The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

by Christina Hopkinson

He dissolves into a boy-shaped puddle on the floor. “I’m so tired. Why do I have to do everything around here?”

  “Fine, I’ll go.”

  On my return, I find that Gabe has taken the trouble to move out of the bathroom, with its tiled floor, and into the hall, with its pale wool carpet, to do a wee. It’s like a Saturday night with Michael around here. Though not in an erotic way.

  “That is it. Bedtime, both of you.”

  “But we haven’t had a bath or stories.”

  “Gabe’s had a shower and you’re nice and clean, so let’s just get on the PJs. Gabe, why did you put the pajamas into the water? Come on, in the bedroom, now.”

  “But I want a story, we always get a story.”

  “Well, your brother should have thought of that before he pooed all over the bathroom.”

  “But it’s not fair…”

  “Life isn’t,” I snap.

  Gabe begins to scream. Offer him a choice, I think, make him think that I am allowing him his independence. I crouch down to be on his level, just like we’re always told to do.

  “Here, sweetheart, let’s go and choose your pajamas.”

  He makes to grab a pair, but then throws them back, offended that I might have thought these were suitable attire. This continues with a second and a third pair. It is as if he has been cursed with an affliction that as soon as he chooses something, it instantly becomes the thing in the world most revolting to him. He is like some metaphor for consumerism and how choice actually makes us more and more unhappy.

  OK, I think, choice not good. I pin him down and wrestle him into some blue and white stripy ones. He is screaming as if they are woven from stinging nettles.

  “Not these ones! Yukky. No, no, no.”

  “Yes,” I shout, having decided to swap into bitch mother mode since nice mom proved such a failure. “You’re bloody wearing them.”

  After putting both legs into the same hole, I finally get them on, whereupon he immediately takes them off. This is particularly annoying since he claims to be unable to undress himself whenever I ask him to. The noise is reaching intolerable levels and I’m sure that the whole street is twitching their curtains.

  Rufus is cupping his ears dramatically and moaning, “Why do I have to listen to this noise?”

  “I don’t much like it either,” I shout over the wails. I want to press fast-forward to get to the point where they are both asleep and I have a large glass of wine in my hands. I can’t work out a way of getting there. There is a ten-foot wall of disobedience, tantrums and teeth-brushing to clamber over until I reach the sanctuary of my evening.

  “Come on.” I grab an arm apiece and drag them into their bedroom. I know I am pulling them too hard but I convince myself that it’s the only way to get them there. I shove them into their respective bunks and hold the door tight behind me. I go into a sort of trance to block out their wails and the beating on the door. Finally it subsides. I feel a surge of triumph, almost immediately replaced by shame.

  I go downstairs to get the damn glass of wine. It’s half an hour later than I had hoped to get them down, half an hour of my precious evening, of time that could have been spent on the delights of tidying up random bits of plastic, cooking supper, making Gabe’s packed lunch for him to eat at Deena’s house or watching mindless TV. I pour myself a glass and slump on a chair in the kitchen. I swear I see a mouse scuttle across the room, but I am too wrung out to care. The image of a rodent is replaced by the image of the marks left on the boys’ arms by my too-tight grip, which is accompanied by a soundtrack of my shouts, of the awful inconsistency of my parenting, veering between craven cajoling and uncontrolled anger. I feel my sorrow rise up inside with an almost physical presence, bubbling up from my stomach into my mouth. It tastes of bile.

  Time is spent staring at the wall, only to be broken by Joel walking in. It’s past nine o’clock. “Glass of wine, how lovely,” is his greeting. He smells as if he has had a few already. “Boys down, then? Shame, I was looking forward to seeing them. Good day?”

  I can’t speak. I can’t even nod or shake my head. I just gulp down another shot of Merlot. He doesn’t seem to have noticed my lack of reply, or maybe he doesn’t care. My mind spins off into a fearful fantasy that there are hidden cameras in this house and that the whole world shall be treated to the image of me dragging my beloved sons so hard by their arms that they might be pulled out of their sockets. There will be another camera inside their room to capture their little fists beating at the door, begging to be let out. Will the neighbors report me to social services? I would if I had heard the sounds coming out of their bedroom.

  Joel looks at the bowl of water with the floating corpses of drowned lice in it. “Have I missed the de-nitting? Shame, I find it strangely satisfying. Who did they get them from, anyway?”

  I shrug.

  “Must have been Mitzi’s kids,” he says.

  The shock of this accusation stirs me out of my shame-induced torpor. “I doubt that. Mitzi’s children don’t have lice.”

  “How do you know? I thought they liked clean hair.”

  “That’s just what they tell parents to make themselves feel better. I suppose I’m going to have to tell Mitzi to check hers. Michael will make cracks about Gabe and Rufus bringing in their plagues from poor school.”

  “How do you know our lot didn’t catch it from her kids?”

  “I don’t think they have nits at private school.”

  Joel looks in the bowl of water. “Well, these ones are wearing purple stripy blazers and bullying the oiks who don’t have a second home in the country, so I think they might be.”

  I fizz with irritation that he has returned home in time to make smart alec remarks, but not to help me when I needed him. He goes upstairs and I follow him. I want to punish him for not being there tonight, for waltzing in as ever when it’s too late, for expressing sorrow at missing out on seeing the boys when I have seen too much of them tonight. I want to punish him for getting me into a position where I punished the boys. I should yank his arms, not theirs. I watch him as he goes into our bedroom, knowing that his coming home from work ritual is good for at least three debits on The List, my only form of punishment.

  The first is easy meat.

  Subsection C [laundry] number 1) Throws his balled-up socks in vague direction of laundry basket. They never go in.

  Then he goes toward the chest of drawers. Come on, Joel, you know the routine. Yes! There it is:

  Subsection E [living] number 3) Empties pockets full of change onto chest of drawers (and kitchen table, mantelpiece, bit by the door where the letters go, etc., etc., creating small foothills of coppers all over the house).

  Once he’s taken out the change he begins to remove the rest of the detritus from his pockets. No doubt some receipts that won’t get charged to expenses, an underground ticket or two, tissues. He stops and turns around to glance at me. He then does something that I find almost as shocking as Mitzi and Michael’s glass coffee table exploits.

  He picks up the pile of change, looks at it, and puts it carefully into his wallet. He puts the receipts into the top drawer of the chest of drawers. He then picks up the tissues that he has left, walks past me and puts them into the toilet.

  I look at his departing back. It is as if The List works, by some strange alchemy or osmosis. I go into the boys’ room and stroke their sleeping foreheads and murmur my apologies into their sleeping minds.

  “Shut up, poo-pen boy,” Rufus says to Gabe in retaliation for a pinch.

  “That’s not very nice,” I say.

  “But he pinched me.” He pronounces it pinch-ed, like something out of Shakespeare.

  “Gabe, don’t pinch him,” I say in a perfunctory way. I’m tired after falling asleep on the floor of the boys’ room, then having been unable to go back to sleep on transferring myself to the marital bed. I greeted the boys effusively when they woke up before six. They looked rather scared; at first I thought it was because they
were carrying the memory of their shrieking, arm-pulling mother, but it may have been their shock at seeing me so friendly at the early hour. I told them how sorry I was and they shrugged. A psychologist could tell me if this was a good or a bad thing.

  I vow to myself that from now on, I will parent them as if there were cameras filming me around the house. I will be patient and consistent. I won’t chat on my mobile, check emails or try to read the paper when I’m with them. I will be, as they say, in the moment. It does not help that our day starts with breakfast, the powder keg of mealtimes. All that cereal-slopping, book-finding and harrying out of the house.

  I vow to myself that from now on, I will parent them as well as I love them. And I love them so much, I really do; it’s just that sometimes, when I’m tired, I don’t like them very much.

  “Why are you calling him poo-boy?” Joel asks Rufus, smirking.

  “Don’t encourage him,” I say.

  “Gabe pooed and used his poo to draw with.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. He said it was monsters but it just looked like rubbishy nothing. I’m much better at drawing.”

  “No, I mean, what on?”

  “The walls near the bath.”

  Joel turns to me. “Is this true?”

  “Yes. It is.”

  He looks as though he is about to giggle. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t think it was such a great anecdote.”

  “It is. Are we supposed to be pleased with his fine motor skills?”

  I shrug.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “Fine.”

  “It’s a bit odd that you didn’t tell me. It’s not like you can exactly forget someone getting creative like that. You’d normally at least have a whine about it.”

  I carry on scraping encrustations off plastic cereal bowls.

  I am beginning to feel that Joel and I don’t exist in the real world anymore, only in relation to The List. It is as if it holds all the truth of our marriage, and what happens or is spoken outside of it is a mirage. He was right when he said that I am being nicer to him. It’s not that we are getting on well, but we are arguing less. I am sublimating all my fury, while he is spending more time in the office and less time pissing me off. When he is at home, he’s different from how he has always been. “Chipper” is the old-fashioned word I’d use to describe him. He’s become this jolly, clasp-hands-together and say “Right, then” type of man.

  As the tally steadily climbs toward 100, I find myself playing out the moment of revelation, when I say: “Joel, I want a divorce.”

  I try the words out loud, just for the effect. It makes me feel sick. It’s not what I want. I want to go back to the way we were, before we had children—except with the children, of course. But I’m not sure that the way we loved each other is compatible with having the boys. It was so self-absorbed. You think to love someone is an act of selflessness, but really you love the reflection of your best self that you see in their mirror. Joel’s flakiness and my efficiency had a perfect chemistry before children, but our boys are like an ingredient that, though delicious in itself, makes the whole recipe go wrong.

  I try very hard to imagine Joel changing so that I find him as helpful as I used to find him seductive. If he doesn’t go over his allotted number of debits on The List, then I shall try to find a way to realize this Shangri-la of family life, though I suspect that it cannot exist. And if he does go over, then I suppose there is only one alternative.

  I try the words out again and repetition has blunted their power to nauseate.

  “Joel, I want a divorce.” I even look at myself in the mirror as I say them and try to picture his reaction.

  He will look shocked, he’ll steal my catchphrase and say “But this isn’t fair.”

  Oh, but it is, I’ll tell him and offer up The List as incontrovertible evidence of my fairness. I shall go through it point by point and he’ll know that I have been scrupulous. Maybe I should even start taking photos on my phone as visual proof.

  I’m aware that it’s odd to imagine the moment of asking your husband for a divorce. It’s like the culmination of an anti-rom-com. A div-dram, maybe. It’s acceptable to daydream about a marriage proposal but not a proposal of divorce.

  When we were going out together, before we got married, I even went through a phase of wondering how he would propose. I’m mortified by it now. Joel being king of the romantic gesture, I had high expectations. Not for him, I was sure, the corniness of a ring hidden in a fortune cookie, a mariachi band in a restaurant or rose petals across the bed. Joel would, I was sure, give me a Proposal Story to end all others.

  For a shameful six months, I watched his every move, determined not to be caught out by his proposal. My face wore a perpetual expression of gracious acceptance and full makeup in readiness, like a nominee on Oscar night. I didn’t fill gaps in conversation if he looked momentarily thoughtful. I let him make all the plans when we went out.

  After six months, I became bored of my uncharacteristically passive behavior. “Don’t you want to get married, then?” I said one morning over breakfast, while wearing the previous night’s slap and a pair of old pajamas. “I’d love to,” he said, giving me one of his enormous grins. “I thought you’d never ask.” That was that, the shortest proposal story of them all. We laughed and kissed and began planning and I honestly felt that I’d got the best proposal after all.

  Since I was the one to suggest marriage, it’s only right that I should be the one to suggest that we end it.

  The last two months are here. Two dozen credits and counting down.

  It takes a couple more impossible invitations and curt conversations with Cara before I finally find myself standing on the threshold of her flat. I’m surprised that someone so precise in her appearance should only do last-minute invitations, but this time I left a message on Joel’s voicemail to ask him, no tell him, that I’d be going out straight from work and could he pick up the boys from Deena’s and don’t whatever you do be late. I then screened my calls in case he tried to persuade me that he had an assignation more pressing.

  Cara’s voice wafts out of the intercom. I can almost smell it. Some sort of discontinued Givenchy scent available only in a perfumery in a tiny Parisian backstreet. I know that Becky is still in Newcastle, though no mention was made of her.

  “Come in.” She is dressed in green. I am making a rare foray in heels. I nipped out and bought them in one of the weird boutiques that pepper the streets around the office, ones which always describe themselves as selling an “eclectic mix of vintage and new designers.” I used to have the right foreshortened calves to feel comfortable in some six inchers, but they seem to have lengthened back to their pre-pubescent shape and now I find only flat shoes feel right.

  “Hello, how are you?” I say. “Sorry again about the walk, you know, in Norfolk, and not being able to make it for a drink those other times.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I love your flat. It’s so white. A polar bear would get lost in it.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  “No, really. White is lovely. Wasn’t it true that in olden days, having very white skin was a sign of being rich, because it meant you didn’t have to work in the fields? Having a white sofa’s a bit the same these days, because it shows you don’t have to worry about people getting it dirty, or sticky fingers, or dry-cleaning bills.” I should stop now. “And this furniture. Is it what they call mid-century?”

  “Some of it, yes. That’s the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona.” She points to a slippery-looking chair that I fear would defeat me.

  In a parallel life, I live in a flat like this. “And it’s so quiet, too.” She’s not helping me. I wonder what she and Becky talk about. I can’t see any traces of Becky in this room. It is hard to believe that she lives here. It’s hard to believe she’s even been here on a short visit.

  Cara stands in the galvanized-steel corne
r of the open-plan room. “Would you like a drink?”

  “Yes, I’d love one.” I think maybe I am supposed to say which drink I’d like. A glass of wine? Or am I supposed to have a cocktail? The only ones I can think of have comedy names like Sex on the Beach. I am so not asking for one of those.

  “I’m having a martini.” Of course she’s having a martini.

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “I’m having mine bone dry with a twist.”

  “Just the way I like them.”

  I watch her make them with the ease with which most people boil a kettle.

  I take a sip. Christ, why don’t they just inject you with gin instead? The effect would be the same. My mouth feels hot with the alcohol. I want to hold my nose to get it down me. I swig it all down in an effort to get rid of the taste. Cara raises an eyebrow. She’s so good at the one-eyebrow raise.

  “I was thirsty.” The act of taking one of those inverted triangle glasses and knocking it back felt pleasantly cinematic. I feel emboldened, either through the alcohol or the gesture. “It’s lovely to be here, really lovely.” Still no response. I can’t think of anything to say, so I say what’s on my mind. “Why did you invite me over?”

  “My, you’re direct.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine. Well…” An elongated word. “I’d like to get to know you.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Because I think you’re one of the most angry people I’ve ever met.”

  “You can’t know many angry people, then.”

  “I wonder what you’ve got to be so angry about.”

  “Nothing. I’m healthy, my family’s healthy, we live OK. Honestly, I’m not.”

  “Is your marriage good?”

  Now who’s being direct? “It’s fine.” I look around the machine for living that is Cara’s flat and the way she matches it so perfectly. “Why? Has Becky said anything to you?”

  Cara shakes her head and I immediately regret mentioning Becky’s name. I try to win her back with a confession. “It’s not perfect, my marriage. My life feels really chaotic and I can’t work out how to tidy it up. It’s all loose ends. Or bloody chargers that I can’t work out what they’re there for. That’s my life. Both in reality and metaphorically, if you know what I mean.”