Maggie Gee - My Cleaner

Suddenly Vanessa begins to cry. Mary has never seen her cry. Vanessa walks away firmly, her face averted, but Mary can see Vanessa’s shoulders are shaking. After a minute, she follows her. She does not touch her, but she stands near. “Are you thinking about your parents?” she asks. Mary herself once cried for her parents. Not so long ago. Three years ago.

“No no, not exactly…Yes. My mother always used to put bread for the birds. Even when she was really ill. Mum liked all of that, frogs, squirrels. She worried about them more than people. And the chicken run — she liked getting the eggs. Her lawn, and the beds…her garden. Poor Mum — you see, she loved her garden. She would be so upset to see the garden.” Each time Vanessa says ‘garden’, she sobs.

And Mary says, “I see. I am sorry,” but in fact, she thinks crying for gardens is silly. Birds eat your fruit, and frogs are disgusting. Mary herself has much worse things to cry for, but she would rather die than tell Vanessa. Slowly she begins to feel angry again. Up country at home there are more things to cry for, and yet Ugandans rarely cry in public. Her own village, half-emptied by AIDS. The nearby villages wiped out by war.

They cry for their parents, we for our children .

How did she end up in this strange part of England that seems as if war has never touched it, where growing old is normal, and many have white hair? (And at last night’s party they were dancing to the band, the white-haired couples, or holding hands, as if they had a right to a long life together.) Where nobody seems to have the Slim disease, and the cars on the road are all four-wheel-drives, even though the road is flat, and straight, and smooth, and none of them walk, because they are too lazy, and if you do walk, you might get killed?

Mary thinks with longing of the roads of Uganda, the straight red roads that sweep away to the horizon, and vehicles come, two or three an hour, but the people throng all along the roadside, the mothers in gomesis , the girls in bright frocks, the babies tied to straight backs with strong cloth, the bicycles loaded with green bananas, the boys with yellow plastic cans of water, the skinny cows with their enormous horns, and everyone talking and laughing and staring, where there is still time, and space, to move, and if one of the jeeps, full of tourists, or soldiers, comes along too fast, there is no problem, there is all the world to spill across and fill, there are fields and forests, not hedges and pavements, and everyone walks and runs and pedals…The British have caught themselves in a trap. Soon their bodies will no longer move. Perhaps that is why Vanessa is so frantic, driving herself to go faster and faster.

Mary does see it’s sad, Vanessa’s ugly village, where the children are fat, which would be strange in Kampala, where only businessmen’s children are fat. There are no real shops here, no businesses, no stalls selling flowers or vegetables. The beautiful church, with its fine tiled spire topped with a golden chicken spinning in the wind, which Mary had hoped they would attend on Sunday, has been turned into flats, so Uncle Stan told her. He whispered that only half of them have sold. “It’s a joke. No one round here can afford them.”

Mary’s anger ebbs away. They are what they are. And with a slow upsurge of pity and pride, Mary finally starts to believe it. The house where Vanessa grew up is poor .

Perhaps she is embarrassed for Mary to see it. It is actually smaller than her own family house, the house where Mary grew up in Uganda.

So she and Vanessa are not so different. In some ways they are almost the same.

But Mary does not feel she worked hard as a child. There were always aunties and cousins to help. For her, there was so much sun, and laughter. And all the doors and windows were open. And nobody drew on the walls of houses.

And without planning it, or wanting it, Mary puts her arm round Vanessa’s shoulder, she draws her to her, and Vanessa cries. “I did the garden, I hated it, but the garden never looked like this…I cleaned the house, I cleaned the house.” She is almost hysterical, she keeps repeating it. They stand together in the autumn wind, and Vanessa clings, and Mary comforts.

On the way back to Aunt Isobel’s, Mary spots something she did not see on the way out. It stands opposite the point where their lane turns off the thundering steel ribbon of road. At first it looks like the eye of a fish, silver and glassy, a thing on a stick, then as they get closer, it’s the mouth of a fish, a silver gape with a grey open mouth, seen from the side, a lateral V, and then she sees that the grey is the road, the ribbon of road reflected in a mirror, and it is some kind of fish-eye mirror that she has never seen before, put there to show drivers that there is a turning where tractors might suddenly come out.

Vanessa spots it at the same time, and as they stand there, waiting for the stream of metal to stop and let them back into kinder country, the sun comes out, and illuminates it. Both of them stop and stare at it, side by side, pressed close together by the tiny gap between the thorns and the lorries. It is a tiny, radiant disc of sharp beauty, with a huge blue sky and swelling white clouds, a convex circle that shines like a world, and they are there, minute, in the bottom right corner, at the end of a road that slopes away into the distance, at one precise vortex of time and space, and the world is enormous, and they are tiny, and their ant-like bodies vibrate with the traffic, two small living things on an enormous planet, and Mary has crossed the earth to this place, and when she turns again, ten feet down the turning, the two of them merge into the same bright dot.

On the way back to London, Vanessa drives, silent, rejecting Mary’s offer to drive, discouraging her attempts to talk. Yet both of them know they have grown closer.

Approaching the front door, Vanessa is anxious. “I only hope Justin’s all right,” she mutters.

“It will be OK, Vanessa,” says Mary. “Anna was coming in to clean. And Soraya said she would cook him dinner.”

“And who is Soraya? Oh, the Indian girl.”

“No, Vanessa, she is not Indian. I have met Trevor’s friend. She is a white woman.”

The house seems normal, no fire or flood, and Justin’s room is tidy, but empty. At seven he comes back, and seems pleased to see them, and actually calls Vanessa ‘Mum’, and tolerates ten minutes of news about the village before he wanders away again.

For Vanessa it is a quick turn around. At seven tomorrow she will be on the Eurostar, sitting opposite Fifi, off to Paris.

“You’ll be all right, Mary?”

“Yes, Vanessa.”

“It’s only three days. Nothing will happen.”

“Nothing will happen,” Mary agrees.

In fact Mary hopes that a lot will happen. Because Vanessa is going away, Mary has fixed for Trevor and Justin to go and do some work for Zakira.

But Vanessa thinks, soon this will be over. Justin is practically normal again. I just need to edge him towards a real job, or possibly he should go back into education, a Master’s in something, I would pay his fees…

The worst is over. I am fond of Mary, we’ve become fast friends, but soon she’ll be gone. One day I shall visit her, of course, in Uganda.

Next day Vanessa sleeps on the train to Paris, though Fifi is nervous, and wants to talk. She is going to visit her ancient grandmother, who has recently been taken into hospital. Fifi, who has never liked spending money, has arranged for them to stay in her empty house. There is a complex chain of negotiation; a cousin has given her spare set of keys to another cousin’s neighbour’s friend, or perhaps the gardener of the neighbour’s friend. There are instructions about lights, and locks, and bedding, ‘such a bore’ for Fifi, who has other things to think about, for instance, payment for the cat-sitter who will be feeding Mimi organic cream and chicken livers.