“You’re stifling my creativity, man,” Joel will self-mockingly say if I try to put the kibosh on these musical excursions, as if by acknowledging the ridiculousness of a bunch of middle-aged men playing their new-age-indie-punk-rave he is thus excused.
Music invades not just his childcare duties, but also my senses when I’m feeling delicate on a Saturday morning. The radio dial does a little dance as I swap between stations.
“Bloody hell, have you messed with the pre-sets again?” I say, laboriously moving it back to the gentle chat of Radio 4.
“When did you get to be so old?”
“I’ll always be younger than you.”
“Technically speaking.”
“Listening to rock music”—I do a sad little strum of an air guitar—“does not make you young.”
“Well neither does listening to this.”
“You know, maybe you ought to grow your hair long and wear a tour T-shirt. I think the boys will think their dad is, like, way cool.”
“Do you know, my darling,” he says, “I think the moment I fell in love with you was when we were in the car and you turned the music up louder. You were the first woman I’d ever met who turned the dial up rather than down. I remember thinking, now this is a woman I could spend the rest of my life with.” He sighs.
“Yes, well, things change. Though not enough. While we’re talking about music, can we have our regular chat about the boxes of vinyl in the living room? You don’t listen to them anymore, so why are we keeping them?”
“I like looking at the sleeves. I get sensual pleasure from the flip they make as I flick through them.” He gives me a look. “I need to get sensual pleasure from somewhere.”
“Could you not get some sensual pleasure from putting them in plastic boxes and moving them to the attic?” The attic is a possessions’ purgatory where stuff goes to spend a couple of years in limbo before being cast into the eternal damnation of the charity shop.
“Don’t make me do that.”
“But you can see all the stuff we’ve got now. The boys need more room for toys and books. It’s not even just the records, it’s the programs and the tickets and the NME back issues and your fanzines.” How can I convey to him the illogicality of those boxes full of records he never plays and ephemera he never looks at? It is matched only by the wardrobe of shirts with frayed collars or garish patterns that he refuses to throw out. “We don’t live in a house as big as your mother’s. In fact, why don’t you move all this stuff to your boyhood home? It would seem appropriate.”
“It’s not the size of the house,” he says mournfully. “You’d still be asking me even if we lived in a palace.”
“Please.”
“All right, whatever.”
“Is that a yes? Will you move them?”
“Yeah, right, will do.”
“When?”
“Laters, Maz. Chill.”
It’s not going to happen. I open my mouth to ask again. Or “nag,” as is the terminology when a woman asks a man more than once to do something. “Fine,” I say instead. One more for The List.
My mood is not much improved after lunch when the doorbell rings. I feel panic, like I did in the olden days when you were caught makeup free and wearing pajama bottoms in the newsagent by a boy you fancied. If houses were people, at this moment mine would be a crazy-haired lady pushing a supermarket trolley full of old newspapers. The recycling box has been emptied and its contents gaffered to the banisters and stairs to make a marble run stretching from the top-floor landing all the way down to the hall.
“Gabe,” says Joel to his second born. “Don’t pull that off, it won’t work if you do that.”
Gabriel continues to tug at the admittedly impressive mid-section of the run, which consists of the cardboard tube that came inside a roll of wrapping paper, a couple of sawn-off plastic water bottles and a cling-film suspension bridge.
I stand there, trying to debate which bit of the house to try to clean or whether just to ignore the doorbell. It goes again. “Coming,” I shout, “give us a minute.”
“Why do you have to ruin everything, Gabe?” whines Rufus. “It’s ruined, it’s completely ruined.” He storms off to throw his distraught body on the bed for all of ten seconds before emerging with a gobstopper-sized marble, which ricochets down the run before pinging to the corner of the hallway that is already a jumble of wellies and scarves.
“Did it work?”
Joel whoops his affirmative before jumping up the stairs, two steps at a time.
I do a quick survey of the kitchen as the doorbell rings insistently once again. On the floor, circles of rice ring the boys’ chairs, though they are dwarfed by the mountain that lies below Joel’s. A pair of boy’s underpants—skid-mark free, thankfully—lie by the cooker. There’s a crunch of breakfast cereal underfoot and damp clothes drying across busted radiators. I kick what I can aside as I run to the door, hoping that it’s someone ringing the wrong bell or one of those ex-miners selling cleaning products.
It’s not, and I can barely hide my surprise at the uninvited guest. “Hello, Alison.”
“My word, what were you doing in there? I thought you’d never answer. Am I interrupting something?” She tries to peer around the door.
“Oh, god, no. No, really no.” Does she think I’ve been inspired by Mitzi to sauce up my daytime love life? When she sees it’s an egg carton, not underwear, strewn across the house she’ll be disabused of that idea. “What are you doing here?” We know each other, but we are not friends, especially not the sort that drop in on one another unannounced. I am about to say something along the lines of “Not that it’s not a pleasure to see you,” when I realize that that would be a lie. So I don’t.
“I’ve just dropped Oliver off at a birthday party around the corner and Chris, for bloody once, is actually looking after his daughter.”
“Right. Great.” Alison is always furious about something. She even makes me feel positively Pollyanna-ish by comparison. Well, occasionally.
I hear squeals and hollers of marble-rolling encouragement. I try to open the front door a little further but find progress impeded by a scooter. I am left to look out through the small crack allowed me like a nervous old lady with a chain on the door. Which is not unlike how I feel, faced with Alison and her permanent scowl and her ability to make one feel both pity and competitiveness in her presence.
“Actually, I come bearing gifts,” she says, waving a bulging plastic bag in my face. “You were saying that Rufus is struggling with his reading…”
“No, it’s not that he’s no good at it, it’s just that he’s reluctant—”
“So I brought you all our early reading books.”
“Won’t Grace be needing them?” Grace is a full year younger than Rufus.
“Oh no, she taught herself to read when she was three. She’s loving the My Naughty Little Sister books. She’ll be begging me for Harry Potter by the end of the year.”
I move my arm out to get the bag, but realize it is so full that I won’t be able to squeeze it in unless I open the door further. I force it open an extra couple of inches, which Alison takes as an invitation to come into the house.
“Gosh,” I say. “A couple of hours without the kids—bliss. You must have so many things you want to do.”
“Absolutely.” And with that, she’s in. I remember Mitzi saying that Alison would ring her up and want to chat for hours on the phone, and we would wonder where her real friends were. And then, Mitzi realized, she was Alison’s real friend.
“Goodness,” says Alison, surveying the hall carpet patterned with gloves, hats and, inexplicably, a children’s UV sunsuit. “Have you been burgled?”
This is what passes for humor in her world. “It’s the weekend, you know. If you’d let me know you were dropping by…”
I hear a shout from the top landing. “Ready, steady, Geronimo…” cries Joel, followed by an ominous thudding as Rufus snowboards down two flights of st
airs in a Cars Snuggle Sac, trying to beat the marble to the bottom. He and the marble land with a thud at Alison’s feet.
Joel and Gabe come rushing down behind him.
“Be careful on the stairs,” I say.
“Will do.”
“Not you, Joel. Gabe. Slide down on your bottom, sweetheart.”
“Did it work?” Joel asks Rufus.
“Yeah, it got all the way down and I didn’t have to push it once and I won, I beat it but it was going so fast and so was I.”
“You know Alison, don’t you?” I say, although she is always referred to in this house as Angrison.
“Yes, we’ve met,” says Joel. “Do you want a go of our marble run? It goes all the way from the top of the house and it’s taken us two hours to make. Look,” he says, pointing at the avocado basket that has been designed as the marbles’ final resting place. “All made from the recycling.”
I expect her to appear unimpressed by the fact that it looks as if the recycling box has been involved in an overly successful breeding program, but instead she giggles. I’d go as far as to say she giggles coquettishly.
“It looks amazing. You’re so sweet, Joel. What a wonderful father you are. You’re so lucky, Mary. I wish bloody Chris could do something like this, though I suppose he’s so busy at the moment building up a client base that he can’t really expend his energies on building a marble run, lovely as it is. Did I tell you he’s getting a record bonus this year? I know, despite all the gloom.”
She walks straight through to my kitchen, stopping to remove a half-eaten apple that has grabbed her foot.
“What can I say? It’s the weekend,” I repeat.
“You know, I really admire the way you’re so laid back about mess. I wish I could let my house go like this,” she says.
“To be honest, I don’t like it much either. I wish it weren’t such a state.”
“Have you tried tidying up as you go along?”
“This is after I’ve been tidying up as I go along. If I didn’t, you wouldn’t have been able to walk into this house. In fact, you barely could as it was.”
“Poor you, it can be hard to cope.”
“I am coping; my house just doesn’t happen to be as immaculate as yours, that’s all.”
“Do you want to know the secret?”
“There’s a secret?”
“Oh yes. There’s a secret. Shall I tell you?”
She leans forward. I lean forward. “Of course,” I find myself whispering.
“Are you ready for this?”
I nod.
“It will change your life.”
And it could, I think, save my marriage.
I don’t know what I expected from Alison’s great revelation. Some sort of voodoo, perhaps—an incantation that could lure the magic cleaning pixies into my home. Maybe, I thought, she’s going to admit that her family doesn’t eat normal food but is fed Complan intravenously through stomach tubes, thus saving on all that endless shopping-cooking-washing-up. Or that they have clothes that are made by NASA and repel dirt and germs. That her family are aliens and so don’t make a mess or need to wash. That she has a robot which does all the tidying—or, failing that, a very cheap illegal immigrant who lives in the cupboard under the stairs.
What I got was a scribbled name on a piece of paper.
“What’s this?” A guru, maybe. A goddess to come around to my house and wave a wand that will sort out the wayward cables and put the outgrown clothes into bags to take to the charity shop.
“It’s a website. For people like you. I used to be like you, Mary, but I found the way. Follow the way, Mary, and you will have a tidy home. And you will become happier, too.” She spoke with all the evangelism of an AA member, but her sermon was made a little less convincing by the fact that she is still the grumpiest person I’ve ever met.
“Has this website made you happier?”
“Oh yes. I’m so calm these days, ask anyone. You won’t believe it, but I used to shout at my family all the time. And now,” she smiles, beatifically, “we live in calm.”
“Sometimes,” I said to her, “I feel as if my house is a physical manifestation of my mind, and it’s all scraggly and messed up, and if my house was this white, empty space then my mind might be, too. Empty in a good way, I mean.”
Alison’s mobile rang. “For god’s sake, Chris,” she snapped. “I’m only requesting that you look after Grace for two hours. Is that too bloody much to ask for? It’s in the cupboard by the front door, of course, where it always is—which you’d know if you ever bothered to take your child to the swings. I’ll be back by six, do you think you can manage until then? Hmmm? Too much for you? How do you think I manage when you go off on those infernal golf weekends? Funny that, isn’t it, since I’m the one who earns more money and yet still has to do more childcare?”
She put the phone in her pocket and then gave me one of those cocked-head, sympathetic looks. “Try it,” she repeated. “I really think you need it.”
I hole myself up with the laptop and with near-trembling anticipation, I type the website address that Alison gave me. Speak to me, I silently intone to the computer, speak to me.
Instead of the virtual magic I’ve been hoping for, I’m faced with one of the messiest looking web pages I’ve ever seen, with the exhortations “Declutter!,” “A new program for home executives!” and “Shiny happy sinks!” I am very confused. Is this really the life-saving secret that Alison has bestowed on me?
I read on, though I am itching to get back to The List to tot up today’s many transgressions. I force myself through the myriad exclamation marks to try to make sense of it all. The website tells, I finally discover, of a system by which your house will be spotless and permanently guest-ready, without you having to spend more than fifteen minutes a day on it. Florid testimonials tell of lives and homes transformed by the mere application of the “dance of disposal,” where the home executive will put on a three-minute song and throw away as many things as she can in its duration. Others speak of the elimination of their “toxic spots,” which sounds like something I haven’t done since I had adolescent acne. All write eulogies as to the transformative powers of the creation of a “Golden Notebook,” a ring-binder of to-do lists, menu plans and household zones. Doris Lessing, I think, must be so proud.
I read on, hoping to discover the secret of how you can inspire those that you share your house with to take as much interest in purging household junk as you do, while at the same time wondering why the women behind this site didn’t think to perhaps try to declutter some of the excessive exclamation marks littering the prose. My eyes are glazing over just thinking about these commands to enjoy the daily cleaning of my toilet bowl and to have fun while throwing out junk. It makes me yearn for the exclamation-mark-free, joyfully joyless zone of The List. My List.
But still, I concede, can all these women (and they are all women) be so wrong? Alison did say it has changed her life, transformed her from Angrison to Airy-fairy-son. Maybe I too shall go from Scary Mary to Merry Mary. Before I can change my mind, I sign up for email reminders of how to “Work the System!” and resolve to give the “ClutterNoNo!™” system of home-executive efficiency a week’s trial.
Day 1. By the time I check my messages at work on Monday morning, I have 39 emails from my new friends at ClutterNoNo. I’m confused before I’ve even read them. How am I supposed to find time to wade through the household detritus if I have to spend all my time wading through my inbox?
I soon discover that I’m already falling woefully behind. I should have set my alarm to get up half an hour before the rest of my family in order to get that toilet bowl really sparkly, as well as making sure that I have put on a “face”—by which I think they mean makeup, rather than just pulling one.
I’m frowning at my screen when I’m interrupted by Lily. “Matt told me to tell you that he needs all the costs added to the schedule by the end of today. Or something. Whatevs.”
&
nbsp; I’m hearing her words at the same time as reading “Go empty the dishwasher! No excuses, right now, girlfriend!”
“Sorry, what was that, Lily?”
“I don’t know, Matt said something about schedules and costs. He needs them.”
“Shall do. If you see him, tell him it’s under control.” But, I think as I read the fourteenth nagging email reminder from ClutterNoNo, I don’t have all my closets under control, do I? Apparently, my mind will never be clean until the closet is. It even talks of a “coat closet,” which I guess is what some people in a parallel universe have instead of the matted jumble of outdoor wear that slithers down the wall from the pegs in the hall. And what about dusting the underside of the dining-room chairs? I don’t even have a dining room. And must I really create my own “signature air freshener” out of fresh mint and rose petals?
I spend the office day trying to wear two hats, that of an efficient home executive (what hat would that be? A hairnet, perhaps?) and that of an equally efficient overseer of production management at a thrusting independent television company (a beret worn at a jaunty angle?). I hardly dare look at my emails for fear of seeing more exhortations to refill my bird feeders and to love myself. Oh, god, ClutterNoNo is right, I really should clean out the boys’ bath toys more often to prevent the frequent occurrence of them vomiting out gray bilge instead of bubbly water when squeezed. And if I had a laundry room, I would go there to look behind the appliances for odd socks.
Since I haven’t had time to buy the ring-binder necessary to create a Golden Notebook, I scribble out a to-do list on the back of a production meeting agenda and go home full of resolve to at least give the ClutterNoNo system a try.
I barely have time to speak to my children, so frenzied am I in my race to tick off tasks. In a bid to have decluttered my allotted number of things, I am forced to throw away the artwork that Gabe has brought back from playgroup. He looks a bit upset, but I sometimes think this endless supply of daubs is all about appeasing the parents rather than bringing out any artistic talent in the child. And, to be honest, they weren’t very good.
The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs Page 14
