Tony Parsons - One For My Baby

I can hear the sound of her vacuum cleaner across the corridor in Lisa Smith’s room. She’s in there, giving the tatty green carpet what she would call a good going over.

“What’s this meant to be?” I say, waving the flyer.

Jackie smiles brightly. “Didn’t I tell you? Business is booming. I’ve been putting flyers all over West One. I thought I’d drop a few around here. Even though I’ve got the job already.”

She seems very happy. God knows why.

“Dream Machine,” I snort. “You mean you. Dream machine-that’s you.”

Her face falls. “What’s the problem? Even if I get some extra work, it’s not going to interfere with our class. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Why should I mind?”

“I don’t know. But you do mind. I can tell. What’s wrong?”

What’s wrong? I can’t say what’s wrong.

I know I don’t like her working in Churchill’s, cleaning our rooms the old-fashioned way, on her hands and knees. I don’t want the teachers and the students staring straight through her, as though she is nothing. And yet I don’t want her working for the stuck-up snobs in Cork Street or-now that I come to think about it-anybody anywhere else. I don’t know what I want. Something more worthy of her than this. I know I don’t want her here. Not anymore.

“The whole cleaning thing. I don’t know. It’s getting me down.”

She has a laugh at that. “Getting you down? What’s it got to do with you? And if it doesn’t get me down, why should it bother you? I thought there was nothing wrong with cleaning.”

“There’s not.”

“I thought there was dignity in labor.”

“I didn’t say that. Come on. I didn’t say anything about dignity in labor.”

“You told me there was nothing to be ashamed of in doing what I do.”

“That’s right.”

“And yet you are ashamed.”

“I’m not. I just want something better for you. Better than cleaning a toilet that Lenny the Lech has recently taken a leak in. Why should I be ashamed?”

“I don’t know. But you are.”

“That’s ridiculous. I just don’t see why you have to do it here. The place where I work.”

“I have to do it wherever I can. I have to make a living. To pay my bills. Dead simple. I can’t rely on any man to keep me, can I?”

“Is that you, Alfie?”

Vanessa is in the doorway. She stares at Jackie. Jackie stares back. I don’t know if they recognize each other from that first day at my mother’s house. I can’t tell.

“Pardon,” Vanessa says.

“Come in,” Jackie says. “You’re not disturbing us.”

There’s only a few years’ difference in their age but they seem like different generations, Jackie in her blue nylon coat, Vanessa in some little red-and-black number from Agnès B. They look as though they come from different worlds, different lives. And I guess they do.

“I’m looking for Hamish,” Vanessa says. “He has some notes for me.”

“Hamish is not in yet.”

“Okay.”

She looks back at Jackie, as if trying to place her.

“Je crois qu’on se connaît?” Jackie says, and I am dumbfounded until I remember that her two A Levels are in Media Studies and French.

“Non,” Vanessa says. “I don’t think we have met.”

Jackie smiles. But she looks as though she wants to argue about something. “Pourquoi pas?”

Vanessa hovers uncertainly in the doorway. “I go now, Alfie.”

“See you later, Vanessa.”

“C’était sympa de faire ta connaissance,” Jackie laughs. “Ne m’oublie pas!”

“Leave her alone,” I tell Jackie when Vanessa has gone. “She hasn’t done anything to you.”

“Want a bet? She was looking down her nose at me.”

“Why would she do that?”

“Because I’m cleaning up after her and all the little snot-nosed bitches like her.”

“I’m so glad you’re not bitter.”

“I’m entitled to be a little bitter. So would you be if you saw the world from down on your hands and knees.”

“I thought you boasted about that. In your stupid flyer.”

She shakes her head. “It’s funny how dirt seems to stick to the people who clean it up. Rather than the people who make it.”

She picks up her light little modern vacuum cleaner and heads for the door.

“But I’ll tell you something for nothing. I’m not ashamed of myself. I don’t feel the need to apologize for making a living any way I can. I thought you’d be pleased about the flyers. I thought you’d be happy that I’m trying to drum up a little extra work to pay my way through college. How naive of me.”

“Sorry.”

“Forget it.”

“The flyer caught me off guard. I don’t know. You’ll be an undergraduate soon. That’s how I think of you.”

This is meant to placate her. It doesn’t.

“No problem. I’ll try to be gone by the time you arrive in the morning. You and all your hot little students. Then you can all pretend that the place was cleaned by magic.”

“Don’t be so angry.”

She turns on me, nearly catching my face with one of the vacuum cleaner’s furry attachments.

“Why not? You’re the worst kind of snob. You can’t clean up by yourself, but you despise the people who do it for you.”

“I don’t despise you.”

“But I embarrass you. Jackie the cleaning lady. Who wants to be a student, as though it’s the greatest thing in the world. When it’s nothing at all.”

“You don’t embarrass me, Jackie.”

“You don’t want to be around me. You don’t like the way I talk, the way I dress, the job I do.”

“That’s not true.”

“You felt like sleeping with me the other night. But only because you were drunk.”

“I like you. I respect you. I admire you.”

I realize that all of this is true. She doesn’t believe me.

“Sure you do.”

“Come out with me on Saturday night.”

“What? Come where?”

“My friend Josh is getting engaged. An old friend. We lost touch for a while but he’s invited me to the party. And I’m inviting you.”

“I don’t know. Plum-I don’t know.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Jackie. You can’t hate the world for shutting you out and then hate the world when you’re invited in. Stop feeling like a martyr, will you? Do you want to come out with me or not?”

She thinks about it for a moment.

“But what should I wear?” she says.

“Wear what you usually wear,” I tell her. “Wear something pretty.”

The day comes when my nan can’t carry on as normal. The pain is too bad, the breathlessness is too fierce. She is afraid of falling asleep in public, afraid of pitching into the road with no Plum to catch her and ease her back into her favorite chair.

So she stays at home. And then increasingly she stays in bed. There will be no more trips to the shops, no more coffee and cake and talk with her friends. Not now. Perhaps not ever.

I sit with her thinking that she is the one person in the world whose love for me was uncomplicated and unconditional. Everybody else’s love was mixed up with other things-what they wanted me to be, what they hoped I could become, their dreams for me.

But my nan just loved me.

Knowing that I am losing her, I take her hand, the bones and veins more visible than they should be, and I stare anxiously at her face, the face that I have loved for a lifetime. Her eyebrows are drawn on all wrong and crooked, and those uncertain pencil marks chew me up inside.

“Are you okay?” I say, asking her the most stupid question in the world, desperate for reassurance.

“I’m lovely,” she tells me. “And you’re lovely too.”

My nan still thinks I’m lovely. And I wonder if she knows me better than everyone else, or not at all.