The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (6 page)

“Can’t think of any other ones about kids. Sorry.”

“Nor can I. Except Brotherhood of Man’s ‘Save All Your Kisses for Me.’ ”

“Never too young to be introduced to the delights of the Eurovision Song Contest.” Six years ago my knowledge of pop trivia rivaled his.

“Very true.” Joel’s love of music was as wide as it was deep. He loved genres that others dismissed, Broadway musicals, 1930s folk and 80s pop. “Do you know what? I’m going to start by concentrating on upbeat but not pappy numbers. ‘Hallelujah,’ ‘Mr. E’s Beautiful Blues’…”

“You who?” OK, maybe he always knew more about music than I did.

“The Eels. ‘Perfect Day,’ of course—wouldn’t everybody’s life be better if they came into the world listening to a bit of Lou Reed?”

“Isn’t it about heroin?”

“The baby’s not going to know that.”

“The baby’s not going to know about much, really.”

“Our baby will be born a genius.” He kissed me. “With your brains. And my, no, your looks too.”

“No, your charm. And your looks too.” At this point, I still felt that he was too good-looking for me, that strangers would point at us and wonder what this god was doing with someone so ordinary.

“No, please no. Not my girth.” He slapped the then small overhang above his belt.

“I love your girth.” I giggled at the other interpretation of this statement and somehow we maneuvered both our growing bellies onto the sofa and celebrated our hope and love to some of the tracks we later chose for Rufus’s birth album (but never actually played, what with the panic over his heart rate, the forceps and all those worried-looking doctors).

“Mary,” says Becky, interrupting my thoughts. “Joel’s wonderful, isn’t he? You do know that?”

“Yes, of course he is,” I say. “He’s wonderful. I’m so lucky.”

I can almost hear the tracks running in my head all these years later as I pass the pregnant women in the café when we get up to
go. There are three of them. One of those will split up with the father of their child, statistically, and another will feel as full of irritation toward their partner as I do toward Joel. I do a little eeny-meeny-miny-mo and pick on the woman in designer glasses as the only one who’ll still be happy in five years’ time.

I get home before Joel, despite having to get some shopping on the way back. Each working day, I’m a Cinderella who must get to the child minder’s in time to pick up the kids. As I run through the streets from the station, I feel as if when the clock strikes 6:30, Deena will spontaneously combust, leaving nothing in her wake but two abandoned children and a pair of inappropriately high shoes. Childcare runs on a strict meter: I shove the coins in to cover just the amount of time I need, to the last minute, not wanting to pay anything more than I might possibly want.

26
) The fact that childcare is paid for out of my salary. As if paying someone else allows me to work whereas it actually allows both or either of us to work, doesn’t it? Which means I have less money than Joel does. Of course, it’s both our money, or more accurately both our debts, but I can never buy clothes for myself without clearing it with him first as there’s never any money in my account, while Joel is always downloading music that he’ll never listen to. If he were a woman and those tracks were shoes, he’d be hiding them in a cupboard and saying, “These old things, I’ve had them for years.”

27
) That whenever I complain that it’s me who has to rush back to pick up the kids, Joel says, “Just pay Deena for extra hours, then.”

28
) Similarly, when I complain about the house being a mess, he says, “Just pay someone to clean, then.” I remind him that we do, for a few hours a week, to which he just says, “Pay her some more, then.” But we’d need a cleaner to work full-time, to follow him about picking up the trail of clothes, food and half-empty glasses that he leaves in his wake. Is the cleaner going to be there last thing at night when he drops all his clothes on the floor? Will she be there every time he eats? Is she going to flush the loo for him? I don’t want to pay for a cleaner, I just want him to
be
cleaner
.

My most frequent nightmare used to be the one about discovering that you hadn’t in fact finished your exams at school, but had to do one more paper that you hadn’t done any revision for. Now, my recurring one is that I’ve left the house, arrived at my destination and suddenly realized that I’ve forgotten to arrange for someone to look after the kids and they’ve been left at home on their own. I’m rushing to get back, frantically phoning neighbors, but things keep stopping me from getting there.

“Hello, Deena, sorry I’m a couple of minutes late,” I say breathlessly. I run not only because I don’t want to be late, but also because I long to see the boys again, like a girl on her way to a first date.

“Don’t you worry about it, we’ve been having a grand time, haven’t we?” Deena beams, balancing her latest grandchild on her hip. I look past the door to the sitting room to see Rufus and Gabe’s ketchup-smeared, television-glazed faces and don’t doubt it. Deena is, as ever, looking as if she is about to enter a glamorous granny competition, with stacked heels, makeup applied with a paint-sprayer, and a magnificent embonpoint. After the patchwork of disastrous childcare arrangements that we’ve had over the years, I’m craven in her presence. I want to say something about the television, the nuggets, and the fact that the squash she gives my kids is not butternut but additive-filled
drinks, but am worried that whatever I say will have an invisible subtitle ticking along below it, reading: “Can you just be a little more middle class, you know, like us?” And it’s unfair, really, given how much she reads to them and properly plays with them and how much better her own children have turned out than the offspring of some of my friends.

Gabe is sitting on Rufus’s lap while they read a book together. Rufus is ignoring the text and making up a story that involves the little girl in the pictures, but rather than being afraid of shadows in the night, in his story she is attacking them with invisible swords made out of thoughts. They look up and see me.

“Mommy,” says Rufus. “Do you know? I missed you.”

“And I missed you both, so much.” For this brief moment everything is perfect.

“Don’t want to go in buggy. My want to walk,” Gabe begins.

“I don’t have time for this,” I reply as I karate chop him into the stroller.

“You’re always saying that,” says Rufus. “You say it ten million times a day.”

“I say it because it’s true, now come on. How was school?”

“You’re always saying that, too,” Rufus says.

“About ten million times a day?”

“No, not that much.”

“So how was it?”

“All right.”

“Who did you talk to?”

“No one.”

“Did you eat anything?”

He shakes his head. I give up. I briefly entertain a fantasy about my unborn girl child, Willa or Aphra or Eudora is her name, who’d giggle and share secrets with me of who her best friend is as we sit on the bed looking at books with a reading age of at
least five years in advance. Mothers of girls are always telling me how amazing their daughters’ reading and handwriting is, while I vainly try to counter with the fact that Gabe can divide up vehicles into those with caterpillar wheels and those without. If you’re a mother of girls, these women tell me with indulgent pride and barely hidden pity, you get to choose Disney Princess duvet covers together, and have the chance to buy patterned tights and to dress your daughter in a sticky-out pink tutu. We poor mothers of boys instead merely learn ace new skills, like a bicycle kick, as we burn off calories with our adrenalin-pumping games of football in the park. We replace our single women’s knowledge of star signs with hard facts about the order of the solar system and the size of the planets. We enjoy their wondrous otherness and melt at the sight of their tiny, unthreatening willies.

I banish all thoughts of Eudora/Aphra/Willa. I love being the mother of boys, however much those with girls find it hard to believe. When I think about Rufus and Gabe, how could I ever want them to be anyone other than themselves?

An hour after I return home, Joel gets back.

29
) Times his return to the exact moment when he’s too late to help with bath- and bedtime, but not late enough to allow me to eat my unmessy toast for supper and watch what I want on TV, which is usually property shows.

30
) Scoffs at property shows and says they’re part of a horrible Little Englander conspiracy to coerce us into an obsession with house prices. Usually starts frothing about “Thatch” and the
1980
s while he’s at it. Generally we fight along male and female lines over the remote control. I concede that he is a rare man who doesn’t like watching football (I gave up my own, rather transparent, interest in it when we got together), but he is following classic middle-aged male precedents by getting into military history and so watching endless documentaries about Nazis. All men do this, don’t they? Reach a certain age and begin to obsess over military history. Antony Beevor’s
Stalingrad
is their gateway drug and, whoosh, before you know it they’re reading books filled with maps showing fronts and pushes. That and suddenly deciding that ₤
5
bottles of wine are no longer good enough for them—those are the male symbols of being over your prime. For women, it’s the development of an interest in interior design. I plead guilty. Men begin to read the business supplement that comes with the Sunday papers, women the travel and gardening ones.

As he comes in, I realize that he’s not alone.

“Ursula, what a surprise,” I say on seeing my mother-in-law, resplendent in full-length velvet skirt, floral turban and dangling parrot earrings. Ursula is a 1980s Posy Simmonds cartoon made flesh, but doesn’t seem to have any awareness of the fact that she dresses like a feminist in panto. I kiss her cheeks, which smell and feel like Vaseline Intensive Care and turn to Joel. “You never told me that your mother was coming over tonight.”

“Didn’t I? I thought I had.”

31
) Never writes anything on the family calendar that I designed and printed out myself on the computer at work and that now hangs prominently in the kitchen.

“Sorry, Ursula.” I gesture down at her ugly-but-not-in-a-fashionable-way boots, but her feet are staying firmly shod.

She looks quizzical, so I nod my head toward my discarded shoes and my own socked feet.

“Oh yes, of course, you make people take their shoes off before they’re allowed into your house. I always forget that. Do you know what Geoffrey Manley says?” she asks Joel. “He says that if you go to a house where you have to check in your shoes at the door, you’ll need to check in your intelligence at the same time. Isn’t that just too true?”

“Actually,” I say, “I think it’s a sign of intelligence to take your shoes off inside as that way you’re avoiding dirtying the carpet and having to vacuum it later on. I mean, would you call the Japanese stupid?”

“Here you are, Urse,” Joel says, while waving my new sheepskin slippers and rolling his eyes to communicate that the “no shoes inside” rule is nothing to do with him.

“Are you staying for supper, Ursula?” I ask. “I’m afraid I didn’t buy quite enough for three.”

“Chill,” says Joel. “We’ll just get a takeaway.”

32
) When it’s his turn to cook anything less fancy than the complete works of Escoffier, gets a takeaway and thinks it counts.

Ursula clasps her hands together in excitement. “What a treat!” Ursula regards using taxis and going to restaurants as decadent luxuries, while living alone in a five-bedroom, albeit rapidly deteriorating, house in one of London’s more expensive areas is frugality itself.

“You haven’t tasted it yet,” I say. “I wish I’d known and I’d have cooked us something more wholesome.”

“Darling, don’t waste your time. I’d much prefer a takeaway.”

She clasps her hands with slightly less excitement to say, “Now, where are my gorgeous grandsons?”

“In bed. Sorry, if I’d known…”

“It’s not even eight o’clock,” she says. “I love the idea of little children running around until midnight like they do in Italy and Spain. So wonderful. Why don’t you ever eat with them? Sometimes I wonder whether you really like them.”

“I love them.” As I say this I am momentarily tempted to wake them to show them that I do with my kisses. Much as I long for them to go to sleep, I long for them when they’re gone from me and sometimes gladden when one of them has a nightmare and needs comfort. But I won’t wake them now because we’re a house with evening stories and regular bedtimes. “Children need their sleep. Poor Rufus is tired enough as it is with all this school stuff without having his night interrupted. There have been studies showing that they get ill and it damages their brains and they become obese if they don’t get twelve full hours every night.”

“Nonsense,” says Ursula. “When Joel was a baby, he’d stay up and join in with all our discussions. I can’t tell you the number of times he’d curl up and fall asleep in a pile of Afghans—coats, I mean, obviously not people from Afghanistan, though we did have quite a few of those too. My darling boy has been to more consciousness-raising meetings than any other man has ever been allowed. Of course, some of the sisters used to say, ‘No one with a penis,’ but I told them not to be so ridiculous—my scion is hardly the enemy, is he? Quite the contrary, and anyway his penis is so tiny you can barely see it. I’m sure imbibing all that marvelous thought is why he’s so enlightened today. You ought to think about the women who might end up with Rufus and Gabe, I’m sure they’d benefit from all we’ll have to talk about tonight.”

“Let’s go and wake them to find out, shall we?” I say.

“We could do,” says Joel. “I didn’t get a chance to see them tonight. You can be a bit of a routine Nazi about bedtimes.”

33
) Takes his mother’s side over mine, every time.

“No, we can’t. I’m not having them woken. They need their sleep and it wouldn’t be fair on anybody.” I pour myself some more wine to make myself clear.