My Cleaner Read online

  MAGGIE GEE

  MY CLEANER

  TELEGRAM

  Part 1

  1

  The sun is shining on Uganda. Today is Mary Tendo’s birthday.

  The sun is shining on fields of white sheets in the hotel linen-store Mary keeps. Soon she will walk to the Post Office and find a letter that will change her life.

  2

  ‘I sent a letter to my cleaner – ’

  In London, it is warm and grey, already warm at nine am, though tomorrow it will be cold again. Most of the summer has been rather chilly, which gives the British a lot to talk about. They creep closer to each other under veils of cloud.

  It is three hours earlier than in Kampala. Vanessa Henman has been up for half an hour and is feeling brisk and pleased with herself. She is on the phone to her best friend, Fifi.

  ‘– Oh, you’re just eating your breakfast, I see. As usual, I’ve been up for absolutely hours. So anyway, today I’m feeling more hopeful. Last week I sent a letter to my cleaner – you won’t remember her – my former cleaner – Yes, black. Yes, young. Well Justin adored her. She went back to Africa years ago. I’ve asked her to come back and help with him. No I didn’t see her when I went to Kampala, of course I didn’t, I was terribly busy, to be frank it was all rather high-powered, embassy parties and what-have-you. No, writing the letter was Justin’s idea. He says I never listen to him, so I thought if I wrote – Yes, exactly. But who knows if we’ll hear from her?’

  A slight noise behind her makes Vanessa look up. She shrieks, loudly, and almost drops the phone. A tall young man is standing in the doorway, long and white and soft and naked, with a string of amber beads round his neck. As she screams, he covers his cock with his hand. ‘What’s the matter, Mother?’ he asks, irritably.

  In her ear, a tiny voice is worrying: ‘What on earth’s the matter? Are you all right, Ness?’

  ‘It’s Justin. I didn’t expect to see him up. Justin, why are you up at this time? I’d better go. Kissy kissy, Fifi.’

  She puts the phone down and glares at him accusingly. How long has her son been listening?

  ‘You ought to be pleased that I am up.’ His flesh has a greyish, unlit look. The lines of the muscles have lost definition, she thinks, anxiously assessing.

  ‘I am pleased darling but you gave me a shock. I was just telling Fifi that I’d written to Mary.’

  ‘It’s the fourth of July. It’s Mary’s birthday.’ He suddenly smiles a radiant smile, and colour returns to his big, loose mouth, and his cheeks lift, and he is very handsome; but his pointless happiness enrages Vanessa.

  ‘How can you possibly remember?’ Suddenly he irritates her beyond bearing, his great pale nakedness, his soft sulky voice, his haywire corona of uncut yellow curls, the fact he is here in her study in the morning when normally he sleeps until four pm, his ridiculous pretence of remembering Mary’s birthday –

  When only a few weeks ago, he forgot his mother’s.

  She sits and stares at him, vibrating faintly, wondering if he is really her son.

  He turns and leaves with a sudden turn of speed, his eyes on the floor, his arms clasping his torso, his cock swinging round and semi-unfurling like a big soft lily in a nest of golden filaments, then stubs his toe on a pile of books, and hops on, swearing as offensively as possible, the orange beads bouncing below his collar-bones, hard on the softness of his flesh.

  His mother watches him go, despairing. He will not get up for the rest of the day.

  Vanessa stares at her crowded desk. The in-tray is layered like puff-pastry, collapsing, sliding at both sides. An old-fashioned birthday card sits by the desklight, with sugary roses and a scattering of glitter. It gives her a strange feeling, this birthday card. It was sent from the village where she was born, which she’s hardly revisited since she left home. Vanessa is proud to be a Londoner, a sophisticate, a creature of the city. And yet her village is still out there, somewhere. Somewhere down motorways and dim summer lanes. The card makes her feel guilty, but also happy, because the link is not quite broken. But the card is hideously ugly. Vanessa sighs, and shoves it out of sight.

  (But two days later, she will write a letter to the cousin she has not seen since girlhood.)

  Outside her study window the sky is low and lidded. Vanessa Henman frowns at the clouds.

  She thinks, I need light. I am a creature of light. The sun must be shining on Africa.

  One year ago, I was in Kampala.

  3 MARY TENDO

  Today is my birthday. It is a great day. The sun is shining on Kampala.

  Thank God for my birthday. ‘It’s Mary’s birthday.’ Little Benedicta, the third room-maid, who wants to please me, told the porter, who helped me to the lift with my bag, which was heavy because it held the Memory Books I am printing out for my friend in NACWOLA. They will go up country, for the women with AIDS. The porter doesn’t realise that I’m used to carrying, because in England I worked like a dog. I have strong muscles underneath my pink blouse. But I smile sweetly and let him help me.

  Here I am important, the Linen Store Keeper. It is a good job, only just below the House Keeper. Perhaps as a graduate I might have done better, but everything doesn’t go to plan. The years of wandering, years I lost, times that I don’t need to think about, for I have done well, I have found my place. I wear a smart suit, and the thin gold chain that Omar gave me when I was his wife.

  It must have been a good day for my parents, thirty-eight years ago, back in our village. I wish they were here to be glad with me. Though we did not count the days, in the village. There were no dates, there was no diary. I was the child who came with the harvest. Later we had to fill in a form, and that was when they invented my birthday. In Britain, my birthday became real. My Omar gave me a birthday card. And every year Justin drew me a picture – Miss Henman’s boy, like my second son. That little, white-haired, white-skinned boy. And my real son, Jamie, covered me with kisses. My English birthdays made me happy.

  In this country we have learned to be happy when we are not frightened of a revolution. Maybe people in the government are lining their pockets, but politicians always line their pockets. At least now the army is under control. Later this year there is another election and maybe we’ll have to be frightened again, and rush like crazies to hoard tins and packets, and wait for rumours, like we did the last time –

  But everything is better than it was when I was little. The butchery and terror of Amin, Obote. So we live for today. Live in the day. There are things we have lost, things we have suffered, but now, today, there is a ring of sunlight. We’re a long time dead, so let us be happy!

  In the village it seemed we were always happy, despite the gunfire we heard at night, despite the killings not far away. The laughter still flies like birds in my ribcage. My days, my days. They are all still with me. The riches that my birthday brings me.

  Jamie, Jamil. My beloved son.

  Today I received a letter from England. A letter from UK, and my heart started drumming. Maybe Jamie had managed to get to London.

  I walked to the posta in my lunch break. Occasionally Omar still sends me letters, and other friends from other countries, and I tell them to write to my PO Box (although it is a nuisance when I forget my key) because in the hotel trade nothing is certain. I like to think I could resign tomorrow, then no one has any power over me. Sometimes I threaten to leave, and they raise my wages, though actually I like my job, and for the moment I mean to stay.

  The Post Office stands opposite the big foreign banks on the red main road of our capital city. The road is pot-holed by heavy rain and then baked dry in the sun again. I am used to this road, with its rivers of traffic, shaking and honking in all directions, though when I first arrived it made me sick and dizzy. I c
ame from the village a lifetime ago, but now the city has entered my veins, dusty and bright and bursting with faces, shining black, almost blind in the sun, rushing me with them into the future.

  The future grips us in its jaws. Once this was the City of Antelopes. Now there are no more golden kobs jumping away down the green slopes. So many shops selling mobile phones, dozens of them, hundreds, though many people buy them, then can’t afford to keep paying for air-time. So the city is littered with dead metal beetles. But the shops keep on springing up cheerful and hopeful, decorated in bright yellow plastic, with tidy staff in the South African style, smiling at us all in sky-blue uniforms. And there are South African burger bars, too, copies of American burger bars, where confident young people sit and smoke and talk and wave their mobiles at each other. Though surely they cannot like the food. It is ten times the price of smoked beef and matooke. They make the burgers from the animals’ entrails, teeth and hooves, stuck together with fat. My friend who works there told me about it. The ice-cream is nice. Sweet and creamy.

  I sit in the linen store. Here I rule. Nze Kabaka wa wanno. The linen store of the Nile Imperial, one of the biggest hotels in the city. Queen of these orderly white fields. It is very quiet. I am in control. I make sure the paperwork is done. Some of the newer maids are slovenly, but I soon teach them how to fill in the forms. And little Benedicta is always helpful. She sharpens my pencils, and brings me tea.

  There are straight-edged bales of cloth like new snow. I never saw snow until I was in England. But I had seen it in the nursery rhyme book they taught us to read with at primary school, and there were pictures of pretty, chilly white children, and strange dark pointed Christmas trees. Later I bought my own tree, in London. My friend Abdu Mawanga helped me carry it home.

  I’m a woman of the world. I have travelled, seen things. The months and years in other places. I count them up like beads on a string. Most Ugandans have never left home. I must remember I am lucky, happy. Katonda anjagalanyo.

  The sun setting over Leptis Magna. Omar, my husband, took me there. It is a great ruined city in Libya. He took me there, as a wife, a lady. He had a camera. He took pictures of me, by the severed stone heads of the snakey-haired women. There were fifty of them. They were all different. Each of them looked sad in a different way. And those sadnesses survived two thousand years of history.

  But we were still young, and very happy. Happiness never turns into stone. Happiness gleams like sand in your hands. We tried out the echo in the open air theatre. Beyond the stage, more sand, then sea. The sky was bright blue and had no edges. There were no clouds. It was full of hope. There was sand in my pockets for years and years. Hard bright grains to press with my fingers.

  It is not only Omar’s fault that we parted. When you’re far from home, marriage isn’t easy. Munamawanga. You are different, and people are distant and suspicious. Neither of the families can support you. Nobody understands your problems.

  But Omar was good. He taught me to drive. Some of his Arab friends didn’t want their wives to drive, but Omar taught me, and was proud of me. Yes, at first he loved me, and encouraged me. Our car was a second-hand Nissan Bluebird. In England, bluebirds mean happiness. A blue tin box of happiness. We closed the windows, and were warm inside. For years it was enough for us. I forgot my degree, I forgot my ambitions.

  But I do not forgive him for taking my Jamie. Jamie, Jamil. Beloved boy.

  Still I am glad that my husband loved me.

  The sun rose over the bridges of London as my bus ran along the burning Thames. Going home from my work as the sun came up and office workers were beginning their day. The same sun we have in Africa, but there it is wrapped in white spider-thread. I got up every morning in the dark and cold while my husband Omar was still fast asleep, because he had studied until two in the morning. I did my work like the other foreigners, cleaning the offices of the sleeping English. They arrived, yawning, as we went for our breakfast, we hundreds and thousands of people from the empire. (They say that Uganda was not part of the empire, they say it was just a ‘protectorate’, which makes me laugh! Protecting us from what? From the other competing bazungu empires.)

  The British Empire was already just a memory. And yet, these office workers were still our masters. They never knew us or talked to us, but we knew about them, from their wastepaper baskets. I wanted to arrive in a suit, as they did, and drink the coffee from the coffee-machine, and use their phones to call my family, and drop old chewing-gum like them, as if the ground would swallow it up. I wanted those people to know my name. (We had names for them, too, they knew nothing about: ‘Hair Shedder’, ‘Sticky Pants’, ‘Snot Finger’.)

  Later in the day I went to their houses and did the same job for less money. It was the only way to enter their houses, to feel what English lives were like. Some of them pretended I was not there. I walked through their rooms, dusting their dust, shush, shush, shush, shush. I was their guest, I was their ghost.

  But now I have a good job, in Kampala. I wear shiny high heels imported from Dubai, which are cheap to me, at 10,000 shillings, so I have three pairs in different colours, and pink-and-blue Masai beads from Kenya, and my flat has a TV-clock-radio and white plastic furniture you just sponge clean, all done in seconds, as good as new. And a small refrigerator with an ice-box. And a special bin for the sliced white bread I buy whenever I feel like it, and a tin for the cakes I enjoy at weekends.

  I have a shelf of books left behind by hotel guests and another shelf I have bought myself, although books in Uganda are very expensive. (I own three books by Ernest Hemingway. He was a foolish man in some ways, but I like his short sentences – short sentences help you to be truthful. He told the truth about being young and having no money to buy books, like me. And about how first love slips into the past, which is also something that happened to me.) Soon I shall buy a second-hand computer, and my friend the accountant will help me to use it. I can type already, so it will be easy. Maybe I will write my own story.

  I go to church regularly, of course, although my kabito does not come with me. I arrive early, and sit near the front, and sing out the hymns from my family hymn book. The pastor knows me and I am respected, though I do not rush up to the altar and bear witness in the new, American evangelists’ style.

  A lifetime ago I left my village. I shall go back some day, when I have more money. I wanted to take my son to see them. The old ones deserved to see my son –

  But I haven’t returned. It is my goal for the future. I will go back rich, with sugar and paraffin. Take them a netball, and a football.

  I will go back with Charles, my friend the accountant. He will drive his car, and wear his suit.

  (Will anyone remember me? My parents have gone, but there are still aunts and uncles. The cousins. I had so many cousins. My friends who sat on the ground with me. We sat in the shade of the mango tree. It was big, and old, with a crown of pink fingers. Sometimes we held hands, and watched the giant ants, wobbling through the dust with their long black bellies. We told each other stories about the village, and made up tales about the city, where Queen Elizabeth might be visiting our king, Kabaka Freddie. Though later the Kabaka died, in England, and people whispered that he had been poisoned.)

  We children always knew we had to leave the village. In order to come back. More, better, different. It was our parents who told us to go. They saw us as teachers, lawyers, dentists, doctors, even presidents. Did they not see we might be porters and cleaners, taxi drivers, parking attendants? Despite our degrees and certificates.

  My father was a farmer, for most of his life, though he worked in Kasese, when I was little, and later, when he was old, he got sick. But most of the time he was what people call a peasant. Although in the village our family was important. Our land grew bananas, maize, sorghum, black and white beans, tomatoes, sweet potatoes. My mother kept him at it, for he liked waragi, and as he grew older, he liked it more, but he never beat my mother, like the other fathers. One day, though
, he fell off our bicycle under the wheels of a bus from the city, and his leg was broken, and the bananas were ruined, and after that he couldn’t ride the bicycle. In our district women don’t ride bicycles, except as passengers, side-saddle. The village men don’t like women who ride. They think sitting astride does something to a woman. So we had to pay one of the uncles to sell our bananas, and he always complained that the bicycle was crooked.

  My mother sold maize and potatoes by the roadside, and beautiful pyramids of tomatoes, as neat as the triangles I drew at school. I loved the hot sweet smell of our tomatoes. The bazungu in jeeps paid good prices for our vegetables, white people travelling through Africa, and thanked us too much, and took photographs, although we had doubled the price for them. I practised my English: ‘Hallo, how are you?’ Some of the other children had bad manners: ‘Hallo, how are you, give me money.’ Then the bazungu looked pink and unhappy, and got back into their jeeps and drove away.

  We had five books. My family was lucky. My father was a barman when he was young in the big hotel for white people near Kasese, near Kilembe mines where they mined copper and cobalt. All the young men wanted to go to Kilembe, to make their fortunes and have adventures, and my mother said it was all the fashion to be courted by a Kilembe boy. My father sent home money, and he brought things back with him, some sheets and pillows, and knives and forks. He said he was happier after they sacked him, when he came back home and looked after the farm, but if so, why did he drink so much? He brought us three novels in English, which careless bazungu had left in the hotel. I read them until they broke into islands. Her Destiny, The Shores of Love, and another title I cannot remember where everyone was stabbed in an English castle. You had to guess the murderer. I did not really care about it. And we had a Bible. And a hymn book.

  The Bible is the single most beautiful book. I read it nearly every day, at home. And we had a copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern, pages 49 to 306. Though many of our neighbours had the everyday prayer book with the hymns we usually sang in the church, no one else had Ancient and Modern. The covers were lost, with hymns 1 to 73. When I came to Kampala, to university, Maama sent it with me, and in the nearby church, it was the book they used, but they had half a dozen copies for five hundred people. So I sang from our book, and was the envy of others. The rest just stood there humming and moving their lips, trying to say the words after me. Maama said the book was mine, when I left Uganda. By that time, though, I had read hundreds of books, all the shelves of my friend the professor who taught me at Makerere University. I loved Charles Dickens, and Chinua Achebe. I loved Mrs Jellyby, and Becky Sharp. For a week I wanted to be pale like Becky. I wanted to make a life, like her. I loved the poets, and the playwrights. But I was still grateful for our family hymn book.