Buying a Smashed-Up Chest
by Adrian Plass
My wife, Bridget, and I are in Eastbourne, our nearest large town. We have come here to visit a shop, an establishment that always affects me in the same way. As we get out of the car after parking, I say to Bridget, “You know, there are two things I enjoy about this shop. One is arriving, and the other is leaving.”

She nods in complete understanding. Blands Warehouse is basically a vast, unadorned barn of a place. It stocks an enormously wide range of products displayed in numberless towering canyons of shelving. You really can get just about anything here. Crockery, bedding, carpets, toys, beer, lighting, garden supplies, mirrors, bathroom fittings, luggage, large and small gnomes made out of painted plaster—the list is endless. The problem is that although prices are comparatively low, the actual quality of items on the shelves, certainly as far as elegance and style are concerned, can be depressingly poor. If you wish to buy, let us say, plain white plates, this is a good place to come. You will do well with things like that. Otherwise, Blands is a temple to bad taste. Bridget and I are well aware of this, but we never seem to learn. The phantom lure of economy draws us in, and then the blatantly awful standard of goods on offer causes us to flee in confusion.

There are exceptions to every rule. In the case of this shop, the exception is the furniture. Or rather one very specific line of furniture. A month or two ago, we discovered that Blands had begun to stock a new line of tables, chairs, dressing tables, and bookcases constructed from reclaimed timber. These pieces were attractive and interesting, incorporating as they did all the faults and imperfections of the old wood, planed and shaped to fit the new designs, but still pleasingly visible. The colour was good too. Waxed to a rich but subdued antique finish, the coffee table that we bought (for a truly inelegant and unstylish price) fitted perfectly with the other bits and pieces in our sitting room at home.

We are here today because we are thinking of purchasing another piece of furniture in the same line. Our old upright piano has died with one last despairing tinkle, and after the faded corpse has been removed, there will be a vacancy for something new against that part of the sitting-room wall. We know just what we want. There is a sideboard, first cousin to our coffee table, that we believe will be a perfect replacement for the departing piano. We are here today to look at it again and measure it and go through the ritual of those mutual reassurances and encouragements that inevitably precedes all of our major purchases.

On the way to the sideboard, we are distracted by a dressing table in the same line, a very nicely designed and constructed piece of furniture. It has a lovely gentle curve at the top of the mirror housing and a neat little drawer under each end of the work surface. The legs are really quite beautifully turned. A good price too. I decide to sit down so that I can get a better view of the underside of the dressing table. As I lower my weight onto what I have assumed is some variety of wooden chest, there is an ominous splintering sound from beneath me, and I make an abrupt descent for a distance of about three or four inches more than I had anticipated.

My response to this alarming event is a panic-stricken, struggling attempt to get up very quickly. This is ill advised. A further succession of cracks like pistol shots echoes around the vaulted roof of Blands Warehouse, and the descent of my person for another six inches or so renders any kind of swift ascent utterly impossible. I am now sitting right down inside the wooden chest with my legs dangling over one side. My wife gazes down at me in frozen disbelief. I am interested to know what she will say. Her comment, when it comes, seems to me a little lacking in compassion.

“It looks as if you’ve just bought yourself a smashed-up chest.”

Watched by the small but fascinated audience of fellow shoppers that has gathered, I attempt to extricate myself from my wooden prison. At first my arms and legs flail helplessly, but nothing else moves. I have been in some undignified situations before, but this one takes the gold medal. Awful pictures form in my mind of my making a lurching, crouching, Quasimodo-like exit from the shop into the outside world wearing this box. Fuelled by the horrific pungency of this image, I engage in some more frantic struggling. After what seems an eternity, I am free and vertical again at last. It has taken about three violent goes. I notice that one or two members of my delighted audience are casting glances to the left and right, presumably wondering whether any of the shop staff have witnessed the destruction of one of their display pieces. They look mildly excited. I can understand that. Seeing others in conflict with authority when you haven’t done anything wrong yourself has always been a prime spectator sport.

Perceiving that the clowning programme is over and that none of the Blands staff have witnessed my encounter with the chest, the audience drifts away, leaving Bridget and me to examine the damage I have caused. I sigh. It is extensive. There is no point in talking about repair. This box is a box no more. It is an ex-box, a pile of wood with some nails sticking out of it.

For one wild moment I contemplate the possibility of flight. I can remember avoiding responsibility for something similar once or twice in past years. If I were to walk straight out of the shop now, I could probably reach the safety of our car in time to make a clean getaway. The moment passes. Even if I were to seriously contemplate such a thing, I have to bear in mind that I am with Bridget. Between us we must surely have one whole conscience. No, there is no escaping it. We have just about internalised the fact that Christians don’t break things and then run off, however much they may want to.

I set off to find a Blands employee and eventually discover a very young man sitting at a desk in the carpet department, deeply absorbed in the business of making a little pattern of holes in his blotter with a ballpoint pen.

“Excuse me,” I say, “I wanted to tell someone that I’ve just destroyed a piece of your furniture by sitting on it.”

The young man looks up from his blotter, suspending his activity in order to stare at me. A wild, hunted look appears in his eyes. His mouth opens and shuts silently. It is as though an alien has appeared and addressed him in the language of another planet.

“I’ll show you,” I suggest, realising that nothing is going to happen unless I say something else.

He nods dumbly, and I lead him down the shop to the scene of my accident. He looks at the thing that was once a chest and blinks heavily. Finally he mutters something about having to “fetch someone else” and hurries away down the nearest canyon where my wife is rather unconvincingly staring at horrible tea towels that she will never buy and pretending to be single.

Half a minute later another man arrives, presumably the young man’s boss. This man is older, possibly in his mid-forties. He is quite smartly dressed and has a serious, troubled expression on his dark-complexioned face. Bridget gathers her courage together and comes over to linger near enough to hear what he has to say.

“Good afternoon,” I say politely to the man. “I’m afraid I’ve broken one of your pieces of furniture by sitting on it. Look, it’s this piece—I mean, these pieces—here.”

He surveys the damaged box. He looks at me. He looks at Bridget. He looks at the box again. He looks around the shop. He rubs his chin with his hand. He looks at me once more. If his expression were a gearbox, it would be stuck in neutral. I do sympathise. I can see exactly what the problem is. Having sifted through the responses available to him after the years he has spent at Blands, he simply cannot find one that fits this situation. Should he adopt a stern, punitive approach in the face of this damage to property? Well, no, not really, because the damage was not deliberate, and the perpetrator has voluntarily confessed to his unpremeditated crime. Perhaps he should be lighthearted and matey. Well, no, not immediately, because he can’t be sure yet if I am willing to pay for the damage. He ought to say something, but he can’t. His lips begin to form words, but they never emerge from his mouth.

“I’ll just fetch someone else,” he manages at last, and he rides off down the same shelf canyon that swallowed up his young colleague a few minutes ago.

Bridget and I wait. As we hang around in the furniture department, we muse on the fact that we may have to work our way slowly up the entire Blands Warehouse command chain until we reach the chairman himself, who will drive down from some distant town with a couple of members of the board and make a final resolution possible. There is a short period during which nothing happens, and then the second man reappears. He has fetched someone else. He has brought a woman with him. She is quite different. She approaches the situation with authority and humour.

“If you don’t like our furniture,” she says with a twinkle in her eye, “why don’t you just tell us instead of breaking it to pieces?”

We all laugh. The woman explains that the chest is not a chest at all. It is a fitment for the top of another, higher piece of bedroom furniture. That is why it was so flimsy. We ask her to tell us the price of the flimsy not-chest. She says it was just under a hundred pounds, but because of my honesty she will only charge us what it cost Blands to buy from the wholesaler. I express my thanks and conceal my horror. She asks the second man to go and find out how much that wholesale price is. Bridget says to him, “Yes, and while you’re gone, Adrian can sit down very carefully on one of these proper seats and jolly well think about what he’s done!”

Up to this point the second man has continued to look uneasy. He smiles broadly at last on hearing me talked about as if I were a naughty child. He hurries away and returns a few minutes later to announce that the wholesale cost of the not-chest is fifty pounds. I find just enough money in my pocket and hand it over, trying to look and feel like a cheerful giver. I think I just about manage the look. He asks me if I would like to keep the piece of furniture that I sat on and in, and have now bought. When I say that I might as well, he picks it up, carries it to the customer service desk for me, and finds me a trolley so that I can transport it out to the car.

Just before we part he stops for a moment, looks very steadily into my eyes, and holds out his hand for me to shake. I could be wrong, but for him this seems to be a very important little piece of interaction. Perhaps in a small way he is encouraged to believe that there might be hope for humanity after all.

I feel a rush of relief as we drive away with our useless ruin of a box in the back of the car. I am relieved because I did resist the temptation to clear off and ignore my moral responsibility. Suppose this man, or any of the other people in the shop for that matter, had observed me making my craven escape and later seen my face on the cover of a book or learned in some other way that I claimed to be a follower of the one who never avoided a necessary confrontation in his life. A dreadful thought.

What a relief to know that Jesus shops at Blands Warehouse.

From Jesus—Safe, Tender, Extreme by Adrian Plass