The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

by Christina Hopkinson

  The morning after my first night with Joel, I didn’t so much wake up in the attic at Ursula’s house as not go to sleep at all. We screwed and laughed and drank, before dozing for only a few minutes at a time, then starting off all over again. We zipped ourselves to one another, creating a film of sticky sweat between us, and I found myself cursing the fact that I had two arms, for the way one of them always created a barrier between us. Our first sleepover was as giggle-infested as any eight-year-old girl’s. “You go to sleep first.” “No, you.” “Are you asleep yet?”

  “I fancied you from the moment I walked into the office,” Joel said as the light poured in and we debated what to have for breakfast. “There you were, a gorgeous redhead standing on a desk, and when you stretched up to do those shelves, there was a little band of bare skin showing around your waist… this one.” He leaned down to kiss the flesh above my stomach and I felt myself get wet once again. It was like when you have a terrible cold and you wonder where on earth all this liquid can come from.

  I blushed. I hadn’t expected this conversation so soon in. Joel didn’t bother playing hard to get because he didn’t need to. “But…”

  “But what?”

  “I thought you were gay.”

  “Some of my best friends, et cetera, et cetera, but what on earth made you think that?”

  “Mitzi told me.”

  His eyes narrowed. “But she knows I fancy you.”

  I blushed with the joy of it, not stopping to question how I had been kept ignorant of that fact. “Maybe I got the wrong end of the stick. Or maybe Mitzi did.”

  “Easy mistake to make, Mary being a well-known boy’s name.” His head moved back down and he licked me. He emerged to speak. “I’m so glad Mary’s not a boy.” He delved in once more.

  “And I’m so glad that you are one,” I said, pulling him up and inside me yet again.

  This could have gone on all day. I wondered whether I ought to pretend that I had some pressing and wildly glamorous engagement on that Saturday morning. Joel suddenly leaped up.

  “I’m an idiot,” he shouted, doing an exaggerated dance of panic that segued into a dance of trying to get his underwear and trousers on.

  “What?” I asked. This is too good to be true, I thought; he’s remembered he’s got a wife and child to meet up with.

  “I’ve got to be in Brussels for lunch. I’m meeting Ursula there. Where are the train tickets?” The room, which had been jumbled when we came in, was now in a comedic state of dishevelment. I started to hyperventilate. I have a morbid fear of missing planes and trains. As Joel flung possessions around in a wild search for socks, passport and ticket, I tried to calm myself by methodically searching through his desk. He had to make that train. If he didn’t, everything would be ruined. I’d be forever the girl who made him miss the train—not just any train, the Eurostar. How impossibly fabulous, I thought in my panic, here is a man who can forget he’s got a trip away, abroad and everything. Here is a man who, instead of spending the night before laying out clothes and uttering the passport-tickets-money mantra, could go out drinking and seduce a girl.

  “Found them,” I shouted. “Your tickets and your passport.”

  “I love you,” he said and kissed me. It wasn’t a proper “I love you,” it was just the one you’d say to anyone who found your tickets and your passport. Nevertheless, it made me realize how I’d feel if he said it for real.

  I love you too, I said to myself. I love that you are so damn good in bed, that you raise my game with your confidence, that you lose things and I can help you find them, that you can treat cross-channel trains like others treat buses.

  Joel is always talking of those “and that’s the moment I knew I loved you” moments; he seems to have had hundreds of them. But when he texted me his thanks and love from the train bound for Brussels, I knew too.

  At work we had a blissful week where we kept our relationship quiet and got off with each other in the disabled toilets on the second floor. We emailed and texted when we weren’t with each other, though we met up as much as we could. I didn’t play hard to get. I was soft to get.

  Then someone caught us in a café around the corner and I knew I’d have to tell Mitzi.

  “Great,” she said on hearing the news. “How sweet.”

  I was so relieved I didn’t analyze her reaction much. “He’s not gay, you know.”

  “No,” she said. “Well, you’ve got to hope not, anyway.”

  And that was that. Mitzi’s and my friendship lost its intensity and I became just one of her many disciples, as I remain to this day. Joel and Mitzi developed their own special prickly, barb-throwing relationship, a love-hate thing where nobody is sure of the proportions on each side. Sometimes he’d insist that we avoid her, which would make me insist the opposite. I didn’t want him protesting too much. Then a year or so later she met Michael, and embarked on a love story more epic than anybody else’s ever, with holidays to private islands in the Maldives and a wedding that made the Oscars ceremony seem under-produced.

  “Could you make it a bit less evident how little you want to be here?” I snap at Joel as we sluice the boys in the recycled brake-pad bath, picking the Norfolk mud off their limbs.

  “Gooey goo for chewy chewing,” he says to Rufus and Gabe and pretends to put some of the glutinous soil into his mouth, much to their amusement. “I don’t know what you expect me to do. You’re always telling me how irritating you find it that I want people to like me. As if I should be wanting everyone to hate me.”

  “I just can’t understand why you, who must make everybody love you, seem so intent on being so boorish and uncharming with Michael and Mitzi. Is there not some middle way?”

  “I can’t win, can I? Either it annoys you that I want people to like me or I don’t want certain people to like me enough.”

  “Don’t worry—they still think you’re so wonderful and I’m so lucky to have you. Everybody loves Joel.”

  “Except my wife, who apparently hates me.”

  “I don’t hate you.” I look nervously at the boys who are busy sudsing themselves up with expensive facial cleanser. Joel looks skeptical. “I just sometimes hate the things you do.”

  “Becky, it is a joy to see you.” A freshly shaved and laundered Joel swoops upon her. They are both tall and broad-shouldered, with the capacity to run to fat and arms built for enveloping others. She whispers something into his ear and I see him relax for the first time since we arrived the day before.

  “How’s your hotel?” I ask when they’ve finished.

  “It’s nice.”

  “It’s gorgeous,” adds Cara, who gives me a kiss smelling of lemongrass. “Mitzi, you are clever to have found it for us.”

  “It’s divine, isn’t it?” says Mitzi. “Its utter fabulousness was the only thing that got us through all those boring planning meetings and arguments with the builders that we had to come up for when this place was being done.”

  Mitzi’s holiday finds are always beyond fabulous. We are invited to admire not Michael’s ability to pay for such luxury, but her cleverness in truffling out these darling boutique hotels and fully staffed villas. That she and Michael go away for the odd child-free week in the chicest of Caribbean hotels is not a sign that they’ve more money than the rest of us, but that they have more discernment, as well as being more in love. Good taste is a sort of morality for her. Even in our scuzzy twenties, she had a natural predilection for Egyptian cotton sheets, 85-percent-cocoa chocolate and very dry wine. She is someone who actually likes doing yoga.

  “Why aren’t you staying here?” I ask Becky. “There’s masses of room.”

  “God, there’s no way Cara was going to share a house with half a dozen under-eights waking up at the crack of dawn. She sleeps with an eye mask and everything.” I picture Cara with a pale green silk eye mask and matching slip. I think of the cut-off tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt that make up my nightwear.

  “I don’t blame her. If I
were you, I wouldn’t want to go on holiday with my family. In fact, if I were me, I wouldn’t want to either.”

  We’re interrupted by the arrival of lazy Daisy and her silent husband.

  “I didn’t know you were coming,” I say. “Though I’m very pleased to see you.”

  “My in-laws have a place down the road. Have done forever. Holiday home like this one. Though I say like this one, but a house less like this one it’s hard to imagine. It’s way more shabby than chic.”

  “It’s very beautiful around here. I’m getting terrible house envy,” I say. “Mitzi, I want your house.”

  “Oh, god, I don’t,” says Daisy. “Such a hassle having a place in the country, even a dump like Robert’s parents’.”

  “A country estate is something I’d hate,” sings Joel, showcasing the knowledge of musicals that may have contributed to the rumor that he was gay.

  “No, really,” says Daisy. “Boilers going wrong and burst pipes and all that. Such a shag. I can’t be doing with one house most of the time.”

  “That’s true,” I say. “I feel that about mine.”

  “Although I have discovered the secret to feeling happy at home,” she says.

  “Do tell.”

  “Lowering your standards,” she laughs. “I apply the same logic to my appearance. In fact, you can combine the two by having only dirty mirrors in your house. And certainly no mirrors in which you can see below the waist.”

  I wish I could channel the spirit of lazy Daisy.

  “And drinking lots,” she adds. “I need a drink after the day we’ve had.”

  Alpha male Michael is, of course, on drinks duty, giving us old-fashioned spirits rather than the cans of lager and glasses of wine that serve as aperitifs at our house. Everyone compliments him lavishly for his way with the gin bottle. It’s unseasonably warm and I find myself drinking the spirits as if they were my usual wine. I notice that Becky is doing much the same.

  After a few of these, I begin to feel shaky. I go to the loo to check out my mottled cheeks.

  “Do you really mean it?” Becky corners me as I emerge.

  “Mean what?”

  “What you said about not wanting to be with your children?”

  “No, of course not. Not really. It was just a silly joke.”

  “Does having children make you happy?”

  Oh, god, here we go. Why can’t Becky ever want to chat about reality television and celebrities? I am feeling as shallow as a Norfolk beach with the tide out.

  “Yes, sometimes. Anxious, too. Stressed, but happy, yes, generally, I think. I don’t know.”

  “You must know. Do Gabe and Rufus make you, Mary, happy?”

  “I can’t imagine life without them. My biggest fear is that something might happen to them. I would never, ever, want to unwish them. I would give up my life for them but at the same time I have this terrible fear of not being around for them.”

  “But do they make you happy?”

  I think to myself of the way I am sometimes woken up at dawn and my first thought is, oh, god, another thirteen hours until their bedtime. Of how I want to stick pins in my eyes rather than read another page of another Thomas the Tank Engine book. Of how my favorite moments of the day are often those without them—going to the cinema, a coffee alone, even my journey to work. Of the perpetual, eternal, overwhelming chaos.

  And then I think of how, when they’ve gone to bed, I find myself longing for them to be awake again because I miss them so much. Of how I gorge myself on Gabe’s beauty. There is something in the truism that all newborns are ugly and all toddlers are beautiful. Especially my second born, who has Joel’s dark skin and my pale eyes. You know when you meet an exceptionally beautiful girl and you want to put on dark glasses in order to stare at her? When you have a toddler, you can stare all you like without embarrassment and they are all beautiful.

  And Rufus’s endearing earnestness, the funny things that he says and his capacity to learn, they make me happy. I love that he goes through the day multiplying every number that he comes across to the power of a hundred for no reason other than that he wants to. I love how he over-uses the word “actually,” draws pictures of domestic appliances, and thinks that the stories I tell him and Gabe when we’ve no books on hand are better than any story we could read. I love that he teaches me that however perfect you think an age is, he grows up and shows me that it just keeps on getting better. I thought that a baby sitting up or a toddler’s early speech could never be beaten, but I didn’t know how good a conversation with a child could be, that it could delight me in a way that none had since those early biography-swapping late-night talks in my early days with Joel.

  “You’ll never get a straight answer out of a parent,” I finally say to Becky. “It’s not a choice that can be rationalized, even by you. I’m glad I’ve got them, really I am, but I don’t believe that on balance people with children are any happier than those without. I’m sure I’ve even read some study or other that says that.” I have to say this to Becky, whatever I really think, because I know there’s every chance she won’t have children herself. I am groping for the balance between encouragement to try and platitudes if she doesn’t succeed.

  She sighs. “I’m still trying to weigh it up.”

  “You’re thinking too much. You always think too much.”

  “I know, I do.”

  We sit down to eat fashionably old-fashioned British food, lots of lovage and obscure cuts of meat, alongside the samphire we picked earlier. I think it’s quite disgusting, but everyone else swoons.

  “What is this?” I ask, prodding at my custard-like pudding.

  “It’s lemon posset,” says Mitzi.

  “I thought posset was what babies bring up—you know, regurgitated milk.” Which is frankly what this looks like.

  “There’s a word for that,” says Joel. “You know, the opposite of a synonym. When the same word has two totally different meanings.”

  “Well, this posset is a wonderful old British recipe made with cream, lemon and sugar. Divine, isn’t it?” says Mitzi.

  “What a shame,” I say. “Dairy.” My plate is quickly swiped away by Joel, who looks happy for the first time all day.

  “Do you want to race tomorrow?” Michael asks Joel.

  “Race what?”

  “Enterprises.”

  “Sorry, is this some sort of City thing?”

  “Dinghies. It’s a two-man jobbie and I’ve put myself down for the Enterprise class in tomorrow’s regatta. You’d make good ballast.” He points at Joel’s posset-filled belly.

  “OK.” He shrugs. “Could be a laugh.”

  “It’s no laugh,” says Mitzi. “The regatta’s taken very seriously around here.”

  “I warn you, Michael, Joel was born without the competitive gene.” It had shocked me at first. He’d lose to me at tennis and he’d just offer congratulations and give me a hug, never insisting we play again and again until he’d won, or blame the racquet for his poor performance.

  “Does it involve me getting up early?” asks Joel.

  I give him a look. “I think what he’s trying to say is, does it involve him spending a lot of time away from looking after his children?”

  “Cut the poor bloke some slack,” says Michael. “As far as I can see all he does is look after your children. Don’t worry, under-the-thumb boy, high tide isn’t until one.”

  “Of course you must go,” I say, faking magnanimity. “And I’ll find something to do away from the children in the morning and you can look after them then. It’s called tag-team parenting.”

  “There are some dear little shops in the village,” says Mitzi. “Very cute interiors, lots of lovely stripes and checks.”

  “Over-priced bags of fudge,” says Becky. “Cara insisted on going to them today. Some rather sweet lavender-stuffed dog-shaped door stoppers, but of course I wasn’t allowed to buy one of those.”

  “I’m going to walk across to the island at lo
w tide,” says Cara. “First thing in the morning, before all the tourists.”

  “Grockles, we call them around here,” says Mitzi. “Isn’t that too divine?” I’m not sure when she began to talk as though she were in an Evelyn Waugh adaptation.

  “Why don’t you come along?” Cara says to me.

  “That would be nice,” I say. How strange to walk at my own pace. To enjoy the journey instead of spending all of it worrying about whether the boys will be able to walk all the way back, whether I’ll have to carry one of them, whether they’ll understand the point of our destination. These have been the years of living vicariously. “How early is early?”

  “Very. I love early mornings. So efficient. Seven o’clock?”

  “That’s practically the afternoon. I’d love to. You can do breakfast, can’t you, Joel?” A rhetorical question. He’s got an afternoon of being shouted at by Michael, I get a dawn walk with Cara. I win.

  I’m having a dream about opening a cupboard door at home to reveal a whole extra wing, including indoor swimming pool and gym, that we never knew existed. “I know,” I’m telling all my friends who have gathered in awe, “I suppose we’re just lucky.” I wake up just as I hit a small barrier of stress when it comes to cleaning out the pool, especially since I can’t find my swimming costume.

  “What are you doing?” I hiss at Joel, who is crashing around the bedroom trying to find a T-shirt to put on over his boxers.

  “Am hungry.”

  “No, you’re just drunk. Go back to bed.”

  “I’m starving. Small portions.” He’s got his T-shirt on by now.

  “You can’t go downstairs. Here, have a cereal bar.”

  “No, need meat. There’s a whole ham in the larder.”

  “You’re not going downstairs on your own.”

  “I promise I won’t play with knives.”

  “I don’t trust you to tidy up after yourself. Bloody hell, Joel, why can’t you sleep through the night without a midnight snack? You’re worse than a baby. A strangely carnivorous newborn.”

  We creep down our staircase, past the utility room and approach the kitchen.