The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

by Christina Hopkinson

  He shrugs.

  “She did?” He shakes his head. “Was it just that you hadn’t gotten around to it? Were you just waiting for the right opportunity? God, Joel, I suppose I should be pleased that you’re always starting things you never get around to finishing. Or was it that if I hadn’t found the receipt it would have happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So it would have happened eventually. And all because I wrote The List. You thought that meant you were allowed to do anything?”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “What did it mean, then? I don’t understand. Was this list a test of our marriage?”

  “Less so than whether our marriage could survive you getting off with someone else.” I’m shouting now, I think, but I can’t really hear my own voice or his, it’s like I’ve lost the volume control.

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry.” He starts to cry now, a currency that is debased since I saw him weeping while watching Magnificent Obsession at the weekend. “I don’t know what came over me. It’s just that all the things that were so great about us now seem so horrible. You’ve changed.”

  “And you haven’t. That’s the problem, Joel. You’re still a people-pleasing child-man, who has to be loved all the time. And if I don’t have the energy then you’ll find it elsewhere. There will always be those women in the office.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. What are you going to do?”

  “I asked you first.”

  “I need to digest it.” Though I feel physically sick. “I can’t look at you right now.”

  “I’ll go.”

  “Where?”

  “To my mother’s, I suppose.”

  He’s leaving me? “If that’s what you want.”

  “If it’s what you want.”

  I shrug. I cannot speak for sadness.

  “What will you tell the boys?” he says.

  That Daddy’s left us? “You’ve gone away for work.”

  I watch him pack, lightly with just a few pairs of pants and some clean T-shirts. He’s always kept a toothbrush at his mother’s and it’s been waiting for his return, as if this was always going to happen.

  He looks at me. “Bye, then.”

  “Yes, goodbye.”

  I want to say something to make it all better, but I don’t know what or even if such words exist. The awkwardness is finally relieved when he turns away from me. I expect him to open the front door, but he goes back toward the bathroom. I follow him and watch him pick up his flattened yellow toothbrush and pop it into his pocket. My legs wobble and my mouth fills with a foul taste. Oh my god. The words are very clear and separate in my head, they run like a subtitle in bold letters. Oh. My. God. The yellow toothbrush is leaving its place beside a Spiderman electric one and a Disney first toothbrush, and instead will sit in a filthy mug at a chaotic twentysomething flatshare in an edgy part of town, where Kitty and other young girls wander around in their underwear and boys smoke weed and argue over the Xbox, where nobody nags about stuff at the bottom of the stairs because there are no stairs and besides, nobody cares.

  “Goodbye,” he says again.

  I can’t speak. Please stay, one voice says. Just fuck off, says the other, furious that our discoveries have led to this permission of what he’s wanted to do with Kitty all along. This was not supposed to happen, this was never part of The List, he is going to get what he wanted from the start, chaos and sex, things that go together.

  After he goes, I sit at my computer and stare at it. Out of habit, I type in an attempt to order my thoughts. I add his newest crime into the debit column in the hope that seeing it on the screen will mean that I understand its significance.

  Has emotional affair with young woman at work and eventually kisses her, leaving me to deal with the domestic detritus in his absence, emotional and actual, while he escapes to her house for dirty sex in both senses of the word.

  I stare at it for a while but I don’t feel any nearer to knowing what it means or what I should do. I begin to type again, this time on the page of offsets.

  Writes list of every annoying thing he does or says with aim of using it in evidence against him, while at the same time lusting after the ordered life and thighs of best friend’s girlfriend.

  I delete them both. I take the whole damned folder called “House admin” and drag it into the recycle bin. Then I drag it out again. I realize that I can’t delete the last six months, anymore than I can delete Kitty.

  He’s left me, he’s actually left me. Of all the outcomes that I envisaged when I started The List, this was never one of them.

  10

  The List V2.0

  I don’t want to work and I don’t want to have lunch with Becky. I try ignoring her calls, but she is as insistent as a child tugging at my sleeve.

  “I’m really busy, sorry. Frantic production, et cetera, you know, frantic,” I tell her on the phone.

  “You still have to eat.”

  “Sandwich at my desk.”

  “I’d have thought you’d hate the way crumbs get into the keyboard.”

  She’s not going to give in. “All right, but we have to be very quick.”

  I put the phone down and see Matt hovering, no doubt waiting for the arrival of Lily so that they can giggle over funny videos sent over the Internet and cool additions to their Facebook pages.

  “She’s not here yet.”

  “It’s you I wanted to speak to.” He throws a document onto my desk. It’s my pitch about housework. “She love love loves it.”

  “Who? The commissioner?”

  “Yeah, Jane, obviously—says it’s exactly what she asked for. Says all women will love it, like it’s female Viagra or something.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Wants to have a meeting ASAP.” He pronounces it as one word: a-zap. “Wants to thrash it out a bit more, but I reckon she is this close to commissioning it as a three-parter. This is exactly what we need at the moment. Genius.”

  “Thank you.”

  He looks at me to emphasize that he was using the word in its blokey, double thumbs-up way, rather than as an accurate description of me and my contribution to this triumph. “You can make?”

  “Yes, sure. I’ll fit it in.”

  “And you can work on it if—no, when—we nail this baby?”

  “If you mean when we get the commission, yes, I’d love to. I have to. I’ve nurtured it. I suppose it is my baby.”

  “Good. Though you might want to rethink your hours. You’re not the only parent around here, you know.”

  Not even Matt can dim my excitement. I’d forgotten this feeling. I love my boys, obviously, and they are the mattress that my life lies upon, but a work high is like a silk eiderdown to wrap myself in. I am a genius. I had forgotten this, but I am really quite clever. I am better than other people at my job. I can do the interesting stuff as well as the boring bits of it. I want to ring someone to tell them. I realize that I want to ring Joel. My good mood evaporates. My eyes start to prickle only seconds after I’ve been smirking with professional triumph.

  I have cried over Joel, but not last night when he left. At first I was too shell-shocked by what had happened that I mooched around, unable to know what to think. Then I read a trashy novel until I fell asleep with the light on; anything to avoid being alone with the swill in my head. I wanted to sleep forever and not get out of bed for months or years, but the boys were unaware of this and jumped on my bed at their usual ungodly hour, not even noticing that Joel wasn’t there, assuming him to be in the shower or down in the kitchen.

  No, I didn’t cry until breakfast this morning, when the boys finally realized that a quarter of our family was missing and asked where Daddy was. It was the cinematic poignancy of their questioning coupled with my desire to hide anything ill from them that set me off.

  “Where’s Daddy?” they kept on asking. “I miss my daddy,” until I could bear
it no longer. I hid in the loo to make sure they didn’t see my tears. They banged over and over on the door, while I shouted, “I’m doing a poo,” to keep them at bay. That last bit was less like a movie.

  When they had finished being winsome, they moved on to moaning about how much they missed him in a way that they never do when he has to go away for work. It was almost as if they knew. Any minute, I expected them to put on American accents and say, “Why don’t Mommy and Daddy love each other anymore?” It felt like a horrible vista into the future when we would have to tell them. What am I going to have to tell them, anyway?

  “I’m so glad you came,” says Becky as we sit at our usual low-rent, high-fiber lunching place. “I got the feeling you were trying to get out of having lunch with me.”

  “No, no.” I glance at my watch. “I just thought I wasn’t going to be able to make it. And I can’t stay long. I’m expecting a phone call summoning me back to the office at any moment.”

  Becky clutches my hand. I’m alarmed at this physical contact. She doesn’t know her own strength and the gesture is more bone-crushing than soothing.

  “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  I decide that I do. “It’s Joel. He’s gone.”

  She nods as if she already knew. “Why? Is this about your list?”

  “Partly. Not really. He did find it a few weeks ago.”

  “Did he read it?”

  “Yes, every last point.”

  Becky looks horrified. “He read your list detailing everything that you don’t like about him?” I nod. “Well, I’m not surprised he left.”

  “The list’s not the half of it. Please don’t tell anyone what I’m going to tell you.” Becky motions a cross over her chest. “Joel had some sort of dalliance with a girl at work. Her name is Kitty.” She gives the look of a child who’s just been told Santa doesn’t exist. I find myself wanting to defend him, to explain that it’s not his fault really and tell her not to judge him, but then I think of the yellow toothbrush. “He didn’t sleep with her. That’s what he says, anyway, and I believe him actually. He hung out with her in a not entirely appropriate way and they kissed. And he wanted to sleep with her. May have even been planning it. I don’t think anything more has happened, but what’s hard is not knowing exactly why it hasn’t happened. Yet. Or hadn’t happened then.” I don’t know whether this is true anymore. God knows what comfort Kitty offered him last night. Maybe he even told her that he’d left me for her, that he’d made this big sacrifice. Maybe that’s even the truth.

  “But Joel would never do anything to risk your family.”

  “That’s what I thought. Looks like we were both wrong.” I mean Becky and I, but in a moment of clarity, I realize that I also mean Joel and I. We’re both in the wrong. Can it ever be that we’re both in the right?

  “What’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know. You know what you were saying about how all your decisions seemed dependent on another being made, so that you ended up being paralyzed into inertia? That’s what I feel.”

  “You’ll have to write another one of your lists,” she says.

  “The List was supposed to make everything clear, black and white, but it’s all messy. Life is as messy as the bloody house and no lovely Excel document is going to sort it out for me.”

  “We can sort it out. Let’s start with your list.”

  “That’s what Joel said. Like it was worse than the girl.” And yet didn’t I feel, in some strange way, that his continual insistence on blocking the plughole of the kitchen sink with breakfast cereals hurt me as much as his chasing this woman?

  “It’s not a question of which is worse or better. You’ve got to drop it with the not fair thing, Mary.”

  “Listen to you, the negotiator.”

  “No, mediator. I’m fully trained in marital mediation and I’m very expensive too, so consider yourself blessed and shut up and listen. When you wrote your list, what did you hope to accomplish?”

  “Like I said, clarity.”

  “Yes, but clarity with what aim? If he failed”—she does a little air quotes gesture—“what was going to be his punishment?” And again. Enough with the rabbit fingers.

  I shrug. She stares at me. I feel like I’m in the witness stand. “Officially, if he proved himself to be as useless as I thought he was, then that would be it.”

  “That would be what?”

  “You know.”

  “I want you to say it.”

  “I was going to divorce him. I mean, I was going to threaten to divorce him. I was going to raise the subject of divorce, at least. We were going to talk about it. In a serious way.”

  “I remember you saying something along those lines,” says Becky, “and I couldn’t believe it at the time, either. Honestly, Mary, had you really planned to sit down at the end of his probationary period and show him your list and say, ‘Well, then, let’s bankrupt ourselves and scar our children forever because you squeezed the toothpaste from the middle on the fourth of March’?”

  “That’s not on the list—with the plastic tubes it comes in these days it doesn’t really matter where you squeeze. Sometimes we even get the pump dispensers.”

  “Don’t try to change the subject.” She’s fierce now and I thank god that she’s on my side. Allegedly. “Were you really going to suggest you divorce over a series of petty domestic challenges? Mary, think about it, try to imagine the full conversation you were going to have.”

  I’d never got further than the triumphant moment where I shocked him with the revelation of the proof of his uselessness. But when it really happened, when he discovered The List for himself, my gut reaction was one of embarrassment. It all seemed so rational at the time, but I look back now and think that I was in the grip of madness. Yes, I was mad in both the angry and the insane senses of the word. This is what always happens: he does something irritating, I am justified in my anger but then I express it in a way that allows him to recolonize the moral high ground. I am justified in my actions, I say to myself again. I am.

  “Come on, Mary, were you really going to ask for a divorce?”

  “No,” I admit finally. “I wanted change. I didn’t know exactly what was to happen, but I knew things couldn’t continue as they were without me killing myself or him. I couldn’t change my children and wouldn’t want to, it didn’t feel like I could change the house, I felt like I couldn’t get a new job while I’m working part-time, as who’d want to employ me? It felt like Joel was the only part of my life I could control. Like food for a teenage girl.”

  She shakes her head. “If you had any idea what I see in my job, you wouldn’t have even let the word ‘divorce’ flash into your mind, let alone entertain ridiculous thoughts about how your life might improve with one.”

  “Improve. That’s it. I just wanted my life to improve and I didn’t know how.”

  “Well, your life’s looking much improved now, isn’t it? Joel got off with another woman and you’re no longer living together, and I presume your boys are missing their father. Yay for your list, hey, Mary? It really made life better for you.”

  “I know, I know.” I sigh. “And I’m miserable and he’s now got the perfect excuse to live at Kitty’s—you know, the girl at work—and get what he wanted all along. I can’t stop thinking about him having moved in with her.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. He went to Kitty’s house. He’s living at Kitty’s.”

  “Don’t be daft, Mary, Joel’s at Ursula’s.”

  “How do you know?” She can’t know. She didn’t see him pack his toothbrush. Please let her know, please let it be the truth.

  “Because I saw him there last night and he said he was staying.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Just sorting out some stuff. Don’t change the subject.”

  “How was he?”

  “In a terrible state.”

  “Really?”

  “Devasta
ted.”

  “Did he tell you what was going on?”

  “Only that you’d had a row, a bad one. He was crying most of the time.”

  I feel a thrilling relief to hear of his misery and his place of residence.

  “I knew it must be bad as he was asking me all sorts of questions of a professional nature,” she says.

  “Like what?” I feel my optimism being extinguished.

  “What the legal ramifications of him moving out of the family home would be.”

  “Which are?”

  “Not great for him. He damages his chances of shared custody if he vacates the children’s main place of residence.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. What he does in these early days can make a real difference to eventual residency orders.”

  “No, I mean was he really asking you about custody and residence and the law?” I think of him projecting himself into a tiny bedsit where the boys will visit, and it’s almost worse than the picture of him at Kitty’s.

  “Yes, he was.”

  “But that’s all to do with what happens when a couple separates or, I don’t know, divorces.”

  “Yes.” She looks apologetic. “I’m so sorry, Mary. I couldn’t understand it at the time, but now I’ve heard about what’s happened, I get it. He’s had an affair, of sorts, and you’ve written a list of why you hate him and he’s read it. In my work, I see people split up over far less.”

  “You think I’ve blown it, don’t you?”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  I think I’ve blown it.

  It’s a mother’s truism: “In many ways,” we say to one another, “it’s actually easier for me to manage when he’s not around.” I’ve said it myself, lots of times. I dare say I believed it.

  The thing is, these last two days, I’ve discovered that it’s not true. It’s a falseism, if such a word exists. However useless Joel is—and he is, very—a second person to pull a child out of the bath is handy, and it’s good to have someone to dish out cereal while I have a shower. I miss having someone to tell of Rufus’s triumphs in his spelling test or the funny thing that Gabriel has said. The thing I’ve always most hated about being a parent is the relentlessness of it all, and this is even more true when you’re on your own. Of course, I’ve been alone before. Joel was away for a month once. This time feels different, though. It feels both relentless and endless, a terrifying combination.