The wingback chair was the only furniture left in Nan's spare room, and it faced the wall instead of the window. We noticed that before we noticed anything about the carpet.
We'd come to clear the bungalow before the sale went through. Dad had the keys, Mo had the tape gun, and the twins were meant to be labelling boxes but were mostly eating custard creams out of the tin marked FRAGILE — or it might have been marked KITCHEN, I get the two mixed up now. The carpet was the swirled brown-and-orange kind nobody's fitted since 1978, running the length of the room in loops that repeated every few feet, the same shape over and over, like a fingerprint stretched thin. We stepped round the chair to get to the wardrobe. Nobody moved it. There didn't seem any point, not on day one, not with three rooms still to do and the estate agent coming Thursday.
On the second day the chair was still facing the wall, but it had shifted, we thought, a few inches closer to the skirting board. Dad said the carpet underneath was probably uneven. Chairs walk on old carpet, he'd seen it before, some job he did years back in a house in Neath. Mo was quieter than usual. She kept looking at the pattern while she taped boxes shut, and at one point she stopped with the tape stuck to her thumb and said, don't you think that bit looks like someone kneeling. She pointed at a loop of orange near the skirting board, the one closest to the chair.
It did, a bit. Knees tucked under, head bowed, the way you'd kneel to look under a bed. We told her she'd been staring too long and to drink some water. The twins had stopped eating the biscuits by then. They didn't say why, and nobody asked.
By the third day we'd agreed, without really agreeing, to get the wardrobe and the boxes done first and leave the chair for last. Mo wouldn't go in alone, so Dad went with her, and I stood in the doorway holding the bin bags because someone had to hold the bin bags. The kneeling shape was two loops closer to the chair than it had been.
Nobody said the carpet pattern doesn't move. By then it seemed a stupid thing to say out loud, the kind of thing that only makes a situation worse once somebody's said it. Mo crouched near the skirting board and ran her finger along the weave the way you'd check a stain. She went very still. When she spoke her voice had a flatness I hadn't heard from her before, and she said the loops nearest the chair weren't the same shade as the rest of the carpet. Older, she said. Worn different. Like something had been kneeling there a long time, pressing the pile down in the one spot, over and over, for years, long before we ever carried a single box through that door.
Dad told her to come away from it. She did, eventually. We finished the room, locked up, went home, ate tea. Nobody has been back for the last box, the one still sitting by the wardrobe with FRAGILE written on the side in Nan's handwriting, the T crossed the way she always did it, too far to the left.
The estate agent rang last week to ask about access. She said the wingback chair in the back bedroom had been moved again, and could someone come and turn it round to face the window. Buyers don't like a chair facing the wall, she said. It puts them off.
We still haven't rung her back.