Nell Walker is a writer and musician from London. She gained a degree in English Literature from the University of York, starting out in theatre and film and eventually graduating in 2017 with a first for her literary dissertation ‘Women Who Kill’. She returned to South East London to pursue her writing career, and is currently completing a book based on her experiences working as a female bartender in Camberwell.
Whilst at Goldsmiths, she has been working on a new collection of life writing examining family dynamics, young Londoners, and unconventional women. The following extract is taken from this collection.
Personal email: njgwalker@gmail.com
College email: nwalk002@gold.ac.uk
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Working House
I live in a working house of women. There is a method to everything that occurs here. There has to be, otherwise things would collapse.
We are three. Nidra, Aria, and me. We are all related in various ways.
Nidra is 45, exactly eighteen years older than me. Aria is 8, exactly eighteen years younger than me. Nidra is the woman my father shacked up with after my mother left him, but they haven’t been together since. Aria is the daughter they reluctantly welcomed on the day I turned 18, and a few months later, my father left for a second time. He’d absconded, all too keen to slip out of the room where the party he’d organised was just getting started.
Post-divorce, my father started calling Aria ‘the revenge child’. She was a symbol of destruction that represented a bitterly concrete end to my parents’ thirty-year marriage. Up until this year, I’d never met Aria. The dust hadn’t yet settled. I am Aria’s half-sister, but now I am also her nanny. I take care of Aria for five full hours each day for a modest but reasonable income while Nidra does her work from home. During the remaining hours, those precious slivers of night-time that belong solely and exquisitely to me, I write.
The house we all occupy is a simple one-up-one-down in a south-west suburb of London, which, to my surprise, suits me just fine. Aria sleeps in the box room, cold as a fridge, next to her mother on the first floor. I sleep in the attic. When I turned up with my bags nine months ago, Nidra had just lost her au pair: a strange, skittish bird-like woman in her sixties who worried about spontaneous household fires and jumped every time the telephone rang. Between adjusting to lockdown without child support and moving her work office into her bedroom, Nidra was at the stage of tearing her hair out when I arrived. Naturally, I became seen as their salvation. ‘My angel,’ she’d say repeatedly, tears of relief sheening her eyes, ‘You’re our angel. What would we do without you?’ It became easier, then, for me to hide my less-than-angelic attributes once the loft space was established as mine. It was a space no-one but me was allowed to enter, fitted with a writing desk, bed and sink. The door even locked. This was my line of separation between the chaos reserved exclusively for my life upstairs and the order that my governess-like work on the ground floor demanded of me.
*
Aria looks eerily like me when I was 8 years old – a little woman. The same dolly-like features, gappy front teeth and slinky dancing legs. She even has a double crown, like me, which I’m told is rare. But her skin is even whiter than mine. You would never guess that she was of Indian heritage. She gets a very proud glow when telling me about her grandma, Ammoumma Trishka, who was sent away from her Malayali home in the Indian deep south aged sixteen on a British governmental nursing scheme and sent all her pay cheques back to her mum and sisters. Ammoumma Trishka has never been home since. Now she is a frail old woman who spooks easily, her russet-skinned hands crinkled delicately with age and leading to perfectly cream-polished nails that she scratches at her eczema with. She’ll meanly wiggle one of those little manicured fingers at Nidra whenever she comes over to cook puffed samosas on a Sunday, littering her diatribe with Malayalam that no-one but her can understand. ‘You need more ventilation, makaḷ. Why is your mortgage so big? This house, tsk, it is always one problem after the other. Yen-i-qu manusilai-ila. You are beginning to look lined, dear.’ But she is always very complimentary towards me, as if I am the mother of her grandchild, and Nidra the strange vagabond who rolled in from the cold. Nidra despises her.
Increasingly, Aria slips and calls me ‘Mum’. Sometimes she’ll quickly backpedal, but often she’ll just laugh in surprise at her own mistake. I have never told Nidra about these moments.
*
Nidra is on work calls from 9 o’clock in the morning to half past seven at night. Every day I come downstairs and cook two eggs on brown toast with salted butter for lunch. I politely clean the pan, tidy the crumbs, then leave at 2.52 for the 3 o’clock school run.
At 2.59, as I approach the school gates, I put on my blue disposable surgical mask and greet the other mothers with my eyes: a friendly nod of acknowledgement that we are all in this together. It’s hard to convey anything other than hostility from behind the face-coverings – one is called upon to become theatrical, parodic in one’s interpersonal gestures to communicate friendliness. I am usually the one who arranges playdates and sleepovers on Nidra’s behalf, but recently that’s been forbidden, no mixing of households allowed. I love the brief jollity of encounters during pick up time. You are never there long enough to be able to have a full conversation as to how things are going, which means messages are exchanged in other ways: non-verbal cues; eye-rolls; other gestures of exasperation. It makes me feel almost normal.
When the school children come flooding out, I feel a great sense of pride. Aria looks identical to how I looked when I was her age, and so it’s easy for people to mistake me for her mother. Sometimes I enjoy the ambiguity, enjoy watching people looking at us and trying desperately to compute the maths – I look young for my age, possibly too young to have an eight-year-old child, but our likeness is still compelling enough to make strangers wonder.
At home, in the evenings, I try to steer Aria towards all of the creative activities that our dad used to do with me at that age. Drawing, piano, listening to new bands. She’s not yet old enough to dig Frank Zappa, or Moondog, but I’m getting there. Sometimes she rebels and all she wants to do is play on her phone. She has a game on there that involves building castles and dungeons out of virtual bricks. It all seemed fairly innocent at first, until I realised the game had an open invite to other players – strangers who can join the game anonymously from their digital devices, who hide behind avatars of little girls. Aria tells me all of the other players are her school friends; that it’s been a way for them to connect during lockdown. But once she told me that sometimes, the game spooks her. She said there is one avatar that she and her friends have labelled ‘The Imposter’, who follows the friends wherever they go, and will only ever appear when the game switches into Night Mode. The Imposter seems to know things that only Aria’s avatar and those of her friends have exchanged in confidence. After she told me, I deleted the game from her phone, but it had been suspiciously re-downloaded the following day and she never mentioned The Imposter again – until very recently.
‘I have to go upstairs and get something,’ she had announced, as the house began to darken with an early winter gloom. ‘I don’t want to go alone. Will you just come with me?’
‘Why don’t you want to go alone?’ I’d asked.
‘Because it’s spooky.’
‘There is nothing spooky about this house,’ I had replied. ‘What are you frightened of? The dark?’
‘It’s not that,’ she’d murmured, then, her voice lowering to a whisper, ‘It’s the other me.’
‘What “other you”?’
‘I’m afraid that if I go upstairs, I might see another me. Someone who looks like me and moves like me and talks like me, but isn’t me. She’s just a trick.’
An imposter.
*
I have a growing appreciation for Nidra and all that she’s been through. At 36, after a series of broken relationships and a big fertility scare, she was jilted at the altar and then met my dad, who, at the time, must have seemed like a safe bet. When I tell people about the situation I’m in, they look at me agape. Their eyes glaze over in transfixion as their brains desperately try to shuffle their perception of my current reality into a story they are comfortable with. I am almost her sister, but not quite, because I am more like a parent. But if I am not her mother, then what can I possibly be? Her father?
Nidra is a fundamentally chaotic personality type who seems to thrive under strict self-imposed regimentation. She always says that her capacity for ‘major nervous breakdowns’ in her late twenties and early thirties was swiftly curtailed once Aria was born; that having something physical, something manifest, to worry about – another little person other than her – was the cure-all to all that bubbling, existential discontent and protracted adolescent angst that had been haunting her for years. Nidra’s job isn’t without its pressures, mind you. She was promoted two days before the first lockdown hit. That meant more admin work, more managerial responsibilities, more pressure. Longer workdays, far less time with Aria. That’s where I came into the equation. And it’s just as well, because Nidra never stops. I think sometimes that if she were to stop, she’d spontaneously combust.
‘Maybe I’m just not cut out for it,’ she’ll say, in those rare moments she lets her guard down in front of me. ‘This job. Being a mother. Life. I mean, look at my family… Two of my aunts had nervous breakdowns and my sister’s a recovering heroin addict. Having your shit together isn’t exactly “in the gene pool”.’
I never told Nidra about my own problems with addiction. I didn’t think it was necessary for her to know just how badly the events of eight years ago affected me.
*
Nidra, I have observed, adheres to a fierce regimen of daily and weekly rituals that by her own admission ‘keep her sane’. Just in the sense that there are certain procedures and routines that must be upheld in order to keep the house running, my stepmother’s internal sense of calm, control and functionality is carefully conserved through her fastidious devotion to a very specific set of rules and regimen. Each Monday I open the door to a masked flower delivery man who hands me the weekly bouquet full of lilies, peonies and roses, which Nidra then trims diligently with a pair of sturdy kitchen scissors before chucking all their stems in the bin. The offcuts hinder the bin from closing and almost always split the bag. She holds a regular subscription to a flower delivery company to ‘make life easier’, and flowers, she says, always bring good cheer to a room, especially in the winter months. The weekly food delivery falls on a Sunday night, and without fail at least one grocery item is always forgotten. On a Saturday, Nidra subjects her bed linen to a four-and-a-half-hour turbo wash in the utilities closet, which rattles all three floors of the house. She always uses jasmine and lavender detergent, and she always follows the first wash with a short laundry of J-cloths and mop-heads in preparation for the cleaner’s weekly visit. The cleaning materials always sit damp in the drum of the washer-dryer until she remembers belatedly to pull them out after dinner.
Nidra abides by a strict and modest diet of fish, vegetables, peppermint tea, berries and live yogurt. Her weekday ‘indulgence’ is two dark chocolate-covered rice cakes after lunch, or, alternately, a little half-filled ramekin of spice-dusted roasted almonds taken along with her first drink of the evening. Even the way that Nidra drinks alcohol is highly regimented. At exactly 6.55 p.m. each day in the moments before her last work call, she treads quietly downstairs in her slippers and tidily makes herself a double gin-and-tonic with 2 ice cubes and one small sliver of lemon. The brand of gin she drinks is Sipsmith, which she measures out in a stainless-steel double-shot measure. As I cajole Aria into her bath, Nidra pours herself a small glass of red and begins to wrap up work for the day. That’s at about seven-thirty.
Once Aria is getting into bed, usually at around eight o’clock after her timed three-minute teeth-brushing session, that is the moment Nidra and I exchange roles as carers. I gather up my knitting work and my drink, wish Aria goodnight and retreat upstairs to the attic. Aria is instructed nightly to read one new chapter of her book whilst Nidra goes downstairs to begin preparing her supper. Through nervous habit, Aria has learnt a patterned series of calls designed to secure a series of certain responses, recognising that if she does not call to her mother within specific time frames, she will have to endure the uneasiness of waiting indefinitely before being tended to. Over the months, I have been trained to understand that Aria summons Nidra at least three times every night. The first summoning follows the completion of the chapter, in rising intonations of three – ‘Mum. Mum? MUM!’ – to which Nidra will shout her reply that she is unavailable, she is eating her supper, that Mummy will be up soon. The second summoning falls not ten or fifteen minutes later, which to a child of her age must be experienced as a terrible, uncertain eternity. The scraping of food into the bin and jangle of utensils into the dishwasher signal a second opening in her mother’s availability, and shortly thereafter, as per Aria’s wish, Nidra ascends the stairs two at a time to appear, trustworthy as a clock, at her anxious daughter’s bedside. A goodnight kiss, a soothing utterance of comfort, and a brief quandary about how far ajar Aria’s door must be kept, Aria’s insistence that the door is not open wide enough, the triangle of light broadcast from the landing not big enough. Her mother then retreats to her own evening downstairs, until approximately an hour and a half later, when Aria’s unrest is made apparent once again during Nidra’s watching of the ten o’clock news. And then, only then, will Nidra shout.
During the second lockdown Aria’s insomnia spells got worse, and she started to exhibit signs of having night terrors. ‘What is it, darling?’ Nidra would plead helplessly at eleven o’clock at night. ‘I want my mummy!’ Aria would yell. ‘Mummy’s here,’ Nidra would say in a low tremor, at which point Aria would begin to shriek and shriek – ‘I want my OTHER mummy! The REAL one!’ – and try, like some freakish scene straight out of a horror film, to rip Nidra’s ‘mask’ off.
The hushed, worried exchange of words between mother and daughter at night is something I am never supposed to be truly privy to; that is sacred, I recognise, and belongs to them alone. These days, I hear only the muffled pitches of their voices, the dulcet motherly tones interfering with the anxious wishing whimsies of a child playing for time and attention through the thickness of my attic room floor, nothing more. I do not know what frightens that child at night. I do not know if it is The Imposter, or the pandemic, or the fear of being alone. Perhaps it is me she fears: the one who looks like her but isn’t her; isn’t her mother; isn’t anything to do with her. The secret sister, the one kept hidden, the older version of herself she didn’t know existed before now, who disturbs the upstairs room of her childhood home. But I never ask. I never respond to her plaintive night-time calls. That is where my responsibilities as Aria’s caregiver and Nidra’s responsibilities as mother diverge.
That is where we draw the line. That is the room of the house I never go into.
*
I have come to predict and understand the complex needlework of patterns in the house – what particular sounds indicate at particular times; the tenor and tempo of footsteps, the rhythm of hinges, the cadences of interacting voices. The switches and knobs and toggles and buttons and bleeps and pings of white goods and microwaves and utilities that punctuate the hours and regulate our domestic lives; the washing of hands and jangling of keys and flushing of toilets and opening of boxes and flicking of switches – all indicating the continuum of time, the notation of hours, the oscillating passage of human beings through rooms of a house. The inhalations, and exhalations, of a working household.
*
I mourn the chaos, bedlam, of my previous life sometimes. I try, under the subterfuge of night, to conjure the pain of it in my mind. To try to remember what I was like, before. There is a beauty to the way of life I have settled into here. It is neat and it is ordered. But it is not mine. I cannot own it, I do not know how I got here.
I’ll find beauty in the simpler moments: traversing the park with Aria each day, where she’ll skip merrily alongside me, telling me all her favourite jokes and riddles.
‘Two mothers and two daughters go to a bakery and eat three doughnuts,’ her gleeful little voice jingles as her welly boots squelch in the mud-puddles, casting dark tracks of spattered wet earth across the hems of her corduroys. ‘Each one eats a whole doughnut. How can that be?’
‘They split the third doughnut,’ I say. ‘That’s the only way it’s possible.’
‘Nope.’
‘Well then I don’t know. There must be four people.’
‘Are you giving up?’
She is smirking.
‘Yes.’
‘There are only three people. There’s a girl, her mother, and her grandmother. That makes two mothers, and two daughters. The middle one is both. Do you get it?’ Her face lights up. ‘Do you see?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I do.’
*
When I finally remove my mask and turn the lock of my bedroom door behind me at night, I strip away my disguise, remove the barrette from my hair that sweeps it back into an orderly fashion suitable for cooking and housework, and I exhale. I exhale and sometimes I almost scream into my pillow.
I perch on the windowsill in a ghoulish crouch and peel back the curtains, opening the window to allow the cool night air to flood in and sweep over my naked body, the one I briefly forgot I had. I stare down at the neighbouring houses backing onto the row of gardens and trace the glowing sash windows with my gaze, scrying the black houses fiendishly for moving figures. The garden row has disseminated into a sequence of brutal organic compositions, loosely conjoined stormy set-pieces stretching vagrantly outwards into the frightening beyond of blustery, unknown horizons. I gaze out at them spectrally from my indoor vantage point, suspended in a ghostly transfixion.
What morbid, voyeur-like pathology this endless concentrated watching of mine satisfies is largely unknown to me, for the times I crouch indoors by the window and cast my vision downwards are hours elapsed with no clear drive besides a view to keep fastidious attention on any and all emerging discrepancies of the outside picture. Often, in these steely, silent bedroom lacunae, I make myself so quiet and still that the smallest emergence of sound – a rustle in the leaves, accompanied only by the sharp fright of a chiaroscuro, slivered outline of a cat captured in streetlamp-amber luminosity – puts dread straight into my veins, as if its sudden apparition might invite some Pandora’s box of nightmarish ideas to emerge all at once from behind the dark mass of plant-shaped shadows draped up the neighbours’ walls. In this nightmare realm, these ghoulish dark illusions cursing the shapes of crooked wood and twisted flora, I feel my veins extending their circuitry beyond the barrier of my attic window and funnelling into the live processes of mangled garden anatomy. Up the wall the plants creep, and reach, and the roots wind themselves into the shape of fear.
The foxes shriek. I shriek back. Who will know the difference, besides me?
At 3 a.m., finally, I welcome bed.
*
This is the way the house works. There is a method to everything that occurs here. There has to be, otherwise things would collapse.