The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (3 page)

“I can’t keep track of them.”

“Molyneux, he’s six or seven, Mahalia, then the twins, Merle and the boy one. What is his name? Begins with an M.”

“Obviously.”

“I was joking about the present; don’t worry about it, I think there’s something in the present drawer.” Present drawer. I have a present drawer. When did I get to be the sort of person who has a present drawer? “Milburn, that’s the boy twin’s name, Milburn.”

8
) Puts milk bottles and cartons back in the fridge if they’re empty. That’s not fair—mostly he makes sure there’s a couple of drops left in them to save them from unequivocal emptiness. But weirdly, he will always leave the bottles with lots of milk in them out on the counter in order that they go sour.

9
) Takes the stickers off bananas and apples and sticks them on the kitchen table.

I whirl around the kitchen picking up, wiping, depositing and washing as I go. I make sure Rufus’s swimming stuff, coat and outdoor shoes are ready at the door while trying to phone Mitzi to check what time the party is.

“Have you seen the car keys?” Joel asks me. Most of the sentences we utter to one another start with the word “where” or some such variant.

10
) Asks me questions when I’m talking to someone else on the phone.

“Sorry, Mitzi, I’m being summoned. Aren’t they on the hook in the kitchen where they’re supposed to be kept?”

“No, that’s why I’m asking.”

“Well, I always put them back there. You must have left them somewhere else.”

“I haven’t used the car in ages.”

This is true. I scurry into the kitchen, hoping that I’ll find them on the hook where they’re supposed to be. Which they are, although partially obscured by a mug.

11
) Asks me where something is and I tell him and he doesn’t look properly so I have to go and find it for him myself. If I say something’s in the fridge, he won’t see it unless it’s in the front of the fridge, as if it’s too much effort to move the jar of chutney that’s permanently rooted to a piece of prime fridge real estate.

“Oh, look, on the kitchen hook, where I said they were.” I hand them to him and make a dash for the safety of the sitting room, doing what he’s usually better at doing than I am—leaving the
children and assuming that someone else (me) will look after them. I sort out the time of Mahalia’s party and then start hunting around.

“Joel!” No answer. “Joe-WELL! Which one of these effing cables is for the laptop?”

“The black one,” he shouts back, eventually. I look down at the nest of vipers at my feet, a coiling mass of unmarked and mostly black cables. These phone, camera and computer chargers have joined old keys as things we can no longer throw away for fear that the moment we do so, we’ll discover both what they are for and a need to use them.

“I told you to mark any new ones with a label and then put them all back in their original boxes together with their electronic husband.”

“Oh well,” he says. “Looks like they’re getting a divorce.”

You may joke, I think, with a strange jolt of satisfaction at hearing him say the word out loud. “I know it sounds like I’m being anal, but I say it for a reason. Now I can’t find the laptop charger and it looks exactly the same as the one for the camcorder and we’ve got five different mobile chargers and I can’t work out which one is for the old phone. And what’s this?” I pick up a lonely white cable.

“For your old toothbrush?”

I stomp off, though he doesn’t notice as he’s become engrossed in playing back some footage on the camcorder that he shot of the boys on holiday. “Bugger,” I hear him shout. “The battery’s gone. Where have you put the charger?”

12
) The way he leaves all the phone chargers and cables out so that I can never work out which electronic item they belong to.

My path away from him is impeded by a blockade of shoes, buggies, scooters, bikes, helmets, the recycling box and the disgorging contents of a mini packet of raisins that I manage to further squash into our neutral-colored and, in retrospect, far too pale sisal carpeting.

The stairs provide a new hurdle. At the bottom of each flight and half-flight in our house are small foothills of debris: slippers, books and clean clothes on their way up; old newspapers, empty glasses mottled with evaporated wine and dirty clothes on their way down. They say that the peak of Everest has become strewn with rubbish. I bet it looks like the landings of our house.

13
) The way he can ignore the pile of stuff at the bottom of the stairs.

Like a driver reversing his 4×4, Joel has a dangerous blind spot when it comes to the stairs that allows him to trot past these stations without ever thinking that perhaps he should pick this stuff up; an ignorance of the fact that humans are the conveyor belt that will carry it home. I once decided to let it all pile up to show him how much I was frantically shoveling to keep this house clear. Gradually the possessions silted up our stairs until they formed barricades. Still he managed to ignore them, actually vaulting over to reach his destination. Then, one day, poor Rufus slipped on an empty packet of Kettle Chips and hit his head against the balustrade and we ended up in the ER. I felt guilty, of course, but it was Joel’s fault.

I lock myself in the bathroom, hunch over the laptop with its fast-fading battery and click on a document called “House admin” (it’s a safe bet that Joel will never open that one). I type furiously in all senses of the word, finishing off with a last flourish:

14
) Never hangs up the swimming stuff but leaves it in the bag to go moldy.

I’m obsessed with cleaning and housework, but my house doesn’t appear to reflect my pathology. If I described someone as being obsessed with cleaning, you’d assume their house to be spotless with vacuumed upholstery and cupboards filled with alphabetized Tupperware for their extensive rice collection. No, I’m obsessed with cleaning and yet live in a filthy home, which is a raw deal, much like it is for my friend Daisy, who complains that she was built with the ample curves of an opera singer, but with a voice so bad that she has to mime “Happy Birthday” so as not to ruin anybody’s party.

Nobody talks about cleaning. Why would they? It’s bloody boring to do and even more boring to talk about, but it’s there. It’s a dirty secret that we don’t want to admit to. Well, I’m going to come clean. I spend more time on sweeping, tidying, home management and wiping than on anything else in my life. It’s my hated hobby, my pastime. Now that I’ve gone part-time in the office, I think I may actually spend more time on housework than paid work. You’d never know the extent of my cleaning load by my conversations with others or by my outward appearance, and least of all by the outward appearance of my house. Nobody ever talks about cleaning or seems to show that they do much, yet they live in spotless, ordered houses. It’s as if their houses are cleaned by osmosis, or fairies that come in the night, or mute Brazilians on ₤7 an hour.

Everybody bangs on about sex, but I spend many more minutes cleaning, doing laundry, tidying and bill-paying than I ever will having sex. It’s very likely that I spend more time thinking about it too.

Nobody talks about cleaning except my mother, and lord how
my sister and I despised her for it. Jemima and I didn’t do cleaning, you see, because we were feminists. The funny thing about feminism is that it hasn’t actually decreased the amount of washing to be done and surfaces to be wiped, nor does it seem to have increased the amount of time men spend doing it, either.

Where do other people put their phone chargers? Where do they lurk? I don’t understand other people’s houses. Where are the odd socks and junk mail? Where have they secreted the broken toys, incomplete jigsaw puzzles and spare coats? Other people’s homes look as if they are on permanent standby for estate agents and buyers’ viewings when they are not even on the market. If we ever wanted to sell our place, then we’d have to hire another house just to hide all our clutter.

Perhaps that’s the secret. That the owners of all these inexplicably perfect homes have another place down the road that’s a moldering mess of outgrown baby clothes, broken toys, unopened mail, half-filled handbags and muddy shoes. It’s the house equivalent of the picture of Dorian Gray, allowing their owners to present their perfect lives while hiding their increasingly squalid parallel home.

When I talk about perfect houses, I suppose I’m really thinking about Mitzi’s. In Mitzi’s house, there’s a place for everything except unsightly door knobs. Instead, kitchen doors just ping open at your touch to reveal a bespoke compost repository or a recycling area pre-divided into cans, papers and bottles. Since marrying into money, Mitzi has come to believe that windows are the windows of the soul, especially when they are draped with curtains made from reclaimed Welsh farmhouse bedspreads.

Mitzi’s house has hallways off hallways and a separate utility room with space to hang up clothes to dry and so avoid using the tumble dryer, thus offsetting the carbon used on all those skiing trips and half-term jaunts.

Rich people turn left to first class when they get on a plane. When you go to houses like Mitzi’s you don’t just walk into the kitchen, but are automatically spirited upward to begin the tour of the house and to admire its latest incarnation, which either involves stripping back or reinstating the original fittings, depending on the year. There is no interiors trend too fleeting to have not been embraced by Mitzi. One wall covered in ornate Timorous Beasties wallpaper at a hundred pounds a roll—check; reinforced glass balcony—check; oddly sized black-and-white photos of her children gliding up the staircase—check. Then there are the quirky individual touches that the rest of us swoon over, which usually testify still further to the perfection of her life and love. The coffee table papered with an antique map of Sicily, where she and Michael spent their honeymoon. The subtle pattern below the cornicing in the hall that is made up of a series of interlocking Ms. The wallpaper in the downstairs loo that is their wedding invitation blown up to a hundred times its original size. The same room’s industrial concrete floor with each member of the family’s footprints immortalized, including the tiny ones of whichever of the brood was newly born at that time (these redecorations tend to coincide with the arrival of a new baby, but then, as Mitzi has had four of them over three pregnancies, most things do).

Mitzi’s current project involves the greenification of her 4,000-square-foot house with wind turbines and solar panels, rather than just ugly old loft insulation like the rest of us. Her new-found mania for all things environmental has opened up whole avenues of consumerism that she is enthusiastically motoring down in her brand-new Lexus hybrid.

I like to go to Mitzi’s house and sneak upstairs while the other women are having handcrafted organic flapjacks in the kitchen and peer into all the bedrooms, half hoping to find them a shambles, just this once. I always offer to help make the tea as an
excuse to thrust open the cupboards and admire the way that her foodstuffs are arranged in the larder (a larder! Just imagine), with flour that comes dressed in old-fashioned sackcloth and jars filled with exotic dried beans.

Later in my Saturday I cook lunch. Or lunches, since every member of the house has a different food issue. Rufus at a ridiculously young age has decided he doesn’t eat anything with a face (bless him for his emotional intelligence but curse him for the hassle); Joel doesn’t eat anything without one. Gabe won’t eat anything at all, really; he has the dietary habits of a Hollywood starlet, all uncooked frozen peas and rice cakes. I have whatever anybody else leaves over. Unless of course it’s dairy, because I’ve got a proper intolerance to that rather than all these made-up allergies that the males in my family claim to suffer from.

“Joel, can you clear up a bit so we can actually eat?”

15
) Puts wet tea towels back in the clean tea-towel drawer. When something does spill on the floor, he uses a tea towel to dry it up rather than the mop.

16
) Goes on about how he does all the cooking, which he doesn’t. He does all the grandstanding, while I do all the boring everyday stuff—the reheating, rehashing, pureeing. When he does cook, he expects me to be some sort of sous chef to him, fetching, carrying, chopping and washing up his saucepans as he goes along. When I cook, I cook alone.

17
) Calls saucepans and pots “the scary ones” and doesn’t touch them when it’s his turn to do the washing-up.

“How was swimming?”

“Good, thank you,” says Rufus. I have a suspicion that Gabe
will remain in touch with his inner tantruming two-year-old for the rest of his life, but Rufus can sometimes sound as if he’s channeling the spirit of a taciturn octogenarian. He is like everybody’s favorite granddad and I adore him for it (though wish at the same time that he might tell me just a little bit more about his day at school).

“Who was there?”

“Nobody.”

“What, not even the teacher?”

Rufus rolls his eyes. “The teacher was there, silly.”

“And about six other kids,” adds Joel. “The mother with the string bikini.”

“And the heeled flip-flops?” I add. “And the extraordinary abs?”

“That’s the one. And the really fat woman with the bleached hair.”

“And the inexplicably hot black partner? I don’t get that one at all.”

“Actually, can I say something?” asks Rufus. “It’s not appropriate”—he pronounces the word as if it’s filled with “b”s—“to talk about the way people look. Even if they are a fat pig. Why are you squeezing me, Mommy?”

“Because you are so sweet and serious.”

He wriggles away from me. “It is serious. We’re not allowed to say nasty words.”

“Like what?”

“Oh my god,” he whispers.

“Is that what they teach you at school these days?” asks Joel. “Of course, they’re completely right.” I catch Joel’s eye and we both stifle smirks before I’m distracted by a pile of unscraped and unwashed plates piled precariously on the worktop.