My Cleaner

by Gee, Maggie

  She takes in Mary and her face is stony.

  ‘Good morning,’ says Mary. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Sorry, I’m not interested,’ the young woman says. ‘I keep telling you lot I am a Muslim.’

  Mary looks puzzled, and then understands. The woman thinks she’s a Jehovah’s Witness. They come to Vanessa’s house, too, always smiling, carrying their Bible, and they’re often black. Last time Mary actually asked them in, thinking perhaps they would pray for Justin, but they stayed for hours, talking nonsense, and she soon realised they did not believe in Jesus.

  ‘I am not a Jehovah person,’ Mary says. ‘I am looking for Zakira. She is young, she is English.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ says the young woman, very decidedly. They stare at each other, deadlocked, for an instant. Earth falls on the floor from the roots of the plant, and the woman kicks it away, crossly.

  Then Mary continues, polite, professional. ‘I am looking for Zakira. I have a message.’

  ‘Carry on,’ the woman seems to say, but this doesn’t make sense, so Mary tries again. ‘Where is Zakira?’ she asks, very slowly. This time she pronounces the ‘Zakira’ differently, in case her accent has caused confusion. ‘She is young. She is an English woman.’

  The woman looks affronted. ‘I thought for a moment you were for me. Are you for upstairs?’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Mary, cunningly. ‘Is anyone there?’ But she senses there isn’t. The house has a hollow, silent feel.

  ‘You’re a Witness, aren’t you. I knew you were.’

  And with that, the woman closes the door. Mary stands outside, in her orange coat, her smile fading, her heart sinking. She tries the other numbers, with no success. She will have to go back and re-read the address.

  By the time she reaches home, she is composed again. Retreat three paces to advance one more. As she comes up the path, she cuts four red roses with the nail scissors she has in her bag, and when she is inside, she puts them in a vase.

  She sits in the sitting room, her shoes beside her, wriggling her toes, which hurt from walking, and Vanessa comes through and gives her a look, down her long thin nose like an ant-bear’s proboscis, so Mary lifts her foot and waves her toes at her, and Vanessa disappears into the kitchen, vanquished.

  But Mary has things to say to her. ‘Are you making tea, Vanessa?’ she calls to her employer.

  There is a pause, and then, ‘I suppose so.’

  Vanessa brings it through with a pale cross face. She is not used to seeing Mary in the sitting room, with her garish yellow dress and clashing blue cardigan, so very un-English, so African: and yet she is plumped down in the middle of her sofa. ‘Will you be cooking soon?’ she asks Mary, curtly.

  Mary smiles at her. ‘Do you like the roses?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Vanessa, catching sight of them, scarlet, four bright grace-notes on the dark piano. She smiles back at Mary, mollified.

  ‘Do you see I have been digging the back garden? And I have been weeding. I am good at weeding.’ And Mary smiles again, her sweet, child-like smile.

  Vanessa thinks, one can’t stay angry with them. Things have been better since Mary arrived. The garden had really been going to seed, but now there are long stretches of freshly weeded earth, though she hasn’t had a chance to look at it closely. Still, she can’t let Mary behave like a house guest. Vanessa tries again. ‘What are you cooking today?’

  ‘Thank you for my tea.’ Mary waits for a moment, and then begins, sounding almost shy. ‘Vanessa, it is Sunday.’

  ‘It’s Sunday. And?’

  ‘Vanessa – I think I will not cook on Sunday.’

  ‘I’m sorry? You have cooked every other Sunday.’ Vanessa begins to boil up with frustration. There is no reasoning with Mary Tendo.

  ‘Vanessa, this is why I must ask for more money.’

  ‘Ah. You are going to ask for more money.’

  Vanessa has been afraid of this. It has happened to several of her friends. People come over here to work, the wages are agreed, everything is dandy, both sides are happy, but then people claim that life is more expensive than they thought.

  Mary starts again, talking faster and louder. ‘I have been working all day for Mr Justin. And recently I talked to Trevor. He assures me most people do not work on Sunday. And besides, I have also been talking to Justin. I learned how much money he was earning at his work. And so evidently, I must ask for more money.’

  Vanessa sits down beside Mary with a sigh. ‘Mary, Justin is hardly an expert on work, he has only done it for a week or two. And trust Tigger to make trouble,’ she adds, crossly. ‘He knows nothing about it, he has never had a cleaner.’

  But Mary sits up straight, and looks her in the face. ‘I was your cleaner. I am not your cleaner.’

  ‘Oh sorry. Sorry. I forgot for a moment.’ Those wide black feet on her pale carpet.

  It is all so difficult. Vanessa wants to get it right. She knows, in her heart, that the money is too little. After all, when she does a freelance lecture or workshop, she never charges less than two hundred pounds a shot. Not that there is really any comparison. How can you compare a writer with a cleaner?

  They sit side by side on the edge of a gulf.

  But Mary smiles at her, and tries again. ‘I think Mr Justin is getting better. I think he will soon want to go back to work.’

  ‘Yes, yes, Mary. You are doing well.’

  They sit in silence, staring at the carpet. They are a breath apart, with the world between them.

  Mary is wondering how she can ask for six hundred pounds per month instead of five hundred. The Ugandans she knows here earn more than that, but they are not living in, with everything paid for. Besides, this job is not very hard. Perhaps it is too much. She will ask for five hundred and fifty. That is only about ten pounds more per week. But the Henman is unpredictable. She has stopped looking cross, her face is kind. Mary turns towards her, and says very softly, ‘If I have more money, I will cook on Sunday. And next week, I think we shall all go to church. It is good for Mr Justin to go to church.’

  ‘Oh never mind that,’ says Vanessa, alarmed. ‘I don’t think so, really, Mary.’ She looks at Mary’s shoes. They are wide as boats. They are made of rope and canvas, hopeless for winter. The weather is changing. Mary must be cold. Perhaps she doesn’t have any winter clothes. And since Mary arrived, she does spend less on food, since Mary buys everything from the market. ‘How would it be,’ Vanessa says slowly, ‘if I were to pay you two hundred pounds?’

  Mary’s face becomes blank with disappointment. So Henman thinks she can put the money down. ‘Two hundred pounds. No, Miss Henman. Two hundred pounds is not enough.’ She shakes her head so hard that her neck starts hurting.

  ‘Not enough? Two hundred pounds a week not enough? But Mary, it is double what you have been earning. Two hundred and twenty a week, then. That’s my last word. And I really don’t know how I will manage to pay it.’ (But in fact, Vanessa knows she can pay it. Her mortgage will be paid off next year. She has money in the bank from Fifi’s videos. And after all, it will not be for long. Justin will get better, and Mary will leave.)

  But suddenly Mary is laughing beside her. It is a beautiful, infectious sound, a laugh full of happiness. And life. And humour. Vanessa wonders, do I ever laugh like that? I used to once. Tigger made me laugh.

  And then she is squashed in Mary’s arms, and Mary is kissing her on both cheeks. ‘God bless you, Vanessa. I love you, Vanessa.’

  And for an hour or so, she really feels it. The money is real. Such a lot of money. In a month, she will earn more than in a year at home.

  Soon the stewpot is boiling loudly in the kitchen.

  That night, they both go to bed feeling happy, but Mary wakes up weeping at three am.

  30 MARY TENDO

  Through my own hard work, I am becoming rich. My wages have gone up, through my own efforts. I have saved just under a thousand pounds. That is three million Ugandan shillings! I have put it in the top right-ha
nd drawer of the dressing-table. A beautiful fat envelope. I blow on the notes so they don’t stick together. When I count them, I always hope to find one more. They rustle like the wind in the tall golden trees that wave at me from across the road.

  Now I look at the planes taking off through my window and am happier, because I do not miss Kampala, or my sparkling white flat, or Charles, my kabito, since I know I shall go back to them soon. (And Jamie will come back. He must come back.) The planes jump like fish into the red-pink sky as they take off from Heathrow every evening. They swim like tilapia towards Uganda. And I shall go back, with a case full of money. This is because I have been so determined. I think I have excelled at all I am doing.

  For example, I chose the right cleaner! Today I was very happy with Anna. A good cleaner can change your life.

  Because today, when Justin was making her coffee, Anna asked him if she could clean his room. And to my surprise, Justin said, ‘Yes’. Because usually he does not want anyone to enter. Of course, I sleep there, so I have cleaned the dust, and made it healthy for me to sleep, but I do not tidy Justin’s things, just take away my duvet and pillow each day. The room is very messy and confusing, and Justin is too lazy to tidy it.

  And while Anna was cleaning, Justin sat in the garden. It is the first time he has been out of the house. He screwed up his eyes at the light like a baby, and nearly came straight back inside. But I brought out a chair, and told him to sit down, and then I fetched him the morning paper – I had never seen him reading a paper.

  (In Kampala, there are fewer papers. New Vision is expensive, and does not tell the truth, and the government keeps closing down the Monitor, or forcing them to run ‘corrections’, or print long speeches by the President. In England they are lucky to have so many papers. They sit on the underground reading them, not looking at each other, rustling the pages, and sometimes you sit opposite a curtain of papers. Vanessa’s house seems stuffed with papers, so the box for recycling is always spilling over, and Anna has to jam the rest in the dustbin.

  In Kampala it is very different. The vendors sit there, on the hot pavement, selling single copies of old magazines. Maybe two months old, maybe six months old, each one weighted with a big piece of glass, dusty broken glass that gleams in the sunlight, in case the precious things blow away. And Ugandans buy them, although they are old. We know that most things change very little. We value the stories, we value the pictures. Some people stick the pictures on their walls. But here in England they must always have new ones. Although mostly they write about plastic surgery, or film-stars divorcing, or diets, or depression, or how happy women can be without men, which I think must depress young men like Justin.)

  Justin sat and read a story about Tony Blair, the prime minister who likes war so much, because he does not live in a country like Uganda, which has four wars going on at once. It is strange how Mr Blair is always smiling (he seems happier than anyone else in Britain!). And he likes our President Museveni, and so does Mr Bush, who came to visit. They all like war, and so they all get on, and no one tries to stop the bloody war in the north, which is killing so many Acholi children, and others, also, who try to pass through, and it is like a curse we cannot escape from; like a swamp that sucks us down.

  I was glad to see Justin sitting out in the sunlight, reading a paper like a normal Englishman. He spread out his paper in the breeze like a prince and ate the lunch I had made for him. Later he can do all these things for himself, but at the moment he is still like a baby. I was glad to see him outside at last. His curls were like an angel’s, fine and golden. The sun shone on his milk-white skin.

  These people do not know how lucky they are. War never seems to happen here. And yet I love Justin. It is not his fault. I want him to be well. I cannot hate him.

  Anna found several things in Justin’s room. First of all, she found he had a television. It was hidden underneath a dressing-gown, which he had draped cunningly over the screen. It was on, but he had turned the sound down. She asked me whether to turn it off. I went upstairs and had a look. I had never seen this television. He was watching a programme called ‘Parent Swap’, where real children choose to swap their parents. So now I know Justin is not sleeping all day.

  If this is how he spends his life, perhaps he is doing it to annoy his mother. When he was little, she always complained if she found Justin watching television. ‘Surely you are not watching TV again?’ – as if most people only watched it once.

  I wonder whether Miss Henman knows her son is interested in swapping his parents.

  But the other thing Anna found is more important. It shows me I have made a major error, but all detectives sometimes make errors. A good detective will learn from them.

  Under the bed Anna found a photograph, and left it on Justin’s table, where I found it. A picture of a beautiful black woman. On the back of the photograph is written ‘Zakira’. And as I look at it, the face changes, and I see it is the woman with the orange headscarf who stood on the doorstep in Canaan Gardens. The woman who was holding the purple flower.

  31

  Trevor has found My African Journey. He sits in the garage, under a bare bulb, browsing through the book which he had liked so much. It was written in 1908, which isn’t really so long ago.

  Winston has a brisk, manly style. When he’s got something to say, he doesn’t hang about. The first chapter is called ‘The Uganda Railway’. Winston seemed very impressed with this, which ran from Nairobi to Lake Victoria: ‘Here is a railway, like the British Fleet,’ – he’d be shocked by how small the old Fleet is now, thinks Trevor – ‘not a paper plan or an airy dream, but an iron fact grinding along through the jungle and the plain, waking with its whistles the silences of the Nyanda ...’

  Trevor likes that phrase, ‘an iron fact’. And the way Winston made himself a butterfly net out of telegraph wire and mosquito net. Once the British were good at making things. These are the kinds of facts Trevor likes. His clients have airy fairy ideas, but he has to work them out in practice. Nessy is airy fairy too. That’s why he does all her donkey work.

  Winston had fallen in love with Uganda. Its polite, clever people, its animals. Not just the animals he could shoot. He really took to the butterflies. ‘Swallow-tails, fritillaries, admirals, tortoise-shells, peacocks, orange-tips ... flitted in sunshine from flower to flower, glinted in the shadow of great trees, or clustered on the path to suck the moisture.’ And yet he also saw the horror of it. Mosquitoes, tsetse flies, death and destruction.

  Trevor wonders what Mary will make of Winston. The book seems to change when he thinks of her reading it. ‘What an obligation, what a sacred duty is imposed upon great Britain – to shelter this trustful, docile, intelligent Baganda race from dangers which, whatever their causes, have synchronised with our arrival in their midst!’

  Didn’t Mary say her language was Luganda? That probably means she is one of these Baganda. Mary is not what you might call ‘docile’. Winston might get right up her nose.

  ‘Let us be sure that order and science will conquer, and that in the end John Bull will be really master in his curious garden of sunshine and deadly nightshade.’

  Trevor has mixed feelings, reading this. Of course, it must have been great to know there was an empire, so any old schoolboy could dream of a future, instead of being on benefits.

  Though maybe it was only public schoolboys. And Uganda wasn’t really our garden ...

  Winston’s confidence shone out from every page, yet the world he imagined never came into being. And he was a bloody clever chap, so what hope is there for the rest of us? The man believed the railway would make everyone rich, yet according to Mary, the line has been abandoned. No more trains from Nairobi to Uganda. They’ve got AIDS, apparently, and old John Bull didn’t even sort them out with clean water.

  Trevor switches off the light and goes back in to the house, leaving his shelves of books in darkness. What must life be like in today’s Uganda?

  32 FROM THE LIFE O
F MARY TENDO

  Mary likes what she re-reads about herself. Her Life now exists outside her head, outside her body, which has lived it. She likes the low hum of her laptop’s engine, which reminds her of her beautiful fridge, at home. Here in London, she’s inventing Uganda, for as she writes, her life becomes different.

  I was a clever girl, rarely given the cane. My parents sent me to boarding school because the local school could no longer teach me. I passed senior school with thirty-five points, the highest score the school had ever had. Being clever did not help me to make friends with the others, but I did not care, I lived for the holidays when I came back to my friends in the village. And then I finished boarding school.

  My father decided I had to marry, but my mother was strong, she stood up for me. ‘If she’s educated, the world will be hers.’ ‘She should marry,’ my father said, sternly.

  ‘You want her to stay here all her life? You want her to stay poor, like us?’

  ‘You want her to be a shrivelled woman who nobody wants, with a womb like a groundnut?’ My father rarely shouted. My mother murmured something soft. I lay awake listening, willing her on.

  Night after night the same row broke out. I knew my father was torn in two. He had been approached, by an old friend, on behalf of a boy from the next village, good people, with many cows, and the bride price offered was a good price.

  Cows now, or cows in the future? My mother saw a blue distant sky raining cows.

  I am the child of good parents. In our village, there was no better father. He called me to him after a week of storms. ‘Daughter, will you marry Mwanje?’ ‘He is quite nice,’ I said, looking down. ‘Thank you for asking me, father. But I don’t want to marry him.’ At first he shouted, but not for long. He made me promise to work my hardest, and let him arrange my marriage later, but he did not look at me when he asked, and I did not look at him when I promised. Both of us knew I was going away.