‘Which one?’
‘That it’s a job.’
‘Which is?’
‘Working for me. Our childminder, Monique, has handed in her notice. And I need a replacement.’
To say the first morning of my new job catapults me out of my comfort zone barely covers it.
It isn’t just that I spent last night on a lumpy sofa bed in my sister’s attic room, which I’ve moved into, feeling like a new staff member arriving at Downton Abbey.
It isn’t just that I’ve had two hours of broken sleep, after Ollie’s reaction to something called the ‘controlled-crying technique’ was so loud and angry it’s
a wonder his cot didn’t burst into flames.
It isn’t even that I’m still reeling from the chaos I witnessed last night: Justin bathing the three youngest children as if it was a human sheep dip as Suzy ran round the house like
a sweating madwoman – ironing uniforms, sewing on karate badges, finishing maths homework, signing permission slips.
It’s that, after I woke this morning and hobbled out of the sofa bed like a geriatric penguin with a slipped disc, I started for the first time to wonder whether I can actually
do
what Suzy’s asking me to do.
I’d flattered myself that, because the kids like me, looking after them would be well within my limits. But now it strikes me that maybe they call me ‘Cool Auntie Hannah’
because their only other point of reference is Aunt Joanna – Justin’s sister – a stout-faced, humourless biology teacher with a mono-brow that could scrub a doorstep.
This unease is not helped by the scene that greets me when I step downstairs and almost collide with Justin.
When Suzy met and married her husband twelve years ago, while he was still training to be a barrister, it was universally agreed that he was a catch: sweet, ‘dishy’ (my mum’s
words) and solvent, the kind of bloke you could take home to your parents and be confident he wouldn’t choose that exact moment to reveal a repertoire of dirty jokes. They were almost
embarrassingly loved up for an unduly extended period and I’m sure they still are, even if they do less snogging on public transport these days. But they both turned out to be amazing
parents, if a little – understandably – exasperated at times.
‘Leo, please, I’ve asked you seven times now. GET YOUR SHOES ON!’ Justin pleads, a crimson patch blooms on his neck.
‘O-
KAAAY
!’ Leo replies defiantly, flinging down the Xbox remote.
‘You’re not even meant to be on the Xbox in the mornings,’ Justin sighs wearily. ‘I thought we’d banned that. Didn’t we ban that, Suze?’
Suzy is attempting to wrestle a tub of Sudocrem from Ollie while simultaneously trying to get Noah’s tie on him. If you look at her briefly enough she appears to have eight arms. ‘I
don’t know. I can’t keep up on what’s banned and what’s not these days,’ she mutters.
Max walks into the living room, dressed and ready, before tapping his mum on the shoulder. ‘What is it, sweetheart?’ she pants.
‘I wondered if we could have a chat,’ he says matter-of-factly.
‘What about?’ Suzy asks.
‘Deforestation. We’re learning about it in geography.’
‘Now’s not really a good time, Max,’ Suzy replies.
‘Okay,’ he says, disappointed. ‘How about Ebola? Or human rights in China?’
‘Auntie Hannah will chat to your heart’s content about current affairs in the car,’ Suzy replies, to my alarm.
‘So you know what you’re doing?’ she asks me, swilling black coffee down her throat as she grabs her bag. ‘I told you about the twins’ karate class tonight,
didn’t I? Will you make sure you give them a snack and drink beforehand, otherwise they’ll keel over.’
‘We’ll be
fine
,’ I reassure her, almost convincingly.
She then says her goodbyes to the children, which all goes well until it’s Ollie’s turn for a kiss, when he looks up from his
Peppa Pig
book and does not take kindly to the
turn of events. ‘MUUUUUUMMMYYYYYYY!’
Suzy winces as her brow pricks with a guilty sweat. ‘Oh darling, it’ll be okay – Mummy will be back later.’ He wails even louder. ‘And Auntie Hannah’s going
to have lots of fun with you today, isn’t she?’
‘WAHHHHHHHHH!’ wails Ollie, launching himself onto the floor head first. I’ve seen this sort of thing before and know it is attributed to ‘the terrible twos’.
Previously any mention of those words would have me running for cover. But now there’s nowhere to run.
‘He does this at playgroup but they assure me that it stops literally THE SECOND I leave,’ she says, biting her lip as she looks at him uneasily. ‘So you should be fine. I
think. Oh God, I
hope
. But text me if there are any problems. I’m in surgery all morning but will come out if there are any emergencies whatsoever.’
‘There won’t be. Just go,’ I urge her under my breath, as if I were aiding a fugitive. ‘Go while you can. We’ll be
fine
.’ At which point Ollie starts
banging his head against the floor.
My frantic, pathetic attempts to divert Ollie’s attention and stop him inflicting grievous bodily harm on himself continue for twenty minutes; I am virtually on the verge
of tap-dancing for him when he finally falls silent.
Unfortunately, this is when my back is turned to retrieve a lost sock, which means I don’t spot him pouring an entire cup of warm tea into Max’s lunchbox until it’s too
late.
I attempt to remake the lunch, while simultaneously overseeing the swapping of Leo’s and Noah’s shoes (the former had two left feet; the latter two right), before deciding it’s
easier to just hand over £2.45 for a hot dinner.
By the time we’ve piled the mountain of sports bags into the boot and the kids have scrambled into the car, we are devastatingly late. In addition, Ollie decides he does not want to be
strapped into his car seat under any circumstances, a position he makes clear by screaming, ‘HELLLPPPP!’ which must give passers-by the strong impression that he’s being
kidnapped.
I finally race to the driver’s seat, snap on my seatbelt and take a deep breath.
‘All ready, kids?’ I smile through gritted teeth, turning the ignition with a sense that we’re at least getting somewhere now.
‘What’s that horrible smell?’ asks Noah.
I sniff. Max does the same. Soon everyone in the car is twitching their nasal passages like a pack of demented bloodhounds, until Ollie laughs and announces, ‘Poo!’ – which at
least sheds immediate light on the situation.
‘
Pwhaarrrrr!
Ol, that’s a
stinky
one!’ Max says. ‘You’ll have to change his nappy before we go. He can’t sit in that.’
‘I
know
,’ I say indignantly. ‘Right. You lot wait here,’ I add, pulling on the handbrake, turning off the ignition, then racing round to unstrap Ollie and carry
him into the house leaving the trail of an odour comparable to that given off by a nuclear waste plant.
Now, I’ve changed nappies in my time – at least two or three. But never when the child in question decides now is a good time to start practising the cancan. Ollie kicks, wriggles
and generally contorts himself into every conceivable position except the one he’s
meant
to be in, while I hysterically squeak the words to ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and
attempt to persuade him to lie still.
This would be bad enough without the issue of the nappy’s contents, of which I will spare you a full description except to say that if I’d known how bad it was going to be I’d
have been less enthusiastic about his cabbage intake during Sunday dinner.
It is Max who rescues me in the end: having unstrapped himself from the car and plodded in to charge up his iPod (the one he’s not meant to have on him) and pinch a bag of Haribos (also
prohibited), he sees my predicament and steps in by entertaining Ollie via the medium of song, while I get down to nauseating business.
Max’s version of Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’ might be about as in tune as a flushing toilet, but it leaves Ollie entranced and still enough for me to finally get him into a clean
nappy.
By the time we’re back in the car, we are twenty minutes behind schedule and all I can do is hurtle to school, intervene ineffectively in a row between the twins about
Doctor Who
,
fail to answer Max’s questions about Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries and bite hard into my lip every time I encounter (or indeed cause) a road-rage incident. Which is on
average every forty seconds.
I screech into the road in front of Max’s school and pull up outside the door. ‘YOU’RE ON THE ZIGZAGS!’ he squeals.
‘But it’s an emergency,’ I argue. A man in a tweed suit emerges from the school gates and starts walking towards us. ‘It’s Mr Brown! I’ll get detention! GO!
GO!’ Max shrieks, and I slam on the accelerator as if trying to flee an armed robbery.
I drive round the block twice before securing a non-prohibited parking place, drop him off, then rocket two streets away to the twins’ infant school, where parking spaces are in equally
short supply. This time I have the added joy of battling with a pushchair you’d need a PhD in applied engineering to construct.
I race to the school gates with one twin on either side of the buggy and have them successfully dropped off, when I finally take a deep breath and try and compose myself.
‘Things can only get better, eh, Ol?’ I say, peering into the pushchair.
At which point he vomits on his sweatshirt.
The rest of the day shows little improvement. I never thought stay-at-home mums had it easy – not ever. But you can’t appreciate how
not
easy until
you’ve attempted this stuff yourself. Having cleaned up Ollie using an entire pack of baby wipes unearthed from the glove compartment, given him a drink and wrestled him back into the car, I
drive home buzzing with a queasy adrenalin. Then I pull into the driveway, turn round and find him asleep – except that I know from Suzy’s instructions that he
never
sleeps at
this time of day, only after lunch.
I try to wake him, gently at first, by calling his name and nudging his shoulder. Then I unstrap him and lift him from the car, increasing the shrillness and volume as I jiggle him up and
down.
But, after a few minutes, I realise with a stab of despair that
nothing
is going to wake him. Panic rises up in me as I put together the pieces of this morning’s jigsaw: how
inconsolable he was, the pungency of his nappy, the vomiting, and now this – overwhelming lethargy.
He’s unwell – clearly – but I have no idea what the hell it is kids get these days. Meningitis? Measles? Diphtheria? I strap him back into the car seat, my head swimming as I
Google his symptoms on my phone and am confronted with a list of medical possibilities that each contain more syllables than a Greek dictionary. I briefly consider phoning Suzy, then an ambulance,
but, deciding not to waste precious time, I race round to the driver’s seat again.
By the time we reach Alder Hey Children’s Hospital twenty minutes later, I am again dripping with sweat and muttering a succession of prayers that involve my promising to live a life of
devout restraint
if only my poor nephew is allowed to live
! Our stumble into A&E is like the closing scene of a disaster movie, Ollie deathly pale and immobile in my arms.
‘I NEED TO SEE A DOCTOR!’
The receptionist looks up and concern flickers to her brow, enhancing my certainty that something’s very wrong. We’ll get you in ASAP, love,’ she reassures me, taking down some
rudimentary details before bustling me straight into triage.
I am midway through recounting to the nurse the full, dramatic detail of Ollie’s deterioration, when he wakes up. She leans in and beams at him.
‘Hello, you!’ she singsongs. ‘Have you been scaring your poor auntie to death?’ He gurgles contentedly and grins back. ‘Let’s just give you a little check
over, shall we?’
Ollie’s basic observations are normal, so we are sent to a waiting room, where we sit for two and a half hours to see a doctor – with only my car keys and some bacon crisps from a
vending machine by way of entertainment.
It strikes me during this time that Ollie couldn’t look more happy and healthy if he were starring in an advert for a Center Parcs holiday. But I can’t take any chances, not on my
first day.
The doctor who finally sees him confirms that the vomiting was ‘one of those things’, that he fell asleep probably because he’d been up all night and that I should simply keep
an eye on him and make sure he has lots of water. I emerge from the hospital fizzing with relief and, despite the staff’s reassurances that it’s always better to get things checked out,
unable to shake the feeling that they must think I’m a raging neurotic with a serious perspiration problem.
The living room is devastated when we return and it takes an hour and a half for me to tackle it, with Ollie plonked in front of
Peppa Pig
. I resolve not to mention to
Suzy that I let the permitted ten minutes a day of television slide; I’ll have enough to confess when I fill her in on the Alder Hey trip.
I consider sitting down for a cup of tea, but guiltily realise that the
Peppa Pig
marathon I’ve just enforced on Ollie is the equivalent of my sitting in front of all five seasons
of
Breaking Bad
in one weekend. So I decide to do something creative with him, which I know is a phrase Suzy and Justin approve of.
I scan the room, looking for ideas, when it hits me: we can paint!
All
kids love painting – and this has the added benefit of leaving us with something to show for my efforts.
I go into this strategy with my eyes wide open, by the way: I know that paint plus toddler can be a messy affair. But I’m not stupid, you see: I’m going to prepare for the worst. I
cover the entire floor area of the living room with yesterday’s
Guardian
, Sellotaping it down forensically into every corner. I dig out some overalls to protect Ollie’s clothes
and, when there is literally nothing left uncovered, the paints come out.
At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, they are a roaring success.