The only chair

Fiction, about two adults over 18. She is fat, which is not the subject of this story. The subject is furniture, and what it means when somebody works it out in advance instead of telling you it does not matter.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

I am fat. I have been fat all my adult life and I am forty-three now, so we can take that as read and get on with the actual subject of this, which is furniture.

Everything written about this assumes a body of roughly one size. It does it so quietly that it took me a long time to work out I was being left out of the instructions rather than failing at them.

Over the knee has never worked. Not once, not with anybody.

The reason is not mysterious and it is not tragic, it is geometry. A man sits down. There is a certain amount of thigh available and a certain amount of me, and the two numbers do not meet.

What actually happens is about twenty seconds of both people being extremely tactful while I try to distribute myself, and then one of us says something light, and then we do something else. Nobody has ever been unkind about it. That has not helped as much as you would think.

The arm of a sofa is the standard advice and it half works. A soft arm takes a heavy person and keeps taking them, so you sink until your hips are lower than your ribs and the whole point of the position has gone. You end up folded into upholstery with your face in a cushion, which is fine if that is what you came for, and is not what the diagrams promised.

Touching your toes I have never attempted, for the same reason I do not attempt ice skating.

Then there was the chair.

Four dining chairs, second-hand, bought off a woman in Formby who was moving to Spain. Wood, spindle backs, nice enough. I bent over the back of one because that was where the evening had got to, and there was a crack like a knuckle, and then a second crack that was not like a knuckle at all.

I went down sideways onto a rug. Nothing was hurt except one chair and all of me. He asked twice whether I was all right and I said yes twice, in a voice that was very calm and did not belong to me, and then I went and stood in the kitchen holding the edge of the worktop.

He thought it was funny about four days later. I did not get there for eleven, and even then only in the way you laugh at something to make it smaller.

Here is the part that actually did the damage, and it was not the chair.

After that I stopped suggesting things. I became very easy to please, which is what women do when they have decided the alternative is a conversation. If a partner proposed something I could not do, I found a reason that had nothing to do with my body: my back, the time, an early start. I steered every evening towards the two arrangements I knew were safe, and I did it so smoothly that I doubt any of them noticed they were being steered.

So I spent about six years running a background process. Will this hold. Can I get down there and back up again without help. If he suggests the knee thing, what am I going to say. It ran the whole time, underneath everything, using up the exact attention I was there to stop using.

I have had the reassurance version several times. Men who said, warmly and meaning it, that it did not matter.

I want to be careful here because they were being kind. But reassurance is a transaction and I have to do the second half of it. He says it does not matter, and now I have to be visibly reassured, and be grateful, and put my face into the shape that lets him know his kindness landed. It turns my body into a subject we are discussing. Ten seconds ago it was just the thing I was standing in.

What I wanted, and could not have asked for without a speech I was not going to make, was for it to be handled rather than mentioned.

Which brings me to a Tuesday in March, and a man called Stephen, who I had been seeing for four months.

He said come up when you are ready. I came up.

The bed had been pulled out about a foot from the wall. There were two pillows stacked in the middle of it, the firm ones from the spare room rather than the soft ones we sleep on. The kitchen chair was by the window, not one of the dining set, the heavy one with the four square legs that came with the house. On the sill there was a glass of water and a hairbrush, and that was the whole arrangement.

None of it was announced. He did not present it. It had simply been done, the way you would lay a table.

The middle of the evening is not the interesting part. It was about forty minutes and I have had better and worse.

What I will record is that for the first time in six years the background process was not running. There was nothing to monitor. The pillows were where my hips needed them, the bed did not object to either of us, and when he told me to get up and go over to the chair I went over to the chair without doing any arithmetic on the way.

All of the attention I usually spend on logistics was available. It turns out to be a lot of attention. I had no idea what I had been paying for it.

Afterwards I asked him.

He said he had done it the Sunday before. He had sat on the kitchen chair and put his full weight on the back of it and leaned, then done the same on two of the dining ones and decided against them.

He had looked up what the bed frame was rated for, which took four minutes. He had measured the height of it with a tape measure and decided it needed the firm pillows. He had moved the bed out so he could stand on the far side without reaching across.

He told me all this in the tone of a man describing how he got the boiler serviced. Then he asked if I wanted tea.

At no point that evening, or in the four months before it, did he say anything at all about my size. Not a compliment, not a reassurance, not a joke to show he was comfortable. I noticed that on the stairs, going down for the tea, and had to stop on the half landing for a second.

That is the whole story. A man moved some furniture on a Sunday and did not mention it.

There is a difference between somebody telling you it does not matter and somebody arranging the room so that it does not. The first is a sentence and it costs nothing and it asks me to do the work of receiving it. The second is half an hour on a Sunday, a tape measure, and a chair he had already sat on. Nobody has to be reassured about anything, because nothing has come up.

If you are fat and reading this: the problem is furniture. It has always been furniture. You are allowed to say so early, in a flat voice, as a logistics matter, the way you would mention a shellfish allergy to somebody cooking. And if the person you say it to reaches for reassurance instead of a tape measure, that is worth knowing about them too.