LAURA ADAMS
TICK TOCK
Chapter 1
Dani
I sat in front of corporal Leo Smith and his wife, Alicia, silently screaming out to the universe begging them for this job. I wasn’t quite sure how this universe thing worked, like if you’ve been bad do they still deliver? Or have you got to be angelic-like and then you get rewarded? Either way, I’d screamed as loud as I could because I needed this job more than I’d ever needed anything in my whole life.
I had stumbled across the advertisement in a newspaper earlier this morning, while sat in the local coffee shop contemplating my messed-up life.
The paper was a few days old and I hadn’t held out much hope of the job still being available. The advert was asking for an ‘au pair’ – posh for live in nanny & general skivvy. There was only one child, a nine-year-old girl, and the job was located in Germany. Sweet, I thought. The further away from Knutsford, the better, so I applied immediately, and within one hour, they had rung me back and offered me an interview for three hours later. It was at that precise moment that I felt intense gratitude for my versatile wardrobe, which was courtesy of my dear mama.
My mother, Evangeline, or Eva as she now liked to be called by her close friends, lived quite the life. Daddy had been very well off, and when he died of a heart attack the day before my fifteenth birthday, I was absolutely devastated!
I loved my father dearly and although seven years have passed since his death, my heart still ached whenever I thought of him. He was handsome and funny and he always had time for me, even when they were hosting one of mama’s elaborate dinner parties. He would come upstairs and check on me every hour or so. He encouraged me to read books to broaden my mind and educate me. Daddy loved books. He once told me that you could learn more from reading than from any school in the whole wide world. He would bring me books whenever he travelled, and I looked forward to him coming into my room to see what surprise world was waiting for me inside the shiny new book cover. I loved escaping into the world of words that swam before my eyes, penetrating my mind as I became at one with the characters; feeling and sensing whatever they were experiencing. Sometimes I was aware that I was holding my breath in anticipation of turning the next page. Daddy and books were everything in my life and then, suddenly, they both vanished. Just like that.
My mother mourned like a professional, never missing an opportunity to tell the world that daddy had died of a heart attack, emphasizing how devastated she was. She draped herself in Black Gucci dresses and milked the sympathy for all it was worth. Not once did she bother to ask how I was coping, not once did she comfort me or offer me support of any kind, and not once did she reference my loss to any of her friends. No, instead, it became evident that I’d been nothing but an inconvenience for her all along. ‘Run along now dear and don’t bother mummy, there’s a good girl, I have a migraine’. I was fifteen and she still spoke to me as if I was five years old, dismissing me in case I ruffled her outfit or ‘bothered her’. I hated her and I missed my father so much. I missed reading, because ever since he’d died, I’d been unable to pick up a book; it reminded me too much of our shared love of books.
When I turned sixteen, mama started having extravagant parties, inviting eligible bachelors and widowers, clearly lining up her next target. She told me to call her Eva and was clearly having some kind of mid-life crisis as she thought she could pull off being my sister. By the time I was seventeen, I’d had enough and I asked her to pull some strings and get me a job as an au pair with one of her flash friends. She was part horrified that I would lower myself to work in such a role and part relieved that I would no longer cramp her style. She put it down to me ‘going through an awkward stage’ as if to humour my request and hide her embarrassment.
I did a brief six-week course with London’s elite Royal Nannies and I lived in with a family for three months before they left for America. I stayed in London and I told mother dearest that I was saving for an apartment and that I was thinking of retraining. I knew this would feed into her superfluous ego and it would be another brownie point with her pretentious friends, especially if I were to become a lawyer.
Of course, I had no intention of becoming a lawyer but it bought me a substantial allowance and time to decide what I really did want to do.
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