The House Work

4 minute read

I have let the house go. It was not a conscious decision. I did not have time to clean it, was never alone in the house long enough to do so. Now the living room looks as if it has vomited itself, the eucalyptus from Christmas still stands in its jar. Every five minutes someone stands on a piece of Lego, howls, or goes flying over a train track, landing bewildered on the floor. On Zoom, someone suggests I get a backdrop. But I’m giving a workshop on authenticity I say, whilst shunting clothes in slow 360s around the floor. Then, my son has a nose bleed in my bed, and I do not have time to change my sheets. Now getting between them is like being in a murder scene.

If houses are a metaphor for our state of mind, I dread to think what mine means.

I try, during lockdown to express some of this to the random women I meet in the playground.

“My house,” I say.

“Oh that,” says one woman.

Another pulls a face. She tells us that all her blowouts with her husband have been over the house. Now he has taken to hoovering on Saturday mornings, his face white with martyred indignation. Yet another woman admits the only thing getting her through all of this is an image she has of herself flying through the house with the hoover, firing everything – the drawings, the models, the stick figures, into the bin. In the silence that follows this statement, we all seem to gaze, exhausted, into our peaceful, clutter-less future.

Before the pandemic, I used to visit other mothers and admire how serenely they presided over the chaos of their homes. I thought they had some inner calm I lacked. I was fascinated too by how immaculate these women always looked. How did they rise up out of all the debris looking so perfectly made up and uncrumpled when I almost always looked as if I had crawled out of a hedge? I thought they possessed a degree of ruthlessness I lacked, the sort of iron nerves that it takes to keep drawing lipstick around the outskirts of your mouth while your son jumps on your newly made bed holding a glass of milk.

I imagine this happens all the time – that our carefully constructed sense of ourselves is challenged in another person’s home.

There is a wonderful moment in a Rachel Cusk novel when a woman visits the home of a friend for the first time. Her friend has not redecorated since she moved in and the wallpaper from the previous owner still hangs on the wall in the hall. One day, the friend tugs at a piece of paper to see what is underneath and leaves it hanging. This unnerves her visitor who knows if this was her house that she would not be able to rest until she got all the wallpaper off. Suddenly her determination, her energy which has always been her strengths, feel like problems she has to resolve.

Of course, it can go the other way too. Who hasn’t sat in a home of relentless order or oppressive symmetry and felt for all the world as if they were in some sort of straitjacket? I have lived with people who label all their belongings with indelible ink, slap post-it notes with their name on them on food items in the fridge, rearrange items on a window sill so they do not touch.

In Alice Munroe’s story, Wigtime, two old school friends, Anita and Margot, meet for the first time. Margot shows Anita her house, which Munroe describes as “all exquisite, shadowy, inviolate.” This care and attention has not been extended to Margot herself. “Her legs were thick and marked with swollen veins, the flesh of her upper arms was dented, her skin was brown, mole-spotted, leathery from lots of sun.” Later Munroe observes wryly: “It looked as if all her care, all her vanity, went into the house.” The reader finds out towards the end of the story that the house is reparation for Margot’s husband’s infidelity.

In my early thirties, I lived alone in an apartment in the Gasworks complex in Ringsend in Dublin. Staring out my window I looked out on another apartment block and at night I could often see right into each one. How strange to be looking on at so many lives. It felt indecent sometimes, like the worse kind of voyeurism. I realised that all anyone does in their apartment in the evening is stare at the television. Looking out at these grey, impassive faces had a strange effect on me. I felt desolate in some way, as if life had no meaning or at worst, was a weird sort of reality TV show. Every living area was dominated by a clothes horse full of drying clothes.

What an effect our surroundings can have on us. In the hardest part of the pandemic to date, during the last mid-term, my son begged me repeatedly could we move house. He needed something to change, for life to be full of possibility in a way it was not. In the end, we moved the sofa. What an effect it had on all of us. This is incredible, said my son, possessed of a whole new energy. And it was.

Of course, the most important thing about any house is the welcome you get when you go into it and I wonder when life resumes how we will cope when the doorbell rings. Will we stare at each other in bewilderment unsure what to do next or will we grab each other and laugh and cry? Will we dance on each other tables like it’s the roaring twenties, or will we sit on the edges of our seats, feeling for all the world as if our boundaries have been violated. I wonder too if my house will be clean by then or will I rise up out of the debris, serene and red-lipped?

If only I knew where the iron was.

Nikki Walsh, March 2021