Worth Waiting
“We’re running about half an hour late, I’m afraid. Have been since first thing this morning.” The receptionist at Kelly’s GP informed her, sitting safely behind the plexi-glass window to dispense bad news. Even though they had found an extra half an hour to make Kelly wait, there was apparently no time for eye-contact.
“Ah… right, OK.” Kelly accepted, not that she had any other choice in the matter. Truth be told it was neither ‘right’ nor ‘OK’ that she was having to wait for half an hour. She’d endured weeks of nagging and pressure from her friends to finally make an appointment with her doctor, so she expected that, having given in finally, the rest of the experience should be less painful. Clearly that was not to be. “It’s a shame you can’t let everyone know about that when it happens.” She passive-aggressively observed.
“Oh, we could.” The receptionist said matter-of-factly. “Please take a seat and watch that screen up there for your name and consultation room to come up.”
Kelly’s passive-aggression found itself tripped by an unfettered admission of guilt. It only ever worked when people tried to defend themselves, but this receptionist was, according to all the evidence, impervious to shame.
Although she was sorely tempted to pursue her enquiries further, Kelly knew when she was beaten, and didn't want to stand around arguing with the receptionist. It wasn't that she didn't have time; the nature of her grievance meant that she in fact had an abundance of it. The problem was that those arguments never ended well. All the receptionists would gang up on her and the other patients wouldn't give her the support she needed, regardless of how reasonable her position was, lest they earn the ire of the administrative department. Even if she somehow convinced the reception staff that she was right, creating bad blood would only ensure that she never got a convenient appointment again, even if her blood was so bad that she really needed one immediately. They controlled this realm, they had the power, and all Kelly could do was accept her punishment with obeisance and take her place in the holding cells they dressed up as an innocent waiting room.
With a perfunctory ‘Thank you’ that fell on unconcerned ears, Kelly left the desk and took the few steps necessary to enter the waiting room. To call it dowdy would have been to call the sun tepid or the ocean damp. It would have been a disgrace and an insult to the efforts which had clearly been made to forge the sanctuary of drabness lying before her. A set of stackable chairs, fresh from the spares cupboard at a disused factory, were arranged with their backs against the walls of the narrow room. Each one looked less comfortable than the last, their pale grey-blue fabric upholstery covering a layer of cushion which would have been considered laughable in its prime, and downright offensive in the present day. The two rows of seats formed a channel which led the eye directly to the badly wallpapered dead-end rear wall of the room.
Squatting sadly where the chair rows ended was a small plastic table with aggressively gaudily coloured plastic chairs in disarray around it. Large-print books, possibly with advanced pop-up functionality, were scattered across all available surfaces as well as the floor, mingling with the mismatched battalion of toys and coloured blocks which held the line between a child’s boredom and the exciting flavours to be found in a strange building. Also distributed liberally among the children’s play area were scrappy pieces of paper and crayons of varied sizes and colours. More than one had been crushed into the carpet, sticking the fibres together in a smeared, stained wax patch. But that was an improvement to the condition of the flooring in general.
Old décor was a source of constant confusion and fascination to Kelly. From unfamiliar houses, to old public buildings, to sitcom backdrops the choices, if the term choice can really be applied, made by her forebears in how to decorate their houses were equally terrifying and mystifying. More than once she considered that the colours may have faded over time, or that the human eye was morphing and now saw what was once beautiful as something less. Her best theory, though, was that the previous decades had been beset by a terrible plague, the sort of virulent epidemic that infected all who contacted it and suffocated them as if they were trying to breathe under water. The nature of this plague, of course, was a dramatic overabundance of the colour brown. Kelly could picture it flowing like floodwater through the streets, pouring down the sides of high-rise flats and billowing like a mist across the plains until everything was smothered with its putrescence. For how long this plague would have continued its campaign of chromatic terror she could only speculate but clearly, during the 1970s, someone gained the upper hand over the scourge of brown and found a way to seal it within decorations and consumer goods. Only by imprisoning it in everything from wallpaper and clothes to electronics and appliances were they able to reduce ambient brown to safe levels.
If her theory was correct, and Kelly had seen no reason to believe that it wasn’t, then this GP’s surgery had been on the frontlines back in the day, providing triage in the great war of brown. Whilst the chairs had managed to escape conscription, the carpet had borne enough of the brunt for the whole building and much of the surrounding town. Deep, dark and unwelcoming, the carpet covered the floor of the waiting room like a mud-bog covers farmland after a harsh winter. Bright, polychromatic light was absorbed by its crushed pile and spat back out as a monument to wet bark chippings and silt, stripped of all its vibrancy in favour of the drudging, shambling, brown. So much brown was there to absorb, it seemed, that the floor was not enough. Cannily, this problem had been resolved. For a clear two feet up every wall the carpet continued, with a soft bend where each wall met the floor and some expert cutting and shaping work in the corners of the room. This was the work of an artist turned to the cause of evil; masterful crafting which should never have been allowed in the first place.
Dumbfounded and afraid, Kelly stood and stared at the carpet, which was easy when it took up so much of her field of vision. This wasn’t the norm, she was fairly sure of that. Were the medical professionals in charge of the surgery expecting her to be able to sit horizontally? Was there a need to protect the lower areas of the wall from wear and tear? Did they need to be made softer and warmer for bare feet? Whatever the explanation, Kelly didn’t feel entirely comfortable committing herself to taking part in the exercise.
“Please take a seat, Ms Heddick, you’re currently a fire hazard.” The receptionist called over. “No offence.” She added, in a cumbersome attempt at deception.
“None taken…” Kelly replied. She’d been called worse by better.
With cautious steps at first, lest the brown bog rise up to claim her, Kelly walked into the waiting room. The floor was very much lava in this scenario, and the best way to safeguard herself was to do as she was told and sit on one of the chairs. There were plenty of vacancies from which to choose; a clear run of six empty seats extended from the close end of the room up to the first of the other waiting patients, who had his head bowed over a magazine of some kind. Kelly had no idea whether he was some tragic terminal case, or was maybe deadly contagious, so maintaining a good four-seat buffer felt like a sensible plan of action. The safely isolated chair of choice accepted her, and she tried not to think about the carpet looming behind her, ready to strike at a moment’s notice.
Sitting as comfortably as she was able, which was to say not at all, Kelly drank in her non-potable surroundings. Further down the rows of seating were a few more patients, each of whom was distracting themselves in some way to pass the tedious wait a little more quickly. They stared at their phones, their magazines, or even their feet if necessary, and seemed to be making every effort to avoid acknowledging that one another existed. A rousing game of charades could probably have delivered them some kind of collective respite from the long wait ahead if only they would work together. Then again, Kelly thought, the ensuing ruckus would probably have been against the will of the wardens at the reception desk. Their harsh retribution was not to be invited so lightly.
Directly opposite Kelly, and standing out among the background of stoic other patients, was a girl in her late teens, or maybe her early twenties. It was hard to tell with so much of her face covered by luminous green hair. One hand clasped a paper cup filled with what appeared to be tea, and the other was digging around inside her small, patchwork backpack.
The girl’s vigorous rustling of hand-in-bag had been what first grabbed Kelly’s attention, but the action of her off-hand was what held it. Starkly contrary to Kelly’s own inclinations, the girl was playing it fast and loose with her cup of tea. Lidless and careless she casually waved the paper vessel around as she fiddled with her bag, and Kelly watched uncomfortably as the pale brown fluid sloshed precariously close to the sides. Worst of all, when she decided that both hands were necessary for the bag rummaging, she decided to rest the cup on the soft, convex seat of the chair next to her. Kelly gripped the edge of her own chair anxiously as the spongey seat gradually sank under the cup, proceeding to tip the tea at an ever steeper angle as what remained of the cushioning rose lazily back up. Her fingernails were nearly pierced fabric as she saw the fluid kiss the lip of the cup. The slightest perturbation from another patient walking across the waiting room, the girl shuffling her legs, or even a stray, spiteful breeze from the otherwise non-functioning air conditioner would cause a tea-fall of thirst-condemning proportions.
As if intentionally playing cruel games with Kelly’s nerves, the girl dropped her bag with a thud. Kelly flinched but kept her eyes locked on the cup to watch for any sign of spillage. There was nothing. How the girl had got away with it she didn’t know, but the tension was killing her.
“Whoops!” the girl said brightly, oblivious to the mortal peril of her beverage, as she leaned down to pick the bag up and resume her searching. Quite what she could have been looking for, or how full the bag needed to be to get it that lost, Kelly had no idea. In fact, she had no idea how anything could play on the girl’s mind, or the minds of any of the other patients for that matter, as much as the frankly nightmarish level of precariousness displayed by the hot beverage situation.
With ever greater vigour the bag search continued. Rattling, shuffling, scrunching, and clinking accompanied a persistent shaking. How the scale of the motion could fail to disturb the tea’s surface Kelly failed to comprehend; it could only be a combination of the impressive damping ability of the chairs, the tremendous surface tension of the liquid, and the sheer, bare-faced, bloody luck of a girl who was taking her cup’s stability for granted. Kelly didn’t know if she could take the anxiety for much longer. The stakes were unspeakably low, but they took on an inflated sense of importance for no other reason than the raw preventability of the looming disaster.
“Ah. They’re on my face.” The girl giggled to herself, touching a hand to her glasses. “That’s the end of that mystery.” She added for the benefit of the room, catching Kelly’s eye and giving her a smile. Kelly smiled back and wished she could look away, but there was no way that the mug of tea would be allowed to leave her line of sight now; not at the eleventh hour. The bag was returned to the ground. A hand reached out for the tea. Kelly’s fingernails touched the interior framework of the chair. The girl swept up her drink casually, and without spilling a drop.
A deaf person in the next room could have heard the tension break as Kelly flopped against the back of her chair, like a marionette doll severed from its strings and allowed to rest. Disaster had been averted against all the odds. Every moment of much-feared tedium for the rest of her wait would at least come with the relief of not having a highly stressful drink-loss spectacle. She cast her eyes around the small waiting room once again, since that was about the sum of the entertainment available to her, and searched for something else to watch. It was equally disinteresting to the last time she’d performed the move and everything seemed to still be in order. The smattering of other waiting patients were still absorbed in their own business of reading dog-eared magazines on topics in which they had no real interest, or staring at the floor and avoiding eye-contact with one another, and no-one was taking any undue risk with their drink. Above them a clock continued to work like clockwork. The mirrored window of the nurse’s office maintained its reflectivity. Kelly could see the reflections of a row of empty chairs and a section of perplexingly carpeted wall, and examined them with what could only be called passing interest in the most generous possible terms. When that had exhausted all it had to offer, her eyes caught back up with the girl opposite.
With both sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her feet braced against the floor, she was leaning over the empty chair next to her and peering closely at a damp patch. With sinking horror Kelly realised what must have happened, reconstructing in her head the events which must have passed silently by while she’d been gawping idly around the room. The girl must have stuck to her devil-may-care attitude to cup management, making movements and gestures with such aplomb despite her precious cargo that the over-filled vessel stood no chance at all. Kelly could picture the tea falling in slow motion against a backdrop of the girl’s horrified face. She would surely have seen the error, apparently too late, and it could only be hoped that she’d learned a harsh lesson.
Just as Kelly was congratulating herself on the masterfully constructed hypothesis, the girl sat up straight and casually tipped another splash of her drink onto the wet patch.
Mouth agape but pulling into a smile that she couldn’t hold back, Kelly watched as the girl leaned in to closely inspect the scene of her crime. It had been a deliberate soaking all along. She hadn’t been careless, she’d been inviting fate to do the work for her.
In one fell swoop, or perhaps one fell splash, entertainment had generated itself for Kelly. She leaned back in her chair and watched the girl poring over her pouring, apparently paying attention to every dampened fibre and the work of each drop of tea. With meticulous care she carried her examinations to completion and then tipped another small splash onto the chair. Over and over she repeated whatever mental calculations and observations she’d previously performed and then added extra tea into the seat, in a perpetual cycle of spillage and measurement. Every now and then she’d let out an excited giggle, her eyes wide with wonder, and she’d keep going.
Kelly became so invested in the unfolding events that it didn’t occur to her to look away when the bell was sounded for the next patient. It occurred to the girl however, who looked up to read the name on the rolling display screen and caught sight of Kelly watching her. She grinned broadly.
“There's nothing quite as absorbent as other people's upholstery that's what I always find." She said with over enthusiastic glee and fascination, as she tipped a little more onto the seat for Kelly’s benefit. "Look at it go! That's nearly half a cup just... gone! This is one thirsty chair."
Kelly didn’t know how to react. Part of her wondered if she should be intervening; whoever sat on that chair next would be getting a soggy bottom with exceptionally milky tea, which wasn't generally the aim of taking a seat. But having watched for so long already, a sudden interruption would appear spiteful at worst and conceited at best. The only reasonable course of action was to allow her to continue and offer support. If that also happened to be the most amusing course of action then so be it.
“It does seem to be drinking more tea than you are.” Kelly observed.
“Oh, I don’t really want this anyway. I only got it to do this.” The girl replied, eyes still transfixed on the gradually expanding damp patch. “You’d barely know how much tea there was in this chair by just looking at it.”
“Must all be soaking through the padding underneath the upholstery.” Kelly hypothesised. The girl seemed to approve, looking up at Kelly with a smile and knowing nod.
“I think you’re right. We’d see a whole different picture if we sliced this fabric off….” She stared silently at the chair. “Maybe next time.”
Kelly was fairly sure she’d just incited vandalism. It didn’t make her feel as guilty as she would have thought.
“I’m Kelly. What’s your name?” she asked, deciding that she might as well humanise the situation.
“Kelly. Kelly. Kelly.” The girl repeated, starting Kelly in the face, unblinking. “OK, I think I’ll remember that now. I’m Holly. Nice to meet you.” She said, adding a genial wave and turning back to the important business of soaking.
After a few more small splashes Holly extended one finger from her free hand and poked at the damp patch, and judging by her expression she found something to be very pleased about.
“It only feels a bit moist, you know?” she relayed, making unnecessary use of the term ‘moist’. “Absolutely incredible stuff.”
Kelly chuckled quietly and leaned forward to engage in a more active inspection. Where Holly’s attention was undivided and burning into the seat, Kelly’s flitted between the splashing and the splasher. She’d never seen someone over the age of five so utterly absorbed by playing with their drink at the expense of another person’s furniture.
"The whole lot! I’ve poured a whole cup of tea into this seat and you can barely even see the stain." Holly marvelled. Her head was mere centimetres from the site of a thousand strangers' posteriors but that didn't bother her at all as she examined the fabric in minute detail. "Seriously, come and have a look!”
Kelly didn’t even hesitate. She did, however, take the time to preserve the sanctity and ownership of her own chair by leaving her jacket obviously and deliberately folded on the seat, with her bag squarely on top. There were plenty of free chairs available in the waiting room, but having already laid claim to this one and put in the hard work of warming it up, it was worth protecting. To go to a cold chair at this late stage would be tantamount to self-harming, even without the newly discovered risks of a secret tea-soaking.
Her sovereignty guaranteed for the time being, she crossed over to Holly and joined her in examining the spillage, albeit at a safer distance from the seat. It was undeniably a smaller wet mark than she would normally have anticipated for a full measure of hot beverage.
“I'm going back for another cup.” Holly announced. “This is more than worth the 40p for more tea. Heck, the world needs this. For science I will make the sacrifice." she nobly declared, standing up and rummaging through her purse for loose change. "Would you like anything while I'm up?"
"Uh... a hot chocolate would be lovely, please." Kelly replied, fishing a hand into her pocket and retrieving a handful of coins to give to Holly.
"No problem. Want to make a donation of another cup of tea for the cause of science?"
Kelly knew she shouldn't. This wasn't how grownups were supposed to behave. Then again the girl was getting her a drink, and it was pretty fascinating to see how much tea a single chair could hold.
"Yeah go on then. Give it a cuppa from me too." She agreed, handing over another 40p.
"You're a visionary. You can see the big picture!" Holly exclaimed with arms waved wide and wild. She pirouetted and ran to the drinks machine, eager not to waste a single precious moment in the pursuit of progress.
Kelly watched Holly go in a whirlwind of energy and then looked ponderously at the seat of such attention. It had gone from a banal detail to a wonder of their limited, waiting-room world; a site of special scientific interest for the niche field of upholstery absorbency. But despite its obvious value to the advancement of humankind it was also dangerous, like a volcano or shopping bag full of scorpions. If someone walked in now, without having seen the experiment going ahead, there was a distinct risk that they would plonk themselves down and absorb a whole cup of tea into their behind. Kelly knew that the chair needed to be treated with respect. It needed a sign, really. Something like 'Caution Wet Chair' or 'Beware: Tea Soaking In Progress'. Nothing to scare people, but enough to inform them of the situation. Anyone here was capable of deciding for themselves whether they wanted to become a human strainer or not, but they could only do that when armed with the data.
In the corner with the children's toys and the magazines were scraps of paper and crayons; everything the budding sign maker needed to ply their craft. This was the best solution that Kelly could think of to satisfy all potential stakeholders in the scenario. Except whoever had the job of keeping the furniture clean, of course. They were taking one for the team.
Kelly crouch-ran over to the children's table so as not to waste valuable time by standing up. She grabbed a scrap of paper with little difficulty or deliberation, but the array of crayons available was momentarily paralysing. A full rainbow of colours was partially represented by elements of differently branded wax crayons. Should she choose the stub of olive green for a calming, if off-putting, message? The almost whole midnight blue to show that this was a deeply analytical pursuit? Or the thick cochineal red, with several angles blunted into its girth, for sheer eye-catching implications of danger? Her eyes flicked like a nervous fly from one to the others and her hand hovered high up, ready to pounce on any one she chose. The eyes of everyone in the waiting room would be on her, their collective breath held in anticipation of the final decision, so she had to make the right one.
Somewhere in her mind the choice had been made before she started thinking. It could only ever be the red crayon, the first choice of infants, artists and visionaries the world over. Kelly swept it up into her hand and heard no gasps of shock or disapproval. Taking that as validation of her selection she paced back to the chair of much absorbency and squatted down without so much as a second thought about getting too close to the carpet. Such trivialities were nothing to her now that she’d found a purpose.
Kelly rested the paper on her knee and prepared the crayon, but didn’t risk putting wax to paper straight away. She hadn't yet settled on the appropriate final wording to convey an informational warning without appearing commanding or aggressive, a matter further complicated by the subconscious implications of such a bright and bold red writing implement. Around the corner, though, she could hear the drinks machine bubbling and spurting diligently, and her time for signage distribution was dripping and stirring away rapidly. She dived in and trusted her gut to make the right decision.
Whether or not Kelly’s gut was trustworthy for the task she’d given it was still up for debate, but she quickly learned that her knee wasn’t an ideal writing platform for it to exercise its newfound responsibility. Even amateur warning-writers knew that the font size of choice for a notice like the one Kelly was writing was always ‘as big as possible’, but that came with a difficulty given her choice of desk. Across both the height and the width of every letter, her knee provided a rich and varied landscape. Her leg’s topology undulated and morphed under the crayon, offering a diverse range of pressures, shapes, and stabilities which translated into a full intensity spectrum of deposited wax; within her first word she’d sampled colours from ghostly-pale to medical-emergency bright. The sign was rapidly turning from a friendly heads-up to a fully realised visual experience.
The sounds of stirring from around the corner ceased, sparking in Kelly an even greater urgency. Abandoning her previous care and attention to high fidelity lettering she slashed wax across the page in a frenzy to complete her grave cautioning. As soon as the last letter was completed Kelly gave the paper a sharp fold and perched it across the back of the damp chair, sitting itlike an unsecured tent on the upholstery heath.
“Seat Will Cause Wet Bum” the paper declared to the room. It offered no judgement of the process, nor any indictment of those who might choose to sit, instead providing simple notification that derriere may become closer to Perrier than most would like. The final letters of “cause” were bunched up where Kelly had realised in a panic that she was running out of space on the line, but that gave it a sense of urgency and authentic imperfection. She’d made art to go along with the science in progress.
With her noble work completed, Kelly scuttled quickly back to her chair. The barricade of jacket and bag had worked a treat, fending off the rampaging hordes of other patients from trying to steal the chair from underneath her, but its time was done. Carefully and respectfully she dismantled the seat protection barrier and took her place again as an observer. She was all-too-ready for her hot chocolate after that ordeal, and genuinely wanted to see the outcome of everything that Holly was doing.
Barely a few seconds after Kelly sat back down Holly appeared with three paper cups balanced in her hands. One of them had a stirrer leaning casually against the inside edge, and the other two were capped with white plastic lids.
“Order’s up!” she said brightly to Kelly with a smile. Like a doting mother she cast a glance over to her soaking project and jolted slightly when she saw that a sign had been added. Not a drop was spilled from any of the cups though, once again demonstrating Holly’s impeccable beverage control. “What’s what?” she asked curiously.
“It’s a sign.” Kelly replied, standing up to take her hot chocolate.
“Seat will…will… coo? Ca… oh, cause! Seat will cause wet bum.” Holly read, turning the words over in her head. “Hmm. I don’t know if we can say that with confidence at this stage.”
“No?” Kelly questioned, holding out her hand. Holly’s voice had lost some of its effervescent edge.
“No.” Holly confirmed, holding her selection of cups forward. Kelly took the hot chocolate. “I mean we’ve not tried squeezing it yet. Sitting down might just drive the tea deeper for all we know.”
“Oh… I hadn’t considered that but I don’t think it’s super likely. Thanks by the way.”
“That’s fine.” Holly answered distractedly. “I suppose it will be a necessary sign eventually though.” Kelly sat back down and listened intently, and Holly returned to her own chair. “I mean, especially with two extra cups there’ll have to come a point where sitting down would be harmful. Good forward planning!” she finally congratulated, her full brightness once again shining through.
“We both want to see this go as far as possible.” Kelly explained with a grin. Holly nodded enthusiastically and placed once of the cups next to the leg of her chair on the floor. The brown carpet accepted the offering. Immediately Holly poured another splash of tea onto the usual spot and watched it disappear beneath the fabric.
“It just keeps going!” she exclaimed.
“More than most other chairs? I can’t say I’ve ever done this with any other chairs to know quite how impressive to find it.” Kelly offered.
“Really? You should definitely try it. It’s one of the best reasons to get out and about.”
“It seems that way.” Kelly agreed for the sake of the social contract. “It’s not why I came today but perhaps in the future…”
"So, what are you here for then?" Holly enquired, conversationally probing into Kelly's private medical concerns with her focus still squarely on the chair.
"A doctor's appointment." Kelly replied, trying not to sound guarded despite her short response.
"Oh, cool. I think most people here are, actually." Holly speculated happily, taking a considered gamble with her assumptions. "I'm getting some jabs. Jabby, jabby, jabs." She continued, making stabbing and injecting mimes with both hands, but still somehow not causing a single drop of tea to fall. If the mimes were in any way representative of her impending treatment then she needed to change to a less frenzied doctor immediately, lest she find herself to be a colander by the end of the day.
"Holiday vaccines I presume? Going somewhere nice?"
"Nah, I just end up in a lot of funky places. Best to keep myself fighting fit so I can rummage about with confidence." Holly informed.
Rummage was a word which conjured a lot of vivid imagery for Kelly. She pictured Holly kneeling in a dumpster, or leaning over a wheelie bin and scavenging for loose change, left over food, discarded kitchen appliances, and other such sundries. But she didn't look homeless or as if she'd been rifling through bins. And those with nothing rarely spent their money on inoculations or tea to pour into chairs. Kelly sipped her hot chocolate and tried to work Holly out. There had to be more to it.
"Rummaging eh? What do you rummage through?" She asked.
"This and that. Anything that looks like it might have what I need or want. And anything that seems interesting." Holly answered, using a lot of words to clarify absolutely nothing.
Kelly wanted to press her for more information, but felt bad about doing so after her own guarded "doctor's appointment" response.
"That's interesting." Kelly remarked. She always had trouble stopping that phrase from sounding sarcastic, especially when there was no follow-up comment to imply any kind of actual interest in the subject. She desperately tried to think of a way to question Holly without being a hypocrite.
"Yeah it is." Holly replied before Kelly could get there. "Had a really good week last week; it'll keep me going for a while, so I've got time for this lot" she made all the injection motions again "to sink in and do their job."
“Brilliant. You can take it easy for a little while.” Kelly said.
“Exactly. It gives me a chance to get out and about. I was wanting a time to come back here and it fell into my lap, just like this tea keeps falling into the chair.”
Kelly raised her eyebrows knowingly. Falling and pouring seemed to be interchangeable concepts here.
A minute or so passed in silence while Holly trickled a stream of tea out of her cup, and Kelly daydreamed about what on earth the girl could have been digging through. Idly her gaze drifted this way and that, eventually focusing on the carpets once again and reviving an old question.
“You come here vaguely regularly then?” Kelly asked. “For more jabs and stuff?”
“Sort of regularly, yeah. It takes time to be inoculated against everything and the more you look the more you find to get protected from. Don’t want to get home and find that I’ve gone rabid or something; that’d be just the worst.”
“Definitely. But if you’re a regular then do you know why the walls are carpeted?”
Holly looked up and examined the walls as if seeing them for the first time. She smirked and cocked her head to one side, trying to work it out.
“It's a valid question. But without doing some science I don’t have a sufficient answer. I can offer you an insufficient answer instead though?”
“Uh… yeah, sure.” Kelly indulged. She was intrigued.
“Because the person who made that decision was not qualified to do so.” Holly advised sagely, with a slow nod to emphasise her overflowing wisdom.
“The wall carpet?” the man further down from Kelly added suddenly. Both she and Holly turned to face him. “It's a silly matter. The flooring people weren't sure where the edges should be so they just overestimated to be sure.”
“Seriously?” Kelly questioned, with the beginnings of a laugh.
“Can’t see why else it’d be like this. I reckon the guys who did my living room carpet would’ve gone up the walls if I hadn’t been explicit about stopping where the floor ended.” The man explained. Kelly nodded sociably. “Caught ‘em trying to measure up the windowsills and the kitchen counters when they were working out how much to quote for. No-one wants a deep pile where you might chop tomato into it or something.”
“No, goodness no.” Kelly acknowledged, trying to work out whether the man was joking or not. He looked deadly serious, but Kelly had been tricked by this sort of thing before.
“I think that still falls under the remit of my insufficient answer.” Holly contended. “Anyone who measures a windowsill or a wall for carpet isn’t qualified to be in charge of that.”
“Fair’s fair.” The man said, looking back down at his magazine. Holly returned to her pouring, and Kelly relaxed into the back of her chair to watch the show.
Shrilly a bell rang out from speakers unseen to signal for the next patient. Every face turned towards the display screen and many turned away again in disappointment when they read “Miss H. Cann”.
“Ooh, that’s me!” Holly said excitedly. She looked at the cup of tea in her hand and the other one by the leg of her chair. “This came around sooner than I expected. Could you take over for me while I’m being jabbed? I shouldn’t be too long.” She requested with a hopeful optimism in her eyes.
Kelly looked at Holly, the cups, the chair, and the display screen. She knew it wasn’t the appropriate move to make, just like arming Holly with a second cup had been needlessly inflammatory. She knew in her heart of hearts that this was deeply childish behaviour and no-one wanted to have a chair saturated with tea. Worst of all the tea was so very milky that it wasn’t going to make the chair any more pleasant in a few days. Then again, they couldn’t come this far without going even further.
“Sure. Why not.” She agreed, ready to try something new.
“I knew I could count on you. You just get it.” Holly beamed, resting the partially-emptied cup on the floor while she grabbed her bag and stood up. “Remember to be gradual with it like I’ve been, won’t you? You can’t just pour the lot on or some will run away over the top and get the floor wet.”
“Heaven forbid.” Kelly muttered despite herself.
“Exactly. We’re not out to make a mess. Back in a bit.” Holly said, striding off towards her consultation room.
Kelly swept up her bag and jacket, relinquishing her hold on the chair which had served her so well, and traversed to the seat previously occupied by Holly. It was hot with the responsibility of watching over such an important project, or maybe just warm from where Holly had been sitting on it, but the sense of duty washed over Kelly all the same. She neatly piled her jacket and bag next to herself, took up the partial cup of tea and leaned over to the soggied seat.
From this angle the dampened patch was more difficult to discern. The asymmetrical way the fabric reflected the yellow room lights meant that there was almost no difference in the colour of tea-soaked threads compared to their dry counterparts. Trying to tell them apart was almost mesmerising; Kelly slowly drew her face closer and closer to the tea patch, trying to look for the subtle clues that it was in fact not as dry as it claimed. Before she knew it she was mere inches away and about to test it with a finger.
She shook herself out of it and sat up. This was ridiculous; she had a job to do, and that was to keep pouring hot drinks on this seat, not to press her face into it.
Judging by the way the weight of the cup shifted Kelly guessed that it was about half full still, and then congratulated herself for not thinking it to be half empty. Leaning into that feeling of achievement she started angling the beverage vessel over the innocent seat. Tipping the cup just up to the pouring threshold proved to be easy, but pressing on beyond the point of spillage went against everything she normally stood for. Every instinct and reflex in her body worked to prevent her from emptying the contents of a perfectly good drink onto a piece of someone else’s furniture. She tried to tell herself that it was owned by the state, and as a taxpayer she was probably entitled to treat it like this anyway, but the logic wasn’t sufficiently convincing. Guilt at having told Holly she’d hold the line, however, especially when coupled to how fun it was to watch the tea soak in, overpowered piffling concerns like having a social conscience. Kelly drew a deep breath of musty waiting room air, and tipped the cup further.
A very quiet dribbling and something like the rapping of a tiny drum heralded Kelly’s continuation of Holly’s noble work. Pale brown waves rippled briefly across the soft undulations in the canvas before sinking between them, leaving only a shimmer on the surface. Kelly watched closely as, over the course of a thirty seconds or so, the shimmer faded down to the almost invisible darkening that she had first noticed. If she hadn’t known what she’d just done then she would have sworn there had been no extra liquid emptied onto the seat at all; it had wholly blended into the upholstered background and hidden itself from sight. Another cascade of tea followed the same pattern of gradual disappearance, and then another, and another, all at the regular intervals naturally formed from the chair’s cadence of absorption, and Kelly watched them like a heron staring into the water for someone’s prized Koi Karp.
Bells rang again to summon a patient and Kelly found herself hoping that it was for someone else; medical treatment be damned she had to keep going. With great relief she saw a stranger’s name scrolling in red digital text, and immediately returned to her work. A few more pours saw her fully inverting the cup; she’d exhausted what remained of the second tea, and all there was to show for it on the pale cushion was a subtle shaded patch barely larger than it had been after cup number one.
Kelly took a sip of what had now become her cup of tepid chocolate and appreciated the unquestionable majesty of Holly’s masterpiece. No chair in Kelly’s own home would have weathered this kind of sustained spillage with such stoic grace. A single cup would have left her office chair dripping, and her favourite armchair was at risk from even a small splash. That this simple, humble, waiting room chair was able to stand as a bulwark against the onslaught of almost a pot’s worth of tea was a modern marvel.
With great excitement and appreciation for the life-events in which she was participating, Kelly took hold of the final cup of tea and prepared to resume Holly’s holy mission. Through the thin white lid she allowed a dribble of tea to bubble free and splatter across threads beset by more liquid than any accidental spillage could muster. She wondered how anyone else in the waiting room was able to tear themselves away from the spectacle. Maybe they, like she had done earlier, were dismissing the true gravitas of what was going on. All they saw was a grown woman playing with her beverages and disrespecting other people’s property, an interpretation which could barely have been further from the truth. She was showing this chair more respect than any waiting room patron, other than the prophet Holly of course, had ever done before in granting it an opportunity to display its super-powers. She was giving it a chance to perform miracles, a chance which it was taking with great aplomb.
Several more splashes fell into the cushion. This single chair was thirstier than the rest of the inhabitants of the surgery combined; it was on its third cup of tea in less than twenty minutes and showed no sign of slowing down. Kelly hoped that Holly would be done with her injections soon, so that she could bear witness to the ever-increasing wonder she had started. There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in Kelly’s mind that she would buy another cup of tea if she had to. She owed it to the world.
Where before she had quietly feared that the receptionists might have made a sudden spot-check and discovered the project, Kelly would now have welcomed their presence. It was vital that they understood the value of what they held out here; these chairs might be able to create a cafeteria in which spillages would matter not. They could provide any bathroom with a safe and robust place to sit, no matter what the shower-curtain-closure conditions were. At this rate they might well be able to make a serviceable sea-wall. There would always be an argument that they should be left in their natural habitat, with activists citing that it would be cruel to snatch them away from their home. Others might claim that making the sick stand up in their waiting room would be impractical, but surely all of that paled into insignificance compared to the good these chairs could do in the wider world. Another splash of tea pooled briefly and descended into the depths of the seat, reinforcing everything that Kelly was thinking.
The bell stopped her train of thought yet again, and another unknown name was called forth for treatment. It was a small mercy, but one that wouldn’t last forever. She was now the longest-waiting inmate of the waiting room and her time to leave would come before long; she had a duty to complete this grand task before that happened. Keeping an even closer eye on the damp patch, Kelly increased the frequency of pouring as much as she dared. She was a renegade of the art, a wildcard in the discipline, keeping her eye close to the site and her hand always poised and ready. The moment she saw that final tell-tale glimmer fade into memory another cascade was falling to take its place, granting the chair no downtime in her quest to determine how much tea it took to slake the mighty thirst on display.
“That’s some good technique.” Holly said proudly into her ear. Kelly jumped with a start, almost splashing tea on herself as Holly’s face appeared up close in her peripheral vision.
“Agh!” she vocalised. “Uh, hi. It’s going really well! We’re half way down cup three and it’s not slowing down at all!” Kelly proudly told Holly.
“Amazing. I told you other people’s upholstery is always a surprisingly good sponge.” Holly replied. One sleeve of her jumper was rolled up, and a small circular plaster now adorned her skinny arm.
“Jabs all fine?” Kelly asked out of a strange sense of obligation. She didn’t know what she was going to do with the information of course; there was no action that she could take for the better or the worse to influence the efficacy of intravenous inoculations, nor to improve their administration if it had gone badly.
“Yep. Stabbed right into my arm and juiced up with exciting dormant viruses and stuff. I’ll be able to sift through all sorts in no time.” Holly informed her with a smile. “It’s a bit sore, but I suppose that’s to be expected if someone sticks sharpened steel into you.”
“Probably, yes.” Kelly agreed. There was a brief pause, with Holly peering between Kelly, the cup, and the stain. “Oh, sorry. Would you like your seat and cup back?” she said, standing up and offering out the tea.
“Thanks. Might as well see this through to the end.” Holly accepted, taking her chair back. Kelly returned to her original place on the opposite side of the waiting room and watched with bated breath. Seeing Holly in command of the pouring again was bittersweet; it was a relief to have her mentor back and see a master of the craft at work, but relinquishing the responsibility and the proximity to the magic was saddening. She had tasted the sweet fruit of tea-captainship for such a short time, but had become accustomed to it almost immediately.
Like a cathedral chiming for midday, the campanologist’s nightmare bell sang out once more. This time it was Kelly’s own name proudly illuminating the waiting room.
“Oh, I’m up.” She said. Holly looked across at the name and seemed to agree.
“Good luck with your appointment! It was nice to meet a fellow enthusiast.” Holly answered with her sincere smile.
“It was nice to get involved. I’ll see you when I’m done, if you’re still here.” She said hopefully, suddenly dreading a world without their marvellous experiment.
“Cool.”
Kelly strode off to so-called ‘Consultation Room 1’, her mind remaining in the waiting room with the fate of the chair as she knocked on the door and heard an immediate instruction to enter. Even as she stepped into the small office, with its low padded chair alongside a sturdy wooden desk, she wondered just how saturated the internal padding had really become. Could it be at bursting point, or would it keep going for several cups yet? There were so few answers.
“Hello.” The doctor greeted. He was a gentleman of what Kelly guessed to be his early fifties. Grey hair was cut short but still found a way to be messy and he looked at her over the top of his rectangular glasses.
“Hi.” Kelly said, dragging herself back into the situation.
“How can I help?” he asked professionally. His fingers were steepled in the way that must be taught, practiced, and perfected in the first year of medical school.
“Um…” Kelly started, trying to remember why she’d booked the appointment in the first place. “…sorry my mind’s a bit thrown from the waiting room.”
“The carpet?” the doctor speculated with a sympathetically pained expression.
“Yeah…” Kelly replied, accepting that as a far more acceptable reason than liquid vandalism. “What’s the wall carpet situation about?”
“It’s in case we need additional floor space, basically.”
“Uh…” Kelly questioned.
“We requested more room when the surgery was being planned and constructed, but this was all we could afford to build in the budget. We could, however, fit more flooring into the budget, so we just bought up a load more and ran it up the walls as auxiliary floor, in case we should need it.” He explained, taking great liberties with logic.
“Oh… I see?” She replied, her face furrowed deep with contemplation. “Actually, no I don’t. Things won’t stay on that flooring because of gravity. It’s just carpeted wall.”
“We did come up against that problem, I’m not going to lie,” He admitted “but it got resolved with Velcro and nails.”
“You just nail things to the wall if they won’t fit in the room otherwise?”
“Or Velcro them, as appropriate.” He confirmed.
“Got it.” Kelly said, unwilling to raise more questions.
They each held an expectant silence.
“So, your problem?” the doctor prompted.
“Ah… yeah… that.” Kelly remembered. She pushed the mysteries of the waiting room to one side. It would still be out there when she was done.
Several minutes of invasive personal questions and judgemental looks later, Kelly emerged from the consultation room with a paper prescription in one hand and a redder hue to her cheeks than when she’d entered. Two to three weeks of medication but not a single day off work necessary; no good had come of this trip at all.
As if to compound her feelings of dejection the overabundance of brown carpet loomed into her vision once again, filling even her periphery with its harrowing pile. But atop it was the full array of seating, including the great work undertaken in the time before ‘thrice-daily after meals’. ‘Very harsh on the stomach’ indeed; that seemed like it was only going to make the situation worse.
There was no sign of Holly, a revelation which sat on Kelly like a damp blanket. Not a blanket dampened with tea via a scientifically rigorous process, but a cold, wet, post washing machine one that did nothing for anyone. At the very least it meant that Holly wouldn’t have to see her in the throes of minor irritation about a diagnosis. A small silver lining, but she’d cling to it none-the-less.
All of the empties, be they scientific tools or the remains of Kelly’s hot chocolate, had been tidied away and presumably binned. No forgotten garments or bags were hung over seat backs or lying between legs. There wasn’t even a calling-card splash of tea across the wall. But at least the warning sign was still in place. Kelly crossed over to the seat to give it one final inspection for old-times’ sake, focusing on the site of the damp spot to honour its rightful grand status. As could have been predicted, the dark patch had grown no larger; the seat’s mystical powers were still intact and stood as a testament to the good times that the waiting room had witnessed.
As Kelly leaned over the seat, holding her head in the proven highly-proximate location for accurate assessment, she saw the same faint witness mark of the tea which had entered over the course of the experiment. She moved her head this way and that, seeing the effect wax and wane as her angle changed, and recognised that whatever had transpired here was special. Faintly, though, she heard a slow, gentle, dripping. Was it a trick of the mind? A yearning so strong for the experimental times that it made itself manifest in auditory sensation? No, Kelly decided. It was definitely a real sound and it was coming from beneath the chair.
Cautiously Kelly moved back slightly and started to kneel down. This was a wholly untested angle, and one that she would have preferred to investigate with the security of her partner in epiphany being nearby, but she was alone now. As intimidating as it was to test a new hypothesis solo, Holly would have wanted her to learn as much as possible before leaving. It was a mark of respect to make this one final observation.
On her knees and leaning sideways, Kelly tilted her head and peered at the underside of the chair. Directly in the centre was a large, shimmering wet patch bulging downwards towards the horrid carpet. The whole soaked prominence was feeding a tiny bead of moisture which grew gradually with every passing second, its brown colour all too familiar. With satisfying regularity the bead would form a full droplet and, after a momentary distension from the fabric, fall onto a growing stain on the carpet below.
Kelly couldn’t, or maybe just wouldn’t, help smiling. The chair’s seemingly endless thirst was a mere illusion, a trick perpetrated by the seat and its partner in crime the brown hell-carpet. With sudden clarity Kelly understood that the additional carpet wasn’t a matter of poor estimation or tenuous attempts at providing extra surface area; it was the key to the ruse. All that extra pile was additional capacity for absorption. It was the greatest con the doctor’s surgery would ever see.
Standing up a wiser woman with a slightly achier back, Kelly took one last look at the seat and its sign, before noticing with a skipped heartbeat that someone had added to it.
“Good advice. It’s been a pleasure working with you. Holly.” It now said, within a slightly lopsided heart. Holly had gone for the analytical midnight blue crayon; it was the most fitting choice for someone of her scientific vision, and also served to confirm that the heart was not a romantic gesture. She really was a genius. Even though tea was gradually creeping up the bottom of the sign, Kelly lifted it up and tucked it into her handbag. Some irrational and unaccountable part of herself wanted a memento of the special time she’d had there, and taking the whole chair wasn’t an option; it would probably have got her arrested. It wouldn’t fit in her car either, so the exercise would have been futile either way. The chair was better off where it stood, a dripping testament to what had transpired there even if it was smoke and mirrors. It didn’t matter to Kelly that the chair wasn’t truly the most absorbent sitting-solution in the world, what mattered was that it had brought her and Holly together under a common cause of empirical observations. Two people had come and gone, and they would possibly never meet again despite their ephemeral unity. But the stains they had left on the furniture would be forever.
“Ah… right, OK.” Kelly accepted, not that she had any other choice in the matter. Truth be told it was neither ‘right’ nor ‘OK’ that she was having to wait for half an hour. She’d endured weeks of nagging and pressure from her friends to finally make an appointment with her doctor, so she expected that, having given in finally, the rest of the experience should be less painful. Clearly that was not to be. “It’s a shame you can’t let everyone know about that when it happens.” She passive-aggressively observed.
“Oh, we could.” The receptionist said matter-of-factly. “Please take a seat and watch that screen up there for your name and consultation room to come up.”
Kelly’s passive-aggression found itself tripped by an unfettered admission of guilt. It only ever worked when people tried to defend themselves, but this receptionist was, according to all the evidence, impervious to shame.
Although she was sorely tempted to pursue her enquiries further, Kelly knew when she was beaten, and didn't want to stand around arguing with the receptionist. It wasn't that she didn't have time; the nature of her grievance meant that she in fact had an abundance of it. The problem was that those arguments never ended well. All the receptionists would gang up on her and the other patients wouldn't give her the support she needed, regardless of how reasonable her position was, lest they earn the ire of the administrative department. Even if she somehow convinced the reception staff that she was right, creating bad blood would only ensure that she never got a convenient appointment again, even if her blood was so bad that she really needed one immediately. They controlled this realm, they had the power, and all Kelly could do was accept her punishment with obeisance and take her place in the holding cells they dressed up as an innocent waiting room.
With a perfunctory ‘Thank you’ that fell on unconcerned ears, Kelly left the desk and took the few steps necessary to enter the waiting room. To call it dowdy would have been to call the sun tepid or the ocean damp. It would have been a disgrace and an insult to the efforts which had clearly been made to forge the sanctuary of drabness lying before her. A set of stackable chairs, fresh from the spares cupboard at a disused factory, were arranged with their backs against the walls of the narrow room. Each one looked less comfortable than the last, their pale grey-blue fabric upholstery covering a layer of cushion which would have been considered laughable in its prime, and downright offensive in the present day. The two rows of seats formed a channel which led the eye directly to the badly wallpapered dead-end rear wall of the room.
Squatting sadly where the chair rows ended was a small plastic table with aggressively gaudily coloured plastic chairs in disarray around it. Large-print books, possibly with advanced pop-up functionality, were scattered across all available surfaces as well as the floor, mingling with the mismatched battalion of toys and coloured blocks which held the line between a child’s boredom and the exciting flavours to be found in a strange building. Also distributed liberally among the children’s play area were scrappy pieces of paper and crayons of varied sizes and colours. More than one had been crushed into the carpet, sticking the fibres together in a smeared, stained wax patch. But that was an improvement to the condition of the flooring in general.
Old décor was a source of constant confusion and fascination to Kelly. From unfamiliar houses, to old public buildings, to sitcom backdrops the choices, if the term choice can really be applied, made by her forebears in how to decorate their houses were equally terrifying and mystifying. More than once she considered that the colours may have faded over time, or that the human eye was morphing and now saw what was once beautiful as something less. Her best theory, though, was that the previous decades had been beset by a terrible plague, the sort of virulent epidemic that infected all who contacted it and suffocated them as if they were trying to breathe under water. The nature of this plague, of course, was a dramatic overabundance of the colour brown. Kelly could picture it flowing like floodwater through the streets, pouring down the sides of high-rise flats and billowing like a mist across the plains until everything was smothered with its putrescence. For how long this plague would have continued its campaign of chromatic terror she could only speculate but clearly, during the 1970s, someone gained the upper hand over the scourge of brown and found a way to seal it within decorations and consumer goods. Only by imprisoning it in everything from wallpaper and clothes to electronics and appliances were they able to reduce ambient brown to safe levels.
If her theory was correct, and Kelly had seen no reason to believe that it wasn’t, then this GP’s surgery had been on the frontlines back in the day, providing triage in the great war of brown. Whilst the chairs had managed to escape conscription, the carpet had borne enough of the brunt for the whole building and much of the surrounding town. Deep, dark and unwelcoming, the carpet covered the floor of the waiting room like a mud-bog covers farmland after a harsh winter. Bright, polychromatic light was absorbed by its crushed pile and spat back out as a monument to wet bark chippings and silt, stripped of all its vibrancy in favour of the drudging, shambling, brown. So much brown was there to absorb, it seemed, that the floor was not enough. Cannily, this problem had been resolved. For a clear two feet up every wall the carpet continued, with a soft bend where each wall met the floor and some expert cutting and shaping work in the corners of the room. This was the work of an artist turned to the cause of evil; masterful crafting which should never have been allowed in the first place.
Dumbfounded and afraid, Kelly stood and stared at the carpet, which was easy when it took up so much of her field of vision. This wasn’t the norm, she was fairly sure of that. Were the medical professionals in charge of the surgery expecting her to be able to sit horizontally? Was there a need to protect the lower areas of the wall from wear and tear? Did they need to be made softer and warmer for bare feet? Whatever the explanation, Kelly didn’t feel entirely comfortable committing herself to taking part in the exercise.
“Please take a seat, Ms Heddick, you’re currently a fire hazard.” The receptionist called over. “No offence.” She added, in a cumbersome attempt at deception.
“None taken…” Kelly replied. She’d been called worse by better.
With cautious steps at first, lest the brown bog rise up to claim her, Kelly walked into the waiting room. The floor was very much lava in this scenario, and the best way to safeguard herself was to do as she was told and sit on one of the chairs. There were plenty of vacancies from which to choose; a clear run of six empty seats extended from the close end of the room up to the first of the other waiting patients, who had his head bowed over a magazine of some kind. Kelly had no idea whether he was some tragic terminal case, or was maybe deadly contagious, so maintaining a good four-seat buffer felt like a sensible plan of action. The safely isolated chair of choice accepted her, and she tried not to think about the carpet looming behind her, ready to strike at a moment’s notice.
Sitting as comfortably as she was able, which was to say not at all, Kelly drank in her non-potable surroundings. Further down the rows of seating were a few more patients, each of whom was distracting themselves in some way to pass the tedious wait a little more quickly. They stared at their phones, their magazines, or even their feet if necessary, and seemed to be making every effort to avoid acknowledging that one another existed. A rousing game of charades could probably have delivered them some kind of collective respite from the long wait ahead if only they would work together. Then again, Kelly thought, the ensuing ruckus would probably have been against the will of the wardens at the reception desk. Their harsh retribution was not to be invited so lightly.
Directly opposite Kelly, and standing out among the background of stoic other patients, was a girl in her late teens, or maybe her early twenties. It was hard to tell with so much of her face covered by luminous green hair. One hand clasped a paper cup filled with what appeared to be tea, and the other was digging around inside her small, patchwork backpack.
The girl’s vigorous rustling of hand-in-bag had been what first grabbed Kelly’s attention, but the action of her off-hand was what held it. Starkly contrary to Kelly’s own inclinations, the girl was playing it fast and loose with her cup of tea. Lidless and careless she casually waved the paper vessel around as she fiddled with her bag, and Kelly watched uncomfortably as the pale brown fluid sloshed precariously close to the sides. Worst of all, when she decided that both hands were necessary for the bag rummaging, she decided to rest the cup on the soft, convex seat of the chair next to her. Kelly gripped the edge of her own chair anxiously as the spongey seat gradually sank under the cup, proceeding to tip the tea at an ever steeper angle as what remained of the cushioning rose lazily back up. Her fingernails were nearly pierced fabric as she saw the fluid kiss the lip of the cup. The slightest perturbation from another patient walking across the waiting room, the girl shuffling her legs, or even a stray, spiteful breeze from the otherwise non-functioning air conditioner would cause a tea-fall of thirst-condemning proportions.
As if intentionally playing cruel games with Kelly’s nerves, the girl dropped her bag with a thud. Kelly flinched but kept her eyes locked on the cup to watch for any sign of spillage. There was nothing. How the girl had got away with it she didn’t know, but the tension was killing her.
“Whoops!” the girl said brightly, oblivious to the mortal peril of her beverage, as she leaned down to pick the bag up and resume her searching. Quite what she could have been looking for, or how full the bag needed to be to get it that lost, Kelly had no idea. In fact, she had no idea how anything could play on the girl’s mind, or the minds of any of the other patients for that matter, as much as the frankly nightmarish level of precariousness displayed by the hot beverage situation.
With ever greater vigour the bag search continued. Rattling, shuffling, scrunching, and clinking accompanied a persistent shaking. How the scale of the motion could fail to disturb the tea’s surface Kelly failed to comprehend; it could only be a combination of the impressive damping ability of the chairs, the tremendous surface tension of the liquid, and the sheer, bare-faced, bloody luck of a girl who was taking her cup’s stability for granted. Kelly didn’t know if she could take the anxiety for much longer. The stakes were unspeakably low, but they took on an inflated sense of importance for no other reason than the raw preventability of the looming disaster.
“Ah. They’re on my face.” The girl giggled to herself, touching a hand to her glasses. “That’s the end of that mystery.” She added for the benefit of the room, catching Kelly’s eye and giving her a smile. Kelly smiled back and wished she could look away, but there was no way that the mug of tea would be allowed to leave her line of sight now; not at the eleventh hour. The bag was returned to the ground. A hand reached out for the tea. Kelly’s fingernails touched the interior framework of the chair. The girl swept up her drink casually, and without spilling a drop.
A deaf person in the next room could have heard the tension break as Kelly flopped against the back of her chair, like a marionette doll severed from its strings and allowed to rest. Disaster had been averted against all the odds. Every moment of much-feared tedium for the rest of her wait would at least come with the relief of not having a highly stressful drink-loss spectacle. She cast her eyes around the small waiting room once again, since that was about the sum of the entertainment available to her, and searched for something else to watch. It was equally disinteresting to the last time she’d performed the move and everything seemed to still be in order. The smattering of other waiting patients were still absorbed in their own business of reading dog-eared magazines on topics in which they had no real interest, or staring at the floor and avoiding eye-contact with one another, and no-one was taking any undue risk with their drink. Above them a clock continued to work like clockwork. The mirrored window of the nurse’s office maintained its reflectivity. Kelly could see the reflections of a row of empty chairs and a section of perplexingly carpeted wall, and examined them with what could only be called passing interest in the most generous possible terms. When that had exhausted all it had to offer, her eyes caught back up with the girl opposite.
With both sleeves rolled up to the elbow and her feet braced against the floor, she was leaning over the empty chair next to her and peering closely at a damp patch. With sinking horror Kelly realised what must have happened, reconstructing in her head the events which must have passed silently by while she’d been gawping idly around the room. The girl must have stuck to her devil-may-care attitude to cup management, making movements and gestures with such aplomb despite her precious cargo that the over-filled vessel stood no chance at all. Kelly could picture the tea falling in slow motion against a backdrop of the girl’s horrified face. She would surely have seen the error, apparently too late, and it could only be hoped that she’d learned a harsh lesson.
Just as Kelly was congratulating herself on the masterfully constructed hypothesis, the girl sat up straight and casually tipped another splash of her drink onto the wet patch.
Mouth agape but pulling into a smile that she couldn’t hold back, Kelly watched as the girl leaned in to closely inspect the scene of her crime. It had been a deliberate soaking all along. She hadn’t been careless, she’d been inviting fate to do the work for her.
In one fell swoop, or perhaps one fell splash, entertainment had generated itself for Kelly. She leaned back in her chair and watched the girl poring over her pouring, apparently paying attention to every dampened fibre and the work of each drop of tea. With meticulous care she carried her examinations to completion and then tipped another small splash onto the chair. Over and over she repeated whatever mental calculations and observations she’d previously performed and then added extra tea into the seat, in a perpetual cycle of spillage and measurement. Every now and then she’d let out an excited giggle, her eyes wide with wonder, and she’d keep going.
Kelly became so invested in the unfolding events that it didn’t occur to her to look away when the bell was sounded for the next patient. It occurred to the girl however, who looked up to read the name on the rolling display screen and caught sight of Kelly watching her. She grinned broadly.
“There's nothing quite as absorbent as other people's upholstery that's what I always find." She said with over enthusiastic glee and fascination, as she tipped a little more onto the seat for Kelly’s benefit. "Look at it go! That's nearly half a cup just... gone! This is one thirsty chair."
Kelly didn’t know how to react. Part of her wondered if she should be intervening; whoever sat on that chair next would be getting a soggy bottom with exceptionally milky tea, which wasn't generally the aim of taking a seat. But having watched for so long already, a sudden interruption would appear spiteful at worst and conceited at best. The only reasonable course of action was to allow her to continue and offer support. If that also happened to be the most amusing course of action then so be it.
“It does seem to be drinking more tea than you are.” Kelly observed.
“Oh, I don’t really want this anyway. I only got it to do this.” The girl replied, eyes still transfixed on the gradually expanding damp patch. “You’d barely know how much tea there was in this chair by just looking at it.”
“Must all be soaking through the padding underneath the upholstery.” Kelly hypothesised. The girl seemed to approve, looking up at Kelly with a smile and knowing nod.
“I think you’re right. We’d see a whole different picture if we sliced this fabric off….” She stared silently at the chair. “Maybe next time.”
Kelly was fairly sure she’d just incited vandalism. It didn’t make her feel as guilty as she would have thought.
“I’m Kelly. What’s your name?” she asked, deciding that she might as well humanise the situation.
“Kelly. Kelly. Kelly.” The girl repeated, starting Kelly in the face, unblinking. “OK, I think I’ll remember that now. I’m Holly. Nice to meet you.” She said, adding a genial wave and turning back to the important business of soaking.
After a few more small splashes Holly extended one finger from her free hand and poked at the damp patch, and judging by her expression she found something to be very pleased about.
“It only feels a bit moist, you know?” she relayed, making unnecessary use of the term ‘moist’. “Absolutely incredible stuff.”
Kelly chuckled quietly and leaned forward to engage in a more active inspection. Where Holly’s attention was undivided and burning into the seat, Kelly’s flitted between the splashing and the splasher. She’d never seen someone over the age of five so utterly absorbed by playing with their drink at the expense of another person’s furniture.
"The whole lot! I’ve poured a whole cup of tea into this seat and you can barely even see the stain." Holly marvelled. Her head was mere centimetres from the site of a thousand strangers' posteriors but that didn't bother her at all as she examined the fabric in minute detail. "Seriously, come and have a look!”
Kelly didn’t even hesitate. She did, however, take the time to preserve the sanctity and ownership of her own chair by leaving her jacket obviously and deliberately folded on the seat, with her bag squarely on top. There were plenty of free chairs available in the waiting room, but having already laid claim to this one and put in the hard work of warming it up, it was worth protecting. To go to a cold chair at this late stage would be tantamount to self-harming, even without the newly discovered risks of a secret tea-soaking.
Her sovereignty guaranteed for the time being, she crossed over to Holly and joined her in examining the spillage, albeit at a safer distance from the seat. It was undeniably a smaller wet mark than she would normally have anticipated for a full measure of hot beverage.
“I'm going back for another cup.” Holly announced. “This is more than worth the 40p for more tea. Heck, the world needs this. For science I will make the sacrifice." she nobly declared, standing up and rummaging through her purse for loose change. "Would you like anything while I'm up?"
"Uh... a hot chocolate would be lovely, please." Kelly replied, fishing a hand into her pocket and retrieving a handful of coins to give to Holly.
"No problem. Want to make a donation of another cup of tea for the cause of science?"
Kelly knew she shouldn't. This wasn't how grownups were supposed to behave. Then again the girl was getting her a drink, and it was pretty fascinating to see how much tea a single chair could hold.
"Yeah go on then. Give it a cuppa from me too." She agreed, handing over another 40p.
"You're a visionary. You can see the big picture!" Holly exclaimed with arms waved wide and wild. She pirouetted and ran to the drinks machine, eager not to waste a single precious moment in the pursuit of progress.
Kelly watched Holly go in a whirlwind of energy and then looked ponderously at the seat of such attention. It had gone from a banal detail to a wonder of their limited, waiting-room world; a site of special scientific interest for the niche field of upholstery absorbency. But despite its obvious value to the advancement of humankind it was also dangerous, like a volcano or shopping bag full of scorpions. If someone walked in now, without having seen the experiment going ahead, there was a distinct risk that they would plonk themselves down and absorb a whole cup of tea into their behind. Kelly knew that the chair needed to be treated with respect. It needed a sign, really. Something like 'Caution Wet Chair' or 'Beware: Tea Soaking In Progress'. Nothing to scare people, but enough to inform them of the situation. Anyone here was capable of deciding for themselves whether they wanted to become a human strainer or not, but they could only do that when armed with the data.
In the corner with the children's toys and the magazines were scraps of paper and crayons; everything the budding sign maker needed to ply their craft. This was the best solution that Kelly could think of to satisfy all potential stakeholders in the scenario. Except whoever had the job of keeping the furniture clean, of course. They were taking one for the team.
Kelly crouch-ran over to the children's table so as not to waste valuable time by standing up. She grabbed a scrap of paper with little difficulty or deliberation, but the array of crayons available was momentarily paralysing. A full rainbow of colours was partially represented by elements of differently branded wax crayons. Should she choose the stub of olive green for a calming, if off-putting, message? The almost whole midnight blue to show that this was a deeply analytical pursuit? Or the thick cochineal red, with several angles blunted into its girth, for sheer eye-catching implications of danger? Her eyes flicked like a nervous fly from one to the others and her hand hovered high up, ready to pounce on any one she chose. The eyes of everyone in the waiting room would be on her, their collective breath held in anticipation of the final decision, so she had to make the right one.
Somewhere in her mind the choice had been made before she started thinking. It could only ever be the red crayon, the first choice of infants, artists and visionaries the world over. Kelly swept it up into her hand and heard no gasps of shock or disapproval. Taking that as validation of her selection she paced back to the chair of much absorbency and squatted down without so much as a second thought about getting too close to the carpet. Such trivialities were nothing to her now that she’d found a purpose.
Kelly rested the paper on her knee and prepared the crayon, but didn’t risk putting wax to paper straight away. She hadn't yet settled on the appropriate final wording to convey an informational warning without appearing commanding or aggressive, a matter further complicated by the subconscious implications of such a bright and bold red writing implement. Around the corner, though, she could hear the drinks machine bubbling and spurting diligently, and her time for signage distribution was dripping and stirring away rapidly. She dived in and trusted her gut to make the right decision.
Whether or not Kelly’s gut was trustworthy for the task she’d given it was still up for debate, but she quickly learned that her knee wasn’t an ideal writing platform for it to exercise its newfound responsibility. Even amateur warning-writers knew that the font size of choice for a notice like the one Kelly was writing was always ‘as big as possible’, but that came with a difficulty given her choice of desk. Across both the height and the width of every letter, her knee provided a rich and varied landscape. Her leg’s topology undulated and morphed under the crayon, offering a diverse range of pressures, shapes, and stabilities which translated into a full intensity spectrum of deposited wax; within her first word she’d sampled colours from ghostly-pale to medical-emergency bright. The sign was rapidly turning from a friendly heads-up to a fully realised visual experience.
The sounds of stirring from around the corner ceased, sparking in Kelly an even greater urgency. Abandoning her previous care and attention to high fidelity lettering she slashed wax across the page in a frenzy to complete her grave cautioning. As soon as the last letter was completed Kelly gave the paper a sharp fold and perched it across the back of the damp chair, sitting itlike an unsecured tent on the upholstery heath.
“Seat Will Cause Wet Bum” the paper declared to the room. It offered no judgement of the process, nor any indictment of those who might choose to sit, instead providing simple notification that derriere may become closer to Perrier than most would like. The final letters of “cause” were bunched up where Kelly had realised in a panic that she was running out of space on the line, but that gave it a sense of urgency and authentic imperfection. She’d made art to go along with the science in progress.
With her noble work completed, Kelly scuttled quickly back to her chair. The barricade of jacket and bag had worked a treat, fending off the rampaging hordes of other patients from trying to steal the chair from underneath her, but its time was done. Carefully and respectfully she dismantled the seat protection barrier and took her place again as an observer. She was all-too-ready for her hot chocolate after that ordeal, and genuinely wanted to see the outcome of everything that Holly was doing.
Barely a few seconds after Kelly sat back down Holly appeared with three paper cups balanced in her hands. One of them had a stirrer leaning casually against the inside edge, and the other two were capped with white plastic lids.
“Order’s up!” she said brightly to Kelly with a smile. Like a doting mother she cast a glance over to her soaking project and jolted slightly when she saw that a sign had been added. Not a drop was spilled from any of the cups though, once again demonstrating Holly’s impeccable beverage control. “What’s what?” she asked curiously.
“It’s a sign.” Kelly replied, standing up to take her hot chocolate.
“Seat will…will… coo? Ca… oh, cause! Seat will cause wet bum.” Holly read, turning the words over in her head. “Hmm. I don’t know if we can say that with confidence at this stage.”
“No?” Kelly questioned, holding out her hand. Holly’s voice had lost some of its effervescent edge.
“No.” Holly confirmed, holding her selection of cups forward. Kelly took the hot chocolate. “I mean we’ve not tried squeezing it yet. Sitting down might just drive the tea deeper for all we know.”
“Oh… I hadn’t considered that but I don’t think it’s super likely. Thanks by the way.”
“That’s fine.” Holly answered distractedly. “I suppose it will be a necessary sign eventually though.” Kelly sat back down and listened intently, and Holly returned to her own chair. “I mean, especially with two extra cups there’ll have to come a point where sitting down would be harmful. Good forward planning!” she finally congratulated, her full brightness once again shining through.
“We both want to see this go as far as possible.” Kelly explained with a grin. Holly nodded enthusiastically and placed once of the cups next to the leg of her chair on the floor. The brown carpet accepted the offering. Immediately Holly poured another splash of tea onto the usual spot and watched it disappear beneath the fabric.
“It just keeps going!” she exclaimed.
“More than most other chairs? I can’t say I’ve ever done this with any other chairs to know quite how impressive to find it.” Kelly offered.
“Really? You should definitely try it. It’s one of the best reasons to get out and about.”
“It seems that way.” Kelly agreed for the sake of the social contract. “It’s not why I came today but perhaps in the future…”
"So, what are you here for then?" Holly enquired, conversationally probing into Kelly's private medical concerns with her focus still squarely on the chair.
"A doctor's appointment." Kelly replied, trying not to sound guarded despite her short response.
"Oh, cool. I think most people here are, actually." Holly speculated happily, taking a considered gamble with her assumptions. "I'm getting some jabs. Jabby, jabby, jabs." She continued, making stabbing and injecting mimes with both hands, but still somehow not causing a single drop of tea to fall. If the mimes were in any way representative of her impending treatment then she needed to change to a less frenzied doctor immediately, lest she find herself to be a colander by the end of the day.
"Holiday vaccines I presume? Going somewhere nice?"
"Nah, I just end up in a lot of funky places. Best to keep myself fighting fit so I can rummage about with confidence." Holly informed.
Rummage was a word which conjured a lot of vivid imagery for Kelly. She pictured Holly kneeling in a dumpster, or leaning over a wheelie bin and scavenging for loose change, left over food, discarded kitchen appliances, and other such sundries. But she didn't look homeless or as if she'd been rifling through bins. And those with nothing rarely spent their money on inoculations or tea to pour into chairs. Kelly sipped her hot chocolate and tried to work Holly out. There had to be more to it.
"Rummaging eh? What do you rummage through?" She asked.
"This and that. Anything that looks like it might have what I need or want. And anything that seems interesting." Holly answered, using a lot of words to clarify absolutely nothing.
Kelly wanted to press her for more information, but felt bad about doing so after her own guarded "doctor's appointment" response.
"That's interesting." Kelly remarked. She always had trouble stopping that phrase from sounding sarcastic, especially when there was no follow-up comment to imply any kind of actual interest in the subject. She desperately tried to think of a way to question Holly without being a hypocrite.
"Yeah it is." Holly replied before Kelly could get there. "Had a really good week last week; it'll keep me going for a while, so I've got time for this lot" she made all the injection motions again "to sink in and do their job."
“Brilliant. You can take it easy for a little while.” Kelly said.
“Exactly. It gives me a chance to get out and about. I was wanting a time to come back here and it fell into my lap, just like this tea keeps falling into the chair.”
Kelly raised her eyebrows knowingly. Falling and pouring seemed to be interchangeable concepts here.
A minute or so passed in silence while Holly trickled a stream of tea out of her cup, and Kelly daydreamed about what on earth the girl could have been digging through. Idly her gaze drifted this way and that, eventually focusing on the carpets once again and reviving an old question.
“You come here vaguely regularly then?” Kelly asked. “For more jabs and stuff?”
“Sort of regularly, yeah. It takes time to be inoculated against everything and the more you look the more you find to get protected from. Don’t want to get home and find that I’ve gone rabid or something; that’d be just the worst.”
“Definitely. But if you’re a regular then do you know why the walls are carpeted?”
Holly looked up and examined the walls as if seeing them for the first time. She smirked and cocked her head to one side, trying to work it out.
“It's a valid question. But without doing some science I don’t have a sufficient answer. I can offer you an insufficient answer instead though?”
“Uh… yeah, sure.” Kelly indulged. She was intrigued.
“Because the person who made that decision was not qualified to do so.” Holly advised sagely, with a slow nod to emphasise her overflowing wisdom.
“The wall carpet?” the man further down from Kelly added suddenly. Both she and Holly turned to face him. “It's a silly matter. The flooring people weren't sure where the edges should be so they just overestimated to be sure.”
“Seriously?” Kelly questioned, with the beginnings of a laugh.
“Can’t see why else it’d be like this. I reckon the guys who did my living room carpet would’ve gone up the walls if I hadn’t been explicit about stopping where the floor ended.” The man explained. Kelly nodded sociably. “Caught ‘em trying to measure up the windowsills and the kitchen counters when they were working out how much to quote for. No-one wants a deep pile where you might chop tomato into it or something.”
“No, goodness no.” Kelly acknowledged, trying to work out whether the man was joking or not. He looked deadly serious, but Kelly had been tricked by this sort of thing before.
“I think that still falls under the remit of my insufficient answer.” Holly contended. “Anyone who measures a windowsill or a wall for carpet isn’t qualified to be in charge of that.”
“Fair’s fair.” The man said, looking back down at his magazine. Holly returned to her pouring, and Kelly relaxed into the back of her chair to watch the show.
Shrilly a bell rang out from speakers unseen to signal for the next patient. Every face turned towards the display screen and many turned away again in disappointment when they read “Miss H. Cann”.
“Ooh, that’s me!” Holly said excitedly. She looked at the cup of tea in her hand and the other one by the leg of her chair. “This came around sooner than I expected. Could you take over for me while I’m being jabbed? I shouldn’t be too long.” She requested with a hopeful optimism in her eyes.
Kelly looked at Holly, the cups, the chair, and the display screen. She knew it wasn’t the appropriate move to make, just like arming Holly with a second cup had been needlessly inflammatory. She knew in her heart of hearts that this was deeply childish behaviour and no-one wanted to have a chair saturated with tea. Worst of all the tea was so very milky that it wasn’t going to make the chair any more pleasant in a few days. Then again, they couldn’t come this far without going even further.
“Sure. Why not.” She agreed, ready to try something new.
“I knew I could count on you. You just get it.” Holly beamed, resting the partially-emptied cup on the floor while she grabbed her bag and stood up. “Remember to be gradual with it like I’ve been, won’t you? You can’t just pour the lot on or some will run away over the top and get the floor wet.”
“Heaven forbid.” Kelly muttered despite herself.
“Exactly. We’re not out to make a mess. Back in a bit.” Holly said, striding off towards her consultation room.
Kelly swept up her bag and jacket, relinquishing her hold on the chair which had served her so well, and traversed to the seat previously occupied by Holly. It was hot with the responsibility of watching over such an important project, or maybe just warm from where Holly had been sitting on it, but the sense of duty washed over Kelly all the same. She neatly piled her jacket and bag next to herself, took up the partial cup of tea and leaned over to the soggied seat.
From this angle the dampened patch was more difficult to discern. The asymmetrical way the fabric reflected the yellow room lights meant that there was almost no difference in the colour of tea-soaked threads compared to their dry counterparts. Trying to tell them apart was almost mesmerising; Kelly slowly drew her face closer and closer to the tea patch, trying to look for the subtle clues that it was in fact not as dry as it claimed. Before she knew it she was mere inches away and about to test it with a finger.
She shook herself out of it and sat up. This was ridiculous; she had a job to do, and that was to keep pouring hot drinks on this seat, not to press her face into it.
Judging by the way the weight of the cup shifted Kelly guessed that it was about half full still, and then congratulated herself for not thinking it to be half empty. Leaning into that feeling of achievement she started angling the beverage vessel over the innocent seat. Tipping the cup just up to the pouring threshold proved to be easy, but pressing on beyond the point of spillage went against everything she normally stood for. Every instinct and reflex in her body worked to prevent her from emptying the contents of a perfectly good drink onto a piece of someone else’s furniture. She tried to tell herself that it was owned by the state, and as a taxpayer she was probably entitled to treat it like this anyway, but the logic wasn’t sufficiently convincing. Guilt at having told Holly she’d hold the line, however, especially when coupled to how fun it was to watch the tea soak in, overpowered piffling concerns like having a social conscience. Kelly drew a deep breath of musty waiting room air, and tipped the cup further.
A very quiet dribbling and something like the rapping of a tiny drum heralded Kelly’s continuation of Holly’s noble work. Pale brown waves rippled briefly across the soft undulations in the canvas before sinking between them, leaving only a shimmer on the surface. Kelly watched closely as, over the course of a thirty seconds or so, the shimmer faded down to the almost invisible darkening that she had first noticed. If she hadn’t known what she’d just done then she would have sworn there had been no extra liquid emptied onto the seat at all; it had wholly blended into the upholstered background and hidden itself from sight. Another cascade of tea followed the same pattern of gradual disappearance, and then another, and another, all at the regular intervals naturally formed from the chair’s cadence of absorption, and Kelly watched them like a heron staring into the water for someone’s prized Koi Karp.
Bells rang again to summon a patient and Kelly found herself hoping that it was for someone else; medical treatment be damned she had to keep going. With great relief she saw a stranger’s name scrolling in red digital text, and immediately returned to her work. A few more pours saw her fully inverting the cup; she’d exhausted what remained of the second tea, and all there was to show for it on the pale cushion was a subtle shaded patch barely larger than it had been after cup number one.
Kelly took a sip of what had now become her cup of tepid chocolate and appreciated the unquestionable majesty of Holly’s masterpiece. No chair in Kelly’s own home would have weathered this kind of sustained spillage with such stoic grace. A single cup would have left her office chair dripping, and her favourite armchair was at risk from even a small splash. That this simple, humble, waiting room chair was able to stand as a bulwark against the onslaught of almost a pot’s worth of tea was a modern marvel.
With great excitement and appreciation for the life-events in which she was participating, Kelly took hold of the final cup of tea and prepared to resume Holly’s holy mission. Through the thin white lid she allowed a dribble of tea to bubble free and splatter across threads beset by more liquid than any accidental spillage could muster. She wondered how anyone else in the waiting room was able to tear themselves away from the spectacle. Maybe they, like she had done earlier, were dismissing the true gravitas of what was going on. All they saw was a grown woman playing with her beverages and disrespecting other people’s property, an interpretation which could barely have been further from the truth. She was showing this chair more respect than any waiting room patron, other than the prophet Holly of course, had ever done before in granting it an opportunity to display its super-powers. She was giving it a chance to perform miracles, a chance which it was taking with great aplomb.
Several more splashes fell into the cushion. This single chair was thirstier than the rest of the inhabitants of the surgery combined; it was on its third cup of tea in less than twenty minutes and showed no sign of slowing down. Kelly hoped that Holly would be done with her injections soon, so that she could bear witness to the ever-increasing wonder she had started. There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in Kelly’s mind that she would buy another cup of tea if she had to. She owed it to the world.
Where before she had quietly feared that the receptionists might have made a sudden spot-check and discovered the project, Kelly would now have welcomed their presence. It was vital that they understood the value of what they held out here; these chairs might be able to create a cafeteria in which spillages would matter not. They could provide any bathroom with a safe and robust place to sit, no matter what the shower-curtain-closure conditions were. At this rate they might well be able to make a serviceable sea-wall. There would always be an argument that they should be left in their natural habitat, with activists citing that it would be cruel to snatch them away from their home. Others might claim that making the sick stand up in their waiting room would be impractical, but surely all of that paled into insignificance compared to the good these chairs could do in the wider world. Another splash of tea pooled briefly and descended into the depths of the seat, reinforcing everything that Kelly was thinking.
The bell stopped her train of thought yet again, and another unknown name was called forth for treatment. It was a small mercy, but one that wouldn’t last forever. She was now the longest-waiting inmate of the waiting room and her time to leave would come before long; she had a duty to complete this grand task before that happened. Keeping an even closer eye on the damp patch, Kelly increased the frequency of pouring as much as she dared. She was a renegade of the art, a wildcard in the discipline, keeping her eye close to the site and her hand always poised and ready. The moment she saw that final tell-tale glimmer fade into memory another cascade was falling to take its place, granting the chair no downtime in her quest to determine how much tea it took to slake the mighty thirst on display.
“That’s some good technique.” Holly said proudly into her ear. Kelly jumped with a start, almost splashing tea on herself as Holly’s face appeared up close in her peripheral vision.
“Agh!” she vocalised. “Uh, hi. It’s going really well! We’re half way down cup three and it’s not slowing down at all!” Kelly proudly told Holly.
“Amazing. I told you other people’s upholstery is always a surprisingly good sponge.” Holly replied. One sleeve of her jumper was rolled up, and a small circular plaster now adorned her skinny arm.
“Jabs all fine?” Kelly asked out of a strange sense of obligation. She didn’t know what she was going to do with the information of course; there was no action that she could take for the better or the worse to influence the efficacy of intravenous inoculations, nor to improve their administration if it had gone badly.
“Yep. Stabbed right into my arm and juiced up with exciting dormant viruses and stuff. I’ll be able to sift through all sorts in no time.” Holly informed her with a smile. “It’s a bit sore, but I suppose that’s to be expected if someone sticks sharpened steel into you.”
“Probably, yes.” Kelly agreed. There was a brief pause, with Holly peering between Kelly, the cup, and the stain. “Oh, sorry. Would you like your seat and cup back?” she said, standing up and offering out the tea.
“Thanks. Might as well see this through to the end.” Holly accepted, taking her chair back. Kelly returned to her original place on the opposite side of the waiting room and watched with bated breath. Seeing Holly in command of the pouring again was bittersweet; it was a relief to have her mentor back and see a master of the craft at work, but relinquishing the responsibility and the proximity to the magic was saddening. She had tasted the sweet fruit of tea-captainship for such a short time, but had become accustomed to it almost immediately.
Like a cathedral chiming for midday, the campanologist’s nightmare bell sang out once more. This time it was Kelly’s own name proudly illuminating the waiting room.
“Oh, I’m up.” She said. Holly looked across at the name and seemed to agree.
“Good luck with your appointment! It was nice to meet a fellow enthusiast.” Holly answered with her sincere smile.
“It was nice to get involved. I’ll see you when I’m done, if you’re still here.” She said hopefully, suddenly dreading a world without their marvellous experiment.
“Cool.”
Kelly strode off to so-called ‘Consultation Room 1’, her mind remaining in the waiting room with the fate of the chair as she knocked on the door and heard an immediate instruction to enter. Even as she stepped into the small office, with its low padded chair alongside a sturdy wooden desk, she wondered just how saturated the internal padding had really become. Could it be at bursting point, or would it keep going for several cups yet? There were so few answers.
“Hello.” The doctor greeted. He was a gentleman of what Kelly guessed to be his early fifties. Grey hair was cut short but still found a way to be messy and he looked at her over the top of his rectangular glasses.
“Hi.” Kelly said, dragging herself back into the situation.
“How can I help?” he asked professionally. His fingers were steepled in the way that must be taught, practiced, and perfected in the first year of medical school.
“Um…” Kelly started, trying to remember why she’d booked the appointment in the first place. “…sorry my mind’s a bit thrown from the waiting room.”
“The carpet?” the doctor speculated with a sympathetically pained expression.
“Yeah…” Kelly replied, accepting that as a far more acceptable reason than liquid vandalism. “What’s the wall carpet situation about?”
“It’s in case we need additional floor space, basically.”
“Uh…” Kelly questioned.
“We requested more room when the surgery was being planned and constructed, but this was all we could afford to build in the budget. We could, however, fit more flooring into the budget, so we just bought up a load more and ran it up the walls as auxiliary floor, in case we should need it.” He explained, taking great liberties with logic.
“Oh… I see?” She replied, her face furrowed deep with contemplation. “Actually, no I don’t. Things won’t stay on that flooring because of gravity. It’s just carpeted wall.”
“We did come up against that problem, I’m not going to lie,” He admitted “but it got resolved with Velcro and nails.”
“You just nail things to the wall if they won’t fit in the room otherwise?”
“Or Velcro them, as appropriate.” He confirmed.
“Got it.” Kelly said, unwilling to raise more questions.
They each held an expectant silence.
“So, your problem?” the doctor prompted.
“Ah… yeah… that.” Kelly remembered. She pushed the mysteries of the waiting room to one side. It would still be out there when she was done.
Several minutes of invasive personal questions and judgemental looks later, Kelly emerged from the consultation room with a paper prescription in one hand and a redder hue to her cheeks than when she’d entered. Two to three weeks of medication but not a single day off work necessary; no good had come of this trip at all.
As if to compound her feelings of dejection the overabundance of brown carpet loomed into her vision once again, filling even her periphery with its harrowing pile. But atop it was the full array of seating, including the great work undertaken in the time before ‘thrice-daily after meals’. ‘Very harsh on the stomach’ indeed; that seemed like it was only going to make the situation worse.
There was no sign of Holly, a revelation which sat on Kelly like a damp blanket. Not a blanket dampened with tea via a scientifically rigorous process, but a cold, wet, post washing machine one that did nothing for anyone. At the very least it meant that Holly wouldn’t have to see her in the throes of minor irritation about a diagnosis. A small silver lining, but she’d cling to it none-the-less.
All of the empties, be they scientific tools or the remains of Kelly’s hot chocolate, had been tidied away and presumably binned. No forgotten garments or bags were hung over seat backs or lying between legs. There wasn’t even a calling-card splash of tea across the wall. But at least the warning sign was still in place. Kelly crossed over to the seat to give it one final inspection for old-times’ sake, focusing on the site of the damp spot to honour its rightful grand status. As could have been predicted, the dark patch had grown no larger; the seat’s mystical powers were still intact and stood as a testament to the good times that the waiting room had witnessed.
As Kelly leaned over the seat, holding her head in the proven highly-proximate location for accurate assessment, she saw the same faint witness mark of the tea which had entered over the course of the experiment. She moved her head this way and that, seeing the effect wax and wane as her angle changed, and recognised that whatever had transpired here was special. Faintly, though, she heard a slow, gentle, dripping. Was it a trick of the mind? A yearning so strong for the experimental times that it made itself manifest in auditory sensation? No, Kelly decided. It was definitely a real sound and it was coming from beneath the chair.
Cautiously Kelly moved back slightly and started to kneel down. This was a wholly untested angle, and one that she would have preferred to investigate with the security of her partner in epiphany being nearby, but she was alone now. As intimidating as it was to test a new hypothesis solo, Holly would have wanted her to learn as much as possible before leaving. It was a mark of respect to make this one final observation.
On her knees and leaning sideways, Kelly tilted her head and peered at the underside of the chair. Directly in the centre was a large, shimmering wet patch bulging downwards towards the horrid carpet. The whole soaked prominence was feeding a tiny bead of moisture which grew gradually with every passing second, its brown colour all too familiar. With satisfying regularity the bead would form a full droplet and, after a momentary distension from the fabric, fall onto a growing stain on the carpet below.
Kelly couldn’t, or maybe just wouldn’t, help smiling. The chair’s seemingly endless thirst was a mere illusion, a trick perpetrated by the seat and its partner in crime the brown hell-carpet. With sudden clarity Kelly understood that the additional carpet wasn’t a matter of poor estimation or tenuous attempts at providing extra surface area; it was the key to the ruse. All that extra pile was additional capacity for absorption. It was the greatest con the doctor’s surgery would ever see.
Standing up a wiser woman with a slightly achier back, Kelly took one last look at the seat and its sign, before noticing with a skipped heartbeat that someone had added to it.
“Good advice. It’s been a pleasure working with you. Holly.” It now said, within a slightly lopsided heart. Holly had gone for the analytical midnight blue crayon; it was the most fitting choice for someone of her scientific vision, and also served to confirm that the heart was not a romantic gesture. She really was a genius. Even though tea was gradually creeping up the bottom of the sign, Kelly lifted it up and tucked it into her handbag. Some irrational and unaccountable part of herself wanted a memento of the special time she’d had there, and taking the whole chair wasn’t an option; it would probably have got her arrested. It wouldn’t fit in her car either, so the exercise would have been futile either way. The chair was better off where it stood, a dripping testament to what had transpired there even if it was smoke and mirrors. It didn’t matter to Kelly that the chair wasn’t truly the most absorbent sitting-solution in the world, what mattered was that it had brought her and Holly together under a common cause of empirical observations. Two people had come and gone, and they would possibly never meet again despite their ephemeral unity. But the stains they had left on the furniture would be forever.