Everything and Nothing Read Online Free

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