My Cleaner

by Gee, Maggie

  ‘It belonged to someone.’

  ‘I think it is a woman.’

  His red lips smiled, and he looked away.

  ‘Justin, what is the name of this woman?’ And then his face began to collapse, like a balloon after the end of a birthday party. (His mother always came to his birthday parties. But I did the work. I blew up the balloons. I blew them up till my cheeks ached with blowing. Usually Tigger, his father, helped me. Miss Henman took a photo of Justin blowing out his candles, but I baked the cake and stuck in the candles. You have to be patient, since they keep falling over, and poor Miss Henman could not be patient.)

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s not important.’

  So then I knew it was important. But I let it rest, I will get there in the end. Akwat’empola atuuka wala. I can be cunning, when I need to.

  ‘Justin, will you tell me why you stay in bed?’

  And then he started to look disagreeable. I know that face very well. Already over a decade ago I remember how his lip would curl at the corner, and both nostrils would go a pointed shape, like a cow breathing out after it has been running. It was the only time Justin looked like his mother.

  ‘I think you know. I bet my mother has told you. I’m supposed to be ill. Everyone says so. The doctors are doing a load of tests.’

  ‘So are you ill, Justin? What do you think?’

  ‘What do you think?’ He turned the question to me.

  His eyes were blue, and still very young. It was hard to tell him what I think.

  I do not believe he has ever travelled. London is another world from Uganda. In my mind, the worlds clash sharply together like the brass cymbals in the church band. Maybe it is hard to know two worlds –

  But all of a sudden I was very angry. I did not show it, but I wanted to strike him. I thought of the sickness in the villages. This mummy’s boy should be sent to Uganda. People younger than him are still dying of AIDS, losing their lives because of ignorance, although in Uganda we educate people, with leaflets and posters and plays in schools where AIDS is shown as a gorilla or a devil and the school-children attack it with spears. Maybe clever Justin would laugh at that, but sometimes it is good for a message to be simple.

  Let him see how everyone works, in Uganda. Even the very ill work harder than him. The sick people are panting in the heat in the fields, till they become too tired to feed their children. Let him see how some mothers, knowing they are dying, fill in Memory Books for their children, writing down everything the little ones need, names of the grandparents and cousins, stories about the children as babies. These are the Memory Books I used to print out on the photocopier of the Nile Imperial. Justin has a soft heart, he would sob if he read them. And there’s not enough medicine; some only have aspirin, while the bathroom cupboard here is stuffed with medicine. Expensive medicine, only half-used. Every kind of painkiller for Vanessa, because she is frightened of getting small headaches, vitamins for this overfed boy.

  This boy who lies here all day, sucking sweets. Only the dying lie in bed in Uganda. I looked at his body. Fattish and white. I wanted to strike him, or shout with rage.

  But instead, I surprised myself by starting to sing, and as I sang, I became less angry. What came from my lips was a nursery rhyme that we learned together when Justin was little, when Vanessa gave me a nursery-rhyme tape, ‘Traditional English Nursery Rhymes’, and told me to listen to it with Justin, because he knew only African songs. ‘Georgie Porgy, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry ...’ I sang very loudly, because I was angry, only two inches from his large pink ear, which made Justin jump like a startled kob, but then he smiled, and began to join in. ‘When the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgy ran away.’

  Of course, I have loved him since he was small. I know that he is sick in his soul. Now he is an adult, I pity him. And all the English. They’ve grown soft and weak.

  ‘Mary, do you think I am ill?’ he asked.

  ‘Now I am here, you will get better.’

  ‘Thank you, Mary. You’re wonderful.’ The smile he gave me was warm and sweet. I thought, it is not his fault he is English. I remembered they can be kind, and polite. The educated ones have very nice manners; we Baganda people appreciate that.

  He took hold of my hand again, and kissed it.

  ‘I knew that you would save me, Mary.’

  I did not say any more to him. Maybe the Henman had driven him crazy, always instructing him and asking him questions. Maybe that is why Justin sleeps all the time.

  I shall find the girl who owned the necklace.

  14

  Vanessa tells herself to be calm, and yet she lies awake worrying.

  It feels as if Mary is doing, well, nothing. Vanessa instructs herself: think positive.

  Of course Mary will concentrate on Justin at first. And then she will have to recover from her journey. What matters is that we all get on.

  She remembers, uncomfortably, more details of how things went wrong with Mary last time. Mary was asking for more money. Perhaps Vanessa had got just a tad out of date, but one couldn’t forever be raising wages ... Happily this time she has been generous. Five hundred pounds a month, she reminds herself. She does the comforting sums yet again.

  When Vanessa went to Kampala, the preceding year, she had discussed the staff question with several Europeans. They all admitted that wages were low, but most of them claimed to pay over the odds. The figures they quoted were amazingly low: 80,000 shillings a month for inside servants, 50,000 for a shamba boy to do the garden. (‘I mean, the natives pay their people peanuts – 15,000 a month, would you believe?’) 80,000 shillings was twenty-six pounds. That worked out at ... Vanessa’s excitement increases. They are paying them six pounds a week out there, less than a pound a day! And that was thought generous.

  Looked at in that light, Mary is rich. She is earning more than one hundred pounds per week. Thirteen times the wage of a servant in Uganda. Not that Mary is a servant here, of course. But Vanessa hopes that Mary will be grateful. In fact, perhaps Vanessa is paying her too much.

  She doesn’t want Mary to think her foolish.

  Vanessa tosses and turns, thoughtful. It would be awkward now to lower the wages, but perhaps she can approach it from another direction.

  Does she really have to employ a new cleaner, now Mary is living here with them? Surely she will expect to clean, since that is what she did before? ‘I will leave it to her own common sense,’ Vanessa tells herself, and begins to doze off. ‘I will get out the cleaning things, and leave them in the kitchen, next to the vacuum and the mop. And perhaps a shopping list, and some money, and the car keys, and perhaps the secateurs, as well, because Mary used to help Tigger in the garden, when he came round at weekends, and the roses do need pruning ... Africans, after all, are basically farmers.’

  ‘While you settle in, I will do the cooking,’ she had said to Mary on her third day, after Mary had overslept again. ‘I expect you have jet lag. Never mind.’

  And Vanessa does do the cooking, at first, and the shopping, as usual, from the supermarket, where she reckons she can ‘fly round’ in quarter of an hour and get enough food for the next few days. It isn’t her style to make a list, shop in bulk, fill up the freezer: she’s a working woman; she has no time. But on days when she isn’t at the university, she sometimes drives to the supermarket early, enjoying the feeling of virtue that brings, darts haphazardly down half-empty aisles, scooping up items that take her fancy, and then, when she tires of it, relapses to the checkout and scoots her trolley to the coffee shop, where she buys a giant latte and skims the paper while the frozen food gently defrosts at her feet.

  After all, she’s never wanted to be a housewife. Her mother was a housewife. Life has moved on.

  She comes home on the eighth day after Mary arrives with three heavy bags, hauls them into the kitchen, and feels suddenly low at the thought of unpacking them. Upstairs the house sounds far too peaceful. She’s inured to Justin sleeping all the time,
but the thought of them both in bed is maddening. So she dumps the bags in the middle of the floor – if the bacteria want to multiply, let them – makes a pot of amber-pale Lapsang Souchong, pours a tiny, delicate lagoon into her favourite, petal-thin, cherry-blossom cup, slips into her study and telephones Fifi.

  ‘Fifi talk to me darling. I need a friend. No absolutely right, I’m not very happy. Mary isn’t doing a hand’s turn. They both just lie there. I am waiting on them.’

  ‘It’s their energy levels,’ Fifi says. ‘You have to release their energy blocks. I did tell you about the “Lettuce Plus” diet?’ She hears Vanessa sigh down the line. ‘When did Mary get here? She’s probably exhausted. Don’t forget you are bathed in radiation in planes. But you always said she was a good little worker.’

  Vanessa clutches at this straw of encouragement. ‘I don’t want to sound as if I am complaining. At least Justin’s shaved. Meaning, he’s walked to the bathroom. Don’t you think he looks terribly handsome when he shaves?’

  ‘Ness, you have to stay calm. You have to stay focussed. You have to accept he can be a pain. Sometimes I’m relieved not to have any children.’

  Vanessa pounces on her favourite theme. ‘Most people don’t realise how a mother suffers – ’

  But Fifi moves swiftly to head her off. ‘Perhaps you should try him on Pilates again? We both know exercise does wonders for depression.’

  Is she trying to say that Vanessa is depressed? Is she hinting that Justin is malingering? Vanessa remembers that Fifi gets jealous when Justin takes up too much of her attention. Once Fifi had actually complained that her Siamese, Mimi, doesn’t get a look in. ‘My son is ill,’ Vanessa says, loftily. ‘Obviously we all know exercise would help him, but frankly, walking down the landing is a start. At least he doesn’t wet the bed any more.’

  Mimi was house-trained as a tiny kitten. After such frankness, Fifi rings off hastily and goes for a long aromatherapy session.

  Invigorated by their little exchange, Vanessa returns to her unpacking.

  She has grown disillusioned with the “Lettuce Plus” diet that Fifi always bangs on about, though according to her handbook, Salads for Life, it is ‘guaranteed to energise the stress-weary’. (But could Justin be stressed, after working six months and lying supine for another six?)

  So Vanessa has returned to her favourite kind of food, which has always been smooth, and white, and mild, although she has a horror of sliced white bread, which Justin likes, and she forbids. The bags she unloads are packed with neat small blankets of starch and sugar and hardened fat, cook-chill lasagnes, prefilled pancakes, palped chicken breasts in white wine and cream, warm mouthfuls oozing with mother’s milk that just need sucking out of soft plastic packets, bland swimmy curries that coat the throat paired with sticky sweet pastes of precooked rice, innocuous veal schnitzels in shrouds of pale crumb, butter-soft purées of neutered root.

  Good, Vanessa thinks, inspecting this hoard. At least I don’t have a life like my mother. At least I don’t have my father to please. That grim little kitchen. The scratched steel sink. At least I don’t bake bread or kill chickens.

  Home is uncomfortable to think about. A thousand miles away from her well-stocked fridge-freezer, her golden infusion of Lapsang Souchong. She gulps down her tea, and does the ‘Tree’ position from yoga.

  All she has to do is stay calm and focussed. Dear Mary will soon get the bit between her teeth.

  15

  At first Mary finds Vanessa’s food delicious. And life in London is wonderfully easy. She does not have to get up at four to be at work at five, as she does in Kampala: she need not buy vegetables from the market and scrub and peel and chop and boil. She does not need to heft hacked shanks of meat, bloody and bony and awkward to carry, back from the butcher’s to her little flat. She is happy that Vanessa is doing all the cooking. Mary’s job is just to serve two plates, one for herself and one for Justin, and take it upstairs to Justin’s room, where she wakes him up, and drags him upright, and tries to make him eat with her. If he doesn’t eat, Mary takes no notice, but eats her own meal and lets him talk.

  But after ten days, Mary doesn’t feel well. She wakes up thinking, Omutwe gunnuma. Lwaki? She never gets headaches in Kampala. Her belly too. Olubuto lunnuma. She looks at her belly. She is definitely fatter. It is probably packed full of cream and soft meat. Her back aches too. She is constipated. She sits there, suffocated, stogged with pale England.

  She has never lived this way before. She quite likes the idea of convenience food, because she is a modern woman, but when she lived with Omar, they rarely ate it, because she wanted to be a good wife. She told him she would learn to cook like his mother, and soon she was good enough to entertain his sisters, when they came to London, suspicious, critical. Omar had asked them, in their own harsh language, if they could find fault with Mary’s sharba libya, lamb slowly cooked in vegetable ghee with tomatoes and hararat and cinnamon. Both of them admitted it was delicious. ‘It is because Mary always adds parsley at the end, it freshens the flavour. It is better!’ he told them, this time in English so Mary could enjoy it. After that, naturally they rounded on her when she served them delicate Libyan rice-puddings: ‘You cannot make mhalbiya without any atr!’ But Omar ate with gusto and laughed at them. ‘Where would she find extract of geranium, in London?’ He loved her Ugandan dishes too, rich groundnut stew bubbling with chillies and ginger, fibrous cassava or yam with beef. Mary would keep quiet when Ugandans in London complained that they never had time to cook properly.

  Vanessa, it seems, has never cooked properly.

  The next time Mary has a meal with Justin, she has to ask him an awkward question. But Mary has known him since he was a boy. She uses the words that she used then.

  ‘Mr Justin – Justin. How often do you poo?’

  She is looking at him so seriously that Justin straight away bursts out laughing. ‘Mary you are funny. You can’t ask me that.’ He takes a big mouthful of mashed potato, which his mother bought ready-mixed with cream and nutmeg, and carries on laughing, in little hiccups.

  Then Mary smiles too, and looks like a conspirator. When she speaks next, she is whispering. ‘Because since I came to live in this house, Justin, I do not poo. My body must have a plug like a bathtub. Justin, you must tell me your secrets. Is it that in the UK, no one poos?’

  After a lot of giggling, she wheedles it out of him. Justin, too, hardly ever poos. ‘Perhaps twice a week,’ he finally tells her. ‘But I mean, Mary – we really don’t count.’

  ‘In Uganda, I poo at least twice a day.’ This claim, made with pride and a demure downward look, makes Justin burst out laughing again.

  ‘Mary, it’s just so cool that you are here.’

  ‘Justin, I am going to have to make changes. Soon we will be pooing every day.’

  Vanessa, who happens to be walking down the landing, hears gales of laughter from Justin’s bedroom, and is once more racked with curiosity. But she goes downstairs telling herself to be happy. If he’s laughing, Mary is a good investment. And very soon, surely, she’ll take over the housework.

  It is true she has ignored the cleaning things, left hopefully out by the tall cupboard. But Justin is definitely livelier. One morning he smiles at his mother on the landing, and it is only half-past ten, and he has pyjama trousers on, which is certainly an advance on nothing. The plates Mary brings down after meals are empty. So Vanessa grits her teeth and goes on cooking. She has deferred the question of hiring a new cleaner.

  Yet the house is getting dirtier: balls of hair and dandruff on the fitted carpets, a mottled skin of grey on the basins, tidemarks of brownish scale in the bath, a faint smell of urine around the lavatory. The kitchen floor bears ghosts of spilled sauces: when the oven goes on, it smells of old burnt food. Vanessa decides not to notice it. That is what Tigger always recommends. Trevor has a gift for not noticing things. It is maddening, but it keeps him contented. Vanessa feels she is learning wisdom. Perhaps she will never lose
her temper again. She does a deal with an unnamed god in her brain: make Justin better, and I’ll be a new person.

  Life goes on like that until the night Mary notices her innards are chock-full of white rice and precooked chicken.

  The next day, Mary gets up at seven. Vanessa hears the front door closing and runs along the landing, heart in her mouth, to check that Justin is still in his room. He is still in his room, but Mary is gone. She reappears at ten with three bulging shopping bags. She leaves a sheaf of scrawled receipts on the table, torn scraps of paper from some crude market. Within half an hour, the kitchen is changing.

  The earth has spilled roots out on to its lap, great brown and red tubers, white in cross-section where Mary has sawed some off for the pot. Great bullet-hard cabbages like dark green oilskins, with bulging white veins as strong as bone. Fat misshapen carrots like giant’s fingers, ringed with knuckles of dirt, trailing six inches of hair; tomatoes puffed and quilted like marrows; pinky-gold mangoes smelling faintly of rot; cocoa-brown cassava as thick as a wrist; two enormous hands of black oversized bananas. And other things packed in rough paper or sacking: shiny beans like pebbles: coarse brown rice. Mary unpacks, and straight away starts cooking, dragging out an old black iron cauldron that has not been used since Tigger was here.

  Vanessa hovers on the threshold, watching, uneasy at this vegetable flood, this weird invasion of living things into her kitchen, and there is Mary, in vigorous action, her strong back bending and straightening, her taut arms whirling like a Hindu goddess.

  At two o’clock there is a giant lunch, after which Vanessa goes in to college feeling as if she has swallowed a farm. Her stomach makes noises throughout her workshop, and one of the MA students gets the giggles. When she comes home at six, Mary is cooking again. The kitchen has been cleaned and tidied, though the rest of the house is still in disorder, and the lunchtime washing-up is stacked dirty on the draining-board.