by Jemma Wayne
“She’s far too young John,” Lynn stated.
It was decided that it would be best if Emily began with simple cleaning. It was John’s idea. Lynn didn’t want her ‘touching things’ and at first made a show of throwing back the covers of the bed to escort Emily out. “It’s not you,” John assured her, intervening, but waiting outside the bedroom door Emily heard Lynn telling him that she didn’t want a barely grown girl she didn’t know in her home, scurrying about like a cockroach.
Cockroach.
The word stunned her. She hadn’t expected to hear it again, to be called it, and the incongruity of it imbalanced her and made her head throb. It had been a while since she’d had a headache this bad. The pain was blinding and sometimes she blacked out from the force of it. Now, she sat on a velvet stool on the landing that was almost as large on its own as her whole house in Rwanda had been, and tried to draw sense from the bleakness. She’d wanted to help. That was what had been so attractive about Home Care: it was a way to heal, someone else if not herself, a way to care for someone again without the need to trust them, without expectations of reciprocity. But she supposed that after all she had expected something back because she’d imagined that Lynn would be a kindly old woman who was gently appreciative. She hadn’t anticipated anger and abuse and dangerous words.
John suggested some ‘tidying up’ downstairs. Did she have any experience cleaning, he asked her.
It was a relief to return to chores that didn’t require thought. The methodical back and forth of mop against wood gently lulled Emily into a calmer frame of mind. When John left, she managed to say goodbye quite pleasantly and busied herself afterwards, content in her solitude. At first, the place seemed tidy and proud in its order, but once she began cleaning deeper – making sure to move objects quietly so as not to disturb the beast upstairs – Emily slowly discovered chink after chink in the glossy veneer. The surfaces had been wiped but nothing upon them lifted in what must have been many weeks. Book and toaster and vase-shaped patches of grey dirt dotted the house like a rash. Emily removed the grime with satisfaction and poked about further. Inside, the cupboards were a disorganised jumble: shelves that began at the back with neatly-lined tins and packets deteriorated into a mess of unconnected objects that had been stuffed wherever they could fit. In the dining room she opened one drawer to find it filled entirely with elastic bands. As she cleaned, curiosity began to get the better of her and soon Emily was speeding around the ground floor unaware of the noise she was creating as she studied photos, picked up trinkets and wiped away the thin layer of dust that at first obscured everything. She didn’t know why she was suddenly so driven, but had a vague idea that she was trying to construct something, or reconstruct it: a life, a personal history, a story that belonged to the woman who was lying alone in bed. Picking up a small, silver elephant, she was reminded for a moment of her own history, of a park she’d been taken to once, and proprietorially she slipped the ornament into her pocket.
Only one door was locked. John hadn’t shown her the room behind it, or directed her towards the key so she presumed this was not a place she was meant to clean. She wanted to though. Peering behind someone else’s door had lit something in her, something she hadn’t felt in many years: Curiosity? Interest? Appetite? Zest? She couldn’t quite place the taste of the emotion but she ran her tongue over her teeth and enjoyed it. Then, reluctantly leaving the locked room behind, she returned to the corridor where she’d first entered. When she ran her damp cloth over the coat stand, the base turned out to be silver.
“I can’t reach down there,” Lynn announced suddenly.
Emily jumped up. Behind her Lynn was standing, leaning slightly to one side but dressed immaculately, the remnants of beauty fluttering against her pale, thin skin like an echo. “It’s been driving me quite mad for weeks, that spot on the bottom, but I wouldn’t ask that girl to do it, and the boys don’t see things like that do they?” Emily was speechless. “I’ll have a cup of tea in the lounge,” Lynn continued. “Lemon. No milk. Make a pot. You’ll have one too.”
Emily found two china cups and used the pot with teabags that had clearly been left on the kitchen counter for this purpose. Lynn was wilier than she looked. It was obvious now that this détente had always been the plan, but why had she put on such a show of anger for her son? Was she pretending then or now? Was she hateful or merely hurting? Pain, Emily knew, had a way of corrupting one’s emotions, but she needed to spot the one that was authentic. She could not fail her first job for Home Care. There was the money to think of, and also that pale sliver of light.
Lynn received the tea with wiry hands, tutting that there were no biscuits. “I can get some now,” Emily offered but Lynn shook her head and waved her into the chair opposite, insisting that she would make do. For a while, the two of them sat without speaking. A vagueness had overcome Lynn’s face, an unsettling illusiveness that was both intense and distant, as if while scrutinising Emily she was also somewhere far away. It was like being viewed through a telescope. Emily tried not to fidget with her fringe and stared back at the woman whose poise made her feel as though she was sitting in front of a teacher, or an immigration officer. “How do you feel today?” she managed to ask finally.
Lynn let out a little noise of impatience and flapped her hand dismissively by way of an answer. “It’s mild today,” she said instead, glancing out of the window as if the weather and not her health was the reason the two of them were there, sipping tea across the generations and racial divides and stories that neither of them yet knew.
“If you need me to do anything, if you need help, I can,” Emily persevered, hoping to remind the elder lady of her newly-acquired nursing credentials, her usefulness, but this was apparently the wrong thing to say.
“This whole situation is preposterous,” Lynn exploded, her serene posture suddenly unbalanced. “I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself. I don’t need a girl like you snooping around my home. Have you taken anything?”
“No!”
“I’ll find out,” Lynn continued. “I’m sick but I’m not senile. They only want you here so they can feel better you know.” Anger spewed out of her, contorting her face and stripping it of beauty, the heat of her wrath erupting like pent-up lava.
“I only meant - ” Emily began but Lynn didn’t trouble herself to listen to the rest. Her mind was made up already.
“They don’t care what I want, but what I want is to be left alone. It’s my life after all. It’s my death. And I can manage it perfectly well without you.”
“You couldn’t manage the coat stand,” Emily dared.
Lynn stopped abruptly. With a great effort of leaning forwards she put down her tea, stirring it with a teaspoon whose clunking sound filled the gaping space Emily’s remark had cut between them.
“How very impertinent,” she declared finally, slowly, regarding Emily without the distance of before and then suddenly chuckling in a soft manner that turned into a cough, for which she needed to dig out the cotton handkerchief she kept balled up inside her sleeve. Emily wasn’t sure now whether to smile or remain serious, to offer help or to look away, so she did nothing. “You can come to clean,” Lynn conceded finally when she had composed herself. “I could do with some help cleaning I suppose.”
“I am not only a cleaner,” Emily pressed nervously, but this was too much. Lynn threw the teaspoon onto the tray.
“You may clean only. Three times a week,” she declared firmly. “From nine until one. It is twelve-thirty now. You may clear this away and make me a bowl of soup before you go. Not too much. Small portions are more appetising. There are tins in the cupboard.”
The last time Emily had prepared a meal for anyone besides herself had been at Auntie’s. Auntie made a fuss of cooking proper Rwandan food every Saturday, usually making enough to last for the whole coming week. She had enlisted Emily’s help, bossing her around the kitchen as though she was born for such power, her whole physique broadening
and lengthening in a way it didn’t when she came to and from work. At first Emily had resented this. During the days and weeks when she had first arrived and wanted only to sleep, and most of the time was allowed to, she viewed these sessions in the kitchen as punishment. Auntie’s nagging was oppressive. She didn’t want to be made to do things, or talk, or listen to Auntie’s gossip; she wanted only to be allowed to retreat into her silent world that deafened her. Whenever she could, she crawled beneath the covers of her bed and lay there, alone, any attempts to marshal her into action being met with resistance and tears and, in the end, screaming and kicking and her throwing up. She didn’t control these outbursts. She didn’t intend them. It was as if her whole body had shut down, like a person in a coma whose total energies are focused on healing the damage to the brain and whose small actions are merely reflex. Except that Emily was not in a coma and, conscious of the thoughts in need of healing inside her head, found she was unhealable.
For many weeks her hibernation was tolerated but eventually Auntie began to insist. “You need to get moving,” she told her, dragging her by her arms into the kitchen and putting her to work. “Chop that up, you’re not useless,” she would say. “Don’t tell me you can’t peel a few potatoes? Don’t tell me you can’t boil the rice? Don’t tell me can’t.” Assailed, Emily began to force her fingers into movement. It felt impossible to begin but somehow she managed to peel vegetables, she dried fish, she boiled beans, she began to handle a knife, and after a few days with barely any direction she was mixing together aubergine and corn and spinach because they couldn’t find cassava. Meanwhile, she listened to Auntie. Mostly her monologues were filled with the details of her day-to-day life and structured in the form of a singsong lament - the cold weather, her underpaid job, her busy husband, the stupid bus that was always late.
Emily correctly understood this fault-finding to be a pastime, proof only of Auntie’s love of talking, and paid little attention to her plethora of sorrows. But one day, in the midst of stirring the stew, Auntie sat down at the table where Emily had been enlisted in her usual task of peeling, and said,
“Your mother was a very wonderful woman Emily.”
Emily was unable to say anything. Instead she stared hard at the potatoes, though her hands had stopped working on them and the peeler dropped to the table where it splattered tiny fragments of skin across the veneered top.
Auntie continued. “You know she was my cousin?” Again Emily didn’t answer but Auntie seemed not to notice. She appeared not to need to be listened to so much as to talk. “I knew her since she was born,” she said, making a clicking sound at the back of her throat just like Emily’s mother had done. “Your father too. He was a friend of my brother you know. He was a good man. He was very clever, like you, no? Your mother wrote that you were very clever.” Auntie picked the peeler up from the table and took over Emily’s job, clicking still. “She always said I was crazy for leaving. She said how could I leave Rwanda? She loved that country too much. She loved the people. Not me. I didn’t hang around. Even at school, I didn’t like to be contained anywhere, I didn’t like all this rigid structure, all these rules. I told my mother no, I was leaving, even when she begged I said no, I had a ticket. Not your mother. She sent me letters. She told me how things were. She wrote when my mother died. She was the one who’d been with her.” Auntie wiped a tear from her eye that she pretended wasn’t there. “She was so strong,” she said, standing up and returning to the stew. “I’m very sorry for you Emilienne. Girls are not meant to lose their mothers.”
After that, Emily had retreated deep into herself again and Auntie saw this. She didn’t bring up her mother any more, although a few times she tried to encourage Emily to talk about herself. In a morbid, uncertain way she wanted to know what had happened, and she nudged her way into the landscape of Emily’s recollections: had there been a fire at that old church, she asked one day. But eventually she stopped talking about Rwanda at all, and stuck to cooking food whose smell knotted up Emily’s stomach with a smarting grief that devoured her appetite and left Auntie with bowlfuls of remains.
Uncle steered clear of her altogether. He knew stories. Not her story but the political narrative. He knew therefore that hideous things had befallen her, he saw the scar on her forehead, which back then still seeped puss occasionally. He knew what might have been done to her, put inside her to poison her, and he treated her as a pitiable animal: a poor soul to feel sorry for and care for out of a moral duty, but not to engage with, damaged as she was. Over dinner, he sometimes asked as if out of interest and encouragement which dishes Emily had made, and then she watched as he left them tidily on the side of his plate.
Emily concentrated hard on not overheating Lynn’s soup. She’d found a tin not yet past its sell-by date, and added carrots and a little flour to thicken what seemed to her to be a very thin broth. From the lounge, she heard the TV blaring. Emily arranged the soup on a tray, poured Lynn a glass of water, and as a final thought added a saucer with three biscuits arranged on it. As soon as Lynn saw the contents of her lunch she rolled her eyes.
“I said a small portion,” she admonished. “And people here do not eat biscuits with soup. Where are you from anyway?”
Emily helped Lynn – who was flapping her away – to balance the tray on her lap, then made a great show of collecting the tea things, as if this was occupying her attention too fully for her to answer the question. Lynn however did not pick up her soup spoon or return her eyes to the television, but stared insistently at Emily.
“Well? Where are you from?”
“I live in Hendon,” Emily conceded finally, thinking fast. “It’s not far from here. 20 minutes.”
“Don’t be so silly, I mean originally.” Lynn reprimanded, shaking her head at Emily’s stupidity. “I know where Hendon is for goodness’ sake.”
“Oh. I grew up in Africa,” Emily relented attempting now to sound flippant, breezy, but still she hadn’t revealed enough.
“Whereabouts in Africa?” Lynn demanded. “I had many friends who went to Africa after university, doing charity work mainly. They came back with all sorts of tales. And trinkets for me. Elephants and giraffes and the like. Whereabouts?”
Emily hovered with the tea things while interminable seconds ticked by, and felt the silver elephant heavy in her jeans pocket, visible she feared. Finally she spoke. “I’m from Rwanda,” she smiled, grinning broadly.
At last this was enough and Lynn said nothing. For the third time that day she examined Emily, scrutinised her, made her feel like a piece of evidence or a rare archaeological find, a testament to a former civilisation, which in some ways she was. Across Lynn’s face crawled titbits of recall and understanding. The word Rwanda was like that; it was unable to be impotent. Rwanda: that is the place where all those people killed each other, people thought, wondering inevitably if Emily was a killer, since she had obviously not been killed. Or else they were full of shock and intrigue and pity, the kinder but no less discomforting emotion. Turning with the tea things towards the door, Emily left Lynn to select one of these two responses and retreated to the kitchen where she fished the teabags out from the pot, carefully washed the inside, and put it back on the kitchen counter. She spent a long time meticulously cleaning the china cups, telling herself she was only moving so slowly because she didn’t want to break them, then finally she returned to the lounge.
“Shall I clear that away before I go?” she asked Lynn, gesturing at the barely-touched soup. But Lynn only flapped her hands again in the exasperated fashion Emily was already growing used to, then looked her straight in the eye.
“How did you get your scar?” she queried, boldly.
Emily was not prepared for this. In defence, she took a deep breath and sidestepped.
“Do you need me to help you with that?”
Lynn let out an irritated exhalation of breath. The woman obviously did not like to be treated like an invalid, her frailness her own embarrassing scar that
showed too much. And suddenly realising this, Emily pushed on. “Do you need help back upstairs Mrs Hunter?” She offered her arms but again Lynn slapped them away.
“Was it a machete?”
“Or I could run you a bath?” Emily pressed, now in open defiance, her tone deliberately consoling.
“What happened to your family?”
“I’ll prepare some dinner for you shall I?” They were trading blows. “Here, let me take that before you spill it.” Emily dived for the tray but Lynn clung on, reaching for Emily’s wrists to keep her there. Emily twisted them away. She reached over once more and tugged at the tray and again Lynn resisted, but finally could hang on no longer, loosened her feeble grip and, victorious, Emily escaped to the kitchen. When she had finished washing up, this time she armed herself with coat and bag, ready for a fast exit, ready to run. By the time she stepped back into the lounge however, Lynn had turned up the volume on the TV, pulled a blanket around her and barely acknowledged Emily at all. In those missing minutes the distant preoccupation of earlier had returned to her face. The fight had left her.
“I never used to watch television,” she mused almost to herself in response to Emily’s nervous goodbyes.
Slowly, Emily backed away into the corridor. The change in Lynn was unsettling. Emily wondered if it was okay to leave her. She wondered too if the woman was pretending again, plotting something, perhaps she’d decided to ring Home Care to cancel Emily’s visits, maybe Emily should appeal to her. But then abruptly, without her saying a thing, Lynn called her back into the room. “You’ll come again on Friday,” she told her plainly. “Be here by nine.”
On the jostling, traffic-plagued bus journey home, while fingering the smooth, stolen elephant, Emily noticed that the winter sun seemed to be poking through the cold air more strongly than it had that morning. She raised her hand to shield her eyes and looked ahead.
Chapter
