The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (28 page)

8

Of Lice and Men

I feel like I’m living in a medieval plague house. I don’t know why I don’t just get out Gabe’s poster paint and slosh a great big red cross on our door. I take it personally—it is as if I, too, am invaded and infested. Jennifer, the trainee therapist from the book group, would say that I am “toxic.”

At work nobody knows the pestilence I bring with me. They have their own infestations: chlamydia, spliffs and cheap cocktails. We are all infected with the self-importance that spreads when we’ve got a program in production, bustling around barking at one another as if LIVES DEPENDED ON IT, when in fact all that will emerge from it is yet another reality entertainment show.

I open my email with dread. Seven new meetings have been dropped into the electronic calendar while my back was turned, all marked up as urgent. I have 102 unread emails, most of which I’m guessing aren’t even addressed to me but I’ll be one of a dozen cc-ed correspondents, all of us in there as extra cover for the sender’s back. It’s all so pointless; it’s the professional equivalent of a kitchen surface that needs wiping only to be smeared all over again ten minutes later.

“You missed a top night, Mazza,” says Lily, who is wearing a Hermès scarf knotted around her head like it’s Woodstock. Another fashion that seems to have passed me by, and that
definitely goes into the long look-book marked “Accessories that make Lily look charming and gamine but would make me look like a mad bag lady.” I am beginning to worry that my long relied upon floral tea dresses fall into the same category, or a subset thereof: maiden aunt at wedding slash history teacher we laughed at.

“Why?”

“The whole team went out to celebrate the pilot being so scorching and Matt put the drinks on exes. Such a top bloke.”

Matt is my age and has 50 percent more children. But Matt is male.

“I didn’t know anything about it.”

“Well you wouldn’t, you were on holiday last week, weren’t you?”

“Half term.”

“I wish I had half terms,” she sighs. “I’m knackered.”

“So am I. Because I do have half terms.”

“What did you do, anyway?”

“You know my friend Mitzi?”

“Ditzy Mitzi who fancies your husband?”

“Does not.”

“Did then.”

“We went to her house. Well, her second house on the coast.”

“Cool, a beach shack. Surfing?”

“I don’t think you can surf in Norfolk. Not that I’d know. And not a shack. About the size of four normal houses. Her pantry is bigger than most people’s kitchens.”

“What’s a pantry? Is that for keeping your thongs in?” Lily grew up in a large vicarage in the home counties and I suspect that she knows full well what a pantry is.

“And it’s got a utility room and everything.”

“Don’t know what a utility room is, either. I’m thinking somewhere you wear utility chic—you know, boiler suits and those
totally fierce Louboutin lace-up boots.” She sighs. “I’d like a futility room, where anyone who entered would be forced to chill and do fuck all but listen to music and talk to each other, really talk to each other. It’s like everyone’s so bonkers and stressed at the moment, know what I mean?”

“I do, I know exactly what you mean.”

“Still, I guess you got to relax on your holiday. Have a good time, did you?”

“Yes, of course. It was incredible. The kids went sailing and swimming and beachcombing. There was so much space and light. You know those big skies they have there? It was great.”

I don’t think I’ve ever looked so forward to returning to the steaming stench-pile of my own home as I did when we fled Mitzi’s. I welcomed the thought of the freedom to kick off my shoes and let them land where they fell, and to put down my sunglasses without fear that they would be sequestered. At first, the morning after seeing what we saw that night, I avoided looking at Mitzi as my mind was so scorched with the image of her in her porny cleaner outfit. And then I found I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Usually I am so dazzled by her brilliance that she is just a hazy shimmer of perfection, but this time I felt that I saw her, properly, for the first time since she got married.

Before I had seen only the swan, but during the last couple of days in Norfolk, I saw the madly paddling legs beneath the glide through life. Mitzi is always cleaning. She has staff and all, but she is either telling them to clean something, doing it herself or guilting you into doing it. I’d have thought the last thing she’d want to do when indulging in a little sexual role-playing downtime would be to pop on her Marigolds and pick up crap.

If she’s not physically cleaning, then she is tidying up life. Smoothing over Michael’s querulousness over why there’s never any bloody peace and quiet in this madhouse, and why do the
children have to make such an infernal racket all the time, and where is Birgita, Radka, whatever her name is? And said quartet of children don’t get to resemble the kids in a catalog that sells homemade bunting and bespoke treehouses by accident. Mitzi had a packet of biodegradable wet wipes permanently at hand to scrape their faces, and would pressure an au pair or nanny to remove them to beyond earshot should they start whining about wanting to use the PlayStation.

And all the environmentally friendly cleaning products in the world could never wipe from my mind the image of her and Michael, nor my new knowledge of how she betrayed me, her friend, all those years ago. When I thought I had seen a knowledge shared between Mitzi and Joel I had been right, though wrong about what it was they both knew.

My excitement about being back at home was matched by my warmth toward Joel. I even declared an unofficial moratorium on The List, which meant that when he dumped the bags in the hall I decided not to add in list number
D
7
:
Will eventually unpack his clothes from the suitcase, but will leave all the sundry miscellaneous items—the cameras, books and toiletries—because they may be of use to other members of the family as well as to himself
.

In the kitchen, what had been a discarded half-eaten apple had been transformed into an almost-eaten apple by a crack team of ants, most of whom seemed to be still crawling over our kitchen surfaces. It was not quite the welcoming committee that I’d have chosen, but they were apple-pie baking grannies in comparison to the next uninvited visitor we encountered.

“What are these?” I asked Joel, pointing at the brown granules under the kitchen sink.

“Don’t know.”

I was feeling sugar-deprived after four days of someone else’s
food and so went to my secret stash of dark chocolate Easter eggs that I have been rationing out to myself. It is hidden behind one of the cupboards, away from the thieving hands of children, but not, as it turns out, from the thieving claws of vermin. Most of the foil seemed to have been removed and there were tiny teeth marks across my expensive dairy-free chocolate.

I dropped the bag in horror. “We’ve got mice.”

“How can you tell?” asked Joel. He tried to stay calm but I knew he was far more terrified of them than I was.

“Those things were mice droppings. Gabe, put that down, wash your hands immediately! And they’ve been at my chocolate.”

“Chocolate!” exclaimed the boys with one voice.

“And god knows what else. This is revolting. I feel dirty.”

Joel started giggling. I wondered when the word “dirty” would cease to provoke this Pavlovian response.

“What do we do about it?”

He shrugged.

“I suppose I’ll look on the Internet and I’ll sort it out because I don’t have anything else to do.”

“You might want to look up how to get rid of ants while you’re at it.”

I was irritated but still protected by the armor of what we had seen together. Back at home, I only had to picture Mitzi in a pair of rubber gloves to feel all warm and benevolent. This lasted the whole of the first day of our return, despite the mice and the ants. We had sex that night—normal sex, obviously—and I began to wonder whether I wouldn’t be able to put our marriage back on track.

Then he went back to work while I took time off to look after the boys for the remaining days of half term, and the dropped clothes, casual requests and general assumption of my domestic servitude began again.

“I’ll need my suit for this meeting on Monday,” he said to me that first morning.

“OK.”

“Pick it up from the dry cleaner, would you?”

“All right, where’s the ticket?”

“Don’t know.” He did that meaningless patting-pockets gesture. “The bloke’s really nice in there, you won’t need it, he knows who I am.”

“So why don’t you do it?”

“Got to rush.”

The nice man in the dry cleaner and I spent an hour looking for the suit, while Gabriel tried to put plastic bags on his head and Rufus said that even school was less boring than this.

“Maybe it wasn’t that dry cleaner,” said Joel. He rifled through his wallet. “Here’s the ticket. Oh, it’s not at that dry cleaner at all, it’s at the one near work. You don’t need to worry about it,” he said generously, “I’ll pick it up myself.”

Then on the Monday morning, when at last it was my turn to join him in the world of work, Joel’s parting words to me were:

“You might want to take a look at the kids’ heads. Rufus has been scratching like mad.”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” I shouted at his departing back. “I feel like I’m living in a World War I trench.”

“Not my fault,” he shouted back, breaking into a trot.

I gave Rufus’s head a cursory examination and managed to convince myself that since I couldn’t see anything jumping, it would be fine to do a more thorough comb after work. What choice did I have? I tried to imagine Matt’s reaction if I kept Rufus off school and Gabriel away from the child minder and failed to turn up to work, especially after what my boss would no doubt refer to as “all that time off over half term.”

My last vision of Rufus in the school playground was of a
mother looking at him suspiciously as he gave his head a vigorous scratch. I felt guilt and anger in equal measure. Why wasn’t this Joel’s problem? I tried to ward off antipathy by thinking of the Mitzi and Michael Show, but it had already lost its power to protect Joel from my wrath.

I have a three-minute window between meetings, which is just enough to open a few emails and work out if any of them need my urgent attention or even my attention at all. The phone on my desk rings.

“What fresh hell is this?” I mutter before answering, “Hello.”

“Hello, Mary.” A voice that would taste of the cucumber in a large jug of ice-cold Pimm’s.

“Cara, hello. I didn’t know you had my work number.”

“I remembered where you work.”

I am flattered. “I’m so sorry about the walk—you know, in Norfolk. I was so looking forward to it.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I never don’t turn up for anything, especially things that I’m looking forward to.”

“I said don’t worry about it.”

“Did you have a good time, in Norfolk, I mean, it’s very beautiful, isn’t it?” I’m gabbling. “Mitzi’s house is amazing, don’t you think?”

“She has exquisite taste.”

“Yes, she does.”

“And how’s Becky?”

“In Newcastle.”

“Yes, of course, that case. How long’s it going to go on for?”

“A month, maybe two.”

“Yes, I think she told me, depending on when it settles. Poor her, must be very discombobulating. And for you too, I guess,
though it’s a very nice town, I think—well, I haven’t been there for years, but it always was and I’m sure it still is. Very friendly, that’s what they always say, don’t they? But still, it’s not home, is it? Though this time at least she’s got a serviced apartment, hasn’t she? Are you going to go up at all?”

“Perhaps. She’s back every Friday.” There’s a pause. “I wonder whether you’d like to have a drink sometime. Your office is near here.”

“Yes, it is. I’d love to. That would be great.” Something very cold in an all-white environment as opposed to a cup of tea in a cluttered kitchen.

“Tonight?”

A weekday, not a Friday or Saturday night? I think of the nit comb and am tempted to say yes, but I know that Joel has already told me he won’t be back until gone eight. “Tonight’s not great for me. Tomorrow?”

“No, can’t do tomorrow.”

“The weekend?” When Becky’s back.

“No. Another time.”

I think of all the times that Joel has turned up past the kids’ bath- and bedtime and how that’s just fine, that’s no problem because I’m the default, the person who is home on time unless I have begged dispensation. I am about to acquiesce to Cara’s summons on these grounds, but it is too late, she has hung up. I feel guilty, as if I have offended her and that it is ineffably rude to be unavailable for a drink at less than half a day’s notice. I wonder whether I shall ever receive the call again.

Combing the boys’ hair is hypnotic. Beside the sofa sits a long-toothed metal nit comb, a clear bowl of water and a bottle of cheap conditioner. We no longer bother with the toxic pesticides, not because we are the sort of immunization-evading,
homeopathy-using parents, but because the little pests have become resistant to all known forms of poison. I’m referring to nits, obviously, not my sons. I’m filled with the usual contradictory desires to find nothing in their hair, but at the same time have the “gotcha” satisfaction of pulling out a few live ones.

“Stay still, Rufus, please.” Normally having such an abundance of hair would be considered a good thing, but in this instance some of that stringy sparse stuff would be good. Where we live, parents of a certain class like to distinguish themselves from their neighbors by growing their sons’ hair to effeminate lengths. The posher you are, the longer it gets. Rufus’s and Gabe’s falls into their eyes and down to their shoulders. It doesn’t matter that your dad might wear a suit and would never dream of going longer than a month between visits to the barber. Mitzi’s boy Molyneux has locks of fairy-tale proportions.

The nit comb makes its slow progress through the red hair of Rufus and then the near black of Gabriel’s. Sure enough, I am rewarded with eleven live wrigglers, a couple of dozen eggs and a few emptied egg carcasses. I stare with satisfaction at the bowl of water where my haul floats and then my heart sinks at the prospect of having to do this every day for a week, with dwindling returns. Then at last will come the day where none appear, but you can never be sure that this is a result of your total annihilation of the enemy or your growing carelessness.