Back in July, my wife and I spent an afternoon lying on a series of mattresses in a department store, before finally agreeing on one. It was more than we’d intended to spend, but she convinced me a good mattress was an investment. “By the time we need a new one, we’ll be dead,” she said.
A new bed base was delivered a few days later, but as summer drew to a close, we were still sleeping on the old mattress. “It takes ages,” my wife said. “They make them to order.”
I imagined a team of people hard at work on my specially commissioned mattress, sewing my name into it by hand. By this time, I had come to believe the new mattress was the solution to all my problems. I believed that when it finally arrived, my back would stop hurting, my sleep would improve, my anxieties would dissipate, and my wife would cease to be angry with me for no reason on waking.
“Where is my posh bed?” I ask one morning, staring up at the ceiling. My neck is stiff and the fingers on my left hand are tingling.
“I was fast asleep,” my wife says.
“You said four weeks,” I say. “It’s been more than four weeks.”
“I’ll ring them later,” she says, rolling over. “If you shut up.” She’s not cross with you, I tell myself. That’s just the mattress talking.
Later that morning, I walk into the sitting room just as my wife is getting off the phone. She shakes her head. “Nobody knows anything,” she says. “They gave me another number to ring.”
“OK,” I say.
“I’m not doing it with you staring at me,” she says.
The next time I go downstairs, I find the sitting room door shut. I can’t make out what my wife is saying, but I recognise her tone: she is very disappointed in the person she is talking to.
“So,” she says, striding into the kitchen 15 minutes later, “they never processed our order, and they’ve since discontinued the model.”
“What does that mean?” I say with a note of panic in my voice.
“They were apologetic, eventually,” she says. “They’re sending me a £20 gift voucher.”
“I don’t need a voucher,” I say. “I need a new bed!”
“This isn’t my fault,” she says.
“It doesn’t matter whose fault it is!” I shout. “We need to find another mattress!”
“You find a mattress!” she shouts.
We are back on speaking terms within 24 hours, except about mattresses. My wife will not allow the subject to be raised again for many weeks. There are dark circles under my eyes most mornings.
“Where had we got to on mattresses?” I ask one afternoon, putting a month’s uneasy truce at risk.
“We hadn’t got anywhere,” my wife says, wheeling around in her chair. “I’m still punishing you for your outburst.”
I think about my reply for a moment. “Really, though, you’re just punishing yourself,” I say. “With continued poor sleep.”
My wife exhales impatiently. “Someone recommended this website,” she says, typing. “They’re meant to be good.”
A page of mattresses appears.
“They all look the same,” I say.
“This is more or less what we chose,” she says, the cursor circling a picture. “Isn’t it?”
“Don’t remember,” I say. “How long does it take?”
“Forty-eight hours,” she says.
“Click buy,” I say.
“We should go down there and lie on it,” she says.
“I’m never doing that again,” I say. “Click buy.”
“It’s half the price of the one we ordered,” she says. “We don’t want to end up with the wrong mattress.”
“We’ve had the wrong mattress for nine years,” I say. “Click buy.”
Sixty hours later, I wake with a curious sensation of weightlessness and a strange lack of pain. I turn over; my wife opens her eyes.
“It’s like sleeping on bubbles,” she says.
“I can feel all my limbs,” I say. I am disappointed to discover that, despite an amazing night’s sleep, I still retain a certain anxiousness about the coming day. Never mind, I think, pulling the duvet over my head, you can just stay here.
