The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs Read Online Free

(me) will look after them. I sort out the time of Mahalia’s party and then start hunting around.
    “Joel!” No answer. “Joe-WELL! Which one of these effing cables is for the laptop?”
    “The black one,” he shouts back, eventually. I look down at the nest of vipers at my feet, a coiling mass of unmarked and mostly black cables. These phone, camera and computer chargers have joined old keys as things we can no longer throw away for fear that the moment we do so, we’ll discover both what they are for and a need to use them.
    “I told you to mark any new ones with a label and then put them all back in their original boxes together with their electronic husband.”
    “Oh well,” he says. “Looks like they’re getting a divorce.”
    You may joke, I think, with a strange jolt of satisfaction at hearing him say the word out loud. “I know it sounds like I’m being anal, but I say it for a reason. Now I can’t find the laptop charger and it looks exactly the same as the one for the camcorder and we’ve got five different mobile chargers and I can’t work out which one is for the old phone. And what’s this?” I pick up a lonely white cable.
    “For your old toothbrush?”
    I stomp off, though he doesn’t notice as he’s become engrossed in playing back some footage on the camcorder that he shot of the boys on holiday. “Bugger,” I hear him shout. “The battery’s gone. Where have you put the charger?”
    12 ) The way he leaves all the phone chargers and cables out so that I can never work out which electronic item they belong to.
    My path away from him is impeded by a blockade of shoes, buggies, scooters, bikes, helmets, the recycling box and the disgorging contents of a mini packet of raisins that I manage to further squash into our neutral-colored and, in retrospect, far too pale sisal carpeting.
    The stairs provide a new hurdle. At the bottom of each flight and half-flight in our house are small foothills of debris: slippers, books and clean clothes on their way up; old newspapers, empty glasses mottled with evaporated wine and dirty clothes on their way down. They say that the peak of Everest has become strewn with rubbish. I bet it looks like the landings of our house.
    13 ) The way he can ignore the pile of stuff at the bottom of the stairs.
    Like a driver reversing his 4×4, Joel has a dangerous blind spot when it comes to the stairs that allows him to trot past these stations without ever thinking that perhaps he should pick this stuff up; an ignorance of the fact that humans are the conveyor belt that will carry it home. I once decided to let it all pile up to show him how much I was frantically shoveling to keep this house clear. Gradually the possessions silted up our stairs until they formed barricades. Still he managed to ignore them, actually vaulting over to reach his destination. Then, one day, poor Rufus slipped on an empty packet of Kettle Chips and hit his head against the balustrade and we ended up in the ER. I felt guilty, of course, but it was Joel’s fault.
    I lock myself in the bathroom, hunch over the laptop with its fast-fading battery and click on a document called “House admin” (it’s a safe bet that Joel will never open that one). I type furiously in all senses of the word, finishing off with a last flourish:
    14 ) Never hangs up the swimming stuff but leaves it in the bag to go moldy.
    I’m obsessed with cleaning and housework, but my house doesn’t appear to reflect my pathology. If I described someone as being obsessed with cleaning, you’d assume their house to be spotless with vacuumed upholstery and cupboards filled with alphabetized Tupperware for their extensive rice collection. No, I’m obsessed with cleaning and yet live in a filthy home, which is a raw deal, much like it is for my friend Daisy, who complains that she was built with the ample curves of an opera singer, but with a voice so bad that she has to mime “Happy Birthday” so as not to ruin