Maggie Gee: My Cleaner

‘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?

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.

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 1 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 VERY 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.

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.