The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (17 page)

“Believe you me,” she says with that smirk again, “I’m not always the one surrendering.”

It shows me how far I’ve come from the world of sexual intrigue and the days when we used to swap top sex tips that I have absolutely no idea what she can be talking about.

*     *     *

It wasn’t just sex that Mitzi and I talked about when we first met, it was everything. It was one of those friendships that was like falling in love, when we stayed up all night swapping pasts and futures and I used to store up funny things to tell her.

It was my first day at my first proper job. I had an idea that working in television was going to be glitzy, a preconception that everyone I had met in the interview process had contradicted with their clothes, which were disappointingly dowdy. All I had to do in my entry-level job was type, but I felt like a media hotshot just being allowed into the building.

My excitement was waning after only an hour in the office. My face ached from all the smiling and my brain flagged from all the names I had to remember. I know now that there are the same types in every workplace and that in my twenties I’d always get befriended by the office joker, but back then it was all new and exhausting to me.

People came up to me and I put my smile back on but they only ever wanted to know where Mitzi was. I didn’t even know who she was.

Then she walked in and I knew it was her. It sounds corny, but it was as if she was accompanied by a choir and a special light filter. I wanted to be her friend so much that I could barely look at her.

I couldn’t believe that she would like me and the mere fact that she asked me if I wanted to get a sandwich with her allowed me to become my most witty, best self. Looking back, I might have become a bit Single White Female, with my Mitzi-inspired taste for vintage dresses and newfound enthusiasm for shoes. The first time she asked me if I wanted to meet up to go shopping at the weekend, out of office hours and everything, I felt as happy as if I’d been proposed to. Our trip to the shops was like a budget, girls-only version of that scene from
Pretty Woman
, as she kitted me out in stylish high-street fashion finds.

One day, she was away from her desk and I answered her phone, this being before everyone got called on mobiles. Personal calls for her were usually from men, but this was a woman, older sounding and with an accent that roamed around the globe in one short sentence. She sounded polite, yet pleading. “Can you pass on a message to Mitzi?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“But you will make sure she gets it. I don’t think my messages have been reaching her.”

“I’ve got pen and paper right in front of me.”

“Tell her to call her mother. Take down my number, in case she’s not got it.”

I hung up and felt ashamed, as if I had intruded on something Mitzi did not want to share. When she came back I passed on the message and I saw her look unnerved for the first time.

“Oh fuck,” she said, with one of those posh voices that can get away with it. “She’s back. Do you know what? In tribute to my old soak of a mother, I think we should go out and get very, very drunk tonight.”

Later, as we bought cocktails we couldn’t afford, she leaned forward to tell me, “I really don’t like to talk about this so you must keep it very secret.”

“Of course.” I was thrilled.

“My mother is a love addict.”

These days, celebrities are always claiming to be sex addicts, but back then the term wasn’t quite so widely used. It sounded very glamorous. I couldn’t imagine my parents being addicted to anything, though they did get a bit twitchy if they missed two consecutive episodes of
The Archers
.

I nodded, not wanting to admit my ignorance. “In what form does her addiction manifest itself?”

“Men, of course.”

“I see.”

“I’m sure you don’t. She’s had five kids by four fathers.”

“Really? It must be nice to have so many brothers and sisters.”

“Haven’t any full ones. I was her only one by a good-looking bit of rough.”

Of course, Mitzi’s parents were bound to be good-looking. “Who was he?”

“Local builder. She left my brother and sister’s father for him. I was the result of her first transgression. Didn’t last, of course. Nor the next one, rich old bastard. A few after that. This one’s being going on for about ten years, but it’s probably on the rocks, guessing by the fact she’s ringing me.”

“Do you get on with the rest of your family?”

She shrugged. “Have you any idea what it’s like for your siblings to be much, much, much richer than you?”

“How much richer?”

“Lots and lots. Mom’s first husband has no chin but he owns a nice chunk of Somerset. His kids don’t like me because Mom left their dad because of mine and, to be honest, they’re not much to look at. My younger sister’s dad has died already and left her enough money to buy a flat when she leaves university. Jake’s poor like me, though, but with the most amazing eyelashes.”

I imagined the feeling I used to get when Jemima got a more generous Christmas present, and multiplied by a hundred to try to imagine what it must be like to have very different financial means from your own siblings.

“It sounds very complicated.”

“You’ve no idea. Honestly, Mary, my childhood. It was like some sort of Catherine Cookson novel, except set in the West Country. They’d come in, father a child, leave again. There’d be a few in between them too. She’s always got to be ‘in love,’ you know—always got to be mooning over a man, has to pretend
they’re Darcy or Mellors or Heathcliff or whoever. So immature. Love’s not like that.”

“No, it’s not.” It hadn’t yet been for me. “How did you cope?”

“I’m smart.” As if I didn’t know. “Wherever we lived I’d find the girl in my class with the most sensible family and latch on. Those stay-at-home mothers loved me. They used to bake cakes every day and proper puddings. It’s a wonder I didn’t get fat. I’d basically live with them until we moved on.”

“Mitzi, I’d never have guessed. You seem so, I don’t know, confident.”

“I got out as quickly as I could. I left home at eighteen and I’ve looked after myself ever since. I tell you something, my children are never going to be poor.”

“Are you going to try to make lots of money, then?”

“Or marry it,” she said and raised her glass.

The next day in the office, Lily is sitting at her desk and sighing. I ignore her. She sighs some more, so much that it begins to sound like panting.

“What’s wrong?”

“My pitch—you know, the one about the dirty house. I’m supposed to have finished it by now.”

“The one that came out of my thoughts about gender inequality in the home?”

“Did it?”

“Yes, I said we should do something on the ways in which the real story about relations between men and women actually centers around household chores. And somehow it mutated into your dirty house reality show.”

“Oh, right. So you can help me with it, then.”

“Not with the format so much, but maybe I can with the background. Look.” I open up a document on my screen. “I’ve been
collecting up research about the issues and what current levels of participation are.”

She peers at it. “Do people really argue about it more than money?”

“They do. It’s more important than sex.”

She looks skeptical.

“Listen, why don’t I write you an introduction and then you can concentrate on the format.”

“Thanks Maz, you’re a star. You’ll have it done by tomorrow, won’t you?”

I’m not going out tonight, of course. “Will do.”

Joel is not having a good month. He’s already used up his March quota and we’re not yet halfway through. The book-group night babysitting fiasco bumped it by five debits. He’s not made it back for bathtime once and, while introducing his firstborn to the joys of video-gaming, he has now lost the cable that attaches the DVD player to the television, thus denying me my box sets. He’s used the word “hormones” three times, as in “Is it your hormones?” followed by a skyward look if I should ever dare criticize his behavior.

I check his chest of drawers: three balled-up tissues (one with what looks like a lump of hardened phlegm encrusted onto it); two receipts for lunches that cost way more than my frugal packed ones or my occasional forays with Becky; a selection of foreign coins and a packet of Rizlas. Those receipts will never get converted into expenses, another debit on The List. He is rubbish with money perhaps because, until he had children, he never really needed any. The small stipend from a trust fund courtesy of Ursula’s illustrious forebears coupled with a natural taste for shabbiness meant that he never needed to worry. Lucky him, able to bum around with the band for all those years, then waltz into a job when necessary.

God, the band. There’s a whole section of The List devoted to The Spitz (named for the 1970s swimmer Mark and that gloriously camp image of him with his big haul of medals and even bigger mustache). They happily reconvene for every fortieth birthday party in the Greater London area, requiring endless practice sessions. These, naturally, occur at weekends and in the evenings, so I’m left doing all the childcare. I cannot think of an equivalent female activity that would allow me to take time off, legitimately, with no one questioning it. “Mommy’s off doing her creative writing course this weekend again”; “Mommy will be off knitting again.”

“You’re stifling my creativity, man,” Joel will self-mockingly say if I try to put the kibosh on these musical excursions, as if by acknowledging the ridiculousness of a bunch of middle-aged men playing their new-age-indie-punk-rave he is thus excused.

Music invades not just his childcare duties, but also my senses when I’m feeling delicate on a Saturday morning. The radio dial does a little dance as I swap between stations.

“Bloody hell, have you messed with the pre-sets again?” I say, laboriously moving it back to the gentle chat of Radio 4.

“When did you get to be so old?”

“I’ll always be younger than you.”

“Technically speaking.”

“Listening to rock music”—I do a sad little strum of an air guitar—“does not make you young.”

“Well neither does listening to this.”

“You know, maybe you ought to grow your hair long and wear a tour T-shirt. I think the boys will think their dad is, like, way cool.”

“Do you know, my darling,” he says, “I think the moment I fell in love with you was when we were in the car and you turned the music up louder. You were the first woman I’d ever met who
turned the dial up rather than down. I remember thinking, now this is a woman I could spend the rest of my life with.” He sighs.

“Yes, well, things change. Though not enough. While we’re talking about music, can we have our regular chat about the boxes of vinyl in the living room? You don’t listen to them anymore, so why are we keeping them?”

“I like looking at the sleeves. I get sensual pleasure from the flip they make as I flick through them.” He gives me a look. “I need to get sensual pleasure from somewhere.”

“Could you not get some sensual pleasure from putting them in plastic boxes and moving them to the attic?” The attic is a possessions’ purgatory where stuff goes to spend a couple of years in limbo before being cast into the eternal damnation of the charity shop.

“Don’t make me do that.”

“But you can see all the stuff we’ve got now. The boys need more room for toys and books. It’s not even just the records, it’s the programs and the tickets and the
NME
back issues and your fanzines.” How can I convey to him the illogicality of those boxes full of records he never plays and ephemera he never looks at? It is matched only by the wardrobe of shirts with frayed collars or garish patterns that he refuses to throw out. “We don’t live in a house as big as your mother’s. In fact, why don’t you move all this stuff to your boyhood home? It would seem appropriate.”

“It’s not the size of the house,” he says mournfully. “You’d still be asking me even if we lived in a palace.”

“Please.”

“All right, whatever.”

“Is that a yes? Will you move them?”

“Yeah, right, will do.”

“When?”

“Laters, Maz. Chill.”

It’s not going to happen. I open my mouth to ask again. Or “nag,” as is the terminology when a woman asks a man more than once to do something. “Fine,” I say instead. One more for The List.

My mood is not much improved after lunch when the doorbell rings. I feel panic, like I did in the olden days when you were caught makeup free and wearing pajama bottoms in the newsagent by a boy you fancied. If houses were people, at this moment mine would be a crazy-haired lady pushing a supermarket trolley full of old newspapers. The recycling box has been emptied and its contents gaffered to the banisters and stairs to make a marble run stretching from the top-floor landing all the way down to the hall.

“Gabe,” says Joel to his second born. “Don’t pull that off, it won’t work if you do that.”

Gabriel continues to tug at the admittedly impressive mid-section of the run, which consists of the cardboard tube that came inside a roll of wrapping paper, a couple of sawn-off plastic water bottles and a cling-film suspension bridge.

I stand there, trying to debate which bit of the house to try to clean or whether just to ignore the doorbell. It goes again. “Coming,” I shout, “give us a minute.”

“Why do you have to ruin everything, Gabe?” whines Rufus. “It’s ruined, it’s completely ruined.” He storms off to throw his distraught body on the bed for all of ten seconds before emerging with a gobstopper-sized marble, which ricochets down the run before pinging to the corner of the hallway that is already a jumble of wellies and scarves.

“Did it work?”

Joel whoops his affirmative before jumping up the stairs, two steps at a time.

I do a quick survey of the kitchen as the doorbell rings insistently once again. On the floor, circles of rice ring the boys’ chairs, though they are dwarfed by the mountain that lies below Joel’s. A pair of boy’s underpants—skid-mark free, thankfully—lie by the cooker. There’s a crunch of breakfast cereal underfoot and damp clothes drying across busted radiators. I kick what I can aside as I run to the door, hoping that it’s someone ringing the wrong bell or one of those ex-miners selling cleaning products.