The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (23 page)

When I got back to the table, the usual game of musical chairs had taken place and I was now sitting opposite him. I felt a socked foot in my lap. He always has worn nice socks, and these were silky, striped ones. His big toe probed and I felt my pants dampen still further and my mouth open in an involuntary “Oh” of pleasure. The toe pushed on. I wanted more than anything to remove that sock and put those toes into my mouth. I put my finger in instead and looked at him. He turned away and started fiddling with his phone. A second later, mine bleeped with a text message alert.

It was a single word: “OUTSIDE.”

I avoided looking at him and texted back: “NOW.” I tried to find the question mark but gave up and left it as an exhortation.

He stood up and said his goodbyes, swaying slightly. I counted to 60 and then did the same. I rushed out only to find that he wasn’t there. It’s all a joke, of course, he’s gay, he doesn’t even like me, Mitzi and he are probably looking at me and thinking, poor deluded drunken Mary. Then I felt a pair of arms around my waist.

“Quick, before anybody else comes out.”

“Speaking of coming out…” I was interrupted by the timely arrival of a taxi.

“Where to?” Joel asked me.

“I’ve got a flatmate,” I said.

He told the taxi driver an address in an area I’d long coveted but would never be able to afford. We indulged in the sort of
frantic, drunken snogging that taxi drivers have to put up with and came up for air outside a large redbrick house.

“My mom’s.”

“She’s not there, is she?”

He laughed. “No, she’s away. Anyway, I’ve got my own flat bit thing.”

We walked through a large hall filled with ancient-looking vases of dried flowers and standard lamps with tasseled shades. I was torn between the desire to follow him or to explore these fantastical rooms with their tantalizing vistas. There was a kitchen with framed newspaper cartoons on the walls and piles of ancient Le Creuset, a study stuffed with books and a tatty armchair, a living room with an exotic drinks trolley. It was all so different from the house I grew up in—this was all faded Persians instead of fitted carpets.

He led me up a corkscrew staircase and then up again to the top floor, which consisted of a vast room with a kitchenette in one corner and a futon in another. The sight of the crumpled sheets made me feel both charged and alarmed. A small door led to a stunted shower room in the eaves. I looked out of the window to see the city sprawled and sparkling in the darkness. It felt like the middle of the night as we’d been drinking since five, but it was only nine o’clock. He rustled up an omelette with herbs cut from a window box that was kept on the roof of the house. I wolfed it down because I wasn’t so drunk not to know that I had to eat something, but I didn’t really want anything other than him in my mouth.

I suppose a thought might have flashed through my head about the wisdom of it all happening so quickly, but I was too drunk and too turned on to care. Normally I might have felt embarrassed by this point, but Joel made me feel like I had come home. In fact, his home felt like the one I should have always lived in,
convinced as I was as a teenager that I had been adopted by these boring people and my real parents were arty liberal types engaging in lively debate in an exotic metropolis.

We kissed and laughed and then kissed some more. Then we drank and talked, hurriedly telling each other strange minor details of our lives that seemed suddenly so fascinating. I wanted to eat up him and his words, then I just wanted to eat some more, so we went downstairs to his mom’s kitchen and ate stale peanuts and cooking chocolate. The snack food sobered me up and I vaguely thought about postponing sleeping with him. But I think I already knew what would happen that night.

It was so glorious. He slipped inside me so easily and yet with perfect friction. I wanted to keep him there forever, but I wanted him in and out. He came quickly, a beautiful sight, naked but for one stripy sock and a condom. I hadn’t come, yet, but this was rectified in what seemed like seconds as he dove down before emerging with a glistening chin. Back in the days that I smoked, I used to sometimes think about the pleasure of the next cigarette even as I was smoking my current one. That was how I was that night as I came—I was impatient to make him hard again and to have him inside me, or to rub his cock gently against me until I was begging him to put it inside me. Even for the third or fourth time, I started to think about how good sex would be in the future, since it had started so promisingly when usually the first night is something just to get through without disaster.

I surveyed myself, speckled with a red flush and stubble burn on my inner thighs. I surveyed the room, which was as disheveled as I was, with red wine splashed against the wall, the sheet coming off the mattress, a saggy bean bag molded to the shape of my bum where Joel had pushed against me from above.

I didn’t think that I had ever been so happy.

7

People in Glass Houses

Subsection E [living] number
5
)
Leaves me to do all the packing. Well, not all the packing, strictly speaking: he packs his own case (small, battered, belonged to his grandfather and is covered in glamorous Cunard cruise liner and early Pan Am stickers) with a few pairs of boxers and a toothbrush
.

E
6
)
Shouts “I’ve finished,” when he’s done doing
E
5
)
and then sits around sighing while I pack for two children as well as all the general family baggage
.

E
7
)
Says “Blimey” when he sees the quantity of detritus I’ve packed—the snacks for the journey, the diapers for Gabe, the potty, the four times daily changes of clothes, the all-weather options, the duvet that Rufus can’t sleep without—“I remember when you used to be able to do hand luggage for a fortnight’s holiday,” he sighs
.

I [general ineptitude] number
12
)
Leaves all the drawers on his chest perilously open. Does he not read the freak-accident-killing-toddler section of the newspapers? The one that warns of decapitation by electric windows in the car, choking on dried apricots and being skewered by an up-ended knife in an open dishwasher?

“Can you at least help me get this stuff into the car?” I shout as I’m surrounded by a mismatched assortment of suitcases and
rucksacks, with overspill barely contained by a couple of plastic bags. Why is packing like this? It starts days earlier with scribbled reminders not to forget various items on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes. Months later, I might find a cryptic clue inscribed on the flyleaf of one of the boys’ books, reading “monitor” or “rabbit.” I also do my best to siphon off the clothes that we will be taking with us in the week preceding departure, but still find myself washing all the favorite must-haves the day before, forgetting to put them in the tumble dryer and having to take them still wet in plastic bags. They then either get hung up to dry in the car (we used to let them fly in the breeze by rolling up the windows to trap them, until Gabe worked out how to unwind the windows on the M1 and liberated a flock of damp undies), or left in the plastic bag to mildew.

In my fantasy, packing involves going into a marvelous walk-in wardrobe full of neatly folded clothes which will be seamlessly transferred to a matching set of luggage on wheels. One day, I think, I shall be the sort of person who keeps my shoes in their original boxes with photographs on the outside to identify the contents.

Mitzi says she’s got packing for the second home down to a tee and can “bundle them into the car in just two minutes.” I think she has been helped in this by buying duplicates of everything, including assorted bicycles and favorite scooters, thus avoiding the pile-up in a toy shop effect that our car boot is currently sporting.

Gabe is hitting his elder brother with a wooden spoon. Rufus rolls around in exaggerated agony and then begins to whine, an oft-adopted tone. In any given hour of the day, a TV production team could easily compile enough footage for “The Tennant family are finding life with two boisterous boys hard-going” segments for one of those programs where a nanny comes and sorts out your dysfunctional family.

“Please,” I shout to Joel. We only ever use such pleasantries in unpleasant voices.

“Can’t we just pretend that we’re ill?” he says.

“Don’t start that again. It will be fun.” This is said in the same bright voice that I use when I’m telling my children about our forthcoming trip to a stately home.

“It will be about as fun as a botulism cocktail with an anthrax chaser.”

“Have you got any better suggestions for the bank holiday weekend?”

“I wish it were just a weekend. I can’t believe you’ve said we’ll stay until Wednesday.”

“Think of it as a long weekend.”

“A very, very long weekend.”

“It’s half term. Have you got any better plans?”

“I’d be very happy to stay here.”

“You know we’d drive each other mad by tomorrow and you’d mysteriously find a reason to go into the office. Look upon it as a free holiday.”

“You know that nothing’s ever free with Mitzi.” He sighs. “At the very least we’ll be expected to wax lyrical about, oh I don’t know, the wonderful original features and aren’t you clever to have found flagstones made from the bones of real organic orphans, and a bath hand-knitted by a thousand Hindu priests and filled with holy water from the river Ganges.”

“It’s a small price to pay. Have you seen the cost of renting in the school holidays?”

“All those ghastly friends…”

“Becky’s staying nearby and will be coming over. You’ll have one kindred spirit.”

“Thank the lord.”

“Come on, let’s get this stuff into the car.”

“I thought we were going for a few nights, not relocating our entire lives.”

“Very funny. Now get it into the car before I decide to go without you.”

“Now we’re talking.”

We have exceeded the maximum time that our family can be in the car without fear of violence. Joel and I have argued about whether we should have music or speech radio, the boys have argued about who gets to hold the portable DVD player.

“So how long did Mitzi say it would take to get there?” It is rare that Joel gets noticeably irritated, but a long car ride to an undesirable destination is enough to rile even him.

“A couple of hours.”

He snorted. “We’ve already been in the car two and a half. Why is it that people with second homes always feel the need to lie about how long it takes to get there?”

“Maybe they’ve got some cunning route.”

“In their time machine.”

“More likely Michael’s Ferrari.”

“That’s it. Once, Michael will have done the journey in two and a half hours at one in the morning 30 miles over the speed limit and now Mitzi feels it’s completely truthful to chirp that their dear little place in the country is just ‘a couple of hours away.’ It’s what people with country houses do. That, and tell you it’s only an hour by train and ‘It can take you longer than that just to get across London.’ And if they move lock, stock and barrel to the country, they’ll always use the phrase ‘You must come and stay. We’ll probably see more of each other than we do now.’ Those are the three immutable laws of buying a house outside the M25.”

Joel’s experience of people with country houses is far more
extensive than mine, given that most of his mother’s friends had “little places” they’d inherited or picked up for a song in parts of Suffolk, Sussex or Dorset, back in the days when being an intellectual seemed to afford one the life of a banker.

A full three and three quarter hours after we set off, we arrive at a large flint and brick converted barn surrounded by fields, and beyond that marshes, and beyond that the sea. Its rustic charm is only slightly marred by the look-at-me solar panels, wind-power generator and about half a million pounds’ worth of cars on the front driveway. That and the sound of two small boys whining from the back seat of our battered Volkswagen Golf and my leaden heart at seeing the wet patch on Gabe’s trousers.