Graceful Abaddon

Loveable Creatures (8)

Chapter Seven: Night Wandering

Despite feeling exhausted, it took Abbey nearly an hour and a half to fall asleep.

Even under the best conditions, she was very high-maintenance when it came to bedding arrangements. She was the sort whose expensive memory-foam pillow had to be flipped over daily for aeration, plushed and jounced and reshaped every night before bed so there were no sunken areas. Since she was about twelve, when she'd finally had enough of the terribly uneven duck-feather pillow of her childhood, she'd decided there was nothing more uncomfortable than a pillow that felt like it had already been trampled by a thousand feet before she'd even laid her head down. She liked her pillows to be as hard as possible - almost ridiculously so, her mother would have said.

The pillow provided for her now, courtesy of Mr Hockock, was wrong in pretty much every way. It was old and browned on its once-white surface - years of sweat and hair grease and saliva dried into the fabric. It smelled like it had not been washed in years either. Naturally, there was no pillowcase so she had to lay one of her workout shirts over the top of it. Furthermore, the padding was awful, all pushed to either side so that each end was lumpy, and the middle sunken to a thin pit of mere cloth. No matter how much she tried to shake it back into some semblance of physical consistency, it refused to do anything but stress her out.

Adding more of her shirts to the top of it didn't work either, and her ability to relax and just ignore it lost out to an eventual silent rage wherein she jumped out of bed, ripped the pillow out from under the clothes and flung it to the floor.

The bed itself was not actually a bed but just a threadbare mattress placed across an ancient metal frame that whined at the slightest little movement. Against the nape of her neck, and then again at the small of her back, two supporting metal bars pressed into her.

She felt like she could not be any more of a spoilt, whiny teenager about it all. But all the same, she could barely keep herself from feeling these things. It's not like she was actually going to complain to Mr Hockock about it. What would be the point? He obviously had done his best to make her comfortable. It just really wasn't all that much, compared to the privileged semi-urban life she'd left behind.

Because she was unable to shower, her back and arms were sticky with perspiration. The night itself had been exceedingly cool, but all the travelling and carrying of things had left her in desperate need for a wash. In the end, kicking and fidgeting, sitting up from time to time to take in deeper lungfuls of air before repositioning herself back down, she eventually slipped into unconsciousness through sheer exhaustion, as if dying into sleep.

Her dream was a strange one, multilayered and without logic.

She was at home and Gavin was late, coming back from work or something to pick her up and take her somewhere. Then, instead of home at good old Toowoomba, she was suddenly, without reason, in Mr Hockock's house on the island, only Mr Leathe's farm was there also. And outside, just beyond the jetty she had landed on with Mr Leathe earlier that night, there was a massive holiday cruiser, idly drifting past the island. High up on the edge of the cruise ship, leaning over the stark white wall and railing, were her parents (both together again), along with Gavin. They were waving at the island, calling out for her as the ship drifted further and further into the horizon. Abbey was naked and frantically digging around her little room for her underwear, a pair of leggings, a shirt. The horn of the cruise ship drifted to her mournfully across the water, the hidden reefs, the labyrinthine lagoon. 

Hurry up, hurry up. 

But she made no progress. She could not think straight. Meanwhile, on the desk beside her bed, a little fan was buzzing angrily, only instead of rotating blades, the fan encased a thick, dark, writhing body of flies, pulsating like an alien orb. Suddenly, a landline phone started ringing, and the door, of its own accord, crashed open. Standing halfway down the corridor, in dirty farmer's overalls, stood Mr Hockock. He was holding the phone, still ringing, and his eyes were fixed on Abbey's from halfway down the corridor.