Fast Fiction: The Chair
Should he have have remembered his office and given up the chair? Richard Mallinson tells a story that made it into The Church Times.
All I did was sit in the chair which was vacant at my side and a man's voice cried angrily, 'I was about to sit there.'
'Oh,' I said, 'I am so sorry.' But I made no attempt to get up.
'Come on,' the voice resumed, 'out of it.'
Now I could see who was speaking. He was a plump fellow with floppy ginger hair and a flabby face. Where had I seen him before?
'Look,' I said, aware that others, including a female novelist, were listening, 'let's try to be civilised about this, shall we? There's another chair over there. Why don't you go and sit in it?'
'Nah,' he said. 'I saw this chair before you and it's the one I want to sit in, so why don't you just get up and bugger off?'
'Look,' I said again . . .
*
'I'm not sure that you handled that very well,' said the female novelist afterwards in the taxi we'd agreed to share.
'Well,' I said, 'you must admit that he fully deserved -'
'No, you needn't have called him a cretin at the top of your voice,' she said, as if the fact amused her.
'Look,' I said yet again, 'he needn't have kicked my ankle, either. It wasn't all one-sided, you know.'
'I'm not saying it was. But I'm surprised that a man in your position should have allowed himself to become embroiled in such an unseemly fracas.'
And she laughed mercilessly.
*
Next day's tabloids let rip with headlines such as, Soap star boots bishop. But in an interview with The Church Times later in the week I countered with, Next time I'll boot him back, says bishop - which some people said was unchristian.
Bugger that, I thought.
