chairs

You’ll never sell it, said the estate agent. Not with that chair there.

She pointed to the chair at the end of the double bed that my ex-husband sat on.

He wasn’t there now. He’d gone to the bathroom, or perhaps to the shop. I don’t know, I didn’t speak to him anymore.

Look, the estate agent continued, I’ve really done all I can, but no amount of vignetting or dodge and burn changes the fact that when potential buyers get here – if they get here – there’s an ex-husband in your house. There simply isn’t a market for it.

It’d been almost a decade, maybe more. It’s hard to recall. We’ve all been living our lives as best we can around that chair. The children say they like jumping off it, touching the ceiling. They said that about the bed too. The extra double bed that was placed in the centre of their shared bedroom. They said they were happy with their surprise bouncy castle world. 

It was alright at first. I found places for all the extra materials. The wide-screen TV got slotted behind the big chair. I back-to-backed the high-backed speakers and pushed them against the wall, stood creeper plants on them and watched them increasingly dangle over my all-too-present memories.

I’m taking you off the market, the estate agent went on. Until you have this sorted. It’s a waste of my time as much as it is of yours.

I didn’t want her to go. She was the only one helping me. 

I looked at the corner where the chair was, facing the wall. I looked round at the bed and the blue-grey wallpaper, carelessly peeling. The spider webs clotting in the recesses of the ceiling. I didn’t want to be here.

I’d managed to hold down a relationship for a couple of years. I’d explained the situation. How it was temporary. How I was trying to help him. How I only wanted the best for my children. For everyone. 

The relationship ended in the end, not because of my ex on my chair but because of his ex sitting on a chair in his house, crying and hissing at everyone. So many years. She’d fall to a heap on the ground as we were making love, screaming that she’d never said he could leave her, that if she only achieved one further thing in her full life, it would be to destroy him.

I said, I can’t handle this, and went back to my own house, where my ex was calmly sitting on his phone playing Candy Crush and vaping. 

Hi, I said, when I still spoke to him. How’s the house hunt going? The job? How’s your new girlfriend? Any, you know, movement?

He said the property market was a nightmare and what could he do, what could he do? He’d give me more updates soon.

I’d got rid of the bed from the kids’ room, at least. Moved the TV. There were occasionally tiny signs of progress. After a few years, I stopped telling anyone. They’d started to think I was complicit. 

Kick him out, they’d say. Why are you allowing this? Just take his key. 

But I couldn’t do it. How would I survive, just the children and me? 

I did want to be alone, sometimes; to go to work. I did want to take a night to myself and walk unburdened down the street. 

You’re using him, they’d accuse me. 

But how, I wondered. I only wanted him to leave. 

Come now, the estate agent said, holding me. Wiping my tears with the shoulder-sag of my own sleeve. Why don’t you get some counselling?

I’d tried counselling, but the counsellor had a house to herself and an ex-partner who had let her be. Her children were thriving; their hair was immaculate. I’d tried to find her through the veil of all the differences between us. Joked with her about my trials and tribulations. Said, don’t you just want to go for a walk sometimes and never return? 

It didn’t help. She didn’t understand me. 

Another friend said she got her ex off the chair in her house by finding him his own flat herself and doing all the paperwork and helping him furnish it. She says they have a healthy relationship now. He’s doing well. She meets him once a month in M&S to help him choose new underpants. 

My family give me Christmas cards to pass to my chair ex, ask what he might want for his birthday. 

A house, I quip. Every year. Or, I don’t know, some initiative!

I’ve told him he’s got to wear blue-grey like the walls, so I can better ignore him. That he can’t come in between 8am and 11pm, unless it’s his day with the children, at which times I leave, so he’s mostly there when I’m asleep. 

I went on a date recently. It was going well, so I brought him home. Totally forgot about it, didn’t I, so used have I got to things. 

Who’s that guy facing the wall in the corner, my date asked. Is this place haunted? 

He bolted to turn the lights on then tripped over my ex’s small suitcase. 

Sorry, my ex said to my date. I’m getting it sorted.

My children think it’s my fault. Because I’m the one shouting at everyone and forgetting where I’ve put everything. 

Why did you take the bed away, they ask. Why don’t you talk to him?

Life goes on around me; I witness the seasons. My hair has changed from brown to grey and thinned like falling leaves. I’ve moved the lamps to the side of the bedroom where he isn’t, so I don’t have to see him. I’ve told him where he can walk and which bits of the house are solely for me. We pass like that for weeks at a time with no disturbance. His presence merely a frigid breeze. A gentle reminder to stay focused, keep on ignoring it. So brief I might have imagined the whole thing. Yet so permanent by now as trying to imagine a world without wind.

Still, I am grateful. My chair ex is at least passive. I have heard of people whose chair exes will smash up sentimental items while their housed exes sleep. Who will text pictures of their ex’s new partner to their shared children and say, this shall be my final downfall, herein lies the blame for all your future failures, avenge me, poison this.

I move around the local area. I travel. I’ve learned to keep my secret, mostly. I’d get rid of the chair, but then I might find him perched at the end of my bed on a winter morning, apologising about how difficult it all is.

Lydia Unsworth is a poet based in Greater Manchester, UK. Her work has appeared in Banshee, Abridged, Perverse, Berlin Lit, And Other Poems, Oxford Poetry and Shearsman Magazine, among others. She is an NWCDTP-funded PhD candidate at the Centre for Place Writing, MMU, looking at kinship with disappearing post-industrial architecture. Her latest collections are Stay Awhile and This Now Extends to My Daughter.