The Yellow Chair

on furniture and what it can hold

It’s painfully hot again and I’m trying not to spiral. I’m doing better during this heatwave than the last. Maybe my anxiety is too drenched in sweat to raise its head.

I’m back in the yellow chair and a white butterfly is fluttering sweetly across the glass of the bay window. A lot of the flowers I planted a month or so ago look like they’ve burnt to a crisp. They’ve only known unbearable heat or sodden days since they took residence here, so I’m as hapless a gardener as I would have predicted myself to be.

This chair I’m sitting in is a tiny island. It was a Facebook marketplace find when my son was only a few months old and I knew it was either find a new place to sit or set fire to all of our furniture.

Is furniture like that for you? Does it have an expiry date? Does it hold memories?

When we moved into this house (someone let us get a mortgage?!) the previous owners left a bunch of stuff. Some of it was useful - two sofas, a shelving unit - and some of it much less so. A shed full of rusted paint cans. A loft with two ancient wardrobes propped in the eaves that I can only imagine are home to a family of chubby rats.

So, the sofas. They were useful in that we needed somewhere to sit and we didn’t have anywhere, but christ were they ugly. Hulking lumps of dark brown leather with the little levers on the side you could pull to recline. My husband fell in love immediately.

The small one went out into the shed at the end of our garden. Now it’s actually sat on our back lawn after I spent the weekend clearing space for work that starts in a few days (my own writing room!!!) and soon our lovely landscaper will come and chuck it in a skip. That will be a good day.

The larger one stayed against the back wall of our living room and the squeaky surface saw me through an entire pregnancy, though I spent the final few weeks bouncing on a birthing ball rather than ending up marooned in its crevices. It held me the earliest newborn days when our cat, Percy, got hit by a car and died and I had to sleep there because the grief of losing my first pet mingled with my tender postpartum nervous system and the fear of slipping once again into the darkness of depression meant that sleep deprivation had to be counteracted for at least one night. The leather soon became covered in milky rings from resting my son’s bottle down between feeds. They overlapped and crusted. Sometimes I would have the energy to wipe them away, but mostly they would stay.

That July, when the baby was eight weeks old and my daughter was flying through her last summer before starting school, my husband went to a football match. If he could see that I was calling it a football match he would roll his eyes. England were playing Italy in the final of the European Championship at Wembley Stadium in what would turn out to be both a devastating defeat and a covid superspreader event.

I had worked in a bustling central London hospital throughout the pandemic, part of that whilst pregnant, yet the virus did not catch me until my husband came home from that night surrounded by nearly 70,000 others, seven months before all restrictions were finally lifted. Why that went ahead, why my husband went… well, that’s for another day, I suppose.

He became ill a day or so later, and I tested positive not long after. He was already in bed, relegated to the box room, and I was worried. I was also hanging on by a thread with a newborn and a four-year-old in the blazing July heat, not sleeping much at night, no chance to catch up during the day. And stick, stick, sticking to the skin of my children and the leather of that godawful sofa.

The milk rings became sour. Our surviving cat began bringing in mice and small frogs and, once, a lizard. There were maggots writhing in the food bin. I had to grow a strong stomach that stifling week while I mothered and disinfected and wrapped up the bodies of small creatures to slip under the lid of the outside dustbin, all while my husband worsened on an airbed in the tiniest room in the house. I felt very lonely despite never being more than a foot away from one or another of my children.

Then there was a day when I didn’t feel quite so feverish, when my son would let me put him in his little bouncy chair for more than seventeen seconds, when my daughter pottered around the garden making me a special drink full of muddy water and dried leaves. Soon, my husband could make it down the stairs and the loneliness began to subside a little.

But what I couldn't do was sit on that sofa anymore. I would sit cross-legged on the floor or stiffly on one of the metal garden chairs we were using at the dining table. Even the thought of sinking back into the leather made me feel nauseous. An overreaction? Maybe. But nothing I could control.

With my tiny son, I drove to an anonymous housing estate to collect the yellow wing-backed chair, still in its box, from a man in a fourth floor flat. Obviously it crossed my mind that this was where I would die. I did not die. Instead, I assembled the chair as soon as we walked back through the door. I tested it out with a deep sigh of relief. A fresh start.

The old monstrosity along the back wall was unceremoniously hacked apart by two men who we paid fifty quid to dispose of it. The triumph I felt as they revved up the power saw and chopped it in half was unexpected and vital. No one could make me keep that wreck anymore.

We have a new sofa now. It’s forest green and - though I try to remedy it every day - covered in dog hair. There’s the side you get to sit on if you’re poorly because it’s next to the radiator which is the perfect place to put your cup of tea, and the side that the dog sprawls across, belly up, until she’s cajoled back to the floor. The children perform somersaults on its overstuffed cushions on a Saturday morning when they get to come down and watch cartoons in their pants. My husband falls asleep there on a Sunday afternoon watching the Formula One. I like to stretch my legs out when I’m alone and crack the spine of my book, crushed velvet under my skin.

The yellow chair is no longer box fresh. It’s covered in the mucky handprints of childhood and the back and sides are cat-claw ragged. The pad dislodged from the bottom of one leg and gouged a huge chunk out of the floor as my son flew from one side of the room into its seat and it skid-skid-skidded.

But both of these places, these tiny islets, hold only good memories.

They can stay.