Being a house guest is a strange thing. It’s mostly that feeling of dislocation. It’s different from a hotel, where you are dislocated but still master of your domain.
The house guest, on the other hand, is master of nothing, trying to cope in an environment both familiar and strange.
The strangest part for me, during a recent stay as house guest, was being unceremoniously dumped out of bed in the middle of the night.
We slept in a basement room containing a futon. At about 2 a.m., my wife — my faithful futon companion — woke up. She decided to read in another room until she got sleepy again.
This left me on the futon alone. I must have rolled to the edge. Somehow, the whole apparatus tipped over in spectacular fashion, depositing me to the floor with the mattress on top of me.
I awoke in the dark, confused and bruised. Was it an earthquake? Had North Korea launched a military attack?
I tried to rise, but achieving a vertical stance was difficult, being squashed between a futon mattress and a wall.
For some reason, my hosts had placed the legs of the futon on some plastic stilt-like things, which had increased the height of the bed. This not only increased the face-to-floor impact, it likely made a tippy futon even more tippy.
“Help — help!” I said, not loudly, so as not to wake up the household.
“What is it? What was that noise?” whispered my wife from the next room.
“Me. I’ve fallen off the futon,” I said. “And now I’m wedged underneath it.”
“How did that happen?” said my wife, switching on the light.
“Don’t know. Must be a fundamental defect in its design. Either that or it’s from Ikea.”
We got the thing back together. But sleeping on the futon was never quite the same after that.
That crucial element of man/bed trust was gone forever.
In my experience, house-guest-related bed mishaps are not uncommon.
Years ago, my brother-in-law and his girlfriend stayed over at my sister-in-law’s house. During the night, that bed somehow collapsed.
Hearing the early-morning commotion, my sister-in-law went to investigate. The bedroom was in disarray. For some reason, a mattress had been placed against a wall.
Even more strangely, when my sister-in-law looked out the window, she spied my brother-in-law and his girlfriend sprinting down the road.
It transpired the couple, perhaps unable to sleep after their upsetting bed collapse, decided to go for a healthful morning jog.
Exactly why the mattress was positioned against the wall was never fully explained.
Years later, the subject is still cause for conjecture and merriment.
My favourite house-guest bed disaster is actually fiction. In Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, almost certainly the best comic novel of the 20th century, Jim Dixon, a university lecturer, stays in the home of Professor Welch, the head of his department.
Dixon awakens after a night spent drinking pints of beer. He realizes he’d passed out while smoking in bed. There are burn holes on his sheets, a pair of blankets and a valuable-looking rug.
Amis wrote: “Had he done this all himself? Or had a wayfarer, a burglar, camped out in his room? Or was he the victim of some Horla fond of tobacco? He thought that on the whole he must have done it himself, and wished he hadn’t.”
Keen to disguise this vandalism, Jim Dixon slices up the sheets with a razor blade, making everything worse.
The dangers of boozing and smoking in bed aside, this passage captures perfectly that curious unease we feel while staying in the homes of others.
During my own houseguest stay, the very same futon tipped over again two days later. With me in it. However, because I’d taken the futon off its stilts, the impact was less severe. And the element of surprise was gone.
A strange experience overall — but then, being a house guest can be a strange thing.
