The disgusting stuff under the bed

BY rights my entire family should be bald.

I have looked under the bed.

So that’s where all the hair went!

A two-dollar coin rolled under there and I went hunting for it.

The memory still haunts me at night while I sleep in a chair. I am never getting back into that bed! It covers a desiccated soup of decay and hair, which, as anyone who has unblocked a drain will know, lasts forever.

There are so many minute, white scaly bits under my bed, with the hair balls, that it looks like a mummy fell apart under there. Or Frankenstein is collecting the bits for his next experiment.

The two-dollar coin can stay there. I have cleaned septic tanks and I’ve gutted a pig, but there are limits to what a human being can stomach.

How does it happen! There are two people in our bedroom. And for less than eight hours a day! Night, actually. Sometimes there’s only one… especially now I’m sleeping in a chair.

We don’t have enough hair to fill the space under bed! Not even if you count the dog!

This must be why bed bugs have such a bad name. Not because they are essentially revolting little creatures that look like nightmares at the other end of the microscope. It’s because they scuttle out at night and drag hair from all over the neighbourhood and hide it under my bed.

And those disgusting flaky bits. Where do they get them? From a cemetery?

And look… now that I’ve admitted to this I don’t want you avoiding me in the streets. We are clean people. We wash. We vacuum. Look under your own bed – it’s happening everywhere!

There is enough hair and dried detritus under the beds of the world to create the Gibson Desert. With plaits.

In fact that’s probably what the Gibson Desert already is… a Sargasso Sea not of sand, but of revolting bits from under the bed.

I used to think that everything you ever owned in your life ended up in the third drawer down in the kitchen, but it’s not true.

It ends up under the bed. At least in the third drawer down it finally overspills and drowns you. Under the bed is dissolves! Which explains what happened to the biscuit I lost under there last week.

There is a serious scientific question here that need answering.

If matter can be neither created nor destroyed, then what is it under my bed? Or rather… what was it?

Not me, surely? Please not me!

I don’t want to look like that, even when I’m dead.

And yet my wife says we’re shedding bits of dead skin all the time.

Ridiculous! Apart from the idea being utterly disgusting, if it were true we’d need snow ploughs in the streets!

I think the X-files are happening to me. The forces of darkness are creating something nasty under my bed. Nasty, and probably hungry… it’s already had my biscuit.

Well it’s not getting me. I’m sleeping in the chair.

My wife says she doesn’t mind facing it alone. I suggested she should vacuum it up, transport it to the Gibson Desert and leave it there.

She said she would. Eventually. Meanwhile she’d just try to be brave and she hoped I was comfortable in the chair.

She was smiling…