The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (40 page)
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Authors: Christina Hopkinson
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“It’s true, she had a difficult childhood. Though it’s actually irrelevant whether she’s nice or not, what matters is that she doesn’t make me very nice. I don’t want to compare myself to her any longer. And to know her is to compare. She invites it. It’s kind of the whole point of her. I can still see Daisy and I don’t see enough of our old friends, and I’ve got to fit in these dates with my husband, and actually there are some really nice parents at school and I could do more for the PTA. There are lots of better things for me to do than see Mitzi. And her attendants. God, if I never have to see Alison again, it will be a better world.” They
both nodded. “But don’t put ‘Never see Mitzi again’ on the list. Not that I’m going to let them back into my manky kitchen ever again.”
Who knew, as Becky would say, that marriage was such hard work, that it would need a business plan, strategies and action points? That it would need daily gratitude, weekly sex and monthly board meetings? That we would sit with our diaries every Sunday evening to work out who was picking up which child to take to football, who could work and get up late, whose hobby took precedence? That it would take a trained mediator, a sort of marital management consultant, to hand out redundancy notices to all the inequality and resentment, and to recruit good will and cooperation?
But there it is, on the fridge, our very own little declaration of co-dependence. An A3 sheet of tiny font, glanced at by visitors before their eyes glaze over with the mind-numbing detail and coded shorthand of it. It nestles beside the invitation to Michael’s fiftieth birthday party, to be held in one of those old-fashioned gentleman’s clubs. I have turned it down, though I like its embossed thickness amid the term dates and shopping lists. Less showy is the invitation to Jemima’s thirty-fifth, that watershed date in a woman’s life, now passed. She and Dan spent the evening snogging like teenagers and she confessed to me that they had decided to stop using contraception. He’ll probably irritate her in the end, but who cares for now.
•
Joel not to indulge himself in the flattering attentions of young underlings in the office, nor to kiss them (or whatever else may have happened).
•
Mary not to entertain fantasies about sophisticated brunettes wearing nothing but green silk lingerie and clutching a sex aid.
No, not really. These two strictures aren’t on the fridge for the world and their offspring to see. They’re in my heart, though, and on my mind.
Joel and I talked a lot about Kitty and I make snippy comments whenever he stays late in the office. But every time I do so, I feel guilty all over again about Cara and feel a compulsion to tell him, though exactly what I’m not sure. Nothing happened—no, really, it didn’t. There is nothing to tell, I say to myself, and although Joel would forgive me—because of Kitty he has no choice, after all—but I’m not so sure that Becky would.
The thing is, I believe Joel when he says that he never fancied her as much as he fancies me. And I know that I will never love anybody like I love him. He has to put up with my irritability as the flipside to that fiery redhead stuff that hooked him in the first place, just as I have had to learn that laid-back charm is not always a good quality. Maybe all relationships are like this—the good can become bad if you let it, it can go either way.
I bumped into Daisy the other day, who had lost a ton of weight since I’d last seen her. I asked her if she’d been working out and got the predictable answer about not being arsed with that. No, she said, but she’d read a book that made her examine her eating habits. The hardest thing about losing all that weight, she told me, was writing a thorough list of all the reasons she over-ate. “It took me weeks,” she said. “I was knackered by the end of it.” By some alchemy, the mere writing of this document allowed her to shed weight almost effortlessly. I was skeptical, but now I think that Joel and I have done the same. It is as if by writing the list—our affidavit of equal parenting, as Becky dubbed it—we got halfway there. Joel and Becky kept asking me what I had hoped to achieve with The List V1.0 and I never knew the answer, but I do now. I thought that by writing down all our domestic problems, I’d cure them. And perhaps, in the end, I did.
If I’m making it sound easy, then I don’t mean to. I still want to kill him, frequently. I still do what he calls “the sigh,” tell him that life would be easier as a single parent and say things like “I don’t mind you staying out late at all, I’m thrilled to do their bedtime alone for the third night in a row.” I still say “I don’t have time for this,” before realizing that actually I do; despite being busier at work, I do have time for lots of things like sex and courtesy that I always thought I didn’t. And he still throws leftover food into the sink and puts saucepans that have had only boiling water in them into the dishwasher.
Daisy’s miraculous diet has taught me another tip. When she wants to eat a cake or biscuit, she says, she decides to wait five minutes. When that five minutes are up, she realizes that if she had decided to eat it, it would be finished by now. Somehow this is enough to stop her every time she reaches for the biscuit tin. I’m the same. I force myself not to splurge on criticism but to wait a few moments, by which time I find that gentle recourse to the document on the fridge door usually suffices.
No, it’s not easy, this new life, but then it’s not hard like the period after I found out about Kitty and that Joel had been tampering with The List. We were so frozen in fear and loneliness that I had begun to feel nostalgic for the aggression and irritation we’d been suffering before.
“You’ve not once told me I’m hormonal,” I say.
“That’s because you haven’t been,” he replies. “Have you forgiven me?”
“Yes, I have. Have you forgiven me?”
“So you see that you’ve got something that needs forgiving?”
“Of course.”
He smiles. “Then you are absolutely forgiven.” We kiss, and not just because it tells us to on the fridge door.
* * *
We’re walking across a wide open expanse just outside the city. Becky and Ursula have escaped the chaos of their house, the building site, to look after Rufus and Gabriel for the afternoon. Becky, bless her, takes every opportunity to facilitate our reconciliation, seeing us as a test bed for her mediation skills and theories. Joel has replaced his romantic gestures of yore with the far more endearing one of following every point on the new list. This morning’s metaphorical bunch of white roses was him giving the boys breakfast and making sure that there was no remnant of it left on the worktops.
“I never knew how blissful it would be to walk at my own pace,” I say to him.
“Without a chorus of ‘Carry me.’ ”
“Or ‘Are we nearly there?’ ”
“And ‘Walks are so boooring.’ ”
We carry on without speaking for a few minutes. On walks, there’s a joyous equality between silence and conversation. I’m so glad that “date nights” can be date days and that we are doing this rather than gulping down a restaurant meal and preparing a poisonous hangover. I never would have known that going for uninterrupted strolls would be one of the things I most missed when we had children.
Joel reaches out and takes my hand. I feel a jolt. It is more intimate than having sex. Anybody can do that, and we’ve been sticking to our weekly assignations. To stretch the comparison between the restoration of our marriage and weight loss, I’ve found that sex and going to the gym are similar in that the hardest thing is getting going, but it’s always worth it once you’ve started.
People don’t hold hands unless they are five or they really like each other. You don’t hold hands with a one-night stand. Mitzi and Cara don’t hold hands.
We walk on and it feels awkward at first. I want to wriggle away and immediately feel like adjusting my coat or scratching my nose. I miss the momentum that my solitary arm-swinging gives me. After a while, though, it feels as if he is propelling me forward and I him, that two arms connected can give you more energy than your own. We swing our arms together as though we have an imaginary child between them. We walk faster and faster until we begin to run down the hill into air that’s on the turn of winter.
It feels as though we’re hurtling into the future.
Arabella Stein has encouraged and guided me in writing this book ever since it was a one-sentence idea. She has reined in both my and Mary’s madness; made me laugh; suggested important amendments and encouraged me when I’ve been disheartened. She is not only my agent, but a brilliant reader and friend.
Thanks too to Ben Fowler, Sandy Violette, Tessa Ingham and everyone else at Abner Stein.
I’m grateful to Carolyn Mays, Francesca Best, and Caryn Karmatz-Rudy for all their excellent editorial changes. Karen Kosztolnyik at Grand Central is a wonderful editor to exchange emails with, and thanks must also go to her colleagues Amanda Englander, Deb Futter, Leah Tracosas, Elly Weisenberg, and Jamie Raab.
Over the years, my children have been cared for and the piles of stuff minimized by Jackie Strawn, Debbie Perera and Renata Zakrocka. Thanks also to parents and teachers at Little Ark and Thornhill Primary School, especially the mothers who have shared their gripes as well as looking after my children. Our families are also on hand with generous offers of help, especially grandmothers Sylvia Hopkinson and Jenny Carruthers.
Thank you, David Barker, my “go-to muso,” who created the new-baby playlist.
Bini Adams and Francis and Charlotte Hopkinson talked me through TV production and the various roles within it, as well as reading an early draft of the book.
Finally, thank you to William, Celia and Lydia Carruthers for all the ideas unwittingly contributed.
Contents
Cyber Cinderella
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Christina Hopkinson
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: April 2011
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ISBN: 978-1-609-41864-9