The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (2 page)

So, you see, it really isn’t my fault I’m so angry. I was born this way.

I’m 35, though not for much longer. Thirty-five: the age at which fertility falls off a cliff, apparently, and so looms large
in the forward planning of any early thirtysomething. It’s the age that we women must skirt and plot around. Thirty-five, the midpoint of your thirties, the decade in which you must both churn out children and soar in your chosen career. The crucial decade when lawyers become partners, journalists become editors, doctors become consultants and teachers become heads and deputy heads. One small decade, only ten years, just like the rest of them. What bad luck for women that these biological and professional imperatives should coincide and collide so exactly. This coincidence double-glazes the glass ceiling.

The thirties are also a woman’s peak time for death in mysterious circumstances. Sylvia Plath, Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, Paula Yates, Jill Dando, Anna Nicole Smith. It’s a wonder that any of us make it through alive.

Actually, I’m not sure there is any mystery to Sylvia Plath’s death. She hadn’t really set out to kill herself, she’d just been examining the inside of the oven to see whether it needed cleaning or not and on finding it quite so filthy with the fat spat from the sausages that Ted Hughes had cooked before dumping her for another woman, she decided to switch it on and keep her head in there.

I’d never kill myself. Though I might kill Joel. The list is my attempt to avoid blighting my sons’ lives with a dead father and a mother locked up for his murder.

At least Christmas is now over. I don’t know why they said that the First World War would be over by Christmas when there’s no time of the year more likely to spark battles and hatred. A dozen explosions and skirmishes daily over the festivities: me buying all the presents for your numerous godchildren; the fact that you don’t “believe” in Christmas cards so I have to do them all as well as sit over Rufus as he labors over one for each of
his classmates; your mother sitting on her ample behind telling me how lucky I am that she brought up her son to be such a hands-on father and fabulous cook. “Yes,” I spit, “he’s so
wonderful
, I’m so
lucky
.”

No turkey could have been stuffed as full as this house was by discarded wrapping paper and toys with itty-bitty constituent parts. Each time a present was opened, which was approximately every three seconds, I’d wince at the challenge of finding somewhere to put the vast plastic monstrosity or cringe at the tiny, easily lost parts that spilled out. I tried to feel happy as my children squealed with delight, but instead I’d be filled with dread. Each time we played with one of these new games, I’d interrupt with “Don’t lose that counter, darling, it won’t work without it,” “No, you’re not allowed a hotel until you’ve put up three blocks,” “Gabe, if you choke on that I’m not going to be the one to take you to the hospital.”

I’ve got three weeks to go until my birthday, which falls on the last day of January. See what I mean about my life being destined to complaint? Fancy having a birthday at the exact point in the year when everyone feels most depressed. When half the people at your so-called birthday celebrations are on the wagon or detoxing.

For my birthday, I’d like teeth-whitening, a week off from bottom-wiping both real and metaphorical and a subscription to
Interiors
. For my birthday, I’ll get a homemade card, a croissant in bed and a “kiss that money can’t buy.” My first words on turning 36 will be “Don’t get crumbs on the bed.”

For these three weeks I shall be thinking of every irritating thing that Joel does and compiling them into a list. I will then organize these misdemeanors into logical sections on a spreadsheet. After my birthday, from February onward, the six-month trial period will start as I mark his behavior against the debits
outlined in the document. The system will be rigorous and able to withstand scrutiny should I ever show it to Joel, which I might if he needs to see proof. It has to be as perfect as our home and marriage is imperfect. It shall be a feat of Excel formatting and punchy punctuation. It will be definitive. It will be scrupulously fair even if, so I’m told, life isn’t.

Let the list-making begin.

Here is my dream of a perfect Saturday. The boys are such champion sleepers that I have to wake them at nine, whereupon they wolf down their quinoa porridge before settling down to some educative but tidy art activities. A shadowy employee with wet wipes for hands hovers in the background, cleaning away, freeing me to engage fully with Rufus and Gabe, who greet all my suggestions with enthusiasm and don’t get cross when I try to make their abstract daubs “look more like something.” We join our good-looking friends and their good-looking offspring for a jolly brunch and afterward our children are whisked away by the delightful and loving nanny-housekeeper figure long enough for me to enjoy my freedom from them, but not so long that I miss them too much. Perhaps a shopping expedition to pick up a party frock for the evening’s event. A little trip to the cinema. To the hairdressers for what Americans call a “blow out.” An hour spent getting ready, moisturizer, primer, foundation, highlighter and blusher; three different sorts of eyeshadow; lip liner, lipstick and gloss. The party—tinkling laughter, champagne, cocktails, tipsy not drunk. Home at midnight, safe in the knowledge that my darling boys will not wake until late on Sunday, when the four of us will lie together in our vast, specially designed bed before having a playful fight with our pillows covered in 1,000-thread-count Egyptian cotton cases.

Or, welcome to the reality of my Saturday.

Having played our usual game of nocturnal musical beds, Joel is on the floor in the boys’ room, while Gabe has taken his place in the marital bed. Except he’s cunningly expanded his tiny two-and-a-half-year-old body to ensure that at least two of my limbs overhang the edge. I look at the clock and at least the time begins with a six, though only just. The street light pours through the bit where the curtains fail to meet and shows me more of my surroundings than I want to see.

Our bedroom looks like a terrorist attack in the Gap.

1
) Leaves clothes anywhere but the laundry basket. Or, rather, either of the two laundry baskets that I introduced for a new system of separating whites from coloreds. When I explained the new system, he said he wasn’t going to practice laundry apartheid and then went off giggling at his wit. He made a similar comment about repatriation of socks and the extraordinary rendition of his last remaining clean underpants that I held hostage in a bid to get him to contribute help as well as clothes to the laundry. He keeps claiming amnesty from the totalitarian regime of my impotent laundry systems.

Though I suppose I should be glad that he’s consistent in dropping his clothes on the floor, in a little crumpled ring at his feet. My friend Jill’s husband puts things in the laundry basket on the days they’re both working, but on the one day she works from home and at weekends, he leaves them on the floor, like then it’s her “job” to pick them up.

It’s symbolic that Gabe has taken Joel’s place in my bed because in many ways he’s also annexed the place in my heart that contains what’s left of my patience, generosity and indulgence. Gabe and I are always going off on old-fashioned dates, sharing
a decaf latte in the café and splodging the frothy soy milk onto one another’s noses, wandering around farmers’ markets and playing hide-and-seek in museums, before settling down to share a bed for the night. He’s currently sprawled on top of me and any sensual urge I may have for physical contact from Joel is sated by Gabe. Joel once said he felt like he’d been superseded by a younger and cuter version of himself.

An odor winds its way up to my nose. This younger and cuter version of Joel is also incontinent. I’ve been sharing my bed with a male packing a full, oh let’s see, actually overflowing, excrement-filled diaper. “Sweetheart, can’t you tell me when you’ve done a poo and I’ll change you, or even better let’s go to the potty. You know you get a sticker if you do that.” He gives a look of satisfaction, akin to that of a ten-year-old who’s just done a “silent-but-deadly” fart over his little sister’s face. He’s supposed to be potty trained, night as well as day. Mitzi’s kids are always dry through the night by this age. “And hasn’t anybody told you it’s the weekend?” I mutter to him. He continues to bounce on the bed, shaking that perilous diaper as he does so. “That hurts. Mommy doesn’t like it when you jump on her, please, sweetheart.”

“Breakfast, breakfast, breakfast,” he sings to an indeterminate nursery rhyme tune. They’re kind of all the same, like hymns.

I’ve drawn the short straw today with this boy child, since he wakes up a full hour before Joel’s charge.

“Good afternoon,” I say, when he and Rufus eventually come down to breakfast.

“I know, the decadence of it, quarter past seven.”

“Still, an extra hour.”

“Sleeping on the bottom bunk of a bed made for dwarves. Every time I sit up I get my hair caught in the springs above me.”

I watch him get breakfast for Rufus. He rips the packet like he’s wearing gardening gloves and a blindfold.

2
) Sprays cereal around the kitchen as if he’s turned on a leaf blower near an open packet of Special K.

3
) Puts used tea bags in the sink. Why do people do this? Sometimes they have little bowls for them instead, which is marginally less annoying, but still, why not just put them straight in the bin—or, if you’re being environmentally sound (which of course you should be and everything, but sometimes I just can’t be bothered to go to the recycling box and I love my tumble dryer, I really do, I shall definitely be getting custody of that in the divorce), in the compost container?

4
) Puts used tea bag in the sink after making a cup of tea for himself without offering to make me one.

5
) Can’t remember how I have my tea. Soy milk, no sugar. Not that difficult, is it?

6
) Calls herbal tea “boiled pants” because that’s what he says it tastes like. Better than one bloke I went out with who consistently referred to it as “lesbian tea.”

“I don’t like the tiny bits of Shreddies,” says Rufus.

Gabe shares this opinion but expresses it by coughing the crumbs up onto the table.

“That’s disgusting,” observes Rufus, correctly.

“You make them better,” says Gabe, pointing at me. “You make them big. Make them big again. I want big Shreddies.”

“There’s a word missing, Gabe? I want big Shreddies…”

“NOW!” he screams.

“No, that’s not the answer I was looking for. I want big Shreddies…”

“HERE!”

“No, ‘please’—‘please’ was the word I was looking for. You’ve had two pieces of toast already, do you really want cereal too?”

“We’re running out of Shreddies, by the way,” says Joel.

7
) Tells me stuff is running out in a really accusatory way. After it’s already run out. And won’t chalk it up onto the shopping list on the section of kitchen wall painted in blackboard paint, something I copied off the interiors magazines I can’t stop myself from buying. Except in the magazines someone has always scrawled “I
you” in those pictures, alongside a shopping list that includes Goji berries and champagne.

“I’ll nip down to the shop to get some more,” I say.

“No, I’ll do it.”

“No, really, I’ll go.”

“No, I insist.”

We look at each other. “First to the door,” he shouts and being a man, he already has his wallet in his pocket, good to go, and beats me to it.

I’m left to deal with the ongoing tantrum of our second child, the dauphin, whom our lives revolve around. When I have calmed his fury over the tiny bits of Shreddies and distracted him with alternative sustenance, he demands that I get the yogurt out of his stomach and back into the pot. I am then admonished for having got the spoon out of the drawer for him. I put it back and invite him to get it out. It’s too late then, of course, I’ve already ruined everything. He has turned me into some sort of Arthurian knight who is set a series of impossible challenges in order to win his hand. I am asked to rid sausages of the brown bits, make fruit slices drier, reattach clipped fingernails, make rainy days
sunny and change the colors of the clothes in his picture books. In our house, the devil wears Primark boys’ combat trousers in a 2–3 and a secondhand stripy T-shirt from Baby Gap.

Calm has been restored when Joel returns with the new packet of un-crumbled Shreddies.

“What are we doing today?” he asks—because I’m his PA, obviously.

“Rufus’s swimming lesson. You take him every week.”

“Oh, right. Where’s his stuff?”

“In the bag in the cupboard by the door.” Where it always is. “And then it’s Mahalia’s party in the afternoon. Have you got her a present?”

He looks very confused. “Mahalia? Remind me.”

“Mitzi’s second kid, bit younger than Rufus.”