Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © C.J. Cooke 2020

Jacket Photographs: Cover Images © Shutterstock.com

Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

C.J. Cooke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008341862

Ebook Edition © 2020 ISBN: 9780008341886

Version: 2020-09-02

Acclaim for The Nesting

‘Norwegian fjords and folktales are beautifully evoked in this vivid and compelling novel’

Rosamund Lupton

‘It has been such a tonic – chilling, totally engrossing and full of intrigue. The pages just whizzed by while I ignored everyone! It’s marvellous’

Katherine May

‘Nordic folklore, snowy landscapes, and an ever-turning screw of tension – a fun, gothic treat’

Kirsty Logan

‘The Nesting is a gorgeous, atmospheric book that chilled me to the bone. The perfect escape book into the deep woods of Norway, where nothing is as it seems. C.J. Cooke just became one of my favourite authors’

Samantha Downing

‘An original and haunting thriller, filled with secrets, ghosts, and Norse folk-tales. The Nesting is an evocative and chilling tale that will keep you guessing, and is best read with the lights on’

Alice Feeney

‘The Nesting is an intriguing mix of gothic drama and domestic noir’

Sophie Draper

‘A taut, scary thriller that winds the suspense so tightly you can barely breathe’

Simone St. James

‘The Nesting is at once a taut psychological thriller, an eerie Nordic fable, and a thoughtful meditation on stewardship – not only of children, but of friendship, of truth, and of the natural world we take for granted at our peril. Ms. Cooke tells her story with a spare, elegant prose that betrays a poet’s ear, and also a poet’s discipline. The language is beautiful, but effortlessly so, pushing the story forward in two deftly handled timelines. The characters are heart-breakingly three-dimensional, yet tell us only what we need to know when we need to know it. This is my favourite kind of book – a quick read with a long echo’

Christopher Buehlman

Dedication

For

Jared & Phoenix

Epigraph

Once upon a time there was a river who, like all rivers, knew exactly where she wished to go. Some people willed her to change her course, and when she did not bend to their will, they began to tear her apart, pebble by pebble, stone by stone.

Of course, the river won in the end, and returned to her route with a wet sigh of relief, running the length of her spine against the familiar grey rocks and stretching luxuriantly against the grooves of earth she had known for centuries.

And she made sure that the people paid dearly for their foolishness.

from P. Johansen’s Book of Remembered Norse Folk Tales, 1999

(trans. A. Faraday)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Acclaim for The Nesting

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1: Endless Dark

Chapter 2: Hauled in by the Throat

Chapter 3: A Place to Stay

Chapter 4: The Nanny

Chapter 5: Building a Nest

Chapter 6: A Home or a Nest

Chapter 7: Are You Going to Die?

Chapter 8: The River

Chapter 9: Is There Something You’re not Telling Me?

Chapter 10: The Hole You Left

Chapter 11: The Felling

Chapter 12: This is a Sign

Chapter 13: Would You Return?

Chapter 14: She Who is Missed Most

Chapter 15: The Bottom of the Earth

Chapter 16: The Cliff and the Forest and the Beasts

Chapter 17: Words that Boil, Wounds that Burn

Chapter 18: The Attic

Chapter 19: The Lift

Chapter 20

Chapter 21: Foreign Agents

Chapter 22: It Didn’t add Up

Chapter 23: Someone else Knows

Chapter 24: The Drill

Chapter 25: The Turning Point

Chapter 26: I Saw Her Swimming

Chapter 27

Chapter 28: The Suspects

Chapter 29: The Discovery

Chapter 30: The Murder of Ingrid Olsen

Chapter 31: The Crossing

Chapter 32: The Discovery

Chapter 33: No Longer Needed

Chapter 34: You Want this

Chapter 35: Different Storms

Chapter 36: The Note

Chapter 37: Curiosity and Suspicion

Chapter 38: She was Mine

Chapter 39: Did You Do It?

Chapter 40: The Choice

Chapter 41: The Guest

Acknowledgements

Author Note

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by C.J. Cooke

About the Publisher

Prologue

Aurelia sprints through the dark forest, her white nightdress billowing like a cloud, her strides long and swift across the carpet of bark and brambles. She tries not to think too much about how the towering silver birches resemble skeletons, moonlight transforming the silvery trunks into endless prison bars and the weeping sky soaking her to the bone.

Her breaths come in quick, frantic gasps, her lungs ache and her feet bleed, but he is tearing after her and he will do much, much worse to her than the forest, or the thing in the house. He will hurt the babies, Gaia and Coco, and she will do absolutely anything to protect them. She has to draw him away from them, as far as she can. For good, this time.

So she powers downhill, her heart trying to climb into her mouth and her mind churning like a river wheel, though she knows there is no way she can outrun him for long, and there is no one to call in the wilderness that spreads for miles on end all around.

She takes the trail towards the cliff where a drop of two hundred feet connects the south end of a sapphire fjord to muscular granite. Her mind splits into two voices, one that tells her yes, this is the only way, the only option, and the other that shouts at her to turn back, it’s crazy, utterly crazy.

She reaches the cliff edge sooner than she’d anticipated. Her toes feel the rush of icy air at the end of the path and she has to wrap her arms around an oak tree to stop herself from tumbling off the end.

She can hear the thud of his feet fifty feet behind. She has only seconds to decide. The risk is enormous. It isn’t the thought of dying that brings a sob to her throat. It’s the girls. Gaia and Coco. Growing up without her.

She sees them in her mind, two bright angels. Even when she feels him grow closer she holds on to that vision and imagines reaching out to them, taking their hands.

Come on, Mumma! Hold on tight!

With a snarl he lunges at her, and quickly she darts out of his way, letting him plunge headlong towards the edge of the cliff where there is nothing but night separating rock and water, life and certain death.

But his shoulder collides with hers, and although she reaches out to take her daughters’ hands, her feet lift and she falls down, down into the endless dark.

1
ENDLESS DARK
Now

Meg was the one who found me slumped against the bathroom wall with red pouring out of my arms. I could make out what she was saying though it sounded like we were underwater. Oh no, oh no. Lexi! What the hell have you done, Lexi?

She crouched in front of me and I wanted to tell her not to because she was going to ruin her lovely yellow skirt by kneeling in my blood. Also there was glass on the floor from the mirror I’d smashed and I’d feel awful if she cut herself.

She grabbed some towels, wrapped them around my arms and started to cry when she couldn’t tie them tight enough. Have you ever tried to tie a knot in a towel? Really difficult, it turns out.

Meg dialled 999 on her phone. By this stage I was swooping in and out of consciousness – I’d taken a fistful of paracetamol, just in case – and I could no longer decipher between reality and hallucination, which is always fine by me as long as neither is threatening. They must have hoiked me down the stairs and into the ambulance, but I don’t remember any of this. I woke up in the hospital a few hours later, puking my guts up. I’ve no idea what they gave me, but it was efficient in wringing me out. They stitched me up, masked the cuts with padded dressings.

Meg came back the next day and brought me lunch in a brown paper bag and looked tearful when I said I couldn’t touch it. David came and I immediately felt guilty again for being a burden on him. He said, ‘I had to use annual leave to come see you. What happened? Why are you here, Lex?’

I had no answer. I wondered if he’d had to clean up the blood. David was always squeamish.

A doctor came along, stood beside my bed with his hands in his pockets.

‘Lexi, before we send you home we need to be sure you won’t do this again. We need you to sign a form saying that you have no more plans to harm yourself.’

He produced a form. I signed it. I took the bus home.

On the phone my mother said that I was always an attention seeker. I read somewhere that those who get under our skin are our best teachers, and while it sticks in me to call my mother a teacher of any kind, I’ll say that her comment inadvertently sparked an epiphany, because even as she moved on to give me a blow-by-blow account of that morning’s Jeremy Kyle, I realized that she was part of the reason I’d tried to top myself. And secondly, I realized that if I was to stay alive, I should probably stop speaking to her altogether.

I lost my job. I was working as an administrator at a care home and took a month off to recover. I didn’t get a sick note, so they sacked me. It was probably illegal, but the thing with illness, mental or otherwise, is that it tends to annihilate your capacity for argument. At the time I was spending twenty-three hours a day in bed. For the first few weeks I mostly slept, though I had such psychedelic nightmares that it wasn’t exactly restful. Dreams about my childhood, about my mother telling me she wished I’d never been born. Dreams of being shipped out to strangers while she ‘sorted herself out’.

David didn’t say much to me during this time. He went out to work every morning, sent me a text at lunchtime, and then came home at dinner time with a ready meal or takeout. I didn’t eat much. He’d sit in bed beside me marking homework assignments while I tried to follow Game of Thrones. When the cuts healed I started sleeping less, and the fear set in again. I asked David if I could go to work with him and he looked at me like I’d suggested he get a full body wax.

‘Come to work with me? What for?’

I didn’t want to say I was lonely at home. ‘Because I’m lonely at home.’

‘Go back to work, then.’

‘They sacked me, remember?’

‘Can’t you just look for a new job?’

‘I could sit in the staffroom and read.’

‘You can’t do that …’

‘Why not?’

‘It would be weird, Lexi. You know it would.’

‘Maybe the caretaker’s cupboard.’

‘The what?’

‘Don’t schools still have those? Mine did.’

‘Look, I’ll FaceTime you.’

He didn’t FaceTime me.

I went to the public library but it was too loud. People were staring and it felt like being branded with hot irons. The books were full of stories that shouted at me and I worried they might fly off the shelves and hit me. Difficult to explain these kinds of things when a librarian is leaning over you asking why you’re hyperventilating on the floor.

So I went home, opened my laptop, and started to write. I wrote and wrote and wrote. It was like the story was being dictated to me. It was about a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had a nightmarish childhood due to her mother passing her around strangers who did terrible things to her, and the girl grew up to be an inventor and made millions and learned self-respect. Note the feminist angle. It was set in Norway. After my doomed trip to the public library, I realized I’d somehow managed to check out some novels, all of them whodunnits set in bleak, Nordic landscapes. Scandi noir. After I finished reading them I thought, that’s what my book is. I tweaked a few details and lo, a Scandi noir it became.

I knew David was going to break up with me. We’d been together eight years and the last six had been fairly rough going. He was like the Arctic. Impenetrable, cold, rugged. I used to find these qualities attractive. Or rather, I remembered the look on my mother’s face when she met him. She was all timid, couldn’t get her words out. He was middle class, which is a bit like saying he was from Middle Earth, wielding a sword that turned blue at the prospect of charging orcs. My mother finds middle-class people – or in other words, anyone with a mortgage – intimidating.

That was reason enough for me to move in with him.

Being dumped went far worse than I’d expected. I hadn’t really considered that the flat was technically David’s and that if we broke up I might end up homeless, but there it was. He came home and looked like he’d had a few drinks, and he said:

‘I can’t do this any more, Lexi. I can’t take it. You’re too much.’

I looked at what he was wearing – since when had he started wearing a shirt and tie? – and said, ‘Too much of what?’

‘Too much of you. We need to split. I’m sorry.’

We hugged. It seemed very amicable. I felt a small amount of pride in what ego I had left that here I was facing the first big milestone of adulthood – namely, the death of my first long-term relationship – and yet I was still managing to say things like ‘no, no, you’re right, it’s better that we stay friends, that’s the main thing’ instead of falling apart. I felt very fond of him right then, because at least he looked like he regretted us parting ways.

But the next morning, he was back to being the Arctic personified.

‘When are you moving out?’ he said, avoiding eye contact as he did his tie. Navy blue with white stripes. Very corporate.

I looked around at all my stuff strewn across the bedroom floor and spewing out of the chest of drawers. I had barely enough strength to make it to the toilet and back, never mind pack eight years’ worth of crap and organize a removal company. And a new home.

‘When do you want me to move out?’ I asked.

‘By next week, if that’s all right,’ he said, and I nodded as though this was a perfectly reasonable request. Note: I’d never done Breaking Up before, not when it involved moving out of my home. And I was on a daily 100 mg dose of an anti-psychotic that occasionally made the bread bin initiate a conversation.

Next week came. I got dressed. Jeans, white T-shirt, bottle-green cardi, and a laser-cut necklace that spelled out ‘protagonist’ in glossy black Helvetica. I filled a holdall with some random items I thought I might need – a tin opener, clean socks, the toaster – and made a packed lunch.

I had forty-one pounds and fifty-nine pence in my bank account. I eyed my wardrobe full of clothes, shoes, and Christmas presents, with trepidation. You might as well have asked me to dredge up the Titanic as ask me to find a way to pack all of it up. It didn’t occur to me to ask anyone for help. I’d put everyone through enough. I’d ruined Meg’s yellow skirt, and traumatized that poor librarian.

So I took my packed lunch and holdall and closed the door of the flat behind me, leaving my key on the table.

When I went outside it was raining. I didn’t have an umbrella. I had a coat, but no hood. This felt symbolic of my life up until that point. She had a coat, but lo, it had no hood.

I reached into my pocket in case I should find an unused poo bag from walking Mrs Hughes’s springer spaniel with which to shield my head against the downpour. No poo bag, but I did find David’s pre-paid rail pass. I’d found it in the hall and meant to give it to him, but the thought had trickled out of my head like a ribbon falling out of a ponytail.

At Newcastle I took a train headed to Birmingham New Street with lots of stops in between. I had no idea where I was going, and it didn’t matter, because the train was moving, and it was a mild comfort to be headed somewhere when my entire life had come to a complete stop. Plus, I was dry, and my arms ached from hoiking around the Tefal 4-slice stainless steel toaster that David had bought me for my last birthday.

The train was full of commuters. As ever I picked up on the cues of people’s lives – accounts spreadsheets, text messages flashing up on screens with evening plans and reminders to pick up milk, phone conversations about a colleague, or a sick aunt. I started to have those thoughts again, the ones that had persuaded me that I was already dead so it wouldn’t be a big deal if I committed suicide. It would be a relief, and everyone would benefit from it. I started to cry. No one paid any heed until my shoulders started bobbing up and down, and then a group of women gathered around me like hens and asked me what was wrong. I told them I’d broken up with my boyfriend.

‘Dear oh dear,’ one of them said, and another said, ‘Well, if you ask me, he sounds like a Grade A cockwomble,’ and they hugged me to their fleshy bosoms.

The train stopped at Durham. The hens told me I was pretty and young and didn’t need a man, and then they got off the train. I dabbed my eyes and kept my gaze fixed on the cathedral, on its sharp spires jabbing the bellies of clouds. Cars threaded through the streets and a smudge of kids played in a back garden. I envied their central heating and washing machines, the comfortable beds that they’d be able to climb into at the end of the day. I had none of that, now, and I had the sensation of being a tiny boat cut loose and drifting rapidly along a thrashing river with a waterfall thundering in the distance. To make matters worse, it occurred to me that I’d left my medication in David’s flat. I found my mobile phone in my bra and rang his number, but it didn’t connect. He had blocked me.

Panic started to stir in me like a thousand manic butterflies. What was I going to do? Where would I go?

I would end it.

That’s what I would do.

Properly, this time.

My own reflection came into view in the glass, and I jumped, thinking at first that a woman had somehow materialized on the other side of the window. But no, it was me. I barely recognized myself. It had been ages since I looked in a mirror – I deliberately avoided this because I hated myself so much – but there I was, looking back at myself.

My reflection had a surprising look of grit. She didn’t look nearly as awful as I felt. She was thin, yes, and her outgrown bob was messy, and she had dark circles under her eyes, but she looked like someone I’d like to talk to. Someone who would listen and not wait until it was their turn to offer an opinion.

My reflection said, You’re writing a book, remember? If you die, the book won’t get finished.

I remembered I’d promised myself that I’d finish writing this damn book. This untitled Scandi noir that was unfolding quite nicely, unlike my miserable life. I owed it to that book – to the little girl in the story, Alexa, who suffered so much – to tell the world her story.

2
HAULED IN BY THE THROAT
Now

The train filled with new passengers and started to pull out of Durham station. A couple of younger women sat in the seats in front with their backs to me, continuing a loud conversation about a job that one of them was applying for.

‘But Sophie, do you really want to go to Norway?’ the one in the blue top said.

My ears pricked up. Norway? My novel was set in Norway. Oslo, to be precise. All the other Scandi noir novels I’d read were set there, and the murderously-hostile-but-dramatic Nordic landscape felt very much like the inside of my brain. So in a way, although I’d never been to Norway, the place felt intriguingly familiar.

‘Well, not really,’ Sophie said, ‘but Lucia’s starting school and Philippa said she’ll only need me during the summer holidays. And that’s not enough, is it?’

‘Couldn’t you just get another job during the school term?’ Sophie’s friend countered. ‘And then nanny for Philippa during the summer hols?’

‘I’ve got my application all ready,’ Sophie said, flipping open her laptop and turning it to her friend. ‘All I have to do is click “send”.’

I could see it through the gap between the seats. I leaned forward and saw the white page of a PDF with boxes requesting information about previous employment and a large white section where Sophie had written a statement – in Comic Sans – about why she wanted the job. A sentence began ‘the wellbeing of children is my number one priority’, but I couldn’t make out the rest of it. Just then Sophie’s friend flicked her long black hair over one shoulder, obscuring my view.

‘How long is it for?’ Sophie’s friend whined.

Sophie mumbled a reply, but I didn’t hear, though her friend gasped.

‘You can’t go to Norway for that long!’ she said, horrified. ‘That’s ages.’

‘I know,’ Sophie said sadly, ‘but it’s a great job. Really well paid. All food and board taken care of, super gorgeous locale. They want someone to start right away …’

Now I was really interested. Free food and accommodation in Norway? Well paid? I could feel myself being drawn in – no, hauled in, by the throat – and there was a tingling sensation all over my body that I hadn’t experienced in a long, long time. Kind of like falling in love, only without the certainty that it’s going to end in tears and vile accusations.

When I was little, Mrs Corbett – my Year Four teacher, who didn’t get under my skin, but who showered me with love and the kind of smiles that made me stand a little taller – told me about serendipity. A happy accident, she said, orchestrated by the universe. She said we were all made of star dust – which I thought was gross at the time – so the oldest parts of our being would recognize when something was serendipitous. I told her that when I met her I had a big shiver all over, and she crouched down and said, ‘That is exactly what serendipity feels like, Lexi, sweetheart. Exactly that.’

‘You can’t go!’ Sophie’s friend hissed. ‘Look, I wasn’t going to say anything for another week or so but … I’m pregnant!’

Sophie gave a squeal and wrapped her arms around her friend. ‘Oh. My. Word. What?!’

Her friend was sniffling and giggling now and I rose a little higher in my seat to catch sight of the laptop screen for the job details.

‘When are you due?’ Sophie said, hugging her friend and rubbing her back.

‘February. I need you here, Soph. I was counting on you helping me out, especially since I’ve got this project to deliver by bloody Christmas. I wanted you to be my doula. Please? Look, whatever this job pays, I’ll double it.’

Sophie considered. ‘All right,’ she said, smiling. ‘Oh blimey, a baby, Seren?’

Seren. Like serendipity.

It was as though the universe was pointing a gigantic, god-like finger from parting clouds right at me, and a Charlton Heston-voice was booming, This job is meant for you, Lexi Ellis.

I had to get the details of that job. Not just the details – I had to get Sophie’s statement, her CV, and her references. After all, she was the one with the experience in nannying, not me. In one wild moment of crystalline clarity, I knew what I would have to do in order to get the job – I would have to pretend I was Sophie.

‘I’m going to get some lunch,’ Sophie announced. ‘Are you hungry? Well, you will be, won’t you? Now that you’re eating for two!’

Her friend – Seren – deliberated. I’d pulled out my phone at this point, hell-bent on getting a screenshot of the laptop screen before she put it away, but Seren was blocking my view, and just as she rose up out of her seat she closed the laptop lid. My heart sank.

Thanks, Universe. Thanks for toying with me.

‘Hold up,’ Seren called after Sophie. ‘I’m coming.’

Sophie glanced back at her bag and laptop, a worried look on her face. She was tall and slender, long auburn hair to her waist, and a belly top revealing a slender midriff. To my horror, she caught my eye.

‘Would you mind?’ she began, and I stared back at her, cow-eyed. ‘Would you mind watching my stuff while we head to the buffet carriage?’

‘Oh,’ I said, finding a sudden composure. ‘Not at all.’

She flashed an appreciative smile. ‘Thanks.’

The two of them headed off down the carriage chatting loudly, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I glanced around to check no one was looking before reaching an arm through the gap in the seat and lifting the lid of the laptop. It was probably password protected. Damn. Quickly I flipped it open and the screen whitened. To my relief, the PDF of the job application was there, right in front of me, and so I thrust my phone forward and took picture after picture of the screen. I scrolled up and down on the keypad, no longer really seeing what I was taking photos of, but snapping hastily at everything and anything to make sure I got it all.

‘Thank you so much!’

Sophie’s voice sounded, sending a javelin of fear right through me, and I sat back in my seat, sweat streaming down my back and my heart clanging in my chest. As Sophie and Seren tucked into their croissants and coffees I scrolled through my phone and zoomed in on the images I’d taken. Some were blurry, most were lopsided, but it didn’t matter. I’d got what I needed.

My name was now Sophie Hallerton, I had a brief CV detailing my nannying experience and email address for a reference, and a saccharine statement in florid prose about my passion for looking after children. In other words, I was set.

I set up an email account. Sophiehallerton1088@gmail.com. I downloaded the form and copied out the answers and Sophie’s responses. If there was one thing I was good at, or at least something I used to do all day long in my last job, it was completing forms and setting up email accounts. Finally, I sent the application off from my new email address.

As the train pulled into Birmingham New Street three hours later, my phone bleeped with an email.

To: sophiehallerton1088@gmail.com

From: maren.larsen@tfarchitecture.net

Subject: Re: job application

Dear Sophie

Many thanks for your application for the position of ‘Nanny’.

We would like to invite you to interview for this role as soon as possible.

Would you be available to meet with myself and Mr Faraday next Wednesday at 1 p.m.? The address is:

313 Rowan Gardens, London, NW3 5TD

We will contact the person(s) you have listed as employment references in the meantime, if that’s OK?

Kind regards

Maren Larsen

My heart leaped. I felt sick and excited at the same time, exactly the same feeling I had when I jumped off the top diving board at the swimming pool, or went on the Ferris wheel with the creaky carriages.

To: maren.larsen@tfarchitecture.net

From: sophiehallerton1088@gmail.com

Subject: Re: Re: job application

Hi Maren

Thank you for your email.

Yes, I’d be delighted to attend this interview.

Kind regards,

Sophie Hallerton

A reply swooped back within seconds – wonderful, see you then – and I leaned back in my seat, my nerves pinging with excitement and adrenalin. Sophie and Seren sat in front of me sucking croissant flakes from their fingers and discussing baby names and birth plans, the job application long forgotten.

Next Wednesday was exactly a week away. The rail pass expired at midnight that day, though David could easily cancel it before then once he worked out it was missing. If he did, I didn’t have enough money to buy another ticket. Come to think of it, I hadn’t enough money to book a place to stay until then.

Using the last of my phone’s battery, I dialled Meg.

3
A PLACE TO STAY
Now

Meg didn’t answer her phone.

I sat on the train, watching the platform fill up with people making their way to the exit. I tried Meg again, and again.

‘Aren’t you getting off, miss?’ a train conductor asked from the aisle.

‘Oh. Yes,’ I said, trying not to be weird and twitchy, as David had often accused me of being. I hoisted up my bag and saw him eyeing the contents. I stepped on to the platform and headed for the exit. Outside I spotted a café, and in a series of highly focused non-weird and non-twitchy movements, I ordered a coffee and parked myself at a table.

What happened next wasn’t ideal. First, my phone battery died, then the waitress came and told me they were closing in ten minutes. I realized with shock that it was almost six o’clock in the evening. This is the thing with depression, and particularly with anti-psychotics – your internal clock goes AWOL, as does your libido, hunger, balance, focus, sense of humour, and short-term memory. So I wandered around trying to forage for a phone charger, then caved and got back on the train to Newcastle, which was now full of drunk, red-faced blokes shouting about a football match. I found a seat as far away from them as possible and curled up in a ball, hoping they wouldn’t shout at me, which they did. And then, at York, the train broke down. Signal failure. We had to get off, were promised we’d be refunded. It was freezing cold, the platform was swarming with aggressive football fans, and I had nowhere to go.

I approached one of the police officers who had – serendipitously – appeared on the platform.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, and in my mind I was poised to tell them a story about losing my purse, and could they point me in the direction of a hostel? My mouth, however, had other ideas. ‘I’m homeless and I’ve nowhere to go and two months ago I tried to kill myself so will you help me please I’m so lonely,’ my mouth said, and I started to cry.

Within a minute I was being asked to get into the police car, and within ten minutes I was standing outside a women’s refuge.

The refuge had a big common area with sofas and a hand-painted mural of a forest across three walls, and a kitchen for us to eat together. The dorms were all full of women and children, but the lady in charge said I could spend the night on a sofa.

I ended up spending the week there. It felt nice, like a little community of bruised, terrified, and addicted women. Jill ran the place with a team of volunteers. Jill was large and had bright red hair piled on top of her head and she always wore a black vest top with a swishy black skirt with purple Dr. Martens. There was a massive garden out the back with deck chairs, and Jill told me every day to sit out there and ‘clear my mind’. A doctor visited and I told her I needed a repeat prescription of the medicine I’d been on. She frowned and suggested I try a lower dose of something that was apparently ‘less taxing’ on the brain. Another woman – a volunteer at a charity shop – came around with clothes, which was great as I literally had only the clothes on my back. I picked out a black trouser suit with a white shirt for my interview, and she found me some sensible shoes.

Wednesday came and I got on the train to London for the interview. I was super nervous, but Jill put some make-up on me and insisted that I look at myself in the mirror. I was surprised. My eyes always looked sallow, but she’d blotted out the dark circles with concealer and added mascara and a flick of kohl just above my eyelashes. A dab of bronzer made me look healthy, and on my lips she dabbed a demure coral lipstick which apparently made my eyes ‘pop’. I found this to be a rather distressing mental image, so Jill clarified: ‘It means your lovely brown eyes look like melted chocolate. OK?’ Melted chocolate can only ever be a pleasant thing.

I also washed my hair for the first time in weeks – months, maybe – and she used a hairdryer and scorching-hot tongs to bring it to life.

‘There you are, my lovely,’ she said, spritzing my hair with something called ‘gunk’. ‘Just like Penélope Cruz, you are.’

I’d expected the interview to be in some big, space-agey skyscraper, but instead the taxi dropped me outside a beautiful mansion in leafy Hampstead – close to the Freud Museum, as it happens. I’d often wondered if lying on a couch talking about my problems – or rather, my mother – would have done a better job of fixing me than medication, but then I figured that slathering myself in snake oil or burying a potato at the root of an oak tree on a full moon would have done a better job of fixing me than medication, so the answer was probably a resounding yes.

I walked up the garden path and pressed the buzzer outside the red door, which had a crescent of stained glass in every colour.

A heavy-set woman with cropped platinum-blonde hair opened the door. She looked like she was mid-fifties, a handsome face and an intelligent, penetrating look about her.

‘I’m here for the interview?’ I said softly. ‘I’m Lex— Sophie. My name is Sophie Hallerton.’

Damn. I’ll never remember to keep that one up. Sophie. I’m Sophie. Sophie. Sophie. Sophie.

‘Maren,’ the woman said, holding out a hand. I shook it. ‘Do come in.’

It became clear that the house wasn’t an architecture firm but a family home, with rustic wooden floors, sage green walls dotted with family photographs, an old rocking horse and a glass cabinet filled with pictures and cute ornaments in the spacious hallway. A staircase swept upwards, where a children’s programme was playing on a TV. Maren gestured for me to follow her through the hallway towards a large kitchen, which was a mixture of high-end design and country charm. An open-brick chimney breast was filled with a silver range cooker; in the centre of the room was an island with six white bar stools and an arrangement of baby-pink peonies. To my left, a pretty garden was visible through French doors: a weeping willow, a pond. The marble surfaces were pristine, but I could make out children’s drawings stuck to the doors of a double fridge freezer standing at the far end of the room. Whoever lived here clearly cared a lot about their family.

‘Can I get you anything to drink?’ Maren said, and I noticed a hint of an accent. Clipped, European. ‘Tea? Coffee?’

‘Just … a glass of water,’ I said. She took a glass from a cupboard and filled it at the fridge freezer’s water dispenser, then got one for herself.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

She gestured for me to take a seat at the kitchen island and did the same. This wasn’t how I expected the interview to go. I noticed she was wearing a floaty navy tunic with white linen trousers, and I suddenly felt overdressed.

‘Thank you very much for your application,’ she said. ‘We were very impressed by your experience. This is clearly a vocation for you.’

It took me a moment to deduce that this was a question. I nodded and gave what I hoped was a relaxed, vocational smile.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Definitely a vocation.’

‘Wonderful that you have a nursing degree.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Er, yes. I thought it might … come in handy one day.’

‘And a certificate in vegan cookery!’

I blinked. Was that on Sophie’s CV? I couldn’t remember. ‘Vegan cookery is something I’m very … vocational … about.’

‘Fantastic!’ she said, clapping her hands together. ‘I’m not vegan myself, though I am partial to red lentil tagine.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, unconvincingly. ‘Me too …’

‘Of course, Mr Faraday is vegan,’ she interjected, ‘and he intends his girls to be vegan, too.’ I gave a nervous laugh. Why hadn’t I noticed the bit about being a vegan chef? Maren glanced at her watch. ‘Speaking of which … Mr Faraday will be joining us shortly, but first I wanted to chat to you about … one or two matters that you should be aware of.’

She gave me a meaningful smile, and I felt acutely aware, now that I was here, that I hadn’t read the job description. It was a nannying job, and I’d assumed that meant looking after some children, or in other words lots of reading and painting and trips to the park. You see, I used to babysit regularly – albeit for my mum’s friends who were either too unconscious or preoccupied with partying to care for their kids – and I’d toyed with the idea of training to become a primary school teacher. None of my babysitting involved vegan cookery, however, or indeed anything that might require a nursing degree, with the exception of the time little Bobby Fitzmaurice cracked his head open on a bong. Duct tape and toilet roll sorted him right out.

‘Mrs Faraday – Aurelia – sadly passed away a few months ago,’ Maren said slowly. ‘Naturally the children are still getting used to the situation – Gaia in particular, given that she’s a little older … and we are trying everything to make life as easy as possible …’

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, the gravity of her words reaching me like physical blows.

‘Gaia and Coco have a nanny here,’ Maren continued, ‘but sadly she is unable to join us in Norway during the build.’

I felt a huge amount of relief at the mention of the children’s names. This was another detail I’d overlooked. Gaia and Coco. What pretty names. It would have been disastrous if I hadn’t known their names. Poor girls, to have lost their mother so young.

‘The build?’ I asked.

‘Tom and Aurelia bought land in Norway. They intended to build a holiday home, but during the construction period, Aurelia … passed.’ I saw her pale eyes moisten, and I realized she must have been close to this woman. I’d spotted a photo on top of the glass cabinet in the hallway of a woman with long, wheat-blonde hair grinning at the camera with an arm wrapped around a little girl of about four. Was that Aurelia? It must be.

‘Aurelia adored her girls,’ Maren continued in a sad voice. ‘They meant everything to her. Part of the reason for the summer home was so that she could cultivate friluftsliv—’

‘Oh, friluftsliv,’ I said, because of course.

‘—this is the Norwegian itch for the outdoors,’ Maren explained. ‘Aurelia wished to give her daughters the kind of summers that she had enjoyed as a child, always out in nature, and connect them to their heritage …’ She wanted to say more but suddenly couldn’t, her words winnowed by grief. She reached into her pocket for a tissue and dabbed her eyes. ‘And now,’ she said in a stronger voice, clearing her throat, ‘the build must recommence, but Tom is anxious to be on site for its duration and requires the children and nanny to be with him. I’m Tom’s housekeeper, and I’ll also be there.’ She stuffed the hankie up her sleeve and turned to me with shining eyes, the memory of Aurelia evidently filed away in her mind so that normal service could resume.

‘The job will require you to be with the children on site on a full-time basis,’ she said, ‘at least until March. Is that a problem?’ Her eyes searched my fingers for any sign of a ring. ‘No … partner who’ll want you home for Christmas?’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘No. Quite the opposite, in fact.’

She frowned at that, but something in her mind told her that this was the answer she wanted and she moved on. ‘Well, your reference was glowing, of course. Tom only sent the application pack to a selection of trusted associates – we don’t use recruitment agencies or anything like that – so we were delighted when Verity championed you.’

She was beaming now, and my face contorted into a rictus grin while my mind did somersaults. Verity?

‘Oh, Verity,’ I said lightly. ‘She’s … that’s so kind …’

Maren batted her hand in the air as though I was being modest, not clueless. ‘Of course she championed you. And what happened in Belgium …’

I gave a nervous giggle and eyed the door. What happened in Belgium? I wanted to shriek. It was abundantly, sharply clear now that I was way out of my depth. It was wrong to lie to a family who’d lost their mother. It was wrong to parade as something that I wasn’t, despite how desperate I was. I placed a foot on the floor and lifted my hips off the chair, preparing myself to sprint the hell out of there.

‘Hello?’ a man’s voice called. I looked up and saw a figure in the French doors, silhouetted by celestial afternoon sunlight that was swelling in the garden. A tall, lean man in a smart navy polo shirt and chinos, dark, tousled hair flecked with silver, and a hint of beard. A slightly more upmarket, skinnier Colin Farrell, with rimless glasses and overlapping front teeth. He marched across the room towards me and extended a hand. A gold wedding band flashed in the light. ‘Tom Faraday,’ he said, grinning. ‘You must be Sophie. A pleasure to meet you.’

‘A pleasure to meet you too,’ I said.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Is that a Geordie accent?’

I hesitated. ‘Yes?’

He glanced at Maren. ‘Spend a lot of time in the north, did you?’

‘I … looked after a child from the north,’ my mouth said, while my brain tried to keep up. ‘She was homesick and so I adopted her accent to make her … less homesick.’ Phew. My excuse seemed to make sense. But I would have to curb my accent. Now that I thought about it, Sophie hadn’t sounded particularly northern.

A warm smile. ‘Well, that’s very kind of you. How long have you been nannying?’

‘Ten years,’ I blurted out. Lies, lies, lies, said my brain.

I was sure Maren would launch into questions about the specifics of this – who did I nanny, and where – but she merely smiled and said, ‘And if you had to describe your nannying style, what would you say?’

I tried to make up another lie, but a squeak came out.

I stood up. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But is there a loo I could use?’

‘Certainly,’ Tom said, spinning around to his left. ‘Straight ahead, past the fridge. Oh, on second thoughts, best not as it’s still blocked. Kids and their toys … Use the one upstairs. Second door on the left.’

‘Thanks.’

I headed quickly upstairs and locked the toilet door behind me, then sat down with my head between my knees and groaned. What was I doing? What. Was. I. Doing?

I spent a few moments taking deep breaths and planning my next moves. I would go back downstairs and tell them that I was very sorry but I couldn’t do it after all. My friend was pregnant – or Sophie’s friend was pregnant – and I had to be around for her. Or Plan B: I’d tiptoe back down the stairs, open the front door, and run the hell out of there.

I was still weighing up Plan A and Plan B when I opened the door to find a small child staring up at me. She had white-blonde hair tied back in a loose plait, a pink gingham dress with a strap hanging off one shoulder, both arms behind her back. Round green eyes shone through turquoise spectacles, and I noticed that someone had drawn pictures all over her hands and bare legs in red felt-tip. She surveyed me curiously.

‘Are you my new nanny?’ she said.

‘I’m … I’m Sophie,’ I said.

It sickened me to lie to a child, I swear, but I could hear Tom’s footsteps on the stairs.

‘I’m Gaia,’ she said. ‘I’m six. How old are you?’

‘I’m twenty-eight.’

‘My mumma’s in heaven,’ she said.

This was a sucker punch to my heart. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

‘This is my teddy,’ she said, producing an old teddy from behind her back with floppy limbs, a tweed waistcoat, and a missing eye. ‘He’s not feeling very well today.’

It was clear that there would be no sprinting out the front door, so I crouched down in front of her and said, ‘What’s your teddy’s name?’

‘Louis.’

‘And why’s Louis not feeling very well?’

‘He’s just feeling a bit sad. And he has a sore tummy.’

‘Ah,’ Tom said, reaching the top of the stairs. ‘I see you’ve met Gaia and Louis.’ He winked at Gaia. ‘How are you doing, pudding?’

‘Daddy!’ She ran to him with her arms out, wrapping them around his legs and burying her face in his thigh. ‘Is this my new nanny?’ she said, glancing back at me.

Tom scooped her up and grinned at me. ‘Well, that depends.’

‘On what?’

‘Shall we introduce Sophie to Coco?’

Tom gestured for me to follow him into one of the bedrooms and I opened my mouth to say something along the lines of I have to go now, but somehow I found myself in the sweetest child’s bedroom I’d ever seen, more a mini-apartment than a bedroom, with thick cream carpet, powder blue velvet curtains, and peach blossom walls, a crescent moon made out of twinkling LED lights, a miniature hot air balloon as a chandelier, and enough toys to fill a crèche, including a plush, twelve-foot toy giraffe. The name ‘Coco’ was hand-painted in fancy gold lettering across a wall, and when I looked over at the white sleigh cot I saw a little girl in a Babygro hanging on to the bars, her legs wobbling as she looked up and threw me a wet smile.

‘I’m Ellen,’ a voice said. ‘How do you do?’

I hadn’t noticed the woman in a long green dress sitting by the crib. She was cross-legged, her arms held out in that absent-minded way I’d seen mothers do when their babies were learning to walk. The nanny who Maren mentioned before. The one who couldn’t go to Norway.

‘Sophie,’ I said, uneasily. Coco let go of the bars and plopped down on her bottom, then turned around and started to crawl. Tom bent down and scooped her up. Blonde, downy curls around her neck, like a little duckling, the same wide green eyes as Gaia. She was adorable.

‘And this is Coco,’ Tom said, planting a kiss on her cheek.

I was struck by how young Coco was, particularly since her mother had passed away.

‘She’s nine months old,’ Tom told me as though he was thinking the same thing. He seemed lost in thought for a moment, then pulled himself together. I can tell when people do that. ‘She’s just learning to crawl,’ he said then, his voice slightly loud. ‘And she can say Dada. Say Dada, Coco. Da-da.’

Coco smiled wetly at him. ‘Ma-ma,’ she said. ‘Ma-ma. Ma-ma.’

The room was suddenly charged with emotion, and I felt my lies pressing down on me like lead weights. But just then, Coco reached out to me, both her hands open wide. Tom passed her to me and I took her, feeling the lovely warmth of her in my arms. I swear, I’ve never been remotely maternal or gooey over other people’s kids – quite the opposite, especially during the drool stage – but there was something different about Coco and Gaia. Or maybe I just related to their loss.

It was clear that Coco had an interest in my hair – she grabbed on to it and yanked it hard, and even when Tom stepped forward to undo her grip she did it again and laughed hysterically. I pulled a face and she clapped her hands together and laughed again. I pulled another face and she squealed in delight.

‘Shall I let you spend some time with the girls?’ Tom asked me. ‘Ellen can fill you in on their routines.’

The urge to run out of there screaming was starting to wane. I was on surer territory, now, especially since I felt so comfortable around Gaia and Coco. It almost felt like I’d known them much longer than three minutes.

Serendipity. That’s what it felt like.

Tom left me and Ellen to chat while Gaia and Coco played in the nursery. Ellen told me she’d worked for Tom for just two and a half months, but she was getting married and couldn’t go to Norway. I could see she’d been torn about this and it was clear she loved the girls.

‘So you didn’t know their mother?’ I said, calculating the length of time Ellen said she’d been in the post and the length of time it had been since Aurelia died.

Ellen shook her head. ‘No. It’s clear that they were devastated, though they’re so young that it takes a long time to process something like that, losing your mother …’ She paused briefly. ‘It was one of the reasons Tom wanted me to nanny for him, while he tried to keep his business going and get his head around it all. I’ve had child counselling training, you see.’ She glanced over at Gaia who was playing with an enormous dolls’ house. ‘They’re doing much, much better now, though Gaia still asks questions. Just so you know, if she asks what happened, the party line is: Mummy had an accident and is in heaven.’

I nodded, though the phrasing made me unsettled. ‘An accident?’ I said cautiously.

Ellen dropped her gaze to the floor. ‘Suicide,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Terrible, isn’t it? What would drive someone to do something like that?’

The scabs on my arms began to itch beneath my sleeves. ‘Yes,’ I said after a long pause. ‘Terrible.’

I left an hour later, both exhilarated and disgusted with myself. There was no way I could take the job, absolutely no freaking way. I’d be lying to a family who had been utterly devastated by an unthinkable tragedy.

But on the other hand, I wanted to be a part of their lives.

I wanted to go to Norway, yes, and I wanted a home and a chance to write my book and turn my life around. But Gaia and Coco were sweet, precious girls who had lost their mother to something I knew better than I knew myself, and beneath the usual thrumming cacophony of self-hatred in my head was a quiet but insistent whisper that maybe – just maybe – I could actually make a difference.

It’s up to you, Universe, I thought. Que será, será, okey dokey?

On the train back to York, an email arrived in my inbox.

To: sophiehallerton1088@gmail.com

From: tom.faraday@tfarchitecture.net

Subject: nanny

Dear Sophie

Can you start on Monday?

Warmly,

Tom

4
THE NANNY
Now

I could not believe it.

I had to scroll up and down a few times to make sure there was no P.S. Just kidding, loser! at the bottom of the email. I even zoomed in on the email address to make sure it was from that Tom, the same Tom with the crinkly grey eyes behind rimless glasses, the same Tom whose sadness had swirled around the room when his baby girl said ‘Ma-ma’, and then I had to say the email out loud to check that I wasn’t getting the wrong end of the stick – ‘can you start on Monday?’ really did mean ‘we’re offering you the job’, didn’t it?

I clapped my hand to my mouth and gave a little scream. I thought I’d come across a little too wired-to-the-moon, especially when Maren was asking all the questions about my nursing degree and vegan cookery.

Speaking of which, I had five days to learn everything I could about veganism, and I figured I ought to brush up on some first aid … When I managed to get my hand to stop shaking I emailed back and said I’d be delighted to accept the job, and a reply came back shortly after saying that he was delighted too, and that details of the flight I’d need to book to Norway would follow shortly after from Maren, as well as money to pay for it.

I could hardly keep still in my seat. It was as if every emotion in existence had come blasting into the train carriage in a torrent, drenching me and leaving me gasping for air. I always did feel things a little stronger than the next person, but usually it was Bad Feelings that I felt strongly. I’d basically gone through life like a dandelion clock, blown to smithereens over and over by an endless series of misfortunes that gusted into my life. But now – now – things seemed to be actually working out, and while it wasn’t a feeling I was accustomed to, it was the best high ever.

A woman sat in the seat opposite staring at her phone with a frown, and I desperately wanted to reach across the table and shake her by the shoulders, screaming, I’ve got somewhere to live! Isn’t that great? And I wanted to shout about how I felt this was meant to be, that those little girls needed me in their lives and that the book I was writing was going to basically write itself, now that I was going to live in Norway surrounded by moody fjords and sinister, abandoned fishing villages.

Then I started to weep, feeling staggered by relief. Shortly after that, paranoia kicked in. A tiny voice in my head that sounded exactly like Eartha Kitt whispered, But what about when they find out you’re not Sophie Hallerton? But to that voice I said Shut up, shut up! and when the woman across from me looked up sharply I realized I’d said this out loud.

I pulled my phone out and dialled Meg’s number. I was on complete autopilot, and it was only when she answered that I realized with a jolt that I’d not spoken to her since she came to see me in hospital. Also, she answered with a distracted ‘Yeah?’ as though she was expecting someone else to be on the other end of the line and I worried I might be disturbing her.

‘Meg? It’s me, Lexi. You’re not going to believe what I’m going to tell—’

‘Where are you?’ she demanded, and I glanced out the window in case we were near something that indicated my location. Still just fields, sheep, and wind turbines.

‘I’m not exactly sure. I’m on a train …’

‘Right, but where have you been? I’ve … I’ve been calling you loads …’

I told her about the women’s refuge and the interview in Hampstead, about how I’d used David’s rail pass to get there and was in fact using it now, though I wasn’t quite sure where I was headed. I covered the handset with my fingertips and hissed at the woman opposite, who was starting to look considerably nervous.

‘Where is this train headed?’ I asked her.

She cleared her throat. ‘Inverness?’

I reported this back to Meg. ‘Anyway, I’m moving to Norway on Monday, but I’ve nowhere to stay until then so I wondered if I can stay with you? And maybe you can lend me some clothes? I’ll be gone until March and I legit have one set of clothes.’

A long pause on the other end of the line. ‘Do you mean … you’re coming tonight?’

‘Is that OK? I’ll see if I can get off somewhere near Newcastle. If not, I’ll get a train back from Inverness … Can you pick me up from the station?’

‘Yes,’ Meg said, strangely emphatic. ‘Yes, absolutely. Just … text me whenever you get in, yeah?’

‘OK, but it might be really late …’

‘That’s fine. See you when you get in.’

‘OK.’

‘Oh, and Lexi?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’m so glad you’re safe.’

There was a weird, motherly tone to her voice. I hung up and frowned at the phone, then the woman opposite. ‘What was all that about?’ I asked her, and she gave a nervous shake of her head in response. ‘I mean, I don’t have a single missed call from Meg. I don’t think she’s rang me once all week. Why would she lie to me?’

The woman muttered a reply, but I was too caught up in my own thoughts to really hear it. I’d known Meg for over ten years. We’d gone to college together, both of us cajoled into doing a BTEC in Business Studies when the Creative Writing course turned out to be full. Meg wrote micro horror stories in biro, usually on people’s skin, a precedent for her current job as a tattoo artist. We were always close, and sometimes I confided in her when I felt down.

‘She sounds … very nice,’ the woman said, and I agreed. Meg was the closest thing to a soulmate I’d ever had. I’d miss her when I went to Norway.

The train pulled in to Newcastle a couple of hours later. I called Meg, and ten minutes later she was on the platform, waving her arm in the air. I noticed how dressed up she was, in a cerulean swing dress with white polka dots, her pink hair swept up in a chignon speared with a peacock feather. She pulled me into a tight hug, and then we walked to her car.

Meg’s flat was in the Avenues in Gateshead, close to Saltwell Park. When we pulled up I noticed a ‘To Let’ sign outside. I asked her about it but she didn’t answer. She made me dinner – a chip butty, a banana, and a cup of tea – while I told her all about the interview, about Tom and Gaia and Coco, and about my novel. She didn’t say anything. I noticed she’d had a new tattoo done. A big fox on her left bicep in thick black ink.

‘I have a favour to ask,’ I said finally, when she didn’t respond the way I thought she might. ‘Obviously I’m a bit skint just now, so I can’t afford to get my mail redirected, and David has blocked my number. Could you possibly nip round every month or so and pick up my post ’til I get back?’

She looked winded.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

She sat down at the table and clasped her hands, so that the letters on her knuckles read ‘LHOAVTEE’.

‘Look, I’m just going to say it,’ she said, lowering her eyes. ‘I’m … David and I …’

‘David and you what?’

I felt like I was in a meeting with my line manager, about to be given a Verbal Warning. She was wearing pea-green eyeshadow and navy lipstick. I always admired how Meg could pull off colour like that.

‘You’ve been pretty hard to deal with, Lex,’ she said tersely. ‘Cancelling plans at the last minute, not responding to text messages … You’ve never even paid me back that forty quid I lent you.’

‘When was this?’ I asked, flustered. ‘Forty quid?’

‘And you lost my Zara dress.’

‘I …’ The Zara dress flashed into my mind. Meg was a champion at finding amazing dresses. This one was an elegant chiffon number that I’d borrowed a couple of years ago when David and I went to York. I’d left it at the hotel and they’d never sent it on. I’d offered to buy her a replacement on eBay, but she said not to worry about it.

‘I didn’t mean to lose your Zara dress, Meg. You know I didn’t.’

She rolled her eyes and leaned back in her seat as if I’d told a barefaced lie. ‘You see? It’s always about you, Lexi. You’re so wrapped up in your own stuff that you never consider what other people are going through.’

The room seemed to be breathing and I felt a migraine coming on. Did she pick me up just to give me a bollocking?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said meekly, and she started to say more about something else I’d done, but then she clapped her hands to her eyes and started to cry.

‘Meg …?’

She lifted her hands off her face, her make-up streaked all down it.

‘I know I’m a complete tit at the best of times,’ I said. ‘But … I’m sensing this really isn’t about your Zara dress or the money I borrowed.’

She looked down at her lap.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘David and I … We’re moving in together.’

‘OK,’ I said gently.

She rubbed her nose. ‘And I know this sounds like I’m a bad friend, but it wasn’t planned. We just … I didn’t intend for everything to happen like this. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘I’m going to make it up to you,’ she said, reaching over to a box of tissues on the worktop and dabbing her eyes. ‘I’m going to go over to his flat tomorrow and pack up a suitcase of your things for you to take to Norway.’

I wondered if I should mention that David insisted on separating our food with named labels, even after eight years of living together, that he snored like a tractor was passing through the bedroom, or that he liked to cut his toenails with one foot raised on the dinner table, usually while I was eating. Maybe she already knew this.

‘Here,’ she said, sliding a silver door key across the table. ‘There’s milk and bread and eggs in the fridge. I’ll bring some ham and carrots tomorrow night.’

I tried to imagine a meal made of ham and carrots, but she interrupted my thoughts to ask if I’d left anything at David’s that I needed. My mind turned to the wall clock in the spare bedroom in the shape of a jam jar, my rattan bookcase, and my framed Frida Kahlo print, but Meg disagreed that these were crucial items for an seven-month-trip to Norway.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked when she got up.

‘I’m staying at David’s,’ she said in a thin voice, looking away. ‘You can stay here. I’ll bring your stuff and take you to the airport on Monday. OK?’

Oddly enough, I wasn’t perturbed at all by the thought of my best friend shacking up with my long-term partner a mere fortnight after we’d broken up. I was more concerned – amused, even – by the thought of Meg discovering that he liked to spend weekends holed up in the spare bedroom with violent video games and a bag of weed, or his weird thing about digging half an inch of wax out of each ear, only to leave a ceremonious row of used cotton buds lined up along the sink instead of chucking them in the bin.

That night, it is safe to say I had the best sleep I’d had for months.

The next day Meg turned up with ham and carrots, and a large suitcase of clothes I’d forgotten I even had. I was pleased to find that I now had seven tops, all with long sleeves to cover the ugly gashes along each of my forearms. The skin between my wrists and elbow was still raw and puckered, and the scars resembled the botched job I made once of repairing the hem of an old quilt. I didn’t want Gaia or Coco to see that. Plus, my cuts still hurt like hell and sleeves meant I could wear padded dressings without anyone asking awkward questions.

Meg also packed some of my old make-up – she must have really dug through my gear to find that – and an old bottle of Body Shop perfume, deodorant, some earrings, underwear, towels, a hairbrush, painkillers, a pretty pair of white leather sandals I’d never worn, my best dress, some of my favourite books and – luckiest of all – my laptop charger. I was stoked. She’d really put a lot of thought into what I’d need.

‘I’m going to take the rest of your things to the charity shop, OK?’ she said. ‘It would be weird, moving in with Dave and having all your stuff around.’

Mum phoned while we were driving to the airport. I hadn’t spoken to her in weeks and she was eager to share with me the latest plot developments in EastEnders, but I knew I had to be firm. I took a deep breath, recalled the epiphany I’d had, and said, ‘Mum, I’m going on holiday for a while, and I won’t be able to talk to you. So I love you, but for now I’m saying … au revoir.’

‘Holiday?’ she spat on the other end of the line. ‘Where do you think you’re off to, eh?’

‘I don’t think I’m off anywhere,’ I said, curtly. ‘I’m headed to Norway, as it happens, and for quite some time.’

‘Norway?’

She started to shout and swear then, a fiery, threat-filled tirade that circled the question of who was going to acquire cannabis for her if I wasn’t around, and though I was sorely tempted to share the news about the end of my relationship and subsequent homelessness, I simply said, ‘You have David’s number, Mother dear. Ask him for weed yourself.’

I said goodbye to Meg, checked in my suitcase, and took my seat on the plane. I’d been booked in first class, which meant that I was served an amazing meal of rump steak, garlic potatoes, and tenderstem broccoli, followed by sticky toffee pudding with banana ice cream. I’d even put on mascara and lipstick, and wore a smart white blouse with skinny jeans and white sandals, and when the other people in first class spoke to me they didn’t look wary, or full of pity. I felt almost happy, excited instead of skewered by fear, like I could hold a conversation with someone without apologizing for my general crapness.

In short, I felt like I was a different person entirely.

And I was a different person. As I stepped off the plane at Ålesund and headed into the terminal, a woman was holding up a piece of white card with my new name spelled out in red capitals:

SOPHIE HALLERTON

5
BUILDING A NEST
Then

Aurelia sits up in bed and glances woozily at the contraption to her right.

The crib.

There’s a noise coming from it that sounds like an alarm, but something at the back of her mind tells her she can’t just reach out and press a button to quieten it down. The room is strange, an arrangement of garish antique dressers and a monstrous wardrobe and that hideous purple wallpaper with a pattern that resembles moths fluttering against the sky at dusk … slowly, the foreign shapes and smells shift into familiarity.

She moves her legs carefully to the edge of the bed and leans forward to check on the soft, mewling bundle of her daughter, her peachy cheeks and rose-petal eyelids dotted with milk spots, a tuft of blonde downy hair springing up from the crown of her head. As always, her tightly bunched firsts are held at the side of her head, and she is wrapped caterpillar-like in a turmeric-yellow hand-knit blanket gifted from a client.

Aurelia watches as Coco drifts back to sleep, then leans forward to ensure the blanket is safely tucked under the mattress. The movement seems to cause her internal organs to slide around the spacious room of her abdomen, and she recalls with a shudder Coco’s quick birth back in London just four weeks earlier.

She’d been at her Preschool Singing Time group with Gaia when the cramps started, but there were still a couple of weeks to go before her due date. Gaia had had to be poked and prodded out of the cosy nest of Aurelia’s womb twenty days after she was supposed to be in the world, and even then it took another seventy-one hours before she begrudgingly emerged, her angry shouts of protest bouncing off the walls of the hospital room. No, it was too early for these cramps to be anything more than Braxton Hicks, she’d thought, as the group sat in a circle and began to sing ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’. The midwife said false contractions were more common with subsequent children because the body had to work harder, running around after one child while growing another.

She asked the group leader for a cushion to make the hard floor more comfortable to sit on, but it didn’t work, and when she could no longer sing for pain she stood up and took Gaia quietly by the hand to their car.

She drove home, intent on having a restorative nap with Gaia to ease the cramps, but they grew worse with alarming speed, so that by the time she pulled up into their driveway in Hampstead she couldn’t make it out of the car.

‘What’s wrong, Mumma?’ Gaia asked, unclipping herself and clambering through to the front passenger seat. She placed her hands on Aurelia’s belly and looked at her mother with concern. ‘Is it the baby? Is she coming?’

Aurelia tried to answer but just then a contraction was building to an almighty peak, rearing like a tidal wave of fire, prising her jaws open and flowing out of her mouth in one long, agonizing holler. Her waters broke in a terrific gush between her legs and around the foot pedals, and in the ecstasy of the gap between that contraction and the next she found her mobile phone and dialled for an ambulance. It came five minutes later, and the team that raced up the driveway found Gaia standing by the car, hand on hip.

‘I can see my sister’s head!’ she yelled. ‘Come quick!’

A noise makes her glance up. Tom is standing in the doorway, a broad smile across his face, his arms folded and his head cocked in curiosity. She is breastfeeding Coco. She can’t remember lifting her out of the crib and putting her to her left breast – the one that always produces more milk – but Coco is feeding nicely, and surprisingly it doesn’t hurt.

Tom takes a couple of steps across the room and kneels down in front of her.

‘I thought you’d be busy with Clive,’ she says, wondering what time it is. ‘Are you done for the day?’

He doesn’t answer, but presses his hands into the mattress on either side of her, leaning in to kiss her. She pecks him back, but when he makes to kiss her more passionately the baby struggles, Tom’s weight pushing her into Aurelia’s chest.

‘Tom,’ she says, pressing a hand against his shoulder to ease him away. ‘You’ll hurt the baby.’

But he persists. He straightens his legs and raises his hips, his mouth hard against hers, his tongue searching. She turns her head away in rejection. She is feeding their child, for heaven’s sake, can’t he see that?

He raises himself to his full height, his eyes blazing. What is wrong with him? She has a urinary tract infection that has knocked her for six, and she is still bleeding. He knows this. But it seems only his needs matter.

Suddenly, without any warning, he swings his arm back and cracks her across the face with all his might. She reels, gasps. Her cheek burns and her eyes brim with tears. She stares up at the horrible, cruel expression on his face and dissolves into tears.

‘Tom! Why did you do that?’

She sits up with a gasp, her heart racing, and looks down into the emptiness of her arms. Where is the baby?

A low cry tells her Coco is in her crib, and slowly she realizes that she was dreaming. Thank God it was just a dream. Tom didn’t hit her. She dreamed it, and it’s over now.

With shaking hands, she reaches down the side of the bed and pulls out the red, leather-bound diary with ‘AF’ inscribed in gold lettering. The diary that Tom bought her, and in which she records her dreams, as per the midwife’s instructions. We want to keep an eye on you, the midwife said. We need to make sure you’re well inside and out.

She writes the date and the dream.

Tom smacked me across the face when I wouldn’t have sex with him????

She stares at the words on the page, and wonders whether she should score them out.

The baby’s cries get louder, insistent. ‘There, there, baby girl,’ she coos softly to Coco, lifting her out of the crib and relishing that moment when, as always, Coco rolls her shoulders and bottom back in a big stretch, before sensing the proximity of a nipple and widening her mouth like a bird, searching for it. A spear of pain chases right up through the nipple to Aurelia’s shoulder, collarbone, and all the way back down to her knees. She groans at the sharp scorch of it as the baby latches on and suckles.

Her heart continues to race and her mind reels with images from the dream. The look on his face when she rejected him. The crack of his hand against her cheek.

Later, she’ll tell him about the dream in wounded tones and he’ll hold her close, kiss the exact spot on her cheek where the pseudo-memory still stings. ‘Did you eat some cheese before going to bed?’ he’ll laugh.

Coco releases the nipple and sinks back to sleep in Aurelia’s arms, satisfied. Aurelia’s breast feels smaller, emptied, and she fastens her bra before lifting Coco to her chest and rubbing her back. Unlike Gaia, Coco tends to wind really well, bringing up a healthy belch within a few seconds that tells Aurelia she’s ready to be settled back into the crib.

But Aurelia cannot sleep. She rises, her head swampy and her body aching, to check on Gaia in her room next door. She sees a foot hanging out of the side of the duvet, a mass of blonde curls, and decides to let her sleep on.

Aurelia pads along the wooden floor of the old house, but it has all the foreign dimensions of a hotel and she makes a dreadful creak that she is certain will wake both children. Mercifully, neither stirs. She heads downstairs to the large kitchen swimming in morning sunlight.

The house may yet feel strange, but that is to be expected – she’s only been here eight days, and with a brand new baby, and this is not to be their home, in any case. This six-bedroom traditional red-painted wooden lodge named ‘Granhus’, Norwegian for ‘Spruce House’ and constructed in the nineteenth century, will be properly restored after their high-concept summer home is built close by. That will be their summer home, and Granhus will become Tom’s Norwegian office for his architecture firm. Or a holiday rental. Or both. It’s big enough for both. Either way, he promised that it wouldn’t be their base. She found it creepy when they bought it, and she finds it creepy now.

From the window by the sink she can see fields whitened with fresh snow all the way to the horizon, where serrated, snow-dusted mountains soar into the clouds. It’s almost Christmas. From the window by the table, the garden sweeps down to a cliff, an ancient forest of towering pine trees gathered on the site of the new building. Beyond that, she can just make out a belt of deep blue – the fjord.

‘We’ll get a boat,’ Tom had said when they came to view this plot of land. ‘We’ll take day trips up the fjord. Maybe sail all the way to Ålesund, have high tea, then turn around and head back home for supper.’

Ålesund is where her father spent his childhood and where her grandparents lived. They’re buried there now, along with aunts and uncles and cousins she never met. It’s a charming port town on Norway’s west coast, and she has fond memories as a child walking around the colourful art nouveau quarter.

‘Come and see what I’ve found in the shed.’

The sound of Tom’s voice makes her drop the mug she was holding and it shatters across the floor in a dozen pieces. He rushes forward to gather up the pieces with a dustpan before she steps on them in her bare feet.

‘Are you all right?’ he says, laughing. ‘Didn’t mean to scare you.’

She recovers, smiles, though her heart is racing. She can still feel the burn of her cheek from where dream-Tom slapped her. The crack in her heart.

‘I found this massive thing in the shed,’ he says, before she can mention the dream. He tips shards of mug into the bin. ‘Do you want to come and see?’

She raises her eyes to the ceiling. ‘What about the girls?’

‘It’ll only take a minute,’ he says.

She slips on her padded coat and a pair of Tom’s wellies and traipses after him out the back door towards the old woodshed at the rear of the house. It’s barely eight in the morning and the forest is carpeted in snow, but it’s unseasonably mild, sunlight picking its way through the towering pine trees all around the house.

‘Be very careful,’ Tom says as he approaches the door to the shed. He holds out a hand and she wonders for a moment if a wolf or lynx has got trapped inside. No. He’d have locked her in the house with the girls if that were the case, and taken down a shotgun. She watches, nervous and excited, as he digs his mobile phone out of his back pocket, switches on the torch and shines it inside the shed.

She follows after and watches the light as he shines it towards the ceiling.

‘There,’ he whispers, grinning. ‘Isn’t that incredible?’

At first she thinks she’s looking at a ceiling lamp, a kind of Frank Gehry-esque ceiling lamp, cone-ish in shape, about the size of a medicine ball and patterned with art deco swirls in peach and mauve. With horror, she realizes what it is, and takes a step back in case its inhabitants wake and come seething out in a frenzy.

‘Hornets!’ she hisses at Tom, grabbing on to his arm.

‘Wasps, most likely,’ he whispers back, not taking his eyes off the cone.

‘I’ll call pest control,’ she says, inching backwards, not daring to tear her eyes away from it.

‘Shame,’ Tom says.

She looks at him as if he’s gone mad, so he explains. ‘Well, it’s beautiful, isn’t it? A perfect papier-mâché cone made by thousands of tiny creatures.’ To her horror, he reaches up to trace it dreamily with his fingertips. ‘It’s a work of natural art, the texture of papyrus. Like finding something from an ancient world.’

‘You won’t be saying that if they sting you,’ she says.

Back in the house, she hangs up the phone, relieved that pest control will come imminently to destroy the nest. Tom is still banging on about how they’ve intruded on the wasps’ territory, Anthropocene this, biodiversity that. She’d forgotten how much of Norway feels off-limits to humans. ‘Haven’t the wasps merely done what we’re attempting to do?’ Tom says, lightly but fully serious. ‘They just created a home for their babies.’

Vile that the nest should take the shape of a womb, she thinks. With a shudder she imagines a baby inside, its head lowered into the cone.

She turns back to the window to drink in the view of the fjord, or rather the bits of blue she can make out through the woodland. She can’t imagine why the previous owners of this place didn’t cut down the trees that obscure such an amazing vista. If just a handful of trees were removed she’d be able to see all the green pleats of the valley crimping on forever and that navy ribbon of fjord stretching to the city.

She tells this to Tom, who frowns. ‘They’re pretty ancient, those trees,’ he says.

‘All trees are ancient, Tom. And it’s not like there’s a shortage of trees around here. You could use the wood for the new house, surely.’

‘You mean “Basecamp”.’ He announces the house’s name with finger quotation marks.

She laughs. ‘Basecamp.’ She’d have preferred something along the lines of ‘Villa Faraday’ or ‘The Tree House’, but whatever. Tom says ‘Basecamp’ captures the sense of family adventure they’re embarking on, so Basecamp it is.

‘Basecamp,’ she deadpans, and Tom grins.

‘I’ll cut down those trees tomorrow. Happy?’

‘Ecstatic.’

It is night time. Coco is lying against Aurelia’s left shoulder and Gaia is curled up beside her in the armchair as she reads from her father’s old journal of Norse folklore, as told to him as a child by his parents and grandparents. The yellowing, crumpling transcriptions splattered with ink blots are much too delicate now for handling, and they’re in Norwegian. Some years ago, she began the painstaking process of translating and digitizing the book into an English PDF file that she reads on her iPad to Gaia. Many are simply too macabre for a six-year-old, but there is a selection of tales that are entertaining and that provide a good source of education about Gaia’s heritage. Gaia loves the tale about the raven who raises two sparrows in her nest when her own eggs are stolen. She particularly loves the one about the man who changes into a wolf when his sadness gets the better of him, and always squeals at the tale of the bear who tries to catch a fish that turns out to be a whale that swallows the bear whole – a metaphor, Aurelia thinks, for biting off more than you can chew.

‘Can you read the one about the lady who was friends with the big deer?’

‘Yes of course,’ Aurelia says, swiping to the beginning of the PDF.

‘Here it is,’ she says. ‘Grete and the Elk.’

Once upon a time there was a woman called Grete who had two daughters. All day long Grete did the work of women, but at night she would stand by the door and dream about sailing across the ocean, or diving to its depths, or even soaring to the moon.

One night, whilst she was standing by her door eating a bowl of riskrem (‘riskrem’ is a kind of porridge,’ she tells Gaia), she heard a noise in the woods, the sound of shaking branches and twigs snapping underfoot. Her dog began to growl, and fear seized her so that she shut the door with trembling hands. But when she peered through the window she saw an enormous elk sniffing at the latch. The next night the same thing happened, and the night after, but on the fourth night she decided to hold her nerve and see what the elk wanted.

The elk was a magnificent creature with a majestic crown of antlers that glinted in the moonlight. Grete was afraid of being run through by them, but as the elk stopped a little way away from her she sensed that it did not mean her harm. Her dog rushed towards the elk, barking and warning it off, but the elk merely looked down at it, and eventually the dog quietened and seemed to accept the elk.

‘What do you want?’ Grete asked the elk. It took one step closer, then another, and she noticed its eyes peering at the remains of the riskrem she had just been eating a moment before. Gently she held up the bowl and the elk ate from it.

The next night Grete made two bowls of riskrem and the elk visited and ate. This visit became a regular habit, and Grete found that she spent her days doing the work of women anticipating its visits with happiness. The elk listened to her more than her husband or children, and she’d noticed it would often seem to respond with little grunts or huffs that sounded as though it understood every word she spoke.

But then Grete became ill. Her oldest girl fetched the doctor who told her nothing more could be done – she would have to stay in bed where she would eventually die.

Grete asked for her daughters to put a bowl of riskrem by the front door each night. At first, they asked why, but after the first night they understood. After three nights, Grete was wakened by the tap-tap-tap of hooves across the floorboards. She was astonished and joyful to see her elk walking through her home, where it came to rest at her bedside. She reached out to stroke his velvety muzzle and told him many tales, to which he nodded and grunted in response.

It is said that, even when Grete passed away, her elk would often visit the house, and her children would wake oftentimes to find muddy hoof prints along the floorboards, for the elk had come to watch over them.

Aurelia has read this story to Gaia many times, always taking care to lighten her tone at the parts concerning death, but still she has questions: ‘What’s “the work of women”, Mumma? Was the elk her best friend? Wouldn’t his antlers have damaged the walls when he came into the house? What does “die” mean?’

‘Will you die, Mumma?’ Gaia asks, falling serious.

‘Not for a very, very, very long time.’

The wrinkle in Gaia’s brow softens. When Aurelia tucks her into her bed the questions about death continue, and she makes a mental note not to read that story again.

But in just ten and a half weeks’ time, she will be dead.

6
A HOME OR A NEST
Now

‘I’m Sophie,’ I said to the woman holding the sign. ‘Sophie Hallerton.’

The name rolled off my tongue as though it was always meant to be. It sounded sophisticated, and I could well imagine my mother’s face screwing up upon hearing someone refer to me as Sophie Hallerton.

The woman grinned and stretched out a hand. ‘Derry Boydon,’ she said in a London accent. Strange – I’d expected her to be Norwegian. She was short with sleek black hair and large blue eyes that put me in mind of a cat. ‘This is my husband, Clive,’ she said, turning to the man standing next to her.

‘How do you do?’ he said, holding out a hand. ‘I’m Tom’s business partner. Tom’s a bit tied up today and I’ve to drop Derry off in the city anyway, so here we are.’

Clive insisted on fetching my bag from the carousel and taking my handbag off my shoulder while Derry pinned me with her huge blue eyes and some very intense small talk.

‘Is this your first time in Norway?’

I nodded.

‘It’s a wonderful place,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have so much fun.’

‘I hope so.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Clive interjected. ‘She’s here to nanny, not sightsee.’

‘Ignore him,’ Derry said as he hoisted my suitcase into the boot of their car, a flashy Mercedes SUV with heated leather seats that smelled overwhelmingly of pine. ‘When I’m back I’ll take you sightseeing. I’m sure Gaia and Coco will relish the chance to get out of the house.’

I strained to take in my surroundings from the back seat. It looked like England, with the addition of snow-capped mountains and a smooth, navy-blue lake in the distance. Everything was very blue and very spiky. So in other words, nothing like England.

‘Not a lake,’ Clive said when I pointed at it. ‘That’s a fjord. Grytafjorden, if I’m not mistaken.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘What’s the difference between a fjord and a lake?’

He gave me a look in the rear-view mirror as if I’d just asked where babies come from. ‘The fjords were made by glaciers over a number of ice ages and then filled with sea water. They always connect with the sea.’

Derry told me more about the region, and about Norway more broadly: how it was world-leading in its environmental ethics, that it was the first country to introduce paid paternity leave, and that it once knighted a penguin.

‘It sounds like an amazing place,’ I observed.

‘Bloody expensive,’ Clive countered. ‘Especially if you decide to build a house out here. My advice on that is – don’t.’

‘Noted,’ I said, and he laughed.

I guessed that Clive was in his mid-to-late forties, a little older than Derry. He wore a gold signet ring on his pinky, and a navy suit. Orange hair greying at the sides, pale skin, expressive blue eyes, thickly set. He had that same air about him that Tom and most of the people in first class on the plane had – confidence. I wondered how he got that confidence, and how I could get it. Maybe it was just the posh accent. I opened my mouth to ask where he was from, but before I could he said: ‘So you’re a nanny? Been doing that a long time, have you?’

I nodded, stiffly. ‘For … a while, yes.’

‘My niece is nannying over in Spain at the moment. Or “au pairing” –’ he said, making exaggerated air quotation marks with his fingers. ‘– which means she gets paid nothing to run around after three kids under the age of five all day. A so-called “cultural experience”.’ More air quotations. He threw me a isn’t-that-ridiculous smile. I tried to match it and failed epically.

‘Still, you’ve got a great guy as an employer,’ he said. ‘Tom’s great. Really, he is. And you’ll have met the girls? Little Gaia and Coco.’

‘Yes. They’re really special …’

He nodded. ‘Yes. It’s such a shame …’ he said, throwing a strange look at Derry.

‘Such a shame,’ she agreed.

I presumed they were talking about the death of the girls’ mother, Aurelia, but just then we pulled up at a sign that seemed to indicate that one of the lanes across the bridge was closed and the traffic was slowing to a halt, so I wasn’t quite sure whether he was referring to the dead mother or the traffic. We sat in silence for a few moments, indicating to merge, until someone let us in and we pulled off.

‘So … you’re Tom’s business partner?’ I asked Clive, wondering why that meant he should be in Norway, or picking me up from the airport.

‘We run the company together,’ he said. ‘Architecture. I’m not sure how much he’s told you about the build …’

‘… not a lot, actually. It’s a summer house, isn’t it?’

‘Indeed. He and Aurelia acquired the site last year. There’s an old lodge on the land, just behind the woods. That’s where everyone is staying at the moment. By everyone, I mean you, Tom, the children, Maren, the housekeeper – I gather you’ve met her already?’

I nodded. The blonde woman who interviewed me at Tom’s house in Hampstead.

‘Occasionally Derry and I pop over and stay for a weekend to project manage, or kick the contractors up the backside, in layman’s terms.’

This news made me feel uneasy. I don’t exactly know what I was expecting, but certainly not a household filled with watchful, confident adults.

‘The build’s important,’ Clive continued in a sombre voice, ‘because regardless of what Tom tells you or anyone else, this house is not just his family holiday home – it’s also a kind of showstopper of a piece for the company. It’s our calling card, if you like. The centerpiece of our portfolio. And this one’s ten times better than the first house.’

‘First house?’ I asked.

‘Oh, blimey,’ Derry said, in a voice that sounded like there was a whole backstory I wasn’t aware of.

‘Yes, well …’ Clive said, clearing his throat. ‘There was a house before this one, but …’

‘They built it on a river,’ Derry said, as though building on a river was a big nope. ‘Basecamp, it was called.’

‘I’m sure Tom will be very glad to fill you in on Basecamp,’ Clive added loudly, keen to move on. ‘Aurelia’s Nest is going to be the ticket.’

‘Aurelia’s Nest?’ I asked.

‘The name of the new house,’ Derry explained.

‘Prior to this we’ve focused mostly on commercial design,’ Clive said, ‘but once we’ve built Aurelia’s Nest we’ll attract more clients engaging with high-end residential design. And right now, that’s where the money is.’

I nodded as if I followed any of this. ‘And … how long do you think it’ll take? The … build, I mean?’

Clive came over very sullen then and I worried I’d hit a nerve. ‘Unfortunately a project as ambitious in scope as this one requires a lot of red tape. That’s before the construction, which is fairly precarious. Basecamp was built over a river, which on hindsight was a very bad idea and we’ve all since learned from our mistakes. Now, Tom is taking zero chances. Aurelia’s Nest is being built on the side of a cliff.’

‘Beg pardon?’ I said in a mousey voice. ‘Did you say …?’

‘Right?’ Derry said, turning all the way around. ‘A house on the side of a two-hundred-foot sheer drop!’

I looked from Derry to Clive with abject terror.

‘Trying to find a team of builders who’ll do their job while hanging off a sheer drop has proved … challenging, shall we say?’ Clive said. ‘Impossible, that’s another word. This is why Tom and I work well together, you see. He’s the risk-taking artist and I’m …’

‘The sane one?’ I offered.

Clive liked that. He threw me a smile in the mirror. ‘Something like that.’

‘Still, it’ll look terrific when it’s finished,’ Derry added.

‘Very modest, aren’t you?’ Clive added, and I must have looked confused because Derry explained. ‘Tom has asked me to do all the interiors. I run an interior design company. That’s why it’s going to look fabulous.’

‘You mentioned an old lodge,’ I said. I was suddenly glad that I’d be staying in the lodge. A nice, safe lodge.

‘A lodge, yes?’

‘What’ll happen to the lodge once the new house … the one hanging off the edge of a cliff … is completed?’

‘Ah. Well, Tom wants to restore it,’ Clive said. ‘But between you and me, I think the place is past it. Lots of damp and draught … Derry can’t stand it. Can you, darling?’

Derry shook her head. ‘It needs tearing down, making into a nice pasture. A vegetable patch, or something along those lines.’ She threw me a look of grave concern. ‘You’ll know what I mean when you get there.’

We dropped Derry off at a ferry port where she said she was getting a ferry to Trondheim to work on a new project. She gathered her bags before getting out and flashed me a smile. ‘So sorry I’m heading off just as you’re arriving,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be back in a few weeks. Good luck!’

We pulled off the motorway and took a road that gradually got narrower and less road-like by the mile. The scenery got more and more intense, too, to the point where Clive rolled down the windows and encouraged me to stick my head out instead of pressing my nose against the glass in awe.

It was like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones all wrapped up and multiplied by a trillion. The road climbed steadily up the side of a shark-fin mountain range, so that we were driving along a stone ridge looking down over a fjord with postcard-blue water. A white dot moving through the middle of it turned out to be a cruise boat, but the water was so still that the boat looked like it was a zip being pulled up a sheet of turquoise velvet. On the other side of the gorge were black zigzags of rock speckled with snow, rich green fields, and gushing waterfalls crowned with rainbows. The clouds were so dramatic that I couldn’t decide where to look – the sky or the fjord – so I spent most of the journey with my neck craned out of the window nodding up and down.

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Clive said. ‘That’s Hjørund fjord,’ he said.

‘Hjørund,’ I repeated. I had the sense that Clive enjoyed knowing things and telling them to others. But I didn’t mind. I would remember Hjørund fjord for the rest of my life.

A red house came into view at the end of a long path through a forest of enormous fir trees. It looked like something straight out of a fairy tale, with a pitched black roof, a white-framed gable end and a cute round window set against the pillar-box red, ivy trailing up one side, and a name, GRANHUS, spelled out in wood-carved letters above the front door. A dozen ravens circled the chimneys, their large wings fanned out like black sails. Beyond the house was a dense patch of men in hard hats carrying iron girders through the woods.

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?

7
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.

‘Sophie?’ Maren whispered. There was a whole paragraph inside that word.

But before I could answer, Gaia shouted: ‘We had so much fun!’

‘Ya-ya!’ Coco shouted, the bowl still atop her head, and clapped her hands. ‘Ya-ya!’

Tom came in then, his phone pressed to his ear like a prosthetic. His mud-caked wellies left a trail of leaves and dirt behind him. He told the caller he’d speak to them later and approached the girls, kissing both on the cheek. ‘Lots of role-playing, I see.’

I hooked on to this. ‘Yes, yes, we were role-playing.’

Gaia perked up, absorbing this new narrative. ‘She’s Upsy Daisy from In the Night Garden.’

‘Is she?’ Tom said. Like me, I don’t think he had the foggiest who Upsy Daisy was. ‘And who are you meant to be, Gaia? An Oompa Loompa?’

‘No, Daddy,’ Gaia said. ‘I’m a Halloween pumpkin.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘A Halloween pumpkin with glasses.’

She whipped her little spectacles from her face self-consciously, only to return them once she realized she couldn’t see anything without them.

Tom’s phone rang, and he was out the door again, tramping pine needles and clods of earth in his wake.

Bath time was straightforward enough – though I did end up wearing the contents of the bath, thanks to Coco’s love of splashing – and by the time bedtime rolled around I felt like I’d been hit by a tractor. Fifteen story books and much cajoling, singing, and bribing later, and both girls finally drifted off to sleep.

I felt like I deserved a medal.

It was a relief to get to my own room, my own space, where I didn’t have to glue my eyeballs to Coco in anticipation of the moment she’d find a shard of broken glass to chew on or a window to hurl herself out of, and where I wouldn’t have to answer Gaia’s infinite stream of brain-melting questions (such as why the moon was called the moon and if people could still poo in heaven).

I took off my clothes and put on my pyjamas – it was only half past eight, but I was dog-tired – then headed to the bathroom to use the toilet and brush my teeth. Right as I was sitting on the toilet, the door creaked open. I gave a jump of fright and called out, ‘Who’s there?’

A small hand appeared around the door, and I recognized it as belonging to Gaia.

‘Can I come in?’ she said from behind the door.

‘I’m … I’m on the loo,’ I said, clutching on to my pyjama bottoms. ‘Are you all right?’

‘If I promise to close my eyes can I sit with you?’

I was thrown by the question. ‘Sit with me? You mean, on the toilet seat?’

‘On your lap,’ she said. ‘Mumma always let me sit on her lap when she was on the toilet.’

Before I could answer, Gaia made her way through the door and climbed on to my knee, right as I hoisted my pyjamas up around my waist. She said nothing, but simply sat there, as if my knee was exactly where she ought to be sitting. Then she said quietly: ‘I don’t like my bed.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Is it uncomfortable?’

She shook her head.

‘Is it … cold?’

She shook her head.

‘Are there worms in it?’

She looked up, confused. ‘Why would worms be in my bed?’

‘Well, what’s wrong with your bed, then?’

Another world-weary sigh. ‘It’s too empty.’

‘Maybe it needs more teddies in it,’ I offered. ‘Let’s go and find some, shall we?’

And I took her by the hand and led her to her bedroom, settled her into bed with an army of soft toys, then went back to my own room. Within minutes I was asleep, but at half past two Gaia’s shrieks ripped through the house. I staggered quickly to her room, expecting to find it full of bats or giant spiders, and when I found neither I tried to console Gaia with a glass of water. She held my hand in a vice-like grip, and when I woke again – once more to the sound of screaming – I was on the wooden floor beside Gaia’s bed, huddled beneath a blanket. Again, I settled her to sleep by stroking her face and holding her hand, and this time she said, ‘I love you, Mumma’ between tear-stricken gasps. I was exhausted, but my heart broke for her.

This went on every night, with a side order of Coco waking every couple of hours. Coco didn’t shriek, though. She was sturdier than Gaia, both in build and temperament, her shining round cheeks always lifted in a gleeful smile. She was quite a heartening child to be around. At night, she babbled and bounced in her cot until I found that a warm bottle of milk persuaded her to lie down and quietly mull over the idea of sleep.

One night, when I’d put Gaia back into her bed for the millionth time and fallen asleep beside her, I was woken not by screaming, but by a question.

‘Sophie?’

‘Hmmm? What?’

‘Are you going to die?’

‘What?’

‘Are you going to die?’

‘Die? Uh, no, Gaia. Not at the moment. I’m too tired.’

‘What about tomorrow?’

‘Why are you so worried about me dying, Gaia?’

She was sitting up in bed, her hair a fuzzy cloud and her glasses askew on her face. Her pyjamas – navy with a snowdrop print – were buttoned wrongly, and Louis was sitting at her feet. She bounced my question around her mind.

‘Mumma died,’ she said softly, and my heart expanded to the size of a football pitch. I wrapped my arm around her.

‘I know she did. I’m so, so sorry. I bet she loved you lots and lots.’

I thought of what Maren had said about their mother. Suicide. How awful. The party line is that Mummy had an accident. How long could they really expect to keep up that pretence? I wondered. Gaia was a very perceptive child, visibly possessed of that firstborn curse of wisdom beyond her years. If her mum died by suicide there would have been signs. Gaia would have known something was wrong.

Gaia buried her face in my side and wrapped her arms and legs around me, so tightly I thought I would be left with bruises. She caught one of the scars on my right arm with her wrist and I yelped in pain.

‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered, panicked.

‘Nothing,’ I said, though my arm was a white-hot kind of agony. ‘All better now.’

‘Don’t leave,’ she whispered. ‘Please, Sophie. Please don’t die?’

‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

‘Pinky promise?’

‘What?’

She held out her little finger. ‘Pinky promise. You have to use your pinky. Like this.’

She demonstrated what I needed to do by hooking her pinky around mine.

And as I lay there in the darkness with Gaia clamped to me like a warm, snoring limpet, I felt a stab of guilt for the dozens of times I’d looked out of the window of the playroom at the woods and the fjord beyond and regretted what I’d signed up for. I’d even thought about running away. It wasn’t that I thought the girls weren’t sweet or that the landscape wasn’t mesmeric – I just felt so completely out of my depth.

And yet it seemed I was the only one vaguely interested in looking after Gaia and Coco. Already I had a sense that the other adults around them – Tom, Clive, and Maren – were fairly clueless in their own ways. After all, they’d hired me as a nanny, and while Tom was full of promises to sit and have dinner with us, or to read Gaia a bedtime story, he was perpetually distracted. He worked from dawn until dusk on the build, wafting into the house at odd moments to snatch a cup of coffee or a cigarette from the packet I noticed he kept hidden behind the toaster, before wafting back out into the gloom of the forest like a ghost. He didn’t appear to eat. Clive was fairly absent, too, but then he was only Tom’s business partner, and nothing to do with Gaia and Coco. I had forgotten he was staying at the house until I caught sight of him in the hall one morning. We exchanged a pleasant ‘hello’ and he went on his way.

Maren spent most of the time doing housework and ironing everything to within an inch of its life. I can still see her now at the ironing board amidst clouds of steam, sawing back and forth across curtains, towels, and table runners until they succumbed and became as flat as she desired. For all her effort, though, I have to say she wasn’t much of a housekeeper. Black mould crept along windowpanes, caterpillars of dust slept snug atop picture frames, and the girls’ washing was regularly stuffed into their drawers instead of being folded and laid neatly flat – rendering the over-zealous ironing pointless. I figured Maren’s strengths lay in baking bread, which she did every morning, filling the house with mouth-watering smells. She also spent an hour a day barking Norwegian nouns at Gaia.

Why bring Gaia and Coco out here at all. I wondered? There was nothing for them to do beyond the dour realms of the creepy red house: no parks or play areas, no trampoline or dodgy wooden swing in the garden. Just past the trees towards the cliff men in work clothes and hard hats shouted and drilled all day long.

Granhus was noisy inside, too, with pipes that groaned any time you turned on a tap or flushed the toilet, and a strange high-pitched wail that drifted from the bowels of the house. ‘Old air vents,’ Maren said dismissively, but it was loud and sounded eerily like the yowl of a cat, or a baby crying. The house was bracketed by thick woods inhabited by wolves, bears, and probably witches, near to the towering cliff that overlooked the fjord. At night, when the girls were finally asleep, I’d tiptoe outside to look at the silhouetted forest, the shimmering fjord, and galaxies that jewelled the sky. The woods became conscious with owls, foxes, bats. Moonlight fell on elaborate spider webs and glinting demon eyes hiding in the shrubs.

It was at once mesmerizing and slasher-movie sinister.

The wildlife seemed determined to get inside. Mice and spiders roamed so freely that Gaia began to name them. Often the mice wouldn’t even budge when I stumbled upon them in the larder – they’d stare me out until I swiped at them with a broom. Day and night, enormous black birds – crows, or maybe ravens, but on steroids – circled the house, predator-like, as though they were just waiting for the moment when they might swoop down and peck us all to death.

By far the strangest moment in those early days, was the morning I woke to find muddy hoof prints – like two devil horns – on the floor of my bedroom. They came all the way through the hallway right up to my bed. Actual hoof prints. I touched the mud with my fingertips to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. The prints stopped by the side of my bed, as though a moose had crept into the house at night and then stood over me as I slept.

The following night, as I watched Gaia sleep – her holding tightly on to me – I knew it wouldn’t be fair to leave her. The reason she woke screaming every night was clear to me – she was missing her mother in a way that she could barely understand. And at night and in her dreams, a hot, surging undertow of confusion and grief coursed through her so strongly I could almost feel it in my arms.

That night, I held her until morning. And she didn’t scream at all.

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