DANGER: NO FLOOR

It did not kill him, but it could have done. He pushed gingerly at the door. So far as he could hear there was no one down stairs but he was worried that he might dislodge something more. The door was stuck. He didn’t want to shoulder it for fear of falling. He stepped back and looked at the door of his living room again. There was the sign, hand written and stuck in place with silver gaffer tape. He glanced about. The electricity had been switched off but not the gas. It felt arbitrary, like what had happened to his front room.
And it was his favourite room too. Ben Worthless had wished it had happened to the back room which he barely use. But that’s the kind of pointless thinking he’d been trying to get away from for the past two years: If only this was like that, then that wouldn’t be like this. What do they say?: “If my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle.” Pointless thinking. He tried to look on the bright side. He was lucky it didn’t give away under him, or during Saturday’s now postponed party. The idea of them all crashing down on the family below, glasses of red wine thrown involuntarily at the walls as they dropped the three meters, made him feel sick. The shock of it and the smell of faeces and blood like when Jenny had been mown down in her new driveway in Waverly. So maybe he was lucky: ‘Fortune in misfortune.’
But it was his living room. It’s where he lived. Where he had lived. And lucky’s not what he felt right now. The walls were still painted ‘Jamboree Yellow’ from when he and Jenny had lived together. The colour just seemed too happy now. He wanted to go for the all white look with the ‘signature’ colour in the window bay, a brilliant blue, maybe ‘Retonic Blue’ by House Hue Executive. It’s the fashion: a block of bright colour to set off the white. But one needs fascist flat walls to pull off that kind of thing successfully, not textured wallpaper, which must be there to hide something nasty in the plaster finish beneath. Something too damaged to filler over.
He’d built this small platform by the window so as he could sit up there and type and gaze out up Warren street to the new hospital for inspiration. The surveyor suggested it might have been the extra weight that caused the initial joist to give. The first Ben knew was when ‘downstairs’ rushed up to say their ceiling was coming in. He never heard a thing. Apparently there was a crack like gunfire.
Everyone seemed to have gone out. They were coming back but Ben didn’t know when: Later perhaps. The engineer, ‘downstairs’, the surveyor, the builders. Suddenly, after all that activity the place had gone dead, everyone vanished, leaving him alone again and this time without the sanctuary of his front room.
“Fuck it,” he thought and gave the door a good kick just by the handle. It shot open and banged about in mid air like a loose shutter on the second storey. He edged toward the doorway and peeked his head over into what had been his room. Two thirds of the floor had dropped out emptying most of his possessions into the flat below. His upturned couch, computer, oak table, potted plants and guilty platform were all strewn below in amongst the possessions of the downstairs flat along with a mass of rubble and plaster.
Ben sniffed in the powerful smell of dust and rotting joists and then hurled himself from the ledge of his doorway head first into the room, diving forward toward the glass coffee table below like it were a far off swimming pool or a window back to the past.

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