The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs

by Christina Hopkinson

Genres: General Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

Mary Gilmour feels as though her life is going down a plug hole clogged with cornflakes and Play-Doh. Her job is part time, but housework is full time, and she has no time at all for her two young sons. Mary is convinced that there is only one thing standing between her and organised contentment: his name is Joel, and she's married to him.

Since star charts have worked on improving the behaviour of their children, she designs an equivalent for her husband: a spread sheet detailing every balled-up tissue, every sock on the floor, every wet towel on the bed.

Although he has no idea of it, Joel has six months to prove that his credits outweigh his debits. Or else….

Release date: April 25, 2011

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

The solitary jigsaw piece sits in the corner of the living room, daring me to ignore it. It is a battle of wills between me
and it. I try to stare it out, but the corner section of a 32-piece puzzle of a dog flying an airplane wins, of course.


“What are you doing?” asks Joel, who is setting up our latest DVD box set, a classy American import with impenetrable dialogue.

I’m rifling through the shelves to find the puzzle that it belongs to. “I can’t watch TV knowing there’s a stray jigsaw piece.
Think how annoying it will be next time we do the jigsaw and the last bit is missing.”


“Chillax, Mary.”

“Chillax? What are you? Twelve? Don’t you think that vampires are, like, the coolest things?”

He laughs and gets on with his episode selection.

The world divides between those who can watch television knowing there’s an isolated jigsaw fragment lying on the floor and
those who can’t. While I’m down there I look under the sofa to see if there are any of its colleagues and I see something
else: a cup. I look inside it and realize that it’s been buried there for weeks, but the tide has finally washed it ashore.
I think it once had coffee in it, but it’s hard to tell now that a mold lathers up its sides like a green-tinged cappuccino froth. Since I drink only expensive soy lattes, I know it belongs to my husband.


“Look at this,” I say as I thrust it in his face.

He doesn’t recoil, but peers at it with interest. “Don’t you think it looks like one of those foams that they put around food
in fashionable restaurants? I don’t know, hand-stacked quail confit with spume of snail extract.” He looks closer. “We should
show it to Rufus. He’d be really interested to see how spores form.”


“Are you going to take it to the kitchen?”

“How do you know it’s mine?”

“Because this is the mug you always use because it’s so big, which is great because it means you can always leave some at
the bottom for someone to spill.” He shrugs and presses play on the DVD. “Well, aren’t you?” One, two, three, I count slowly,
just as I learned in an article I read recently about anger management.


“Laters.”

“When later?”

He turns the sound up on the TV. I increase the volume of my sigh and stare at him hard. I crack first, I always do, and take
the mug to the kitchen. I tip its contents down the sink and manually squish the bits of mold through the sieve that guards
the plughole. My husband’s cup overflows with fungi. Mine with fury and irritation.


“Joel,” I shout on my return, having dispensed with both the mug and any attempts to avoid being angry. “I’m fed up with living
in this squalor.” No response. “If you just tidied up as you went along…”


He’s entered that trance that our sons do when placed in front of a TV. I half expect him to go and sit with his face six
inches from the screen. I try again, this time actually stamping my feet like Rumpelstiltskin. “You never do a thing around
here, you’re worse than a child; my life would be so much easier if I had only two boys to contend with. You, you,” I splutter, groping for the best example to illustrate his total blindness to the quantities
of detritus that I sweep away for him, “you don’t see how much I do. And how little you do.”


“Like what?” he says, finally.

“I don’t know, it’s not like I keep a list,” I said.

“Maybe you should.”

“Maybe I will.”

A list, I think the next day, maybe I should keep a list. One with all the things he does or doesn’t do around the house.
I can’t see any other way of making him understand the state we’re in. What would I do with this list? Is making a list yet
another thing that falls onto my plate, while the only thing on his is large hunks of meat?


I’m distracted by Gabe, who has retreated to the corner of the kitchen with the look of a mathematician thinking about the
world’s largest prime number.


“Gabe, what are you doing? Wait, don’t do it, wait, wait, wait, let me get the potty. Here it is.” His trousers are whipped
off and his bottom planted just in time to catch the daily event around which my life seems to revolve. “Well done,” I exclaim
brightly, though in reality it’s more my triumph than his. “You are such a clever boy.” I hug him, which is ill-advised as
I haven’t yet done a thorough wipe. “And clever boys get stickers.”


I go to the chart on the fridge door that proclaims to the world all of my second born’s successful encounters with the potty.
There are not very many of them. “Here we are, football or dinosaur?”


We’ve had four months of more poo than a pig farm but we finally seem to be getting somewhere. I’ve always been skeptical
about star charts, but our newly instituted one appears to be effective. He gets a sticker or a star for every potty success, every painless exit from the house to get Rufus to school
and every prompt bedtime. There are no black marks for misdemeanors, not because Gabe is the sort of child who is free from
sin, far from it, but because we’re the sort of craven parents who can’t bear to tell our children off. (And when we do dare
to give them the meat of criticism, we have to douse it in the ketchup of endearments. “I’m not sure everyone else in the
restaurant wants to hear you make farty noises, darling,” “Sweetheart, Mommy doesn’t like it when you hit her.”)


“Superstar Gabe, you are well on your way to getting that Thomas the Tank Engine Aquadraw Deluxe set.” If only Joel were so
easy to train.


And that’s when it hits me. Of course: that’s what I can do with the list of everything he does to annoy me. I will make the
spousal equivalent of a star chart. Except because he’s 38, not two and a half, he won’t get a star for every good thing that
he does, but a black mark for every bad one.


I shall compile a list of all that he does to irritate me and then I’ll note how often he commits one of these sins. It will
be an accurate account of every balled-up tissue left on the side, every empty carton of milk put back in the fridge, every
pile of laundry ignored, every time I’ve had to put my hand in the kitchen sink to pull out those grotty bits of yuk he never
seems to notice. It will be a spreadsheet detailing all misbehavior over a period of, let’s say, six months.


I haven’t felt such excitement in years. It reminds me of how I used to feel when in the early stages of developing a new
format at work. Everything is falling into place. It is brilliant. I am brilliant.


My list will be a thing of beauty and efficiency, a work of art of Excel and observation. If it were published, it would be
admired, but I’m not going to stick it up in the kitchen like Gabe’s star chart, amid the party invitations, school dates and shopping
lists. Joel’s not a potty-training toddler, but a grown man with more than a fortnight to prove himself. And he won’t be getting
a Thomas the Tank Engine branded treat as a reward, no he won’t.


If my list, his star chart, proves him to be an asset in this house then he gets to stay in it. If it doesn’t, well, I suppose
that means he doesn’t and we will have to rethink everything we’ve ever believed about this marriage.


So here’s the thing, Joel: all you have to do is avoid making me angry.

The problem is, I’m angry most of the time. I’m so permanently irritated that I feel that my life is narrated in CAPITAL LETTERS.

I know I’m not supposed to be angry. I am supposed to be able to “manage” that emotion, just as I manage people and budgets
at work. Anger is not fashionable or righteous anymore; we are not storming barricades and taking pride in it. It is an “inappropriate”
emotion.


It’s not as if I’m entirely one-dimensional; my moods are nuanced. I can range from mildly irked right through to incandescent
fury, but anger is the umbrella emotion under which these gradations shelter from many things that provoke them.


Things that make me angry include: the phrases “too posh to push,” “methinks she doth protest too much,” “reader, I married
him” and “it is a truth universally acknowledged”; baby girls with slutty whores’ names like Lola, Delilah, Jezebel, Lulu
and Scarlett; any use of the word “mummy” unless uttered by a child to its mother (yummy mummy, mummy tummy, slummy mummy);
people talking about size zero and middle youth.


I’m angry that I work; I’d be even angrier if I didn’t.


Most of all I’m angry at you, Joel. And if I could distill this anger to its purest essence, it would consist of some bracken
dishwater with floating bits of lamb chop grease in it to represent your total inability to help around the house. So not
very pure at all; in fact, not so much an essential oil as an oil slick of filth polluting my hearth and heart.


It’s not my fault I’m angry. I was always destined to be so. My parents used to tell me that I was born during the Winter
of Discontent, which I believed and I think they did too. I grew up with tales of how my parents had battled through streets
stacked high with uncollected rubbish and stench to a power-cut hospital unmanned by striking midwives. Then I read that the
Winter of Discontent actually occurred some years later and I had merely been born during a freakish cold snap and it was
snow rather than rubbish that was piled high. But the myth was there, that I had been born during a national strop, a collective
temper tantrum. “You’re just like a union leader,” my parents used to tell me, “always whining.” They’d snap “Life isn’t”
at me, whenever I uttered the phrase “It’s not fair.”


How much sunnier I would have been, went the family joke, had I been born during the Summer of Love instead.

And just to compound matters, my parents named me Mary. As in quite contrary, which my mother tells me I was from a preternaturally
early age. Even in the womb, I reacted furiously to any food other than white bread and water, giving my mother violent morning
sickness morning, noon and night for the full nine months of pregnancy. Once born, I refused to drink the cheapest brand of
formula. I refused to be laid down on my front, as was prescribed in those medically incorrect times, but screamed and screamed
until put on my back. I frowned until furrows lined my face, but failed to smile until almost three months old. I scratched myself so much I was forced to wear tight mittens all
the time. My colicky crying time was not limited to early evenings, but lasted all day and much of the night. My bottom, my
mother tells me, was an angry red too—so bad was my diaper rash that it bled. (Looking back, it seems evident that I was suffering
from an extreme dairy intolerance that would have been easily rectified had I been breastfed by a mother prepared not to drink
cow’s milk herself, and, yes, I am a bit angry about that too.)


These facts alone were enough to ensure my choleric temperament, but then my newborn head’s colorless fuzz soon gave way to
bright red hair. Not auburn, nor titian, nor merely “warm,” but proper red. Otherwise referred to by well-meaning folk as
“At least it’s not ginger,” a shade of hair color also known as “Well, it’s OK on a girl” (this latter frequently said in the presence of my similarly flame-haired firstborn boy child). Red hair, like big boobs
and poker-straight tresses, is one of those things that people strive to achieve through artifice but decry if natural. Think
of all those millions spent on henna and hair dye and yet when you’ve got it naturally you just get “Well, at least it’s not
ginger.” And when the child with red hair first throws the standard toddler temper tantrum that all do some time after the
age of one, everybody says, “Ooh, isn’t she fiery?” instead of “Look at that toddler throwing a tantrum as toddlers are wont
to do.” To this day, I’m not allowed to show the slightest ill temper without someone referring to my hair color. I’m a “feisty
redhead” if liked and a “ginger whinger” if not.


So, you see, it really isn’t my fault I’m so angry. I was born this way.

I’m 35, though not for much longer. Thirty-five: the age at which fertility falls off a cliff, apparently, and so looms large
in the forward planning of any early thirtysomething. It’s the age that we women must skirt and plot around. Thirty-five,
the midpoint of your thirties, the decade in which you must both churn out children and soar in your chosen career. The crucial
decade when lawyers become partners, journalists become editors, doctors become consultants and teachers become heads and
deputy heads. One small decade, only ten years, just like the rest of them. What bad luck for women that these biological
and professional imperatives should coincide and collide so exactly. This coincidence double-glazes the glass ceiling.


The thirties are also a woman’s peak time for death in mysterious circumstances. Sylvia Plath, Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe,
Paula Yates, Jill Dando, Anna Nicole Smith. It’s a wonder that any of us make it through alive.


Actually, I’m not sure there is any mystery to Sylvia Plath’s death. She hadn’t really set out to kill herself, she’d just
been examining the inside of the oven to see whether it needed cleaning or not and on finding it quite so filthy with the
fat spat from the sausages that Ted Hughes had cooked before dumping her for another woman, she decided to switch it on and
keep her head in there.


I’d never kill myself. Though I might kill Joel. The list is my attempt to avoid blighting my sons’ lives with a dead father
and a mother locked up for his murder.


At least Christmas is now over. I don’t know why they said that the First World War would be over by Christmas when there’s
no time of the year more likely to spark battles and hatred. A dozen explosions and skirmishes daily over the festivities:
me buying all the presents for your numerous godchildren; the fact that you don’t “believe” in Christmas cards so I have to
do them all as well as sit over Rufus as he labors over one for each of his classmates; your mother sitting on her ample behind telling me how lucky I am that she brought up her son to be such a
hands-on father and fabulous cook. “Yes,” I spit, “he’s so wonderful, I’m so lucky.”


No turkey could have been stuffed as full as this house was by discarded wrapping paper and toys with itty-bitty constituent
parts. Each time a present was opened, which was approximately every three seconds, I’d wince at the challenge of finding
somewhere to put the vast plastic monstrosity or cringe at the tiny, easily lost parts that spilled out. I tried to feel happy
as my children squealed with delight, but instead I’d be filled with dread. Each time we played with one of these new games,
I’d interrupt with “Don’t lose that counter, darling, it won’t work without it,” “No, you’re not allowed a hotel until you’ve
put up three blocks,” “Gabe, if you choke on that I’m not going to be the one to take you to the hospital.”


I’ve got three weeks to go until my birthday, which falls on the last day of January. See what I mean about my life being
destined to complaint? Fancy having a birthday at the exact point in the year when everyone feels most depressed. When half
the people at your so-called birthday celebrations are on the wagon or detoxing.


For my birthday, I’d like teeth-whitening, a week off from bottom-wiping both real and metaphorical and a subscription to
Interiors. For my birthday, I’ll get a homemade card, a croissant in bed and a “kiss that money can’t buy.” My first words on turning
36 will be “Don’t get crumbs on the bed.”


For these three weeks I shall be thinking of every irritating thing that Joel does and compiling them into a list. I will
then organize these misdemeanors into logical sections on a spreadsheet. After my birthday, from February onward, the six-month
trial period will start as I mark his behavior against the debits outlined in the document. The system will be rigorous and able to withstand scrutiny should I ever show it to Joel, which
I might if he needs to see proof. It has to be as perfect as our home and marriage is imperfect. It shall be a feat of Excel
formatting and punchy punctuation. It will be definitive. It will be scrupulously fair even if, so I’m told, life isn’t.


Let the list-making begin.

Here is my dream of a perfect Saturday. The boys are such champion sleepers that I have to wake them at nine, whereupon they
wolf down their quinoa porridge before settling down to some educative but tidy art activities. A shadowy employee with wet
wipes for hands hovers in the background, cleaning away, freeing me to engage fully with Rufus and Gabe, who greet all my
suggestions with enthusiasm and don’t get cross when I try to make their abstract daubs “look more like something.” We join
our good-looking friends and their good-looking offspring for a jolly brunch and afterward our children are whisked away by
the delightful and loving nanny-housekeeper figure long enough for me to enjoy my freedom from them, but not so long that
I miss them too much. Perhaps a shopping expedition to pick up a party frock for the evening’s event. A little trip to the
cinema. To the hairdressers for what Americans call a “blow out.” An hour spent getting ready, moisturizer, primer, foundation,
highlighter and blusher; three different sorts of eyeshadow; lip liner, lipstick and gloss. The party—tinkling laughter, champagne,
cocktails, tipsy not drunk. Home at midnight, safe in the knowledge that my darling boys will not wake until late on Sunday,
when the four of us will lie together in our vast, specially designed bed before having a playful fight with our pillows covered
in 1,000-thread-count Egyptian cotton cases.


Or, welcome to the reality of my Saturday.

Having played our usual game of nocturnal musical beds, Joel is on the floor in the boys’ room, while Gabe has taken his place
in the marital bed. Except he’s cunningly expanded his tiny two-and-a-half-year-old body to ensure that at least two of my
limbs overhang the edge. I look at the clock and at least the time begins with a six, though only just. The street light pours
through the bit where the curtains fail to meet and shows me more of my surroundings than I want to see.


Our bedroom looks like a terrorist attack in the Gap.

1) Leaves clothes anywhere but the laundry basket. Or, rather, either of the two laundry baskets that I introduced for a new
system of separating whites from coloreds. When I explained the new system, he said he wasn’t going to practice laundry apartheid
and then went off giggling at his wit. He made a similar comment about repatriation of socks and the extraordinary rendition
of his last remaining clean underpants that I held hostage in a bid to get him to contribute help as well as clothes to the
laundry. He keeps claiming amnesty from the totalitarian regime of my impotent laundry systems.

Though I suppose I should be glad that he’s consistent in dropping his clothes on the floor, in a little crumpled ring at
his feet. My friend Jill’s husband puts things in the laundry basket on the days they’re both working, but on the one day
she works from home and at weekends, he leaves them on the floor, like then it’s her “job” to pick them up.

It’s symbolic that Gabe has taken Joel’s place in my bed because in many ways he’s also annexed the place in my heart that
contains what’s left of my patience, generosity and indulgence. Gabe and I are always going off on old-fashioned dates, sharing
a decaf latte in the café and splodging the frothy soy milk onto one another’s noses, wandering around farmers’ markets and
playing hide-and-seek in museums, before settling down to share a bed for the night. He’s currently sprawled on top of me
and any sensual urge I may have for physical contact from Joel is sated by Gabe. Joel once said he felt like he’d been superseded
by a younger and cuter version of himself.


An odor winds its way up to my nose. This younger and cuter version of Joel is also incontinent. I’ve been sharing my bed
with a male packing a full, oh let’s see, actually overflowing, excrement-filled diaper. “Sweetheart, can’t you tell me when
you’ve done a poo and I’ll change you, or even better let’s go to the potty. You know you get a sticker if you do that.” He
gives a look of satisfaction, akin to that of a ten-year-old who’s just done a “silent-but-deadly” fart over his little sister’s
face. He’s supposed to be potty trained, night as well as day. Mitzi’s kids are always dry through the night by this age.
“And hasn’t anybody told you it’s the weekend?” I mutter to him. He continues to bounce on the bed, shaking that perilous
diaper as he does so. “That hurts. Mommy doesn’t like it when you jump on her, please, sweetheart.”


“Breakfast, breakfast, breakfast,” he sings to an indeterminate nursery rhyme tune. They’re kind of all the same, like hymns.

I’ve drawn the short straw today with this boy child, since he wakes up a full hour before Joel’s charge.

“Good afternoon,” I say, when he and Rufus eventually come down to breakfast.

“I know, the decadence of it, quarter past seven.”

“Still, an extra hour.”

“Sleeping on the bottom bunk of a bed made for dwarves. Every time I sit up I get my hair caught in the springs above me.”

I watch him get breakfast for Rufus. He rips the packet like he’s wearing gardening gloves and a blindfold.


2) Sprays cereal around the kitchen as if he’s turned on a leaf blower near an open packet of Special K.

3) Puts used tea bags in the sink. Why do people do this? Sometimes they have little bowls for them instead, which is marginally
less annoying, but still, why not just put them straight in the bin—or, if you’re being environmentally sound (which of course
you should be and everything, but sometimes I just can’t be bothered to go to the recycling box and I love my tumble dryer,
I really do, I shall definitely be getting custody of that in the divorce), in the compost container?

4) Puts used tea bag in the sink after making a cup of tea for himself without offering to make me one.

5) Can’t remember how I have my tea. Soy milk, no sugar. Not that difficult, is it?

6) Calls herbal tea “boiled pants” because that’s what he says it tastes like. Better than one bloke I went out with who consistently
referred to it as “lesbian tea.”

“I don’t like the tiny bits of Shreddies,” says Rufus.

Gabe shares this opinion but expresses it by coughing the crumbs up onto the table.

“That’s disgusting,” observes Rufus, correctly.

“You make them better,” says Gabe, pointing at me. “You make them big. Make them big again. I want big Shreddies.”

“There’s a word missing, Gabe? I want big Shreddies…”

“NOW!” he screams.

“No, that’s not the answer I was looking for. I want big Shreddies…”

“HERE!”


“No, ‘please’—‘please’ was the word I was looking for. You’ve had two pieces of toast already, do you really want cereal too?”

“We’re running out of Shreddies, by the way,” says Joel.

7) Tells me stuff is running out in a really accusatory way. After it’s already run out. And won’t chalk it up onto the shopping
list on the section of kitchen wall painted in blackboard paint, something I copied off the interiors magazines I can’t stop
myself from buying. Except in the magazines someone has always scrawled “I you” in those pictures, alongside a shopping list that includes Goji berries and champagne.

“I’ll nip down to the shop to get some more,” I say.

“No, I’ll do it.”

“No, really, I’ll go.”

“No, I insist.”

We look at each other. “First to the door,” he shouts and being a man, he already has his wallet in his pocket, good to go,
and beats me to it.


I’m left to deal with the ongoing tantrum of our second child, the dauphin, whom our lives revolve around. When I have calmed
his fury over the tiny bits of Shreddies and distracted him with alternative sustenance, he demands that I get the yogurt
out of his stomach and back into the pot. I am then admonished for having got the spoon out of the drawer for him. I put it
back and invite him to get it out. It’s too late then, of course, I’ve already ruined everything. He has turned me into some
sort of Arthurian knight who is set a series of impossible challenges in order to win his hand. I am asked to rid sausages
of the brown bits, make fruit slices drier, reattach clipped fingernails, make rainy days sunny and change the colors of the clothes in his picture books. In our house, the devil wears Primark boys’ combat trousers
in a 2–3 and a secondhand stripy T-shirt from Baby Gap.


Calm has been restored when Joel returns with the new packet of un-crumbled Shreddies.

“What are we doing today?” he asks—because I’m his PA, obviously.

“Rufus’s swimming lesson. You take him every week.”

“Oh, right. Where’s his stuff?”

“In the bag in the cupboard by the door.” Where it always is. “And then it’s Mahalia’s party in the afternoon. Have you got
her a present?”


He looks very confused. “Mahalia? Remind me.”

“Mitzi’s second kid, bit younger than Rufus.”

“I can’t keep track of them.”

“Molyneux, he’s six or seven, Mahalia, then the twins, Merle and the boy one. What is his name? Begins with an M.”

“Obviously.”

“I was joking about the present; don’t worry about it, I think there’s something in the present drawer.” Present drawer. I
have a present drawer. When did I get to be the sort of person who has a present drawer? “Milburn, that’s the boy twin’s name,
Milburn.”


8) Puts milk bottles and cartons back in the fridge if they’re empty. That’s not fair—mostly he makes sure there’s a couple
of drops left in them to save them from unequivocal emptiness. But weirdly, he will always leave the bottles with lots of
milk in them out on the counter in order that they go sour.

9) Takes the stickers off bananas and apples and sticks them on the kitchen table.

I whirl around the kitchen picking up, wiping, depositing and washing as I go. I make sure Rufus’s swimming stuff, coat and
outdoor shoes are ready at the door while trying to phone Mitzi to check what time the party is.


“Have you seen the car keys?” Joel asks me. Most of the sentences we utter to one another start with the word “where” or some
such variant.


10) Asks me questions when I’m talking to someone else on the phone.

“Sorry, Mitzi, I’m being summoned. Aren’t they on the hook in the kitchen where they’re supposed to be kept?”

“No, that’s why I’m asking.”

“Well, I always put them back there. You must have left them somewhere else.”

“I haven’t used the car in ages.”

This is true. I scurry into the kitchen, hoping that I’ll find them on the hook where they’re supposed to be. Which they are,
although partially obscured by a mug.


11) Asks me where something is and I tell him and he doesn’t look properly so I have to go and find it for him myself. If
I say something’s in the fridge, he won’t see it unless it’s in the front of the fridge, as if it’s too much effort to move
the jar of chutney that’s permanently rooted to a piece of prime fridge real estate.

“Oh, look, on the kitchen hook, where I said they were.” I hand them to him and make a dash for the safety of the sitting
room, doing