Care of Wooden Floors Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 itwould 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