The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (12 page)

I reel. “It’s a wonder you don’t asphyxiate yourself.”

“What, and your shit don’t stink?” he replies, the swear word causing us both to reflexively glance at our oldest boy child.

“Well, I don’t sit there like a prince on a throne for three hours. I thought I was getting a lie-in.”

“You are.”

I gesture at the boys. “So relaxing.”

“You just need to look after them while I make you your special breakfast.”

“Not much of a lie-in then, is it?”

He sighs. “All right, all right, but you know how difficult it is to cook and look after them.”

“You don’t say.”

“Happy birthday, sweetheart. You don’t look a day older than when I met you.”

“Unless I was a particularly raddled-looking twenty-seven-year-old, I’m sure I do. God, thirty-six, I’m way nearer my forties than my twenties now,” I say, peering into the mirror, which due to the fact that neither of us have changed the lightbulb that blew a fortnight ago, casts a not unflattering glow. Perhaps he’s right, perhaps I am weathering well despite all the anger and bitterness I’m feeling. You’d have thought it would be showing in my face. There must be a photograph of me somewhere in which I appear shriveled with ill will and resentment, allowing me to look, well, all right, I suppose.

“No, really,” he says. “I was looking at you talking to Becky and Mitzi and you’d never know you were all the same age.”

I give mental thanks to the trichological Botox known as a fringe and decide at least to try to enjoy my birthday. I am leavening the load of XY chromosomes in this household by inviting my sister Jemima. She’s the only one of my family, my first family, that I’ve got down south and introduces into this house the pleasantly familiar elements of my hometown, food obsessive-compulsiveness and impractical footwear.

My birthday resolution to be happy is further tested as I go downstairs 20 minutes later to view the carnage left over by the preparation of pancakes with maple syrup and blueberry compote. There’s a huge bunch of flowers, from an expensive celebrity florist. They are undeniably gorgeous. Joel is good with such things.

“Brassica and French tulips,” he says. “They’re grown in Kent, not Kenya. I checked.”

I don’t bloody want apple blossom and French tulips, I think, I want wiped worktops and dressed children. I look at the flowers
again. They are so perfect and sculptural that I feel our kitchen is unworthy of them; they deserve work surfaces like Mitzi’s to showcase their loveliness. I’m wrong, it’s not that I don’t want these flowers, I just want the life to match. “Thank you, they’re beautiful.”

“And so are you.”

These are the sort of words he’s lavished on me from the moment we first got together. They brought me to a stupor of love, but now that love is hungover. His compliments have become habitual.

He gives me flowers, but he doesn’t put them into a vase. He shows them off to visitors, but he fails to empty the water, even when it’s slimy with age.

I take out a shepherd’s pie from the freezer for lunch. Or “just shepherd’s pie,” as Joel always refers to it, despite the fact that it’s actually a total pain of peeling and chopping to make, and always ends up keeping me up until way past my bedtime mashing potatoes. I’m good at “just” type of recipes—bolognese, macaroni and cheese, sponge cakes—while Joel excels at “Wow, look at that, you spoil us” food. Which may in fact be rustled up in minutes: pan-fried scallops with a balsamic jus or a steak with homemade Béarnaise sauce.

Jemima arrives, ostentatiously wearing a pair of sunglasses amid the winter gloom. I hug her and enjoy the fact that she is my size. Not as huge and bear-like as my husband, not as small and terrier-like as my sons. She smells delicious and clean and unfrazzled.

“Do you mind?” I gesture toward her shoes and the pile of outdoor ones we’ve left by the door.

“A bit. I mean, have you seen them?”

They are spindly-heeled, complicatedly strapped and pointy-
toed. “They’re fabulous,” I say, slipping easily into the shoe-language of yore. These days I tend to reserve the words “gorgeous,” “exquisite” and “fabulous” for people’s new kitchen units. “Absolutely stunning. They’re far too nice to join that hellhole shoe mountain. Why don’t we go and put them on the dresser where they can be properly venerated?” She takes me at my word and carefully conveys them toward the kitchen.

“You’re looking thin,” she says. “Have you lost weight?”

“A bit, I think,” I reply.

“Almost half a stone, I’d guess, maybe a bit less. Five pounds?”

“All right, it’s six pounds. My, you’re good,” I say. “You’re like one of those boys who can guess a woman’s bra size to within half a cup just by looking.”

She giggles. “I try. Do you think I can market this particular skill in some way?”

“Additional skills and interests on your CV? Anyway, you’re one to talk. You look fantastic. Really toned. Have you been going to the gym a lot?”

“Three to four times a week.”

“Lucky you. I never get a chance to go anymore. Although I’m now quite thin, I’m skinny-flabby, do you know what I mean?”

“It’s a small price to pay,” she says. “For all this.” She gestures around the kitchen, which looks like a bad TV drama version of a family home, rather than the real thing. All the obvious clues are there—the children’s daubs stuck to the walls, invitations to birthday parties hanging off fridge magnets, piles of picture books on an old pine dresser, brightly colored crockery hanging on hooks. And me, too, I’m just set dressing—I can’t be the real mother at the heart of this hearth, I’m a bad actor pretending to be a grown-up. I’m a fake materfamilias. Martyr-familias, perhaps.

Jemima looks wistful, as she does when the subject of her
single and childless/child-free state arises. I am not to complain of my life or describe it as less than perfect. She brightens as Joel enters the room.

“Darling,” he says, enveloping her. “Nice sunglasses.”

“We call them sunnies nowadays.”

“Oh, you crazy young folk. Come and tell me all about what life is like out there.” He gives a theatrically wistful sigh. “Are you still doing the Internet dating thing?”

I wince, waiting for Jemima to do the hurt, single-girl look, but she swings back to anecdote mode for his benefit. “I’m on three separate sites. On one of them, I’ve got the seventh most visited profile. It’s exhausting sifting through all the emails. God, there are some freaks out there.”

“But some not-freaks too?” I ask.

“Oh, yes. There’s this surfer guy who wants to hook up. He is hot to trot.”

“How old is he?” I am so boring and predictable.

“Twentysomething. Late twentysomething, I think.”

“I’m not surprised you’re inundated,” Joel says. “It’s brilliant. A smorgasbord of possibilities with none of the stigma of dating agencies of the past. I mean, if someone like you goes online… If I were single and went onto a dating site and there were girls like you—well, it’s like the sort of thing I used to fantasize about as an adolescent.”

I wonder if he still does.

“You do look fantastic, Jemima,” I say, falling into an age-old but strangely comforting routine of everything being about her, even on my birthday. It’s always a relief to cede attention in her direction. Her eyebrows are plucked, her skin exfoliated, her clothes fashionable. “We could be a ‘before and after’ shot on one of those cosmetic surgery makeover shows. You’re the physical embodiment of what I’d look like if I hadn’t had children.”

“Or been born with red hair,” she chips in. “Not that it isn’t lovely. I’ve always loved your hair.”

“Flame,” I say, “as in flame-haired temptress.”

Joel laughs a little too heartily.

“Do you want to go and check that the boys aren’t killing each other?”

“They’re fine.”

I give him the look that conveys this was a rhetorical question and he slopes off.

Jemima physically slumps once Joel leaves the room. “It’s not that great, you know.”

“What isn’t?”

“Internet dating. It’s all very well having a limitless supply of fresh meat, but the thing is, you don’t want it to be endless, do you? I mean, the whole point is that it should end with you meeting someone great. Me meeting someone great.”

“It’s not the end, though, meeting someone. It’s not the end of problems and the solution to everything. It’s just the beginning of a whole set of new ones.” How can I communicate to her, without being patronizing, that there’s a whole long life beyond the chick-flick ending.

“But at least you’ve got the option of all these new problems. I’m beginning to worry that your thirties is like some gigantic game of musical chairs and somehow I’ve been left standing.”

“Jemima, I’m really sure that should you choose to settle down, then you will. And anyway, you’re young. You’ll always be my little sister.”

“I’m almost thirty-five.”

“And you’re gorgeous. You’ve always been the gorgeous one. I once heard Mom on the phone saying, ‘I know, who’d have thought it, but Jemima’s the unmarried one.’ ”

“God, she is awful, isn’t she?” We snigger. Ganging up on our
mother has always united us. Joel and I might not have mastered the concept of shared parenting, but Jemima and I have got shared daughtering licked. Although of late, I’ve been wondering whether we haven’t been a bit unfair to Mom. We did nothing to help her around the house. She tried everything to induce us. Timetables, lists and bribery, but nothing worked. She did housework too well, that was her mistake. She did it so seamlessly, secretly and silently, that I never actually realized she was doing it all and how much there was of it.

“Honestly, make the most of this time,” I say. “What may follow is not an endless honeymoon of perfection. I always think that being single is like being unemployed—if you knew how long it was going to last, you could have such a fun time of it.”

“It’s not fun anymore,” she says. “I’m so bored of it. I’m bored of the bloody dates and the swapping childhoods and the ‘Did you have any pets when you were growing up?’ and the phoning and the not phoning. There are so many ways to be not-called these days. They can not-call you by email, by Facebook, by mobile, by landline, by office phone, by text. Fuck, I’m sick of it. Do you know why I go to the beauticians so much?”

“To look as good as you do?”

“It’s because I want to be touched. Oh, god, that sounds really pervy, doesn’t it? When you’re single, you crave being touched so you end up paying for face massages and full-body seaweed wraps. You crave human touch and it’s better to pay for it this way than have stupid one-night stands with men you don’t even particularly like but who still manage to make you feel shit if they not-call you. And guilty if they do because you have absolutely no intention of ever seeing them again.”

“I have too much touch in my life. I’m always picking them off, like tics.”

“Who, Joel or the boys?”

“All of them. Urgh.” She smiles. My ploy to make her feel better has worked. It’s a lie, of course, at least partially. I love that my boys are like hooks of Velcro, ever-ready to attach themselves to the mother loops. I grab at them when they walk past me to crush their skinniness into my chest, pulling them in so tight it’s as if I want to be one again, as we were in pregnancy. It’s a wonder to me that I have this constant and accommodating source of physical comfort and I dread the day, which cannot be too far off, when it will end. Joel, though, with his clammy arms at night and the way that he is rendered on a different scale to Rufus and Gabe—I was telling the truth about that.

“I’m sorry you’re feeling like this, Jem. Maybe twentysomething surfer boys aren’t the way forward.” Jemima still has her penchant for pretty boyband member types, which was a good look when she was an equally exquisite young thing, but doesn’t make for ideal settling-down material.

“You think I should lower my standards?”

“Not lower so much as change them. An actuary rather than an actor this time? Dad’s fat whistling man, you know, the one he said he wanted us to end up with.”

“He’s fat because he loves his food.”

“And he whistles because he’s so jovial and contented.”

Jemima puts her head in her hands. “Oh, god, I don’t want that. I want thin angsty man.”

“And I just want you to be happy.”

I do want her to be happy. Despite all the fighting and the dieting and the clothes-stealing, that’s all we’ve ever wanted for each other. I want her to have what I have, I suppose—the marriage and the children—but what arrogance is it of mine to think that’s what will make her happy? I mean, it’s not exactly
working for me, is it? I worry that in fact, I want her to meet someone and settle down not because I want her to be happy like me, but because I want her to be
unhappy
like me.

She perks up once again as Joel returns. People do that, around Joel—he can make everyone but me glow. He’s well on his way to becoming fat, though I haven’t heard him whistle much of late.

“Joel, do you think you can tidy up the breakfast things so I can get on with laying the table?”

Jemima makes that rising-inflection “ooh” sound that children do when their teacher gets annoyed, as in “Ooh, Miss has got a bit batey.” “Mary,” she says, “nobody would ever guess that you kept your side of our bedroom so messy that there were things growing in it.”

“I know, she was wonderfully untidy,” says Joel. “It was one of the things I fell in love with, her fantastically slatternly ways.”

“Yeah, well, you have to do a bit more maintenance when you’ve got children, Joel.”

“Do you remember,” Jemima says, “how you used to make a line out of tights across the room. Do you remember those really thick woolly ones that Mom used to try to get us to darn if we got holes in them?”

“Make do and mend, she used to say. Don’t know the last time I darned a sock.”

“I’ve got some you could work on,” says Joel.

“Very funny,” I say. “I do remember the Maginot Line of tights. You weren’t allowed to step over it or put any of your stuff in my territory.”

“You used to move it a few inches further into my side of the room every day and think I wouldn’t notice.”