Cold Comfort
The following story appears in Bob Franklin’s ‘Under Stones’, released in February 2010 by Affirm Press.
The wrong pillow can ruin your night as surely as a loose pair of socks can ruin your day. I should know; I used to be a sales rep for a pillow company. Until the night in question...
I was in the high country at the time, driving between appointments. I didn’t mind being away on the road, though it caused a lot of tension between mother and I, especially since the time she’d had a fall in the kitchen. No harm done on that occasion, apart from some bruising that she’d refused to show me.
After that, she’d really stepped up her campaign to get me to ask for a job at head office. To be honest, I was having doubts about staying with the company at all. They’d started cutting corners with their manufacturing methods and to my mind the product had gone downhill. The new pillows were simply too soft.
I’d had a dismal day in the uplands; my last pitch had been contemptuously dismissed by the manager of a private nursing home, whose office could only be reached by running the gauntlet of patients’ sad, scared eyes. On the return journey through the common living area, I’d resolutely looked away from slack mouths, soft words lost behind the jarring volume of the television. For a moment I’d felt that I would have to sit down, the harsh metallic voices on the TV were scrambling my thoughts. I couldn’t remember why I’d gone there, but an empty armchair opened its arms wide in the cloying, milky warmth of the room. Then a nurse arriving for the night shift released me with a blast of cold air. She held the door open and her eyes said, ‘Go now.’
I still felt a bit shaky, and my next meeting was in a town a good few hours drive away, so it wasn’t long before I pulled into a motel for the night.
It was the middle of winter. I appeared to be the only guest as I crossed to reception, footfalls swallowed by a carpet of pine needles. At the creak of the door, the old woman at the desk unfolded with a sound like dead leaves blowing down an alley. Struggling with twisted hands, she gave me the key to the closest room, saying something I didn’t quite catch as I walked away.
Exhausted as I was, I knew I was in trouble when my head hit the pillow, sinking way too low. I tried not to think about it, but as I started to drift off, the corners of the pillow crept over my face, edging together with the awful slowness of crematorium curtains. I jerked awake, gasping, and hurled the pillow away. It hit the back wall as if it were something much heavier than a pillow, making a moist, meaty sound and sliding down the bricks to the floor.
I lay watching it carefully, waiting for it to move again. After a while I fell asleep.
I dreamed that I was a secret agent, a dealer of death. I had a real cool pad where many ladies were entertained and Mum definitely didn’t live there. I was on the trail of an enemy agent and I’d tracked him down to a motel in the middle of nowhere. Creeping into his room, I could see by moonlight a shape huddled beneath the blankets on the bed. I fired five rounds into it; then I pulled away the blankets. Fully expecting to find some decoy beneath, I was surprised to see the body of my enemy. But then I heard a creaking sound and I turned around to find that his pillow was lying in wait behind the door.
I woke up in a cold sweat, my eyes darting toward the dark shape at the foot of the bed.
That was my last trip as a pillow salesman. When I got home the next day, I found Mum lying on her bedroom floor, barely alive. She’d been there all night, having tripped over a pillow late the previous afternoon. I work from home now, where I can keep an eye on her twenty-four hours a day.
Even though I threw all the pillows out of my room I still sometimes dream that I’m suffocating. But Mum’s always there when I wake up.
An earlier version of this story appeared in ‘The Big Issue’.
Bob Franklin is a Melbourne-based writer, comedian and actor. His first short story collection, ‘Under Stones’, published by Affirm Press, is out now. Series three of ‘The Librarians’, in which he appears, will screen later this year on ABC1. Series one and two are available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
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