Maggie Gee - My Cleaner

Sometimes they ask for unfamiliar people. A man has rung several times for ‘Mistendo’. He has a faintly rasping, Arab-sounding voice, but the person he is asking for must be Japanese. Vanessa does not connect it with Mary. She never thinks of her as having a surname. Because she is a cleaner, she is only ‘Mary’. Vanessa cuts him off, with a terse ‘Wrong number.’

Someone has been calling for Justin this morning, a soft woman’s voice, pretending to be shy. Vanessa snaps, “Justin’s asleep.”

“Please will you wake him?” the woman asks. “Certainly not,” says Vanessa, and puts the phone down. As soon as it’s down, she has a twinge of misgiving, but the girl did not even give her name, she is certainly someone from these horrible companies, ringing up to exploit Justin’s illness, and Vanessa thinks, “I was right to be firm.” But in case he gets cross with her, she might not mention it.

In any case, Justin is still hardly speaking to her. He is not impolite, he does not lose his temper, he just leaves any room Vanessa enters. On the surface, things have worsened since her small tiff with Mary. Vanessa rehearses words she’ll never say, of inquiry, apology, entreaty, but he slips away while her mouth is still opening.

In other ways, Justin is certainly improving. He is somewhere in the house, vertical, not naked! For some weeks now, he has been opening his curtains, and appearing, dressed, around the house before noon. Vanessa has managed to bite her tongue and not ask him if he has any plans, though in some respects it is more difficult now than it was when he was tucked away upstairs. He does seem to like watching Anya clean. When she comes to the house, Justin gets up earlier, and even offers her cups of coffee. This is rather a relief to his mother, who was never sure that he knew how to make one. “Could you make some for me too, while you’re at it,” she had called through to Justin this morning from the study, but the grunt that came back was discouraging. She had to get up and make her own.

The phone rings again. “ Yes! ” Vanessa snarls, and feels silly when she finds it is Fifi. Vanessa pulls herself up in her ergonomic chair, and fills her voice with animation. “Lots and lots better, thank you darling. Oh yes, having Mary here was a great decision. Not mine, by the way, it was Justin’s idea. As you know I have always been a listening parent. My whole aim has been to empower my son. Well no, he’s not actually back at work. It all takes time. You can’t rush things. When you are a mother, you learn to be patient.”—This is a subtle thrust at Fifi, who at forty-eight will never be a parent.

Yet Vanessa has come to depend on Fifi, now she doesn’t have a man, and her son has grown distant. There is a little story she wants to tell Fifi, wants to tell someone, at any rate. So she changes tack, and flatters her. “Darling it’s so kind of you to ring. Sometimes you’re the only person I can talk to. I do think Justin and I are making progress.” And she tells her about the mobile phone.

Vanessa recently found what must be Justin’s mobile phone, on top of the bookshelves in her bedroom. It is small and sharp, shiny and modern, and opens and shuts like a silver shell. Although Vanessa’s not a big fan of mobiles, it seemed like a symbol of the old Justin, the one she once felt proud of, and had such high hopes for, who went off to work each day in a suit. Also, he had left it on her special bookshelves, which could only mean he had been borrowing a book, though Vanessa can’t pin down which one has gone. Most important, her son had come into her room, he had actually come into his mother’s room , after so much rejection, so much shouting, after actually saying that his mother was ‘toxic’!

“Justin never asked for the phone,” she tells Fifi. “He never came looking for it, either. I just slipped the thing back into his room, next day, at the foot of the bed, without saying anything.”

Fifi, after six years of therapy, falls eagerly upon this incident. “I love it,” she gasps. “You see, it was a message. He was trying to slip back into your body. The mother’s bedroom means her body—”

“I don’t know about that—” says Vanessa, uneasy.

“—well not in a pervy way, of course. Think womb , darling, not vagina. Womb and room, that’s rather good! And borrowing your book, well that was a tribute. It’s terribly touching. I’m so happy. And your reaction was perfectly judged. By giving it back, you acknowledged his autonomy. My therapist would be proud of you both. By the way, what shape was it?”

“Well, mobile-phone-shaped,” says Vanessa.

“You see?” Fifi is triumphant. “I told you so. I won’t say it’s phallic. But it’s yin and yang. You are getting into harmony. In any case, I must rush off for my Reiki.”

“I’m never quite sure what Reiki is.”

“Oh universal life-force energy, darling. You know, the universe is made up of thought. We just have to manifest joy and abundance.”

Vanessa tries to find this reassuring.

Once Fifi is prone upon the massage table, she finds herself talking about Justin and Vanessa. It is easier to talk, somehow, hanging in a void, staring at the floor through the padded face-rest. The masseuse says, “You always talk about them. Sounds like they’re almost family.” A long pause, and then Fifi replies, “Well I virtually have no family. My mother is dead. My brother’s in Canada.” Suddenly the face-rest feels uncomfortable, hot on her face, pressing on her. She squirms and rears up like an irritated serpent. “How are you finding the new face-rest?” the masseuse inquires, anxious, pausing for an instant. “Actually I preferred the old one.”

“This one’s more modern. It’s top of the range. In fact it’s the Cloud Comfort Memory Foam model.”

“Oh right, it must be me then, don’t worry.” But Fifi feels less joyful, and less abundant. All afternoon, she reflects on her life.

Before supper, she phones Vanessa again. “It’s true, Vanessa, I’ve neglected my family. Mimi, as you know, is like my child, Mimi is warmer than the average Siamese, but there’s still a strain of selfishness. The truth is, anyone could fill her bowl. I do have a family, aunts and uncles and things, but I never see them, since my parents died. Of course they’re mostly in France, my lot. As a matter of fact, I have a living grandma. But I should go and see them — I’m going to go and see them. And I wanted to ask — will you come with me?”

Vanessa feels flattered to be needed — her own house seems to do quite well without her — and says, rather grandly, “Delighted to help. Why not a little holiday in France?”

But Fifi presses on, disconcertingly, “I started thinking about you and Justin. You’re really in just the same boat as me.”

Vanessa is speechless for a second. She prefers to feel compassion for Fifi. “Justin is not a Siamese.”

“You don’t see your family either, do you? And of course, Justin is all on his own.”

“Nonsense, Fifi, he has always been sociable.”

(Yet now he lies in a room alone. She doesn’t admit it, but Vanessa feels vulnerable. She has no siblings, and she never sees her cousins. Who is there to hold her to the ground? Sometimes, when she lies there in the middle of the night, she feels she and Justin could be lost in the darkness, two atoms of dust, empty, meaningless. Perhaps she and Fifi could help each other. She decides she will confide in her.)

“As a matter of fact, just a month or so ago, I had a birthday card from my cousin in Sussex, who I haven’t seen since I was a schoolgirl. It started me thinking, and I wrote to Lucy. And I really have been hoping she’ll get back to me. Not that I myself feel lonely, of course. I don’t know, I thought it might somehow help Justin. To have more of a family than just me. In any case, Lucy hasn’t written back.” The truth is, Vanessa is still hoping.