The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (11 page)

“Thanks for tidying,” I say and then kick myself. Why do I say thank you for tidying, when it would never occur to him to say thanks to me? All I do is perpetuate the idea that it is my job to clean and anything he does is a gift to me.

“Pleasure,” he says. “Well, not really. Cleaning is bloody boring, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“We ought to get a cleaner.”

“We’ve got one.”

“Not you. I mean a proper one.”

“We have. Kasia. She comes on Tuesdays for three hours. I get in a paddy about how messy the house is, you tell me not to be so suburban, cleaning the house for the cleaner, we argue about what she’s there for, and you complain as she puts your flowery shirts in my cupboard as she evidently can’t countenance a man wearing such fripperies.”

“Oh yes, her. Well we ought to get her more often, then. Although are we exploiting a woman from a poorer nation so that we don’t have to do our own manual labor? Can it ever be right to have someone else get on their hands and knees in your own house?”

“There
is
something very, I don’t know, supplicating, about cleaning floors and toilets, I agree.” I stop myself from pointing out that the only time he gets on all fours is to amuse the boys by pretending to be a hippo. I spot a half-eaten biscuit on the floor and immediately get down to pick it up. While there, I start trying to pick out debris from under the fridge.

“Kasia’s the one who’s always throwing paper into the rubbish bin instead of the recycling, isn’t she?” he says.

“And cleaning the house with paper towels and vacuuming the kitchen floor instead of wiping it and asking for powerful chemical detergents and putting the washing machine on with just a couple of dish towels inside.”

“Really? Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he asks.

I shrug. “I’ve never met an environmentally conscious cleaner.”

“That’s a bit rubbish of her. Have you had a word with her?”

“No, god, no, I’d never do that. If we’re so awful that we need someone else to clean our toilets for us, then the last thing I’d do is give her strictures on how to do it.”

“It is pretty awful that we have a cleaner, isn’t it? I mean, we’re young and healthy, perhaps we should do it ourselves.”

“Why is it that it’s socially acceptable to subcontract traditionally male jobs, like painting the house or clearing out the garden, but somehow I should feel ashamed about the fact that we have a cleaner for three hours a week? Ursula never felt guilty, did she?”

“True,” he says. “And we always had a daily, so called because she came in every day.”

“Not that it did much good.”

“True. OK, so we have a cleaner, but couldn’t we find someone a bit more environmentally sound? Is there no agency for green cleaners? Greeners, maybe?” He chortles.

“Like I say, I don’t think those that clean can ever have the luxury of being green.”

“Being green is not a luxury, it’s a—”

“Leave it out, Joel. Save it for Mitzi, you and her have so much in common these days.”

In a bid to get the number of positive points for my list up to a nice round dozen, I let Joel dictate the day’s events. Which in reality means having to draw up a menu of suggested activities for him to choose from and then do all the prep to facilitate them.

50
) Uses me like some sort of parental PA. Typical weekend conversation runs like this:

Him: “What are we doing today?”

Me: Respond with a detailed itinerary or, when I’m feeling up to it: “I don’t know, what do you think we should do?”

Him: “I don’t mind.”

Me: “Well, we could go to the Science Museum to see the Heath Robinson exhibition, or we could go to the woods, it’s supposed to be nice weather.”

Him: “I don’t mind.”

Me: “OK, we’ll go to the museum.”

Whereupon if the excursion is a disaster, it’s all my fault.

As if he were a child, I give him three choices, and, like a child, he inevitably opts for the last one presented to him: baking. I suppress the urge to suggest an alternative, since this activity inevitably leads to flour covering the kitchen like cocaine in a rock star’s dressing room.

“Put in about four tablespoons of sugar, Gabe; one—that’s
right, more or less—two, keep going,” he orders gently and I watch as our second born treats the mixing bowl like a sand pit, completely failing to get the requisite spoonfuls of sugar into the mix.

7.
Bakes with the boys. If there’s one activity that seems to be the distillation of all that we hold dear in modern parenting, it’s baking with the kids. It’s as if the amount of time you spend baking is the simplest measure of How Good A Mother You Are. Baking combines our mania for home-cooked, unprocessed food and quality, old-fashioned activities with the children. It’s a recipe for parental smugness. The mothers I know will never have a baking session without making sure that the activity is broadcast to the world. “Sweetheart, let’s go home now and make that cake”; “Here, we brought you some alphabet biscuits—we made them ourselves, didn’t we, Felix? Yes, that’s right, it’s a ‘wuh’ for Waitrose”; “We’re a bit tired, I’m afraid, as we’ve been stirring the Christmas cake mix.”

Joel is different, though. He doesn’t make a big deal of his cooking or announce it to the world. He just does it and gives every impression of enjoying it.

I sort of like baking, too, but never so much as I think I should. I find myself not letting the children do the measuring out and spooning in for fear that the proportions will not be recipe-exact. I don’t like them licking the bowl because the mix is full of raw eggs, which pregnancy has taught me is A Bad Thing. Joel lets them do what they like with the ingredients and yet somehow the results always seem to taste better than mine.

I feel an unexpected burst of love that is directed at Joel as much as at Rufus and Gabe. They look like an ad for the perfect father
and sons, doing cute things with icing sugar on noses and learning about weights and measures in the process.

“Do you want to do the coloring, Rufus?” Joel asks. “You’re mixing red and green. Interesting. What happens when we mix red and green?”

“It looks like poo poo,” says Rufus, peering at the icing.

“It makes brown, yes. Shall we make poo biscuits?” He takes a small disc of mixture and rolls it into a sausage. Rufus and Gabe fall about laughing and enthusiastically copy him. “We’ll put this lovely poo-colored icing on it when they come out, shall we?”

8.
Makes our children laugh. Is the funny one. I’m the boring one, the Wise to his Morecambe, the Dean Martin to his Jerry Lewis.

A man as big as Joel can’t help but look incongruously gorgeous while sporting oven gloves and putting a tray of poo-shaped biscuits in to bake. Bless, I think. Curses, I think as he then leaves the room with the boys trailing in his wake as if he’s the Pied bloody Piper. Yes, leaves the room. Without sweeping up any of the flour, throwing away the excess poo-colored icing or washing up the bowls. He just leaves them for me to tidy up, consciously or not. For every good thing he does, another bad one follows—the yin and yang of our partnership. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth like I was taught in yoga. (Now if ever there was an inappropriate form of exercise for the woman some people refer to as Scary Mary, it was yoga. All that peace and meditation stuff drove me mad. I kept on waiting for the sweaty bit to get started. I mean, what’s the point of exercise if it doesn’t make you drip? I soon gave it up and swapped to classes with names like Body Combat and Kick Ass, Tums & Legs.)

Later, Joel extends his culinary skills to non-scatological adult
food by rustling up a nice roast chicken, which he refrains from stuffing with butter, on account of my intolerance. His repertoire veers toward the Elizabeth David end of things and he manages to not complain too frequently about the fact that he is prevented from dolloping cream and butter into all that he mixes.

9.
Is a good cook. Sure, he’s messy, but sometimes it is bliss to be cooked for. Just the very act of it makes one feel nurtured and cherished. He cooks with enthusiasm and love, while I cook with practicality and ready-made sauces.

I exceed my usual two small glasses of wine by another couple. We lounge on the sofa watching Saturday night rubbish. He rolls a joint and the alcohol has taken the edge off the irritation this usually provokes in me and I don’t order him out into the cold, but merely ask him to stick his head through an open window into the garden. I don’t even feel particularly irked by the fact that he’s espresso guy at work (hyped up, over-zealous and frenetic) and weed guy at home (useless slobby stoner). I even have a drag myself and experience a Proustian moment from its taste, throwing me back to our courtship and afternoons spent giggling and watching black-and-white films on TV.

We lie on the sofa in a rare state of contentment. He takes my socks off and I’m mildly embarrassed about the parmesan nature of my feet, but don’t care too much on account of a) being sodden by alcohol and b) it being only Joel.

10.
Gives a really good foot massage. A really, really good foot massage.

I hope he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t. I feel as if I’m drifting in and out of consciousness. He moves up to my shins and then
strokes my thighs through my jeans. The stiffness of the material creates an enjoyable tension, but not as enjoyable as the feeling when he removes them and begins to run his tongue along the same place. I don’t know whether it’s the effort of trying to think up his good points or merely being coshed by alcohol and a couple of tokes, but I decide not to stop him. “Decide”? That’s the wrong word—there’s no way I could stop him even if I wanted to. It’s been a while.

11.
Has a remarkably dextrous tongue.

He licks the very top of the inside of my thighs, while his hands remove my pants (due to a laundry crisis, they’re the ones that I bought for my last post-partum hospital stay and come up past my waist) and then move under my bra and onto my breasts. His tongue now moves up and into my untamed pubic hair, past the episiotomy scars and expertly finds the right place to concentrate its attentions. One hand stretches out to my nipples, while the other puts a finger gently inside me and out, inside and out, all the while his tongue playing me like the strings on a violin.

I am now lying back on the sofa, while he is on his knees so that his head is at just the right place. I don’t want it to go on too long, but neither should it stop just yet.

I can’t wait any longer and I pull him up and into me and his head is now level with mine. I tilt my head to kiss his neck.

“I love you,” he says and I’m embarrassed and try to avoid his eyes. That’s almost too personal for me, too intimate, it’s as if I need to make a stranger of him. Whatever they tell you in women’s magazines, sometimes sex is easier with strangers. All the talk and abandon and the looking into each other’s eyes in the moment should be easier with someone you know as well as we know each other, but I need him to be either the man I knew
a long time ago or a man I’ve yet to meet. I move my eye-line to his expansive chest and it works, it makes him feel fresh to me once again.

I feel stoppered by him. I’ve forgotten how completing it can feel. I think I hear a child crying, but it’s a cat wailing on the street, or a police siren, they all have the same note of distress. I work hard to get back in as I’m almost there, almost, I can get there, just not quite yet. “Not yet,” I whisper, “almost.” He stops himself and then starts again. I work to get back into it, refusing to allow myself to be distracted by street noises that my imagination mutates into the sound of crying children. I try to stop the random faces that enter my head from preventing me as I am almost there, I don’t want it to go, I must let go. A last face falls into my consciousness. It’s Cara. I finally let go, calling out to let him know, followed seconds later by a relieved Joel.

12.
He’s really not bad in bed. Not bad at all. What am I saying? He’s great. The only man in my not-very-extensive list of lovers who has always been able to get me there. It didn’t help that the other handful were all chosen purely on the basis of their pretty-boy looks—some sort of competition I was running with Jemima, I think, as to who could pull the boy who looked most like a member of Take That first time around. As a consequence, it was as if it was enough that they deigned to sleep with you—that was pleasure enough, surely?

I stretch across the sofa, woozily plea-bargaining in my head once again. If, I say to myself, you go and find a wet wipe to help clear up the patch on the sofa, then I will destroy The List. You will have passed my test before it has even begun. We lie there. I feel twitchy about the dribble running down my thighs and onto
our already stained and manky sofa. He rolls over and adds a Turin-shroud-like imprint of his cock onto one of the expensive cushions that I bought in a fit of interiors improvement. He gets up and I hear him stumble, joint- and sex-stoned, into the bathroom. A flush sounds.

“Get some paper or a wipe, get some paper or a wipe,” I silently implore, still feeling a tingling good will. “Get some paper or a wipe.”

He comes back. He is empty-handed.

4

An Incredible Cook

“If you want, you can sleep in; that’s my present to you, my love,” says Joel with a kiss on the morning of my thirty-sixth birthday, as the boys bounce around us.

“Why, thanks.”

“Just wait here and I’ll go and do my thing.”

Oh, god, here we go: crime number 48, the extended session in the locked toilet. My birthday good will dissolves like a vitamin C tablet. After 20 minutes, the boys, who’ve been jumping on the bed, and I become restless and go into the bathroom.