Are You Sitting Comfortably? -- A Story

Gordon Stafford drained his third can of the evening, crushed it with sausage fingers and dropped it by the side of his chair, where it clanked against the other two. The last few drops of lager spilled out, adding to the permanent dark patch where countless other such spillages had stained the carpet. On the other side of the chair was a matching bare patch where several discarded dog-ends had scorched the fibres before he put them out properly; usually by pouring lager on them, because he couldn’t be bothered to get out of the chair.

Gordon farted into the chair cushion and cracked open another can. He wondered vaguely if the man who invented the six-pack had been a piss-head like himself. It seemed such a stroke of genius to pack cans in batches of six: four just wasn’t enough for an evening; eight was better but maybe just a little over the top for a normal night. No, six was the number: start drinking around eight o’clock, make each one last half-an-hour or so and you take your last sup around eleven. Perfect. If he bothered to go to bed any more, it would be just about the time he’d have got up and stumbled to the bedroom. As it was, eleven o’clock was about the time he fell asleep in the chair.

Halfway through the six-pack, he generally found, was the Golden Moment. It was exactly where he was now, and it was a magical point of perfect equilibrium, poised midway between sobriety and oblivion, where thought was still possible but slowed by the alcohol, and filtered so that negative thoughts seemed to lose their potency. After three cans of Special Brew, everything was fine. Three cans later the filter turned from translucent to opaque and precious few thoughts got through. At this moment, as he took a first sip from can number four, things were just about as right with his world as they could ever be. For these few precious minutes at nine-thirty every night, Gordon could almost believe he was happy.

He picked up the satellite remote control and switched channels. He subscribed to the total package. He was what could be described—with an unpleasant irony—as a ‘heavy user’. He reckoned he generally put in a twelve- to fourteen-hour TV shift every day. The Big Brother house appeared on the screen, the nine remaining housemates engaged in some inane challenge that would bring them a crate of beer if they won. Gordon took a long pull on the Special Brew and belched loudly. There was a nice-looking Asian girl in the house this season, and he was enjoying keeping an eye on her. He hoped she wasn’t voted off early. Mainly for her benefit, he’d been waking up in the middle of the night and putting in a couple of hours watching the digital-only channel that generally showed the housemates sleeping, but occasionally something a bit more “interesting.” It was many years since Gordon had had any kind of sex life, and even then it was a pretty lacklustre affair. Occasionally while watching the Asian girl he felt the familiar stirrings, but any tumescence was short-lived and whatever discharge there was happened without force or manual intervention. It was many months since he’d been able to reach round with his hand to assist. Or been aroused enough to want to.

Some hours later, he woke from a rough sleep. He was aware that he’d been snoring harshly, as he always did.  The neighbours had complained, but what the hell did they expect him to do? They’d been round a couple of times: the first, very apologetic and rather embarrassed; the second, less apologetic and more annoyed. The third time they came, he didn’t even bother going to the door. Now they just thumped on the wall, sometimes loud enough to wake him.

He had the familiar sour taste in his mouth and reached over the chair arm to pick up the last of the six cans he’d drunk earlier. There was a mouthful left in the bottom and he swigged it, washing it around his mouth before swallowing.  He felt peckish and wondered if there was any food left on the low table by the chair. He tried to reach across with his left arm but discovered that he couldn’t lift it. For a moment he had the terrifying idea that he’d suffered a stroke while he slept and was now paralysed on his left side. Maybe his brain was sending signals that weren’t reaching their target. But that thought quickly left his head because he knew he could feel his arm, could feel the pressure of its contact with the chair. And now he realized that when he really strained, there was a slight movement, before it met some kind of resistance. In the meagre TV light, he tried to see what was stopping his arm from rising. It looked—it couldn’t be, though, could it?—It looked as though somehow his arm had slipped under the fabric of the chair. He tried to pull it free but it seemed stuck fast, maybe caught on the tough fibres. He strained to reach across with his right hand, but couldn’t quite make it. He was breathing hard with the effort already, and eventually gave up, with a grunted “fuck it.” The empty can dropped onto the carpet, and he fell asleep again.

Pale light from a steel sky pushed weakly through the curtains. At ten past nine, it finally woke Gordon. A rancid fart escaped him and he felt his bladder straining for relief. He prepared himself to stand up, getting his feet into the right position to support his bulk. When he moved—or rather, tried to move—his arms, he couldn’t. He suddenly remembered the strange experience earlier, when he’d been unable to move his left arm. It seemed like a dream, but this certainly was not. Looking down at his left arm, he could see that just below the elbow it disappeared into the fabric.  Turning to his right, he now saw that his right arm too was embedded somehow in the chair arm.

Now he began to panic. This couldn’t be real. The chair wasn’t old, there were no tears or worn areas in the covering, despite the fact that he generally sat in it for twenty hours a day. How could his arms have slipped inside? He wrenched first at one, then the other. They barely moved. He could still feel his fingers, still feel the sponge padding beneath them. There didn’t seem to be any one particular place where his arms were catching, they simple felt bound to the chair at all points. As the morning light grew steadily brighter, he was able to more clearly see his situation: both arms disappeared within the chair at the elbows. He could make out no splits in the fabric into which they had slipped; his forearms just simply weren’t there. No matter how much he pulled and twisted, there was nothing he could do. His bladder ached and he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer.

He called out, noticing without caring the shake in his voice; he was scared, and at this stage he couldn’t care less who knew it. He shouted until his throat was dry and raw. No one came. He knew his neighbours worked. Maybe they had already left. Or maybe they were so sick of his thunderous snoring every night they were ignoring him. Two hours later, his bladder finally let go and he pissed himself.

It was well into the afternoon and Gordon realized with amazement that he must have fallen asleep. There was a moment of utter relief when he realized he’d been dreaming about being stuck in the chair, and then a heart-sinking thud as he tried to move his arms and felt them utterly pinned, as they had been before. His mouth was desert-dry, his throat was burning, and the room smelled of stale urine.

He attacked his bonds with renewed urgency, calling all the time with ever-decreasing volume. Then he realized something had changed. His arms were no less constricted, but now the bottom half of his body seemed less manoeuvrable than it should be. He tried to raise his left leg and found that he couldn’t. His right leg was equally immovable. There was no way of leaning forward enough to look down at his feet, but somehow he knew that if he could, he would see them wrapped within the pelmet at the base of the chair.  And now he knew that his arms hadn’t just slipped under the chair covering through tears that had opened up while he slept. Though half of him knew it was totally crazy, and most of the other half wondered if he were either dreaming or had actually suffered some kind of mental damage—maybe a stroke or an aneurism or one of the other things that could go wrong in there—the small part of him that was left knew with utter certainty that the chair was eating him.

The consumption of Gordon Stafford took another day. Thankfully for most of it he was asleep, and towards the end unconscious. It didn’t seem to happen while he was awake, in fact. But always when he came to wakefulness, a little more of him had disappeared. In his final few hours, his only thought was to wish he could at least have a drink of water: a long, gut-stretching drink of fresh, ice-cold water. It was all he wanted. His struggles had long since stopped. His throat was now a ragged tunnel from which he could produce nothing more than a hoarse, painful whisper. He knew there was no way out now. Only his head and neck were free of the chair, and he was sure that the next time he lost consciousness would probably be the last time. Oddly, he was okay with that. It was a bizarre way to go, and he wished it could have been otherwise and otherwhen, but everyone had to go sometime, right? If only he wasn’t so damned thirsty. And then he felt the dry fabric easing over his chin, could smell and taste the dust in it, and he knew that soon the thirst would go away.

“When was the last time you saw him, Mrs. Robertson?” The constable was young, with a pale face and a smattering of freckles. His uniform didn’t quite fit. Joyce Robertson guessed he’d not been in the force more than a year. “I’m not sure I can say,” she replied, realizing that although she had called the police about her next door neighbour, she couldn’t actually be certain about when she’d last seen him, or even been aware of him. Gordon Stafford wasn’t exactly a gregarious individual. Now she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she’d seen him in the last two or three months. But of one thing she could be sure: “I haven’t heard him snore for over a week, now.” She explained how the man’s deafening snoring regularly kept them awake at night, how she and Mr. Robertson had mentioned it to him several times, and even resorted to banging on the wall some nights. “But we haven’t done that since...well, it must be nine or ten days at least.”

The constable nodded, trying to look thoughtful when she was sure she knew exactly what was going through his mind. After knocking on Mr. Stafford’s door and calling through the letterbox, all with no response, he asked her to stand away from the door, took a couple of steps back and ran forward, barging it with his shoulder. The wood around the Yale lock split violently and splinters flew everywhere. The door slammed back against the interior wall. They both steeled themselves for the expected stench of a long-dead body. But apart from the vague odours of stale beer, stale urine and body odour, there was nothing. They walked along the short hall and turned into the living room. It was empty. They checked out the back kitchen, then climbed the stairs and went through the whole upper floor. Finding no-one, they descended the stairs.

Joyce Robertson was relieved, albeit puzzled. She didn’t know Gordon Stafford particularly well, but in the seven years they had been neighbours, she couldn’t recall a single occasion when she’d been aware of his absence. Neither had she ever known him to entertain visitors. She knew that in the last six months he had barely left the house, even to visit the shops. In fact the only callers she’d ever seen had been the postman and the man delivering his groceries each week. She glanced around: there were no signs that he had gone away, and yet he clearly wasn’t around. Baffled, she followed the young constable out of the house, and returned home. Rather uncharitably, she began feeling a certain hope that the snoring was now a thing of the past.

“The bed’s no good, and the dining table and chairs are scrap, but we can take the rest.” John Andrews, manager of the local charity shop, was quite sure he’d manage to sell most of the furniture in the house. Some of it wasn’t really fit to sell on, and most of it was a bit dated, but there were a few nice items, and since it was all free, he couldn’t really lose. The armchair in particular looked in very good condition. It would need a clean—he could detect the body smells emanating from it—but other than that it didn’t appear to have been much used.

The two men spent an hour loading up the van with everything that he’d decided to take, then he followed them back to the shop, where it was unloaded. Several days later, it was all for sale in the shop. The armchair, the best piece of the lot, was sold within a week.

The two delivery men carried the armchair into the cramped, cluttered sitting room, according to Miss Holloway’s instructions. She was a short lady, made shorter still with age, but held onto the last of her independence with tenacity. “Over here please, by the fire. So that I can see the T.V. and reach the radio on the sideboard. That’s fine.” She looked admiringly at the chair, which was still in very good condition and looked so inviting. “Lovely. I think I’m going to be spending a lot of time in this chair.”

Hello, Miss Holloway. Come to join us, have you? My name’s Gordon Stafford. Don’t worry, there are lots of us in here. You’ll soon make plenty of friends...