Maggie Gee - My Cleaner

“Read me the signs,” she says sharply to Justin, who is humming and staring in a blissed-out fashion.

“It’s cool, Mary, we’re heading for the motorway.”

On the motorway, thinks Mary, things will seem more normal, the lights will be brighter, the traffic streams steadier, and I will get my bearings again. Unconsciously, she starts to drive faster. Soon she is going very fast indeed, revving at the lights, overtaking, and she bombs on to the motorway without a pause, and Justin wakes up and sits bolt upright.

He remembers, with a shock, Zakira and the baby.

“Look, Mary, you’d better slow down, since it’s snowing. See, the overhead signs are saying 40.”

Mary shoots a glance across at him. He is a young, fit man. He should be driving. At any rate, he should not be taking it for granted that driving will be done by someone else, while Justin sits there handing out instructions. Mary feels safer when she drives faster, in control at last, skating through life, leaving everything behind, the mess, the exhaustion, the years of slow, insurmountable work, going inch by inch, a snail with a duster. If Mary can stay in the fast lane, she will, and in any case, today the roads are dream-like, the whole of England has become insubstantial, her early feelings of doubt and panic have been replaced by a dreamer’s calm: nothing will stop her, nothing can hurt her.

But Justin’s voice nags in her ear. She manages to stop herself snapping at him.

“Justin, I love you, but soon you must start driving. You will see later, with the baby. It will be useful if you are driving.”

His full red lips, so like the baby’s, look suddenly sulky, lower lip jutting. He has made an effort; he has got better; he is working hard, he has become a father, he’s making an attempt to please his mother, he’s trekking to the back of beyond for Christmas…

Now Mary expects him to drive the car!

“Mary, I love you, but you are my driver.”

She looks at him narrowly through newly wiped glasses, which show every pimple, every flaw. This tall young man with his pout like a baby. That greedy mouth which had dragged at her nipples.

“Mr Justin, I am not your driver.”

But he only laughs, in his Justin way, a charming cherub, and pats her dark hand, stroking it as it clutches the wheel, the hand of the woman who has mothered him, served him, cleaned up his vomit, given him her breast, this black woman guiding him through a snowstorm, in the midst of a reindeer herd of cars, all chafing forwards in the snowy darkness, their headlights dipped on the new white like eyes.

“They can’t have done the gritting. The snow is settling,” says Justin, reflectively, looking at the road.

Then suddenly he is clutching her wrist, as he has pulled at Mary a thousand times before, pulled at her skirt, her sleeve, her arm—“Watch out, Mary. We have to slow down.” They are shooting down the slip road to their second motorway, and Mary once again shows no signs of braking to dovetail into the slipstream of the traffic—“Mary, honestly, it’s dangerous!” He has spotted, lying on its side like a beetle, a gritting lorry on the hard shoulder, with flashing lights and three hunched men.

And all his life he has been tugging at Mary (she feels as she screams across the shuddering lanes and, as if by magic, other cars avoid her) and she’s never minded, it was only Justin, her second baby, Jamil’s little brother — but now he is so much bigger than her, and he is still tugging and begging and ordering, and thinking it is funny to call her ‘my driver’, and Jamie can no longer make everything right.

“Justin, be quiet. I am a good driver. I have driven you ever since you were a baby. Now will you please stop bothering me.”

Her authoritative voice works on him. He falls silent, and then he dozes. Sleep has always been his way out. He only wakes up when he feels the car slowing to a standstill, and his first thought is, “Thank God, we’re here.”

But he looks out of the window, and sees motionless traffic, just visible through endlessly cascading snow, and he looks upwards, and it comes forever, falling from roofless grey halls of snow, and suddenly it fills him with vertigo, the blind gyres of snowflakes bearing down on him, rushing so fast the car can never escape them, the sky has pressed the whole world to a standstill, and it keeps on coming: the snow, the snow.

“What’s happening, Mary?”

“I don’t know. We have been standing here for half an hour. Maybe there is an accident.”

Mary is writing in a small green notebook. “What are you doing, Mary? Shall we play Hangman?” When he was a boy, Justin taught Mary Hangman, and the two of them used to play it for hours.

“Perhaps later, Justin. I am writing something.”

“Is it a shopping list?” It makes him smile. How many times, when he was smaller, has he helped Mary write the shopping list? And she always added the things he asked for, the sausages and beans, the crisps and jelly, though she kept them in the cupboard with her cleaning things, where he knew his mother never looked, and it was one of their special secrets, and Justin remembers how much he loves her, and she is here with him now, in the snow, and they’ll save each other, of course they will, and it will all be a great adventure (his mother is miles away, as usual).

And then he remembers, no, it is Christmas, it’s much too late for shopping lists.

And Mary seems a little distant. “No, Justin. It is something different.”

He takes her hand, playfully, and tries to stop the pen. She snatches it back with surprising force. He looks at her, hurt: “Don’t be cross with me.”

“I am writing my Autobiography .”

“Oh yes, that thing you were doing in your room, and Dad had to help you with the computer. Did you keep it up, then? How is it going?”

She imagines she hears a note of lordly indifference. “I will soon finish it, and publish it. That is why I work when I get the chance. When it is published, you can buy a copy.”

It is starting to get a little cold in the car. Outside, there are desultory outbreaks of hooting. People switch their engines on and off. One man has got out of his car, and peers forwards, but the snow is too thick for him to see anything.

“What if the Jag won’t start again?” Justin asks her. He just wants reassurance.

And Mary runs the engine for a bit, so the heater comes on, and the minutes pass, and her pen whispers over the lined paper, and Justin drums his fingers on the dashboard and wishes the tape deck were not broken, and the snow shushes, shushes outside the window, and the wind moans dog-like down the white blocked lanes. And Justin thinks, we could sit here forever, and it isn’t entirely an unpleasant thought, because he’s always found Mary’s presence so soothing; but today there is something different about her.

She is preoccupied, almost impatient, as if she has better things to do, but he knows he can tease her out of this mood; he has always been the centre of Mary’s world. She went back to Uganda but she never forgot him. She came back and loved him the same as before. Secretly, he thinks she loves him more than Jamil. Of course Jamil grew in Mary’s belly, but Mary was always there for Justin’s bedtime, and Justin’s birthdays, and Justin’s illnesses — which means she can rarely have been at Jamil’s. Jamil has always been his ghostly rival — he has only met him on five or six occasions — but Justin is pretty sure he’s still ahead. Mary has mentioned Jamil less this time.

“Are you going to write about me and Jamie?”

Her pen stops writing. She stares at the dashboard as if it is a television. “Yes, Justin. I shall write about you.”