The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (21 page)

“You’re quite right,” says Becky. “That’s what I’m always telling Cara.” She pulls a face. “Especially yogurt. It’s supposed to be a bit moldy.”

“You are a woman after my own heart,” says Ursula. “Ham is supposed to have that green shine to it. Sign that it’s mature.”

“Exactly,” says Becky, with rosé-fueled emphasis. “The waste not want not mentality is authentic environmentalism. Not like your friend Mitzi.” She hisses her name.

“That’s what I’m always saying to Mary,” adds Joel. “It’s about buying less, not more.”

“I agree,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me all this. I find all that hybrid-car-driving, fancy compost heap stuff sticks in my throat too, you know.” Though not quite as much as Ursula’s two-month-old cream would.

I clear the plates and take them into the kitchen. I decant leftovers into little bowls so as not to be accused of wastage and look in vain for some plastic wrap. The fridge is already crammed with saucepans holding useless remnants of previous meals and strange bowls of unidentifiable fat. I’m desperate for the toilet, but find the lack of bathroom locks inhibiting. Joel finds my attitude bewildering and tells me just to shout “I’m in here,” if I hear someone coming.

Becky joins me. “It’s bliss here, isn’t it? You’re so lucky, Ursula is so wonderful. This house, it’s my idea of heaven.”

“How so?”

“Everything shouts out a life lived. The sofas dip where bums have sat and you feel like just sitting there means you join a great pantheon of others and the good times they’ve had. I love that all the walls have been drawn on and that door frame has the heights etched on of not just your children, but Joel, too. I mean, how fantastic that it hasn’t been painted in 30 years. You know that you could pick up anything and there would be a story
behind it. A mug bought on holiday, books signed by the author, ancient cookery books with food-encrusted pages.”

“Ursula doesn’t really do much cooking,” I reply.

“If these walls could talk…”

“They’d be pontificating about something or other in a judgmental, intellectually entitled way.”

“Well, I think it’s brilliant. I hate the way people these days get rid of perfectly usable kitchens because they’re not in this year’s colors, or think that there’s no place for something that looks ugly but may have a beautiful story behind it.”

“This isn’t about Ursula’s house, is it? Are you still feeling uncomfortable at Cara’s?”

“I suppose.” Becky picks up an ancient place mat with an engraving of a Cambridge college. Or at least, St. John’s College in a mud storm, splattered as it is with vintage congealed gravy.

“But it’s so perfect,” I say, thinking of Cara’s galvanized-steel worktops.

“Exactly. Perfection’s not really me. When I look at the place that I’m living in—see, I can’t even call it ‘my place,’ it’s ‘the place where I’m living’—I just wonder where all the ephemera is.”

“Ephemera?”

“The stuff, the souvenirs, the gifts, the old chairs that don’t match.”

“Oh, the crap, you mean.”

“It’s not normal, the way these people expunge anything that isn’t aesthetically pleasing from their lives. And then I think I’m the only piece of ephemera, or crap as you’d call it, in the whole flat. I’m the only thing that isn’t shiny and new. I’m the only thing that doesn’t match, that doesn’t match some scheme or other.”

“Becks, this isn’t about the way that Cara has decorated her house, is it? We identify ourselves with our surroundings, don’t we? If my house isn’t tidy, I feel untidy, unhinged. The state of
my house dictates my state of mind. Is something like that going on with you?”

“You’re right.”

“I thought so.”

“No, I mean you’re right about confusing your feelings about where you live with how you feel about yourself, but I think it’s probably the other way around. It’s not that the state of your house reflects the state of your mind. More that the state of your mind dictates to you how you feel about your house.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take you and Joel. It’s not your untidy house that’s the problem, it’s you. Just like it’s not actually the fact that I don’t wear white and match the painted floorboards at Cara’s that’s the issue, it’s the fact that I don’t match her. We don’t match each other.”

Joel walks in, carrying a tray piled with plates stacked precariously on top of one another. It really annoys me the way he doesn’t put all the food scrapings and the cutlery onto the top plate when he clears the table. Not that he ever clears the table at home; this sort of helpful behavior is reserved for his mother.

Becky looks at me and at Joel, then squeezes my arm. “Think about it.”

I did think about it. I am still thinking about it three days later when I should be sorting out some yet more revised budgets, or at the very least electronically skiving like a normal person working in TV.

“Done,” says Lily, staring at her Facebook page. “Status updated. I’m so through with Zak.”

I hadn’t been aware that she had been so with Zak in the first place. “I’m sorry to hear that. What is your current status? No, don’t tell me, why not just tweet me since I’m sitting all of five meters away from you.”

“You’re not subscribed, remember? Do you want me to sort it out for you, Grandma?”

And to think how dismissive I used to be of my parents when I had to program the video recorder for them. “I was joking. Single and happy? Single and looking? Joining holy orders?”

“Single and thinking.”

“That’s not like you.”

“What, the single bit or the thinking bit?”

“Either?”

“Very funny.” She twists her dangling scarf with the Op Art pattern. See, Lily can wear a scarf and it looks hip, edgy and nonchalant. If I wore one, I’d look like a middle-aged Labor MP. Or, worse, Ursula. “Nah, seriously, I’m bored with all these boys. I want a man. Someone like your sex-on-a-stick husband. He is fierce.”

“Oh, please.” Someone less fierce in any sense of the word I cannot imagine. Talking about anybody’s husband, even or especially my own, as sexually attractive makes my stomach turn. When we were all on the dating scene, it was perfectly acceptable, even mandatory, to drone on about how gorgeous and stud-like your latest man was and how well endowed he was, but I now find any reference to the allure of a married man distasteful. Such language about sex and men has been replaced with a new vocabulary of tragicomic celibacy and casual disparagement.

“No, seriously,” continues Lily. “He’s got that salt and pepper hair, big strong arms thing going on. I’m hot for that now, skinny girl-boys are very last year, don’t you know? Where would I find Joel version 2.0? I’m thinking chopping wood or shearing sheep.”

I laugh. “Nothing could be further from the truth. He’s the least practical or outdoorsy person I’ve ever met. He grew up in London and was amazed to find that cows lived in fields rather
than in city farms. He thinks that to light a fire, you just have to switch on the gas.”

“You know what I mean.” Lily is undeterred. “He looks like he would survive in the event of a global meltdown. And that’s what really matters. How did you two get together?”

“I hate to tell you this, but we didn’t meet while white-water rafting in the Amazon. We met at work.”

Lily looks around at the fey creatures populating the office and winces. “And?”

“He started out as a runner, inappropriately since he never runs anywhere, and there weren’t many straight men in our office and, well, we got together.”

“Details, I want details. I love ‘how we met’ stories.”

“OK. You know my friend Mitzi? She’s come in and met me for lunch a couple of times, used to work in telly.”

“Blonde, thin, rich Mitzi with all the children. Botox.”

“Why does everyone know she’s had Botox but me? Is it because you read all those magazines where they put big red rings around any surgery celebs have had?”

“Important sociological documents, those magazines,” she says. “Go on, tell me about Mitzi and your man.”

“She was working in the same place as Joel and I. She fancied him so I assumed, we all assumed, that nobody else would get a look-in. In those days, Mitzi pretty much creamed off anyone remotely attractive—the presenters, the execs, the married man who owned the company.” It was an immutable law of nature that Mitzi was the attractive one. Long of leg but not too tall, slim but not skinny, blonde yet with a nose just big enough and a jaw just strong enough to save her from blandness. Her looks alone were killer, but it was also the way she carried them. Her mane naturally flicked, her hips swayed, her eyes had a slight glaze to them which made men believe she was permanently
thinking about sex. The rest of us accepted her supremacy without really objecting to the presumption. It would have been like a planet objecting to having to rotate around the sun. “I wasn’t sure I liked him that much anyway. I remember thinking he was a bit porky,” I continue to Lily. “Mitzi said he wasn’t fat, he had ‘generous girth’ and that it showed he loved food and drink and thus life and thus sex.”

“So she copped off with him first.”

“No, Joel didn’t fancy her back.” It was that simple, that’s what I tell myself. But for Mitzi and the rest of us in her wake, it didn’t seem like a credible explanation. It was as if the earth had stopped spinning on its axis. I expected frogs to fall from the sky and plagues of locusts to attack.

“And he fancied you?”

“Yes.” I smile to relive my happiest triumph, its luster undimmed by what has happened since. “It’s a bit more complicated than just that, or at least it seemed so at the time.”

“Go on, tell me. Did bitchy Mitzi stand in your way?”

“No, no, not really. Sort of. Not on purpose, I don’t think. She kind of didn’t tell me that Joel fancied me, but I think that was because she’d misunderstood what he was saying and had assumed I wasn’t his type. I think. I’m not sure I ever really got to the bottom of who said what and what happened myself. Anyway, Joel and I got together and that was all that mattered at the time.”

That was all that mattered for years afterward. If I ever had a down moment or couldn’t get to sleep, I’d just go over Joel’s and my “how we got together” story and I’d tingle. It became what a friend of mine calls your “default thought,” which has now been replaced by the moment Rufus first smiled or when I lay in the hospital clutching the extraordinarily beautiful newborn Gabe and Rufus gently stroked his soft skull.

The fact that I’d never really questioned Mitzi’s role in us getting together, or more possibly her role in us almost not getting together, was irrelevant. I didn’t want to have it out with her back then, partly because I was on such a wave of love that I couldn’t accommodate the necessary amount of logic or bad feeling, and partly, less edifyingly, I wanted her around to witness my happiness.

“You know what, Lily?” I say. “There’s no interesting intrigue with me and Joel. One office, two people, a lot of alcohol—isn’t that how everyone gets together?”

That made it sound simple. The truth is more complicated but so much sweeter. Our “how we met” story has all the misunderstandings and confusions of a Hardy novel without the rural idyll or Shakespeare without the twins and cross-dressing. Or perhaps it was merely a bad rom-com, depending on your cultural reference point. At the time, it was a messy, non-linear business, but the years of our relationship have honed a narrative out of it. After we got together, we loved to swap our perspectives, to recount our history to one another once again, all the while finessing it, adding adorable touches, trying to give it a perfect three-act structure.

How it began. Joel walked into the office and saw me. I was putting up a shelf, since the two-bit production company I worked for didn’t seem able to stretch to refurbishment and I was the most practical person there. I was standing on a desk, showing my handiness with a spirit level and power drill. I got down to say hello and gave my drill a little whirr for extra emphasis. I was flushed with exertion. Joel said later, when we were in bed together, “That slight sheen of sweat and the red in your cheeks, I knew exactly what you’d look like post-coitally. And I was right.” He claims he fell in love with me then and
there. But there are, in fact, many “And that’s when I knew I was in love” moments from Joel: when I ordered a pint of Guinness; when he found out I’d actually read one of Ursula’s books; when he saw that I could go on holiday with hand luggage only.

Despite Joel’s nascent paunch and permanent five-o’clock shadow, the girls in the office fell about and acted like they were builders on a construction site and he was a big-busted blonde, just about managing to stop short of wolf-whistling. I myself find it hard to see now, but am occasionally reminded when I witness Joel’s continuing effect on women. It’s something to do with the contrast between the way he looks and the way he acts. He was, is, very masculine-looking, not in a waxed Adonis way, but in his big hairiness. Yet he has a real touchy-feely, talk-about-my-emotions personality. “How are you?” he’d ask, not as a pleasantry, but because he really, really wanted to know and not just about your physical health, but about how you were feeling—no, I mean how you’re really feeling, tell me, tell me everything. He could say camp things like “Ooh, girlfriend, get you in your Missoni,” but in that deep, chocolate-brown voice of his, like James Mason’s. He could talk about the nuances of heel height, all the while wearing the same old scuffed-out shoes. He is a man of political engagement and principles, yet who likes reading women’s magazines and can talk about celebrity couples and the names they’ve given their offspring.

“H.O.T., hot,” said Mitzi after a couple of days, and the other girls hid their disappointment that a red dot had appeared on the best painting in the gallery.

“It’s like he really understands women,” she said after she’d managed to smuggle him out of the office for a coffee one morning.

“Watch this space,” she said after she’d lured him out for a drink after work.

“He’s gay,” she announced after their fourth lunch break.

“Really?” I asked. I could have sworn that he’d been flirting with me, but I later found out that everyone felt the same way. He’s very good on eye contact, Joel, like his second born. “Did he tell you?”