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

forgotten slogans only to embed itself in this dead rock, which remembers it still. And the slogans echo to silence, and a man from an indifferent country sees the mark but not the maker, his time, his cause. All gone, and damage and trash is left behind.
    The woman from the museum, that strange creature who brought me here, wrinkled her nose as if to indicate
Ooh, isn’t this fun?
and turned back towards the street, talking merrily to herself. I waited a couple of minutes until I was certain that there was no possibility of awkwardly re-encountering her around the corner, and then followed.
    My stomach pinched and I realised with unwelcome timing that I was hungry. It was past lunchtime, the bulkof the afternoon was already gone, and my lower back ached from the walking. Doubly unwelcome was the realisation that I had a chore to run. I needed to buy groceries. Either I had to shop, or I had to eat out every night, and as I didn’t know how long I would be here, eating out could become expensive. But the notion of shopping for groceries while technically on holiday was repulsive to me.
    There was a small supermarket on the way back to Oskar’s flat – I had seen it on my way out. But at some point in its history, a thunderingly incompetent acolyte of Baron Haussmann had had his way with this city. Its historic street pattern had been almost obliterated by an attempt to systematise it into a grid. This almost-grid had then been further complicated by a series of non-orthogonal avenues that stretched out from two focal points, the Market Square and the National Assembly. This carved the plan into dozens of flatirons, splinters and sawteeth. On the map, it looked a little like a sheet of reinforced glass that had two bullet holes punched in it, radiating fractures. On the ground, my path back to Oskar’s via the supermarket zig-zagged in an uneven W.
    The supermarket occupied the ground floor of one of the spearhead-shaped blocks, a wedge like the prow of a ship. A heavy antique iron clock was cantilevered out from the sharp point of the block, above the store’s front entrance, layers of cellulite-lump black paint and hefty Roman numerals speaking of another age. And now it surmounted a buzzing mass of strip-lighting and ready meals. It was a purgatory of sticky linoleum and radiumblueinsectocutors. I bought what I needed and left as swiftly as possible.
    As I uncomfortably backed my way through the resisting front door of Oskar’s building, I heard a disconcerting noise. At first I thought the door was creaking, but that was not the source. It was a sort of creak, though, but also more than that. It was the sound of the blade of a spade being dragged along a pavement, only changing in pitch, rising as it went. There was then a fraction of a beat of bright silence, a bit of rustling, and a savage metallic slam. It was the sound of a mechanical giant with a lame foot, limping towards some malign goal. The twin sounds repeated, rusted yowl and mantrap slam. They were coming from upstairs.
    On the landing between the ground and first floors was a woman, hair tied back in the ubiquitous headscarf, her age an irrelevant point somewhere between forty-five and seventy. A life of poor diet and hard work had turned her into a huge callus, and her nose was pushed up in a way that inescapably reminded me of the squashed face of a bat. She was dumping rubbish-filled plastic bags into a metal-doored hatch in the wall of the landing, a rubbish chute with an age-degraded but still powerful spring on its opening. The effort needed to pull it down was clearly considerable, and it snapped shut with swift viciousness. Creak, slam. Hearing me climb the stairs, she turned and confronted me, demanding something I did not understand.
    I took an instant dislike to this new person in my life, blocking my way. After the troubling interlude in the alley,I did not care for further crone encounters. Also...I look like nothing myself, and try not to