2005 - My Cleaner

by Maggie Gee; Prefers to remain anonymous

  The air is full of Christmas petrol: it has a poisoned, leaden feel. The sunset is magnificent but also lowering, red flames shooting between mountainous clouds which are the brownish purple that presages snow.

  As they turn out of their street, the white dance begins, first big light flakes, individual as flowers, and then slowly quickening, multiplying, twisting, till within thirty minutes their car has been sucked into a sifting forest of grey-white shapes, as soft and thick as if cut from flannel, which burst into brightness at every street lamp, then fade again, instantly, whiten then darken, so everything looks different, hides and shifts, and the solid stream of traffic melts and blurs into a series of whispering spectres, and deepening the white is the indigo evening as night blues over the afterglow.

  “Your mother said I shouldn’t drive if it was snowing, but it didn’t snow till we had already left,” says Mary, smiling, but she isn’t quite happy, though Mary believes in being happy.

  Firstly, her glasses, though nearly new, bought from a friend who no longer wanted them, keep steaming up, and pinch her nose. She has to take them off and wipe them, and on one occasion, nearly loses control, and Justin reaches across to grab the wheel. “Be careful, Mary,” he says, crossly, sounding suddenly unpleasantly like Vanessa.

  Secondly, Mary had forgotten snow. Her memory had turned it into something minor, something sweet and flat and docile, like icing. She is taken aback that it is eating the world, surging up all round her, in four dimensions.

  Thirdly, her kabito hasn’t called. Four weeks ago, he telephoned to tell her he was coming, he had the tickets and was ‘sure of a visa’, but since Ugandans don’t believe in a visa until it is in their jacket pockets, he promised to call again to confirm; but the second phone-call has never come, and she’s been unable to track him down.

  So Mary is doomed to spend Christmas with strangers, in a village a world away from her own village, far from her church and her friends in Kampala, away from her beloved friend the accountant, who grows more dear now she isn’t going to see him. She misses him badly, longs for him. For the first time she thinks, “I might marry Charles.” But she cannot marry him until she locates him. Will she ever see him, or Uganda, again?

  “Read me the signs,” she says sharply to Justin, who is humming and staring in a blissed-out fashion.

  “It’s cool, Mary, we’re heading for the motorway.”

  On the motorway, thinks Mary, things will seem more normal, the lights will be brighter, the traffic streams steadier, and I will get my bearings again. Unconsciously, she starts to drive faster. Soon she is going very fast indeed, revving at the lights, overtaking, and she bombs on to the motorway without a pause, and Justin wakes up and sits bolt upright.

  He remembers, with a shock, Zakira and the baby.

  “Look, Mary, you’d better slow down, since it’s snowing. See, the overhead signs are saying 40.”

  Mary shoots a glance across at him. He is a young, fit man. He should be driving. At any rate, he should not be taking it for granted that driving will be done by someone else, while Justin sits there handing out instructions. Mary feels safer when she drives faster, in control at last, skating through life, leaving everything behind, the mess, the exhaustion, the years of slow, insurmountable work, going inch by inch, a snail with a duster. If Mary can stay in the fast lane, she will, and in any case, today the roads are dream-like, the whole of England has become insubstantial, her early feelings of doubt and panic have been replaced by a dreamer’s calm: nothing will stop her, nothing can hurt her.

  But Justin’s voice nags in her ear. She manages to stop herself snapping at him.

  “Justin, I love you, but soon you must start driving. You will see later, with the baby. It will be useful if you are driving.”

  His full red lips, so like the baby’s, look suddenly sulky, lower lip jutting. He has made an effort; he has got better; he is working hard, he has become a father, he’s making an attempt to please his mother, he’s trekking to the back of beyond for Christmas…

  Now Mary expects him to drive the car!

  “Mary, I love you, but you are my driver.”

  She looks at him narrowly through newly wiped glasses, which show every pimple, every flaw. This tall young man with his pout like a baby. That greedy mouth which had dragged at her nipples.

  “Mr Justin, I am not your driver.”

  But he only laughs, in his Justin way, a charming cherub, and pats her dark hand, stroking it as it clutches the wheel, the hand of the woman who has mothered him, served him, cleaned up his vomit, given him her breast, this black woman guiding him through a snowstorm, in the midst of a reindeer herd of cars, all chafing forwards in the snowy darkness, their headlights dipped on the new white like eyes.

  “They can’t have done the gritting. The snow is settling,” says Justin, reflectively, looking at the road.

  Then suddenly he is clutching her wrist, as he has pulled at Mary a thousand times before, pulled at her skirt, her sleeve, her arm—“Watch out, Mary. We have to slow down.” They are shooting down the slip road to their second motorway, and Mary once again shows no signs of braking to dovetail into the slipstream of the traffic—“Mary, honestly, it’s dangerous!” He has spotted, lying on its side like a beetle, a gritting lorry on the hard shoulder, with flashing lights and three hunched men.

  And all his life he has been tugging at Mary (she feels as she screams across the shuddering lanes and, as if by magic, other cars avoid her) and she’s never minded, it was only Justin, her second baby, Jamil’s little brother—but now he is so much bigger than her, and he is still tugging and begging and ordering, and thinking it is funny to call her ‘my driver’, and Jamie can no longer make everything right.

  “Justin, be quiet. I am a good driver. I have driven you ever since you were a baby. Now will you please stop bothering me.”

  Her authoritative voice works on him. He falls silent, and then he dozes. Sleep has always been his way out. He only wakes up when he feels the car slowing to a standstill, and his first thought is, “Thank God, we’re here.”

  But he looks out of the window, and sees motionless traffic, just visible through endlessly cascading snow, and he looks upwards, and it comes forever, falling from roofless grey halls of snow, and suddenly it fills him with vertigo, the blind gyres of snowflakes bearing down on him, rushing so fast the car can never escape them, the sky has pressed the whole world to a standstill, and it keeps on coming: the snow, the snow.

  “What’s happening, Mary?”

  “I don’t know. We have been standing here for half an hour. Maybe there is an accident.”

  Mary is writing in a small green notebook. “What are you doing, Mary? Shall we play Hangman?” When he was a boy, Justin taught Mary Hangman, and the two of them used to play it for hours.

  “Perhaps later, Justin. I am writing something.”

  “Is it a shopping list?” It makes him smile. How many times, when he was smaller, has he helped Mary write the shopping list? And she always added the things he asked for, the sausages and beans, the crisps and jelly, though she kept them in the cupboard with her cleaning things, where he knew his mother never looked, and it was one of their special secrets, and Justin remembers how much he loves her, and she is here with him now, in the snow, and they’ll save each other, of course they will, and it will all be a great adventure (his mother is miles away, as usual).

  And then he remembers, no, it is Christmas, it’s much too late for shopping lists.

  And Mary seems a little distant. “No, Justin. It is something different.”

  He takes her hand, playfully, and tries to stop the pen. She snatches it back with surprising force. He looks at her, hurt: “Don’t be cross with me.”

  “I am writing my Autobiography.”

  “Oh yes, that thing you were doing in your room, and Dad had to help you with the computer. Did you keep it up, then? How is it going?”

  She imagines she hears a note of lor
dly indifference. “I will soon finish it, and publish it. That is why I work when I get the chance. When it is published, you can buy a copy.”

  It is starting to get a little cold in the car. Outside, there are desultory outbreaks of hooting. People switch their engines on and off. One man has got out of his car, and peers forwards, but the snow is too thick for him to see anything.

  “What if the Jag won’t start again?” Justin asks her. He just wants reassurance.

  And Mary runs the engine for a bit, so the heater comes on, and the minutes pass, and her pen whispers over the lined paper, and Justin drums his fingers on the dashboard and wishes the tape deck were not broken, and the snow shushes, shushes outside the window, and the wind moans dog-like down the white blocked lanes. And Justin thinks, we could sit here forever, and it isn’t entirely an unpleasant thought, because he’s always found Mary’s presence so soothing; but today there is something different about her.

  She is preoccupied, almost impatient, as if she has better things to do, but he knows he can tease her out of this mood; he has always been the centre of Mary’s world. She went back to Uganda but she never forgot him. She came back and loved him the same as before. Secretly, he thinks she loves him more than Jamil. Of course Jamil grew in Mary’s belly, but Mary was always there for Justin’s bedtime, and Justin’s birthdays, and Justin’s illnesses—which means she can rarely have been at Jamil’s. Jamil has always been his ghostly rival—he has only met him on five or six occasions—but Justin is pretty sure he’s still ahead. Mary has mentioned Jamil less this time.

  “Are you going to write about me and Jamie?”

  Her pen stops writing. She stares at the dashboard as if it is a television. “Yes, Justin. I shall write about you.”

  “Have you bought Jamie a Christmas present?”

  “Yes, I am always buying him presents.”

  “Have you bought me a Christmas present?”

  But Mary will not answer him.

  Suddenly there’s movement, way up in the distance, and other engines fire into life, and under the shimmering scythings of snow, the whole scene shudders into motion again, but this time it’s a halting, wounded motion; the whole herd knows that for now, life has changed, survival has become part of the challenge.

  “I need the bathroom,” Mary says, primly. “We’ll have to stop at a Services.”

  Their progress is, to Justin, reassuringly slow. There is no more possibility of Mary speeding. The traffic flow moves in stops and starts, at 10 or 20 miles an hour, a great suffering, disintegrating caterpillar, assaulted from above by hordes of tiny white predators, and Mary and Justin desert the jerky caravan and move with a relative turn of speed down the road towards the blankness of the Services’ carpark. A field of churned snow, with a few white-fleeced cars crouched at random angles in the emptiness. The town is reverting to countryside. The world of machines is losing its grip.

  Inside, the Services seem ghostly. The personnel have a haunted look that goes oddly with their coronets of tinsel, their fluffy reindeer ears, their enormous necklaces of glittery red and green Christmas balls. They stand and stare out of the plate-glass windows. “I’m only supposed to be on duty till nine,” a harassed-looking teenager confides in Mary. “But nobody’s thought about how I get home. I’ve got a baby waiting for me, you see.” She looks far too young to have a baby. “Where are you making for, anyway?”

  Mary tells her, and the girl looks self-important. “Forecast’s like really crap,” she says. “Excuse my language. They’re saying, like, nobody oughtn’t to be driving tonight.”

  “We shall be fine,” Mary says.

  “Good luck,” the child calls after her.

  But part of Mary is not sure she is fine. She sits in the ladies’ using her mobile. Mary has several people to contact, and does not want to do it in front of Justin. She needs to call Omar, though her heart is heavy. The phone calls to Libya have never been easy, hard to get a connection, hard to talk to Omar, but now there is the nagging fear of bad news. She needs to call her friend the accountant, to tell him where she is, and what is happening. She wants to tell him that she loves him, since she has never told him that she loves him, and perhaps she will never escape this place, this endless journey through corridors of ice, this long middle passage between two strangenesses, and even when she arrives, she will be far from home.

  But first she must do what she dreads, and ring Omar. She shivers as she puts in the number, and manages to misdial three times. The line is appalling, racked with howls and moans. Her ex-husband is out, and Awatef seems distant. “He could not look for ever, Mary.” And so he came home. “Baghdad is still dangerous, do you understand?” The boy in the zoo had already moved on, and Omar could not even confirm he was Libyan.

  Omar has come home, without Jamil. Without Jamil. Hope, drags, curdles.

  “Mary, believe me, Omar has tried…but he must also look after his family.”

  “Once he had another family,” says Mary, but Awatef doesn’t hear, and Mary doesn’t repeat it. Instead, she says, “Tell Omar I am sorry.” She is not surprised, but she shivers more severely, shaking so hard that her teeth knock together. So cold, so pitiless, this grey country. She sits and stares blankly at the concrete floor. Then she rings the number Vanessa has given.

  “Mary! I have been mad with worry! Is Justin all right? What on earth has happened!”

  The voice is broken up, it is fizzing with snow. Mary thinks that her little employer must be frozen. (But in fact, Vanessa’s sitting in Lucy’s front room, telling her cousin all about her life, cradling a large balloon of brandy that both of them agree they ‘wouldn’t have usually’. Fortunately Lucy is a good listener. Vanessa is having a lovely time. Lucy makes her feel glamorous. Now she in turn feels benign towards Mary. After all, poor Mary’s writing was a little old·fashioned, even though the agent did her best to be kind. Vanessa is the one who is tipped for success. She’s already drafting the blurb in her head—“a raw, riveting tale of rural lust…”)

  “It is snowing, Vanessa, the road is not easy, but Justin is fine. He is eating chips and drinking his tea.”

  “Where are you?” The voice sounds suspicious now.

  “Crossroads Services, near Freemantle.”

  “You’ve stopped at the Services? That will hold you up. I do hope you’re not going to get here too late.” There is a silence. Mary turns her eyes to the window shivering against the night, its glass shaking and straining in the wind, barely managing to hold back the wild white weather, the unfriendly distances of which Vanessa knows nothing.

  Perhaps alerted by her silence, Vanessa tries again. “Of course the main thing is you’re both all right. It’s just that, you know, preferably, I’d rather you didn’t wake up Lucy.” She cocks one eyebrow at her cousin, who makes polite demurring faces: they mustn’t worry, it is quite all right.

  “Yes, Miss Henman.”

  “Oh really, Mary, by now you must have learned to say Vanessa.” She means it to be friendly, but it comes out wrong, as if she is saying that Mary is stupid, and Mary’s voice echoes back through the snow, muted, stubborn: “To say Vanessa. Yes, Miss Henman.”

  “It isn’t actually snowing here,” Vanessa says, as if that makes it better. “But the forecast did say it was on the way. Isn’t it exciting, a White Christmas! You’ll be able to tell everyone in Uganda you had a real White Christmas with us!”

  Then Mary starts to know she will not be going. A voice in her head says, Never, never. “Yes, Miss Henman. A White Christmas.”

  (But where did that voice come from? Of course she must go. But it speaks to her again: Go home, go home.)

  “Well anyway Mary dear, safe journey. Give my love to Justin. Kissy kissy kissy.”

  53

  Vanessa puts down the phone frustrated, but dramatizes it into a laugh, for Lucy. “That was Mary. Of course, my African friend. Yes, the heroine who saw off that infatuated student. We are very close now, but as you know,
she was my cleaner for years and years. They don’t find it easy to be treated as equals. Even now Mary occasionally calls me Miss Henman. As if she were a child, and I the teacher!”

  And Vanessa starts to glow with her own importance, the power of ruling and then renouncing, the touching affection Mary feels for her now, which “must mean I’m not completely ghastly!” She laughs at the absurdity of that thought. “She saved my life, Lucy, you know.” And then inspiration carries her along. “But I have been able to give something in return. Living in the house of an established writer has encouraged Mary to write about her life. Now I’ve put her in the way of a top literary agent. Of course in my job I have all the contacts. It isn’t certain she’ll be able to help her, but if Mary gets published, won’t it be wonderful?”

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” says Lucy, yawning. “It’s very exciting, all these famous people. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll tear myself away and go up and finish wrapping my presents. I’ve left them out some ham and potato salad.”

  Real snow starts falling, light and lovely, in the blank central space of the double-glazed window that Lucy has framed with spray-on snow and little bunny-scuts of glued cotton wool. “Oh isn’t it glorious, magical,” Vanessa enthuses, as Lucy goes to bed, and then settles down alone with a double gin, the TV controller, and a mug of cocoa. She feels heroic, waiting up for them.

  But she falls asleep, frightened, and still on her own, as the temperature plummets around two am.

  54

  Now Mary is ready to ring her accountant, but she looks at her watch: already ten pm. Midnight in Uganda: too late to ring. She longs for Kampala’s warm earth, tender heat, the sheen of round brown arms in the moonlight. She hopes Charles is being faithful to her.

  She switches to ‘Messages’ to send him a text, but finds to her surprise that he has left her one. She clicks on it, and reads, and reads again, flushes the toilet, and shouts “E-e-eee!” She looks in the cold mirror of the loos, and smiles, and then laughs, and an elderly woman who had peeked around the outside door, gingerly, draws back again. Mary’s all alone in this sterile grey space, but her smile is big and warm enough to light up the room—