The other chair

Fiction, about two adults over 18. She knew exactly how to run it from the other end of the room. Asking for it herself took eleven days and a note she nearly did not leave.

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

A story by the editor.

Neil asked me for it eleven years ago, badly, standing at the sink with his back to me. I said yes before I had properly worked out whether I meant it, and I have run the whole thing ever since. The day, the reason, the number, the point at which we stop. I am good at it in the way anybody gets good at a thing they do fortnightly for a decade.

In March I started wanting the other chair.

It arrived the way a draught does. I noticed it in one spot, by the back door, and then over about six weeks I found it everywhere in the house.

What I actually did was read a paragraph on a forum, written by a woman in Leeds, about what twenty minutes does to the inside of her head. I read it on the Tuesday. I read it again on the Thursday. Three weeks later I went looking for it using a search term I had to invent, because I could not bring myself to type the obvious one into a machine that also does the shopping.

None of this was ever Neil's fault, and I want that established early, because people hear a story like this one and immediately go looking for the villain in it.

What defeated me was the words.

I have an enormous vocabulary for this and every single item in it points the wrong way. I can say warm up. I can say I will check in with you halfway. I can say hands on the back of the chair.

I can say I am going to stop when your shoulders go, whether you have finished the number or not, and I can say all of it in a voice I never once had to practise. None of it works from over there. From over there the whole thing collapses into one sentence, which is that I want him to do it to me, and there is no dressing that up.

I tried for eleven days.

I wrote it on paper, which was deliberate. A text can be opened at the wrong moment, on a platform, next to somebody. I did not want him reading it in front of the man who does the MOT.

The first draft was two sides and read like a submission to a parish council. I had a paragraph explaining where it had come from. I had another paragraph promising it did not mean I wanted to stop doing what we already do, because apparently I thought he would need reassuring about the timetable. There was a sentence beginning "I have thought about this very carefully," which is a phrase I have never once believed when it has been said to me.

The second draft was jokey. Three lines with an escape hatch built into the last one, so that if his face did anything at all I could tell him I was messing about. I read it back twice and put it in the bin, and then took it out of the bin and burned it on the hob, because that is where I had got to by then.

The fifth draft was five sentences long and I could not look at it directly. It is the one I sent.

I could have handled a no. Neil has said no to me maybe four times in twenty-two years and every one of them was the right call.

The danger was the tone. If he had been pleased about it, in the way men can be pleased, with a bit of a grin in it, I would have taken the whole thing back inside the hour and never raised it again. I also had a smaller fear that I am less proud of, which was that he had been waiting eleven years for me to come round, and that everything I had run in that time had been a holding pattern.

And underneath both of those there was the real one. In this house I am the person who knows how it works. I read the room and I call it early, and I own the calm voice and the drawer with the brush in it. Asking meant standing in front of my own husband and being a beginner at forty-three, in the one area of our life where I have never had to be.

The note lived in the zip pocket of my bag for eleven days. It went in on a Wednesday and came out on a Sunday, softer at the folds than when it went in. I took it to work with me. I took it to my mother's, which I still cannot account for.

Twice I got close to just saying it. Once in the car park at Sainsbury's, with the engine off. Once in bed with the light already out, which is the coward's window and I did not even manage that one. Both times the thing that came out of my mouth instead was a question about the guttering.

I did it on a Sunday at twenty past four, for no better reason than that I could not face another Tuesday with it in my bag.

I put it on the table by his keys, folded once, nothing written on the outside. Then I went into the kitchen and shut the door and took every knife and fork out of the drawer and washed a drawer that did not need washing.

He came in at one minute past five.

Forty minutes. I know it was forty because I looked at the clock on the oven about once a minute and I can still see the numbers.

The television stayed on for a while, which told me nothing. Then it went off, which was much worse. After that there was no sound out of that room at all, and a man reading five sentences does not need eight minutes, so he was reading them again, and I could not decide what that meant.

By half past I had a full set of symptoms I could have described in my sleep, because I have been reading them off other people for eleven years. Hands that will not settle anywhere. Swallowing too often. Starting a job, then starting a second job with the first one still half done. And the one I trust most in other people, which is going completely still for no reason and then noticing about ten seconds later that you have done it.

That was the part that got me. I have handed out waiting as though it cost nothing. I have said Thursday on a Monday morning and then gone back to my book with an entirely clear conscience. Eleven years of setting the clock for somebody else, and it had honestly never crossed my mind to find out what the Tuesday and the Wednesday are like from inside.

I got as far as the door handle once, to go and take it back off the table while I still could. I want to be honest about that. The plan I had settled on was that if he came in and started a sentence with the word love, I would laugh and tell him it was a joke, and I stood at my own kitchen door for a minute and a half while I got that laugh exactly right.

Then the handle moved under my hand from the other side, and I stepped back, and he came in with the note still folded in his fingers.

He put it down on the worktop. He did not sit, and he did not do the thing I had spent eleven days dreading, which was to arrange his face into something.

He said, "What do you want afterwards."

It is my question. It is the question I ask him every single time, in the car or over the washing up, because you cannot make the plan without it and because almost everybody forgets to. He has been answering it for eleven years. I had never once heard it pointed at me.

I stood there with a wet cutlery drawer in front of me and I could not answer. Not a single word came out. He waited a while and then said that not knowing was allowed, and that I could tell him on the day, or afterwards once I did know.

Then he said, "Sunday. Not this one. The one after."

He picked his glasses up off the side, and went back through, and after a minute I heard the television come on again.

There is a thing I have said to Neil about fifty times over the years, in the calm voice, usually while he is somewhere between deciding and admitting. The asking is the hard part. Everything after the asking is admin.

I meant it kindly every time I said it, and I had no idea whatsoever what I was talking about.

People who know about us all want to hear about the Sunday after next. What happened, how many, whether I cried, whether I was any good at it, which is a peculiar thing to ask and they ask it anyway.

I will say this much and then leave it alone. Forty minutes in a kitchen with a drawer full of cutlery and a man in the next room reading five sentences I had carried around for eleven days. Whatever the Sunday turned out to be, it was easier than that.