The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (13 page)

Joel laughs. “I expect you’d like to do that in our bedroom too.”

“It’s odd,” I say, “that you spend the whole of your childhood wishing you could have a bedroom of your own and your entire twenties trying to share one again.”

“But even when we were small,” Jemima continues, “you used to count up the number of tiles on the bathroom wall to make sure that we had exactly half the bath each to sit in. Although there was an odd number of tiles, so you took the extra one as you said you were older.”

“You were just as bad.” These stories are well worn and age has weathered them from bitter battles to fond memories. “One time you wouldn’t let me get out of the car over ‘your side’ and we were parked up against a wall, so I ended up having to climb into the boot and out that way.”

“You complained if I looked out of ‘your’ window. And you counted the hundreds and thousands on my fairy cake just to check it didn’t have more than yours.”

“What about tubes of Smarties? We always had to pour them out to check that they had equal amounts.”

“That was you that used to do that. You’d nick all my orange ones.”

“I love these stories,” says Joel, accompanied by the chortle that reminds me so much of his mother. “Go on.” Being an only child, he thinks that sibling bickering is like the national dance of an Eastern European country—hilarious to witness, but mortifying to have actually partaken in. When our sons fight—which they do, constantly—he thinks it’s some unique family trait that has been inherited directly from me, like the red hair.

“You’ve heard them all before,” I say.

“But I’ll never tire of them.”

It’s fine for me and Jemima to laugh at each other’s pettiness, but not for Joel to join in.

“Have you spoken to Mom recently?” I ask her.

“Usual Sunday nighters. Just when I’m feeling most depressed and least likely to talk.”

“Same here,” I say. “She always rings when I’m grappling with the boys’ bedtime. She sounds worried about Dad.”

“She should be. He should cut down on his pork life, as the song says.”

“He is fat, isn’t he? Hope I haven’t inherited his gene.”

“Me neither.” We both do a check of our respective stomachs for reassurance.

Lunch is not the Italian family feast that I always fantasize it might be. Gabe spits out his shepherd’s pie, which his interpreter Rufus explains is because “it tastes like sick.” Jemima and I push the pie around our plates with reflexive competitiveness, throwing little glances at each other. If it wasn’t for Joel’s prodigious appetite, there would be leftover mince for weeks.

Joel brings out the cake, which he made the day before. It’s fudgy and sludgy and I have to concede, heavenly.

“Oh my god,” mouths Jemima, “this is a-maze-ing.” She dips her finger in the fudge icing and sucks it, making me want to put my own finger down my throat. Ah, happy memories of our shared bulimic phase. “Do not tell me it’s dairy-free.”

“It’s got marge and soy milk instead of butter. Plus best-quality dark chocolate,” he tells her. “And white wine vinegar, weirdly, but it seems to work.”

“That is so nice of you to do that for Mary.”

“It is my birthday,” I protest. “It’s not my fault I’m dairy intolerant.” Eyebrows are raised. “What is it with everyone thinking that? You wouldn’t say that if I had asthma or something. It’s a medical condition.”

“You are such an incredible cook, Joel,” Jemima says. “You’re
so lucky, Mary. Why can’t I find a nice man like him? How come you managed to nab such a winner?”

How had I? I had often wondered this when I’d been enjoying the first flush of our love, many years and children ago. I can remember so clearly him walking into the office; he was wearing a thick slate-gray polo neck that was shredded at the cuffs, worn-down gray cords and Converse trainers long before they were fashionable. I don’t know why I keep the vision of his first appearance so pristine in my memory since at first I didn’t find him remotely attractive. Being immune to the charms of Joel Tennant put me in a minority of one in the office. The other women, including Mitzi, ran around him though he was barely more than a runner himself. I prided myself on remaining aloof, but then, like the last sibling in the family to catch chicken pox, when I fell, I fell the hardest.

I look at my birthday cake. It has nine candles on it, three and six added together. When I had my ninth birthday, Jemima stripped naked and tried to do headstands, which everyone else thought was adorable. Mom made an elaborate cake in the shape of a fat little pony and found a redheaded doll to sit on top. It was back when she didn’t work, so she could devote herself to her pair of ingrate daughters and slothful husband. She went back to work again when we were at secondary school, but her devotion to the house and the household remained unstinting. Dad’s work within the home didn’t increase in line with hers outside, and when he did make some minimal contribution, badly—laying the table or a fry-up—he’d call it “helping your mother.” And if she ever asked Jemima and I to do anything, we’d shout “Why don’t you ask Dad to do it? God, you’re so sexist, Mom. Stop colluding with the patriarchal society!” Rather touchingly, our mother could not hide her excitement at getting out of the house to work and would
carry a completely unnecessary briefcase and take “urgent” phone calls from the university office where she did admin, during which she’d talk too loudly about “faculty strategy” and return to the kitchen looking flushed with self-importance.

I think of the other times my birthday has added up to nine. My eighteenth, when I snogged David Parsons, who was absolutely gorgeous but also trying to see how many girls from our school he could rack up. Jemima turned him down a couple of months later, to her credit, although when I asked her why, she said, “Blergh, he’s revolting,” which made me feel small about my own feelings of triumph at having kissed him. I didn’t have a party for my twenty-seventh. I felt like I was hurtling toward thirty, which at the time seemed so old and so scary. When I finally got there, I felt giddy with relief after dreading it for so long. Why didn’t I enjoy my twenties more? Why didn’t I revel in my youthful gorgeousness and enjoy the power that I could have yielded? I wasn’t perfect looking, but my god, it was as good as it gets and I didn’t appreciate it. If only I had known on my twenty-seventh birthday that later that year, I would meet Joel and become as happy as I’d ever been or probably will ever be.

“Nine candles,” I announce. I have nothing else to add.

Joel ruffles my hair in the manner of an uncle to a small child. “What are your plans for your thirty-seventh year?”

“I’m going to find myself a keeper,” says Jemima. “And then I’m going to have a baby. Maybe not all this year.”

“My plans are…” I trail off. My plans, if you must know, Joel, are this: today is the last day of January and the last day of the phase of List Compilation. Tomorrow is the first day of February and it shall also be the first day of List Implementation. I shall spend the night of my birthday not dancing in a club nor out in a restaurant with friends, but putting the finishing touches to my Excel spreadsheet of marital investigation.

Every month you shall have an allowance of two debits a day. These are your freebies, if you like. Anything you spend over this and don’t claw back by positive points will go toward your monthly total. Thanks to Becky’s intervention, I won’t count yin negatives that follow yang positives, does that make sense? It means that if you change a diaper, you won’t be penalized for not putting it in the diaper bin, or if you make a delicious meal, you won’t be penalized for not clearing it up.

Any debits over your monthly allowance (i.e., 60 in September, April, June and November; 62 for the others, save February, 56) will be added to your total score of infringements. If, after six months, this score is over 100 points, then that’s it; the proof I needed that you’re a selfish, lazy pig with no respect for me, this house or this family.

It needs a bit of tweaking, but it’s almost there. I itch to get back to the laptop and finesse its wonder. Each month has its own spreadsheet. Across the top are written the dates. In each of the columns, I will be writing a number that can be cross-referenced to a separate tab where I have sorted the top 100 of his crimes into subsections like kitchen, bathroom, laundry and general ineptitude. There’s another tab with the dozen or so credits that can offset them.

“Do you two mind emptying the dishwasher?” I ask Joel and Jemima. They slowly do, with Joel leaving the more obscure items in there for me to repatriate, as is his habit. Once I left Rufus’s soup flask in there just to see how long Joel would manage to ignore it and it survived five cycles before I realized that this repeated washing was eroding the dinosaur transfer and I decided to rescue it. It’s the same when he empties the plastic bags brought by the online supermarket delivery. Doesn’t know where baking powder goes, just leaves it in the bag. Black-eyed peas? Sing “Where Is the Love?” and leave them lying on the counter.

I briskly wipe surfaces, pick up food from the floor and look at the way they have moved plates nearer the dishwasher but not actually
into
the dishwasher. Joel has already settled back into his chair and is looking at me with bemusement.

“Relax, Maz,” he says. “Why don’t we just do it later?”

“Because it will be me not we that does it later. I hate it when you say that.”

Jemima gives me a quizzical look. We’ve shared everything from nits to knitwear, but I don’t ever tell her all that I have to complain of in my life. Rufus’s belief in the tooth fairy and Jemima’s in the happy-ever-after are precious gobbets of innocence in a corrupted world. “Fine,” I say. “Let’s clear it up later then. Why don’t you switch on the kids’ channel, ASBO parent style, and I’ll make some tea?”

Later, Jemima and Joel are playing a game with Rufus and Gabe that involves eating pistachios and throwing the shells back into the jar. Everyone finds this hilarious and I don’t dare be the boring one, as usual, and tell them to throw the empty shells into the compost.

“Jemima,” I say. “Do you remember how Mom used to get you a present on my birthday, so you didn’t feel left out?”

“You’ve reminded me often enough.”

“And then on your birthday I didn’t get one too, and they used to tell me not to be so silly and that I was older…”

Joel and Jemima say together, “It’s not fair,” their voices a whining imitation of mine. They fall about laughing at that.

“Well, it wasn’t…”

“Life isn’t,” they say again with one voice.

“No, I suppose not.” I look at my husband and my sister. One large and dark, the other thin and blonde, but the same, they are the same. Both effortlessly favored, blessed by love, the people that others gravitate toward, the ones whose names are
remembered. Now we are always “Joelandmary,” just as it was always “Jemimaandmary” as I was growing up. I’m an idiot. I spent my whole childhood grappling for popularity in the face of an alpha girl sister and now I’ve only gone and married someone who makes me feel the same way. As a child, I lived with parents who seemed to prefer the other one. As a parent, I live with children who definitely prefer the other one. I’m a second-class inter-generational sandwich.

I stop scouring the sink aggressively and grab Rufus, hugging him tight to me, stroking his hair and delighting in its musty unwashed smell. Poor mite, to be so squeezed by me and to be so like me. I kiss the hair that he inherited, which I have always hated on myself and on him is breathtakingly beautiful—so many shades on every shaft, all with names from nature like ginger, conker and nut. Despite its glory, it’s Gabe’s hair that always gets patted in shops, those thick dark curls with their strange blond highlights (“Are they natural?” people are always asking, as if I go to the hairdresser with my two-year-old and ask for a half head of foils). It’s Gabe that smiles at strangers, while Rufus is not so good on eye contact, and like all middle-class parents I went through a phase of thinking he might be autistic. He and I are underdogs, but I vow to make sure he’ll never feel it.

“Happy birthday, sorry it’s a week late,” says Becky, giving me the well-reviewed biography of a dead female writer. It’s our fortnightly Monday lunch and I’m so very glad.

“Wow, it’s quite long given that she died young, isn’t it?” I say, looking at the book’s don’t-drop-it-on-your-foot proportions.

“Do you know, she was only thirty-eight.”

“She can join my ‘talented women who died in their thirties’ club. Jemima tells me that she always checks how old celebrities were when they had their first child, while my parents are
obsessed with working out death ages in obituaries. I wonder which camp I fall into?”

“Death ages, definitely,” says Becky.

“Thanks.” I pick up the book again and flick through the photographs of a woman doing all that I have done and so much more. “Thirty-eight you say? Only two years off. How depressing.”

“That she topped herself?”

“No,” I say, “that she should have achieved so much in such a short time. My biography at thirty-eight would only be a pamphlet.” Unless, I think, I could patent my revolutionary marriage-value-calculating list to both fortune and acclaim.

“What would you like to achieve?” asks Becky. I love that she asks me questions like that. I feel that she’s the only person with whom I talk about things other than my children and my day-to-day tasks and expectations. Even at work, I never seem to get beyond the discussions about what we watched last night and where everyone else is going out for the evening.

“I don’t know.” I love that she asks me such questions, but it doesn’t mean that I know how to answer them.

“Come on,” she says firmly. “Don’t tell me you’ve achieved all that you want to in life?”

“OK. I stress about where Rufus will go to secondary school, so I guess I want him to go somewhere good, or at least right for him. I want Gabe to be potty-trained.”

Becky looks like she’s going to bring up her seafood wrap. “Come on, Maz, what about you? What about your career? What are your goals?”

“I’m not sure I have a career anymore. I’ve got a job. I’m not making excuses but it’s quite hard to have a career when you work part-time.”