Everything and Nothing Read Free

the odd sweet or biscuit is fine.’
    Ruth nodded approvingly while Christian stared oblivious out of the window. ‘That’s pretty much how we feel, but we’ve had such problems with Hal. The doctor says we should go with it for now. She even told me to try giving him things like chocolate to get him used to the idea of eating. But that’s absurd, don’t you think?’
    Agatha thought it sounded sensible. She had been brought up on a diet of frozen burgers, oven chips and chocolate. Pot Noodles, if she was lucky. And it hadn’t done her any harm. But of course she shook her head disapprovingly.
    ‘And what about discipline, where do you stand on that?’
    ‘I do believe in rules.’ Agatha could remember her last employer screaming at her children after telling Agatha in her interview that she thought a raised voice was a stupid voice. They were fucking priceless these women. ‘But I think they should be rules we’d obey anyway, like be polite and kind and don’t hit or snatch, those sort of things. And I don’t like to threaten anything I’m not prepared to carry out.’ Agatha wasn’t confi dent she should say this as Ruth Donaldson was in all likelihood another of those crazy women who wouldn’t be left in charge of their kids if they lived on the local estate but somehow got away with it because they lived in half-a-million-pound houses and knew a few long words. But then again these women were usually addicted to parenting programmes and so had a fair idea for how they should be behaving even if they couldn’t manage it themselves.
    ‘I put on the advert light household duties, are you okay with that? I meant a bit of laundry and keeping things a bit straight and maybe a bit of food shopping.’
    ‘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