Everything and Nothing

by Araminta Hall

  ‘Oh, absolutely, that’s fine. Of course I’d do that.’ That was the part Agatha liked the best. Putting everything into its right place. Sorting the house and making her employers marvel at her efficiency. She had been a cleaner many times in her life and she always proved herself indispensable. A lot of these families lived in near slum conditions. Agatha had learnt that they were the sort of people who you’d look at from the outside and wish you could be part of them. You’d covet their clothes and their house and coffee maker and £300 hoover and fridges in bright colours. But they couldn’t even flush their own toilets, most of them. They didn’t understand that the world had to be neat and that keeping things in order was very simple.

  ‘And as you know, Christian and I both work long hours. I try to be home for seven, but Christian never is. Are you okay with that? Maybe sometimes putting them to bed?’

  ‘Of course, I’m used to that.’ By the end of most jobs Agatha would have preferred it if the parents had disappeared; she liked to imagine them vaporised by their own neuroses. Handling children was always so much easier than adults.

  ‘So, Aggie, tell us about yourself.’

  Agatha was used to this question now, she knew these types of people liked to pretend they cared, but it still roused a dread inside her. The other answers hadn’t really been lies. It wasn’t like she was going to feed the kids crap whilst hitting them and shovelling the dirt under the sofa. She was going to be a good nanny, but she couldn’t tell these people about herself. She had experimented with a couple of answers in the past few interviews, but she’d found that if you said your parents were dead they felt too sorry for you and if you said they’d emigrated they still expected them to call. This was the first time she’d tried out her new answer: ‘I was brought up in Manchester and I’m an only child. My parents are very old-fashioned and when I got into university to study Philosophy my dad went mad. He’s very religious, you see, and he said Philosophy was the root of all evil, the devil’s work.’ She’d seen this on a late-night soap opera and it had sounded plausible, or maybe fantastic enough to be something you wouldn’t make up.

  Ruth and Christian Donaldson reacted exactly as she’d expected, sitting up like two eager spaniels, liberal sensitivity spreading across their faces.

  ‘He said if I went he’d disown me.’

  ‘But you went anyway?’

  Agatha looked down and felt the pain of this slight so hard that real tears pricked her eyes. ‘No, I didn’t. I could kick myself now, but I turned down the place.’

  Ruth’s hand went to her mouth in a gesture Agatha doubted to be spontaneous. ‘Oh, how awful. How could he have denied you such an opportunity?’ She was longing to say that she would never do anything so terrible to her own children.

  ‘I stayed at home for a while after that, but it was terrible. So many rows.’ Agatha could see a neat suburban terrace as she said this with a pinched man wagging a finger at her. The air smelt of vinegar, she realised; maybe her mother had been a bad cook or an obsessive cleaner, she wasn’t sure which yet. She wondered along with this kind couple sitting in front of her how he could have been so mean. ‘I left five years ago and I haven’t spoken to them since.’

  ‘But your mother, hasn’t she contacted you?’

  ‘She was very dominated by my dad. I think they’ve moved now.’

  ‘Do you have any siblings?’

  ‘No, it’s just me. I’m an only child.’

  ‘Poor you,’ said Ruth, but Agatha could already see her working out that they were getting a nanny who was clever enough to get into university, and for no extra cost.

  When Agatha got back to her grotty room in King’s Cross she felt tired and drained. She was still trying to work out why she might have told the Donaldsons she was called Aggie when no one had ever called her anything but Agatha. She supposed it must have sounded friendlier and she’d have to go with it now. Her room-mate’s mobile was ringing. She answered with a curt hello and then started waving madly at Agatha. Lisa was prone to wild mood swings, so Agatha didn’t take any notice until she heard what she was saying.

  ‘Oh, she was amazing, we were so sad to lose her . . . yes, she had sole care of both of them, I work full time . . . No, it was because we decided to move out of London, to get the children a bigger garden.’ Lisa started to pretend she was sucking a massive penis as she said this which annoyed Agatha, she fucking had to remember the script. ‘In fact, we nearly stayed just to keep her.’ Fake laughing, Lisa miming sipping a glass of champagne. ‘Oh, it’s so hard, isn’t it, all that juggling.’ Lisa put her hand over the phone and mouthed fucking tosser at Agatha, who smiled obligingly. If Lisa fucked this up she might hit the stupid bitch. ‘No, no, ring anytime, but really, I couldn’t recommend her highly enough.’ Lisa threw her phone onto the bed and made a sucking noise with her teeth. ‘Man, those posh types are gullible. They almost deserve to be done over, innit?’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Agatha, fishing her last twenty-pound note out of her wallet and handing it over to Lisa. If you wish for something hard enough it will happen, someone had once told her, or maybe she’d seen it on a film. She didn’t care, all she cared about was wishing herself out of this hellhole and into the Donaldsons’ home as quickly as possible.

  ‘Do you want Indian or Chinese?’ asked Ruth as she rooted through the spare kitchen drawer overflowing with wrapping paper, old packets of seeds, a spilt box of pins, paint colour charts and numerous other bits of tat for which they would never again find a use.

  ‘Don’t care,’ answered Christian, pouring them both wine. ‘I’m knackered.’

  The children had only been in bed for fifteen minutes and Ruth was sure Betty would be down any minute with some excuse like wanting a glass of water and then she’d lose her temper, which would mean the only real time she spent with her daughter would be about as far from quality as you could get. But how long could she be expected to go on surviving on so little sleep? It wasn’t a euphemism to say that sleep deprivation was a form of torture; there were doubtless thousands of people right now in prisons around the world sleeping more than she was. Christian had developed the ability to sleep through Betty’s crying and she’d long since stopped trying to wake him. Survival of the fittest, she found herself thinking most nights, dominant evolution. It was no wonder Betty cried all day; Ruth would do the same if she could.

  Christian noticed it was nearly nine and couldn’t help feeling as if he’d wasted his day. He’d lied to Ruth earlier and told her he’d managed to get a bit of work done when all he’d accomplished was approving the advert for the new admin assistant for his department. He felt physically wrecked. Why did Betty cry so much? And why wouldn’t Hal eat? He knew they should talk about it but also felt too tired to bring up these explosive topics with Ruth. Because his wife always had the energy for a fight, if nothing else.

  ‘So what did you think of her?’ she was asking.

  ‘Fine, how about you?’

  ‘I thought she was great and her referee couldn’t give her enough praise.’

  ‘Right.’ Christian sat down at their long wooden kitchen table, which had been designed for a much larger and grander house and made their kitchen feel as foolish as an old woman in a mini skirt. Ruth had bought it from an antiques fair in Sussex where they’d walked round a massive field filled with Belgians selling old bits of furniture which would be burnt in their own country but went for hundreds of pounds over here. He could remember the Polish builders laughing at Ruth when they’d been renovating the house and a pair of wall lights had gone missing and she’d asked the foreman if maybe one of the men might have taken them. To us, he had said, throwing his hands in the air, they are pennies. Christian had felt hated by those men. Actually not hated, more contemptuous. He knew they laughed at him in their own language, wondered at what mad man would spend thousands on a fucking house.

  ‘But do you think we should hire her?’

  Christian tried to think of a reason t
o hire or not to hire. Their last nanny had seemed great until she’d left with no more warning than the time it had taken to say the words. He couldn’t even picture the new girl properly, but he did remember that she’d made Betty stop crying. ‘She seemed great. Do we have a lot of choice?’

  Ruth looked grey. ‘No, but is that a good reason to hire someone to look after your children?’

  ‘Look, do it. If it doesn’t work out we’ll re-think.’ He put his hand over hers and got a flash of passion from the touch of her skin. She did that to him sometimes.

  She tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘Okay, good plan, Batman.’ It was what she said to Hal and it sucked his desire right out of him.

  Agatha’s room in the Donaldsons’ house was so perfect it made her want to cry. It was right at the top, which made her feel cocooned, all those people between her and the world. And it was painted in a light blue that she had once read was called duck-egg blue, which was a colour she could imagine cosy American mothers using. Jutting out of the far wall was a large white wooden bed festooned in squishy, fluffy cushions which gave the impression you were floating in the clouds as you drifted off to sleep. And her own little bathroom behind a door she’d thought was a cupboard, where Ruth had kindly put some expensive-looking lotions and potions. Best of all though the only windows were on either side of the roof so you couldn’t see the street and instead could stare at the sky in all its different guises and pretend you were in any number of countries and situations. It was the sort of room Agatha had dreamt of, but never imagined she’d inhabit.

  Ruth and Christian seemed very concerned she had everything she needed and immensely grateful that she had agreed to take the job, when it should have been the other way around. She smiled and laughed all weekend, but was itching for them to leave on Monday morning so she could get stuck in. She had plans for the house and kids. First she would sort and tidy and then she would get Betty to stop crying all the time and finally she would get Hal eating. Life was simple when you set out your targets in basic terms.

  The house was dirtier than she had given it credit for. The Donaldsons’ cleaner had been taking them for a ride because anywhere you couldn’t see had been left untouched for years. Under the sofas and beds were graveyards for missing items which Agatha couldn’t believe had ever been of any use to anyone. The inside of the fridge was sticky and disgusting and the lint in the dryer must surely be a fire hazard. All the windows were filthy and the wood round them looked black and rotten, but really only needed wiping with a damp cloth. The bread bin was filled with crumbs and hard, rotten rolls and the freezer was so jam-packed with empty boxes and long-forgotten meals that it looked like it was never used. There were clothes at the bottom of the laundry basket which smelt mouldy and which Agatha felt sure Ruth would have forgotten she owned, simply because they needed hand washing. Cupboards were sticky from spilt jam and honey, and the oven smoked when you turned it on because of all the fat that had built up over the years. Agatha would never, ever let her future home end up like this. She would never leave it every day like Ruth did. She would never put her trust in strangers.

  ‘How’s the new nanny?’ Sally, her editor, had asked as soon as Ruth had arrived at work that first Monday, to which she’d been able to reply truthfully, ‘She seems great.’ And at first she had, in fact still now, a week since Agatha had started, she seemed great. It was just that she made Ruth feel shit. Ruth suspected her feelings to be pathetic, but the girl was too good. Her house had never been so clean, the fridge never so well stocked, the food she cooked every night was delicious and the children seemed happy. It was a working-mother’s dream scenario and to complain was surely akin to madness; but before Aggie she had always found something perversely comforting in bitching about the nanny, in secretly believing she could do a better job. Ruth knew enough however to know that she undoubtedly could not have done a better job.

  Ruth had given up work after Betty was born but she had only lasted a year and the memory of that time still resonated deep inside her. Ruth was a coper, sometimes even a control freak. She prided herself on her ability to get on with life, to run at it full tilt without wavering, not to be afraid to try, to not even be afraid to fail. But life with Betty had been different.

  She had started so positively, with such high hopes and expectations. She was going to always have fresh flowers on the table, bake bread and cakes, read to Betty every day, take her for long walks round the park, teach her the sounds that animals made and smother her in kisses. At first it had been like the best drug she’d ever taken, pure euphoria accompanied her everywhere. It reminded her of the feeling she used to get lying on a hot beach and feeling as if the sun had penetrated her body, warming every organ. Before, of course, the ozone layer was wrenched apart and the sun became carcinogenic.

  The warmth however came from within her and what she had achieved. There is a moment after giving birth when you have come through the shit and the blood and the vomit and the sensation of being split in two and turned inside out and the pure unadulterated terror when you realise that, like death, no one else can do this for you. And that moment is heaven. It is pure bliss. It is spiritual and yet earthy. You know your place and accept it for maybe the first time in your life. You are like other women and spectacularly set apart from men. And this feeling lasts, often for months.

  But like every drug, it had its come down, a come down which took Ruth by surprise. She could remember the moment exactly. She had been cutting carrots in the kitchen, thinking about how she could save a bit of supper for Betty’s lunch the next day, when her brain shifted. She physically felt it, like a jolt in her skull. One minute she was in the moment and the next her hands were disconnected from her body. She watched them performing the mundane task of cutting and couldn’t feel them. She tried a different job, filling the pan with water, but it was the same. She thought she might faint and went running in to Christian, who was watching football on the telly and couldn’t understand what she was going on about. Why don’t you go to bed, he’d said, you must be knackered, what with all that getting up all night. I’ll do supper, bring it up to you on a tray.

  But sleeping did nothing for her. She woke the next morning covered in sweat, her heart racing. When she sat up in bed her head spun and the room tilted when she went to the bathroom. She begged Christian to stay at home because she must be ill, but he looked at her as if she was mad and asked if she remembered that his new show was going out that night.

  Ruth pulled herself together because babies hold all illnesses apart from their own in contempt, but the world remained distorted. From then on everything she had jumped and skipped to only twenty-four small hours before became as hard as leaving a new lover in a warm bed on a cold winter’s day. She started to feed Betty from jars, Christian’s supper was often absent, the cleaning went undone for weeks on end. She began to hate the park in the same way that she had once hated flying, something she couldn’t ever imagine doing again. Even the women whom she was starting to make friends with now seemed foreign, the language they spoke disconcerting and meaningless. She was never going to be as competent as they were, days were never again going to wash over her, fear was beginning to limit her every moment.

  Ruth had felt as though she was disappearing. Her bones felt slushy in her body so that sometimes she was sure she was going to faint in the park or fall down the stairs while holding Betty. She worried constantly about what would happen to her precious daughter, who she loved as ferociously as a mother lion. She calculated that if she died just after Christian left for work that would be twelve hours Betty would have to spend alone. Certainly she’d be scarred for life if not seriously injured or killed. And when he spent the night away on a programme she couldn’t sleep for anxiety, feeling as if she was falling through the bed and into oblivion when in truth she was simply exhausted.

  Things came to a head when going to the supermarket became terrifying. She recognised the irony. Here she was, a woman who
had backpacked round Asia, spent a year at an American university, moved to London after meeting Christian only once and worked her way up a very greasy career ladder, now paralysed by the thought of a few aisles of food.

  Ruth tried to grab onto the person she had been but couldn’t find herself however hard she looked. She remembered a confident woman, but it was like watching a film, the idea that she would ever climb back into that skin impossible. After nine months at home she realised that it was only going to get worse. She looked at all the women in the park and marvelled at their self-lessness. There was an army of women out there, she realised, who had made the ultimate sacrifi ce, themselves for others, and she had nothing but respect for them.

  The Monday that Aggie started should have been insignificant for Christian. He prayed she’d work out because he couldn’t bear the eruption of stress from Ruth if she didn’t. They’d have to go through all those tedious conversations again about her staying at home when they both knew she never would. Full-time motherhood hadn’t suited her, but still she would flirt with the idea. He couldn’t understand why Ruth was so prepared to waste both of their precious time on arguments that had no answers or endings. She could worry about anything and nothing with equal importance, so that sometimes his head spun and he felt as though he was on a rollercoaster.

  But Ruth seemed happy when he’d left and Aggie had already been in the kitchen fixing breakfast for Betty and ignoring the fact that Hal wouldn’t eat, something which he’d always silently believed to be the best policy. But Ruth would insist on fussing round him so much at every meal. He wondered how she had the energy and optimism to start every day thinking Hal would eat, to go to the trouble of putting food in front of him at every meal, to dance around him with the spoon, begging and pleading. If Christian had a say he’d have stopped offering Hal anything and then given him a few biscuits after a couple of weeks. It was odd how Ruth never considered that the GP might be right. But he never said anything because decisions like this were always Ruth’s remit. He was scared to get involved in the important stuff, not just because of the argument he could so easily cause, but also because he’d be setting a precedent and more would be expected of him in the future.