My Cleaner Read online

  Little blond Justin. Pointy nose, grey eyes. I think he looked very like his father. An English face with sharp small features, except his mouth, which was round, like a rose. He liked to be kissed. He liked to kiss. He liked to be with me when I worked in the kitchen. I liked it too. Children make me smile. All my adult life I have felt short of children.

  He wasn’t allowed in his mother’s room. He couldn’t be around her when she was working. He was always with me. I liked him there. The more I liked him, the less I liked her.

  I met the writer-woman through a postcard in the newsagent. ‘Nice friendly family requires trained cleaner.’ Trained? What did she mean? Not to do doo-doo on her floor? I was trained to be a teacher or a writer like her. I have been to Makerere University, ‘the best university in Africa’. (Everyone says that who hasn’t been there, and I always smile and agree with them, although bits of Makerere are falling down.)

  I went round to see her, smiling, smiling. She shook my hand as if we were equals (I was never equal to the people I cleaned for. I knew all about them, all their dirtiness, the secret habits that no one else knew, the places they left snot, or sanitary towels, the fruit they left to moulder in the bins meant for paper. And so, I was superior.)

  And yet, not all of them were bad. Even the Henman is not all bad.

  That day she was alone with her small son, who was pulling at her skirt and snatching at her sleeve. I saw she could not make him behave. I saw he needed her to look at him. At the same moment, I started to love him.

  I asked her, where was the family? She looked puzzled, and then she laughed. ‘You are from Africa, of course. This is a single-parent family. That means, it is just me and my boy. Women like me rather like it that way.’ She said it with a strange, show-off face that made me think she did not really like it.

  ‘Women like me’. She meant modern women, not African women with too many children and aunts and sisters and grandparents. I thought, well somewhere there must be a father, unless this woman is the Virgin Mary, but I said nothing, only smiled politely, and looked at her as if I admired her.

  (But how can you be happy not to have a family?)

  I asked her what the job would be.

  ‘Oh not very much, I’m not a fussy person.’ Her smile was thin and nervous. She wanted me to like her, but I knew what they were like, these thin smiling women. ‘Just wash the floors, vacuum, dust and polish. I do like a really clean kitchen and bathroom, and sometimes I’m afraid that means hands and knees.’

  It took me a moment to see what she meant. She thought I would kneel down to clean her floor. ‘Yes, yes, Madam,’ I said, smiling, smiling. She was stupid, so perhaps she would pay me well. ‘How much is the hourly rate, Madam?’ (I would never call her ‘Madam’ again, but at interviews it makes a good impression.)

  Suddenly she looked both mean and ashamed. ‘Two pounds an hour, take it or leave it.’ Her mouth shut tight like an envelope of money. In those days, no one paid less than two pounds. It was the least you could pay, to the least of people.

  I stopped smiling, but I accepted. I took from her, and later I left her.

  One day she caught me in her garden, chasing a frog down her path with a broom. I was shouting at it, driving it forwards. ‘It’s only a frog,’ the yellow-haired one said, her thin lips angry, but trying to smile. ‘Leave it alone, Mary. They’re sweet little things.’ It lolloped away, jerky, slimy. She watched it as if it was her own baby.

  These people are dirtier than in our village, something my mother would not believe. Ugandans know about animals. Frogs are worse than cockroaches.

  This woman had books that were covered in dust. She never read them, or lent them to me. Her rooms were lined with them, like tiles or plaster. Big piles of them stood in the hall and bedroom. Without being read, they were slowly dying. I saw the pages were going yellow.

  I am an honest woman, but I used to take them, in batches of three or four at a time, whatever had risen to the top of the pile. I hid them in her cupboard, and waited for a while. If she missed one, and asked me, I ‘found’ it for her. If she didn’t notice, they were justly mine. I have always been a reader, but she never offered. She never asked me if I wanted them. Perhaps she didn’t think I could read, though I read her letters when I got the chance.

  The only book she missed was one she had written, which only goes to prove how big her head is.

  I was glad she told me. I put it straight back. I didn’t want her stupid writing on my bookshelves. She probably wrote poems, ‘Little frog, I love you. I save you, Froggie, from the big fat African.’

  (The truth is, I did read some pages, later. She wasn’t a poet. It was prose like a desert, going on to the horizon, and nothing ever happened.)

  Her bottom was flat and white as a chapatti. I saw her once, coming out of the bath. ‘Sor-ree, Mary,’ she said, and giggled. If she saw what she looked like, the thing would have cried.

  I left her one day. I left the country. I travelled the world, then I came back to Kampala. Without my husband, without my son. Home, but not home. Still far from my village. Each night I tell myself, I’ll go there soon. But for now I have a respectable job, a decent position with okay wages, and save my money whenever I can.

  Why am I afraid to open her letter?

  6

  Justin wakes up at three am ravenous, hollow and sad in the heavy moonlight, and gets out of bed to raid the fridge as he often does once his mother is sleeping, and steps on the plate, and crushes the salad, and leaves it there spilled on the fitted carpet.

  On his way back to bed, Justin pauses on the landing, outside the door of his mother’s room, and drops, briefly, to his hands and knees. He listens, sniffs, alert like a fox, his shoulders white in a panel of moonlight, his pale hair stiff as a ruff of ice, and then crawls closer and closer in until he thinks he can hear her breathing, and noses the door, and kisses it, then stops, stone still, as her light clicks on, and lopes dog-like to his own room.

  Her light goes out again. The house is silent.

  7 MARY TENDO

  The envelope is too thin to contain money. It was the first thing I looked for, of course. She must owe me money for the work I did. Here what she paid me would be a fortune, but not in London, where even breathing cost money.

  I have opened the letter. It does not begin well. ‘I hope that you and yours are healthy and happy. I myself am well, but there is bad news’ – bad news on my birthday, that is unlucky. ‘Justin, who you were so sweet with, is ill. In fact, very ill. He never gets up. He has been back home with me for six months now, and I am looking after him hand and foot ‘– well, she never did that when he was little – ‘but the future does not seem very hopeful ...’

  Does she mean he is dying? That stabs my heart. How old must he be? Twenty-one, twenty-two. Surely only Africans die so young. ‘I thought of you, because you always loved Justin.’ Then it goes on for several paragraphs. ‘If you happened to be free, or looking for a job, I would be so grateful if you came back to help me. Promise me at least to consider it. Please do ring soon. I will ring straight back.

  Affectionately yours,

  Dr Henman’

  She’d left space for a signature, but forgot to sign it. I know her real name. Vanessa H Henman. Her friends called her ‘Nessie’, but I called her ‘Miss Henman.’ Nessie is the name of a monster in Scotland. I know she wanted me to call her ‘Doctor’. Now Dr Monster comes begging to me.

  I sit staring at the linen. Blank, blinding. Scotland is a pale place, all ice and snow. I never had enough money to go there. She was a cold woman. A mean woman. I cannot go back, not even for Justin.

  Then I think about him. He was rarely ill. He was never allowed to stay away from school, because his mother had to do her writing. Is it really possible that Justin is ill? It makes a small pain, under my rib-cage.

  And then, on the reverse, I see an ink postscript.

  ‘PS. Obviously we should pay return airfare. And reward you V
ERY HANDSOMELY.’

  Suddenly, the future lights up like a necklace. If I had enough money, I could go to my village. I could come back rich, and go to my village. Without asking my kabito for money.

  It comes out of the blue. It is chance, or fate, but perhaps God wants me to leave my country. Now I’m back in Kampala, I don’t want to leave, but ...

  My life is a story of arriving and leaving.

  8 MARY TENDO

  The first time I left it was chance, not choice.

  My father’s brother had a very large wife. They had both been close to the guerrilla soldiers who based themselves near the lands of my family as they fought the liberation war. After the victory, my aunt moved away from my uncle, and lived in the city, and became famous. She had many friends in the new government, and beautiful gomesis in many colours with sleeves puffed up like a butterfly’s wings, and shiny new cars with small frightened drivers. She became the new Minister for Women’s Affairs and the Protection of Public Morals.

  My aunt had five sons but no daughters. She sent for me just before I graduated, and asked me why I had not come to see her. I did not say that in my family we believed she was a proud and cruel woman who was unfaithful to my uncle. I said that I had felt unworthy.

  ‘But the state needs modern young women like you. Our new president wants to encourage women. My job is to encourage young women. If you are a good girl, your aunt can help you.’

  Her house was on Kololo Hill, near all the embassies, where everyone is rich. She had a pretty garden full of bougainvillaea, in three colours, white, peach and pink. Dry, papery bougainvillaea. The pink was a killing, brilliant pink, the colour of a muzungu’s lipstick. She wanted me to cut it back so the timid white and peach could flourish. She told me that her shamba boy was ill, but I knew she just wanted to see me humbled. I worked all day in the blazing heat, and in the evening she called me in and told me to wash, then the house-girl brought supper.

  She said there was a new presidential scholarship that paid for women graduates to study abroad. Probably it would mean a future in the government. Certainly it meant at least a year in UK, and the chance to gain an MA from London. She wanted me to apply for it.

  ‘But Aunty, I am not the best student in my year.’ The goat was tough, but I made myself eat it. Her big white teeth cut through it like scissors. She shouted at the girl who served it, but at me she smiled, a wide blank smile.

  ‘You are my niece. You will win the scholarship. I wish I had daughters, but God did not wish it.’

  Four months later I was on a plane to London, flying through the sky for the first time, thinking about what my father had said. He had come to Kampala to see me off. I think he had never been there before. At any rate, he got lost for a day and was found by some people from our village who were selling clothes in Owino market. My mother couldn’t come: she was supervising the harvest. She sent me, wrapped in a banana leaf, a package of fried ants, delicious enswa, although the leaf was bruised and torn. Perhaps she thought I would take it to England. It would not have made the right impression!

  My father was very proud of me. ‘At last, someone from our family is flying.’

  I didn’t say, ‘But we often flew, we children playing round the mango tree. We used to raise our wings and fly like hummingbirds.’ I didn’t want to think about the mango tree or the cousins I was leaving behind. I sat on the plastic seat beside him and told him I would buy them presents.

  ‘They say London is very expensive,’ he told me gravely. ‘Daughter, you will have to be wise.’

  Suddenly he looked smaller and older. I didn’t say what was in my mind, that he had never been to London, that he would no longer be able to advise me. ‘You know your daughter can live on nothing.’

  He tried to think of a last piece of advice. I think he was recalling my childhood. I used to run faster than the boys, and came into the house with my knees bloodied where I had fallen on stones or acacia thorns. The scars were still there under the nylon tights I was wearing to look European.

  ‘Don’t run around on the plane, daughter. They say they fasten you down with a belt. If you wriggle too much you will rock the plane.’

  I left him sitting there, not moving. Alone, as if he was learning something. How hard he had tried to be a good father. He had made himself say nothing about children, or marriage, although I had already left it too late according to the customs of our village.

  I was young, and proud. I was going to England. The plane took off, and I looked down on Uganda. The buildings shrank as the view increased. Where was my father in so much space?

  I remembered his words as the roaring plane broke through into the sunlight above the clouds. The journey levelled and became easy and the stewardess said we could unfasten our seatbelts. She had a smart uniform and shiny lipstick and her hair was flat-straight like a European. She obviously knew about flying, and London. I smiled at her and undid my seatbelt so I could lean over and look at the sun, and there was heaven. I was rushing towards it. Africa was lost beneath brilliant whiteness.

  I imagined my family, small as insects.

  When we landed in London they sprayed the plane against mosquitoes. My throat grew tight. As I came out on to the high steel steps, the light was like ice. I stared out at London, and nearly fell forward.

  But this time I’m a woman, and everything is different.

  I look at myself, tiny, all those years ago. One day I mean to write that girl’s story. I hear her voice in my head at nights. All her mistakes have become my wisdom.

  Now I do not need to beg money from the government, or work like a dog in my fat aunt’s garden. Now I am too sensible to fall down the steps. Now I have flown on countless planes. Now I am too old to become a cleaner.

  The letter starts to tingle in my left hand. How much would Henman pay me to go to England?

  9 VANESSA HENMAN

  When she rang today I nearly said, ‘Not now!’ She sounded like all the other opportunists who ring up and bother you when you can least bear it: foreign, and flat, without affect. She said, ‘Is it you?’ as if she didn’t like me, but of course, it is just that she isn’t English, shyness rather than anything else. Her voice had got deeper, as well, with the years. I was slamming the phone down – because let’s be frank, these firms do mostly use foreigners, so a foreign voice does make me suspicious – when I suddenly realised it was Mary.

  ‘Mary! Is it really you?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Henman, I got your letter.’

  (Of course Mary always pronounced ‘Mrs’ as ‘Miss’. It was one of the irritants I’d almost forgotten. I’m sure I had told her that I was a ‘Dr’, but she’d looked at me blankly, in that African way. Perhaps it was because I was a single mother. I resolved that this time she should call me ‘Vanessa’. Mary and I had to make a clean start.)

  Yes, she was well. She had a very nice job.

  I started to tell her about Justin, his terrible depression, his refusal to eat, the way he was getting less and less mobile, the succession of doctors who could do nothing. ‘Justin hates everybody, Mary. Except you. Of course you know how much I love him.’

  There was a silence on the line. I thought for a moment we were cut off.

  ‘Miss Henman, I need money for Jamil. He has a place at Al-Fateh University. His father says he will be a vet, but he has to pay to get into al-Fateh.’

  Jamil was the son; I had forgotten about him. Of course, the father was Libyan. Naturally there would be deals to be done. In any case, this was the African way. When they dealt with white people, they bargained upwards, just as they beat people down in the markets. I understood things better now I’d been to Africa. ‘Mary, I know we can work something out.’

  ‘Miss Henman, now I shall give you my number. It is the number of my mobile. When you decide about the money, you telephone again.’

  This was a new Mary. More confident ... bossier. More avid for money, which took me aback. Unwilling to trust an old friend. Bu
t I’d been to Africa, I understood, for in Africa, everyone is poor, poor things, even the richer ones aren’t quite like us, so I made allowances, and rang off, gratefully, and did some calculations on an envelope.

  She doubled what I offered, and I agreed.

  Of course money is problematic, with Africans. They don’t understand that we borrow everything, that we are poor in a different way. That my house cost me more than she could earn in a lifetime. They never understand we have money troubles too. That life in London is hideously expensive. I suppose it is a failure of imagination.

  Although, to be fair, they themselves have nothing. The monthly wage of a house-girl in Kampala is not much more than five English pounds.

  In any case, now I feel happier. Mary is coming. All will be well.

  Of course she will have changed. All of us have changed. Justin was a boy, when she was here, and such a darling, so clever and happy. I was still struggling to make my name. Mary seemed like a girl to me.

  Though she can’t have been a girl, she had just had a baby. She started with me as an hourly paid cleaner. I remember how deferential she was, calling me ‘Madam’ at the interview. (She must have thought she embarrassed me, because she never did that again. Not that I was sorry, but it sounded quite sweet. Her voice was lilting, like a little dark bird’s. The ‘Madam’ fell on my soul like balm.)

  I think that Justin was only three. Such a beautiful boy. Red lips, blond curls, smile of an angel, though he did have a temper ... Gifted. Oh yes, he was very gifted. Walking at ten months, talking at eleven, trying to read the cornflake packet at two, admitted to school nearly a year early – at my insistence, but they were pleased to have him. Already a fluent reader, of course; they slowed him up, if anything. And oh, so charming, and amusing. Though tiring, of course, when one was working hard. Motherhood’s never an easy option.

  Justin made all the other parents jealous. They must have got tired of hearing all his achievements. Their own children seemed to have all kinds of problems: eczema, asthma, dyslexia, dyspraxia, while Justin was wonderfully lexic and praxic. Yes, and his skin was like silk under glass.