The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs Read online

  Our bedroom looks like a terrorist attack in the Gap.

  1) Leaves clothes anywhere but the laundry basket. Or, rather, either of the two laundry baskets that I introduced for a new system of separating whites from coloreds. When I explained the new system, he said he wasn’t going to practice laundry apartheid and then went off giggling at his wit. He made a similar comment about repatriation of socks and the extraordinary rendition of his last remaining clean underpants that I held hostage in a bid to get him to contribute help as well as clothes to the laundry. He keeps claiming amnesty from the totalitarian regime of my impotent laundry systems.

  Though I suppose I should be glad that he’s consistent in dropping his clothes on the floor, in a little crumpled ring at his feet. My friend Jill’s husband puts things in the laundry basket on the days they’re both working, but on the one day she works from home and at weekends, he leaves them on the floor, like then it’s her “job” to pick them up.

  It’s symbolic that Gabe has taken Joel’s place in my bed because in many ways he’s also annexed the place in my heart that contains what’s left of my patience, generosity and indulgence. Gabe and I are always going off on old-fashioned dates, sharing a decaf latte in the café and splodging the frothy soy milk onto one another’s noses, wandering around farmers’ markets and playing hide-and-seek in museums, before settling down to share a bed for the night. He’s currently sprawled on top of me and any sensual urge I may have for physical contact from Joel is sated by Gabe. Joel once said he felt like he’d been superseded by a younger and cuter version of himself.

  An odor winds its way up to my nose. This younger and cuter version of Joel is also incontinent. I’ve been sharing my bed with a male packing a full, oh let’s see, actually overflowing, excrement-filled diaper. “Sweetheart, can’t you tell me when you’ve done a poo and I’ll change you, or even better let’s go to the potty. You know you get a sticker if you do that.” He gives a look of satisfaction, akin to that of a ten-year-old who’s just done a “silent-but-deadly” fart over his little sister’s face. He’s supposed to be potty trained, night as well as day. Mitzi’s kids are always dry through the night by this age. “And hasn’t anybody told you it’s the weekend?” I mutter to him. He continues to bounce on the bed, shaking that perilous diaper as he does so. “That hurts. Mommy doesn’t like it when you jump on her, please, sweetheart.”

  “Breakfast, breakfast, breakfast,” he sings to an indeterminate nursery rhyme tune. They’re kind of all the same, like hymns.

  I’ve drawn the short straw today with this boy child, since he wakes up a full hour before Joel’s charge.

  “Good afternoon,” I say, when he and Rufus eventually come down to breakfast.

  “I know, the decadence of it, quarter past seven.”

  “Still, an extra hour.”

  “Sleeping on the bottom bunk of a bed made for dwarves. Every time I sit up I get my hair caught in the springs above me.”

  I watch him get breakfast for Rufus. He rips the packet like he’s wearing gardening gloves and a blindfold.

  2) Sprays cereal around the kitchen as if he’s turned on a leaf blower near an open packet of Special K.

  3) Puts used tea bags in the sink. Why do people do this? Sometimes they have little bowls for them instead, which is marginally less annoying, but still, why not just put them straight in the bin—or, if you’re being environmentally sound (which of course you should be and everything, but sometimes I just can’t be bothered to go to the recycling box and I love my tumble dryer, I really do, I shall definitely be getting custody of that in the divorce), in the compost container?

  4) Puts used tea bag in the sink after making a cup of tea for himself without offering to make me one.

  5) Can’t remember how I have my tea. Soy milk, no sugar. Not that difficult, is it?

  6) Calls herbal tea “boiled pants” because that’s what he says it tastes like. Better than one bloke I went out with who consistently referred to it as “lesbian tea.”

  “I don’t like the tiny bits of Shreddies,” says Rufus.

  Gabe shares this opinion but expresses it by coughing the crumbs up onto the table.

  “That’s disgusting,” observes Rufus, correctly.

  “You make them better,” says Gabe, pointing at me. “You make them big. Make them big again. I want big Shreddies.”

  “There’s a word missing, Gabe? I want big Shreddies…”

  “NOW!” he screams.

  “No, that’s not the answer I was looking for. I want big Shreddies…”

  “HERE!”

  “No, ‘please’—‘please’ was the word I was looking for. You’ve had two pieces of toast already, do you really want cereal too?”

  “We’re running out of Shreddies, by the way,” says Joel.

  7) Tells me stuff is running out in a really accusatory way. After it’s already run out. And won’t chalk it up onto the shopping list on the section of kitchen wall painted in blackboard paint, something I copied off the interiors magazines I can’t stop myself from buying. Except in the magazines someone has always scrawled “I you” in those pictures, alongside a shopping list that includes Goji berries and champagne.

  “I’ll nip down to the shop to get some more,” I say.

  “No, I’ll do it.”

  “No, really, I’ll go.”

  “No, I insist.”

  We look at each other. “First to the door,” he shouts and being a man, he already has his wallet in his pocket, good to go, and beats me to it.

  I’m left to deal with the ongoing tantrum of our second child, the dauphin, whom our lives revolve around. When I have calmed his fury over the tiny bits of Shreddies and distracted him with alternative sustenance, he demands that I get the yogurt out of his stomach and back into the pot. I am then admonished for having got the spoon out of the drawer for him. I put it back and invite him to get it out. It’s too late then, of course, I’ve already ruined everything. He has turned me into some sort of Arthurian knight who is set a series of impossible challenges in order to win his hand. I am asked to rid sausages of the brown bits, make fruit slices drier, reattach clipped fingernails, make rainy days sunny and change the colors of the clothes in his picture books. In our house, the devil wears Primark boys’ combat trousers in a 2–3 and a secondhand stripy T-shirt from Baby Gap.

  Calm has been restored when Joel returns with the new packet of un-crumbled Shreddies.

  “What are we doing today?” he asks—because I’m his PA, obviously.

  “Rufus’s swimming lesson. You take him every week.”

  “Oh, right. Where’s his stuff?”

  “In the bag in the cupboard by the door.” Where it always is. “And then it’s Mahalia’s party in the afternoon. Have you got her a present?”

  He looks very confused. “Mahalia? Remind me.”

  “Mitzi’s second kid, bit younger than Rufus.”

  “I can’t keep track of them.”

  “Molyneux, he’s six or seven, Mahalia, then the twins, Merle and the boy one. What is his name? Begins with an M.”

  “Obviously.”

  “I was joking about the present; don’t worry about it, I think there’s something in the present drawer.” Present drawer. I have a present drawer. When did I get to be the sort of person who has a present drawer? “Milburn, that’s the boy twin’s name, Milburn.”

  8) Puts milk bottles and cartons back in the fridge if they’re empty. That’s not fair—mostly he makes sure there’s a couple of drops left in them to save them from unequivocal emptiness. But weirdly, he will always leave the bottles with lots of milk in them out on the counter in order that they go sour.

  9) Takes the stickers off bananas and apples and sticks them on the kitchen table.

  I whirl around the kitchen picking up, wiping, depositing and washing as I go. I make sure Rufus’s swimming stuff, coat and outdoor shoes are ready at the door while trying to phone Mitzi to check what time the par
ty is.

  “Have you seen the car keys?” Joel asks me. Most of the sentences we utter to one another start with the word “where” or some such variant.

  10) Asks me questions when I’m talking to someone else on the phone.

  “Sorry, Mitzi, I’m being summoned. Aren’t they on the hook in the kitchen where they’re supposed to be kept?”

  “No, that’s why I’m asking.”

  “Well, I always put them back there. You must have left them somewhere else.”

  “I haven’t used the car in ages.”

  This is true. I scurry into the kitchen, hoping that I’ll find them on the hook where they’re supposed to be. Which they are, although partially obscured by a mug.

  11) Asks me where something is and I tell him and he doesn’t look properly so I have to go and find it for him myself. If I say something’s in the fridge, he won’t see it unless it’s in the front of the fridge, as if it’s too much effort to move the jar of chutney that’s permanently rooted to a piece of prime fridge real estate.

  “Oh, look, on the kitchen hook, where I said they were.” I hand them to him and make a dash for the safety of the sitting room, doing what he’s usually better at doing than I am—leaving the children and assuming that someone else (me) will look after them. I sort out the time of Mahalia’s party and then start hunting around.

  “Joel!” No answer. “Joe-WELL! Which one of these effing cables is for the laptop?”

  “The black one,” he shouts back, eventually. I look down at the nest of vipers at my feet, a coiling mass of unmarked and mostly black cables. These phone, camera and computer chargers have joined old keys as things we can no longer throw away for fear that the moment we do so, we’ll discover both what they are for and a need to use them.

  “I told you to mark any new ones with a label and then put them all back in their original boxes together with their electronic husband.”

  “Oh well,” he says. “Looks like they’re getting a divorce.”

  You may joke, I think, with a strange jolt of satisfaction at hearing him say the word out loud. “I know it sounds like I’m being anal, but I say it for a reason. Now I can’t find the laptop charger and it looks exactly the same as the one for the camcorder and we’ve got five different mobile chargers and I can’t work out which one is for the old phone. And what’s this?” I pick up a lonely white cable.

  “For your old toothbrush?”

  I stomp off, though he doesn’t notice as he’s become engrossed in playing back some footage on the camcorder that he shot of the boys on holiday. “Bugger,” I hear him shout. “The battery’s gone. Where have you put the charger?”

  12) The way he leaves all the phone chargers and cables out so that I can never work out which electronic item they belong to.

  My path away from him is impeded by a blockade of shoes, buggies, scooters, bikes, helmets, the recycling box and the disgorging contents of a mini packet of raisins that I manage to further squash into our neutral-colored and, in retrospect, far too pale sisal carpeting.

  The stairs provide a new hurdle. At the bottom of each flight and half-flight in our house are small foothills of debris: slippers, books and clean clothes on their way up; old newspapers, empty glasses mottled with evaporated wine and dirty clothes on their way down. They say that the peak of Everest has become strewn with rubbish. I bet it looks like the landings of our house.

  13) The way he can ignore the pile of stuff at the bottom of the stairs.

  Like a driver reversing his 4×4, Joel has a dangerous blind spot when it comes to the stairs that allows him to trot past these stations without ever thinking that perhaps he should pick this stuff up; an ignorance of the fact that humans are the conveyor belt that will carry it home. I once decided to let it all pile up to show him how much I was frantically shoveling to keep this house clear. Gradually the possessions silted up our stairs until they formed barricades. Still he managed to ignore them, actually vaulting over to reach his destination. Then, one day, poor Rufus slipped on an empty packet of Kettle Chips and hit his head against the balustrade and we ended up in the ER. I felt guilty, of course, but it was Joel’s fault.

  I lock myself in the bathroom, hunch over the laptop with its fast-fading battery and click on a document called “House admin” (it’s a safe bet that Joel will never open that one). I type furiously in all senses of the word, finishing off with a last flourish:

  14) Never hangs up the swimming stuff but leaves it in the bag to go moldy.

  I’m obsessed with cleaning and housework, but my house doesn’t appear to reflect my pathology. If I described someone as being obsessed with cleaning, you’d assume their house to be spotless with vacuumed upholstery and cupboards filled with alphabetized Tupperware for their extensive rice collection. No, I’m obsessed with cleaning and yet live in a filthy home, which is a raw deal, much like it is for my friend Daisy, who complains that she was built with the ample curves of an opera singer, but with a voice so bad that she has to mime “Happy Birthday” so as not to ruin anybody’s party.

  Nobody talks about cleaning. Why would they? It’s bloody boring to do and even more boring to talk about, but it’s there. It’s a dirty secret that we don’t want to admit to. Well, I’m going to come clean. I spend more time on sweeping, tidying, home management and wiping than on anything else in my life. It’s my hated hobby, my pastime. Now that I’ve gone part-time in the office, I think I may actually spend more time on housework than paid work. You’d never know the extent of my cleaning load by my conversations with others or by my outward appearance, and least of all by the outward appearance of my house. Nobody ever talks about cleaning or seems to show that they do much, yet they live in spotless, ordered houses. It’s as if their houses are cleaned by osmosis, or fairies that come in the night, or mute Brazilians on ₤7 an hour.

  Everybody bangs on about sex, but I spend many more minutes cleaning, doing laundry, tidying and bill-paying than I ever will having sex. It’s very likely that I spend more time thinking about it too.

  Nobody talks about cleaning except my mother, and lord how my sister and I despised her for it. Jemima and I didn’t do cleaning, you see, because we were feminists. The funny thing about feminism is that it hasn’t actually decreased the amount of washing to be done and surfaces to be wiped, nor does it seem to have increased the amount of time men spend doing it, either.

  Where do other people put their phone chargers? Where do they lurk? I don’t understand other people’s houses. Where are the odd socks and junk mail? Where have they secreted the broken toys, incomplete jigsaw puzzles and spare coats? Other people’s homes look as if they are on permanent standby for estate agents and buyers’ viewings when they are not even on the market. If we ever wanted to sell our place, then we’d have to hire another house just to hide all our clutter.

  Perhaps that’s the secret. That the owners of all these inexplicably perfect homes have another place down the road that’s a moldering mess of outgrown baby clothes, broken toys, unopened mail, half-filled handbags and muddy shoes. It’s the house equivalent of the picture of Dorian Gray, allowing their owners to present their perfect lives while hiding their increasingly squalid parallel home.

  When I talk about perfect houses, I suppose I’m really thinking about Mitzi’s. In Mitzi’s house, there’s a place for everything except unsightly door knobs. Instead, kitchen doors just ping open at your touch to reveal a bespoke compost repository or a recycling area pre-divided into cans, papers and bottles. Since marrying into money, Mitzi has come to believe that windows are the windows of the soul, especially when they are draped with curtains made from reclaimed Welsh farmhouse bedspreads.

  Mitzi’s house has hallways off hallways and a separate utility room with space to hang up clothes to dry and so avoid using the tumble dryer, thus offsetting the carbon used on all those skiing trips and half-term jaunts.

  Rich people turn left to first class when they get on a plane. When you go
to houses like Mitzi’s you don’t just walk into the kitchen, but are automatically spirited upward to begin the tour of the house and to admire its latest incarnation, which either involves stripping back or reinstating the original fittings, depending on the year. There is no interiors trend too fleeting to have not been embraced by Mitzi. One wall covered in ornate Timorous Beasties wallpaper at a hundred pounds a roll—check; reinforced glass balcony—check; oddly sized black-and-white photos of her children gliding up the staircase—check. Then there are the quirky individual touches that the rest of us swoon over, which usually testify still further to the perfection of her life and love. The coffee table papered with an antique map of Sicily, where she and Michael spent their honeymoon. The subtle pattern below the cornicing in the hall that is made up of a series of interlocking Ms. The wallpaper in the downstairs loo that is their wedding invitation blown up to a hundred times its original size. The same room’s industrial concrete floor with each member of the family’s footprints immortalized, including the tiny ones of whichever of the brood was newly born at that time (these redecorations tend to coincide with the arrival of a new baby, but then, as Mitzi has had four of them over three pregnancies, most things do).

  Mitzi’s current project involves the greenification of her 4,000-square-foot house with wind turbines and solar panels, rather than just ugly old loft insulation like the rest of us. Her new-found mania for all things environmental has opened up whole avenues of consumerism that she is enthusiastically motoring down in her brand-new Lexus hybrid.

  I like to go to Mitzi’s house and sneak upstairs while the other women are having handcrafted organic flapjacks in the kitchen and peer into all the bedrooms, half hoping to find them a shambles, just this once. I always offer to help make the tea as an excuse to thrust open the cupboards and admire the way that her foodstuffs are arranged in the larder (a larder! Just imagine), with flour that comes dressed in old-fashioned sackcloth and jars filled with exotic dried beans.