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Authors: Will Wiles
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chagrin, that London was also sunny. I wanted it to be raining there, and sunny here, so that I could properly enjoy the
Schadenfreude
of the holiday-maker. But they would be sweating on the Tube, and when lunchtime came not an inch of grass in the central parks would be spared the imposition of a secretary’s pasty arse.
Time trundled on, trams rumbled by. No wonder they had served as muse to Oskar. They informed the air like the lowing of cattle, the same air of unthinking service of unknown needs. A tram is unaware of its timetable; even its driver, its guiding intelligence, is concerned only with his route. I decided that I would do at least one culturally improving thing today, if nothing else – I would find and listen to
Variations on Tram Timetables
, Oskar’s great success.
Noon passed. The day was broken, cracked down the middle like a paperback’s spine. I made a simple lunch, thick slices of Routemaster-red sausage, Land Rover-green cucumber, slices of cheese and bread, a sliced lunch conducted by a sharp, pointy little paring knife, a mostsurgical instrument from Oskar’s surgical kitchen. Consciously avoiding thinking about my actions and their implications, I pulled the cork out of the half-full bottle of wine on the kitchen table and poured myself a glass. A glass at just past midday, only an hour from rising, not a healthy thing. But this was a holiday, of sorts, not a time to be concerned with the formalities of everyday life. I would have to be careful, though, not to spill anything.
The stain was still there, of course, that damn little mark. It was so small and pale, nothing at all. I was now worried that my fierce cleaning yesterday had, if anything, made it more noticeable. The scrubber surface of the sponge had left tiny scratches in the thin polish of the floor – an oval matt patch, with that cursed little blemish at its centre. The message was clear – no more scrubbing at it. There was nothing more I could or should do about it. I had to put it from my mind, ignore it. There was no way Oskar would notice it.
What was I thinking? Of course he would notice it. I knew that he would. I chewed on a slice of sausage ruefully, and remembered the effort I had made to clean my flat before Oskar had come round to dinner that time. It had made little difference.
What did he want, after all? Even he could do nothing about the inevitable degradation of all things, the scuffs and scratches, the smuts and drips, the fingerprints and dust. Fingerprints are universal, the calling-card of humanity. I loved those forensics shows, the television police procedurals in which criminalists painstakingly reassemble human incident from smudges and residues, the blooddrop and lipstick trace, the soiled tissue and shed thread. In those, the most evil criminals were always the ones who left the fewest clues. When a killer left no trace, not a hair, not so much as a single helix, you knew that you were dealing with a real bastard, a psychopath, calculating, emotionless, outside the human. An intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic. As for dust, that was more human than anything. It is primarily dead skin cells. We are walking dust factories. However futile it was, Oskar’s resistance to this inevitable grime was magnificent.
It was too early for wine. I sipped it with care. It clung to my lips, and to the sides of the glass. Winemakers call this the ‘legs’, and it’s a measure of the alcohol content of the wine – the ‘stickiness’ is caused by the spirit overcoming the liquid’s surface tension.
Surface tension – not a bad description of my fears for the floor, and Oskar’s other perfect planes. His other plane of existence. What was he doing right now? Approaching 3 a.m. in California – he would be still asleep in a hotel room, in that city of hotel rooms and freeways. My mental image of Los Angeles was a sun-baked tangle of asphalt clichés. LA was the nest of his wife, his soon-to-be-ex wife,
Schadenfreude
of the holiday-maker. But they would be sweating on the Tube, and when lunchtime came not an inch of grass in the central parks would be spared the imposition of a secretary’s pasty arse.
Time trundled on, trams rumbled by. No wonder they had served as muse to Oskar. They informed the air like the lowing of cattle, the same air of unthinking service of unknown needs. A tram is unaware of its timetable; even its driver, its guiding intelligence, is concerned only with his route. I decided that I would do at least one culturally improving thing today, if nothing else – I would find and listen to
Variations on Tram Timetables
, Oskar’s great success.
Noon passed. The day was broken, cracked down the middle like a paperback’s spine. I made a simple lunch, thick slices of Routemaster-red sausage, Land Rover-green cucumber, slices of cheese and bread, a sliced lunch conducted by a sharp, pointy little paring knife, a mostsurgical instrument from Oskar’s surgical kitchen. Consciously avoiding thinking about my actions and their implications, I pulled the cork out of the half-full bottle of wine on the kitchen table and poured myself a glass. A glass at just past midday, only an hour from rising, not a healthy thing. But this was a holiday, of sorts, not a time to be concerned with the formalities of everyday life. I would have to be careful, though, not to spill anything.
The stain was still there, of course, that damn little mark. It was so small and pale, nothing at all. I was now worried that my fierce cleaning yesterday had, if anything, made it more noticeable. The scrubber surface of the sponge had left tiny scratches in the thin polish of the floor – an oval matt patch, with that cursed little blemish at its centre. The message was clear – no more scrubbing at it. There was nothing more I could or should do about it. I had to put it from my mind, ignore it. There was no way Oskar would notice it.
What was I thinking? Of course he would notice it. I knew that he would. I chewed on a slice of sausage ruefully, and remembered the effort I had made to clean my flat before Oskar had come round to dinner that time. It had made little difference.
What did he want, after all? Even he could do nothing about the inevitable degradation of all things, the scuffs and scratches, the smuts and drips, the fingerprints and dust. Fingerprints are universal, the calling-card of humanity. I loved those forensics shows, the television police procedurals in which criminalists painstakingly reassemble human incident from smudges and residues, the blooddrop and lipstick trace, the soiled tissue and shed thread. In those, the most evil criminals were always the ones who left the fewest clues. When a killer left no trace, not a hair, not so much as a single helix, you knew that you were dealing with a real bastard, a psychopath, calculating, emotionless, outside the human. An intellect vast and cool and unsympathetic. As for dust, that was more human than anything. It is primarily dead skin cells. We are walking dust factories. However futile it was, Oskar’s resistance to this inevitable grime was magnificent.
It was too early for wine. I sipped it with care. It clung to my lips, and to the sides of the glass. Winemakers call this the ‘legs’, and it’s a measure of the alcohol content of the wine – the ‘stickiness’ is caused by the spirit overcoming the liquid’s surface tension.
Surface tension – not a bad description of my fears for the floor, and Oskar’s other perfect planes. His other plane of existence. What was he doing right now? Approaching 3 a.m. in California – he would be still asleep in a hotel room, in that city of hotel rooms and freeways. My mental image of Los Angeles was a sun-baked tangle of asphalt clichés. LA was the nest of his wife, his soon-to-be-ex wife,
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