Lizzie loved her part-time job at Mummy’s Little Helper, even if it only paid her expenses. She was sixty-five last year, and officially retired, but sitting at home was just making her fat and slow, and Jack, her husband, was driving her crazy, so her two days here were her favorite of the week.
Lizzie had looked after children all her life—first as the oldest of six siblings, then as a nanny, a mother to her own brood of five, and, most recently, as a maternity nurse where she was passed, by word of mouth, from one posh, overprivileged Chelsea or Kensington new mother to another. “Lizzie is an absolute darling! Total godsend!” they would say. “Salt of the earth!” as if that actually meant anything other than she’s not like us you know, but you can probably trust her not to nick the silver.
She’d just handed all the children back to their various carers, including little Elsa, with the constantly dripping nose and dirty fingernails, whose mother was, as usual, more than half an hour late. Rather confusingly, there were three Elsas currently registered. That film, Frozen, had a lot to answer for.
Lizzie went to take her coat off the peg in the hall and noticed, on the floor, directly beneath it, a pale-green exercise book, like the ones her kids had done their sums in. It must have dropped out of someone’s coat or bag. She picked it up. On the front was written The Arithmetic Project. She popped it in her handbag. Someone was bound to ask after it tomorrow.
IT WAS A FEW DAYS before Lizzie thought about the maths book again. She’d asked some of the mums if one of their children were missing it and had been carrying it around with her, waiting for someone to claim it, but no one had. So, since she was having a well-earned break with a cuppa, she took it out and looked at it. It didn’t say “arithmetic” at all—she hadn’t been wearing her reading glasses, so she’d misread it—it said The Authenticity Project. What on earth did that mean? She flicked through the pages. There were none of the sums she’d been expecting to see; instead, several different people had written in it.
Lizzie felt a wonderful tingle of anticipation. She had always been nosey. It was one of the best things about being a nanny or a maternity nurse—you could learn all sorts of things about a person by having a good old snoop in their knicker drawer. You’d think people would be a little more inventive with their hiding places. And this book looked as if it might hold secrets. Like a diary, maybe. She never did anything with the information she collected. She prided herself on being honorable and decent. She just found other people fascinating, is all. She sat back and started to read.
How well do you know the people who live near you? How well do they know you? Do you even know the names of your neighbors? Ha! Actually, Lizzie knew all her neighbors. She knew their names, their children’s names, and the names of their cats. She knew who didn’t sort their recycling properly, she knew who had the most marital arguments, she knew who was having an affair and who was spending too much time at the bookies. She knew far more about everyone than they’d want her to know. She was, she knew, renowned for being a curtain-twitcher. But at least she was popular with the Neighborhood Watch.
Julian Jessop.
Sometimes she would hear a name and the walls would fall away, like a set change at the theater, and she’d be transported right back to another time, and now she was in 1970, on the King’s Road with her friend Mandy. They’d spent so much time together back then that they were known as “Lizandmandy.” They were fifteen years old and had dressed up specially in miniskirts, with their hair backcombed and eyes ringed in jet-black kohl.
They were looking through the window of the fabulous Mary Quant studio, when a group of people, in their late twenties or early thirties, walked toward them. They were impossibly glamorous. The three men were wearing the latest flared trousers, and the girl a minidress, hem several inches higher up the thigh than theirs, a fur coat, and bare feet. In public! Her hair tumbled down in messy curls to her waist, as if she’d just gotten out of bed. Lizzie was sure that if she got close enough to her, she’d smell of sex. Not that Lizzie knew what sex smelled like back then, but she imagined it would be a bit like tinned sardines. One of the men had a real parrot sitting on his shoulder.
Lizzie had been aware that her mouth was wide open.
“Blimey, Lizzie, do you know who that was?” said Mandy. Then, not waiting for an answer, “That was David Bailey, the photographer, and Julian Jessop, the artist. Weren’t they gorgeous? Did you see Julian wink at me? He did, I swear he did.”
Until that day, Lizzie had never heard of Julian (although she’d not let on to Mandy, obviously; she didn’t want to give Mandy any more reason to think herself the cooler of the two), but she’d seen his name several times in the years that followed, in the gossip columns usually. She’d not heard it for decades, though. If she’d thought about him at all, she’d have assumed he was dead, from something tragic but faintly glamorous, like a drug overdose or a venereal disease. Yet here he was, living just down the road still, writing in a little book that someone had dropped right into her lap.
Monica. Lizzie knew her, too—she’d been in her café and had a cup of tea and a slice of cake once or twice when she was feeling flush. She’d liked Monica, because although she was obviously busy, she’d generously stopped what she was doing for a chat. They’d discussed the local library, if she remembered correctly, and what a godsend it was to the community.
She knew exactly what Monica’s problem was. Young women today were just too fussy. In her day, they’d understood the need to settle. You found a young man, about the right age, usually one whose parents your parents knew and lived nearby, and you got married. He might well pick his nose when he was driving, or squander too much of the housekeeping down the pub, or have no idea where to find a clitoris, but you realized that you probably weren’t perfect either, and an averagely good husband was better than no husband at all. The problem with all this new technology was people had so much choice that they just couldn’t make a decision. They carried on looking and looking until one day they realized all their eggs had hard-boiled. Monica should stop fannying around and get on with it.
Bugger. Her tea break was over. She was dying to read more, but it would have to wait.
“WHAT ARE YOU reading there, Liz?” asked Jack. It came out a bit mumbled as he was still trying to get a bit of chicken out of one of his back molars with an index finger. No wonder she’d not kissed him on the mouth for years. These days she tended to just give him a peck on the top of his head, where there was a large bald spot, like a helicopter landing pad, as she passed by.
“Just a book from work,” she replied, being deliberately vague. She was reading Hazard’s story. She knew him, too. Presumably there couldn’t be two young men from Fulham with the name Hazard, in which case he’d come back from Thailand and was working in the garden at Mummy’s Little Helper. He was quite dishy, despite the beard. Lizzie generally had no truck with men in beards. I mean, what did they have to hide? Apart from the chin.
She didn’t judge him for the whole addiction thing. She knew how these things could sneak up on you. She’d gone through a phase of being rather too fond of the cooking sherry herself, not to mention the scratch cards, and Jack still smoked twenty John Player Specials a day, at vast expense, ignoring the ghastly photos of blackened lungs plastered all over the packets.
Riley sounded like a sweetheart, the poor confused lad. She knew him as well. He was one of the lovely young Australians working with Hazard. She was dying to find out if Hazard was still on the wagon, if Julian was teaching the art class, and if Riley had sorted things out with Monica. This was better than EastEnders.
There was one story left to read. Who was it next? She’d save it for her break tomorrow.
LIZZIE WAS SETTLING in for the perfect tea break in the staff room: PG Tips, two Jammy Dodgers, Steve Wright in the Afternoon on Radio 2, and a book containing someone else’s secrets. As her kids would say, what’s not to like? She made herself comfortable in her favorite armchair and began to read.
My name is Alice Campbell. You might know me as @aliceinwonderland.
BINGO! Lizzie had a full house. She knew everyone in the book. What’s more, she knew exactly how the book had come to be here. Alice was the pretty blonde who helped them with their fund-raising. She remembered Archie, one of the toddlers, playing with the shoulder bag Alice had left in the hall, under the coats. He must have taken out the book and left it on the floor.
Lizzie worried slightly whenever Alice turned up at Mummy’s Little Helper that she might make the other mothers feel inadequate. She was always so perfectly dressed, so obviously in control, so different from the mums they helped, who were usually chaotic and invariably struggling. Although Lizzie did wonder how much of Alice was a front. Sometimes her carefully modulated, uptight accent slipped just a little, revealing shades of a much more colorful and accessible one. She carried on reading.
Although, if you follow me, you don’t actually know me at all, because my real life and the perfect one you see are diverging further and further apart. The messier my life becomes, the more I crave the likes on social media to convince me that it’s all OK.
I used to be Alice, the successful PR girl. Now I’m Max’s wife, or Bunty’s mum, or @aliceinwonderland. It feels like everyone has a piece of me except for myself.
I’m really tired. I’m tired of the sleepless nights, the feeding, the nappy changing, the cleaning and the washing. I’m tired of spending hours documenting the life I wish I had, and replying to messages from strangers who think they know me.
I love my baby more than I ever thought possible, but every day I’m letting her down. She deserves a mother who feels constantly grateful for the life they share, not one who’s always trying to run away, into a virtual world that’s much prettier and more manageable than the real one.
I wish I could tell someone how I feel, that sometimes I sit in the circle at Monkey Music and just want to punch my fist through the stupid pink tambourine. Just yesterday, at Water Babies, I felt an almost uncontrollable urge to sink to the bottom of the pool and take a deep breath in. But how can I confess that @aliceinwonderland is just a sham?
And if I’m not her, then who am I?
Oh, Alice. Even before postnatal depression was officially “a thing,” the women in Lizzie’s family and social circle knew the signs. Back in the days when Lizzie had her first baby, all the grandparents, aunts, uncles, godparents, and friends would rally round a new mum. They’d offer babysitting, bring casseroles, and help with the housework, which helped ease the physical, emotional, and hormonal shock of giving birth.
And there was Alice, feeling she had to do it all alone, and desperately trying to make it look perfect.
As soon as her shift finished, Lizzie looked up Alice’s address in the contacts book. What little Alice needed was a professional.