The Extra Chair

Mr. Henne had taken the stairs like a negotiation.

Every evening he sat on the landing chair to rest between the fourth and fifth floors, even though he lived on the fifth. The chair was his. He had carried it up himself twelve years ago and no one had asked him to take it back inside.

When he died, the chair stayed.

Len from 5B found out from the notice on the lift, which Mr. Henne had never used. RESIDENT 5C. NEXT OF KIN NOTIFIED. The wording was so polite it sounded like an apology for dying.

Len stood on the landing with his shopping and looked at the chair.

It still faced the stairs.

Building management sent a note on the third day. Personal effects on common property were to be removed. Len wrote back that the chair was not on common property so much as it had become the landing.

Management did not find this legally interesting.

On the fifth day, Ane from 5A put a cushion on it.

On the sixth, someone left a glass of water on the floor beside it, which was either an offering or a mistake. Len drank it because the landing was warm and he did not like waste. He felt guilty anyway.

The next of kin arrived on the ninth day. A niece, brisk, kind in the way of people who have a van booked for 14:00.

She went through 5C. She took the radio and the good coats and a box of photographs. She stood on the landing with her hands on her hips.

“That’s his chair.”

“Yes,” Len said.

“Does it belong to the building now?”

“I don’t think the building wants it.”

She sat down.

The stairwell made its usual afternoon noises: a door, a laugh, a child being told not to slide the bannister.

“He said he was only resting,” the niece said.

“He was always only resting.”

She smiled at the floor.

“I can’t take it. The van is full of actual life.”

“We’ll keep it.”

“We?”

Len had not known he was a we until he said it.

“The floor,” he said.

Management sent a second notice. Len printed it and put it under the chair, which he felt was a complete response.

People began to sit.

Not as a memorial. As a landing. Ane tied her shoes there. The delivery woman from Lattice Market checked addresses there. A teenager from the sixth floor sat to argue with someone on a terminal and then forgot to be angry.

Len sat there the evening the niece’s van left.

The city beyond the stair window was Lattice at its most itself: stacked, repeating, not quite identical, like a thought someone had had twice.

Mr. Henne’s door had a new lock.

The chair had no lock.

On the fourteenth day management arrived in person. A man with a measuring tape and the disappointment of someone sent to win a small war.

“It’s a hazard.”

“It’s a chair.”

“In a means of escape.”

Ane appeared with a cup of coffee and sat in it.

The man from management looked at her.

“You’re sitting in the hazard.”

“I’m resting,” Ane said. “Between floors. It’s traditional.”

He measured the landing. The chair left enough width. He looked as if this personally offended the tape.

“I’ll file an exception.”

“Good,” Len said.

After he left, Ane looked at Len.

“You going to sit?”

“In a minute.”

He put his shopping inside. He came back. He sat.

The wood knew the shape of a heavier man. Len was only borrowing it.

From the landing you could hear five kitchens. Someone was frying onions. Someone was telling a joke badly. Someone was being forgiven for it.

Len stayed until his legs remembered they had a flat.

He did not take the chair inside.

Some furniture was a neighbour.