2005 - My Cleaner

by Maggie Gee; Prefers to remain anonymous

  “What do you mean by that?” asks Vanessa.

  “BARKING mother. IDIOT father,” Tomlinson shouts, as if it is obvious. Now other party-goers are falling silent and pausing to stare, curious. “Feel I can be quite frank with you, Vanesha. All friends here. S’right, issn’t it?” She clamps her arm around Vanessa, looks suddenly serious, and opens her mouth. There is a burp, then a raspberry trickle of wine. “Jus’ write the truth about it all. Thing ish, you’ve done fucking well, Vanesha. Got to fucking Cambridge from our fucking awful school. Father who could hardly even write his name. Mother should’ve been in the fucking loony bin. You were practically a fucking servant, at home. OK, your novels aren’t fucking Proust—”

  And at that, she slides gently on to the floor, and falls asleep, smiling cherubically.

  Vanessa snatches up the last of the bottle, turns on her heel and returns to the party. She will talk to anyone who isn’t Miss Tomlinson. Drink blunts the contours of the conversation. Tommers was jealous and an alcoholic. Besides, Vanessa despises swearing. Within half an hour she is singing karaoke, and half a dozen people are clapping her on, while a few young men in the corner are jeering. But Mary is leading a loud conga round the hall, her red hips swinging from side to side, her face glowing, her smile very white, at the head of a great sweeping ‘S’ of people.

  In fact, Mary seems to be the star of the evening. Vanessa drinks more in the hope of being jollier. Surely she can be as much fun as Mary, on her home ground, in her own village. Ray Biggins sways up to her, with his coat on. By now his face is more plum than crimson, but she knows he is going to apologise, and she offers her cheek, beneficent. Instead he smacks her on the lips, wetly. “You were always a good kisser, Ness. What I’ve come to ask though is…” (pointing at Mary) “is she really an African princess? That’s what she told my mate Gonzy.”

  Vanessa’s last, unreal memory is of saying goodnight to Lucy’s daughter Serena, who is trying to apologise to her. “I do hope Miss Tomlinson wasn’t a bore. When she is drunk, she does tend to swear. She’s been very bitter since her girlfriend left.”

  “Oh she can fuck off,” Vanessa shouts, cheerily. Serena stares at her, appalled.

  Then begin the long trials of sobering up.

  In the early morning, her head spinning with wine, many things she has forgotten come back to Vanessa. How often she missed school to look after her mother. How once when Miss Tomlinson was her form mistress, Vanessa went to school late with her nails raw and bleeding because her mother had begged her to bleach the kitchen. How she never went on trips. There was never the money. She would watch the others setting off, excited.

  And yet, she got to Cambridge. That was really something. The only girl ever from this village.

  It wasn’t nothing. It was surely something. Even if her novels weren’t any good…

  No good, no good. Her life was no good. She hadn’t been good to her son, or her husband.

  your novels are hardly fucking Proust.

  The words come back to her, at three, at four.

  When Vanessa finally starts to nod off, Mary starts snoring with imperial grandeur, then runs her feet in the bed like a hamster, until Vanessa says loudly, “Shush”, when Mary says, puzzlingly but distinctly, “I’m sorry, Justin,” turns over and farts, so obviously she is fast asleep.

  It is a loud and very smelly fart which makes Vanessa burn with indignation. Somehow it seems to smell of Africa, and everything she doesn’t like about Mary. In any case, the fart has staying power; it is salty, peppery, meaty and fatty as all the sausages and bacon at the party. Perhaps that makes it an English fart. Why didn’t Mary do it before she turned over? The line of her cheek almost seems to be smiling. After that it is even harder to sleep.

  It is an odd sensation, waking up with Mary. The first night they arrived, Vanessa was so tired she had slept dreamlessly through until morning, then got up hastily and put her face on before Mary could wake and see her, pallid. But the day after the party, Vanessa jerks awake with a thumping headache at half-past nine, and Mary has got up and drawn the curtains, so the morning light blazes full in her eyes. Vanessa is aware she must look dreadful. Mary stands peering down at her. She is dressed, and her eyes and teeth gleam white. She looks big and healthy. She has lipstick on.

  “Good morning, Vanessa,” she almost sings. “Have you slept well? Did you like the party?”

  44

  “So you’re off today,” whispers Uncle Stan, at breakfast. Aunt Isobel has gone to see off the grandchildren, so Vanessa finds herself cutting up his toast, and feeding it, patiently, morsel by morsel, in through her uncle’s trembling jaws. There is a cavern of blackness behind his false teeth. He dribbles, slightly, from the corners of his mouth. She tells herself she is glad to do it. It makes her feel better, after last night. She is being useful, as a niece should be, and she’s never known what to do for him, she’s never done anything for her family, she left them behind, all the aunts, the uncles, her elderly parents, her school, her friends…Mary is watching her from the doorway. There is an odd moment when their eyes meet. Vanessa has a moment of deja vu, remembering how Mary used to sit and feed Justin, when he was little, spoon after spoon.

  “You should take your friend to see where you lived,” Stan wheezes, as Vanessa gets the last bit in, and then he coughs it out again. She picks up his coffee, and tests it for heat. “Still standing, I hear. Just about. Apparently they’re going to demolish them all. All the old tied farm cottages. Wouldn’t mind a last look myself.” But he knows he will not get to the village again. What would that mean, to be imprisoned?

  “Odd to think we never owned that house,” says Vanessa.

  “Oh no. It was one of your mother’s complaints, that he never paid for the roof over your heads. But of course that’s how it was with farm workers. That was how they paid them, with those old tied cottages.”

  “I don’t really know if I can bear to see it,” says Vanessa, wiping her uncle’s chin. “Maybe we should get off back to London.”

  “Vanessa, I think we should visit your home,” says Mary, and comes round and pats Vanessa’s shoulder. Vanessa sits passively and lets Mary touch her.

  “Vanessa, I will drive us. I think you are tired.”

  “Of course not, Mary. I must have exercise.” And, just like that, she is Vanessa again.

  And they do walk, although the car’s already packed, and Mary has found the errant glasses in her pocket, and actually popped them on her nose to prove it, little gold moonlets that make her look younger.

  The cottage is along the old main road. Vanessa sets off at a swinging pace, plunging off the lane into the river of traffic. “Don’t worry. There’s a pavement all the way,” she instructs Mary, who looks doubtfully at the dwindling strip of tarmac where they have to walk in single file. Mary hangs back behind Vanessa and watches the stick-like figure of her employer battling forwards in the autumn wind.

  Though every so often, Vanessa half-turns and gives a boisterous ‘thumbs up’ of encouragement, the truth is, she isn’t enjoying this either. The tarmac is cracked and overgrown with weeds. Every two seconds, another loud vehicle screams past her shoulder, and the air buffets her. At first the hedge on their left looks pretty, scattered with red hawthorn berries, fat wild rose-hips, old man’s beard and the last blackberries, but within a few paces it becomes her enemy, reaching out thick savage tentacles of bramble that block the pavement and wave towards the road, forcing Vanessa out into the traffic’s lethal slipstream. The brambles she manages to bend sternly forwards spring eagerly back and whip at Mary’s face.

  Everywhere they see enormous notices. ‘SLOW THROUGH THE VILLAGE’, ‘40’, ‘SLOW DOWN’, and one forlorn THANK YOU FOR DRIVING CAREFULLY’. But in fact all the cars are doing 70 or 80, and Mary, sullenly bringing up the rear, fervently wishes that she could join them, that she could be part of this giant rally that cuts the English fields in two, instead of a tiny, deafened walker with snakes of vegetat
ion clutching at her ankles.

  Now Vanessa has turned, and her mouth is opening, and she is pointing and shouting something, but a full-tilt, cliff-high furniture van carries her words away into the future.

  “Over there!” Mary finally makes out, and with that Vanessa darts with staccato urgency into a narrow gap in the traffic, and reemerges, to the squealing of brakes, across the road by some kind of hut. Taking her time, to express her disapproval of this whole life-threatening manoeuvre, Mary picks her way across to join her.

  “This is where I grew up,”, says Vanessa. Not looking at her, looking at the ground. The place is half-boarded up, and half broken-into. Some windows are smashed, and some are nailed shut. But it is not possible, Mary thinks, Vanessa can never have grown up here. The walls are covered with purple graffiti, the same crude signs that she sees in London.

  Whatever its present state might be, this house can never have been other than small. In fact, it is more like a hut than a cottage. The roof is low. The front door is mean. Even in Mary’s village, this would not be much.

  The garden is half the size of where they have been staying, and it is entirely overgrown with weeds. There is the remains of a bird-house like Stan’s, but its wood has turned green, and bits of jungle throttle it. There is a pond, but it is full of dark leaves. Beside it, a rusted tangle of chicken-wire.

  Suddenly Vanessa begins to cry. Mary has never seen her cry. Vanessa walks away firmly, her face averted, but Mary can see Vanessa’s shoulders are shaking. After a minute, she follows her. She does not touch her, but she stands near. “Are you thinking about your parents?” she asks. Mary herself once cried for her parents. Not so long ago. Three years ago.

  “No no, not exactly…Yes. My mother always used to put bread for the birds. Even when she was really ill. Mum liked all of that, frogs, squirrels. She worried about them more than people. And the chicken run—she liked getting the eggs. Her lawn, and the beds…her garden. Poor Mum—you see, she loved her garden. She would be so upset to see the garden.” Each time Vanessa says ‘garden’, she sobs.

  And Mary says, “I see. I am sorry,” but in fact, she thinks crying for gardens is silly. Birds eat your fruit, and frogs are disgusting. Mary herself has much worse things to cry for, but she would rather die than tell Vanessa. Slowly she begins to feel angry again. Up country at home there are more things to cry for, and yet Ugandans rarely cry in public. Her own village, half-emptied by AIDS. The nearby villages wiped out by war.

  They cry for their parents, we for our children.

  How did she end up in this strange part of England that seems as if war has never touched it, where growing old is normal, and many have white hair? (And at last night’s party they were dancing to the band, the white-haired couples, or holding hands, as if they had a right to a long life together.) Where nobody seems to have the Slim disease, and the cars on the road are all four-wheel-drives, even though the road is flat, and straight, and smooth, and none of them walk, because they are too lazy, and if you do walk, you might get killed?

  Mary thinks with longing of the roads of Uganda, the straight red roads that sweep away to the horizon, and vehicles come, two or three an hour, but the people throng all along the roadside, the mothers in gomesis, the girls in bright frocks, the babies tied to straight backs with strong cloth, the bicycles loaded with green bananas, the boys with yellow plastic cans of water, the skinny cows with their enormous horns, and everyone talking and laughing and staring, where there is still time, and space, to move, and if one of the jeeps, full of tourists, or soldiers, comes along too fast, there is no problem, there is all the world to spill across and fill, there are fields and forests, not hedges and pavements, and everyone walks and runs and pedals…The British have caught themselves in a trap. Soon their bodies will no longer move. Perhaps that is why Vanessa is so frantic, driving herself to go faster and faster.

  Mary does see it’s sad, Vanessa’s ugly village, where the children are fat, which would be strange in Kampala, where only businessmen’s children are fat. There are no real shops here, no businesses, no stalls selling flowers or vegetables. The beautiful church, with its fine tiled spire topped with a golden chicken spinning in the wind, which Mary had hoped they would attend on Sunday, has been turned into flats, so Uncle Stan told her. He whispered that only half of them have sold. “It’s a joke. No one round here can afford them.”

  Mary’s anger ebbs away. They are what they are. And with a slow upsurge of pity and pride, Mary finally starts to believe it. The house where Vanessa grew up is poor.

  Perhaps she is embarrassed for Mary to see it. It is actually smaller than her own family house, the house where Mary grew up in Uganda.

  So she and Vanessa are not so different. In some ways they are almost the same.

  But Mary does not feel she worked hard as a child. There were always aunties and cousins to help. For her, there was so much sun, and laughter. And all the doors and windows were open. And nobody drew on the walls of houses.

  And without planning it, or wanting it, Mary puts her arm round Vanessa’s shoulder, she draws her to her, and Vanessa cries. “I did the garden, I hated it, but the garden never looked like this…I cleaned the house, I cleaned the house.” She is almost hysterical, she keeps repeating it. They stand together in the autumn wind, and Vanessa clings, and Mary comforts.

  On the way back to Aunt Isobel’s, Mary spots something she did not see on the way out. It stands opposite the point where their lane turns off the thundering steel ribbon of road. At first it looks like the eye of a fish, silver and glassy, a thing on a stick, then as they get closer, it’s the mouth of a fish, a silver gape with a grey open mouth, seen from the side, a lateral V, and then she sees that the grey is the road, the ribbon of road reflected in a mirror, and it is some kind of fish-eye mirror that she has never seen before, put there to show drivers that there is a turning where tractors might suddenly come out.

  Vanessa spots it at the same time, and as they stand there, waiting for the stream of metal to stop and let them back into kinder country, the sun comes out, and illuminates it. Both of them stop and stare at it, side by side, pressed close together by the tiny gap between the thorns and the lorries. It is a tiny, radiant disc of sharp beauty, with a huge blue sky and swelling white clouds, a convex circle that shines like a world, and they are there, minute, in the bottom right corner, at the end of a road that slopes away into the distance, at one precise vortex of time and space, and the world is enormous, and they are tiny, and their ant-like bodies vibrate with the traffic, two small living things on an enormous planet, and Mary has crossed the earth to this place, and when she turns again, ten feet down the turning, the two of them merge into the same bright dot.

  45

  On the way back to London, Vanessa drives, silent, rejecting Mary’s offer to drive, discouraging her attempts to talk. Yet both of them know they have grown closer.

  Approaching the front door, Vanessa is anxious. “I only hope Justin’s all right,” she mutters.

  “It will be OK, Vanessa,” says Mary. “Anna was coming in to clean. And Soraya said she would cook him dinner.”

  “And who is Soraya? Oh, the Indian girl.”

  “No, Vanessa, she is not Indian. I have met Trevor’s friend. She is a white woman.”

  The house seems normal, no fire or flood, and Justin’s room is tidy, but empty. At seven he comes back, and seems pleased to see them, and actually calls Vanessa ‘Mum’, and tolerates ten minutes of news about the village before he wanders away again.

  For Vanessa it is a quick turn around. At seven tomorrow she will be on the Eurostar, sitting opposite Fifi, off to Paris.

  “You’ll be all right, Mary?”

  “Yes, Vanessa.”

  “It’s only three days. Nothing will happen.”

  “Nothing will happen,” Mary agrees.

  In fact Mary hopes that a lot will happen. Because Vanessa is going away, Mary has fixed for Trevor and Justin to go an
d do some work for Zakira.

  But Vanessa thinks, soon this will be over. Justin is practically normal again. I just need to edge him towards a real job, or possibly he should go back into education, a Master’s in something, I would pay his fees…

  The worst is over. I am fond of Mary, we’ve become fast friends, but soon she’ll be gone. One day I shall visit her, of course, in Uganda.

  46

  Next day Vanessa sleeps on the train to Paris, though Fifi is nervous, and wants to talk. She is going to visit her ancient grandmother, who has recently been taken into hospital. Fifi, who has never liked spending money, has arranged for them to stay in her empty house. There is a complex chain of negotiation; a cousin has given her spare set of keys to another cousin’s neighbour’s friend, or perhaps the gardener of the neighbour’s friend. There are instructions about lights, and locks, and bedding, ‘such a bore’ for Fifi, who has other things to think about, for instance, payment for the cat-sitter who will be feeding Mimi organic cream and chicken livers.

  “I must say the family seemed rather reluctant. And almost suspicious of my motives. I mean, it was my therapist told me to go. Of course I couldn’t tell them that. But anyone would think I was after Grandma’s money. I admit she has rather a lot of money, but for heaven’s sake, there are ten of us grandchildren, and all the others have done better than me, they have all podded, there are scads of great-grandchildren. I am hardly competition for them. In any case, I am a grandchild. I do have a right. I have a right to a family.”

  Vanessa pretends to fall asleep. Fifi is tiring when she talks about rights. Besides, Vanessa needs time to herself, she needs to drink deep of her own story, the bittersweet time-warp of her days in the village…it’s like sipping medicine, remembering Miss Tomlinson. The things the woman said about Vanessa’s parents.

  The sour dark house where Vanessa grew up. Yesterday it looked so cramped, so poor.