2005 - My Cleaner

by Maggie Gee; Prefers to remain anonymous

  Zakira’s nervous about meeting Justin’s rude, cold mother. Still, at least the fear makes her feel alive, where an hour ago she was indifferent, moribund, because it seemed that no change was possible, that she would be imprisoned in the cold for ever, imprisoned in her body with its lumbering cargo. No one would visit her and no one would help her, and the big heavy baby would never be born, because out in the world no one waited for him, no-one wanted him except his mother.

  Now the knot of fate is going to loosen. Zakira sways along at Mary’s side.

  Mary gives Zakira one last warm smile before she slips her key into the door. She leads Zakira into the sitting-room, then goes upstairs to waken Justin.

  But he is not there.

  The bedroom is empty.

  Even more surprising, the bed is made. Mary checks the bathroom, the loo. No one. She comes downstairs and scans the back garden. It doesn’t seem possible, but Justin has gone. (Though she doesn’t remember this until later, she sees Justin’s arrows all over the garden, sticking out of tree-trunks and flowerbeds and fences, the arrows Mary smuggled in from Uganda, pale bamboo arrows with barbed steel heads. Justin has been playing with someone in the garden. His goat-skin quiver lies on the ground.)

  She is just relaying the bad news to Zakira when the front door opens, they rise to their feet, their faces alight with nervous excitement—and Vanessa tramps in, looking tired and grim as she does at the end of a day of teaching. She goes straight to the kitchen without noticing them. The tap runs, then she reappears, and is taken aback to see the two of them.

  “Good afternoon Miss Henman, Vanessa,” says Mary.

  “Ah Mary,” says Vanessa, with a small sigh, and encompasses Zakira with a vague smile. Soon her house will be full of Ugandans. Still, Mary has worked harder since her wages rose: she is washing-up again, and using the vacuum.

  “Miss Henman, this is my friend,” starts Mary. “She—”

  “From church?” Vanessa says, shaking Zakira’s hand rather cursorily. “Very nice to meet you. Now, Mary, do make your friend tea or coffee. I’m actually exhausted. I shall go and lie down.”

  And before either woman can explain herself, she has swept upstairs, clutching a milky glass of aspirin, her lips tight and pale without their coat of crimson, her forehead creased with tiredness, a folder of marking in her other thin hand, together with the letter she has found in the hallway.

  The gaps in the house become wider and deeper. They sit there stranded in the shadowy sitting room, surrounded by photographs of strangers, and suddenly they feel what they did not before, two African women in a foreign land.

  Mary stares at Vanessa’s African masks, which her employer is particularly proud of, staring out at them from an expanse of pale plaster, dark cicatriced faces with empty eyes. They do not feel like ancestors.

  “I do not like them,” she says to Zakira.

  “They are ignorant,” says Zakira, regally. She is not talking about the masks. For a moment she feels much closer to Mary. What can it be like, living under this roof? “People like her know nothing about us. And they do not want to get to know us.” And then she pauses, and reflects. “I think they are afraid of us.”

  34

  Vanessa lies upstairs on her bed. The aspirin is beginning to work. Down below, she can just hear the quiet murmur of the two women’s voices like a distant river. It isn’t unpleasant. It is comforting. Perhaps she and Justin have grown too self-enclosed. Perhaps it is good to meet new people, though today she had come home completely exhausted.

  Vanessa’s class today was a near-riot. She had asked the new intake to bring in an object which inspired their writing, and might inspire others. Usually people bring photographs, maybe ferns or shells, a stone or a feather. But Derrick had turned up with a whole dead pigeon, and two of the girls became hysterical, one because she said all pigeons had fleas (though it was a soft, pink, plump-looking thing) and the other because she suspected he had killed it. This girl, Daisy, who came from Devon, wore long hippyish clothes that were tight over her breasts, and had big, fixed eyes, rather slow and moon-like. She very often seemed to quarrel with Derrick. Perhaps she was attracted to him. Daisy had brought along a photo of her cat, which was white and fat and soft and sleepy. “You like to kill things,” Daisy shouted at him. “We don’t want to see your victims.”

  “It died of old age,” Derrick insisted. But there were two small marks on the back of its neck which looked suspiciously like airgun pellets.

  Derrick became defiant and articulate. As the girls shrank away, he pushed the pigeon towards him, so it sat in the middle of the long table, almost living as its flesh-coloured feathers slowly settled, beautifully soft, from pink to pearl, a thing of wonder in its intricate detail. Vanessa started to imagine an odour, a sort of sweet-savoury, menstrual smell, but it could equally well have come from the girls. Her classes were usually a moil of hormones. Derrick had a loud, rather toneless voice, which allowed him to dominate the room, though this time he had a lot of competition. “Salvador Dali threw a cow from a plane. You probably don’t even know who Dali is. If that was art, tell me why my pigeon isn’t?”

  Soon everybody was shouting at once and Vanessa had to bang the green marker on the whiteboard, but before they fell silent, she heard Derrick demand, “You tell me what is interesting about your fat pussy?” Whereupon half the class collapsed in laughter, while Daisy stood up and burst into tears.

  By the time Vanessa had mediated, only forty-five minutes remained for writing, which Daisy insisted was unfair, since “Some people write very fast without thinking,” looking hard at Derrick, who by now was established at his own small table in the corner of the room, where the pigeon would cause least physical violence. So Vanessa had agreed there would be no reading out, and instead she had taken all the writing in, which meant she had doubled her load of marking.

  Daisy, of course, was very annoying. But Vanessa had become a little anxious about Derrick, whose scripts, though skilful, were increasingly violent. Perhaps she shouldn’t be encouraging him?

  It was very odd, this writing business. Looking quickly, she sees that the best piece comes once again from the infuriating man with the Father Christmas beard, who has written a skit upon this morning’s class, where the teacher is whimsical and ineffectual, and the pigeon is actually crawling with maggots—

  But she forgives him, since he has made her beautiful.

  Vanessa falls asleep for an hour, and dreams she is writing the book of a lifetime. It spools from her fingers, witty, brilliant. She has written two thirds of the book before breakfast, though Daisy stands there, wailing and pointing, “You went too fast! You killed the pigeon!” She is about to deny it when she looks under the desk and finds she is making love to the boy, whose penis is a fat, pearly-pink pigeon, and she thinks, “This is brilliant, it doesn’t stop me writing! I could have been doing this all these years!” She has almost finished, she is coming, she is there—but when she stands up to take her bow, she finds she is naked below her waist, and sees Justin waiting behind her, staring, hang-dog, heavy, unloved by anyone, jealous of the boy with the thin dark body, and he says, “You see, you forgot about me. It’s all your fault, you forgot about me.”

  Waking, she remembers that rush of pleasure that came with the sense that she had written brilliantly. Her headache is gone, the voices have vanished. Full of resolve, she goes down to her study.

  But there are so many books in there. The piles seem to loom like cliffs all round her, the base eroding, the summits frowning. She picks up a novel she has never read which is touted on the front as ‘The book of the century…Brilliant writing, subtle, heart-piercing.’ She reads a few pages. It is banal. Sighing, she returns to her own writing, but she finds her mind wandering over to Mary. At five o’clock, she telephones Tigger.

  “Mary seems to have made some friends,” she tells him. “She brought this Ugandan person to the house. They were nattering away when I came home.”
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  “Good for her,” says Trevor. “She’d get bored, otherwise. You’re busy with your teaching, N’essie.”

  “Don’t call me Nessie,” she snaps, at once. “It’s a stupid nickname, honestly, Tigger. And please don’t talk about me like that. I’m not a teacher, you know, always teaching people. I’m a writer. It would be frightful to be a teacher.”

  “It was the summit of my ambitions,” he says. “I always wanted to teach history. But as it turned out, I was better with my hands.”

  Some dim memory is stirring in Vanessa. “Do you know I’ve just remembered something. I think Mary once wanted to be a teacher. May even have trained as a teacher, over here. I think she didn’t finish, the money ran out.” Which makes her feel better—Vanessa has the job that Mary Tendo always wanted.

  “It’s not over yet,” says Trevor, gnomically. “There’s more to Mary than meets the eye. Toodle-oo, Ness. Got things to do.”

  “What are you up to?” Vanessa asks. She has always unconsciously kept tags on Tigger.

  There is a pause, which in another man might have sounded guilty, and something which might almost be whispering, and then he says, “Got to read a book.” That ridiculous urgency, as she should have predicted, as if otherwise the book might escape him.

  He was like that about reading, he did it on purpose, he had to stick out and be difficult. They might have made a go of it if he had been more normal. But as it was, poor Justin did not really have a father, not a normal, useful father, that is. Justin did not have a normal family.

  And then she remembers this morning’s letter. She gets up and runs back up to the bedroom. It is still on top of the duvet, unopened. She sees, as she sticks her nail into the envelope, it comes from the village where she was born. The letter is from Lucy, her country cousin. Her heart lifts with real excitement. She settles against the pillow to read.

  To her surprise, Lucy writes well, although she is not educated, just a housewife. Vanessa thinks, writing well must be in our family. She feels a little twinge of pride. It is stuffed with news: very little is bad. Uncle Frank, the husband of Aunt Isobel, has been an invalid for years with Parkinson’s. “I pop in and see Dad every day, but we think he can’t go on forever. He’s had a good innings—83!” The rest of it is a kind of social diary: who has married, who has children, the village scandals, the new village hall, which they have been building on the site of one three hundred years old, which Vanessa remembers: dank lath and plaster. And Lucy is inviting her to the opening. “Why don’t you bring Justin down to see us? We’re having a knees-up at the end of October. My place isn’t a palace, but you’re very welcome.”

  Vanessa is shocked by how pleased she is. They still remember her. They might even love her. There is still a world to which she belongs, although she has neglected it for half a lifetime. The silent world of her mother and father. Though once she had longed above all to escape it, time has rinsed it in reminiscent sunlight. She imagines: overlapping leaves of oak trees, the soft green body of a hilly landscape. Her mother’s garden, with its vegetable beds. A place where she need not be busy.

  Then she checks herself. She is being sentimental. The party will be a fluorescent-lit bore, where people will get drunk and do karaoke. And no one will know what to say to her. Of course she won’t go. She will get on with her novel. And what will she say, if they ask about Justin? Her contemporaries’ children will all be working, dropping babies like rabbits, chubby grandchildren; bragging about sales targets, cars, trampolines, plans for camper-van trips to New Zealand…She pushes the letter away, firmly.

  But the past whispers on from the blue letter.

  PART 4

  35

  Mary Tendo

  The Henman is spoiling my plans again. Last night she lost her temper with Justin and Trevor. The woman should have been praising them. And me, as well, for encouraging Justin. A son must see his father, whatever the cost. (I did not take Jamey away from his father. If he ran away, he chose like a man.)

  Sometimes ‘I think she is possessed by spirits. Of course, I do not believe in demons, and yet she has invited them into her home, with the many hideous masks and figures that she brought back from her trip to Uganda, although most of them were not made in Uganda, they were made in other African countries which are at a lower level of development, on the Gold Coast, in Mali, in Guinea. I have said to her several times already that these masks are not good to have in the house, but she only laughed at me, and said, “Mary, you are funny. I can’t believe anyone still thinks like that. But of course it is a cultural thing.” And with that she laughed more loudly than ever, so her grey eyes turned into tiny metal buttons.

  But last night she did not laugh, she screamed.

  Of course I am not a person who smokes, because I know smoking is unhealthy, but occasionally I have a cigarette—in fact, every evening before bed, in the garden.

  I buy Ugandan cigarettes, from Harlesden, Rex and Sportsman cigarettes, from the Mugalu Brothers. Once I know Vanessa is in bed, or in the bathroom, I pop out through the kitchen door, and light up. Recently Justin has come and smoked with me. Although I consider this to be a good thing, because it gets him out of his bedroom, the Henman is unreasonable about smoking, and so I have not mentioned this achievement.

  But last night after I had finished my writing and came downstairs to sit in the garden, the Henman was still in the sitting room, and so I hid my cigarettes in my pocket.

  “Mary, I am out of my mind with worry. Is Justin up there with you, in your room?”

  “No, Miss Henman.”

  “I thought I heard noises.”

  “No, Miss Henman. He must be in his bedroom.” And then I remember, he was not in the house when I brought Zakira back to see him.

  “Of course I’m not stupid, I’ve looked there, he isn’t.”

  And then I saw how frightened she was. And I realised that she does love him. And I too was frightened, but I did not show it. It is always best to be brave and cheerful.

  “He never goes out. You know he doesn’t.”

  She is looking very old, and thin, and white. I said, “But Miss Henman, he should go out.”

  And she shouted, “Do not tell me things I know already!” and then she said “Sorry, I am just upset.” Justin has been missing for several hours. But this was only the beginning of her shouting, because at that moment the doorbell rang, and she ran to the door, on her thin little legs, and threw it open, and there was Justin, in the bright porch light, and behind him was Trevor. And to me Justin looked lovely as an angel, with the light shining down from heaven on his curls, and his cheeks were rosy, and I tried to embrace him, but the Henman was screaming and hitting her chest: “My God, Trevor, what have you been playing at?”

  “Er—hallo there, Ness. The lad’s been helping me.”

  “I’ve been painting,” smiled Justin. He was proud of himself. “I have worked for six hours. And Dad has paid me! At any rate, he is going to pay me.” But his face started to fall as he saw his mother.

  “You bastard, bastard!” she shouted at Trevor. “I’ve been so worried! Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing? I actually phoned you this afternoon, and he must have been there, but you didn’t say a thing—” She was yelling this right in Trevor’s face, but he said nothing, just looked at Justin.

  “Er—”

  Then Justin started to look unhappy and worried, and said, “I asked him not to tell you. I didn’t want anyone to know. Just in case I freaked out, and was a failure.”

  Then the Henman turned round and screamed at Justin instead. “Well you can hardly be a success as a painter! Did I bring you up to be a labourer? Do you want to be a failure like your father? Oh Justin, you were always such a high flyer!”

  And then Mr Trevor looked very sad.

  And so I thought, time for Mary Tendo to join in, because there was no reason for all this sorrow: at last Justin was working again. And also, I wanted my cigarette.

  �
�Perhaps we should all count to five,” I said. “If Trevor and Justin go into the garden, Vanessa could make us a cup of coffee, and then we can talk about everything calmly.”

  But then the Henman started screaming at me. She was turning around like a white tornado, striking at each of us in turn. “Oh and what will you be doing while I make your coffee?” she said very loudly, staring at me.

  “I shall go in the garden with Trevor and Justin.”

  And so I went there, but they did not follow, perhaps because they were afraid of her. Two big strong men, afraid of a woman. Trevor said, “Better not wind her up. She’s already practically snapped her watch-spring.” But I could not stay inside like a child. I sat outside on the lawn under the moon, which shone on the neat bare earth I had weeded. It was a very big moon, low and orange. Inside the house I could hear her screaming, and Trevor talking quietly, but Justin said nothing, and in the end his mother stopped screaming, and I heard the sound of the front door closing, and then I suppose that she went to bed. And so I smoked cigarettes, three in a row, because my heart was beating loudly, and I was thinking, all this fuss, and I do not make any fuss about Jamie. These people do not really know about sorrow. They do not know about missing someone.

  And then at last Justin came out to join me. He had taken his clothes off, like he did before, and his nose was running, and his cheeks were slippery. He clung to me again, like a baby, but I made him sit up, and have a cigarette, and he felt very cold, and was shivering, and I went and got a rug, and wrapped it round him. Perhaps this boy would have died of cold. It is so different in England, the things you die from.

  But he still dropped the ash on his naked skin, and yelped like a rabbit before I could shush him. Then the window of the Henman’s room banged open, and she shouted down, “What is going on? You all think I am stupid, but I am not! I know perfectly well what you two are up to!”