The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (4 page)

“Can’t you put these in the dishwasher?”

“Nah, it’s already full.”

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) Dishwasher—never empties it, although he has been known to take out a couple of clean items should he need them. Or sometimes he just takes a few things out in order to put some dirty things in amid the clean ones. Or just leaves those dirty ones on top of the counter with the words “the dishwasher’s full.” Or, on the rare occasions he does empty, he just puts the clean things on the side in piles for me to put into the cupboards properly. And if he should deign to put something in, stacks from the front so I have to reorder everything.

Any feeling of closeness to Joel evaporates and I feel exhaustion wash over me. “If I take the boys to Mahalia’s party and give you a break then, can I go and have a nap now?” Of such horse-trading parents’ weekends are made.

“Sure.”

“Me sleep with Mommy,” says Gabe. “Please, Mommy. Me a little bit tired.” Oh, the unfairness, I think—first, that both his childcare stints today will consist of pushover Rufus, and that even while napping I will not be spared the demands of our second born. What I lose in sleep, however, I will gain in the human hot-water bottle warmth that my chubby cherub provides.

19
) Tells me it’s bad to let our sons watch too much TV (of course, his mother, Ursula, didn’t even have one in the house when he was a boy, and he would go and stand outside the TV rentals shop for hours to stare at the magic moving images. Which is probably why he’s ended up making programs to go on it as a grown-up) and yet when he’s on duty, it’s permanently switched to CBeebies.

“Fine, but if you come into Mommy’s bed you have to sleep, OK? No mucking around. Really, I mean it.”

Some time and no sleep later, I am trudging to Mitzi’s house. While pushing a buggy, you always trudge, never trot. It’s not far away geographically, but light-years away socially.

I almost expect a maid to let me in, given the house’s imposing double doors, but this type of rich person tends to keep her servants a secret. That’s not to say she doesn’t have any. Mitzi has such a large retinue that running her house is like managing a small corporation. She occasionally complains in hushed tones about one or other of her staff—the nanny, the au pair, the masseur, the cleaner, the acupuncturist, the guy who does the lawn—and I try to feel sorry for her, but it’s really hard to sound like a nice person when one is talking of the modern servant problem.

Michael opens the door. I wish I could say that he’s short, bald and fat, but he combines money with height and dark hair that’s graying at the temples in the way that Hollywood make-up artists apply fake white to denote age and distinction. I think he’s what you’d call a silver fox.

“Good to see you,” he says. I can’t tell if he means this. Some of my friends’ husbands have never morphed into the mates category. He retains all of the scary elusiveness that schoolfriends’ dads used to when we were children. Without even asking, you know he’s going to have a special kitchen chair with arms that nobody else is allowed to sit in and might get grumpy if you mess up the newspaper before he’s read it.

Mitzi doesn’t have to relocate her children’s parties to the local church hall, so cavernous is her kitchen-dining-family-whatever room. When Mitzi invites you to a dinner party, she always says it’s “just a kitchen supper.” Which is like calling her kitchen “just a kitchen” when it is in fact a 40-by-20-foot glass-cased temple to food, families and the good life. It’s got the same stuff in it as our kitchen, what they refer to in department stores as white goods—except of course in Mitzi’s they’re not white, they are galvanized steel, and everything is twice the usual size: a double oven, a two-doored fridge, a reclaimed medieval refectory table that comfortably seats 20, a separate utility room. We’re all about eating at home these days, but filling our kitchens with industrial catering equipment.

People seem to be breeding a need for more space in their house, don’t they? Children don’t share bedrooms. Their rooms must double up as sort of kiddie offices cum leisure centers with a desk and a computer, a TV and a DVD player. We need enormous rooms to do everything in as a family, but then we realize how grim it is to do everything as a family, so we yearn for all these private anterooms: the home cinema, the library, the gym. Except Mitzi doesn’t yearn—she has.

20) Doesn’t earn shedloads of money in the City so that I can have a vast number of rooms that somebody else cleans for me.

I scratch that one from my mind and vow not to include it on the list, feeling a blast of shame. I’d hate to have one of those big money banker type husbands. It’s not as if money buys everything. Though it does buy quite a lot of handstitched soft furnishings, I can’t help but notice.

Michael ushers me into the kitchen palace where women who
look too skinny to menstruate let alone give birth sit sipping champagne (champagne! Not just sparkling or cava), while children dressed in exquisite clothes frolic. I recognize a few faces from the book group I go to and from all the birthday parties and christenings and celebrations of Mitzi and Michael’s fecundity that have been held over the years. We friends of Mitzi are like readers of a celebrity magazine, invited regularly into her lovely home to coo at newborns and new extensions.

Mitzi canters over to me. “Mary! How brilliant to see you.” She manages to make it seem like she really, really means it. That’s the thing—I want to mock Mitzi, but then she’s like this, so effortlessly disarming. She’s doing casual but is glammed up by her trademark vermilion lipstick. Everything is trademark in Mitzi’s world. It’s like the way she doesn’t buy things, she “sources” them.

“And vice versa. Have you bought another new car?” I hate myself for having noticed the G-Wiz parked next to the Lexus. I hate that I care what car they have parked on their off-street parking. I hate that I care that they have off-street parking.

“Dear, isn’t it? It’s so miniature, the kids love it. And so environmentally sound. I don’t have to pay the congestion charge and I can practically park it anywhere. Now we’ve got the Lexus hybrid and this one so we’re really cutting down our emissions.”

“Gosh, two environmentally friendly cars. I guess that makes you twice as green as us with our crappy old petrol-using estate.”

“Actually, since you don’t have even one green car, that makes us infinitely greener than you, if my math serves me correctly?” She grins and I think she’s being ironic. I’m trying to remember exactly how it was that Joel had told me it’s better to drive an old car, however rubbish its engine is. Something about carbon costs of production, but Mitzi’s in full flow. “To be honest, we’re
trying to save money as much as the planet at the moment, so it’s a bonus that there’s no car tax or congestion charge on it.”

“I don’t think of you as being on an economy drive.”

“Every little bit helps,” she says. “Austerity Britain and all that.”

“And there was I imagining that you thought austerity Britain was just a vogue for expensively home-produced veg and lovely Second World War light fittings.”

“Indeed, one must keep calm and carry on.”

“Carry on spending,” I say, “apparently, to help the economy.”

“I like to do my bit,” she says and laughs.

Gabe is clinging to my leg like some sort of rutting terrier, while Rufus, too, remains connected by an invisible umbilical cord. I try to shake them off, literally in Gabe’s case, but they hover.

I look around at the dozen or so children. “It’s so great that you don’t feel you have to invite Mahalia’s whole class from school.”

“But I have,” Mitzi says brightly.

“Blimey, those private school class sizes really are a lot smaller, aren’t they? Worth paying ten grand a year just to avoid having to have thirty kids at your birthday parties.”

“No, silly,” she says. “Mahalia’s having two birthdays.”

“Like the Queen?” Well, she is a bit of a princess.

“I suppose.” Mitzi makes as if to frown, but her brow remains remarkably unlined. I have a permanent frown mark etched on my face now. “I’m having a separate party for all Mahalia’s schoolfriends. I thought it would be a bit hectic if I had all her home friends and her schoolfriends in one bash. Are there really thirty kids in Rufus’s class? There are fifteen in Mahalia’s. And two teaching assistants. And it costs more than ten grand, what with all the extras. Over twelve.”

Twelve times four children out of taxed income. My very-gifted-at-numeracy elder son would be able to make that calculation in a trice, but I settle at the vague answer A Lot Of Money. A lot of money that everyone else at the party is happy to pay, it seems. I wonder, as ever, what it is other parents know that I don’t which means Rufus going to the local state primary condemns him to a life of crack addiction and a career in armed robbery. I worry that he can’t write out his birthday cards in the medieval-monk-of-Lindisfarne perfect illuminated script that Mahalia’s privately educated friends have written out hers (“Have a delightful birthday” one reads. Delightful?).

21
) Doesn’t worry enough. I have to do all the worrying for our children’s future while Joel just says that they will probably turn out fine and there’s not a lot we can do about it anyway.

I regret wishing that Gabe would detach himself from my leg now that he has and is approaching the art cupboard with dangerous intent.

“He’s very boisterous, isn’t he?” says Jennifer, whose child appears to be on Mogadon. “Have you thought of getting him tested?”

“For what? He’ll do enough tests when he has to start going to school.”

“Attention deficit disorder,” she says. “I know a great educational psychologist.”

“We had to see one of those for Oliver—you know, because of the gifted and talented thing,” says Alison.

“Well, he can’t get his hyperactivity from his father,” says Mitzi. “He’s so laid back he’s upside down.” Everyone laughs. Hang on, I think, you’re not allowed to slag off my husband.
Or my son, who is not hyperactive, he’s spirited. “Have you met Joel?” she continues. “He’s this totally adorable slob.”

Less of the slob. And less of the adorable, while you’re at it. “Actually,” I say, a word I’ve caught off Rufus, “Joel’s a very successful executive TV producer-director.”

“I know he is, darling. And you know how much I love him.” Again, she turns to her audience to explain, “Joel and I have a special relationship.”

That’s what I can never work out. Whether the sniping between Mitzi and Joel is born of antipathy or some sort of heat between them, like they’re characters in a 1930s screwball comedy. Joel had the choice between us when we met all those years ago. Does he ever regret his choice? Looking around the vast acreage of the house and garden, I’m sure Mitzi doesn’t regret hers.

At last it is time to go. Rufus and Gabe get a goody bag made out of actual cloth to take away, while my own leaving present is the familiar sense of both inadequacy and disdain. This particular cocktail of emotions is fed further by the discovery that one of the myriad gifts in the goody sack is the book that we’ve just given Mahalia as her birthday present. Except ours was wrapped in newspaper as we’d run out of wrapping paper, while this one is in beautiful handmade and recycled paper with perfect hospital corners and a ribbon. “Horrible materialism,” I say to Joel later. “Horrible material,” he says, pointing to the patchwork of silk remnants that makes up the party bag.

I’m thinking about Mitzi’s larder later that evening, as I sit in bed flicking through the latest Lakeland Plastics catalog. Just looking at its storage solutions section offers me the promise of a well-ordered home and I turn down the pages of color-coded
Tupperware that will revolutionize my cupboards. Family life is a constant storage challenge in search of a solution.

22
) Has a constantly growing collection of glasses by his bed. Each has a different level of water left to stagnate within and it looks like he’s trying to get enough to be able to do that music hall turn of rubbing the rims to make different notes.

I stare at Joel. Even in bed, he’s untidy, flinging his limbs across it, mummifying himself in the duvet and throwing off pillows. His face is sandpapered with stubble. His face is crumpled in a frown.

23
) Checks his BlackBerry in bed. Is important enough at work to be given a BlackBerry, while since my part-time downshifting career choice, I don’t even get given a company mobile.

He senses that I’m looking at him. He mistakes my disgust for lust and leans over to me.

24
) Checks his BlackBerry in bed and then expects me to have sex with him when he puts it down.

25
) Checks his BlackBerry while having sex with me, on occasion.

“Piss off, J.” He looks wounded. “I’m tired and you can’t just switch me on like a BlackBerry.”

“It’s work.”

“It’s Saturday night.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s just not that sexy to use your BlackBerry in bed.”

“But reading about Tupperware is the height of eroticism, I suppose,” he says, gesturing at my catalog.

“It’s work, too. The difference is that it’s work I have to do when I get home from my job.” I roll away from him, feeling so angry that my skin tingles with it. I’m not quite sure why I do or where it comes from.

My life is going down the drain, and it’s a drain clogged with swollen Shreddies, solidified globules of grease and a dried-up piece of Play-Doh.

2

He Takes the Rubbish Out

On my way to work, I pretend that I’m a single glamorous woman, soy latte in one hand, expensive buckle-laden statement handbag in the other (only one part of this image is factually correct and it’s the one that cost ₤1.90 from the café).

My office is some sublet space in a large industrial warehouse. Our floor is shared between other two-bit/four-people television production companies fermenting in the media brewery and we feel like the tent-city of offices: displaced, floating, chaotic. The other areas of the building are used by a very cutting-edge advertising agency and some vague “media consultants.” The reception area is most unreceptive, all unpainted concrete and ironic retro office furniture, while the still-remaining Christmas tree, which is black and decorated with white cube-shaped baubles, only serves to make it more so.