shocked she was actually feeling.
“Come on,” said George, pulling his wife’s arm, “I’ll explain how it works.”
He did, George went over every aspect of his creation. Although he went over its workings repeatedly, Martha found it so difficult to move on from her state of shock.
In the end, George suggested, “Wait until I have it installed in our bedroom, in situ as they say. I’m sure you’ll see it in a different light, then.”
Raising an eyebrow, Martha offered no reply.
Over the next few hours, as George set about installing the device in their bedroom, the sound of drilling, hammering, and moving of furniture permeated the entire house.
Taking no part in its installation, Martha wondered if she had made the right decision, allowing her husband to create such a thing. Perhaps, she thought, sleeping in different rooms on the worst occasions of her snoring had not been so bad an idea after all. However, things had moved on considerably since then, because inside their bedroom her husband was now drilling the ceiling like his life depended on it.
“Shan’t be too long, now,” he shouted above the noise of the drill. “Then you’ll see what’s it’s like, that it’s not that bad, you’ll see.” The sound of the drill went on and on...
Silence, when the hammering, drilling and clattering within the confines of their bedroom finally ended, Martha was hurled into a quandary. Was she to be happy now that it had stopped, or worried that the device was ready for testing?
“Dear,” George called out to his wife from within the incumbent silence of the bedroom, “you can come in now…”
She hesitated; standing outside her bedroom door, Martha felt as if she was stepping into the unknown, into what she could only imagine to be a frighteningly new change to her life, to her sleeping experience, which, despite the interruption it had obviously caused to her beloved husband, had always been so restful to her. Turning the door handle, Martha pushed the door open and looked in.
Grinning from ear to ear, like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, George, proudly waving an arm, presented the finished article to his sceptical wife. “Well?” he asked. “What do you think of it?”
She had no words. Martha had no words to describe how she felt, staring into the room, at the abomination of a contraption that was hanging, suspended from the ceiling, over her part of the bed.
When she was eventually able to speak, to bring herself round to saying something – anything – about the snore reducer, as George had come to call it, she whispered, “It’s, it’s – so big…”
“That’s because of the added ceiling height, in here, compared to the garage,” he explained. “I forgot all about it. That’s why it took me so long to install it. Modifications are always difficult, you know.”
Feeling braver, Martha entered the room. Approaching their bed, she studied her side. There were some rather unusual mounds where her head rested. “What are they for?” she asked.
“They are there to keep your head in place,” he explained, lifting the bed sheets to show her the foam pad inserts he had installed into the mattress. “So these,” he took hold of a number of long rubber tubes hanging from a bracket screwed into the ceiling, “will always be perfectly aligned with your head.”
“I, I don’t know…” Martha mumbled. “It’s all so scary, so different from how I envisaged it, when you first told me.”
His face falling, George could see that his plan was in trouble. Thinking fast, he said, “Look, close the curtains and we’ll pretend that it’s bedtime. I will be the guinea pig, taking your place. Then you’ll see there is nothing to be afraid of.”
“Okay,” she replied, pulling the curtains closed, getting into her nightie.
“What are you doing, woman?” he asked, eying her actions suspiciously.
“Getting ready for bed, of course,” she told him. “We want this simulation to be as real as possible, don’t we?”
“Hmm, I suppose so” he mumbled. “Have you any idea where my pyjamas are?” George was always losing his pyjamas. For some peculiar reason his pyjamas might turn up anywhere within the house (and sometimes without). Like missing socks, they were a mystery.
Pulling open a drawer in the tallboy, Martha threw him a pair. “Here’s a clean pair,” she said.
When they were both suitably dressed, Martha lay down on her husband’s side of the bed. George, however, stood staring at her side with almost as much trepidation as his wife had displayed when seeing the invention.
Noticing this, Martha teased, “Afraid?”
“He said nothing; George would never admit s to so foolish a thing.”
“Come on,” she said, “get into bed.”
He got into bed. Martha’s husband – the inventor – got into their bed, settling his head into the foam pads, directly beneath the long rubber tubes hanging down from the ceiling.
She laughed; Martha laughed at the silly man, lying there on his back, with ten rubber tubes dangling annoyingly into his face, trying to avoid them, but unable.
“I thought you were supposed to lie on your side?” she said.
“That’s correct,” he replied. “I was just thinking…”
“You were? I’m impressed,” she said, “that you were able to do anything with those silly things dangling in your face. What were you thinking about?”
“I was thinking that if this is a success,” he took hold of the tubes and jiggled them about, “I could go into business manufacturing it as my patented cure for snoring. What do you think of that?” he asked.”
“I think,” she said lovingly to him, “that we should find out if it actually works, before getting carried away with such fanciful ideas.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he said, rolling onto his side, settling down for a sleep. Sitting up again, he cried out in alarm, “But I don’t snore! This won’t prove anything!”
“Never?”
“No, at least I don’t think so.”
“Go to sleep, let me decide on that,” she ordered.
Lying down, allowing the dangling rubber tubes to rest over the left-hand side of his head, George prepared himself for a trial run. Opening her Mills and Boon book, Martha settled down for a nice read.
Having ten rubber tubes resting on the side of your head is not an ideal way of trying to fall asleep, but George had faith in his invention; he was certain that despite this distraction, this annoyance, his brain was capable of cancelling it out. Having said that, they almost drove him mad, tickling his ear. He persisted, though, because he was utterly convinced as to the soundness of his invention.
“Are you all right, dear?” Martha asked, as her husband brushed away the tubes for the umpteenth time. The tubes, however, soon returned to their original position.
“Yes, let me go to sleep, will you?” he replied grumpily. “I need some peace!” Martha turned the page of her book and continued reading.
Twisting and turning, George struggled with the demons in his head, the imps that were doing their utmost to keep him awake. Half-awake and half-asleep, he rolled over, onto his back. The ends of the tubes, having a new target – his face, covered his nose and mouth with their annoyance.
Coughing and spluttering, George awoke with a start. Sitting upright in the bed, with the tubes fanning around him, he asked, “What happened?”
Turning the page of her book, Martha offered him no reply. Remembering that he had told her to leave him in peace, George lay down, rolling onto his side once again, trying to get back to sleep, to continue with the experiment. Shooting him a quick glance, Martha smiled mischievously.
The same thing, George rolling onto his back and then waking up, repeated itself repeatedly, so many times Martha began to doubt that his lumbering brain might ever come to accept the presence of the tubes, and so stop him from choosing this position. It was only when she had reached the end of a particularly long chapter did she realise that her husband was sleeping quite contentedly on his s
ide, showing no signs whatsoever that he wished to roll onto his back. “It’s a success,” she whispered, “a success.”
That’s it, my friends, that’s how George finally got a good night’s sleep. Yes, of course it took Martha a while to get used to sleeping underneath the dangling contraption, but in the end she did, and they both lived (and slept) happily ever after.
THE END.
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