Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles Read Free Book Online Page A

I had been to a birthday party where the host’s presents included a ‘magic eye’ print – a rectangle of coloured static that, if stared at for long enough, apparently resolved into an image of the New York skyline. A succession of other guests gazed deep into this picture and then whooped or gasped or similarly exclaimed satisfaction when the trick played out. It would not work for me, remaining a poly-chrome garble. Look more closely, the other guests, my friends, said, unfocus your eyes, cross your eyes, look past the picture, don’t try too hard. I stared and stared, and they all looked at me with that same expression that the museum guide now wore, a sort of cultish eagerness.
    I pointed at the wall. ‘What am I looking at, then?’ I said.
    Before I could lower my arm or step back, the old woman grabbed my raised arm by the wrist and pulled it insistently towards the wall. I was stunned; a sick horror rose in me and I think I let loose a breath, a gasp of shock, but she still wore that determined grin. Her grip was like iron, and maybe I could have freed my arm, but not without a violent movement that was utterly beyond me. This woman was perhaps more than double my age yet I was completely unable to conceive of wresting free of this grip that terrified me. My muscles were heavy wads of wet toilet tissue. She pulled my hand forward so that the index finger, still extended, went into one of the holes in thestone.
How many years of filth are in there?
I wondered. And then my wrist was free – she left my hand with a finger pointing in this rough little hole. The hole was deep, maybe three inches or more – it almost swallowed my finger. It was too deep to have been made by some natural process of erosion, and there were many others like it.
    ‘Pan!’ the woman said, quite suddenly, a short, explosive syllable. ‘Pan! Pan!’ She was pantomiming firing a rifle. Maybe in other circumstances the sight would have been comical. But not now.
    ‘Pan!’
    I saw now, and whipped out my finger as if it had been burned. These pockmarks were bullet holes. The side of the museum had been riddled with bullets. From what war or revolution? Who had been fighting whom? Was it even fighting? They could have just lined people up in this alley and shot them. Revolutionary justice. Counter-revolutionary justice.
    The museum guide was still grinning at me. She could see that I now knew what I was looking at, I was sure. Maybe she thought that this was what tourists wanted to see, the real history. She clearly had me pegged as a foreigner – maybe she thought, or knew from experience, that Westerners were likely to be unenchanted by the displays inside the museum and instead had a ghoulish fascination with the story drilled into its stone, its guts, the real thing. I still did not know if these scars were recent or not. But it seemed to me that most of the history here was recent. I doubted that their television schedules were cluttered with
I
♥
the 1980s
. Strikes and shortages, curfewsand disappearances. The holes were a presence, not an absence. They awed and chilled me.
    I ran my fingertips over a hole at chest level. Dug into solid stone at the bottom of that hole was a chunk of lead. What did it pass through before pitting the wall? The air, alive with shouts and commands and terrible noises; and skin, and muscle and sinew, and bone and blood? Had the blood been washed off, or was it now a component of the black filth that coated every inch of the wall? From blood to crud; vital motivating fluid one moment, dirt the next. Whose blood, though, if it was indeed there at all? Why spilled? What for? Fascist? Communist? Nationalist? Dissident? Loyalist? Monarchist? Collaborator? Resistance? Might this have been a freedom fighter’s corpuscles, or were these terrorist cells? Whoever had won would now decide that. Faceless idealists flitted in my imagination. Or no one, nothing – a bullet hurled through air ringing with