Ray's Family Heirloom.

The Chesterfield came into the farmhouse the year Ray’s father passed, straight under the window facing the fire.

Ray’s daughter Amy took her first steps on the rug in front of it, hand over hand along the buttons. Ray is seventy two now, and there have been plenty of little footsteps since, five grandchildren sharing that same patch of floor while he sat, you guessed it, in his spot on the end.

Ray Meagher has lived his whole life within half an hour of the Blue Lake. Thirty one years at the mill, a block just outside town, and a windbreak of pines he planted himself back in the eighties and has been complaining about ever since.

Winter down there comes in off the Southern Ocean and it does not muck about, so from about May the front room is the only room anybody really uses. Which is to say that for half of every year, that lounge was the house.

Everyone in that house had a spot and nobody ever had to be told whose was whose, and Ray’s was the left end, near the lamp, close enough to the fire to feel it.

Forty years of the same man settling into the same place will show in leather eventually, and if you looked at that left arm you could see it plain as day. You could see exactly where his arm went.

It did not fail all at once, the way people expect. The colour went first at the tops of the arms where hands land, then the grain flattened right through the middle where everybody sat, and then one winter a seam finally let go and a throw went over it, the way a throw does.

It was fine like that for a good while. By the end it was not fine at all, and Ray knew it long before anybody in the family said a word to him about it.

So he rang us on a Monday morning, and the first thing out of his mouth was not what we made, or what it cost.

“Can you fix it?”

It had been his father’s, he told us, and he was not ready to be the bloke who finally got rid of it.

“It was Dad’s.”

We went and had a proper look at it, and we genuinely wanted to say yes to him.

The trouble is we could not fix it. Re-covering a Chesterfield of that age means building onto somebody else’s frame, and by the time the leather has gone the frame has almost always gone with it, so you would be back where you started inside a few years having paid near enough what a new one costs. We would rather tell a man that straight than take his money for it.

“Righto. Thanks anyway.”

And that was that. He was not rude about it, he simply had no interest in being sold anything, and off the phone he went. We thought we had lost him, and to be honest we thought we had probably earned it.

Then he rang back on the Thursday. Not to order anything, mind you. Just to ask us one thing.

“How long am I looking at, and what actually happens in them weeks?”