Daniel Addercouth

Ewan’s father rotates each tile as he lays it down on the hallway rug, making sure to follow the pattern on the hand-drawn sketch he’s holding. Each hexagonal tile has two white and two black stripes like a zebra. Once he’s put down eight tiles, he turns to Ewan. “This is how she wanted it,” he says, pointing to the diagram. Seeing Mum’s distinctive cross-hatching makes Ewan miss her. She was always making beautiful things, like the hallway rug, which she wove herself. Dad used to say she was too talented to be working as an art teacher at the local school here in this godforsaken corner of the Scottish coast.

“See how the pattern repeats with every fourth hexagon?” Dad says. “It’s called a periodic tiling.”

Mum had been asking Dad to redo the bathroom floor for years, to replace the ugly brown-and-cream tiles the previous owner had left. But then she got ill and there were other things to worry about. Now Dad’s finally going to do it, after Ewan knocked one of Mum’s decorative beach stones off a shelf and cracked a brown-and-cream monstrosity. He and Ewan made the two-hour drive to Inverness the previous weekend to pick them up from a special shop. The boxes were surprisingly heavy. A lot of 14-year-olds would have refused to go on such an errand with their father, but Ewan didn’t have anything better to do on a Saturday. And he knows how much Dad wants the floor to look nice.

Dad tapes the sketch to the bathroom wall. He shows Ewan how to apply the mortar to the floor with the trowel and how to lay the tiles on top. “Make sure you rotate them to match the pattern.” He demonstrates how to put blue plastic spacers between the hexagons so they’re the right distance apart. Dad lays a few to show him how it’s done, then he lets Ewan have a go.

“Well done,” Dad says as Ewan manoeuvres the tile into position. Dad adjusts the hexagon slightly so it’s perfectly lined up and pops in a spacer.

“You can tile an infinite plane with hexagons without any gaps,” Dad explains. “In mathematics it’s called tessellation.” Ewan nods. He knows this already, just as he knows his father is parroting what he’s read on Wikipedia without really understanding it. Dad has been coming out with this stuff ever since Ms Sharma asked him to the school to tell him Ewan had obtained a perfect score on the Intermediate Mathematical Challenge. There’s been more of this kind of talk lately, after Ewan’s grades slipped following his mother’s death. He wants to do well at school, but somehow he always gets distracted during tests.

They work in silence. The rain beats on the bathroom window. The hexagons spread across the floor like pieces in a board game. Ewan calculates that, at their current speed, it will take them another two hours and 10 minutes to cover the space, not including the edge pieces which will have to be cut to shape.

Dad’s mobile phone rings. He looks at the screen, sighs, and puts down his trowel. “Moira. What can I do for you?” He frowns as he listens. “Oh shit. I’m sorry. I’ll be there right away.”

He ends the call. “The shower I installed for her has started leaking. I have to go over.”

Ewan looks at the tiles. “What should I do?”

Dad thinks. “Keep going. Leave the edges, I’ll do them later. Oh, and please try to concentrate, won’t you?”

After Dad leaves, Ewan continues laying the tiles, making sure to follow the instructions carefully. He wants the floor to be just the way Mum planned it. He checks the diagram and takes care to rotate each tile correctly. The pattern is pretty simple once you understand it. It looks good. The stripes running in different directions create the illusion of mysterious three-dimensional spaces. He imagines how pleased Mum would have been. That gets him thinking about hospital beds and how empty the house feels without her laughter and her constant enthusiasm for new projects. He forces himself to think about maths instead. That helps when he wants to distract himself, like when he’s standing alone in the corner of the schoolyard while the other boys from his class play football.

He tries to visualise the Euclidean plane extending to infinity in all directions. He imagines having the task of tiling it. Like Sisyphus, who his father once told him about, endlessly rolling the same boulder up a hill. Except he wouldn’t be performing the same job over and over again, but doing one task of infinite scope, which would also take the whole of eternity. He wonders which he would prefer. Is one of them less futile, or do they amount to the same thing in the end?

It’s the middle of the afternoon when Dad returns, his clothes soaked from the rain. “Sorry, that took longer than I expected.” He stands in the doorway of the bathroom and looks at Ewan’s handiwork. “You’ve made good progress. Well done.”

“Thank you,” says Ewan quietly. He was hoping Dad would be pleased.

Nodding, Dad surveys the room. “Better than I could have –” His voice trails off.

Ewan looks up at his father, who’s frowning. “Is everything OK, Dad?”

Dad is propping up his chin with his hand. “It’s my fault for telling you to keep going.”

Ewan looks at the tiled floor, trying to figure out what his father is looking at. At first everything looks perfect. Then he sees it. One tile is rotated 60 degrees out of position, disrupting the pattern. He doesn’t know how it happened. He was trying so hard to concentrate. He knows how much his father wanted the pattern to be perfect. “I’m sorry.”

He sits on the edge of the bath and stares at the tiles with their black-and-white stripes. His eyes slip out of focus and the images of the tiles slide around, until the tiles with the same rotation intersect and the image stabilises. Except now it looks like it’s further away, below the surface of the bathroom floor. The mislaid tile stands out. The image flickers back and forth, because each eye is seeing a slightly different tile. As if his brain can’t decide how to interpret it.

Dad sits down next to Ewan and puts his arm around him. “Your mother used to tell me a story whenever I made a mistake. She said in the old days carpet weavers would deliberately add errors to their patterns, because only God could create something perfect.”

Ewan looks up. “Really?”

“It’s called a Persian flaw. Your mother would have approved.”

Ewan studies the floor. The mistake really isn’t that noticeable. “We still need to do the edges.”

Dad nods. “Let’s keep going.”

Daniel Addercouth

grew up on a remote farm in the north of Scotland but now lives in Berlin, Germany. His stories have appeared in National Flash Fiction Day’s FlashFlood, Free Flash Fiction and New Flash Fiction Review, among other places.

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Twitter: @RuralUnease