of horror, some throaty, gasping protest, because the cat stopped, paused halfway through its steady act of vandalism, forelegs still extended, claws still exposed but for their points, which were dug into the hide of the sofa seat. It looked at me; I looked at it. It seemed, as it often does, so unfair and limiting that life does not have a little switch or dial that can turn back time a short way. A mere thirty seconds would be enough for most situations like this, not much to ask, but it seemed we were stuck with the tedious, unrelenting tyranny of linear time.
‘Fuck! No, fuck, shoo!’ I exclaimed, lunging towards the sofa. The cat took the message and bolted. I was left inspecting the damage – two ranked sets of tiny tears in the leather, strung together by scratch trails. It clearly could not be repaired, saving some arcane process known to a shrinking number of wizened old men that I knew nothing of. Why can’t leather simply heal up, I wondered? It is just skin, after all. I ran my fingertips across the scars, caressed them, but I did not feel them scab and seal under my touch. The surface was not completely broken, just deeply scratched. Maybe there were secret, invisible menders out there...but I didn’t like my chances of finding such a person in London, let alone in this foreign place. Looking down at the sofa, my eye of course strayed to the wine stain, beautifully framed by its pale, scrubbed penumbra. If the cleaner had seen it, she had either done nothing to it, or whatever she had done had made no difference.
My grandparents had a small pond in their suburban back garden, a pond that used to fascinate me, full as it was with slimy life. Frogs mated there, leaving great slicks of spawn. This was my childhood Serengeti. The pond was circled by concrete slabs. My mother used to tell me, the five- or six-year-old me, not to lean out too far while kneeling on the slab, a warning that I thought made no sense. I knew my own centre of gravity, precocious child that I was. There was no chance I would just fall in. But the slabs were not held in place with mortar or cement – they were just resting at the pond’s edge to anchor the black plastic waterproof lining. Years of moss and the encroachinglawn made them look like permanent geological features, but they were loose, and one day I leaned over too far, the slab see-sawed on the edge of the pond, and I was dumped into the water.
I remember being told once that, on average, a man will spend twenty-four hours of his life having an orgasm. This is no doubt apocryphal, but if you did tot up all those explosive seconds, you would probably arrive at a surprising length of time. And I imagine that we spend a similar lengthy period, over a lifetime, in the middle of an accident – in the act of tripping over, or dropping something breakable, or otherwise engaged in routine slapstick. While on my way into the pond, an appreciable amount of time between the moment when balance was definitively lost and the moment when contact was made with the surface of the water, a perfectly articulated thought occurred to me:
This was why Mum warned me not to lean over too far.
It made perfect sense now. Such a pity, though, that this insight should only strike at this moment, when the tipping point had been passed, when the situation became irretrievable. It was as if the thought had been waiting, fully formed, underneath the paving slab, waiting to be released and flit into the cortex at the moment of crisis.
This was why Oskar did not allow the cats on the sofa. This, this was the reason, not the hair, and it was only now the damage had been done that the reasoning became clear. It had oozed like a bead of blood from the gashed leather. Regretful, after-the-event wisdom; the Germans must have a word for it. Oskar would know. If they didn’thave such a word, they should. We rely on them for things like that.
The cats were off the furniture; the stable door was firmly closed
‘Fuck! No, fuck, shoo!’ I exclaimed, lunging towards the sofa. The cat took the message and bolted. I was left inspecting the damage – two ranked sets of tiny tears in the leather, strung together by scratch trails. It clearly could not be repaired, saving some arcane process known to a shrinking number of wizened old men that I knew nothing of. Why can’t leather simply heal up, I wondered? It is just skin, after all. I ran my fingertips across the scars, caressed them, but I did not feel them scab and seal under my touch. The surface was not completely broken, just deeply scratched. Maybe there were secret, invisible menders out there...but I didn’t like my chances of finding such a person in London, let alone in this foreign place. Looking down at the sofa, my eye of course strayed to the wine stain, beautifully framed by its pale, scrubbed penumbra. If the cleaner had seen it, she had either done nothing to it, or whatever she had done had made no difference.
My grandparents had a small pond in their suburban back garden, a pond that used to fascinate me, full as it was with slimy life. Frogs mated there, leaving great slicks of spawn. This was my childhood Serengeti. The pond was circled by concrete slabs. My mother used to tell me, the five- or six-year-old me, not to lean out too far while kneeling on the slab, a warning that I thought made no sense. I knew my own centre of gravity, precocious child that I was. There was no chance I would just fall in. But the slabs were not held in place with mortar or cement – they were just resting at the pond’s edge to anchor the black plastic waterproof lining. Years of moss and the encroachinglawn made them look like permanent geological features, but they were loose, and one day I leaned over too far, the slab see-sawed on the edge of the pond, and I was dumped into the water.
I remember being told once that, on average, a man will spend twenty-four hours of his life having an orgasm. This is no doubt apocryphal, but if you did tot up all those explosive seconds, you would probably arrive at a surprising length of time. And I imagine that we spend a similar lengthy period, over a lifetime, in the middle of an accident – in the act of tripping over, or dropping something breakable, or otherwise engaged in routine slapstick. While on my way into the pond, an appreciable amount of time between the moment when balance was definitively lost and the moment when contact was made with the surface of the water, a perfectly articulated thought occurred to me:
This was why Mum warned me not to lean over too far.
It made perfect sense now. Such a pity, though, that this insight should only strike at this moment, when the tipping point had been passed, when the situation became irretrievable. It was as if the thought had been waiting, fully formed, underneath the paving slab, waiting to be released and flit into the cortex at the moment of crisis.
This was why Oskar did not allow the cats on the sofa. This, this was the reason, not the hair, and it was only now the damage had been done that the reasoning became clear. It had oozed like a bead of blood from the gashed leather. Regretful, after-the-event wisdom; the Germans must have a word for it. Oskar would know. If they didn’thave such a word, they should. We rely on them for things like that.
The cats were off the furniture; the stable door was firmly closed
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