They say when you hit the bottom, the only way is up. But in 2010, I found I seemed to keep plunging through new, hidden levels of bottom. Maybe I was some sort of losing pioneer. My descent just didn’t stop. Slowly, every bit of comfort I had in my life was stripped away.
Most people take a bed for granted, but you’re only ever three or four bad decisions away from losing the bed from your life. When things got very difficult for me a few years back, I ended up doing a reverse Ascent of Man, only the bed equivalent. I did the ‘Descent of Beds’. I did the whole circuit in fact. I went from a King Size double bed with an oak veneered Bedstead with a medium oak finish – which owing to my lack of handiness with tools, the Kind Girl had to put together – to spending a night sleeping in my decommissioned office chair in my Balham storage unit, where the motion sensor lights in the storage would go off every fifteen minutes. Too uncomfortable to sleep, I spent the whole night flapping my arms like I had some illness just to keep the lights on after my mobile had died.
My unit was packed with all my stuff, things that I wouldn’t be able to use for a long time because of my nomadic existence. I wore slim fit jeans that night. That was a big mistake. The storage unit was cramped and those jeans were claustrophobic on the crotch. It was a tight squeeze in there. I’m talking both the storage unit and the jeans.
As you slowly recover, you find yourself sleeping on an assortment of beds that need to be put together before you can sleep on them, waiting for people to leave the room so you can build the bed. You stand at the bottom of the stairs, all deferential, waiting to collect your bedding. It is horrible to live like that. Long-standing friendships are altered forever, your standing in the hierarchy of those associations slipping. I slept on floors. I slept on all manner of sofas – sofas that pulled out and sofas that didn’t pull out. I slept on futons too.
I started off with the inflatable though. The inflatable is the worst. I don’t think when people buy them, that they realise quite how noisy an inflatable is or what a bad night’s sleep they’re putting their guest through. The inflatable is right up there with the waterbed. The bedding keeps sliding off too. The key to getting a half decent night’s sleep on the inflatable – you can’t hope for better than that – is to only go to bed when you’re absolutely tired and it’s imperative that you settle into your sleeping position early.
Just weeks before he passed away, Lopez was putting me up at his Norbury place, which his brother had gradually refurbished to make him more comfortable during his illness. Whilst there, I slept on an inflatable which had a small hole in it. I taped the hole up, but to no avail. Every night I’d re-inflate this thing, only for it to lose air. I’d spend each night gradually sinking into the floor. The bed sinking like my career. Complaining wasn’t really an option. Lopez was on chemo. He was getting lumbar punctures. I was just on a punctured inflatable.
After the inflatable, I found myself progressing to the sofa bed. Anything that sees you move on from the inflatable is progress, even if it means your legs dangling off the end of a tiny two-tier sofa from Ikea. I also found myself staying on a couple of lengthy leather sofas, which were far more comfortable, but hot and sticky on a summer’s night, and cold during the winter. But at least it was possible to stretch out on them. Much like on the inflatable however, it was impossible to prevent the bedding from sliding off on the non pull out sofa. Some hosts will suggest you don’t need to pull out the sofa, so the sofa can be redeployed for its primary function in the morning when everyone’s awake. They couch it in terms that suggest they’re giving you a choice, but having put it out there, you feel like you have no option but follow their suggestion. You lie there on the unpulled out, pull out sofa, your bedding slipping off, feeling somewhat robbed of the chance of a better night’s sleep.
And then came the hugely overrated futon, probably seen by most as progress in the bed chart, if such a thing were to exist, but I would strongly dispute that the futon should be placed above the sofa bed. The futon is beloved by those who waste no time in telling you how popular it is in Japan, which completely overlooks the fact that it takes a long time to get used to sleeping on its padded mattress, and that its nightly construction can easily put you into conflict with neighbours if you’re living in a converted flat.
As you put these half-beds together at night, you’re too tired and bewildered to reflect on how you got to that point in your life. Couples that put you up go to bed together and live out the life most adults are expected to live, the life that you expected to live. Meanwhile, you’re downstairs in the spare room or front room, trying to cobble something together that given how tired you are, often feels as complicated as the Rubik’s Cube at that time of night.
And then there was the single bed in room 11, the hotel I once lived at after the fire, and was still living at when I started this blog nearly three years ago. As a man, few things have the capacity to make you feel as alone as the single bed. And gradually I forgot what it was like to share a bed with my ex-girlfriend. I remember how small the bed in room 11 was. Every time I turned to my left, even in my final weeks there, much to my frustration, I’d whack my head against its pink walls. I just never got used to it.
These are all variations of the bed that most adults never have to worry about. I hope to never sleep on any of these again. And I don’t believe I will.