Care of Wooden Floors Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘They’re not out to get you.’
    ‘I just do not understand the stealing of the vodka,’ Oskar said, gesturing at the bottle he had brought with him, which was now heavily depleted. We had been drinking for hours, and my guest was showing worrying signs of being a maudlin drunk.
    ‘You should know better than keeping it in a shared fridge,’ I said.
    ‘It is the only way to keep it chilled,’ Oskar said. He looked almost comically morose, like Droopy the Dog, summoning up hitherto unsuspected jowls.
    ‘I don’t know, mix it with Coke or something.’
    Oskar wrinkled his nose. His lip kinked in disdain. ‘I prefer it neat.’
    I sighed. ‘It’s a shared kitchen. You have to compromise. Live and let live.’
    ‘But they do not “live and let live”, they leave a mess, they leave the dirty plates...’
    ‘They’re students,’ I said wearily. ‘So are you, so am I. Relax.’
    Oskar frowned. ‘And this is relaxing?’
    Fogged by vodka, it took me a moment to register that he had asked a question. ‘What?’
    ‘This,’ he said with a languid gesture around my room. ‘This is relaxing?’ I tried to see what he was indicating and failed. ‘Well, it’s relaxing to have a drink with a friend...’ I said. Oskar was unnerving me. I remembered that this was the first time I had seen him drunk. He was an unknown quantity.
    ‘No, no, no,’ Oskar said. His voice rose and he became energetic, rising from his chair, pacing the floor. ‘This! Your room! The way you live! This chaos!’
    This took me by surprise. In another frame of mind I might have been offended, but instead I simply found myself surveying the room again, trying to see through Oskar’s eyes. The open bottle of vodka stood on my desk, or rather stood on the small canton of desktop not lurking beneath a thick carapace of books, papers and assorted detritus. Bookmarks bristled like tattered standards from forgotten wars, or the books themselves lay prostrate, open, held in the middle of a thought that could never beretrieved. Paper was scattered everywhere, but little of it had been fully used. Instead, each sheet bore just a couple of discarded sentences, or an arcane note, its meaning lost. Tired biros lay like pick-a-sticks. A plate, scattered with crumbs and waxy traces of peanut butter, lay atop one heap. A Frisbee lay at the bottom of another, and I had a vague recollection that it had served as an ashtray before being covered in notes. Another impromptu ashtray, formerly the lid of a jar of gherkins, now spilled cigarette butts behind the desk, into the lair of a medusa of extension cords. Above it all, my angle-poise shone cyclopically like the fire brigade floodlights at a midnight motorway catastrophe. The rest of the room displayed variations of the disarray of the desk in clothes, books, posters, bedding and the worthless paraphernalia that early adulthood attracts – dancing Coke bottles, inflatable guitars, purloined pint glasses, incense holders, broken CD cases, novelty bottle openers, a crippled cafetière.
    I shrugged. ‘I know it’s untidy...’
    ‘It is not just the room,’ Oskar said. ‘A room is not just a room. A room is a manifestation of a state of mind, the product of an intelligence. Either conscious’ – and he dropped dramatically back into his armchair, sending up a plume of dust and cigarette ash – ‘or unconscious. We make our rooms, and then our rooms make us.’
    I wanted to say:
There you go. That’s why they don’t like you
. I did not. I quit smoking. Much of the contents of the room would go into black bin-liners at the end of the term. After that room, there were other rooms, then shared houses, then a string of one-bed flats. I have regarded themall with the same dissatisfaction. This was Oskar’s gift to me.
    Gazing up at the ceiling of Oskar’s bedroom, splashed by a fantail of sunlight from the windows, I felt most satisfied. I listened to the city edge its way in. A tram grumbled and