The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

by Christina Hopkinson

  “And no revising the list between times, and when you do revise it, there’s to be no distractions, no listening to the radio or watching TV.”

  “Or checking your BlackBerry,” I added. “Which reminds me…” I think about sex and how we don’t have time for it, what with the kids and all, but do have time to check our emails and our storage solution catalogs.

  “What?” asked Becky.

  “Nothing.” I blushed.

  Housework took the longest. My initial list had over a hundred suggestions, including some obscure blinders.

  “Taking out the rubbish,” posited Joel. “Taking special care to make sure all recyclable items are in the green box.”

  “De-fluffing the tumble-dryer drum,” I countered.

  “I see your de-fluff thingie and raise you a…” he paused. “A trip to the supermarket.”

  “Disinfecting the powder-dispenser drawer in the washing machine.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake,” said Joel. “You are making these up.”

  “I’m with Joel on this one,” said Becky. “I don’t believe anybody disinfects their drawers.”

  “They do. And a monthly boil wash with vinegar. Wait a minute.” I go to the washing machine and pull out the drawer, which is gratifyingly treacly.

  “It’s like some sort of primordial slime,” said Joel. “I feel sick.”

  “What is that stuff? Does everyone have it?” asked Becky.

  “I don’t know where it comes from, either. There must be landfill sites crammed with dust and hairballs and the fluff from between people’s toes and that brown limescaley stuff in the toilets…”

  “Make it stop.” Joel was clasping his ears.

  And so it went on. And on. I found myself enjoying it as a validation of all that I had been trying to prove to Joel since the day Rufus was born. Maybe it was the presence of Becky, but he was receptive in a way that he had never been before.

  “It can’t just be one way,” he said, once we’d thrashed out yet another point. “If I’m to raise my standards, then Mary’s got to lower hers, too. We should be meeting halfway, right?”

  “Not quite halfway,” said Becky. “Sixty-forty, I think. But you’re right, one way of feeling more satisfied with your house is to care less.”

  “Quentin Crisp and all that,” said Joel.

  “You what?”

  “He said that after a few years, the dust didn’t get any worse.”

  “You are revolting. Dust is made of human skin.”

  “If it’s yours, it makes me love it even more, my sweet.”

  Becky was scribbling another point on the list.

  • M to learn to care less about the state of her house and to be more tolerant of occasional drops in standards.

  In the manner of an aging woman changing the lightbulbs in her bathroom to 40 watts, I thought, but they had a point. If I stopped seeing my house through the prism of others’ eyes then maybe I could just step over the mess. Perhaps it could even be argued that not tidying was a form of time management and efficiency. If I wiped surfaces down at the end of a weekend instead of after every meal, I’d be saving myself half an hour of superfluous cleaning.

  When I say I want to stop seeing my life through the eyes of others, I mean the eyes of Mitzi. For years it was as if I’d been wearing a wristband with the legend “WWMD”: what would Mitzi do? And now I know: Mitzi would perform humiliating acts of perversion for her husband alongside consequence-free infidelity with another woman’s girlfriend.

  * * *

  It had been there, lurking, all the while, but I was hoping we’d manage to avoid talking about it.

  “I’m an idiot,” said Becky. “There are four areas of this relationship. Earning, childcare, housework and… can anyone tell me what the fourth is?”

  “Watching TV?” I suggested.

  “Anyone? Joel? Nobody? It’s you, you idiots.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “No, you plural: you two. Your relationship. How often do you have sex?”

  “You can’t ask that. You most certainly can’t put it on the list for everyone to see.”

  “Not often enough,” said Joel. He has no embarrassment about sex. He can talk about it like an agony aunt in a women’s magazine, full of gynecological detail mixed with revolting phrases like “making love.” Early on, I remember we were eating a takeaway when he said, “You know, you taste different when you’ve eaten a curry.” I offered to brush my teeth. “I don’t think that’s going to make much of a difference,” he said, before putting down his fork to test the theory.

  “You can’t schedule sex,” I protested to Becky.

  “I’m not going to say you have to do it on Saturday nights.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But you do have to do it once a week. Without fail.” I had a vision of Becky popping up between us in bed, pointing at her watch and reminding us that six days had passed.

  “Joel, you were the one who said this was all becoming too business-like.”

  “If Becky says we’ve got to do it, then we’ve got to do it.”

  “What happens if I’m not in the mood? We’re not in the mood.”

  “You get yourself in the mood,” said Becky. I gave her a skeptical look. “Don’t ask me, not exactly my area. I don’t know, you give each other a massage, do it outdoors, on the kitchen table…”

  “Get drunk.”

  She ignored me and continued, “Have phone sex during the day, role play, a bit of S & M, wear some sexy underwear.”

  “If I can get rid of all my vinyl,” said Joel, “you can chuck out your nursing bras and get some new ones designed for the non-lactating woman.”

  “I didn’t know you noticed.”

  “I didn’t think the little poppers to let down the cups were for my benefit,” he said.

  “And you’ll need to do more things together as a couple. Without your offspring.”

  “What, like a weekly date night?” I said.

  “You know what Ursula would say to that?” asked Joel, and we said in unison, “Horrid Americanism.”

  “Us sitting in a restaurant trying to talk about things other than the children and giving up and sitting in silence?” I said. “Sounds like it’s really going to help our marriage.”

  “It won’t be that bad,” said Joel. “We could do other stuff, go to the cinema, watch a band. We never go to exhibitions anymore.”

  I remembered the time, before we got married, when we saw an exhibition about representations of the nude throughout history and Joel whispered filth in my ear throughout until I could bear it no longer and we slipped into the toilet reserved for those with wheelchairs or babies needing changing for some brisk but highly satisfying sex. I never used to be able to recall that incident without feeling guilty about anybody who might have had more pressing need of the facilities. But then, after Becky’s exhortations about weekly sex, I found myself remembering it with a rippling in my groin and a first surge of optimism. This might work, I thought, this might actually work.

  “We could have a book club,” I said.

  “I’m not going to your loopy book club.”

  “No, just the two of us. I loved how we used to share books, before we had children. How you used to read out loud to me.” We’d lie curled around each other for hours and he’d read out the latest literary hit in his deliciously deep voice, like my own personal audiobook. Then we’d talk or argue about its merits and meanings. I never read anymore.

  “Good work, team,” said Becky, looking at her watch and making a “T” shape with her hands. “Right, guys, time out.”

  “Did they teach that at mediation school?” asked Joel.

  “Yes, they did, thanks. Ten minutes for tea and reflection, let us adjourn to the kitchen.”

  Joel started flicking through the color magazines that had come with the weekend papers. He stopped at a spread and started making a two-fingers-down-his-throat gagging gesture.

  “Wha
t is it?” I asked.

  “This,” he said, pointing at its pages. “If you’re fond of sand dunes and salty air,” he read out loud, “you’ll love Mitzi Markham’s Norfolk retreat, which proves that reclaimed can also be refined.”

  “Oh my god, is that the article they were doing when we were there? Are there any photos of us?”

  “I think we’ve been edited out.”

  “Not eco-chic enough, even though she made the boys wear that scratchy organic cotton.”

  He turned the page. “They’re here. It’s just you and I that don’t cut it.”

  “Look at them.” Our sons had mud streaked across their faces like an old-fashioned game of Cowboys and Indians. “Becky, are they not the most gorgeous children on these pages?”

  “Definitely. Mind you, that’s not hard. There’s something of the Midwich Cuckoos about Mitzi’s kids.” The four of them stood together in one of the photographs, their white-blonde hair blending into the sand dunes behind them.

  “Just listen to this crap,” said Joel, as he read from the article. “Visitors to the vast family room are rewarded with panoramic views of the Norfolk skies and a wealth of Mitzi’s quirky finds. Blah, blah, blah. The glass atop the coffee table was salvaged from a derelict church that Mitzi stumbled upon while holidaying in the Île de Ré. ‘The kids love crawling underneath it and seeing how the glass distorts their faces,’ she laughs, relaxed about the wear and tear of life with four boisterous children.” Joel rolled his eyes before continuing: “And my husband and I find it perfect for our filthy sex games. Michael just won’t shit on glass that doesn’t have a charming back story.”

  “It doesn’t say that!” said Becky.

  “No, of course not. But it should do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You never told her?” said Joel. “Becky, Becky, Becky, prepare to be amazed—this is the best story ever.”

  And so we told her, with Joel taking the part of both Mitzi with her rubber gloves and Michael, using our kids’ table from Ikea to crouch over in a tribute to the event. I did a running commentary, with additional dialogue from Joel. We laughed so much that our stomachs ached and tears ran down our faces. Every time we tried to compose ourselves, Joel would make his Michael “strainy face” and we would collapse once more. I laughed like I was young again.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at them,” said Becky, finally.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll have to,” I said. “I’m not going to see her anymore so I don’t see why you will.” I had seen her only once since I had made my discovery about who the plumber and the gardener were. It was at book club and all was the same—the fawning attendants, the stylish edibles, her choice conversational nuggets—but I was different. Funnily enough, I had had no problem looking her in the eye after the weekend in Norfolk, and I even managed to forgive her for trying it on with Joel nine years ago, but I couldn’t unknow what I had learned about her and Cara. I tried to listen to her business plans about her environmental products or her pride at her children’s myriad achievements, but I couldn’t, not any longer. She alluded once again to her marital sex life and paid tribute to Michael’s glories as a husband. Her life is a lie, but I knew one thing to be true: she would never leave him, whatever happened.

  “What?” asked Joel. “You’re never going to see her? Not at all?”

  I shook my head. I glanced at Becky and chose my words carefully. “She’s not a very nice person.”

  “Finally,” said Joel. “What have I been telling you all these years?”

  “I never much liked her,” said Becky. You don’t even know the half of it, I thought, and I’m not going to tell you.

  “She is actually very insecure.”

  Joel snorted. “They said that about Hitler.”

  “It’s true, she had a difficult childhood. Though it’s actually irrelevant whether she’s nice or not, what matters is that she doesn’t make me very nice. I don’t want to compare myself to her any longer. And to know her is to compare. She invites it. It’s kind of the whole point of her. I can still see Daisy and I don’t see enough of our old friends, and I’ve got to fit in these dates with my husband, and actually there are some really nice parents at school and I could do more for the PTA. There are lots of better things for me to do than see Mitzi. And her attendants. God, if I never have to see Alison again, it will be a better world.” They both nodded. “But don’t put ‘Never see Mitzi again’ on the list. Not that I’m going to let them back into my manky kitchen ever again.”

  Who knew, as Becky would say, that marriage was such hard work, that it would need a business plan, strategies and action points? That it would need daily gratitude, weekly sex and monthly board meetings? That we would sit with our diaries every Sunday evening to work out who was picking up which child to take to football, who could work and get up late, whose hobby took precedence? That it would take a trained mediator, a sort of marital management consultant, to hand out redundancy notices to all the inequality and resentment, and to recruit good will and cooperation?

  But there it is, on the fridge, our very own little declaration of co-dependence. An A3 sheet of tiny font, glanced at by visitors before their eyes glaze over with the mind-numbing detail and coded shorthand of it. It nestles beside the invitation to Michael’s fiftieth birthday party, to be held in one of those old-fashioned gentleman’s clubs. I have turned it down, though I like its embossed thickness amid the term dates and shopping lists. Less showy is the invitation to Jemima’s thirty-fifth, that watershed date in a woman’s life, now passed. She and Dan spent the evening snogging like teenagers and she confessed to me that they had decided to stop using contraception. He’ll probably irritate her in the end, but who cares for now.

  • Joel not to indulge himself in the flattering attentions of young underlings in the office, nor to kiss them (or whatever else may have happened).

  • Mary not to entertain fantasies about sophisticated brunettes wearing nothing but green silk lingerie and clutching a sex aid.

  No, not really. These two strictures aren’t on the fridge for the world and their offspring to see. They’re in my heart, though, and on my mind.

  Joel and I talked a lot about Kitty and I make snippy comments whenever he stays late in the office. But every time I do so, I feel guilty all over again about Cara and feel a compulsion to tell him, though exactly what I’m not sure. Nothing happened—no, really, it didn’t. There is nothing to tell, I say to myself, and although Joel would forgive me—because of Kitty he has no choice, after all—but I’m not so sure that Becky would.

  The thing is, I believe Joel when he says that he never fancied her as much as he fancies me. And I know that I will never love anybody like I love him. He has to put up with my irritability as the flipside to that fiery redhead stuff that hooked him in the first place, just as I have had to learn that laid-back charm is not always a good quality. Maybe all relationships are like this—the good can become bad if you let it, it can go either way.

  I bumped into Daisy the other day, who had lost a ton of weight since I’d last seen her. I asked her if she’d been working out and got the predictable answer about not being arsed with that. No, she said, but she’d read a book that made her examine her eating habits. The hardest thing about losing all that weight, she told me, was writing a thorough list of all the reasons she over-ate. “It took me weeks,” she said. “I was knackered by the end of it.” By some alchemy, the mere writing of this document allowed her to shed weight almost effortlessly. I was skeptical, but now I think that Joel and I have done the same. It is as if by writing the list—our affidavit of equal parenting, as Becky dubbed it—we got halfway there. Joel and Becky kept asking me what I had hoped to achieve with The List V1.0 and I never knew the answer, but I do now. I thought that by writing down all our domestic problems, I’d cure them. And perhaps, in the end, I did.

  If I’m making it sound easy, then I don’t mean to. I still want t
o kill him, frequently. I still do what he calls “the sigh,” tell him that life would be easier as a single parent and say things like “I don’t mind you staying out late at all, I’m thrilled to do their bedtime alone for the third night in a row.” I still say “I don’t have time for this,” before realizing that actually I do; despite being busier at work, I do have time for lots of things like sex and courtesy that I always thought I didn’t. And he still throws leftover food into the sink and puts saucepans that have had only boiling water in them into the dishwasher.

  Daisy’s miraculous diet has taught me another tip. When she wants to eat a cake or biscuit, she says, she decides to wait five minutes. When that five minutes are up, she realizes that if she had decided to eat it, it would be finished by now. Somehow this is enough to stop her every time she reaches for the biscuit tin. I’m the same. I force myself not to splurge on criticism but to wait a few moments, by which time I find that gentle recourse to the document on the fridge door usually suffices.

  No, it’s not easy, this new life, but then it’s not hard like the period after I found out about Kitty and that Joel had been tampering with The List. We were so frozen in fear and loneliness that I had begun to feel nostalgic for the aggression and irritation we’d been suffering before.

  “You’ve not once told me I’m hormonal,” I say.

  “That’s because you haven’t been,” he replies. “Have you forgiven me?”

  “Yes, I have. Have you forgiven me?”

  “So you see that you’ve got something that needs forgiving?”

  “Of course.”

  He smiles. “Then you are absolutely forgiven.” We kiss, and not just because it tells us to on the fridge door.

  * * *

  We’re walking across a wide open expanse just outside the city. Becky and Ursula have escaped the chaos of their house, the building site, to look after Rufus and Gabriel for the afternoon. Becky, bless her, takes every opportunity to facilitate our reconciliation, seeing us as a test bed for her mediation skills and theories. Joel has replaced his romantic gestures of yore with the far more endearing one of following every point on the new list. This morning’s metaphorical bunch of white roses was him giving the boys breakfast and making sure that there was no remnant of it left on the worktops.