The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

by Christina Hopkinson

  Him: “What are we doing today?”

  Me: Respond with a detailed itinerary or, when I’m feeling up to it: “I don’t know, what do you think we should do?”

  Him: “I don’t mind.”

  Me: “Well, we could go to the Science Museum to see the Heath Robinson exhibition, or we could go to the woods, it’s supposed to be nice weather.”

  Him: “I don’t mind.”

  Me: “OK, we’ll go to the museum.”

  Whereupon if the excursion is a disaster, it’s all my fault.

  As if he were a child, I give him three choices, and, like a child, he inevitably opts for the last one presented to him: baking. I suppress the urge to suggest an alternative, since this activity inevitably leads to flour covering the kitchen like cocaine in a rock star’s dressing room.

  “Put in about four tablespoons of sugar, Gabe; one—that’s right, more or less—two, keep going,” he orders gently and I watch as our second born treats the mixing bowl like a sand pit, completely failing to get the requisite spoonfuls of sugar into the mix.

  7. Bakes with the boys. If there’s one activity that seems to be the distillation of all that we hold dear in modern parenting, it’s baking with the kids. It’s as if the amount of time you spend baking is the simplest measure of How Good A Mother You Are. Baking combines our mania for home-cooked, unprocessed food and quality, old-fashioned activities with the children. It’s a recipe for parental smugness. The mothers I know will never have a baking session without making sure that the activity is broadcast to the world. “Sweetheart, let’s go home now and make that cake”; “Here, we brought you some alphabet biscuits—we made them ourselves, didn’t we, Felix? Yes, that’s right, it’s a ‘wuh’ for Waitrose”; “We’re a bit tired, I’m afraid, as we’ve been stirring the Christmas cake mix.”

  Joel is different, though. He doesn’t make a big deal of his cooking or announce it to the world. He just does it and gives every impression of enjoying it.

  I sort of like baking, too, but never so much as I think I should. I find myself not letting the children do the measuring out and spooning in for fear that the proportions will not be recipe-exact. I don’t like them licking the bowl because the mix is full of raw eggs, which pregnancy has taught me is A Bad Thing. Joel lets them do what they like with the ingredients and yet somehow the results always seem to taste better than mine.

  I feel an unexpected burst of love that is directed at Joel as much as at Rufus and Gabe. They look like an ad for the perfect father and sons, doing cute things with icing sugar on noses and learning about weights and measures in the process.

  “Do you want to do the coloring, Rufus?” Joel asks. “You’re mixing red and green. Interesting. What happens when we mix red and green?”

  “It looks like poo poo,” says Rufus, peering at the icing.

  “It makes brown, yes. Shall we make poo biscuits?” He takes a small disc of mixture and rolls it into a sausage. Rufus and Gabe fall about laughing and enthusiastically copy him. “We’ll put this lovely poo-colored icing on it when they come out, shall we?”

  8. Makes our children laugh. Is the funny one. I’m the boring one, the Wise to his Morecambe, the Dean Martin to his Jerry Lewis.

  A man as big as Joel can’t help but look incongruously gorgeous while sporting oven gloves and putting a tray of poo-shaped biscuits in to bake. Bless, I think. Curses, I think as he then leaves the room with the boys trailing in his wake as if he’s the Pied bloody Piper. Yes, leaves the room. Without sweeping up any of the flour, throwing away the excess poo-colored icing or washing up the bowls. He just leaves them for me to tidy up, consciously or not. For every good thing he does, another bad one follows—the yin and yang of our partnership. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth like I was taught in yoga. (Now if ever there was an inappropriate form of exercise for the woman some people refer to as Scary Mary, it was yoga. All that peace and meditation stuff drove me mad. I kept on waiting for the sweaty bit to get started. I mean, what’s the point of exercise if it doesn’t make you drip? I soon gave it up and swapped to classes with names like Body Combat and Kick Ass, Tums & Legs.)

  Later, Joel extends his culinary skills to non-scatological adult food by rustling up a nice roast chicken, which he refrains from stuffing with butter, on account of my intolerance. His repertoire veers toward the Elizabeth David end of things and he manages to not complain too frequently about the fact that he is prevented from dolloping cream and butter into all that he mixes.

  9. Is a good cook. Sure, he’s messy, but sometimes it is bliss to be cooked for. Just the very act of it makes one feel nurtured and cherished. He cooks with enthusiasm and love, while I cook with practicality and ready-made sauces.

  I exceed my usual two small glasses of wine by another couple. We lounge on the sofa watching Saturday night rubbish. He rolls a joint and the alcohol has taken the edge off the irritation this usually provokes in me and I don’t order him out into the cold, but merely ask him to stick his head through an open window into the garden. I don’t even feel particularly irked by the fact that he’s espresso guy at work (hyped up, over-zealous and frenetic) and weed guy at home (useless slobby stoner). I even have a drag myself and experience a Proustian moment from its taste, throwing me back to our courtship and afternoons spent giggling and watching black-and-white films on TV.

  We lie on the sofa in a rare state of contentment. He takes my socks off and I’m mildly embarrassed about the parmesan nature of my feet, but don’t care too much on account of a) being sodden by alcohol and b) it being only Joel.

  10. Gives a really good foot massage. A really, really good foot massage.

  I hope he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t. I feel as if I’m drifting in and out of consciousness. He moves up to my shins and then strokes my thighs through my jeans. The stiffness of the material creates an enjoyable tension, but not as enjoyable as the feeling when he removes them and begins to run his tongue along the same place. I don’t know whether it’s the effort of trying to think up his good points or merely being coshed by alcohol and a couple of tokes, but I decide not to stop him. “Decide”? That’s the wrong word—there’s no way I could stop him even if I wanted to. It’s been a while.

  11. Has a remarkably dextrous tongue.

  He licks the very top of the inside of my thighs, while his hands remove my pants (due to a laundry crisis, they’re the ones that I bought for my last post-partum hospital stay and come up past my waist) and then move under my bra and onto my breasts. His tongue now moves up and into my untamed pubic hair, past the episiotomy scars and expertly finds the right place to concentrate its attentions. One hand stretches out to my nipples, while the other puts a finger gently inside me and out, inside and out, all the while his tongue playing me like the strings on a violin.

  I am now lying back on the sofa, while he is on his knees so that his head is at just the right place. I don’t want it to go on too long, but neither should it stop just yet.

  I can’t wait any longer and I pull him up and into me and his head is now level with mine. I tilt my head to kiss his neck.

  “I love you,” he says and I’m embarrassed and try to avoid his eyes. That’s almost too personal for me, too intimate, it’s as if I need to make a stranger of him. Whatever they tell you in women’s magazines, sometimes sex is easier with strangers. All the talk and abandon and the looking into each other’s eyes in the moment should be easier with someone you know as well as we know each other, but I need him to be either the man I knew a long time ago or a man I’ve yet to meet. I move my eye-line to his expansive chest and it works, it makes him feel fresh to me once again.

  I feel stoppered by him. I’ve forgotten how completing it can feel. I think I hear a child crying, but it’s a cat wailing on the street, or a police siren, they all have the same note of distress. I work hard to get back in as I’m almost there, almost, I can get there, just not quite yet. “Not yet,” I whisper, “almost.” He stop
s himself and then starts again. I work to get back into it, refusing to allow myself to be distracted by street noises that my imagination mutates into the sound of crying children. I try to stop the random faces that enter my head from preventing me as I am almost there, I don’t want it to go, I must let go. A last face falls into my consciousness. It’s Cara. I finally let go, calling out to let him know, followed seconds later by a relieved Joel.

  12. He’s really not bad in bed. Not bad at all. What am I saying? He’s great. The only man in my not-very-extensive list of lovers who has always been able to get me there. It didn’t help that the other handful were all chosen purely on the basis of their pretty-boy looks—some sort of competition I was running with Jemima, I think, as to who could pull the boy who looked most like a member of Take That first time around. As a consequence, it was as if it was enough that they deigned to sleep with you—that was pleasure enough, surely?

  I stretch across the sofa, woozily plea-bargaining in my head once again. If, I say to myself, you go and find a wet wipe to help clear up the patch on the sofa, then I will destroy The List. You will have passed my test before it has even begun. We lie there. I feel twitchy about the dribble running down my thighs and onto our already stained and manky sofa. He rolls over and adds a Turin-shroud-like imprint of his cock onto one of the expensive cushions that I bought in a fit of interiors improvement. He gets up and I hear him stumble, joint- and sex-stoned, into the bathroom. A flush sounds.

  “Get some paper or a wipe, get some paper or a wipe,” I silently implore, still feeling a tingling good will. “Get some paper or a wipe.”

  He comes back. He is empty-handed.

  4

  An Incredible Cook

  “If you want, you can sleep in; that’s my present to you, my love,” says Joel with a kiss on the morning of my thirty-sixth birthday, as the boys bounce around us.

  “Why, thanks.”

  “Just wait here and I’ll go and do my thing.”

  Oh, god, here we go: crime number 48, the extended session in the locked toilet. My birthday good will dissolves like a vitamin C tablet. After 20 minutes, the boys, who’ve been jumping on the bed, and I become restless and go into the bathroom.

  I reel. “It’s a wonder you don’t asphyxiate yourself.”

  “What, and your shit don’t stink?” he replies, the swear word causing us both to reflexively glance at our oldest boy child.

  “Well, I don’t sit there like a prince on a throne for three hours. I thought I was getting a lie-in.”

  “You are.”

  I gesture at the boys. “So relaxing.”

  “You just need to look after them while I make you your special breakfast.”

  “Not much of a lie-in then, is it?”

  He sighs. “All right, all right, but you know how difficult it is to cook and look after them.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Happy birthday, sweetheart. You don’t look a day older than when I met you.”

  “Unless I was a particularly raddled-looking twenty-seven-year-old, I’m sure I do. God, thirty-six, I’m way nearer my forties than my twenties now,” I say, peering into the mirror, which due to the fact that neither of us have changed the lightbulb that blew a fortnight ago, casts a not unflattering glow. Perhaps he’s right, perhaps I am weathering well despite all the anger and bitterness I’m feeling. You’d have thought it would be showing in my face. There must be a photograph of me somewhere in which I appear shriveled with ill will and resentment, allowing me to look, well, all right, I suppose.

  “No, really,” he says. “I was looking at you talking to Becky and Mitzi and you’d never know you were all the same age.”

  I give mental thanks to the trichological Botox known as a fringe and decide at least to try to enjoy my birthday. I am leavening the load of XY chromosomes in this household by inviting my sister Jemima. She’s the only one of my family, my first family, that I’ve got down south and introduces into this house the pleasantly familiar elements of my hometown, food obsessive-compulsiveness and impractical footwear.

  My birthday resolution to be happy is further tested as I go downstairs 20 minutes later to view the carnage left over by the preparation of pancakes with maple syrup and blueberry compote. There’s a huge bunch of flowers, from an expensive celebrity florist. They are undeniably gorgeous. Joel is good with such things.

  “Brassica and French tulips,” he says. “They’re grown in Kent, not Kenya. I checked.”

  I don’t bloody want apple blossom and French tulips, I think, I want wiped worktops and dressed children. I look at the flowers again. They are so perfect and sculptural that I feel our kitchen is unworthy of them; they deserve work surfaces like Mitzi’s to showcase their loveliness. I’m wrong, it’s not that I don’t want these flowers, I just want the life to match. “Thank you, they’re beautiful.”

  “And so are you.”

  These are the sort of words he’s lavished on me from the moment we first got together. They brought me to a stupor of love, but now that love is hungover. His compliments have become habitual.

  He gives me flowers, but he doesn’t put them into a vase. He shows them off to visitors, but he fails to empty the water, even when it’s slimy with age.

  I take out a shepherd’s pie from the freezer for lunch. Or “just shepherd’s pie,” as Joel always refers to it, despite the fact that it’s actually a total pain of peeling and chopping to make, and always ends up keeping me up until way past my bedtime mashing potatoes. I’m good at “just” type of recipes—bolognese, macaroni and cheese, sponge cakes—while Joel excels at “Wow, look at that, you spoil us” food. Which may in fact be rustled up in minutes: pan-fried scallops with a balsamic jus or a steak with homemade Béarnaise sauce.

  Jemima arrives, ostentatiously wearing a pair of sunglasses amid the winter gloom. I hug her and enjoy the fact that she is my size. Not as huge and bear-like as my husband, not as small and terrier-like as my sons. She smells delicious and clean and unfrazzled.

  “Do you mind?” I gesture toward her shoes and the pile of outdoor ones we’ve left by the door.

  “A bit. I mean, have you seen them?”

  They are spindly-heeled, complicatedly strapped and pointy-toed. “They’re fabulous,” I say, slipping easily into the shoe-language of yore. These days I tend to reserve the words “gorgeous,” “exquisite” and “fabulous” for people’s new kitchen units. “Absolutely stunning. They’re far too nice to join that hellhole shoe mountain. Why don’t we go and put them on the dresser where they can be properly venerated?” She takes me at my word and carefully conveys them toward the kitchen.

  “You’re looking thin,” she says. “Have you lost weight?”

  “A bit, I think,” I reply.

  “Almost half a stone, I’d guess, maybe a bit less. Five pounds?”

  “All right, it’s six pounds. My, you’re good,” I say. “You’re like one of those boys who can guess a woman’s bra size to within half a cup just by looking.”

  She giggles. “I try. Do you think I can market this particular skill in some way?”

  “Additional skills and interests on your CV? Anyway, you’re one to talk. You look fantastic. Really toned. Have you been going to the gym a lot?”

  “Three to four times a week.”

  “Lucky you. I never get a chance to go anymore. Although I’m now quite thin, I’m skinny-flabby, do you know what I mean?”

  “It’s a small price to pay,” she says. “For all this.” She gestures around the kitchen, which looks like a bad TV drama version of a family home, rather than the real thing. All the obvious clues are there—the children’s daubs stuck to the walls, invitations to birthday parties hanging off fridge magnets, piles of picture books on an old pine dresser, brightly colored crockery hanging on hooks. And me, too, I’m just set dressing—I can’t be the real mother at the heart of this hearth, I’m a bad actor pretending to be a grown-up. I’m a fake materfamilias. Martyr
-familias, perhaps.

  Jemima looks wistful, as she does when the subject of her single and childless/child-free state arises. I am not to complain of my life or describe it as less than perfect. She brightens as Joel enters the room.

  “Darling,” he says, enveloping her. “Nice sunglasses.”

  “We call them sunnies nowadays.”

  “Oh, you crazy young folk. Come and tell me all about what life is like out there.” He gives a theatrically wistful sigh. “Are you still doing the Internet dating thing?”

  I wince, waiting for Jemima to do the hurt, single-girl look, but she swings back to anecdote mode for his benefit. “I’m on three separate sites. On one of them, I’ve got the seventh most visited profile. It’s exhausting sifting through all the emails. God, there are some freaks out there.”

  “But some not-freaks too?” I ask.

  “Oh, yes. There’s this surfer guy who wants to hook up. He is hot to trot.”

  “How old is he?” I am so boring and predictable.

  “Twentysomething. Late twentysomething, I think.”

  “I’m not surprised you’re inundated,” Joel says. “It’s brilliant. A smorgasbord of possibilities with none of the stigma of dating agencies of the past. I mean, if someone like you goes online… If I were single and went onto a dating site and there were girls like you—well, it’s like the sort of thing I used to fantasize about as an adolescent.”

  I wonder if he still does.

  “You do look fantastic, Jemima,” I say, falling into an age-old but strangely comforting routine of everything being about her, even on my birthday. It’s always a relief to cede attention in her direction. Her eyebrows are plucked, her skin exfoliated, her clothes fashionable. “We could be a ‘before and after’ shot on one of those cosmetic surgery makeover shows. You’re the physical embodiment of what I’d look like if I hadn’t had children.”