The bed is one of the very last things they had bought of their furniture. This is not necessarily true; she had bought the bed frame along with the dressing table and the wardrobe for a bundle price. But he has never thought a bed frame enough to make it a bed - the bed is the mattress.
The history of beds he had slept in came in various forms. He had spent nights on the couch if his brother’s girlfriend came over. He had slept on the floor mattress, barely a piece of cotton in his parents’ room whenever his mother had turned on the air conditioner. His two other brothers would each take a corner around his mother’s bed. Elbows and toes in each other’s hair and they would speak to each other in the cooling darkness. They would talk about everything until it was really late in the morning and they all have to wake up later for school and work. In his formative years of emotive tantrum, he would refuse to sleep in the house. He would sleep at the bench a distance from his flat, he would sleep beneath the shop house at the beach and he would sleep in his friends’ house. When his insomnia came after he graduated, he would sleep anywhere in the house and at least attempted to anyways. He tossed and turned in the kitchen or under the bed. Finally he will always gave up and stared blankly outside his kitchen window.
The irony when he goes traveling is always the hotel beds. There they were, majestically comfortable and puffy and cloudy, they are always the ones he had to spend the minimal time with. After all, a rare chance to go overseas no one would want to spend it all by sleeping in. On their Thailand trip he did it. He was so convinced that he had food poisoning from eating fired bugs from street, he insisted on spending the rest of his vacation in the hotel’s king sized bed, the kind that swallow you alive with thread counts, satin pillowcases and yellow table lamps.
In fact when he had shopped for his bed, he had used the word ‘that kind that eats you alive’. He’s shopping for the ultimate cotton coffin. The one that you won’t mind dying in. He had heard so much about dying in one’s sleep. His primary school principle had told his school that it was a very much-preferred way to die. It is a very romantic and a dignified way to pass on. When he did nursing, he was then told dying in one’s sleep is actually suffocation. He shrugged away that scientific notion and went ahead and ordered ‘the kind that buries you alive’ mattress anyway. He guessed that he was more afraid of deprivation of comfort than death itself.
It was not that he had intend to spend a lot of time sleeping or bought the bullshite about how people will spend a quarter of their lives sleeping and thus the need for a better bed. He needs a good bed now that’s he’s married with her. He has to believe that it can work. If you ask him to close his eyes and talk about his parents or just get him drunk enough to feel sad, he will tell you about the voices between the walls. How when he was a boy in his bedroom tuning in to his parents’ conversations before they slept, across the rooms. It was before the time when his parents fought and slept in different rooms. It was a quieter time when they would ask about each other’s day and tease about little things. Sometimes his mother’s voice would go shrilly and called his father ‘Friend’ in Hokkien. People would nickname each other silly sweet titles but theirs was ‘Peng Yu Eh’. He could always picture them at the head of the bed, propped up on pillows, his father would probably smoke and they would talk until their voices were no more across the rooms. Or at least until he curled up and sleep like a ball in the covers. Safe and comforted by his parents’ bedtalk.
When they shopped for the bed, he had specifically asked for a high bed so that they can ‘climb into’. Actually a normal twelve inch mattress would suffice but he felt that he had to be animatedly specific to oppose the low lying Zen-like beds that were rampantly so in the rage. As a result he fell from his new bed once. It was three thirty in the morning and he was due for his morning shift in the next three hours, he woke up upon a thud and found himself on the floor. He was so embarrassed and looked around in the dark for her. She was sleeping like a log, her back against him with her face in her hair. At least he paid well for the individual pocketed spring mattress.
One night he was turning in with her, they heard noises between the walls. Being a newly weds in a new house there will always be irrational fear of breaking and entering. He climbed out of bed and checked all the windows, locked them and returned to the bed. More crashing sounds broke out from upstairs. It was one in the morning. The couple above raised their quarrels and their kids began to brawl. He listened closely and thought that he was back in his old flat when his parents used to fight endlessly in the nights. He used to wonder about his neighbors. What would they think and how would they look at him in the morning when they see each other in the corridors? Would they try to look into his house? Lying in the bed with her and listening to the fight a ceiling apart, he had become the neighbor. He pulled the covers to their chin and asked her to ignore the quarrel. And there he slept in the thick and soft bed, holding her hands and prayed that they will never end up like that.
