The Boy Asked Me Not To Sit In The Green Chair Because It Was Occupied

The green chair was in the corner of the living room and it was hideous and I loved it.

The first night I sat in it. The boy — four, blond, obsessed with dinosaurs — came in, stopped, and said, "You can't sit there. It's occupied."

Occupied.

I laughed and asked who by, and he said, "The gentleman."

I moved. I am not brave and I was seventeen and I moved, and I told myself I moved because it was easier.

Over the next year I sat for them maybe forty times. The rules of the green chair were absolute and were enforced entirely by a four-year-old boy with the manner of a small, tired concierge.

You could put things on it. You could not sit on it.

His parents thought it was hilarious. His father used to sit in it deliberately, to wind him up, and the boy would not scream or cry — he would simply stand there, and wait, and after about forty seconds his father would get up, every single time, and afterwards he would be strange for about ten minutes, and he never once explained why.

I asked the boy once, in the way you can ask a four-year-old anything, what the gentleman looked like.

He said, "Like a granddad. But not ours."

I asked if the gentleman ever said anything.

He thought about it, seriously, for a while, and then he said: "He says the same thing as the tap."

I did not understand. I still do not, entirely, but that night I stood in their kitchen and listened to the tap, which drips, which has always dripped, and the drip is very regular, and after about a minute of standing there I found that I had started to hear it as two syllables.

I have never told anybody that. It sounds insane. It IS insane. It is a dripping tap.

They moved house when he was six and they took the green chair, and I asked him — I could not help myself, I was nineteen by then and cocky — whether the gentleman had come too.

He said, "No. He stayed with the tap."