The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (36 page)

I have cried over Joel, but not last night when he left. At first I was too shell-shocked by what had happened that I mooched around, unable to know what to think. Then I read a trashy novel until I fell asleep with the light on; anything to avoid being alone with the swill in my head. I wanted to sleep forever and not get out of bed for months or years, but the boys were unaware of this and jumped on my bed at their usual ungodly hour, not even noticing that Joel wasn’t there, assuming him to be in the shower or down in the kitchen.

No, I didn’t cry until breakfast this morning, when the boys finally realized that a quarter of our family was missing and asked where Daddy was. It was the cinematic poignancy of their questioning coupled with my desire to hide anything ill from them that set me off.

“Where’s Daddy?” they kept on asking. “I miss my daddy,” until I could bear it no longer. I hid in the loo to make sure they didn’t see my tears. They banged over and over on the door, while I shouted, “I’m doing a poo,” to keep them at bay. That last bit was less like a movie.

When they had finished being winsome, they moved on to moaning about how much they missed him in a way that they never do when he has to go away for work. It was almost as if they knew. Any minute, I expected them to put on American accents and say, “Why don’t Mommy and Daddy love each other anymore?” It felt like a horrible vista into the future when we would have to tell them. What am I going to have to tell them, anyway?

“I’m so glad you came,” says Becky as we sit at our usual low-rent, high-fiber lunching place. “I got the feeling you were trying to get out of having lunch with me.”

“No, no.” I glance at my watch. “I just thought I wasn’t going to be able to make it. And I can’t stay long. I’m expecting a phone call summoning me back to the office at any moment.”

Becky clutches my hand. I’m alarmed at this physical contact. She doesn’t know her own strength and the gesture is more bone-crushing than soothing.

“Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”

I decide that I do. “It’s Joel. He’s gone.”

She nods as if she already knew. “Why? Is this about your list?”

“Partly. Not really. He did find it a few weeks ago.”

“Did he read it?”

“Yes, every last point.”

Becky looks horrified. “He read your list detailing everything that you don’t like about him?” I nod. “Well, I’m not surprised he left.”

“The list’s not the half of it. Please don’t tell anyone what I’m going to tell you.” Becky motions a cross over her chest. “Joel had some sort of dalliance with a girl at work. Her name is Kitty.” She gives the look of a child who’s just been told Santa doesn’t exist. I find myself wanting to defend him, to explain that it’s not his fault really and tell her not to judge him, but then I think of the yellow toothbrush. “He didn’t sleep with her. That’s what he says, anyway, and I believe him actually. He hung out with her in a not entirely appropriate way and they kissed. And he wanted to sleep with her. May have even been planning it. I don’t think anything more has happened, but what’s hard is not knowing exactly why it hasn’t happened. Yet. Or hadn’t happened then.” I don’t know whether this is true anymore. God knows what comfort Kitty offered him last night. Maybe he even told her that he’d left me for her, that he’d made this big sacrifice. Maybe that’s even the truth.

“But Joel would never do anything to risk your family.”

“That’s what I thought. Looks like we were both wrong.” I mean Becky and I, but in a moment of clarity, I realize that I also mean Joel and I. We’re both in the wrong. Can it ever be that we’re both in the right?

“What’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know. You know what you were saying about how all your decisions seemed dependent on another being made, so that you ended up being paralyzed into inertia? That’s what I feel.”

“You’ll have to write another one of your lists,” she says.

“The List was supposed to make everything clear, black and
white, but it’s all messy. Life is as messy as the bloody house and no lovely Excel document is going to sort it out for me.”

“We can sort it out. Let’s start with your list.”

“That’s what Joel said. Like it was worse than the girl.” And yet didn’t I feel, in some strange way, that his continual insistence on blocking the plughole of the kitchen sink with breakfast cereals hurt me as much as his chasing this woman?

“It’s not a question of which is worse or better. You’ve got to drop it with the not fair thing, Mary.”

“Listen to you, the negotiator.”

“No, mediator. I’m fully trained in marital mediation and I’m very expensive too, so consider yourself blessed and shut up and listen. When you wrote your list, what did you hope to accomplish?”

“Like I said, clarity.”

“Yes, but clarity with what aim? If he failed”—she does a little air quotes gesture—“what was going to be his punishment?” And again. Enough with the rabbit fingers.

I shrug. She stares at me. I feel like I’m in the witness stand. “Officially, if he proved himself to be as useless as I thought he was, then that would be it.”

“That would be what?”

“You know.”

“I want you to say it.”

“I was going to divorce him. I mean, I was going to threaten to divorce him. I was going to raise the subject of divorce, at least. We were going to talk about it. In a serious way.”

“I remember you saying something along those lines,” says Becky, “and I couldn’t believe it at the time, either. Honestly, Mary, had you really planned to sit down at the end of his probationary period and show him your list and say, ‘Well, then, let’s bankrupt ourselves and scar our children forever because
you squeezed the toothpaste from the middle on the fourth of March’?”

“That’s not on the list—with the plastic tubes it comes in these days it doesn’t really matter where you squeeze. Sometimes we even get the pump dispensers.”

“Don’t try to change the subject.” She’s fierce now and I thank god that she’s on my side. Allegedly. “Were you really going to suggest you divorce over a series of petty domestic challenges? Mary, think about it, try to imagine the full conversation you were going to have.”

I’d never got further than the triumphant moment where I shocked him with the revelation of the proof of his uselessness. But when it really happened, when he discovered The List for himself, my gut reaction was one of embarrassment. It all seemed so rational at the time, but I look back now and think that I was in the grip of madness. Yes, I was mad in both the angry and the insane senses of the word. This is what always happens: he does something irritating, I am justified in my anger but then I express it in a way that allows him to recolonize the moral high ground. I am justified in my actions, I say to myself again. I am.

“Come on, Mary, were you really going to ask for a divorce?”

“No,” I admit finally. “I wanted change. I didn’t know exactly what was to happen, but I knew things couldn’t continue as they were without me killing myself or him. I couldn’t change my children and wouldn’t want to, it didn’t feel like I could change the house, I felt like I couldn’t get a new job while I’m working part-time, as who’d want to employ me? It felt like Joel was the only part of my life I could control. Like food for a teenage girl.”

She shakes her head. “If you had any idea what I see in my job, you wouldn’t have even let the word ‘divorce’ flash into your mind, let alone entertain ridiculous thoughts about how your life might improve with one.”

“Improve. That’s it. I just wanted my life to improve and I didn’t know how.”

“Well, your life’s looking much improved now, isn’t it? Joel got off with another woman and you’re no longer living together, and I presume your boys are missing their father. Yay for your list, hey, Mary? It really made life better for you.”

“I know, I know.” I sigh. “And I’m miserable and he’s now got the perfect excuse to live at Kitty’s—you know, the girl at work—and get what he wanted all along. I can’t stop thinking about him having moved in with her.”

“When?”

“Last night. He went to Kitty’s house. He’s living at Kitty’s.”

“Don’t be daft, Mary, Joel’s at Ursula’s.”

“How do you know?” She can’t know. She didn’t see him pack his toothbrush. Please let her know, please let it be the truth.

“Because I saw him there last night and he said he was staying.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Just sorting out some stuff. Don’t change the subject.”

“How was he?”

“In a terrible state.”

“Really?”

“Devastated.”

“Did he tell you what was going on?”

“Only that you’d had a row, a bad one. He was crying most of the time.”

I feel a thrilling relief to hear of his misery and his place of residence.

“I knew it must be bad as he was asking me all sorts of questions of a professional nature,” she says.

“Like what?” I feel my optimism being extinguished.

“What the legal ramifications of him moving out of the family home would be.”

“Which are?”

“Not great for him. He damages his chances of shared custody if he vacates the children’s main place of residence.”

“Really?”

“Yes. What he does in these early days can make a real difference to eventual residency orders.”

“No, I mean was he really asking you about custody and residence and the law?” I think of him projecting himself into a tiny bedsit where the boys will visit, and it’s almost worse than the picture of him at Kitty’s.

“Yes, he was.”

“But that’s all to do with what happens when a couple separates or, I don’t know, divorces.”

“Yes.” She looks apologetic. “I’m so sorry, Mary. I couldn’t understand it at the time, but now I’ve heard about what’s happened, I get it. He’s had an affair, of sorts, and you’ve written a list of why you hate him and he’s read it. In my work, I see people split up over far less.”

“You think I’ve blown it, don’t you?”

She doesn’t say anything.

I think I’ve blown it.

It’s a mother’s truism: “In many ways,” we say to one another, “it’s actually easier for me to manage when he’s not around.” I’ve said it myself, lots of times. I dare say I believed it.

The thing is, these last two days, I’ve discovered that it’s not true. It’s a falseism, if such a word exists. However useless Joel is—and he is, very—a second person to pull a child out of the bath is handy, and it’s good to have someone to dish out cereal
while I have a shower. I miss having someone to tell of Rufus’s triumphs in his spelling test or the funny thing that Gabriel has said. The thing I’ve always most hated about being a parent is the relentlessness of it all, and this is even more true when you’re on your own. Of course, I’ve been alone before. Joel was away for a month once. This time feels different, though. It feels both relentless and endless, a terrifying combination.

All I want to do is flop in front of the TV with a large glass of wine, but Jemima is coming over for some pizza with her new man. She met him on the Internet and he works in IT and she sounds smitten after less than two months together.

Fate is very cruel, I think, as I open the door to my sister, who looks happier than I have seen her for years. Is there only so much romantic happiness available to share between us, like chocolate at Christmas?

“This is Dan,” she says with pride. Dan, Dan the fat whistling man, I think as I shake hands with this smiley person. Where’s the six-pack and boyband good looks of her usual type? I force myself to cheer up, which is made easier by Dan, who it is difficult to feel uptight around. He enthuses about our house, compliments the photos of our boys and says that Rufus has very good writing for his age. Jemima giggles throughout.

“Where’s Joel?”

“He’s out, some work thing. Sorry.”

“That is such a shame,” she says. “You’d love him, Dan. Joel is the best.” They would like each other. At last Jemima has a boyfriend Joel could talk to.

It’s lucky we’re eating pizza slices rather than food requiring a knife and fork, since Jemima and Dan appear to need to hold hands throughout. They use the first person plural a lot and talk about selling their flats to buy somewhere together.

“I told you, didn’t I?” she says to him as I turn away to stack the dishwasher. “My sister has the perfect life.”

I feel like someone’s tightening a corset around my chest. The phone goes and I escape the loved-up couple.

“It’s me.”

I feel both terror and excitement, like the early stages of dating, though more of the former and less of the latter. “Hello, Joel.”

“I wanted to say good night to the boys but I couldn’t get away and I didn’t want to do it in front of people.”

“Don’t worry.”

“How are they?”

“Not great. They miss you.”

“The boys miss me?”

“Yes, of course. The boys miss you. Where are you?”

“At Ursula’s.” I strain to hear his mother’s voice in the background as proof, but there is none. Nor, however, is there the sound of raucous young people having fun. “I thought about going to a mate’s and then I realized I couldn’t really think of any. The ones I like have children and I don’t think I could bear to be around somebody else’s kids at the moment.”

“I thought you’d be having a nice time doing all the things we talk about doing if we didn’t have children—leisurely pints, the cinema, all that.”

Silence. “Joel?”

“I’m here.” His voice is cracking.

“Do you want to come over and do bedtime? Tomorrow?” I feel like I’m putting myself on the line in asking him.

“Yes.”

I put the phone down and try to compose myself. Fortunately Jemima is too busy twisting Dan’s curls around her fingers to
have noticed the strangeness of my conversation and its effect on me.

Dan announces that he is off “for a slash.” Jemima has always gone out with boys, but Dan is very much a bloke. I can’t believe she is with someone so forthcoming about his bodily functions, nor that when he says such a thing she looks at him as though he’s just said he’s off to pick up his Nobel prize.

“Well?” she asks.

“Well, what?”