My Cleaner

by Gee, Maggie

  I don’t understand what has happened to him, why he lies there dully staring at nothing, not reading books, actually not reading when his room is full of wonderful books, not writing anything, though once he wanted to be a writer, not combing his hair or washing or smiling. I suppose that part of me is angry with him, but the other parts of me are racked with sorrow. It isn’t in the family, this kind of depression. Not on my side of the family, at least. Just my mother’s brother who killed himself, and that was because he had the wrong medicine. Admittedly my mother was sometimes unwell, but she never actually stayed in bed. Once or twice she went away to hospital. But the rest of us are perfectly cheerful. My cousin Lucy was such a happy girl.

  It must come from Justin’s father’s side. Of course, Tigger would never admit it. He doesn’t believe in introspection.

  That is my only reservation about Mary. She got on too well with Justin’s father. It’s the African way: defer to the men. They tell me that is changing now. Perhaps she will come back a feminist! In which case we shall get on better. I myself have always been a feminist, though not, of course, a man-hater. And after all, Mary is now divorced. She mentioned this in a letter she sent that may or may not have been asking for money – there were hints, I suppose – three years ago. Both her parents were ill in the government hospital. The hospital was free, according to Mary, but the drugs had to be bought from a private clinic. It seemed a peculiar system to me, but I sent a little money by Western Union. It’s true that Justin more or less insisted. One was happy, of course, to have been of use. She wrote again later. The parents died. It would be heartless to think it was a waste of money.

  When she first came to us, Mary was probably in her early twenties, though she looked like a teenager. She and Justin hit it off at once. He certainly wasn’t as old as four. She began by cleaning two days a week, and ended up coming every day to look after Justin when he came home from primary school. I was a slightly older mother, thirty-eight when I had Justin. I didn’t feel old: I was slim and fit. Older mothers can be better mothers. We have more resources – to be frank, more money – and more knowledge, and of course we value our children more than some teenage alley-cat casually dropping a litter of kittens.

  Justin was a very wanted child. I keep telling him that, but it seems he can’t hear me.

  By the time Mary arrived I was in my forties, though she probably assumed I was in my thirties. Having a baby takes years off you. As long as you have help, as I did (a maternity nurse, and then a nanny until Justin started nursery school).

  Mary, of course, must have had help too, because she was busy till late at our house. She came to me at one every day and stayed until Justin went to bed. She probably had some cousin or other looking after Jamil while she was with us. She did once ask me if she could bring her son along to work with her here when he was poorly, but I had to say, ‘No’, lest he infect Justin. Sometimes she baby-sat for me, though she started to ask for extra money, and sulked if we got back after midnight, claiming she had to get up very early. Perhaps she did have to get up early – in fact, I believe she did several jobs, because the husband wasn’t earning. He was some kind of perpetual student, at that time. Later she claimed he was a diplomat.

  Now I think perhaps I got some things wrong. Justin was always very sweet with little children. Perhaps I should sometimes have let Mary take him back to her place, to play with Jamil, as she asked. There would have been advantages for her son, playing with a clever, articulate boy. But then, Justin had so many activities: judo, maths for gifted children, drama, Français pour les jeunes, chess club, gym, kiddy Pilates, Fun with Yoga. Mary was always driving him somewhere, and he loved his activities, I’m sure he did.

  (Curious that now he is completely inactive. The doctor says that his muscles are wasting.)

  I would come in to the kitchen unexpectedly and find them cuddled up at the table, singing. He used to make up nicknames for her. She taught him all sorts of African songs which must have increased his cultural awareness, though it gave me a strange feeling when he sang them on his own and I couldn’t understand a single word. It was like living with an African boy! So I bought a tape of nursery rhymes and asked her to teach him some English songs.

  Of course there is no competition between us. We shall be united in caring for Justin. Perhaps I was a tiny bit jealous of her when she started to let him call her ‘Aunty’. It was an African habit, not appropriate for England. The child had real, blood aunties, and it only confused him to call Mary ‘Aunty’.

  It was as if he loved Mary more.

  More than his real aunties, not more than me. He can never have loved her more than me.

  I do believe in being honest with children. I sat him on my lap and explained to him, one evening, that I paid Mary to look after him, and that if I didn’t pay her, she wouldn’t do it, whereas Aunty Becky and Aunt Isobel loved him for nothing.

  It suddenly comes back, what he said to me. He must have thought I was attacking Mary, when I was only trying to give him the facts.

  ‘Who is Aunt Isobel?’ he asked. I couldn’t believe he had forgotten his godmother. Of course she lived a long way away. ‘And I only see Aunt Becky at Christmas. Why don’t you pay them too? Then they’ll love me more. They hardly ever come to see me. Mary comes to see me every day.’

  He left me winded, with nothing to say. He was staring at me with eyes like stones, and his fists were clenched as if he wanted to hit me. His father had a temper, and so does he.

  Then he said something worse, shouting, crying.

  ‘Why hasn’t anyone paid you to love me?’

  10 MARY TENDO

  Leaving again. I am leaving my country. The plane climbs unsteadily up through the clouds. It can’t seem to get clear. Perhaps we shall die. I keep my seatbelt on, remembering my father. So proud, so afraid when I first left Uganda.

  Once I hardly knew that I lived there.

  When I was a child, I lived in the village. My village was the whole world to me. But I saw it was not, when I came to Kampala.

  Then I left the city, and saw my country, and all the golden land around it.

  Now there are no more clouds below us. I peer down, and see tremendous spaces. Trees that stretch away like a sea. And in the distance, yellow desert. And all these lands are African.

  That was what I saw, when I first left home. Although England is famous, it is very small. I saw, from thousands of miles away, that I had come from Africa. That I belonged to Africa. I was Ugandan, and also something more.

  So I am who? Baampita ani? I am an African woman, thanks be to God. It extends behind me, the mountains and forests that air travel allows me to see. The green and the gold going on for ever.

  The valley of time, stretching back to Adam, as I read in a newspaper headline in London: ‘ADAM AND EVE WERE AFRICAN. Rift Valley Origins of First Man.’ So Adamu and Eva belonged to us! I carried the cutting in my handbag till the paper was yellow and dropped into dust.

  It helped me to see their littleness. The little lives of the rich bazungu. They are rich and clever, but they are like nsenene, swarming insects that cover the sun. They will fall away, as the insects do.

  Thank God I am an African woman.

  Part 2

  11

  When Mary Tendo flies into Heathrow it is a cold clear evening in mid-September and she is nervous about Immigration. She checks her passport once again, and her pink notebook with Miss Henman’s number. Her fingers leave damp prints on the cover and she wipes them on the hard webbing of her seatbelt, telling herself, ‘In a few hours it will be over.’ Yet looking around her, on the plane, at the anxious faces of younger Ugandans, licking their lips, staring out of the window, she guesses she’s one of the very few with a job to go to and a place to stay. For her, getting a visa was not impossible. Her bank statements could pass the test, with a cash injection from her friend the accountant, and of course Vanessa Henman, at the other end, was a doctor, a householder, a colleg
e lecturer, which made Mary’s paperwork look good. In time, the agency issued the visa. Yet the process has left Mary feeling like a criminal. They even took prints of her index fingers! When she first went to London, all those years ago, everything had been so much simpler.

  Why have the British grown afraid of her?

  And having the visa is no guarantee. Mary knows that even with a visa Ugandans are turned back at Heathrow airport. If that happens, she will be paid nothing. She half-wishes she had stayed at home.

  It happened to a boda boda man Mary knew, one of the hundreds of men in Kampala who rent out the pillions of their scooters to passengers, lining up on street corners near the big hotels. After a mile on the bumpy roads, most passengers are glad to get off. This man was kind; he was nicknamed ‘Smiler’, and sometimes he gave Mary a lift home for nothing, because she was pretty, and looked tired. Smiler always wanted to better himself. His father had died when he was seven, and Smiler had had to try and work the farm. First he grew maize and cassava, and sold his harvest until he could afford to buy coffee. Then he planted coffee and sold it each year until he had enough money to buy a bicycle. Then he used the bicycle to take loads of green bananas to Kampala, where he sold them for a big profit. He did that for four years in a row (though he was so thin he could hardly keep the bike steady, weighed down by a great curving anchor of bananas) until he had enough money to buy himself a second-hand boda boda. Then he got it in his head that he must move to England, to pay for his five younger siblings in the village. So he sold the scooter he’d spent years saving up for, to pay for his visa and airfare to London, where several cousins had promised him work.

  He was back in Kampala the day after he left, rejected by Immigration at Heathrow, without an explanation, without his scooter, without the money he had spent on the airfare, without any hope of getting entrance to England, fifteen years of his life blown in a day, too shocked to take in what had happened to him. Mary saw Smiler alone on the pavement, his pupils grown small and stunned with loss. She bought him lunch at the Curry Pot. Soon he had managed to rent another scooter and was back on the street, but his eyes were still different, and she always paid him, and tipped him well.

  Now Mary, too, has taken a risk. She has sub-let the flat she loves so much to a second cousin whom she thinks she can trust. But she hasn’t given up her good job at the hotel. She has told the manager a small lie to the effect that she has a female condition, something delicate (so her male boss won’t pry) and serious, so she needs some time off. If things don’t work out, she will be magically cured! In the meantime, her job remains open.

  But the loss of her flat preys on her mind. She was happy there. Her life made sense. Things were going well with Charles, her kabito, and they were talking about marriage. Has she risked all this for the chance of making money?

  Besides, her last memories of the UK are not rosy. They run through her mind as the plane circles lower, roaring awkwardly through banks of white cloud that stream fitfully across the blue English sky.

  When Omar left her, Mary’s life fell apart. She’d gone back to Uganda with almost nothing, for she had put everything into the marriage, both the money she earned so hard by cleaning and the hours she cared for her family unpaid. She knows that in Kampala people thought she was a failure, a returnee who came back with nothing, a nkuba kyeyo who did not manage to earn enough money to change her life. This time Mary will have to do better. No wonder she is sweating as she steps out of the aircraft, though the London air feels cold on her skin.

  Miss Henman has said she will be there at the airport. Mary wonders if Justin will be well enough to come. In any case, would she recognise him?

  All at once her heart lifts with happiness. She feels certain she will recognise Justin. Of course she will be able to help him. She is not in UK just for the money. Jesus, I thank you for bringing me back. God will make Justin well again. Mary rejoices to be back in London.

  Now she looks at the long slow queue of non-EU nationals, snaking heavily along beneath the harsh airport lights, in the vast concourse, a great vault of plastic ten times as big as Namirembe Cathedral, the dark red Anglican cathedral in Kampala. Mary joins the slow queue. Disdainfully, because she is almost a Londoner, she has married and given birth in London, and lived with its citizens for nearly a decade. She does not want to be lumped together with these village virgins, these foreigners, who are gawping around at the airport, awed, because they have never been beyond Entebbe.

  In the end she gets a limp, pale pink immigration officer who has the regulation unsmiling face. He stares at her photo, and then at her, then, frowning, back at the photo again. Mary is ready for what comes next. ‘Is it really you?’ he says, with raised eyebrows. ‘This photo doesn’t look like you.’ She knows she must not get upset, or show anger, so she makes herself smile and says, ‘Yes, it is me. Perhaps I was younger.’ He does not smile back. ‘You are married?’ Mary says, ‘Yes’, without thinking, and dare not correct herself in case he thinks she’s lying. Just for a moment, her heart beats hard. But she only hesitates for one split second when he asks if her husband is in London. The answer ‘He is in Libya’ would probably detain her for several hours. Instead, she says, ‘He is in Africa.’ She finds herself staring at the man’s lower teeth, which are grey and uneven, patched with off-white. British teeth which have seen better days. Fortunately, before his next question, one of the hard-eyed solitary men who stare at all incoming passengers comes hurrying over with an urgent message and the pale, bespectacled man loses interest, yields up her passport, waves her on.

  Now she swings her great suitcase off the carousel, rejoicing in the strength of her arms, and pushes her trolley gaily through Customs. ‘Nothing to declare’, naturally, though she has brought all sorts of presents for Justin, knives and barbed arrows, since he always loved weapons, which the two of them will hide from his non-violent mother; to give to his girlfriends, bead necklaces (which are Kenyan, she knows, but he will not, and she bought them from a seller near the National Theatre, so in a way they are Ugandan), a smooth goat-skin quiver trimmed with soft fur, two African shirts with sunburst patterns. At the last moment she’d remembered Miss Henman, and snatched up a woven raffia basket in vivid shades of yellow and green. It is tied to the side of her trunk with string. She regrets it, briefly. It makes her look too like the humbler people in that long pleading queue.

  But nothing matters now except seeing Justin. She is hurrying towards the crowded barrier where hands and heads twitch and wave, three deep. She smiles at them all, indiscriminately hopeful. The flickering screen of faces is scanning her, but only one, suddenly, reacts. It is the small bony face of an elderly lady, and two stick-thin arms have shot up in the air, waving a sign that says, ‘WELCOME MARY’.

  My God, she realises, it is the Henman. In eleven years, she has become this mask, topped with flat yellow hair that makes the skin look whiter. But the face is smiling, and Mary smiles back.

  Only seconds later, the two women have met. Close up, she can see it is really Miss Henman, just eleven years older, thinner and tighter, her mouth showing large new youthful teeth which smile and smile in her direction. Miss Henman puts down her bag and her coat and Mary realises that she means to kiss her, but Mary decides to hang on to her case, which she drags behind her like an alibi, and her other hand clutches flightbags and passports and the free Daily Mail she picked up on the plane, which is full of stories about a new wave of illegal immigrants, this time arriving from China and Russia.

  And then something happens against her will. Mary finds she is letting everything go. She has laid her great suitcase down on its back, and dropped the small bags in a pile on the floor, and the passport and paper go fluttering after. Despite her best plans, she and Henman are hugging, the thin arms turn out to be surprisingly strong, the narrow lips peck at her cheeks like a bird, and her own lips kiss back, and she even feels tears – a warm soft stinging in her dry tired eyes – to be welcomed like this
by the woman she has hated.

  ‘Miss Henman,’ she sighs, and the woman says, ‘Vanessa. We must be Mary and Vanessa, please.’

  12

  Vanessa leads Mary away to a taxi. She has taken Mary’s lightest bag, leaving Mary pulling her life on wheels, the shoes, the coffee, the arrows, the Bible, the photograph book of Omar and Jamie, her Songs of Praise, her two new gomesis which she means to wear when she goes to church.

  As they fly along the motorway, the trees amaze Mary, so thin, so golden, so perfectly matched, so lacking in birds and fruit and flowers, so often solitary, without brothers. A few are scarlet as tulip trees, and Mary remembers that this is autumn. She had almost forgotten the crisp English seasons: at home all the seasons run together. But the trees are beautiful, and she is content, marvelling anew at this effortless journey, the way the taxi has all its parts working, no corrugated cardboard, no broken windows, the fact that they did not go at once to buy fuel, the rows of identical red brick houses, the organised Englishness of it all, this smooth chill world she had almost forgotten.

  The house is the same, but surely bigger, greyer. Mary’s heart beats hard as she walks up the path and sees the same clouds of dried lavender heads, the same red rambling roses, grown enormous, bending over the porch and encircling the window, and the hedge now almost as tall as she is.

  When she was here before, her Jamie was little. She was still breastfeeding him at night. The rosebushes were small. She had loved their scent. Her own little boy. Her precious darling. How can he have gone so far away?

  Mary makes herself think about Justin instead.

  As they walk up the path, she says to Vanessa, ‘I am excited. I am longing to see him. I think he is tall. Tall like his father.’