The Babysitter: From the author of digital bestsellers and psychological crime thrillers like The Girl Next Door comes the most gripping and addictive book of 2020!

by Phoebe Morgan

  Beside me, Callum is asleep, the covers flung off him, his mouth very slightly open. He is so familiar to me now, after fifteen years of marriage, and another year of dating before that. Emma was born in the January of the year we married, out of wedlock, as Maria likes to tease. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t got pregnant, if we hadn’t rushed into the wedding, but thoughts like that are useless now. What’s done is done. Or is it? For a while now, I’ve been thinking of a way out, but it’s easier said than done.

  I watch the rise and fall of Callum’s breath, the easy way he lies, both arms above his head. There’s something childlike about it, childlike and carefree. I sleep curled up, like a foetus on guard against the world. I’m a light sleeper, usually, but Callum sleeps like the dead. Sometimes he will fling out a limb, crush me with it accidentally. Occasionally, he will sleep in the spare room at home, if he’s been working late in his studio, and on those nights I spread myself out, starfish style, feel a splash of guilt at how much I enjoy it. I allow myself to imagine what it might be like to live like that all of the time. To be single like my sister.

  Quietly, I ease back the covers and leave the room, glancing at my reflection in the tall gold mirror as I do so. My silky white nightie looks old and tired, my hair is full of split ends that dangle onto my shoulders. A mosquito bite stands out on my arm, red and itchy. Although I’ve only just got up, I already feel tired at the thought of the day. Another day of pretence.

  I pick up my phone, standing on the dresser, but it is resolutely silent, the top right-hand corner devoid of any signal. We are disconnected, I think, and the thought makes me feel a wave of relief. It is strangely refreshing not having the usual cacophony of noise first thing – the news alerts, the updates from the uber-mothers, the concerned voicemails from the school headteacher about Emma’s worsening grades, her fallouts with the girls in her year. The bad behaviour that nobody can quite explain. Instead, there is silence, a blank screen. I glance at Callum’s phone, on charge over on his side of the bed. My fingers itch for a moment, the desire to unlock it and rummage through his electronic life again is strong, but really, what’s the point? I know everything there is to know, now. His passcode is Emma’s birthday – sweet, until you realise it’s all a sham.

  Downstairs, there’s a pile of Maria’s new wares in the living room, unloaded from the car: a stand-alone lamp with a twisting, ornate base; a pile of rugs in rich, warm colours; a bookcase painted in a soft teal colour. I run my finger over it gently, wishing I had my sister’s eye. And her freedom.

  In the kitchen, I select one of Maria’s blue ceramic mugs that she got from the pop-up market in the village and pour myself a much-needed filter coffee. I wanted to take Emma to see the market, try to use it as a bonding opportunity for the two of us, but my sister says it’s not there this week; it seems its opening hours are as random and sporadic as the little bakery.

  Taking a long sip of coffee, I select the sharpest knife from the rack and begin to slice fruit for my daughter: dicing the apples, skinning the kiwis, pitting the cherries. I pile it all into a small blue and white bowl, drizzle fresh yoghurt around the outsides and dot fresh raspberries on top. It looks so pretty that I almost want to take a photo. I would, if I were one of those people. Emma says there are lots of them – food bloggers, Instagram influencers who only need to post a picture of their breakfast to get hundreds of thousands of likes. My daughter’s own social media channels are private, closed, especially to me. Believe me, I’ve looked.

  Of course, Emma isn’t interested in my efforts. When I tap on her bedroom door before gently pushing it open, she pulls the white sheet over her head, but not before I catch a quick glimpse of her: the pale face already scowling, the low-level teenage anger that seems to radiate from her every limb these days. I stand still for a second or two in her doorway, watching her, but she doesn’t move. Silently, soundlessly, Callum appears behind me. His hands go to my waist.

  ‘Let her sleep,’ he says softly, and semi-reluctantly I back away, close the door. I feel the familiar tug of guilt that I always feel around my daughter, the worry that Callum does know better, that he and Emma share something that I, for some reason, do not. Does my husband know what’s right for our daughter? Am I failing so badly as a mother that it’s pushing their bond even closer?

  My feet are bare on the tiles and I’m still clutching the bowl of beautiful fruit. Callum has a hold of me, and, not knowing what else to do, I smile at him as he bends down and kisses the tip of my nose. He used to kiss me on the mouth, always and without fail, but lately he has started to choose my nose instead, or my forehead, occasionally my hand. When did it begin, I often think to myself, did it begin around the same time as everything else? I look down at my hands, avoiding his gaze; my fingers are stained red from the raspberries. Little flecks that look like blood.

  ‘I’m going to take a shower,’ he says. ‘Is Maria up?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say – the door to my sister’s room is resolutely shut. I smile to myself; Maria never did handle hangovers very well. When we were teenagers, she’d always drink more than me, encourage me to join in. I can still remember the sharp scent of vodka as she pushed it towards me in our bedroom, and the funny taste of it from the china cup. Mum never knew, I don’t think. Maria made sure of it. She washed the cups in the sink and put them back on the shelves in the morning, soap suds covering up the smell of spirits.

  I watch now as Callum retreats away from me, back to our en suite. I go upstairs, open the huge sliding doors that lead out onto the terrace. It’s already hot; the sun is white in the sky. I know we were thinking of driving to Rouen today – Callum does like a plan, an itinerary – but I can feel the pull of the swimming pool already, am visualising myself stretched out on a sun lounger by the water, my husband and daughter twenty miles away wandering the streets of France.

  It’s not that I don’t love my daughter. I do. More than anything. But bit by bit, I am losing her, and for all intents and purposes, my husband is already lost. Sometimes that hurts so much that I simply cannot bear it. Instead, I detach: I disengage from them both, retreat into the corner of my mind that still thinks of myself as an individual, rather than part of a three. It doesn’t always work.

  Emma has become more and more withdrawn over the last eighteen months, her slide into adolescence much harder on me than I’d ever imagined it might be. I have wished so many times that her hormones would manifest themselves differently; that I could bandage up a wound, administer doses of medicine like I did when she was a little girl clamouring for Calpol. But of course I cannot.

  A friend of mine once told me drunkenly that her own teenagers are exactly the same – hissing with an inexplicable rage one moment, all smiles the next, a seemingly impossible merry-go-round of emotions that reverberate around the family. We were sipping white wine in the kitchen of our house in Ipswich, the only two left after a gathering one Christmas. We used to be a lot more sociable, Callum and I. My friend – let’s call her Kate – had valiantly drunk the best part of two bottles by the time she began talking about her children (she has one of each – a son and a daughter, not far off Emma’s age now) and it was clear she’d wanted to open up to someone for a while.

  ‘Sometimes I just wish they’d disappear,’ she had said, gazing gloomily into her glass of Pinot, and I’d felt myself nodding, even though I didn’t really agree. I wouldn’t swap Emma for the world, in spite of all her moodiness.

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ Kate said, almost immediately after she’d finished speaking, clapping one hand to her mouth, the gesture a little bit sloppy due to the wine. ‘That was a terrible thing to say. Please Siobhan, forget I said it.’ I watched as a look of panic came over her face. ‘You will, won’t you? You will just forget it? God, me and my big mouth.’ She hiccupped. ‘I’ve had way too much wine.’

  It must be said that at this point I was not sober either, but I wasn’t as far gone as my friend, wh
ose eyes were beginning to take on the blurry sheen of someone who might be about to cry.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, Kate, it’s forgotten,’ I said to her, the words coming slowly. I was wearing a long white cardigan, and I wrapped it around myself, feeling chilly despite the warmth from the fire in the living room and the twinkle of our Christmas tree lights. We’d gone all out that year in an attempt to cheer Emma up, ‘bring her out of herself’ as the school headteacher had helpfully suggested. My body felt strange beneath the cardigan, as though it belonged to someone else.

  Anyway, it’s hard to think back to when Emma began to change. To when my bubbly little girl turned into something different. All parents say that, don’t they, that the morphing of child to adolescent is a truly bizarre experience, something you’re never prepared for despite how many times you’ve warned yourself it will happen.

  She began to turn in on herself, spending more and more time alone in her bedroom. Whereas before she had been happy spending time with me after school, sitting atop the Aga with her legs dangling down, watching me in the kitchen, now she vanished, a blur of school uniform and long hair disappearing up the stairs. I used to stand at the bottom step, trying desperately to think of the magic words that would bring her back, make us close again, but somehow they never came.

  ‘It’s just hormones,’ Callum had said at first, shrugging, and for a second or two I hated him. Hated him for dismissing her like that. He and Emma have always got on very well – truth be told, there are times when I look at them both and feel jealous, though that’s not something I’d ever really want to admit to anyone else. But despite their closeness, Callum has never really tackled the problem, at least not head on. He buried his head in the sand and it’s stayed there ever since. When he did try to talk to her about it, he became too brusque, almost aggressive. I suppose a stroppy daughter didn’t really fit into his persona – his TV exec personality, his almost local celebrity status. In spite of how much he loved her, she was becoming a blot on his copybook. But it wasn’t as though I was much better. I worried about her, but I was frustrated, too. I wanted her to snap out of it, to grow up a bit. Look, I’m just being honest. I never pretended to be perfect. Despite what people might think.

  Callum comes outside, his hair wet from the shower, a white towel wrapped around his waist. Our villa is overlooked slightly by the one above us on the hill, but Callum has never been particularly bothered about privacy. When I first met him, he was quite the exhibitionist, forever taking risks and encouraging me to loosen my inhibitions a bit – wanting public displays of affection, snatched encounters outdoors on our dates. I’m not sure he ever really got what he wanted in that respect – not from me, anyway. It was never really my thing.

  ‘Still up for going to Rouen today with Maria?’ he asks me. ‘We can probably drag Ems along too, don’t you think?’

  He’s grinning at me in that careless way he has, running a hand through the dark spikes of his hair. Whatever odd mood that had gripped him on the plane over here seems to have gone now, faded away in the heat and the wine and the luxuriousness of the swimming pool. Callum is a man who is used to getting what he wants and despite everything, he still has that ability to charm me, to grin like a Cheshire cat and make those old giddy feelings arise in my stomach.

  ‘Mmm,’ I say, about to capitulate, and then suddenly I look at him and think better of it. ‘You know what, actually, Callum, I was thinking I might stay here for the day, by the pool,’ I say. ‘Might get a bit of work done, if I can get the internet working.’ I pause. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  He groans, but it’s only a mock-groan, I can tell. He doesn’t really mind if I don’t come, and I can already see his mind skipping ahead to what this means – a possible father-daughter day for him and Emma. Just Daddy and Ems. No bad cop today.

  ‘We’re on holiday, Siobhan,’ he says. ‘Plus, you said you’d always wanted to visit Rouen.’ He pauses. ‘You don’t need to be working – I work! You need a break. That’s why we came here.’

  Is it, I ask myself silently, but outwardly I smile, though I’m bristling inside at his casual dismissal of my need to work. ‘I know, I’m sorry. But if I can power through some bits today then it’ll free me up for the rest of the time here. I promise.’ I’m improvising now.

  He relents, as I knew he would, and I settle myself down by the pool, my laptop on my knee, listening as Emma finally rouses herself and the pair of them set about getting ready to go to Rouen. At one point, Emma comes out to the patio, stopping when she sees me on the sun lounger.

  ‘Are you not coming?’

  I gesture at my laptop with a rueful sigh.

  ‘Work. I’m sorry, darling. But you’ll have fun with Dad.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She seems to accept it relatively easily (I could almost be hurt by her lack of protestation) and I watch as she lifts the hem of her white summer dress, sprays her legs with mozzie spray.

  ‘Maria?’ Callum is calling for my sister, the sound of his voice bouncing over to where I lie at the pool. It’s very hot – I should get a hat. ‘Maria? Where are you?’

  She emerges from a side door, sunglasses over her eyes and a shopping bag in her hand, blue plastic straining at her wrist.

  ‘Have you been out?’ I ask, confused, and she nods.

  ‘Popped to the patisserie, managed to catch it open for once.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘we thought you were still in bed.’

  She grins at me. ‘I handle my hangovers a little better than I used to, sis. Been up and about for hours. Sorry about the stuff in the living room, had to unload the car. Croissant?’

  ‘Emma and Callum are hoping to go to Rouen,’ I say. She looks at me by the pool, the two of them ready to go, and seems to assess the situation at a single glance.

  ‘I think I’ll stay here with Siobhan, actually,’ she tells Callum, the car keys glinting in her hand. ‘Here, take these. You’re insured on mine, aren’t you? You’ll manage. Just go slow on the bends. We’ll save you a croissant for when you get back.’ She’s tossed the keys across the patio to him before he can argue; I watch as he catches them deftly. He’s always been sure of himself, has my husband, but as he and Emma turn to go, I catch sight of something unreadable on his face. It is there for a second, and then it disappears.

  Five minutes later, they are gone. I wait until the sound of Maria’s car stuttering up the hill has faded into the distance, then close my laptop, which I never had any intention of using. I don’t really have much work to do; my role at a pharmaceutical company has gradually lessened over the years as Callum’s star has continued to rise. I took a step back from it when Emma was born, wanting to prioritise my family, prioritise my husband. I’ve spent sixteen years of my life doing just that, which is why, I suppose, the thought of it all crumbling now is a little too much for me to bear. After the sacrifices I’ve made, the things I have endured.

  I lie back on my sun lounger. Beside me, my sister sets out the croissants on the white plastic table in front of us, then settles herself down. For a few seconds, we are silent, listening to the sound of the crickets, but I can feel her gaze on me, the way I always could when we were younger. She’d always be trying to catch me out, and sometimes I feel as though nothing has changed. ‘She’s protective of you,’ our mother often said, ‘she cares about you as if you were her own. Eldest sibling syndrome.’ I’ve never been sure if that’s the case, although there’s nothing concrete to suggest otherwise.

  The pool glistens in front of us, and I reproach myself; we are here because of Maria, aren’t we, we are in this beautiful place, in the sunshine, because she has been kind enough to offer it up. Things have changed – we are adults now, and I have nothing to worry about. The crickets sound as though they are getting louder. All I want is some time to think – about what I’m going to do, how Callum and I are going to move forward. Whether we are going to move forward at all. But I can’t hear my thoughts for the hum of the insects, and M
aria’s presence next to me is distracting.

  ‘So,’ Maria says at last, as if she can read my mind, ‘when are you going to tell me what’s going on with you, S? I might be able to help.’ She pauses. ‘You know you can tell me anything, sis. That’s what I’m here for. Remember?’

  I don’t say anything. A trickle of sweat works its way down my neck.

  ‘Siobhan?’

  ‘There’s nothing going on,’ I say at last, ‘really, Maria. Everything’s fine.’ It has become my party line over the years; the words slide off my tongue like honey.

  A silence falls between us, heavy with everything I’m not saying. Briefly, I close my eyes, the hot sun burning an orb of white into my eyelids.

  ‘It’s almost forty degrees now,’ Maria says eventually, pulling her sun lounger a little bit closer to mine with a slight scraping sound as it shifts across the tiles. She’s wearing a white lace smock over her black two-piece swimming costume, looking every inch the glamorous sort of woman that I can’t be any more. Her body is unscarred, child-free – the thin silver line from my caesarean stretches across my belly. I haven’t really answered her question, her reminder that I can tell her anything. Anything at all. It’s what she used to say when we were younger, back when we shared a room – she’d whisper to me in the dark, ask me to tell her my secrets. Truth be told, at that age I didn’t have any – most of my thoughts revolved around my homework and what was going on in Neighbours.

  ‘Mm,’ I mumble, ‘it’s lovely.’ There’s another silence for a minute, the only sound the throbbing of the crickets, and the drifting, dull burr of an overhead plane. I follow it with my eyes, and wonder briefly about the passengers on it – are they happy? Are they free?

  ‘Thanks for staying with me,’ I say at last to my sister, and she shrugs her shoulders, smiles across at me. Her eyes are covered by her mirrored sunglasses – I stare at my own tiny reflection in her lenses.