‘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.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
