Maggie Gee - My Cleaner

“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 purees 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.

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 bararat 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.