The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (5 page)

I get into the lift with one of the advertising girls, who wears clothes that I think are described in fashion-speak as “directional.”

“Which floor?” she sneers. I am just about to answer, when she looks me up and down then presses three, correctly, for me and the panoramic penthouse for herself.

“Thanks,” I mutter. For what? Judging that my mom uniform of smocky top and not-that-skinny jeans could have only belonged to what’s known as the dowdy floor in this building.

I arrive at the sanctuary of the dowdy floor and plonk myself down next to Lily with some relief, even if she is the most fashionable and youthful beacon in this area of the building. She even has the name of a coltish young supermodel (or a toddler—a florist couldn’t have as many Lilies, Irises and Poppies as Rufus’s class at school). Advertising shrew would never have guessed that Lily works on this floor. She wears clothes that are so directional as to have performed a 180-degree turn and become the sort of things that my senile great-aunt would wear on escaping from the care home. There’s no trend too ugly for her to embrace. She even went through a self-harming phase as she’d been told everyone was doing it, though she cheerfully admitted that she hadn’t actually managed to pierce the skin on her arms with a biro, just to make it look like she was trying to do her own tattoos.

“Do you know what?” I say to her. “Some stupid cow from the advertising agency just assumed I worked on this floor.”

“Well, you do,” Lily observes, while performing a good-tempered version of the up-and-down look that I got in the lift.

“True. Good Christmas?” I ask.

“Eggs-hausting,” she replies in exhausted fashion. I stop myself from telling her she doesn’t know exhausting until she’s had children. Much of my conversation with Lily consists of me trying to stop myself from explaining to her that it won’t necessarily be easy for her to have “twins, a boy one and a girl one” by IVF at a moment convenient to her, once she’s won an Oscar and written a best-selling novel, or “move to a big house in the country and start a really successful Internet business with a really gorgeous husband” at some point in her thirties. She’s always telling me that she doesn’t understand why I work part-time—“Like, why don’t you just get more babysitting?”—which is also her answer to any complaints about not being able to get out much these days.

When I first met Joel, I was an assistant producer and he was a researcher, having frittered away most of his twenties on his band, or “the band” as it’s always referred to, like it produced a few seminal albums. I had clawed my way to that position by the time-honored, by women at least, route of starting as a secretary at minimum wage, having written to every production company in London with my CV. He got his first position in telly via a phone call from his mother to an old friend who’d done a documentary with her in the seventies. Within six months of him starting, he was a producer too, though I consoled myself that I was still senior to him and whatever happened I’d always have better A-level grades. Soon we were competing to be the first to get a producer-director credit, that sweet mix of the practical and the creative. We spent our days making reality shows and our nights planning the world-changing documentaries we were going to make together.

And now he’s an executive producer and I’m a… a what? A sort of production managers’ manager? Development slash coordination slash human resources? When we’ve got a program to work on, which we don’t at the moment, hence the tiny corner of sublet office space, I’m the last staging post on a production line of whining—the whinge sponge, if you like. Production managers are kind of like mothers in that they tidy up, budget for and chase after creative, tantrum-throwing types. I’m the person that even the production managers complain to and demand that I find order in their chaos. Professionally speaking, I’m the mother of all mothers.

I used to be one of the creative ones, I used to have ideas. Now I’m a backroom girl. I’m like one of those women in World War II films who push airplanes around maps, allowing the pilots to soar off on their adventures. Opportunities for part-timers, mothers and over 35s are limited in the
Logan’s Run
world that is television.

“Is no one else in today?” I ask Lily.

“Nah. Do you want to see my new Facebook page?”

“I thought you did MySpace.”

“Yu-huh. I’ve got both.” She looks at me like I look at my mother, like my children look at me.

“Perhaps I’ll get myself one of these Facebook thingies one of these days,” I tell her.

“Yeah, you should. There are loads of old people on it these days.”

“Yes, I believe that Saga has even set up a social networking site for us.”

She gives me the “whatevs” face and we settle down to work. A new production starts in a few weeks and I busy myself with color-coded schedules and timetables, trying to slot together the incoming hordes and marshal the troops, much as I do at home for the three males. Time flies by in a way that it didn’t when I was ensconced in the bosom of my family for that eternal Christmas break, and before long it is midday.

It’s traditional to dread Mondays. I yearn for them. Especially every other one, when I get to have lunch with my friend Becky. A proper lunch break out of the office was one of the things (along with status, salary and prospects) that got reduced once I went part-time. Workload wasn’t.

Our lunch venue is not exactly The Ivy; we’re balanced on uncomfortable stools eating sandwiches at a bar, looking out on the street through a fogged-up window. We swap Christmases, hers an enviable-sounding one of much “mooching around” London interspersed with occasional bouts of family. For the childless, family is something you get to dip in and out of.

“Seeing you twice in one week,” says Becky. “That’s a rare treat.”

“Oh, yes, Friday,” I say as if I’ve only just remembered the
invitation to Cara’s party, the date of which is inscribed in both my diary and my head. As if I’d forget, as if I get invited to lots of smart parties in flats that look like they belong on the set of a film about glamorous women. “What’s it in aid of?”

“It’s not for charity,” she says.

“No, I mean, is it someone’s birthday? Your anniversary? Ooh, are you making an announcement? Is there a civil partnership looming?”

“Jeez, why is everyone on at us about that? Bloody civil partnerships. Do you know what nobody seems to have twigged about them? In terms of acrimonious splits and their financial repercussions, they’re just as bad as any marriage. I don’t know why everyone’s so celebratory about them, the only people who should really be celebrating are us lawyers. Ya-hey.” She makes a champagne toast with an imaginary glass. Becky is a family lawyer, which is more commonly and less euphemistically known as a divorce lawyer. The word “family” is often used as a euphemism, I find—family fun, family film, family day out. Just an adjective meaning “crap,” usually—though that’s certainly not the case with Becky, whom I’m told is quietly brilliant at her job.

“Still, it’s great for me,” I say, “since now you can be as bugged by annoying questions as Joel and I were before we finally caved in and got married. I wonder if you’ll get spared the ones about children along with crude remarks about your ovaries.”

Becky looks terse at this point and I wonder if I have said something wrong. “It’s just a party, Mary. If anything it’s a professional thing for Cara’s clients, drum up some business. Not the best time to be in financial PR.”

“It probably is quite literally easier to sell snow to Eskimos than to get good press for bankers. Still, if anyone can do it, Cara can. I expect she can persuade anybody of anything.” I use the
pause that follows to dive into what’s been preoccupying me all the while. “In your professional opinion…” I begin to ask.

She sighs. “A lot of my friends’ sentences begin that way these days. Something to do with forty a-beckoning.”

“Sorry,” I continue. “In your experience, what’s the most common reason people give for wanting to get a divorce?”

“Obviously, there’s the usual—infidelity, money problems, domestic and verbal abuse. Often, it’s not so much what someone has done as what they’ve failed to do. Neglect, lack of respect, nothing in common. You can’t really generalize.”

“What about housework?” I ask, concentrating on drawing a series of stacking cubes onto the window’s condensation.

“What about it?”

“Do people get divorced because their houses are a mess?”

Becky laughs. “No, not generally. I suppose if it were symptomatic of some sort of wider malaise. What’s this about?”

“A program we might be doing, a bit like
Wife Swap
,” I say.

“I knew you weren’t talking about you and Joel. Your house is always immaculate.”

“Yeah, right,” I say. “It’s a disaster.” But I feel a burst of womanly pride that somebody has been fooled by the brief frenzy of tidying that goes on before we have visitors. “You only say that because you’re like my mother-in-law in your belief that cleanliness is next to gormlessness.”

“Ursula is a marvelous woman,” Becky says with a frown. “I wish I lived with her instead of Cara.”

“How’s that going?”

“Fine. Sort of. She’s just so anal. Everything’s just so and tasteful and perfect. Everything has to be
exquisite
, do you know what I mean? She has a DustBuster—you know, one of those mini
vacuum cleaner things and she uses it around my chair before I’ve even finished eating.”

“I do that a bit, with the children.”

“Exactly. With. The. Children. And that’s not all. It’s a bloody Philippe Starck DustBuster. All polished chrome. Even the bloody DustBuster has to be the world’s most tasteful DustBuster. I’m only allowed to put my stuff, you know all my vases, ornaments, presents that people have given me, things that mean something to me, in the spare room. She has a computer program for working out which art should go on which wall space. She’s a gay man trapped in a lesbian’s body.” She frowns some more and then contradicts herself. “Except she doesn’t have a lesbian’s body as it’s far too gym-toned and hairless. It’s a gay man’s body.”

“Right, a gay man trapped in a gay man’s body?”

“Who fancies women,” corrects Becky.

“So a straight man, then,” I say. “Except she fancies lesbians.”

“Not strictly true,” Becky says. “Cara’s always had a thing for turning straight women gay. Especially the married ones.”

“Really?” I feel a surprising charge.

“Yes. Haven’t you noticed how much more femme I’ve got over the last year?”

True, ish, I thought; Becky had become a little less Weimar Republic lesbian of late and now made the occasional uncomfortable foray into dresses.

“So Cara’s a gay man trapped in a gay man’s body, but with boobs and stuff, but who’s like a straight man as she fancies straight women…”

“I think this analogy’s run its course,” Becky says with a full stop.

“Indeed. You were telling me, about divorce and housework, is there a link?”

“Not unless it’s a reflection of something else. A deep inequality in the relationship, I suppose. Are they really doing a program about housework?”

“No,” I say mournfully. “It’s Joel. He’s driving me mad.”

“So you’re going to divorce him.” Becky laughs.

“I’m serious.”

She looks at me. “Oh my god, don’t you think you’re over-reacting?”

I shake my head. “No. It would be an over-reaction to kill him. Which I have thought of doing.”

“Come on, Mary. It’s not like he hits you or anything.”

“Every time he leaves the sodding milk out, or his bloody socks on the floor, or drops his coat as he comes in, or a tea bag in the sink,” I say, “it feels like a little blow to my head. A small, well-aimed punch in my stomach.”

“Really worth divorcing him over, then. Perhaps you and I should do a wife swap: you come and live at our palace of clean and I can go and luxuriate with Joel in the warm gunk of your place. Joel is wonderful. You’re so lucky.”

I look over to the corner of the café, where three women, as pregnant as each other, are sitting and having a no doubt decaffeinated coffee together. Everything about them says first-time mothers. They wear gorgeous box-fresh maternity clothes and give off a throb of excitement and hope. Children are still a potentially chic accessory and how you give birth is something you dictate in a plan. They still live in this edgy, urban area, but they’ll move soon, you know, they’ll say—the schools in the inner city… so many kids with English as a second language… besides, we wanted a garden and a proper high street.

I’ve never felt such optimism as I did when I was pregnant with Rufus. Joel used to stroke my belly and talk to it, telling it funny stories and singing his favorite songs. We knew we weren’t
the only ones in the world to be having a baby, one trip to the nursery section of a department store put paid to that, but that didn’t stop us feeling like we were. We wallowed in every cliché, believing that somehow we were the first people in history to be going through them.

My preparation consisted of reading Internet message boards discussing perineal massage and wincing, while Joel’s was creating the perfect birth playlist.

“Do you want songs that are about children or is that a bit literal?” he asked me as I lay eight months pregnant with Rufus on the sofa. He was rifling through CDs with an energy that I no longer see from him. He was keen to play lots of them to the bump, in the manner of someone who thinks fetuses become cleverer if they listen to Mozart.

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“This is our progeny’s introduction to the world of music so, yes, it does matter. Bob Dylan’s ‘Forever Young’ as an opener, yes, perfect. Throw in a few love songs, ‘At Last’ by Etta James, and Primal Scream, but which one? I know, ‘I’ll Be There for You.’ Bowie’s ‘Kooks’ is about kids, though it’s not such a great song, is it? What other songs are there about children?”

“ ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls,’ ” I suggested. I was enjoying his seriousness.

“Always good to have a song with a whiff, or should I say
soupçon
, of pedophilia. Shall I add Serge Gainsbourg’s loving duet with his daughter, ‘Lemon Incest,’ while I’m at it?”