The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (29 page)

I turn off the TV and sink back into the sofa. The boys disappear up to the bathroom. I know I should follow them or use this brief respite to swish out the nit bowl or to repatriate the Playmobil knights’ swords and shields, but I flop. The house is quiet. I enjoy the quiet.

I should never enjoy the quiet.

“Mommy, Mommy,” shouts Rufus. “Gabe’s done an enormous poo and it’s gone everywhere.”

I dash upstairs. “Where is it? Where is it?” I walk into the bathroom to find it looking like a dirty protest on H block. Gabriel is using a very hard, tubular piece of his own excrement as a crayon and is scribbling over the walls. I have to concede he is showing a better hand and thumb grip than he has ever managed with the felt-tip pens. He puts a finger to his face, leaving a smear, so that he looks like the birthday boy ecstatic with the joy of his chocolate cake.

“Stop that, stop that at once,” I scream.

“That’s what I told him, Mommy, I told him that. Mommy, I told him to stop, I did, I kept on telling him. That’s not appropriate behavior. It’s disgusting.”

“Not helping, Rufus. Go and grab me some more wipes. Put down the poo, Gabriel. Put down the poo.”

He laughs and scampers past me.

“No,” I shriek. Not near the carpet. I grab him so hard that I leave red welts on his upper arms. I feel a sense of triumph. I shove him back into the bathroom and dunk him in the shower, fully clothed, while I throw the poo-crayon down the toilet and frantically wipe the walls and the floors. I take him out and he drips onto the floor, his clothes clinging hard to his body. All the while, he is screaming and sobbing. I struggle to remove his clothes and then mummify him in a dry towel.

“Stay right where you are!”

I go in search of pajamas and return only to find that he is emptying a bottle of fake tan over himself, leaving orangey streaks across his pudgy limbs. It’s like the Red Queen theory of evolution, that the faster you run the more the ground goes in the opposite direction and you stay in the same place. Here I cannot tidy up as fast as my children can mess up. I shove him back in the shower.

“I never did things like that when I was a baby,” says Rufus.

“Please, go and get your PJs on.”

“Mommy, tell Gabe off, tell him how I never did things like that when I was little.”

“You’re still little.”

“No, I’m not, I’m in Year 1.”

“Yes, fine. Damn it, there’s no diapers. Please, Rufus, can you go and get some from the kitchen?”

He dissolves into a boy-shaped puddle on the floor. “I’m so tired. Why do I have to do everything around here?”

“Fine, I’ll go.”

On my return, I find that Gabe has taken the trouble to move out of the bathroom, with its tiled floor, and into the hall, with its pale wool carpet, to do a wee. It’s like a Saturday night with Michael around here. Though not in an erotic way.

“That is it. Bedtime, both of you.”

“But we haven’t had a bath or stories.”

“Gabe’s had a shower and you’re nice and clean, so let’s just get on the PJs. Gabe, why did you put the pajamas into the water? Come on, in the bedroom, now.”

“But I want a story, we always get a story.”

“Well, your brother should have thought of that before he pooed all over the bathroom.”

“But it’s not fair…”

“Life isn’t,” I snap.

Gabe begins to scream. Offer him a choice, I think, make him think that I am allowing him his independence. I crouch down to be on his level, just like we’re always told to do.

“Here, sweetheart, let’s go and choose your pajamas.”

He makes to grab a pair, but then throws them back, offended that I might have thought these were suitable attire. This continues with a second and a third pair. It is as if he has been cursed with an affliction that as soon as he chooses something, it
instantly becomes the thing in the world most revolting to him. He is like some metaphor for consumerism and how choice actually makes us more and more unhappy.

OK, I think, choice not good. I pin him down and wrestle him into some blue and white stripy ones. He is screaming as if they are woven from stinging nettles.

“Not these ones! Yukky. No, no, no.”

“Yes,” I shout, having decided to swap into bitch mother mode since nice mom proved such a failure. “You’re bloody wearing them.”

After putting both legs into the same hole, I finally get them on, whereupon he immediately takes them off. This is particularly annoying since he claims to be unable to undress himself whenever I ask him to. The noise is reaching intolerable levels and I’m sure that the whole street is twitching their curtains.

Rufus is cupping his ears dramatically and moaning, “Why do I have to listen to this noise?”

“I don’t much like it either,” I shout over the wails. I want to press fast-forward to get to the point where they are both asleep and I have a large glass of wine in my hands. I can’t work out a way of getting there. There is a ten-foot wall of disobedience, tantrums and teeth-brushing to clamber over until I reach the sanctuary of my evening.

“Come on.” I grab an arm apiece and drag them into their bedroom. I know I am pulling them too hard but I convince myself that it’s the only way to get them there. I shove them into their respective bunks and hold the door tight behind me. I go into a sort of trance to block out their wails and the beating on the door. Finally it subsides. I feel a surge of triumph, almost immediately replaced by shame.

I go downstairs to get the damn glass of wine. It’s half an hour later than I had hoped to get them down, half an hour of
my precious evening, of time that could have been spent on the delights of tidying up random bits of plastic, cooking supper, making Gabe’s packed lunch for him to eat at Deena’s house or watching mindless TV. I pour myself a glass and slump on a chair in the kitchen. I swear I see a mouse scuttle across the room, but I am too wrung out to care. The image of a rodent is replaced by the image of the marks left on the boys’ arms by my too-tight grip, which is accompanied by a soundtrack of my shouts, of the awful inconsistency of my parenting, veering between craven cajoling and uncontrolled anger. I feel my sorrow rise up inside with an almost physical presence, bubbling up from my stomach into my mouth. It tastes of bile.

Time is spent staring at the wall, only to be broken by Joel walking in. It’s past nine o’clock. “Glass of wine, how lovely,” is his greeting. He smells as if he has had a few already. “Boys down, then? Shame, I was looking forward to seeing them. Good day?”

I can’t speak. I can’t even nod or shake my head. I just gulp down another shot of Merlot. He doesn’t seem to have noticed my lack of reply, or maybe he doesn’t care. My mind spins off into a fearful fantasy that there are hidden cameras in this house and that the whole world shall be treated to the image of me dragging my beloved sons so hard by their arms that they might be pulled out of their sockets. There will be another camera inside their room to capture their little fists beating at the door, begging to be let out. Will the neighbors report me to social services? I would if I had heard the sounds coming out of their bedroom.

Joel looks at the bowl of water with the floating corpses of drowned lice in it. “Have I missed the de-nitting? Shame, I find it strangely satisfying. Who did they get them from, anyway?”

I shrug.

“Must have been Mitzi’s kids,” he says.

The shock of this accusation stirs me out of my shame-induced torpor. “I doubt that. Mitzi’s children don’t have lice.”

“How do you know? I thought they liked clean hair.”

“That’s just what they tell parents to make themselves feel better. I suppose I’m going to have to tell Mitzi to check hers. Michael will make cracks about Gabe and Rufus bringing in their plagues from poor school.”

“How do you know our lot didn’t catch it from her kids?”

“I don’t think they have nits at private school.”

Joel looks in the bowl of water. “Well, these ones are wearing purple stripy blazers and bullying the oiks who don’t have a second home in the country, so I think they might be.”

I fizz with irritation that he has returned home in time to make smart alec remarks, but not to help me when I needed him. He goes upstairs and I follow him. I want to punish him for not being there tonight, for waltzing in as ever when it’s too late, for expressing sorrow at missing out on seeing the boys when I have seen too much of them tonight. I want to punish him for getting me into a position where I punished the boys. I should yank his arms, not theirs. I watch him as he goes into our bedroom, knowing that his coming home from work ritual is good for at least three debits on The List, my only form of punishment.

The first is easy meat.

Subsection C [laundry] number
1
)
Throws his balled-up socks in vague direction of laundry basket. They never go in
.

Then he goes toward the chest of drawers. Come on, Joel, you know the routine. Yes! There it is:

Subsection E [living] number
3
)
Empties pockets full of change onto chest of drawers (and kitchen table, mantelpiece, bit by the door where the letters go, etc., etc., creating small foothills of coppers all over the house)
.

Once he’s taken out the change he begins to remove the rest of the detritus from his pockets. No doubt some receipts that won’t get charged to expenses, an underground ticket or two, tissues. He stops and turns around to glance at me. He then does something that I find almost as shocking as Mitzi and Michael’s glass coffee table exploits.

He picks up the pile of change, looks at it, and puts it carefully into his wallet. He puts the receipts into the top drawer of the chest of drawers. He then picks up the tissues that he has left, walks past me and puts them into the toilet.

I look at his departing back. It is as if The List works, by some strange alchemy or osmosis. I go into the boys’ room and stroke their sleeping foreheads and murmur my apologies into their sleeping minds.

“Shut up, poo-pen boy,” Rufus says to Gabe in retaliation for a pinch.

“That’s not very nice,” I say.

“But he pinched me.” He pronounces it pinch-
ed
, like something out of Shakespeare.

“Gabe, don’t pinch him,” I say in a perfunctory way. I’m tired after falling asleep on the floor of the boys’ room, then having been unable to go back to sleep on transferring myself to the marital bed. I greeted the boys effusively when they woke up before six. They looked rather scared; at first I thought it was because they were carrying the memory of their shrieking, arm-pulling mother, but it may have been their shock at seeing me so friendly at the early hour. I told them how sorry I was and they shrugged. A psychologist could tell me if this was a good or a bad thing.

I vow to myself that from now on, I will parent them as if there were cameras filming me around the house. I will be patient and
consistent. I won’t chat on my mobile, check emails or try to read the paper when I’m with them. I will be, as they say, in the moment. It does not help that our day starts with breakfast, the powder keg of mealtimes. All that cereal-slopping, book-finding and harrying out of the house.

I vow to myself that from now on, I will parent them as well as I love them. And I love them so much, I really do; it’s just that sometimes, when I’m tired, I don’t like them very much.

“Why are you calling him poo-boy?” Joel asks Rufus, smirking.

“Don’t encourage him,” I say.

“Gabe pooed and used his poo to draw with.”

“What?”

“Nothing. He said it was monsters but it just looked like rubbishy nothing. I’m much better at drawing.”

“No, I mean, what on?”

“The walls near the bath.”

Joel turns to me. “Is this true?”

“Yes. It is.”

He looks as though he is about to giggle. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t think it was such a great anecdote.”

“It is. Are we supposed to be pleased with his fine motor skills?”

I shrug.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

“Fine.”

“It’s a bit odd that you didn’t tell me. It’s not like you can exactly forget someone getting creative like that. You’d normally at least have a whine about it.”

I carry on scraping encrustations off plastic cereal bowls.

I am beginning to feel that Joel and I don’t exist in the real world anymore, only in relation to The List. It is as if it holds all the
truth of our marriage, and what happens or is spoken outside of it is a mirage. He was right when he said that I am being nicer to him. It’s not that we are getting on well, but we are arguing less. I am sublimating all my fury, while he is spending more time in the office and less time pissing me off. When he is at home, he’s different from how he has always been. “Chipper” is the old-fashioned word I’d use to describe him. He’s become this jolly, clasp-hands-together and say “Right, then” type of man.

As the tally steadily climbs toward 100, I find myself playing out the moment of revelation, when I say: “Joel, I want a divorce.”

I try the words out loud, just for the effect. It makes me feel sick. It’s not what I want. I want to go back to the way we were, before we had children—except with the children, of course. But I’m not sure that the way we loved each other is compatible with having the boys. It was so self-absorbed. You think to love someone is an act of selflessness, but really you love the reflection of your best self that you see in their mirror. Joel’s flakiness and my efficiency had a perfect chemistry before children, but our boys are like an ingredient that, though delicious in itself, makes the whole recipe go wrong.

I try very hard to imagine Joel changing so that I find him as helpful as I used to find him seductive. If he doesn’t go over his allotted number of debits on The List, then I shall try to find a way to realize this Shangri-la of family life, though I suspect that it cannot exist. And if he does go over, then I suppose there is only one alternative.

I try the words out again and repetition has blunted their power to nauseate.

“Joel, I want a divorce.” I even look at myself in the mirror as I say them and try to picture his reaction.