The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (7 page)

“Maybe next time, Mother,” says Joel.

Ursula gives me a look that says: what a shame you hate your children so. It’s the look she gives me every time we’ve gone on holiday to a place with a kids’ club.

“Seriously,” I say, “please can we just leave them be? They’ve had a tiring day. And more to the point, I’ve had a really tiring day.” She snorts. “Sorry, Ursula, what was that?”

“You’ve hardly been down the mines, have you? Or raised a family of four children single-handedly like some of my friends? Honestly, you lot don’t know you’re born.” Joel retreats from the kitchen. “You young women seem so angry.”

Oh no, here we go again. The “you young women have never had it so good speech” and “you can never thank me enough.” “More wine, Ursula?”

She is not so easily deflected. “Angry all the time when you haven’t really got anything to be angry about, have you?”

Except being lectured by you every time you come over and get a couple of glasses of Pinot Noir down you. “Well…” I begin, but she’s off.

“You’ve got it all: the right to have interesting yet flexible jobs and still see your children; to wear what you want, even if it is most dreadfully whorish in the name of so-called empowerment; wonderful husbands who work so hard and still do all the housework—not that there is any these days, what with all your dishwashing machines and microwave cookers. You’re so lucky. Maybe you’re angry that you haven’t got more to be angry about.” She chortles, a particularly irritating chortle that her son has inherited from her.

“I don’t know where to start,” I say truthfully. “You’re right that feminism has brought us many benefits…”

“Thank you,” she says, as if it were she that powered the revolution single-handedly.

“It’s great that we can work—great, really. But it’s as if the outside world has moved at one pace and the inside one, what goes on here,” I jab my finger, “at home, has gone at another, much slower one. There’s like this disconnect…”

“Disconnect? What a horrid piece of management speak.”

“Looking after the house and the children, it hasn’t caught up,” I continue, gabbling my words to stop her interrupting me again. “No, that’s wrong. It’s like women’s development has moved on one track and men’s on another. We’ve had the revolution for women, but we didn’t realize that of course it wouldn’t work unless men had a revolution too.”

“Some men have, haven’t they? Just look at Joel,” says Ursula.

I try to follow her command, but Joel is nowhere to be seen—as is always the case when Ursula and I do battle.

“Joel is wonderful. You’re so lucky,” she continues.

“Yes, obviously I’m really lucky. But even someone as wonderful as he is, is not quite 50–50 when it comes to the dirty washing and the worry and the shoe-buying and the thank-you letter writing and the organizing of playdates…”

“Playdates?” she exclaims.

“It’s like when you arrange to meet another parent so that—”

“Yes, I know what it is. But my dear, what a ghastly Americanism. It’s like all these people saying ‘hey’ instead of ‘hello.’ Don’t you think it’s dreadful, Joel, the word ‘playdate’?” He reappears on cue in a way that he never does for me.

“Yes,” he agrees, of course. “It sounds like something you might have with a Playboy bunny in the Playboy mansion.
Involving two of them wearing something pink and fluffy and grappling each other in a softplay zone.”

Ursula and I uncharacteristically unite to throw him a despairing glance. He sometimes adopts this irksome men’s magazine persona when his mother’s around. He disappears into the back garden for some unfathomable reason. I think about the first time that Ursula lectured me. I agreed with everything she said and felt giddy with flattery that she should think me worthy of her energies.

“Seriously, Ursula…” I’m wondering whether to go into the fact that part-time work is a con. That shared parenting is a myth. That her feminism has got me the work outside the home but hasn’t rid me of the work inside it. That her son is a disgusting slob who’s been brought up with unhygienic levels of tolerance of squalor. By her. “The battle’s not been won. Men aren’t doing much more at home.”

“I think you’ll find that statistics show they’re doing a lot more childcare.”

“Childcare, yes, maybe. The fun bits of childcare, certainly—the trips to the zoo and the panto, and the organized stuff. But not the boring bit, the daily grind…” At that moment, Joel chooses to walk past us, straining under the weight of our over-filled rubbish bag.

“I thought I’d do this now,” he says to no one in particular. “In case it’s forgotten about later.”

Ursula looks at him the way I do Gabe when he gets a poo in the potty—bursting with maternal pride.

34
) He takes the rubbish out. That sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? But it isn’t, not when it’s seen as the domestic equivalent to doing the laundry. Four people’s dirty clothes every day—the washing, the sock-ball rolling, the pant folding—versus taking the rubbish out once a week. Hmm, like that’s fair. When I think about it, all his domestic chores are the one-offs, the once-a-weeks, like rubbish bags, or the annual jobs like the car’s MOT, the insurance. While mine are the ones without end or beginning, the ones that can never be ticked off. The wiping down of one surface while another is being smeared. The putting clothes in drawers while the laundry bag fills. I get all the modern Herculean labors.

Though I can only remember one of Hercules’ labors now that I think about it, and it’s the one about the stable where as fast as he clears the hay, more dirt just keeps appearing—there’s a river running through it, carrying a perpetual tide of filth. There’s one streaming through here too.

“Shit,” I hear him shout, followed by the sound of objects being picked up, accompanied by an exaggerated gagging sound.

35
) Insists that we only fill one rubbish bag a week. I try, I really do, with the compost and the recycling and, for a very brief time, the reusable diapers, but Joel is going to have to accept that we are profligate landfill site contributors and that’s just tough.

“Yes, it’s great that Joel does the rubbish.” I’m distracted by the little trail of non-specific rubbish bag juice that’s zigzagging across our kitchen floor and is now no doubt variegating our oatmeal-colored carpet in the hall. “But there’s those daily, endless, non-tickable-offable”—Ursula raises her eyebrows at my poor use of English—“bits and pieces that only women seem to do. Just ask anyone. Any woman.”

“I do hope our conversation isn’t going to just end up being
a discussion of who does the washing-up,” she says. “In the old days, when we were having a barnstorm about gender wars, we’d joke to one another, ‘this isn’t going to end up as an argument about who does the washing-up.’ Sadly, it too often did. Don’t you think you’re worrying too much about petty domestic tasks when there are more important issues like the global levels of female circumcision or the lack of financial equality at work?”

I’m on my knees, physically and probably metaphorically, as I wipe the floor of the bag’s dribble. “But don’t you see, there will never be equality anywhere until there is at home?”

“Equality begins at home?” she chuckles.

“Exactly,” I say.

“Really, dear, you’re far too concerned with the outward appearance of your house.” She glances at me and the carpet cleaner gun I’m wielding as I plan to do battle in the hall. “You all are, your lot. Obsessed with shiny new kitchens and bathrooms that look like they belong in a hotel. Do you know, it would no sooner have occurred to us to replace a kitchen that hadn’t completely collapsed than it would have to replace our own bodies with bits of plastic. Then again, your lot do quite a bit of that too.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with trying to make your house hygienic…”

“Don’t think we didn’t talk about all this. We had ‘wages for women’ campaigns and housework strikes and we did all this to death. But I think we’ve moved on, don’t you?”

She has certainly moved on, from me to the living room to squeal delightedly over the takeaway menu that Joel’s pulled out for her to have a look at, grinding in some of the rubbish bag’s juices along the way. She strokes his cheek in a frankly revolting way.

“Can we have Thai, rather than Indian? You know all that
ghee is a nightmare for me,” I ask as they excitedly pick out their choices.

“Yes, remember that Mary’s intolerant,” says Joel, giving a fine example of the aforementioned chortle.

“Dairy intolerant,” I correct.

“Yeah, intolerant,” he says.

“I don’t know,” says Ursula. “Nobody was ever allergic to this and intolerant to that when I was young. I think we were too busy fighting the state to fight the plate.” I can see her mentally note the phrase down for her next book.

“I get all wheezy,” I protest. “My nose streams for weeks if I dare have a non–soy milk latte. Isn’t that true, Joel?”

He shrugs his shoulders, allowing Ursula to continue to expound her latest theory.

“I notice that a lot of young women seem to be vegetarian without actually caring about animals, and intolerant to—what a coincidence—anything that might be considered fattening.”

“Joel’s the one who used to be a vegetarian. Hard to believe now…”

“Yes, but he was a vegetarian for ethical rather than aesthetic reasons, wasn’t he? Isn’t it all a socially acceptable way of controlling your food? By banning whole food groups, you can essentially eat less, can’t you? But it’s all food disorderly conduct.”

“I haven’t got a food disorder,” I say.

“Well, you did have that phase when you were a teenager, didn’t you, with your sister?” says Joel.

Crime number
33
over and over again.

“Jemima and me got into a bit of competitive dieting, that’s all. It’s completely normal.” Of course, Jemima won that little bout, by only going and getting herself full-blown anorexia complete with protruding ribs, a brief stay in the hospital and traumatic parental self-recrimination.

“For your generation, yes,” says Ursula. She turns to Joel. “They’re a generation of control freaks, aren’t they?”

“Too right.”

Did she just call me a control freak? Preceded by a general accusation of being a lazy, silicone-filled, hygiene-obsessed ingrate. I have to get out of here. “Excuse me, I think I just heard Gabe.” I run out.

I sit on the marital bed. What will it be called after the divorce, I wonder? The ex-marital bed, I suppose. I tell you what, though, I’m definitely getting it in the settlement, for the dozen times you just agreed with your mother over me. I look down at my chest and wonder whether I might as well get myself some plastic surgery, since Ursula seems so convinced that everyone of my generation is at it.

When Ursula was my boyfriend’s mother, there was no one I liked and admired more in the world. I think I fell in love with her as much as with Joel. To have a famous feminist for a mother seemed to me to be the most glamorous background in the world, added to which she was not only right-on, she was also from a rich and aristocratic family. The fact that she was a single mother, too, just made her impossibly exotic. And her house! Book-filled and decrepit, ancient furniture stained by Isaiah Berlin’s gin and tonics, an old-fashioned drinks trolley sticky with liqueurs that she’d picked up from speaking engagements in far-flung places. It was just the sort of life I dreamed of as a teenager, the kind I read about in novels by Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch. I’d even read her seminal work,
Cleopatra’s Needle Wasn’t Used for Darning
(followed up, with diminishing returns, both intellectual and financial, by
Ophelia Should Have Learned to Swim, Joan of Arc’s Inflammable Tunic
etc., etc.) and had vowed to live my life by such creeds.

My boyfriend’s mother was the person I most admired, yet
my mother-in-law is the one I most resent. Some sort of reverse alchemy takes place on marriage and having children, where all the things that I most loved about Joel became the things I now most hate.

By pretending that Gabe has woken up, it seems I’ve caused him to do so in reality and I hear him wailing in his bedroom. Joel and Ursula go in and begin reading to him.

“Thomas is all covered in mud,” I hear Joel saying. “Really useful engines must be clean. He needs a bath.” Short “a.”

36
) Does really irritating Northern accent for the Fat Controller in the Thomas the Tank Engine books. I suspect he bases his characterization on my dad. I can’t stand Thomas the Tank Engine and his endless friends. I’m sure my unborn daughter Eudora/Willa/Aphra wouldn’t want to read them. She’d probably be on C. S. Lewis by the age of three.

I update The List and feel a lot better.

When did everything that I love about Joel turn into everything that makes me want to wax his chest, not because I like hairless torsos, but in order to cause him pain? The way we met and got together was a chick-lit novel made real, role reversed with Joel taking the part of the ditzy protagonist, forever losing things and arriving late, while I was the haughty Mr. Darcy figure. Our romance came complete with a full complement of misunderstandings and wrong impressions, the victory over the heroine’s more attractive friend, and the culmination in a love and sex fest of a few years’ duration. I used to stare at him and wonder how on earth I’d ever got so lucky. I used to think, “I don’t deserve you.” Now I think, “I don’t deserve
this
.”

The rot sets in as the placenta comes out, when we had our first child. Looking back, there had probably been intimations of how life was going to be when we moved in together, and a few more when we got married, but I ignored them. Maternity leave was when our roles got stuck in aspic. When I became sitcom woman—shrewish, nagging, worrying about getting my whites whiter—and he became sitcom man, avoiding The Wife by hiding with a can of cold lager, and later, making up for not being there all the time with the children by being the “fun one” when he was.

It’s ironic that we should have turned into Man and Woman, because when we met, I loved all that was feminine about Joel. I can cry tears of frustration and anger, but rarely ones of happiness or melancholy. Joel, on the other hand, wells up at the mention of Joe Strummer or when Leonard Cohen sings “So Long, Marianne.” He notices sunsets and will call purple “lilac,” “indigo” or “mauve.” He was, is, an amazing cook and will want to discuss whether it’s dill or chives in the side dish that we’re eating at a beachside café on holiday. He spent his teenage years experimenting with eyeliner and even kissed a few equally hairy-faced men. He has a penchant for exquisite socks and likes to smell nice. I took all this as proof that Ursula had done her job and that here was a truly emancipated man, one who was in touch with his feminine side. In short, a man as different as could be from my father, who has to have a week’s worth of meals labeled and put in the freezer when my mother escapes him to go on a work conference.