I meant to ask...’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘You mentioned a cleaner – when do they come?’
    ‘Does something need to be cleaned?’
    Yes, everything, always. ‘No, but I just thought I should know in case I’m naked or something.’
    A tram passed by, clunking into the distance, trailing with it my ability to take back what I had just said.
    ‘Are you naked now?’
    ‘No! But I don’t know if I have to be here to let them in or something.’
    ‘She has a key.’
    ‘OK.’ There was a cork on the kitchen table in front of me. My unoccupied hand picked it up and started to roll it back and forth between my fingers. Was this call really necessary? Was there some unasked question in the background, with the tinfoil shush of the line? Was Oskar waiting for some unknown reassurance from me?
    ‘You are having a good time?’ Oskar was in the habit of framing statements as questions – not in the infuriating