LOUIE

Louie 

While still a teenager myself I was paid to look after three young children while their parents – both directors of an independent family bank – were away at a conference in Singapore for a few days.

The middle child, Louie, aged seven, had a glossy head like a hazel nut. He was small for his age but the most talkative of the three and also the most ingenious, teaching his siblings how to unlock their bedroom windows and throw all their possessions out onto the lawn, and how to turn on the garden hose and water each other. 

So I fed the kids as instructed, watched them tear around their well-kept garden, showed them how to make smelly feet biscuits and origami penguins,  made sure they brushed their teeth and put them to bed before nine o’clock every night after one hour of non-violent TV. Then I did the laundry, watered the numerous house plants and enjoyed the quiet domesticity of this comfortable house in the suburbs of an unfamiliar city. Every evening I sank into the cream ocean-sized L-shaped sofa and listened to their parents’ collection of CDs – mostly 1990s prog. rock bands with names like Elbow and Ozric Tentacles – and read some stories by J. G. Ballard, whom I decided I liked, apart from his 1960s misogyny. 

The parents were away a little longer than expected, but the children didn’t seem to mind and started opening the door to their parents’ customers. They took their cash, which they carefully counted and locked away in marked envelopes in a steel safe in a back room, and even lent money out after making a record of the amount in a large ledger. 

One morning I noticed the handsome Variegated Monstera Albo (to which I had been formally introduced) sullenly drooping. Its glossy green leaves had developed yellow spots and were beginning to curl at the edges because the plant had been housed in a shallow container and its roots were waterlogged and beginning to rot.  So I left the eldest child (12) in charge of the youngest (5) and, holding Louie’s hand, set off to buy a better pot. 

We caught a bus to the city centre and walked through a huge shopping mall and along an endless high street looking in every  window (and dawdling in front of the shoe and handbag shops), but without success. Louie was beginning to complain that his legs were hurting when at last we found an old-fashioned department store.  “This looks like the place”, I thought. It dated back to the mid 1800s and was one of those shops with uneven timber floors and random staircases to which modern escalators and elevators only added more spatial confusion, so our journey up to the china and glass department was not without twists, turns, blind alleys and dead ends, designed to ensure that each customer traipsed through umpteen tempting departments before they reached their destination. 

In the china and glass department they sold honey-coloured blown glass vases and jugs, blue willow-patterned fruit bowls, leaf-green ironstone salad bowls with matching servers, an earth-red Japanese ceramic planter embossed with dragons; sadly too big to carry home, and every kind of elaborate vessel you can imagine. But most were too small and round or too tall and narrow or too wide and shallow and they were all extremely expensive. What I really wanted was a simple terracotta pot. 

“Can I interest you in one of these?” asked a helpful assistant, showing me a heavily indented yellow japonica dish. “It’s for displaying tomatoes and would make a nice centre piece for a table of hors d’oevres”, she said. “Or how about this Murano jar?”, she asked, seeing my puzzled expression, “It’s for storing and displaying small soaps: the ones you bring back from holiday hotels. Practical and elegant. It would look good in anyone’s bathroom”. Wondering whether it would look good in mine, I picked up the jar and spent several minutes just staring through its swirling colours at the displays around me, which converged and fanned out kaleidoscopically. But then it ocurred to me to look at my watch. I realised I’d been in the shop for hours and Louie’s small hand was no longer in mine because he had long since wandered off. 

“Louie!” I shrieked, spinning round. “Louie!  Louie! Louieeee! Louieeeee!”  

The other customers at first stared at me then rapidly turned away in horror, dropping their heads between their shoulders and clapping their hands over their ears as all the objects in the shop vibrated in unison, flew off their stands and shattered on the floor into a thousand polychrome pieces.  

This explosion was followed by a heavy silence so terrifying it constricted my heart and squeezed the breath from my body. Where was Louie? What had happened to him? Had he been kidnapped by a heroin addict to be sold for body parts? Had he opened the gate of a goods lift and fallen 30 feet down the shaft? Had he got locked in one of a hundred cupboards in the basement? Would he hammer and shout for days then starve to death? Would he be lost forever in the labyrinthine intestines of this infernal shop? How could I ever go back and face his parents? They would be destroyed. And should I really have left his five year old sister in the care of his twelve year old sister, who was happy to open the door to any passing stranger? Had they been abducted by a paedophilic slave trader? I wanted to die......  

But then I heard the sound of running feet followed by the sight of a running boy.  Louie had grown bored and sneaked into the carpet department, where he’d crawled under a pile of Berber rugs and fallen asleep. I clasped him to me with indescribable relief. While I held Louie and surveyed the devastation all around, people encircled us with warm gestures and words of sympathy and kindness. 

Then it happened. 

From out of cupboard no.98 in the basement, the Lego cabinet in the toy department, the knicker and sock barrels in the lingerie department and the lambswool chest in the haberdashery department, and from a small gap between the cashmere winter coats in the women’s clothing department; from under Egyptian cotton sheets on the king-sized and queen-sized beds and the Disney duvets on the single beds and bunk beds in the bedroom department, and the mountain of scatter cushions in the furniture department crawled, walked and ran towards us first a handful then a dozen then a hundred small children, rubbing the sleep from their eyes and clutching furry unicorns, transformers, racing cars, trainers with flashing soles, glow-in-the-dark T shirts, bright plastic kitchen appliances - and whatever else had taken their fancy en route.

The breakages and thefts were forgiven, the police were called, the press were informed and a major operation was mounted to find the families of all the missing children. 

Louie and I were given a free taxi ride home. He was holding a chocolate elephant from the Food Hall and promised not to say a word. His sisters were safe and utterly nonplussed. They had cooked themselves dinner and left none for us.

The next day the swiss cheese plant gave up the ghost but the children’s parents came home to a tidy home and smiling children, and would never be the wiser. 

I decided to give up my plans to become a nanny and instead enrolled at college to study horticulture. A better career choice, I thought.