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Suddenly some of the men came running up the hill towards us, looking back and waving their arms at Clive as though something had happened. Clive jumped out of the car. I wasn’t sure whether to stay put or follow. Overthinking this decision entirely, I slowly got out of the car and decided I’d tell him I needed the loo if he asked why I’d followed.
Six men – clearly Norwegian, given that I couldn’t understand a word they were saying – were all frantically shouting at Clive and pointing back at the patch of trees down the hill. It was clear Clive couldn’t understand them either, because he held up his hands and shouted, ‘I can’t understand any of you! English, please!’
One of the men stuck his hands at either side of his head, the palms facing forward and his fingers splayed.
‘Moose?’ Clive said, and the man nodded.
‘Big moose.’
A few seconds later, we saw it – this huge, dark brown creature with a staggering set of antlers on his head, around five or six feet wide. The moose was both gigantic and irate. It walked slowly towards a wooden frame and butted it with its antlers.
Standing on a rock I could make out a handful of men near the moose, all of them with their hands up in surrender. One of them was waving something, evidently trying to get the thing to back away, but with the effect of making it more pissed off. Clive seemed to think the waving thing was a great idea, though, because he pulled off his jacket and started flapping it above his head, shouting and yelling.
Suddenly a huge gunshot sounded, a terrific, echoing blast that made me jump. I spun around and saw a man at the back door of the red house holding a large rifle with smoke coming out of it. Tom. A sound of hooves on the ground signalled the animal’s departure, and all the men clapped and cheered.
Tom walked down the steps towards me, one hand holding the rifle, the other extended towards me. ‘Sophie,’ he said, beaming. ‘So glad you could make it.’
I smiled nervously, and shook his hand. ‘You scared off the moose,’ I observed.
He nodded, just casually reloading a long silver bullet into the chamber of his enormous rifle. ‘Sorry about that. He’s been a bit of a nuisance these last few days. I’m hoping that was enough to see him off for a while.’
Clive came marching back up the hill, grinning. ‘You missed,’ he said to Tom.
‘I wasn’t aiming for him,’ Tom answered, gesturing for me to come inside.
‘Pity,’ Clive panted, mopping his brow. ‘I heard moose tastes delicious.’
Inside the red house, or Granhus, as it appeared to be named, Gaia raced up to me in the kitchen and wrapped her arms around my knees as though we were long lost friends.
‘Sophie!’ she yelled. ‘I’ve missed you so much!’
‘You have?’ I said. I wanted her to say it again. I don’t think anyone had ever said that to me before.
I told her I had a present for her, and she got so excited I fretted I’d built her up for something big – like a scooter, or maybe a pony. I presented her with the little pair of tweed trousers I’d made from one of Meg’s cushion covers for Gaia’s teddy bear, Louis. ‘To go with his waistcoat,’ I said, and she gave a squeal of delight.
‘He’ll love them!’ she shouted. ‘Come and see your bedroom!’
Maren appeared then, telling Gaia to wait just a minute. She asked if my journey was a pleasant one, and would I like a cup of tea?
‘Yes please,’ I said, even though I didn’t, but ‘yes’ seemed the right answer. I sat down at the table opposite Gaia, who was introducing Louis to his trousers and chiding him for not wearing any beforehand. It’s naughty, Louis. And you could get a chill. I could hear Tom outside, pacing up and down and chatting to someone on his mobile phone. The kitchen had old Shaker-style turquoise cabinets, red bunting, and the most incredible views framed by each of the three windows. Maren poured me a cup of tea and explained the moose intrusion, though I’d seen it all first hand.
‘They keep coming because they think the river is here,’ she says. ‘This is the problem when you mess with nature. The animals of this place have been drinking from that river for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. And now it’s gone.’
‘Gone?’ I said.
She grimaced. ‘Tom built a dam. He was meant to divert the river, but then it bled into the ground. Turned the whole site into a marsh. And now the elk are going crazy. I won’t be surprised if I come down one morning and find one drinking from the tap.’
She gave a rueful laugh.
I tried to laugh along. Great. She rinsed some mugs, turned back to Gaia. ‘Shall we show Sophie the rest of the house?’
‘We’ll start at the top and work our way down, shall we?’ Maren said, leading me up an incredibly narrow set of stairs. Maren’s ample hips blocked out the light ahead of me, rubbing either side of the wood panelling. She led me to the attic, a long room with six feet or so of head room and bookended by two porthole windows.
‘Mostly storage up here,’ she explained, batting away a moth. ‘But we keep a bed here in case we have guests.’
The next level down had a bathroom and three bedrooms, all with whitewashed floorboards that creaked whichever way I stepped. I noticed framed black and white photographs on the walls of the hallway, ghostly, moody images of the tall, narrow trees I’d seen on the way to the house. Maren saw me admiring them, but kept us moving.
‘These bedrooms belong to me and Tom, and Clive and Derry have what used to be the children’s.’ She turned and smiled politely. ‘Yours is downstairs, and we’ve moved Gaia and Coco’s bedrooms there, too.’
She took us back downstairs and along a narrow hallway behind the kitchen, where a recent extension created a modern living room with a bookcase, sofa and armchairs, then a small office, and a long playroom kitted out with tables, whiteboards, play mats, sand tubs and endless cabinets and cupboards filled with every toy under the sun.
‘This is your room,’ she said, opening the door to the last bedroom at the corner of the house. It was smaller than the other bedrooms, but I loved it. A single iron-posted bed with a cosy red quilt ran alongside a window overlooking the woods. A modest wardrobe at the foot of it, a chest of drawers, a bedside table, and a lamp. A door adjacent to the bed led to a bathroom with a shower cubicle, sink, and toilet.
‘Perfect,’ I told her, and she looked relieved. I sat down on the bed, testing out the mattress. Good and firm. Perhaps I’d have a nap, then do a spot of writing. The view from my window was exactly what I needed to get going.
‘Good,’ Maren said, clasping her hands. She glanced at her watch. ‘Would you like half an hour to freshen up?’
She seemed to pick up on the fact that I was utterly clueless as to what she meant.
‘The baby’s nap ends in thirty-five minutes,’ she said. ‘She’ll need a half-hour of flash cards, then reading time, dinner time, and songs for bed. And Gaia, too, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ I said, and she smiled, satisfied that I knew what I was doing. Which of course I didn’t.
‘Oh, before I forget,’ she said, sliding a folded piece of paper from an invisible pocket in her skirt. ‘This might be helpful.’
I unfolded it. A spreadsheet mapping out each day from 6 a.m. until 7.30 p.m., with activities such as ‘slime time’, ‘messy play’, and ‘hidden music’ all signalling exactly how I was to spend each hour. Slime time? Mercifully Sundays were blanked out as a ‘Daddy and Daughters Day!’ though I noted the asterisk at the bottom of the page: *occasionally you will be required to work on these days.
‘That’s just Coco’s schedule,’ Maren said, lest I grew too comfortable with the thought of only working eighty hours a week.
‘Obviously,’ I said, wearing my finest rictus grin.
‘As you know, Gaia is homeschooled,’ she said. ‘Her schooling coordinates with Coco’s naps, totalling three hours a day, with the exception of her Norwegian lessons.’
‘Norwegian lessons?’ I said nervously. Becoming fluent enough to teach Norwegian in a few hours might be a stretch, even for someone as desperate as I was.
‘I teach Gaia Norwegian,’ Maren said. ‘The rest of the schooling lies with you. Tom favours the Montessori method. I was led to believe that wouldn’t be a problem?’
‘Oh, no problem!’ I said, too loudly. ‘Montessori is my middle name!’
‘Excellent,’ she said, stepping towards the bedroom door. ‘Well, I’ll see you in approximately twenty-eight minutes.’
‘Great!’ I said, giving an actual thumbs up.
Twenty-eight minutes. I hoped with all my hoping cells that this place had broadband. I was going to have to do some serious googling. What was it called again? The Tesserati method?
‘One last thing,’ Maren said, stepping back inside the room. ‘Tom’s accountant flagged that the standing order for payment of your salary has been set up to someone called Lexi Ellis?’
I froze. My heart shot into my mouth and I tried not to look like I was going to puke. ‘Erm, yes,’ I stammered. ‘It’s my … business name.’
‘Oh. Right,’ she said. ‘Well, so long as it’s the correct account … Just be sure to let us know if you don’t receive payment at the end of the month. Oh, and another thing.’
I thought I was going to black out. I watched, rigid with terror, as she pulled the door behind her in case anyone else heard. She’d found out, I knew it. She was about to yell and scream at me. You’re an imposter! A cuckoo!
I deserved it. I deserved it all.
‘The basement,’ she said in a low voice. ‘It’s a no-go area.’
‘Basement?’
She nodded, then looked upset, her hands started to wring of their own accord. ‘It was … it was Aurelia’s room. Tom has insisted that we’re not to go in. So, even if you hear something down there, please remember to stay out.’
‘Oh. Of course.’
‘Wonderful.’ She visibly exhaled away the sadness triggered by the mention of Aurelia. Then, with a finger in the air: ‘See you in twenty-six minutes!’
I held up my own index finger. ‘See you then!’
She shut the door, and I lay down heavily on the bed, crumpled by relief. And when my heart stopped trying to punch its way through my ribcage I wondered if I’d heard her right, or if the new drugs I was on were every bit as brain-mangling as the last set.
Even if you hear something down there, please stay out.
Hear something?
What the hell was in that basement?
ARE YOU GOING TO DIE?
Now
My memories of that first month are pretty hazy. Suffice it to say that looking after two Tasmanian devils single-handedly and without any forewarning of their talent for finding sharp objects and scaling dangerous heights faster than lightning – or of their need for constant enraptured attention – was a baptism of boiling lava.
I spent a good part of the time seeking out ways to escape, and had I not been so leached of energy I might well have attempted to swim up the fjord all the way back to the airport. Caring for a ten-month-old was like trying to lasso a hurricane. I began to perceive parents as heroic but very deranged masochists. For the first three weeks ‘Daddy and Daughters Day’ did not happen, and the sacred promise of rest that I’d clung to all week popped like a leftover party balloon. Lack of sleep turned me into a cloud that wafted around after Gaia and Coco, whose combined energy could power South America for years to come.
But wait – I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the beginning. To the moment I entered the seventh circle of hell.
Stepping into my role as nanny felt like entering the Roman Colosseum to face a gladiator armed with flails and scourges. I was quite literally just off the plane and expected to have had a bit of time to adjust to my surroundings. Well, I guess I had some time – twenty-six minutes! – which was enough to put on some deodorant, stare at the mad schedule Maren had given me for Gaia and Coco, and do some frantic googling.
Messy play: developing cognitive and fine motor skills through the medium of a bag of flour thrown liberally around the room.
Slime time: literally involving slime, which I’d possibly have to make using shaving foam and contact lens fluid, before encouraging the kids to slime each other.
Montessori: child-centred intellectual exploration merely guided by a teacher. I had a vague sense of what that meant. I figured that ‘intellectual exploration’ likely meant reading and collecting leaves and pine cones, and I thought back to the time I’d taken little Matty Barris to the local park while his mum slept off a hangover on our kitchen floor. We’d gathered up all the beer cans around the slides and spent the afternoon making a beer-can sculpture. He cut his hands a few times and I filched a few syringes out of the cans before Matty got to them, but our end product was Tate Modern-worthy, if I do say so myself.
At three o’clock I ventured along the hallway to the nursery, where I was supposed to find Coco emerging from her nap. At the far end of the cot I could see her little blonde head, damp with sweat, and a chubby arm wrapped around a comfort blanket. A dummy was wedged in her mouth and she sucked at it rhythmically, like a real-life Maggie Simpson.
I sat down in the green rocking chair by the window and glanced at the clock. A minute past three. Hadn’t Maren said Coco was meant to wake up at three o’clock? Should I wake her? I waited another five minutes. Finally, Maren appeared in the doorway, her hands clasped and a tight smile on her face.
‘Everything all right?’ she said, and I nodded.
‘I think … she’s still sleeping.’
Maren pursed her lips – I noticed she did this when there was a job to be done, and one that ought to be done by someone other than her and she wanted to remind them of their responsibility – and clapped her hands. Coco jolted awake at the sharp, sudden sound in the peaceful room. Her eyes flicked open and she sat upright with a loud gasp. After a few moments she burst into tears, scared and still half-asleep. I glanced at Maren, who raised her eyebrows in a way that signalled I was to sort out the crying.
I reached down into the cot and lifted Coco out. She was heaving long, bitter sobs, the kind that suggested she was none too pleased about being wrenched from the deepest of slumbers. She felt warm and surprisingly heavy in my arms, and I bounced her for a bit to calm her down, but as she began to wake up she focused her eyes on me and fell silent. Good, I thought. See? I’ve always had a way with babies. But just then, as she took in the sight of me, this weirdo she didn’t know from Adam, she burst into fresh howls and squirmed, trying to wriggle out of my arms.
‘Now, now, Coco,’ Maren chided, grabbing her and setting her on her hip rather roughly. ‘This is Sophie, your new nanny. She’s the one who looks after you.’ Then, tapping her foot: ‘Shall we bring Coco to find Gaia? I expect she’ll be waiting for you.’
Maren led Coco and me back to the playroom, where she showed me a cupboard stacked neatly with paint pots, sheets of card, wooden animals, train sets, books, and – oddly – a collection of kitchen utensils, including whisks, pans, sponges, and wooden spoons.
‘You’ll find no princesses or Barbie dolls in here,’ Maren said. ‘Aurelia was against such things.’
‘I like her already,’ I said, and she flinched.
Gaia raced into the room then, pulling chairs and a small table from a corner of the room and setting the table up with a crayon-holder and sheets of paper.
‘Now, now,’ Maren said, wagging her finger at Gaia. ‘I’m afraid drawing time isn’t until five o’clock. Right now is flash card time.’
I saw Gaia’s face fall. ‘She loves drawing,’ Maren said, in a tone that suggested drawing was on a par with skinning dead rodents. ‘Here are the flash cards.’ She handed me what resembled a large-scale set of playing cards featuring frogs and umbrellas. Then, her work done, ‘Have an enjoyable afternoon. Dinner is at five thirty.’
I felt a sense of relief when she left. I turned back to see that Gaia was already in the middle of a drawing, hands splayed on either side of the page and her face so low it was almost touching it. Her teddy, Louis, was sitting on the seat beside her, and every so often she’d look down at him, as though to check he hadn’t leaped off and run somewhere. I sat in the chair opposite with Coco on my lap and held up one of the flash cards to her. This one featured a large letter ‘R’ in both upper- and lower-case, with a cartoon rainbow.
‘See, Coco?’ I said. ‘R for rainbow.’ Blimey, I was doing pretty damn well. I was responding to the name ‘Sophie’ without batting an eyelid, and my accent was legit BBC Radio 4. Nannying was going to be a piece of cake.
Coco gave me a cross look. I lifted another card. S for Snake. She reached out and grabbed the flash card, shoved it in her mouth, and chewed off a corner. Without looking up, Gaia said, ‘Coco hates flash cards.’
‘Does she?’ I muttered, trying to retrieve the chewed piece of card from Coco’s mouth. When she chomped down on the end of my index finger I gave a loud ‘Fu-uh!’ stopping just in time before the whole word came out, and she looked at me with alarm before bursting into a loud laugh.
‘Say that again,’ Gaia said. ‘She likes it.’
‘Say what again?’ I said. ‘Fu-uh?’
Coco laughed again, louder.
‘Best not,’ I said.
‘Fuh!’ Gaia said to Coco, sending her into fits of laughter. ‘FUH!’
I glanced at the door, waiting for Maren to emerge with a concerned look on her face. I found the appropriate flash card and held it up to Coco. ‘Fuh for Fox. See?’
‘Here,’ Gaia said, thrusting a picture at me. ‘It’s for you.’
I tried to make sense of the heavily-coloured shapes on the page. A rainbow, I could make that out, and beneath it five hollow-eyed figures which appeared to be walking on stilts whilst holding hands.
‘That’s you,’ she said, pointing at one. ‘And that’s me, that’s Coco, and the small one is Louis.’
‘Who’s this?’ I asked, pointing at the tallest of the figures.
‘That’s Mumma,’ Gaia said. ‘She’s holding your hand because she wants you to take care of me.’
‘Is she?’ I said, swallowing hard, and before I could change the subject Gaia fixed her jade-green eyes on me and leaned close to whisper in my ear. ‘Mumma told me that she wants you to take care of me.’
‘How did she tell you that?’ I asked.
Gaia looked puzzled. ‘Mumma tells me lots of things,’ she said, shrugging.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this. She took a fresh page and started on another drawing, which started as two large circles that she proceeded to fill in completely with black felt-tip.
‘Look, Coco,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Balloons.’
‘No, not balloons,’ Gaia said flatly. She added a mouth with bared teeth beneath them. ‘It’s the Sad Lady. See?’
‘Who?’
‘She lives in our basement. And she doesn’t have eyes, just holes.’
‘O … K …’
I tried to push this comment to the recesses of my mind. The basement. Holes for eyes. Not a weird thing for a six-year-old to say at all. Maybe she’d had a similar warning from Maren. Don’t go near the basement! Such a warning would fire anyone’s imagination. Or maybe Gaia was just predisposed to a Gothic temperament. I had been a weird kid, too. Long before my mother’s dysfunctionality re-arranged the wiring of my brain I was the Wednesday Addams of every playgroup, a collector of dead insects, precociously obsessed with winding up any overly-smiley adult with whom I came into contact by telling them that Satan was my father, or replying to their benign, who’s-a-pretty-girl questions by deadpanning ‘I eat souls’.
Happily, Gaia moved on to relatively chirpier subject matter – rainbows, which she transformed into gravestones – and finally we read the flash cards, or rather I read the flash cards while Coco devised a game of speed-crawling out of the room and up the stairs. When four o’clock came I consulted the schedule: it was time for ‘splash and scoop’, though I had no idea what that was.
‘It’s when we fill the tub with water and splash it,’ Gaia said, her expression joyless as an All Saints ad. I looked around for the tub in question, but just then she brightened and said: ‘Could we do something else?’
‘Certainly,’ I said.
Gaia pushed her glasses up her nose, shuffled off her chair and lifted Louis. ‘He likes his trousers,’ she said, rubbing the hem of them between finger and thumb. ‘They’re a bit scratchy but he likes the pattern.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I can make him another pair, if he likes?’
She smiled, and next thing I knew she was walking behind me and playing with my hair. Coco – who was gnawing on a crayon at this point – gawped up at her sister as she ran her fingers through my hair like a comb.
‘I like your hair,’ Gaia said. ‘Why is it so black?’
I was learning fast that six-year-olds were masters of The Abstract Question. It was better to respond with truth, I reasoned, or at least a version of it. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘My biological daddy was from Spain. Possibly.’
The full truth was that I had been conceived while my mother was on her one and only sojourn out of the cosmopolitan wonderland that is Sunderland on a hen-do in Majorca. A few weeks after that she began to feel sick, and for four or five months thereafter she numbed the sickness with weed.
‘That’s how I became a weed addict!’ she used to muse fondly. ‘Little did I know I was up the duff! If I’d known, I’d have had an abortion! Lucky you, eh, Lexi?
My father could have been one of any number of men she encountered on that trip, none of whom she could recall clearly. What was clear was that I inherited nothing of my mother’s clammy English pallor, and the olive-skinned, conker-eyed and black-haired colouring that I did inherit served only to invite a range of soul-crushing xenophobic taunts that would be hurled at me in the playground, in the street, and occasionally in my own home.
Of course, I didn’t tell any of this to Gaia.
‘What does “biological” mean?’ she asked.
‘It means my real daddy. So, your daddy is your real daddy, isn’t he?’
She nodded.
‘I never knew who my real daddy was.’
She cocked her head. ‘Why?’
I opened my mouth, then closed it. There was simply no safe way to answer that question.
‘Why don’t we play a game?’
‘Shall we play hairdressers?’ She started running her fingers through my hair again. ‘I love your hair. When I grow up, I’m going to have black hair just like yours.’
‘That’s very sweet of you, Gaia.’
‘I can do your make-up, too.’
I started to tell her to stop, but the sensation of having my hair played with was so soothing that my willpower rolled over like a dog wanting its belly rubbed and before I knew it I was allowing both of them to twist my hair into braids and draw all over my face.
Maren entered the kitchen right as Coco decided she’d had enough of my attempts to feed her soggy pasta and broccoli – this was all I could cook, vegan-wise, for a good three weeks – and picked up the bowl, plopping both bowl and its contents on her head like a hat. Maren stood next to me, looking over the scene with her mouth open. It was then that I realized I hadn’t removed the face paints that Gaia and Coco had slathered all over my face during our make-up session, nor had I fixed the bird’s nest they’d made of my hair. Also, Coco’s nappy had exploded – I had forgotten that babies need to be changed regularly – and whilst I had been frantically attempting to change her, Gaia had applied the paints to her own face. She’d gone for a Halloween look, covering her face entirely in orange and applying white circles around both eyes.