2005 - My Cleaner

by Maggie Gee; Prefers to remain anonymous

  Because her friend the accountant is already in London. Charles is at Heathrow! He has cleared Immigration. Because of the weather, he is putting up for one night at the airport, but tomorrow he will come to ‘the white woman’s house’, enyumba eyo mukyala omuzungu.

  Mary’s smile dies. The house will be empty. There will be nowhere for Charles to go.

  Meanwhile Justin is sitting waiting in the café. “I thought you had left me,” he says, with mock pathos. The humour of it is lost on Mary. He is just a baby, a baby man. As they come out of the Services, the icy wind hits them, and flurries of snow attack their lips and noses, and both of them skid on the pristine white surface, and Justin clings on to Mary’s arm. It isn’t clear if he is using her or saving her, but Mary feels Justin is dragging her down.

  And now her consciousness is torn in two, as the future pulls her in opposed directions. She knows she must drive Justin to Vanessa’s village. She has promised to do it. She has to do it. Justin is incapable of getting there alone. It is one of the last things she’ll do for Vanessa, a kind of final handover, and then—Vanessa will carry the load on her own.

  But Mary also knows that she is going back to London. She imagines herself hugging her friend the accountant. She can almost feel his strong arms crushing her. She knows they will soon be together again.

  For the moment, the snow is enough to cope with. She’s reluctant to leave the kingdom of light, the reassurance of the other human faces, and reenter their box, and restart the race, the snails’ race over the earth’s glassy surface, which is slowly being covered with a skin of black ice, so that every so often, the car slips very slightly. It feels colder now: they keep their coats on. Justin has a picnic blanket under the back seat, and when he sees Mary shivering, he plunges like a dolphin and brings it up, and drapes it carefully round her shoulders.

  “Thank you,” she says, and gives him a smile, the first real smile for several hundred miles. “I am happy I have borrowed your mother’s boots.”

  “Oh?” Looking down, he sees she is wearing his mother’s best boots, which are wildly expensive. The grey suede boots his mother had bought with the money from the third Pilates book. They look plain and serviceable, broad and blunt-toed, but Justin knows they are a fashion item. He thinks, “My mother will not be pleased.” But the grey boots look quite good on Mary, kitted out, as she is, like an Andean Indian, with at least six layers of clothing on.

  This time, they are driving at 5 miles an hour. Justin starts to notice that when Mary skids, she tries to correct it by steering against the direction in which they are sliding, and so the car just keeps on skidding.

  Which doesn’t matter while the skids are small.

  “Mary,” he says, but tentatively. “I don’t suppose you’re used to driving on ice.”

  She is concentrating, but she still laughs. “Justin, we do not have ice in Uganda, unless you are driving in the Rwenzori mountains. And I have never been to the Rwenzori mountains.”

  She thinks, one day I will go with Charles. One day I will have another life. One day I am going to have enough money to do the things I want to do. And she thinks with pleasure of the money she has earned, the money she carefully hid under the carpet after it was spared by Vanessa’s attacker. It is a start. More will follow. And her friend the accountant makes good money. He would earn more if he diversified less. She will encourage him to concentrate. Once they are married, it will all come true. They will give what she has earned here away to the village, but then there will be more. Together, they will make it. And maybe more children. It’s her dearest wish. She had always longed for a brother for Jamil. For years she wanted it, but now that is over. God in his terrible wisdom did not want it.

  For now she is trapped, in hostile country, and a thought flies across her mind, like a heron, a sharp dark heron on its way to the horizon, Now is no time for me to die. Lord Jesus, please do not let us die. And she prays, also, for Zakira and the baby, all babies, every small suffering thing.

  And she finds herself praying once again for Jamie. Whom the world and its wars took away from her, like all the other sons from all the other mothers. After this, she tells God, she will resign herself, yield up her hopes and accept His will. But just one last time, she begs for his life. Because it’s all that matters, to be alive. Not who he is with. Not what he does. Not what he believes. Just that he lives. Just give me a sign, please, Jesus…

  And then she waits, staring straight in front where the headlights shine on the blind red eyes of car after car pushing on into the future. But all she hears is the snow, and the silence. And then she knows he is not alive.

  And so she is there. The place of utter darkness. There, in the middle of the meaningless whiteness. She needs to look it in the face. There is a terrible comfort to it, after all the hoping, and wishing, and praying, and hoping again. If there is nothing, it can come to an end.

  But, nagging at the edge of her consciousness, Justin is still trying to tell her something. “Mary, when we slip, you must drive into the skid. If you steer against it, it makes it worse.”

  “Justin, please do not give more advice.” And in any case, the traffic has stopped.

  The car begins to seem small, to Justin, who’s grown used to being driven in Trevor’s van, with the windows open and music playing, and Trevor driving casually, with one hand. Mary’s style of driving is very tense. And her face, grimacing forward at the weird snow-light, looks big and mask-like, not like herself, her jaw sticking forward, almost a skull. She looks like death; wooden, awesome. She could be ninety years old, at this moment. He wonders, for the first time since he has known her, if Mary could ever actually dislike him.

  But his inner voice rejects it, instantly. This is his Mary. Mary loves him.

  And then suddenly, she shakes herself, and her face softens, and she comes back to life.

  For more than ten minutes they’ve been stationary. If possible, the snow is coming harder now, one solid assault from a great sack of grey feathers. Mary looks at her watch, but not at him. “Justin, shall we put the radio on?”

  They get a local station, which is playing a song called ‘Call off the search’, which isn’t encouraging. Then there is a break for traffic news. Justin grips her arm as he hears ‘M23’. They listen. Drivers are being told to avoid it. A 20-mile tail-back has developed. Cars at the front are becoming snowed under. Though in the opposite direction, cars are still moving, people are still managing to drive to London, ‘gridlock’ is the word that’s being applied to them. And yet they are only 50 metres from an exit; if they wanted to escape, there is a way out; but they are all locked in the grip of duty, all of them are going to parents or siblings, aunts or uncles or expectant children, bearing cargoes of effortfully chosen gifts. If they give up now, it is surely all wasted. Christmas fever has them in its grip. It is the time for duty, the once-in-twelve-months when British people remember the family. In hundreds of cars, there is esprit de corps as they huddle together against the night. In just as many, quarrels are starting. Older men talk about ‘Dunkirk spirit’, and teenagers snigger, and turn up their music, and blame their parents for getting stuck, and tell them which totally important TV programmes they are being forced to miss.

  Mary looks longingly out of the window at the stream of traffic pressing on to the capital, where Charles is sleeping on the edge of the airport, beside the quiet beds of the aeroplanes, the beautiful great birds which, after the snow, will soar up into the red sky again, to warm Entebbe, to Uganda. And she wants to be in them, flying away, she is filled with desire for the skies of home, to look up at the kabakanjagala tree, the tree whose name means ‘the king loves me’, its red flaring generous mouth in the sunlight, and Charles loves me, the king loves me…

  Then Justin is shaking her by the shoulder. “You’re asleep, Mary. Don’t sleep, don’t leave me.”

  “It doesn’t matter, the traffic isn’t moving. Maybe it will never move again.”

  “
You have to stay awake in case we get going.”

  She looks at him, coldly. He is a great baby, but he isn’t a baby, he’s a rich young man. His cheeks look loose, his mouth is sullen. He is too old to say, “Don’t leave me.” She isn’t his lover, she isn’t his mummy, and she has been driving for nearly seven hours. Mary has had enough of him.

  “Justin, I want you to listen to me. I need to sleep for an hour or two. Probably the traffic isn’t going to move, but if it does, you will have to do the driving.”

  “Mary!” he whines, in explosive panic, “you have to be joking, you know I can’t drive, my mother made you promise to look after me!”

  “Yes,” says Mary. “Nineteen years ago. But now it is over. You are no longer a baby. I do not have to look after you. Now I shall get out so that you can take over.”

  She is wrapping his blanket tighter round her shoulders, she is opening the door, she is getting out—

  And Justin starts sobbing and panicking as the snow and the night whirls in through the breach, the terrible terror of adult life, where he will be cold, and no one will love him. The harsh air saws at his nose, his throat. “Where are you going! You can’t get out!”

  And she shouts, into the loud buffeting wind, “I’m not getting out, I’m just making space so you can move into the driver’s seat,” but she sees him still sitting there, shouting and sobbing, his face going pink as he gets more indignant, and she suddenly realizes he’ll never do it, while she is there he will always be a baby who expects Mary to be his nanny, his second mother, his cleaner, his driver—the wind howls around her ears, pure pain, and in thirty seconds her fingers are freezing. She shouts, “Move across, or else I’m going,” and he doesn’t move, he just sits there shaking, a boy in a bubble, a frozen boy, and Mary suddenly knows what to do.

  “Goodbye, Justin, I love you,” she says. “Remember that you are a good driver. Tell your mother I tried to look after you. But now you will have to take care of yourself.” And with that, Mary firmly closes her door. She plods to the right of the bonnet of the car, going slowly, sternly so as not to fall over, and makes for the central reservation, and Justin half rises in his seat, Justin half tries to follow her, because on her own she will surely be killed, and on his own he will surely die, and he shouts at her ‘Mary, Mary, be careful’, but he sees her climb sturdily over the barrier, a moving mountain of coat and blanket that slowly gathers a veil of snow; then she crosses, deftly, through the north-bound cars, though as each one passes Justin gasps and winces; and he is still slumped in the passenger seat, in a solid ice-field of south-bound traffic, when he sees a big lorry in the northerly slow lane veer over in Mary’s direction, then stop, and he thinks, some great trucker will take her away, some man with great muscles and a dark blue chin, but after a few minutes the lorry starts up again, and Mary’s still there, still plodding northwards, and as she gets smaller, she looks like a peasant, huddled under her hump of blanket, and he can no longer see her face, and she trudges along like all the earth’s peasants, fighting their way north through a world of snow.

  Justin feels terror, and impotent anger, and hot tears rush into his eyes, but as he watches her recede in the distance, moving doggedly but infinitely slowly, he suddenly thinks of Zakira, pregnant, in the lumbering slowness of her final weeks. How she needed him to look after her. And he discovered that he could do it. That he could be a man, a father. He flexes his hands. He peers forward and assesses it. Only 40 or 50 metres to the exit. Justin slides over and takes the wheel.

  Mary knows inside that she is strong as an ox, that she can walk for ever, all the way back to London. When her friend was ill in Kiwoko hospital and she was a student at Makerere she often walked half a day to visit her, carrying melons, sliced bread and clean clothes. If only she had gloves. In all her life she has only owned one pair of gloves, a rainbow-striped wool pair she wore in winter in the early morning life she led as a cleaner, and they must have fallen apart long ago, she screws up her eyes and the lids make rainbows, rainbow strands of nothingness, there must be ice on her lids, her lashes, and her hands are like ice, they have no separate fingers, two blockish things that she raises with difficulty, trying to fend off the moths of sleep, the cold soft wings of the hungry spirits…

  Jamie is dead. She can go to him.

  She keeps on walking, though she’s going slower. She remembers the walk in Vanessa’s village, when the brambles caught them and the thorns scratched them. Looking back from the present, it seems bathed in sunlight. They knew where they were going, everything was easy. Mary intends to hitch to London, but only one vehicle has stopped to date, a thin white-faced man in the cab of a huge lorry who indicated she should suck his penis, and she mimed back that he should fuck himself, which at the time gave her a feeling of freedom, but now she no longer feels free, or brave, and the exhilaration of her choice has gone.

  Now she no longer feels anything at all except the heaviness of keeping on walking, and even if she wants to hitch, she can’t, because she can no longer lift her hand, or turn her head towards the traffic behind her, but every time a car passes, she wobbles, almost knocked sideways by the weight of cold air, and now the worst pain has passed from her hands and is turning her ears to lumps of hot ice, two growing tumours of burning coldness, pressing her eardrums until they must burst, and then even that pain begins to grow numb, and the noises turn to a single roaring, a single battering, stunning loudness.

  So that when someone drives up the hard shoulder behind her, blowing loudly on his horn again and again, letting down his window, waving and beckoning, at first she hears nothing, then the car is upon her, and for a moment she thinks she will be killed, and then she realizes, it’s Justin, laughing.

  “Get in, Mary. We are driving back to London.”

  55

  Vanessa’s woken at nine by a worried-looking Lucy, still in her pyjamas, frowning gently down at her: she has been listening to the news in bed. “They say about five hundred motorists are trapped. Their motorway completely froze up. There are snow-ploughs and ambulances out.”

  “Is anyone hurt? Tell me nobody’s hurt. Nobody’s dead. Please tell me that.”

  Lucy’s stricken face seems to say the opposite. Vanessa enters the zone of horror.

  So when Justin telephones, nervous, guilty, at ten o’clock, having got four hours’ sleep, and tells his mother that they had to turn back, they will not be coming, but they are both safe, she does not complain, she sobs with relief, and when Mary comes on the line to speak to her, Vanessa doesn’t care that some Ugandan will be staying, she says ‘Yes’ at once, “Yes, yes, of course’, and says Mary must help herself ‘to whatever’, and ‘of course, Mary dear, take care of Justin.”

  “Vanessa, Justin will take care of himself.” Mary Tendo is laughing, softly.

  “Thank you, dear Mary, for everything.”

  “For everything. It’s OK, Vanessa.”

  On the swell of relief, Vanessa longs to be generous. She takes a deep breath before she speaks. “Oh, and Mary. I received a letter—a letter came from my friend the agent. The Christmas post is very bad. I think you may have, uh, accidentally included some of your writing with my students’…Of course it was a surprise to me. I would have encouraged you with your writing, but you didn’t tell me. Which is a pity. But in any case, the agent liked it.”

  “The agent liked it. What did she say?”

  “She said it was vivid. Really, you know, very promising, Mary. She definitely liked it.” For some reason, Vanessa finds this hard to say. “It was one of a few she especially picked out. And this, my dear, is a very good agent.”

  “And will she sell it?” asks Mary Tendo, calmly.

  “It’s early days, but who knows, maybe.”

  “Who knows, maybe,” Mary laughs. “Thank you, Vanessa. We will see. First I will have to finish my book. I am tired now, Vanessa. I have to sleep.”

  “Mary, the agent would like to meet you. And I—I would like to com
e and see you in Uganda.”

  “Ah, in Uganda. Goodbye, Vanessa.”

  Vanessa puts the phone down, and passes the news of their safe arrival on to Lucy.

  She stands lightly brooding, looking out of the window at two sparrows skirmishing over a nut. She had thought Mary would be more excited. Why wasn’t she dazzled by the thought of an agent? Why wasn’t she, well, just slightly more grateful?

  In fact, Mary is sitting in Vanessa’s front room with her feet up on the sofa, singing softly. The agent liked it. She especially liked it. She picked it out from the bazungu students. Mary finds she is singing herself to sleep. She holds Justin’s blanket against her chest. Even the mightiest eagle, she thinks, can sometimes come down from the treetops to rest.

  “Are you all right, Mary? Oh, you’re singing. What did Mum have to say to you?”

  “Nothing important. Just…something nice.”

  “Mary, stop being mysterious. You know that I know all about you.”

  “Not everything, Justin. You are still young. I know things you can never imagine.” She smiles at him. “Now, go to Zakira’s.”

  56

  Mary Tendo

  Today is Christmas Day. It is a great day. The snow is still falling like mist in London. I think the sun is shining on Kampala. Soon we are going home to Uganda. God has smiled on his servant, Mary. Katonda Mulundi. He is really good.

  £3,005.75! I have earned myself a small fortune. In every way I have been successful. There is a firm bulge of money under my carpet. I have counted it with my friend Charles, and we smiled as we reached £1,000, then £2,000, but the number kept rising, and when we got to £3,000,1 whooped with joy and danced on the landing. Over nine million Ugandan shillings! Soon the money will fly back with us to Kampala.