text: HOME HELP Ann Martin Trigger Warning: Self-harm By the time Ellie went to make them a cup of tea, Marian knew she would get the job. Interview? Hardly. Two strangers talking through tears. It was hardly a job either. Ssix hours a week light housework. But it would serve its purpose, which was to give her something to think about, something to pour into the emptiness. A quick scan of the room while Ellie Roberts was in the kitchen told Marian a lot. Furniture good, but shabby. Carpet ditto and with the kind of indelible stains that come with small children. A plastic crate in the corner filled with a colourful jumble of toys. A Sesame Street book half under the couch. That hurt. A wedding photograph in a frame on the coffee table that she gazed at for longer. Ellie younger, but with the same soft, dark hair and eyes under a pearl coronet and a billow of white tulle. She was gazing up at her new husband not just with love, but sheer, raw adoration. And why not? Hugh Grant boyish, with his hair slightly rumpled and a grin on his face as though he’d won first prize in a lottery. Nice couple. Happy couple. Ellie came in and set down a tray on the small table before sitting herself back down to face Marian. Tea-party niceties were observed, tentative attempts were made at connection “Milk? Sugar? I’m sorry, I thought we had biscuits, but the children seem to have finished them.” Ellie’s voice, too, was soft. A gentle, slightly nervous woman with shy, searching eyes. Searching for what?? Searching for something she might just have found? “That’s fine. I try not to nibble between meals. I have serious issues with the size of my hips, these days.” Marian smiled, much easier at seeming at ease, but possibly only because she was some thirty years older. She gave Ellie her cue to begin. “So, you want someone to come in three mornings a week?” Ellie nodded. “Yes, I don’t get a lot of spare time during the week and the little I do have, I want to give to my children.” Her eyes went to the wedding photograph. “Chris died just over a year ago. Cancer. So it’s important that...” Tears pooled, her voice thickened, wobbled and stopped. “Of course,” said Marian. It was a long time since she had needed to speak to anyone this tenderly. “I know what you mean. My husband died twenty eight years ago, when our daughter was six. She became everything. I had to love her enough for both of us.” Ellie picked up the incongruously cheerful red teapot and began to pour, her fingers gripping firmly and an equal grip on her voice, but the tears got away. “I don’t know what I’d do without my mother. She’s my one true angel. My lifeline” She paused and groped at a box of tissues, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose. “Sorry, sorry. I do try not to do this.” A gulp of air and she went on rapidly. “I drop the children off to her at the unearthly hour of seven am, so that I can be at work by eight. That way I can finish at four. My boss is very kind. Mum takes Layla to kindergarten and then looks after Joey for the day. She picks Layla up at three and I’m at her place by five. It’s not perfect, but we do our best.” “We always do our best, don’t we?” said Marian. “It’s all we can do.” As tentative as it had seemed when she applied, she now really wanted this little job. “Tell me about your children.” “Layla is five and Joey’s two,” said Ellie. “I would have had them here today, but Mum has taken them to a puppet show in the Botanical Gardens. I told her she didn’t need to, with it being Saturday and she’s had them all week. But she wanted to. Well, you know what grandmothers are.” Oh yes, Marian knows. Grandmothers are women who get bruised in the heart. Women who give those hearts completely and unconditionally to children who are theirs, but not theirs. Then comes the karate chop to that heart when their only daughter gets a job in some world away city and takes the grandchild with her. It could be forever and the pain in the wounded heart never seems to grow less. Now the tear-mist was her own. “Can you start tomorrow?” That was sudden. . Ellie was brisk now, taking charge, spelling out the arrangement. “I can give you a key right away. I’m afraid our paths won’t cross very often, but just come in at about nine and do whatever you think needs to be done. You don’t have to worry about the children’s laundry, I take that to Mum. There’s a Chinese ginger jar on the hall table, I’ll leave your money in there on a Friday. Cash is ok, isn’t it?” It was all so simple arrangement and so right. Just a few hours a week when she wasn’t alone at home, yearning for the child that she’d cared for every day for three years. When Jessica had found herself pregnant and then kicked the father out of her life, Marian had struggled with it all. But not for long. With Jessica keen to get her Masters, who else but her mother to give the devotion and support she’d always given? Who else but Grandma to look after baby Bryn? It had been so beautiful, so good. Just the three of them. It had filled Marian up in a way she hadn’t been filled since Jessica was born. It had been so good and she was missing it so desperately now it was gone. Incey Wincey Spider and blown kisses on Zoom could never be the same. Even though she so readily took on working for Ellie Roberts, she wasn’t prepared for the blows that would bruise her heart afresh. The primitive, love-filled drawings fixed with magnets to the fridge. Mummy and Layla and Joey. Love you Mummy, Granny in the park, each one labelled in an adult hand, Layla K1. The Beatrix Potter decorated bedroom with baby animal mobiles. The cot stripped down to the waterproof under-sheet after an accident in the night (she would gladly have washed the sheets). A small, balled up, inside-out sock under a single bed. Sticky finger marks on the wall beside a high chair. Pooh Bear and Piglet tableware in the dishwasher. A blue tortoise stool to help short legs reach the toilet seat. The unmistakeable smell of baby talc. Photos by Ellie’s bed. The husband, alive, still rumpled, still grinning. Two small painted faces; a fairy princess and a pirate. It hurt, but it was somehow a healing hurt. Therapy to cure an addiction. By the time she’d been cleaning that house for three weeks, she knew that she needed to keep on coming. She knew, in fact, that she needed more. She needed to meet those children, to hold them in her arms, bury her face in their hair and soak herself through and through with the very feel and sound and smell of them. She hadn’t seen Ellie in person since her interview, but there had been notes - sometimes even smiley-face notes - and her money had always been in an envelope in the ginger jar. That wasn’t enough, so Marian devised a plan. It was a simple plan, just a tin of home-baked cupcakes iced with kitten faces. A little gift delivered on a Saturday. I knew you wouldn’t mind. Another cup of tea together and then the offer. “I do know you have your mother, but if for any reason you ever need someone else ... a sitter....” After all, she and Ellie had already connected, bonded even, over tea and tears. It would be ok. It would be good. So why an ambulance? But there it was outside Ellie’s gate, one medic closing the doors, another starting up the engine. By the time she had parked, they were speeding down the street. Marian struggled with her seatbelt. Fumbled with the door of her car. Finally made it to the gate. She wasn’t the only one. Greedily inquisitive spectators were already gathered to mull and murmur and stare. Marian grasped the arm of a woman with fuchsia pink hair, leopard-skin pants, tattooed breasts and a cigarette poised between fingernails that matched the hair. “What happened?” Marian could hear her own voice, thin and cracked. “What? The woman looked at her with eyes black-rimmed and turquoise lidded but not unkind. “Tablets, love,” she said with a smoker’s rasp. “Sleeping pills. She’ll be ok. But only because I saw her bedroom light still on at ten this morning. Gut feeling, you know. Then she wouldn’t answer her door.’ She gave a half grimace, half grin. “Pays sometimes to have nosy neighbours!” Blowing smoke sideways, to miss Marian’s face, “I’ve seen you, haven’t I, coming and going? She wasn’t expecting you today, that’s for sure! ” The woman went on, happy to tell her story anew. “I did keep half an eye on her after her husband buggered off with that woman from his office. He was an arsehole, that one. I knew that the first time I met him. You can always tell. But she thought his arsehole was the sole source of the world’s solar energy. I tried to be a friend after he left her, but it wasn’t what she wanted. He’d tried to hit onto me once when I asked them round to my place for Christmas drinks and I think she picked it up. Anyway, she wouldn’t have a bar of me.” She waved her cigarette towards the bunch of neighbours who now felt free to comment as loudly and speculatively as they liked about the woman whose gate they were gathered around. “Wouldn’t have anything to do with any of us. She had her mum though, and they were very close. I think with her mum still there, she might have pulled through. But when her mom died a couple of months ago, well, I worried something like this might happen.” Marian felt her legs trembling, her face go white and cold. Stiff and clumsy mouth didn’t want to form the words. “B.but... the children.... What about the children?” The woman spluttered on her cigarette, then dropped it to the ground and stomped on it as though it was a venomous insect. She stared at Marian “Children?” she wheezed. “What do 'ya mean? Ellie doesn’t have any children.” Marian got back into her car. She sat for a long time and gazed down the street. Then she began to weep. On and on she loudly wept and wailed, for all the hurts she knew about and for those she did not, for things that happen and things that don’t, for things that are stolen and things that are lost. For everything. When there were no more tears, when her eyes were stinging, puffed and raw and she couldn’t breathe through her nose, she wound down her window and called out to anyone who would answer. “Where have they taken her? Do you know where she’s gone?”