1. They will tell you at the interview that you are part of the family. You are not part of the family. You occupy a position somewhere between the Miele and the Dyson, which is not the worst place to be, since the Miele and the Dyson are serviced annually and spoken of with genuine tenderness.
2. They advertised for an ‘au pair’ because ‘nanny’ comes with a minimum rate and superannuation. You will be paid two hundred and eighty dollars a week in cash for what the ad called light childcare duties and what the laminated schedule on the fridge reveals to be sixty-one hours, and when you divide one number by the other, do it silently, in the granny flat, which is not a flat but a converted storage space behind the garage with a bar fridge and a view of the recycling.
3. The house is in Mosman and it has a First Nations name, engraved on a brass plate beside the door. When guests ask what it means, Saskia says it means ‘peaceful waters’. It does not mean ‘peaceful waters’. I looked it up at the library at Spit Junction. It means ‘place of many stingrays’, which is closer to the truth of the house.
4. The children are Hugo, who is seven, and Clementine, who is five. Hugo bites, but only staff, a distinction he did not invent so much as inherit. Clementine refuses all food that is white, which sounds manageable until you understand how much of her life has been arranged around things that are white.
5. The mother is Saskia. She works from home in the sense that she is at home, moving between the reformer in the sunroom and a wellness brand that has been about to launch for three years. She will call you ‘darling’ from the first morning, because ‘darling’ is what you call a girl whose name you have decided not to retain. When she tells you that they are very relaxed here, she will be holding the laminated schedule.
6. The father is Richard. Richard is in Singapore. It does not matter when you are reading this. Richard is in Singapore.
7. On Thursdays Saskia hosts her book club, which is eleven women, four bottles of Provence rosé and a novel that nobody has finished, and you will assemble the grazing board and carry it out, and she will introduce you as ‘our wonderful girl, she is basically family’, at which point you may refer to instruction one.
8. If you ever mention the award rate for childcare workers, and once, exhausted, I did, Saskia will do a small laugh, a laugh the size of a caper, and explain that this is not really a job so much as a cultural exchange. She is right, though not in the way she believes. A great deal of culture is being exchanged in that house, and the rate of exchange is the whole story.
9. Now the important part. On the hallway table there is a large resin bowl in swirled tortoiseshell, and when guests admire it, Saskia tells them about the studio sale in Paddington where she met the artist, who was luminous and difficult in the way that real artists are. That bowl cost me sixteen dollars and forty cents on Temu, including shipping. The bowl from the studio sale I sold on Facebook Marketplace to a woman in Cammeray who paid one hundred and eighty dollars, cash, and had the decency to ask no questions.
10. Under the loose board beneath the bar fridge you will find the ledger. In the left column I recorded my hours at the proper award rate, minus what they actually paid me, a number that grew the way mold grows, quietly and in the dark. In the right column: the linen cushions, replaced from Kmart; the hand-thrown dinner set, replaced from Kmart; the brass candlesticks; the ceramic vase shaped like a fist; and the small painting in the study that Richard calls the Olsen, which is now a very good print, while the original hangs in a flat in Marrickville above a man who paid fairly. Each entry has a date, a sale price and a running balance. I am not a thief. A thief takes without documentation. I am a wage recovery scheme with excellent records.
11. In March the right column finally met the left column, and the following week I gave my notice, citing a family emergency, and Saskia pressed my hand and said they would be absolutely lost without me, addressing most of this to her phone. I stopped when the columns balanced. I had my eye on the Murano decanter and I let it live. Restraint is what separates an accounting from a spree.
12. They have never noticed, and this is the real instruction. Saskia still runs her thumb around the rim of the Temu bowl when she tells the story of the luminous artist. What they bought was never the thing itself. What they bought was the price, and the price is stored safely in the memory of having paid it, where nothing you or I do with our hands can ever touch it.
13. Be gentle with Hugo. Biting is a language, and staff are the only people who stay within reach long enough to be spoken to.
14. Clementine knows. She watched me wrap the first bowl in a tea towel and she looked at me for a long time and put her finger to her lips, and every Friday since she has collected her commission in strawberry clouds from the good aisle at the IGA. She is the only person in that house who can tell the real thing from the copy. I think about that more than I think about the money. Look after her. Keep the ledger going. Leave instructions for the girl who comes after you.
Honni van Rijswijk is a lawyer, academic and fiction writer. Her short stories have been a finalist in the Zoetrope Short Story Contest and long-listed in the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and she has been published in the literary journal Southerly. She is the recipient of a Varuna Writing Fellowship, her short story “The Magpie Season” was shortlisted in the 2025 Hope Prize, and she recently published a longer short story in The Thieving Magpie (https://thievingmagpie.org/honni-van-rijswijk-fiction/). Her debut novel, Breeder (Blackstone Publishing, 2021), was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards (2022). She holds an LLB (Hons) from the University of Sydney and a PhD from the University of Washington, and is an academic at the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, where her research centers on law and literature. She lives in Sydney with her partner and child.
The Disappointed Housewife 