The Chair

This was my own take on TV pictures of an empty factory floor screened as part of a documentary sometime during the early 1990s recession. I say empty, but there was a wrecked chair in shot . . .

A vast factory floor. Rows of machinery once ran in parallel across it. But all that has been dismantled and sold off by the receivers. The windows have been broken: pieces of glass, in an assortment of shapes and sizes, lie all around. Wooden partitions have been kicked to smithereens. In the middle of this hostile place stands a chair - or the remains of one: tube metal frame and cracked plastic seat with chalky dust ingrained; the back has vanished, leaving two thin prongs pointing aloft as if to counterpoint the thick black wires dangling from the ceiling.

Into the silence come four men in search of a lesson: a former Chief Executive - tall, white-haired, wearing a suit for the first time in months; a TV journalist whose earnest reporting for a regional current affairs show is widely praised; a cameraman who once admitted, drunk, to a colleague that the world he saw through his lens was the only one he really knew; and the sound engineer who'd followed by declaring film-making to be the art of composing symphonies people could believe in.

The former Chief Executive has been interviewed on the thickly-tufted lawn outside. In here they will find a few wordless scenes, and the telling echo of footsteps on a concrete floor. So up and down he wanders, dragging his heels through the shattered spaces, holding his thick black overcoat tight round his body. He looks at the chair for a few seconds, curious, then turns away. He's trying to find a way of walking which will speak his mind. Or rather the mind he had a year ago. Because the truth is, he's adjusted very well. It was uncomfortable at first. But now he feels it was no more difficult than the retirement he had looming anyway. It was just that the firm had retired with him.

"Do you know what you'll say over this?" he asks the journalist.

"It'll depend on the editing, how much of it I can fit in."

"But you will use it?"

"Definitely - it'll make a strong closing image."

The former Chief Exec imagines his own voice-overs as he steps around the splinters on the floor: 'While John Bradshaw wanders through the ruins of the firm founded by his great-grandfather . . . ' What? 'Bradshaw & Sons, which had come through the depression of the 1930s and survived two world wars . . . ' No, wars had been the making of this business.

At the edge of his vision, the former Chief Exec sees that dark stumpy antenna tracking him. "Getting you now John," says the cameraman. "Could you look a bit less in a hurry?"

The former Chief Exec is eager to please. He stops and shakes his head a few times, but feels himself exaggerating the gesture. No, he needs to be desolated, that's it. But instead he notices the chair again. He moves over to it and stands there staring. The camera lowers.

"Er . . . shall we leave you alone for a few minutes, John?" asks the journalist.

"Eh? Sorry, no, it's just this chair. I'm trying to remember it . . . "

The journalist glances at his companions.

" . . . we bought a job lot of these years ago when we fitted out the canteen. So that's probably where it was. Or the storerooms - a lot got shoved in there, we never had enough shelf space, we were always piling stuff on chairs."

"Well I guess it could've been any of those," the journalist puts in tentatively.

"But which one? Sorry, this must seem a bit odd to you, but I really thought I knew the place like the back of my hand."

The former Chief Exec twists himself around and pulls away; he resumes his questing ramble. He turns his head this way, then that, studying every block of empty space in the building. Through his mind run more voice-overs: 'The waste of skills, the waste of machinery, the waste of people: the loss of Bradshaw & Sons is a loss to us all.' But he is too awkward to be angry. 'A monument to the failure of government to invest for the benefit of future generations . . . '

But was the failure only the government's? The former Chief Exec remembers the man they had titled Director of Corporate Strategy banging on about 'turning swords into ploughshares.' It was after the Wall came down and everybody was talking like that: it was typical of Dennis - that was his name - to jump on any bandwagons that were rolling.

"Maybe he was right," murmurs the former Chief Exec, as he remembers a living room crowded but silent; a young woman puffy red around the eyes, figures dressed in black munching politely on sandwiches they couldn't taste.

"Sorry John?" asks the journalist.

"Eh? Oh, nothing, just thinking . . . " The former Chief Exec finds he is gazing at the chair again. "Where was it, where was it?"

"John . . . ?"

"Yes, I know what you're thinking. It's just that it . . . well, all those years, there it was, right under my nose! Waiting for this, today . . . no, that doesn't make any sense . . . It's like it should've told us something was up . . . that's not it either . . . "

" . . . "

"I wish I'd known . . . damn, there's always so much we don't know . . . "

"Well, I'd agree with you there John! . . . Anyway, we've pretty much got all the footage we want. Shall we leave you to it?"

"No, no, I'm coming. No sense crying over spilt milk!"

And so they leave. The place is quiet again, quieter than anyone can imagine. At least until the vandals return. And there again stands the chair, alone with its secret history. Captured on film now, if that means anything.