The Bench in the Courtyard
The bench in the courtyard of Farrow House had stood in the same place for years, under the plane tree by the bins. Then, one week in April, it started moving.
Yolande noticed on a Tuesday. The bench was out in the middle of the courtyard, in full sun, three metres from where it belonged. She was carrying two bags of shopping and she was not in the mood, so she put the bags down and dragged it back. It was heavier than it looked.
By Friday it was in the sun again.
She decided it was the man on the ground floor, the one who would sit out there every afternoon with his paper. She began to plan the sentence she would say to him, and then she never said it, because you don’t, and because he was eighty-one.
The bench went on moving all summer. Some weeks it was under the tree. Some weeks it stood against the far wall, away from the windows on the second floor. Once it had been turned right round, facing the wall like it had done something wrong. Yolande told herself she would stop putting it back, and never quite did. She started watching it the way you watch weather.
In September a van came and two men from the council took the bench away. There had been a complaint, they said. They weren’t sure whose. It took them four minutes.
Then something happened that had never happened at Farrow House. People came out.
Eleven residents stood in an empty courtyard with nowhere to sit: the man from the ground floor, the woman on the second floor with the baby, the family whose boys were always playing football against the end wall, Yolande. And they worked it out. He had been moving it into the sun. She had been moving it away from her window, because of the talking at night. The boys had been using it as a goal. Yolande had been dragging it back under the tree, every few days, for six months.
Everybody turned and looked at her.
“You could have said something,” the woman with the baby said.
“So could you,” said Yolande, and then they all laughed, because it was true of every one of them.
They wanted the bench back. Nobody had the council’s number.
By then, though, they had each other’s.