My Cleaner Page 2

  We children played outside as dusk fell. We were the only house with a jacaranda. Most people had purple potato trees, which had no special evening sweetness. The sun drew the perfume from the creamy yellow flowers. There were little gold weaver-birds which danced and settled. We chattered like birds and ate sugar cane. Being a child was light, and easy.

  (Yet every so often we were woken by gunfire. Sometimes there were rumours that soldiers were hiding from other soldiers in the bush near by. One thin man, haggard-faced, very important, came and stayed the night with us, and I was told to tell nobody, and not to speak to him, or look at him. But I risked a glance, and he was handsome, and he smiled at me as if he had seen me. I thought he was a hero. My secret hero. Now he is in the government, and people say things about corruption. I think it is harder to be a hero, once you become the power in the land.)

  Our parents told us to go to the city. At night, they talked about the city lights. They said they shone like stars in the distance, though all we could see was low dark hills. The first time I saw the lights for myself was when my father took me to boarding school. There they were, a line of stars on the horizon, and a kind of humming, like a thousand bees. A thousand bees going after money. And they did shine like stars, growing brighter and brighter, until I was dazzled, and forgot about the village.

  I managed to move from the country to the city. I made the great journey between worlds. It kills some people, and drives some of us mad. I did not want this to happen to my children. You see them, walking on the streets of London, the ghosts of Africans attacked by spirits, with matted hair, laughing and shouting. I thought, ‘My children will be born in the city. My children will never suffer like that.’ I meant to have three, or four, or five, not the nine or ten they have in the village. I was proud I knew about family planning. And yet my life has not gone to plan.

  In the end, I had only one child, a son. And no one can predict what their children will suffer. Sometimes I find I am arguing with God. Is it true that he sees every sparrow that falls? Can he see Jamil? Does he care for him?

  I had names for my daughters, but they never came. Life in London was all rushing and running. I loved Omar at first, and we knew such happiness. He made me laugh, as my father had. He liked my cooking. We liked our car. But later there was never enough money to pay the instalments or the petrol or insurance, and my student grant from the government lapsed, and I stopped my MA and became a cleaner. After all my dreams, and my parents’ dreams, this was the future I had seen on the horizon. The shining lights were just empty offices that had to be cleaned before the sun came up. And a hundred dusty bulbs, in dusty houses.

  I thank Jesus that those days are over. Now when the maids come for sheets, they knock politely. It calms my soul, the clean, blank whiteness, the way the maids bow their heads to me. ‘Happy birthday, Miss Mary.’ ‘Happy birthday, Miss.’ The older ones don’t know their own birthdays, but the young ones think they know it all. I do not let them take liberties, though I praise Benedicta, who is polite.

  I am proud to be the Linen Store Keeper. Now I am important, and my life is in order. The white sheets muffle the noise of the city, and the noise of the past, all those foreign cities, the dirt and the mess of the years I lost.

  The sounds in the village were always the same. The city is a muddle of shouts and machines, but the sounds in the village spoke to me. The thump of the wooden pestle on its mortar as the women crushed ground-nuts for ground-nut sauce. Thud-ah, thud-ah like the beats of my heart. And little quick voices of weaver-birds. They dart through the branches like bright yellow thread.

  But now my blood has grown red and loud. When I close my eyes, I am still in the city. There are horns blaring and beggars begging, their feet tipped like flippers from polio. They sit in a line outside the phone-shops. When I lie in the darkness, I no longer see my family home’s white jacaranda, with its buds that opened into yellow-white stars. I am in the city, and it is in me.

  I picked up my letter from the Post Office. It is a strange building, flat and red. They say government spies live on top of the posta. The spies, if they’re there, are welcome to watch me. I do not care about the government. The queues were long because I went at lunchtime. There are fifty queues, and the rules are always changing. I went to my box, clutching my key. The metal felt slippery and hot in my hand. I held it so tight that it marked my palm.

  I was so excited when I saw there was a letter. God had sent me a letter on my birthday. I am not a child, wanting cards and presents, but a letter from my son is my heart’s desire. Jamil had remembered my birthday, a miracle! I felt the whole post office was smiling at me. Trying to hurry, I dropped my letter, and had to clutch it up from the dusty floor.

  I saw my own name, in blue ink, swimming closer. At first I was sure it was Jamie’s writing. My eyes caressed it; my heart leapt and thudded.

  Then it snapped into focus, and everything was wrong. Neat angular writing. Not my Jamie’s. I recognised it, somehow, but it was not his.

  And then my skin stood up in small pimples like the legs of a chicken dead on a table.

  The writer-woman’s writing. Yes, it was her.

  I am still not ready to open it.

  4

  Justin is dreaming about his childhood. It is six pm, and he is still in bed. He has thrown off the thick cloud of duck-down duvet his mother got out for him yesterday and lies sprawled on his back in a sheen of chilled sweat, streaks of blonde hair slicked across his pillow.

  In the dream, all his school-friends have come for tea. He is still at his local primary school, so the friends are every shape and colour. It is his birthday, they are smiling at him. Mary Tendo is making the tea, plates and plates of white bread and red sweet jam, the food he always liked best as a boy, though his mother never allowed white bread. Mary used to buy it when his mother was out. And chocolate biscuits, and crisps, and baked beans.

  But now they are eating a small white giraffe that Mary has bought for him as a treat. The giraffe is quite tough, and starts wriggling, but he wants to eat it to please Mary, though the other children push it away. Now it cocks up its head and looks at him, big reproachful eyes, a long tremulous lip. Suddenly it gets up from the table. It is his mother, who has just come home. Her teeth are big and sharp and yellow and she smells very strongly of giraffe.

  Justin cries out, afraid, and wakes, and sits up, and sees he is alone in a darkening room. Outside the window, it is raining again. He scratches furiously, and goes back to sleep.

  Two rooms away in the big suburban villa, bought for a song twenty years ago, Vanessa Henman is exercising hard, driving herself through her hundredth stomach crunch, her neck tendons cording, her vertebrae clicking. She tries to support her head with her hands but it’s almost impossible to relax it: the head seems to go on working on its own, such a heavy head, such a narrow neck, too long, far too long, for the rest of her body. 100, 101, 102 – and then she remembers she need only do 100, but a voice in her head insists she go on, and for neatness she aims for 110, but the demon drives her to 120. Until ten years ago she ran every day, but the bones in her hips began to ache.

  ‘You have to accept you are getting older,’ the doctor had said to her, quite gently, when she went to ask him to deal with the pain, a decade ago when it still seemed new. ‘None of us is getting any younger, Mrs Henman. It’s probably best to give up the running.’

  ‘Dr Henman, actually,’ she’d snapped at him. (She flushes pink now, remembering.) ‘I can’t give up running, it’s part of me. In any case, I’m only in my forties.’

  Had she known the future, she would have kissed him. For after that meeting with Dr Truman, she had taken up Pilates instead of running, made friends with Fifi, her Pilates teacher, and co-written a book which had made her name and earned them both a lot of money, The Long Lean Line: Pilates for Everyone. It hit the beginning of the craze for Pilates: Vanessa was on every radio show, though Fifi, who was younger, got the television dates
, and starred alone in the video, which had almost caused an argument between them, and Vanessa had to be forgiving. They had followed it up with another three, The Long Lean Line 2, 3 and 4.

  Though it seems the vein might soon be exhausted. She’s had a phone call from her editor. ‘I’m talking to Marketing, Vanessa darling. Maybe we’re coming to the end of the line. No, sorry, of course I’m not trying to be funny.’

  In any case, novels are her métier. She published two novels in the 1980s, which were ‘very well reviewed’, as she always points out. On the strength of them, she got the job she still holds, as Lecturer in Creative Writing at one of the new universities. She started that department, and designed the course, which over the years has grown increasingly popular.

  But the students always ask her what she’s written recently. They only half-smile, and look slightly disappointed, when she tells them about her Pilates books.

  ‘They have made me a lot of money,’ she assures them. ‘Remember there is money to be made from non-fiction.’

  ‘Most of us want to write fiction, and novels,’ a brave, and ignorant, student protested. She gave him B- for his next two assignments.

  Creative Writing, she has come to understand, is a magnet for the unteachable. Two in ten students are actually mad. In recent years she has too often caught herself listening to a student describing the plot of his novel, the two-hour tutorial extending like a desert, as a voice in her ear hisses, quite loudly, ‘This person is insane. Both of us must be. The story he is telling me is not worth telling. Nothing at all in this exchange is real. Why aren’t I writing my own novels?’ She is starting a new module this term, called ‘Autobiography and Life Writing’. Perhaps this will encourage the students to make sense: or perhaps the madness will just come out.

  At least she is still all right for money, though there is the enormity of Justin, the problem of Justin, a limp dead weight, sucking up her energy, her time, her money, weighing on her like a mountain of debt. Every time he breathes, he becomes more costly. How can she write novels with him in the house?

  Vanessa frowns as she trots downstairs. And the stair-carpet’s filmed with a faint spume of hair, her own yellow-blonde hair, which tends to fall out. She is temporarily without a cleaner, since the last one met Justin naked on the landing. ‘I just don’t feel right with men around,’ the woman had whined, as she handed back their keys. Vanessa told herself she could manage without; these days one had to pay cleaners a fortune, and they didn’t do it half as well as oneself. But she’s finding herself too busy to clean, though she sometimes attacks a pan or a surface with furious vigour for ten minutes or so.

  Justin is a liability. How can she keep cleaners with a nudist about?

  It is time for another conference with Tigger – her nickname for Trevor, Justin’s father. She gave him up two decades ago, once she realised he had no ambition, and refused to take things seriously; including her writing, including her. He wouldn’t read the parenthood manuals she bought him. They separated when the boy was just a baby, one and a half, just beginning to talk (it hurt that he said ‘Dadda’ before ‘Mumma’). But Tigger still hung around the house all the time. Though in the last year, since things went wrong for Justin, Tigger has too often been otherwise engaged, falling for a stupid young would-be artist not so much older than his son, some kind of Indian who doesn’t speak English.

  Typical, she thinks, typical of men. All right, he still phoned and he still sent money, he even came round to do trivial jobs, but he seemed to think his loyalty was to this young girl, just because she happened to be living with him.

  Vanessa chops carrots into crisp orange rings, so forcefully she almost cuts off a finger. Usually she is too busy for vegetables, except for the pre-cooked, supermarket kind, but Fifi has suggested that Justin ought to have some, that he is simply short of vitamin C, and that is why he lies in the dark and sleeps. So Vanessa has bought a book called Salads for Life, and is making a mixed salad to share with Justin, though the last one simply sat by the side of his bed, growing limp and brown as the shadows lengthened.

  It doesn’t matter, she won’t give up, she will do the right things, even if no one else does, though Justin’s father has let her down, though Mary Tendo has not answered her letter, though Fifi is often unsympathetic, and her hips still ache, and her students are thick. She will keep up standards: she is a stoic.

  These thoughts are comforting. She chops less fiercely, approving the marriage of reds and oranges, tomatoes and carrots, garnet-bright grapes, of apple-white celeriac and slivers of spring onion, the light and dark greens of the moonlets of cucumber, the silver-pale edges of the iceberg’s frills, the curves of the onion like the bole of a lute, and all of it sitting like grace on the plate, indisputably good for them, and she has made it.

  It matters to Vanessa to do things right.

  5 MARY TENDO

  It is early morning. The sky is red as kisses, the passionate kisses of my friend the accountant who said goodbye to me ten minutes ago. (That is what I call him when the bolder young maids try to find out about my private life. In fact, I am happy that Charles is an accountant, and I like to think of him that way, though in my heart I also call him my kabito, my sweetheart.)

  There are too many people on this taxi. It is a joke, the law that says maximum fourteen. The driver is greedy, and instructs the boy to hang out of the door and take on more people from the crowds of early morning workers at each stop. There are seventeen of us now, and three live chickens which squawk as we rock into the ruts of red earth where the heavy rains have dug into the road that roars up and down the hills of Kampala. A man in front of me has AIDS, or TB. He is very thin, and coughs horribly, and cannot hide it with his bony hand, and everyone tries to move away, but we are packed together like the dried bananas I took with me when I went to London. I think the chicken is pecking my calves, but my legs are pressed hard against a sticky plastic suitcase that belongs to the fat woman next to me, and I cannot turn round to shoo it away.

  I am holding my birthday present on my lap. It is the computer I have always wanted. Not the big heavy thing I had imagined, but a silver laptop, a thing of beauty. It is nearly new, and it is easy to use. I love it more than anyone can imagine. I have longed for one for years, so I can write down the stories unravelling in my head like pieces of ribbon. I will write about my youth, like Hemingway. Already I have written a sentence on it. ‘dear charles thank you for my present. it is my new baby! yours sincerely mary.’ I have not got the hang of the capitals yet. I am clutching it tightly, in case it gets dirty.

  At least the boy keeps the sliding door open so air without germs comes into the taxi. It smells of warm rain and earth and flowers, the red-tulip-flowered trees called kabakanjagala which means ‘the King loves me’. (King Ronald still loves us, though he does not really rule us. Now we are ruled by Museveni, and he loves us so much he doesn’t want to leave us. So people whisper he might rig the elections. I think it would be better if he loved us less.)

  I spent last night with my friend the accountant who lives in a new flat in the suburb of Bukoto. Charles took me to a smart café, western-style, which opened recently on the Jinja Road, where we had a big table with a white cloth just for the two of us, and small portions, and the waiter was a boy who called me ‘Madam’, though I thought he was laughing at me behind his eyes, and most of the other guests were bazungu, nearly as white as the tablecloths. I think I would rather have gone to Jimmy’s, where you eat smoking hot pork under the stars, delicious muchomo, with your fingers. But in the end I had a very nice birthday, a very nice night with my friend the accountant, and was too busy to read my letter. Now it is morning, although in London it will still be the middle of the night.

  Henman is in London. Henman is sleeping. Does she still live in that big empty house, so much too big for only two people?

  I worked for her, nearly a decade ago. Miss Henman. Vanessa Henman. Nessie. I spent eight years with her, at firs
t twice a week, then every afternoon, because she found me useful. With her son Justin, who was like my own, but what? But easier to love. (Not that I loved him more than Jamie. I have never loved anyone more than Jamie.)

  Easier to love, because not mine. I did not have to fight with his father. Indeed, I liked the little boy’s father, though the writer-woman seemed to despise him, and talked about him jeeringly, both in his presence and his absence. She called him ‘Tiger’, an animal’s name.

  In fact this Trevor was very clever. He mended the washing-machine and the boiler. He made the radiators work one winter when there was snow on the ground outside and the heating broke and we nearly froze to death. I became worried about Justin. English children are pale as ice. His little fingers were blue like the sea, the blue-grey sea that is a wall around England. But he said, ‘My dad is coming soon. I know my dad will be able to fix it.’ And his mother was screaming, ‘Why isn’t he here?’ But then Trevor arrived, and like magic, fixed it.