Sofa, So Bad.

 I have a smelly sofa. At first I thought it was just me, stinking it up. I used to go to the gym and come in and collapse on it, sweaty and disgusting, before I had the energy to face the shower. I also went through a period of breakfasting on fried tomatoes and raw garlic. I'm a monster, yes. 

I'd bought this sofa. Picked the fabric. The colour, which is something like "Arsenic" on the Farrow and Ball paint chart, which is a toxic irony too far. It took months to come and was not cheap. When it arrived it was gorgeous, twice the size of my last sofa, which had been nicknamed "the dog box". There were slight issues with it, however. I'd bought firm cushions, the firmest they had, because I'm as I'm hard on cushions as I am on shoe heels, gussets in boxer shorts and jeans, and my own knees, so I thought the firmer the cushion the better. But they had no give, and would edge out from the back of the sofa every time I got up, so I was pushing the cushions back into place three or four times a day. The sofa was dressed in a hardwearing tweed, but after six months it started to fray and bobble. Then the summer came. And it began to stink. 

As a good Catholic boy, I blamed myself. 

"Ah," I thought, "it's me. I stink. Susan's sofa - we're a two sofa household - doesn't smell, because she's fragrant and delicious. But me, I'm so much tainted, sinful meat, like a tin can of e coli. Of course I made the sofa stink just by sitting on it. Of course. 

The smell came and went, but it was at its worst usually, but not always, on sunny days, and it was an overpowering chemical, garlic stench. I took the cushions off, took them into the garden and scrubbed them down. It made no difference. Fabreze did nothing. But the smell sometimes disappeared, and there didn't seem to be any real trigger, any pattern. We thought it might be heat or humidity, but it didn't seem to be the case. It waxes and wanes by its own private schedule, like a drunken moon. We've had the windows open for months. 

It stinks. Badly stinks. Stinks like a miasma, a malaria. It's a stench that could poison you. 

Butter wouldn't melt. Garlic butter wouldn't melt. 

I looked up "my sofa smells of garlic" on the internet. It's everywhere. Loads of people have incredibly smelly sofas, and garlic is the smell that's usually described. It's apparently "off-gassing", because of the the flame retardant materials used in its manufacture. It's a known thing. A very known thing. On the internet. 

But everything is known on the internet. Everything has equal weight. So some people thought it was definitely bad for your health. Some people said it was harmless. Some people had had results with bicarbonate of soda or charcoal. We tried the former. It didn't work. 

But, periodically, the pong just went away. And like a medical condition you hope will just, somehow, heal itself, I just let it go. It can't stink forever, right? Even the sun will burn itself out eventually. How long can something stink, with nothing fuelling that stink? It will go away. 

This last week was unbearable. Rogue Trooper would have had trouble with the fumes wafting off this bastard couch. It was disgusting. We broke. We rang up the suppliers and, rather surprisingly, they agreed to send over a technician to assess the situation. He'd be there on Friday. 

"I bet it doesn't smell on Friday," I said to Susan. 

On Friday, there was no smell at all. The sofa clenched. It kept its bitter poisons deep within itself, like I do. Nothing. No pong. It was a perfectly nice sofa. You could have taken it home to meet your mother, and she could have parked her arse on it perfectly happily, not worrying it contained a dead Frenchman. It's at its worst, usually, in the mornings: the windows closed, the still air. But not today. Nothing. Not a whiff of anything. 

Typical. 

There was a knock at the door. It was a tattooed man in a black baseball cap. He was called Cliff. He was the technician. He wrinkled his nose on the doorstep. 

"Well, there's no doubt there's a smell." 

Shit. How bad was it? Susan and I could barely smell it today, and this guy could smell it from the street. Had it eroded our nasal lining? Would we ever be able to smell again. This thing was like a dirty bomb of long Covid blowing up in our numb faces. 

Cliff came in, gave it some big, theatrical sniffs, and concluded that our sofa stank. He filled out a form, confiding that this was a very well known problem, but that ours was perhaps the worst he'd ever encountered. He'd report back to the sofa company, but he was an independent, he didn't know what their procedure would be from this point forward. 

Cliff left. We opened the windows. 

The word from the sofa manufacturer was that Cliff told them there was no manufacturing error, and therefore there was nothing to be done. Cliff had sold us down the river. The sofa was worse now, drunk on its own power, belching out great toxic fumes, a reeking landfill, farting out this awful chemical burlesque of garlic. I love garlic, but this was really taking the edge off. This was the garlic people who hate garlic smell: paint-strippingly caustic, all bad breath and abandoned take aways. Rats would swerve it. And it appeared we were stuck with it. 

I get angry. But Susan gets calm. Cool. She focuses. She made a list things she wanted to say - there is a helpline to call - and she went through the list of grievances in a measured, unflustered way. It was a forensic examination of inconsistencies and logical fallacies she skewered like she was mounting a particularly noxious garlic-butterfly. The woman she was talking to, a nice brummie called Yvonne, said she didn't think there was much she could do, but she'd talk to her manager and call her back. I scoffed. As if. 

I went out to buy sausages. 

My phone pinged in my pocket. The company had agreed to a full refund. They would take the sofa away, and then authorise payment of the full amount back to my bank account. 

This was unusual. I immediately rang Susan. 

"Wait! Has something gone right?"

"Yeah, they're taking it away. The stench is going to be history." By the time I got home she was already researching replacement sofas. There was a sale on. 

Fair play to the suppliers, whom I won't name. They did the right thing. There was very little quibble and they were pretty quick about it. Which leads me to believe my sofa may be carcinogenic. Napoleon was killed by his wallpaper. How fitting, then, that it's death by sofa for me. 

The customer services for my death couch were top notch, however. 

We bought a new sofa today. The old one will be taken away next week. The new one won't be delivered for three weeks. I've got a fortnight of sitting on the floor. 

As we were going through the stuff in the showroom, with Rich, the salesman, I said "The reason we're getting rid of our current sofa is because it stinks. We come down in the morning and instead of facing a bright new day we face a cloud of choking stench."

He said: "Have you tried Fabreze?"

No one in the shop had ever heard of the "off-gassing" smell, the noted fire-retardation chemical smell that's either toxic or isn't, according to who you ask on the internet. No one in the business of selling sofas to the public has ever heard of this. Rich, heard my complaints about the smell from the sofa, and assumed we were just disgusting pigs with smelly arses and no filter, who would not only rather buy a new sofa than clean the old one, but would actually tell the salesman this as idle conversation. 

We schooled him. He looked like nervous comedian Mark Watson before we started. After our chat about the sofa manufacturing process and the horror of off-gassing, he looked like a rat eying up the nearest drainpipe. 

We bought a sofa. Another sofa. Let's hope it doesn't stink the place out.