My Cleaner E-Book

Maggie Gee

• Herausgeber: Telegram Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Ugandan Mary Tendo worked for many years in the white middle-class Henman household in London, cleaning for Vanessa and looking after her only child, Justin. More than ten years after Mary has left, Justin - now twenty-two - is too depressed to get out of bed. To his mother's surprise, he asks for Mary. When Mary responds to Vanessa's cry for help and returns from Uganda to look after Justin, the balance of power in the house shifts dramatically. Both women's lives change irrevocably as tensions build towards a climax on a snowbound motorway. 'Beautifully observed, intelligent and moving … a carefully wrapped surprise that gets better and better with the unravelling.' The Scotsman 'A moving, funny, engrossing book.' The Observer 'Gee satirises the liberal conscience of the chattering classes with uncomfortable perception in this hugely enjoyable novel … her portrayal of Britain's new underclass of immigrant workers is presented with her trademark stinging clarity.' Metro 'Maggie Gee is a superb and pitiless analyser of middleclass angst. Elegant, humorous and surprising, this is a classy performance.' The Times 'It's amazing how many details, characters, stories within stories, Maggie Gee's unquenchable exuberance crams into this comparatively short book.' The Spectator An intelligent and satisfying read.' The Sunday Times 'A masterful study in Africa/UK relations which manages to be supremely uncomfortable without being cynical, and clever without being calculating.' Big Issue 'The Flood was chillingly predictive. My Cleaner is a calmer, happier novel. Yet a gnawing tragedy lies in the shadows, all the more poignant for the deftness with which it's brushed aside.' The Independent

Leseprobe

MAGGIE GEE

MY CLEANER

TELEGRAM

Part 1

.

1

The sun is shining on Uganda. Today is Mary Tendo’s birthday.

The sun is shining on fields of white sheets in the hotel linen-store Mary keeps. Soon she will walk to the Post Office and find a letter that will change her life.

.

2

‘I sent a letter to my cleaner – ’

In London, it is warm and grey, already warm at nine am, though tomorrow it will be cold again. Most of the summer has been rather chilly, which gives the British a lot to talk about. They creep closer to each other under veils of cloud.

It is three hours earlier than in Kampala. Vanessa Henman has been up for half an hour and is feeling brisk and pleased with herself. She is on the phone to her best friend, Fifi.

‘– Oh, you’re just eating your breakfast, I see. As usual, I’ve been up for absolutely hours. So anyway, today I’m feeling more hopeful. Last week I sent a letter to my cleaner – you won’t remember her – my former cleaner – Yes, black. Yes, young. Well Justin adored her. She went back to Africa years ago. I’ve asked her to come back and help with him. No I didn’t see her when I went to Kampala, of course I didn’t, I was terribly busy, to be frank it was all rather high-powered, embassy parties and what-have-you. No, writing the letter was Justin’s idea. He says I never listen to him, so I thought if I wrote – Yes, exactly. But who knows if we’ll hear from her?’

A slight noise behind her makes Vanessa look up. She shrieks, loudly, and almost drops the phone. A tall young man is standing in the doorway, long and white and soft and naked, with a string of amber beads round his neck. As she screams, he covers his cock with his hand. ‘What’s the matter, Mother?’ he asks, irritably.

In her ear, a tiny voice is worrying: ‘What on earth’s the matter? Are you all right, Ness?’

‘It’s Justin. I didn’t expect to see him up. Justin, why are you up at this time? I’d better go. Kissy kissy, Fifi.’

She puts the phone down and glares at him accusingly. How long has her son been listening?

‘You ought to be pleased that I am up.’ His flesh has a greyish, unlit look. The lines of the muscles have lost definition, she thinks, anxiously assessing.

‘I am pleased darling but you gave me a shock. I was just telling Fifi that I’d written to Mary.’

‘It’s the fourth of July. It’s Mary’s birthday.’ He suddenly smiles a radiant smile, and colour returns to his big, loose mouth, and his cheeks lift, and he is very handsome; but his pointless happiness enrages Vanessa.

‘How can you possibly remember?’ Suddenly he irritates her beyond bearing, his great pale nakedness, his soft sulky voice, his haywire corona of uncut yellow curls, the fact he is here in her study in the morning when normally he sleeps until four pm, his ridiculous pretence of remembering Mary’s birthday –

When only a few weeks ago, he forgot his mother’s.

She sits and stares at him, vibrating faintly, wondering if he is really her son.

He turns and leaves with a sudden turn of speed, his eyes on the floor, his arms clasping his torso, his cock swinging round and semi-unfurling like a big soft lily in a nest of golden filaments, then stubs his toe on a pile of books, and hops on, swearing as offensively as possible, the orange beads bouncing below his collar-bones, hard on the softness of his flesh.

His mother watches him go, despairing. He will not get up for the rest of the day.

Vanessa stares at her crowded desk. The in-tray is layered like puff-pastry, collapsing, sliding at both sides. An old-fashioned birthday card sits by the desklight, with sugary roses and a scattering of glitter. It gives her a strange feeling, this birthday card. It was sent from the village where she was born, which she’s hardly revisited since she left home. Vanessa is proud to be a Londoner, a sophisticate, a creature of the city. And yet her village is still out there, somewhere. Somewhere down motorways and dim summer lanes. The card makes her feel guilty, but also happy, because the link is not quite broken. But the card is hideously ugly. Vanessa sighs, and shoves it out of sight.

(But two days later, she will write a letter to the cousin she has not seen since girlhood.)

Outside her study window the sky is low and lidded. Vanessa Henman frowns at the clouds.

She thinks, I need light. I am a creature of light. The sun must be shining on Africa.

One year ago, I was in Kampala.

.

3 MARY TENDO

Today is my birthday. It is a great day. The sun is shining on Kampala.

Thank God for my birthday. ‘It’s Mary’s birthday.’ Little Benedicta, the third room-maid, who wants to please me, told the porter, who helped me to the lift with my bag, which was heavy because it held the Memory Books I am printing out for my friend in NACWOLA. They will go up country, for the women with AIDS. The porter doesn’t realise that I’m used to carrying, because in England I worked like a dog. I have strong muscles underneath my pink blouse. But I smile sweetly and let him help me.

Here I am important, the Linen Store Keeper. It is a good job, only just below the House Keeper. Perhaps as a graduate I might have done better, but everything doesn’t go to plan. The years of wandering, years I lost, times that I don’t need to think about, for I have done well, I have found my place. I wear a smart suit, and the thin gold chain that Omar gave me when I was his wife.

It must have been a good day for my parents, thirty-eight years ago, back in our village. I wish they were here to be glad with me. Though we did not count the days, in the village. There were no dates, there was no diary. I was the child who came with the harvest. Later we had to fill in a form, and that was when they invented my birthday. In Britain, my birthday became real. My Omar gave me a birthday card. And every year Justin drew me a picture – Miss Henman’s boy, like my second son. That little, white-haired, white-skinned boy. And my real son, Jamie, covered me with kisses. My English birthdays made me happy.

In this country we have learned to be happy when we are not frightened of a revolution. Maybe people in the government are lining their pockets, but politicians always line their pockets. At least now the army is under control. Later this year there is another election and maybe we’ll have to be frightened again, and rush like crazies to hoard tins and packets, and wait for rumours, like we did the last time –

But everything is better than it was when I was little. The butchery and terror of Amin, Obote. So we live for today. Live in the day. There are things we have lost, things we have suffered, but now, today, there is a ring of sunlight. We’re a long time dead, so let us be happy!

In the village it seemed we were always happy, despite the gunfire we heard at night, despite the killings not far away. The laughter still flies like birds in my ribcage. My days, my days. They are all still with me. The riches that my birthday brings me.

Jamie, Jamil. My beloved son.

Today I received a letter from England. A letter from UK, and my heart started drumming. Maybe Jamie had managed to get to London.

I walked to the posta in my lunch break. Occasionally Omar still sends me letters, and other friends from other countries, and I tell them to write to my PO Box (although it is a nuisance when I forget my key) because in the hotel trade nothing is certain. I like to think I could resign tomorrow, then no one has any power over me. Sometimes I threaten to leave, and they raise my wages, though actually I like my job, and for the moment I mean to stay.

The Post Office stands opposite the big foreign banks on the red main road of our capital city. The road is pot-holed by heavy rain and then baked dry in the sun again. I am used to this road, with its rivers of traffic, shaking and honking in all directions, though when I first arrived it made me sick and dizzy. I came from the village a lifetime ago, but now the city has entered my veins, dusty and bright and bursting with faces, shining black, almost blind in the sun, rushing me with them into the future.

The future grips us in its jaws. Once this was the City of Antelopes. Now there are no more golden kobs jumping away down the green slopes. So many shops selling mobile phones, dozens of them, hundreds, though many people buy them, then can’t afford to keep paying for air-time. So the city is littered with dead metal beetles. But the shops keep on springing up cheerful and hopeful, decorated in bright yellow plastic, with tidy staff in the South African style, smiling at us all in sky-blue uniforms. And there are South African burger bars, too, copies of American burger bars, where confident young people sit and smoke and talk and wave their mobiles at each other. Though surely they cannot like the food. It is ten times the price of smoked beef and matooke. They make the burgers from the animals’ entrails, teeth and hooves, stuck together with fat. My friend who works there told me about it. The ice-cream is nice. Sweet and creamy.

I sit in the linen store. Here I rule. Nze Kabaka wa wanno. The linen store of the Nile Imperial, one of the biggest hotels in the city. Queen of these orderly white fields. It is very quiet. I am in control. I make sure the paperwork is done. Some of the newer maids are slovenly, but I soon teach them how to fill in the forms. And little Benedicta is always helpful. She sharpens my pencils, and brings me tea.

There are straight-edged bales of cloth like new snow. I never saw snow until I was in England. But I had seen it in the nursery rhyme book they taught us to read with at primary school, and there were pictures of pretty, chilly white children, and strange dark pointed Christmas trees. Later I bought my own tree, in London. My friend Abdu Mawanga helped me carry it home.

I’m a woman of the world. I have travelled, seen things. The months and years in other places. I count them up like beads on a string. Most Ugandans have never left home. I must remember I am lucky, happy. Katonda anjagalanyo.

The sun setting over Leptis Magna. Omar, my husband, took me there. It is a great ruined city in Libya. He took me there, as a wife, a lady. He had a camera. He took pictures of me, by the severed stone heads of the snakey-haired women. There were fifty of them. They were all different. Each of them looked sad in a different way. And those sadnesses survived two thousand years of history.

But we were still young, and very happy. Happiness never turns into stone. Happiness gleams like sand in your hands. We tried out the echo in the open air theatre. Beyond the stage, more sand, then sea. The sky was bright blue and had no edges. There were no clouds. It was full of hope. There was sand in my pockets for years and years. Hard bright grains to press with my fingers.

It is not only Omar’s fault that we parted. When you’re far from home, marriage isn’t easy. Munamawanga. You are different, and people are distant and suspicious. Neither of the families can support you. Nobody understands your problems.

But Omar was good. He taught me to drive. Some of his Arab friends didn’t want their wives to drive, but Omar taught me, and was proud of me. Yes, at first he loved me, and encouraged me. Our car was a second-hand Nissan Bluebird. In England, bluebirds mean happiness. A blue tin box of happiness. We closed the windows, and were warm inside. For years it was enough for us. I forgot my degree, I forgot my ambitions.

But I do not forgive him for taking my Jamie. Jamie, Jamil. Beloved boy.

Still I am glad that my husband loved me.

The sun rose over the bridges of London as my bus ran along the burning Thames. Going home from my work as the sun came up and office workers were beginning their day. The same sun we have in Africa, but there it is wrapped in white spider-thread. I got up every morning in the dark and cold while my husband Omar was still fast asleep, because he had studied until two in the morning. I did my work like the other foreigners, cleaning the offices of the sleeping English. They arrived, yawning, as we went for our breakfast, we hundreds and thousands of people from the empire. (They say that Uganda was not part of the empire, they say it was just a ‘protectorate’, which makes me laugh! Protecting us from what? From the other competing bazungu empires.)

The British Empire was already just a memory. And yet, these office workers were still our masters. They never knew us or talked to us, but we knew about them, from their wastepaper baskets. I wanted to arrive in a suit, as they did, and drink the coffee from the coffee-machine, and use their phones to call my family, and drop old chewing-gum like them, as if the ground would swallow it up. I wanted those people to know my name. (We had names for them, too, they knew nothing about: ‘Hair Shedder’, ‘Sticky Pants’, ‘Snot Finger’.)

Later in the day I went to their houses and did the same job for less money. It was the only way to enter their houses, to feel what English lives were like. Some of them pretended I was not there. I walked through their rooms, dusting their dust, shush, shush, shush, shush. I was their guest, I was their ghost.

But now I have a good job, in Kampala. I wear shiny high heels imported from Dubai, which are cheap to me, at 10,000 shillings, so I have three pairs in different colours, and pink-and-blue Masai beads from Kenya, and my flat has a TV-clock-radio and white plastic furniture you just sponge clean, all done in seconds, as good as new. And a small refrigerator with an ice-box. And a special bin for the sliced white bread I buy whenever I feel like it, and a tin for the cakes I enjoy at weekends.

I have a shelf of books left behind by hotel guests and another shelf I have bought myself, although books in Uganda are very expensive. (I own three books by Ernest Hemingway. He was a foolish man in some ways, but I like his short sentences – short sentences help you to be truthful. He told the truth about being young and having no money to buy books, like me. And about how first love slips into the past, which is also something that happened to me.) Soon I shall buy a second-hand computer, and my friend the accountant will help me to use it. I can type already, so it will be easy. Maybe I will write my own story.

I go to church regularly, of course, although my kabito does not come with me. I arrive early, and sit near the front, and sing out the hymns from my family hymn book. The pastor knows me and I am respected, though I do not rush up to the altar and bear witness in the new, American evangelists’ style.

A lifetime ago I left my village. I shall go back some day, when I have more money. I wanted to take my son to see them. The old ones deserved to see my son –

But I haven’t returned. It is my goal for the future. I will go back rich, with sugar and paraffin. Take them a netball, and a football.

I will go back with Charles, my friend the accountant. He will drive his car, and wear his suit.

(Will anyone remember me? My parents have gone, but there are still aunts and uncles. The cousins. I had so many cousins. My friends who sat on the ground with me. We sat in the shade of the mango tree. It was big, and old, with a crown of pink fingers. Sometimes we held hands, and watched the giant ants, wobbling through the dust with their long black bellies. We told each other stories about the village, and made up tales about the city, where Queen Elizabeth might be visiting our king, Kabaka Freddie. Though later the Kabaka died, in England, and people whispered that he had been poisoned.)

We children always knew we had to leave the village. In order to come back. More, better, different. It was our parents who told us to go. They saw us as teachers, lawyers, dentists, doctors, even presidents. Did they not see we might be porters and cleaners, taxi drivers, parking attendants? Despite our degrees and certificates.

My father was a farmer, for most of his life, though he worked in Kasese, when I was little, and later, when he was old, he got sick. But most of the time he was what people call a peasant. Although in the village our family was important. Our land grew bananas, maize, sorghum, black and white beans, tomatoes, sweet potatoes. My mother kept him at it, for he liked waragi, and as he grew older, he liked it more, but he never beat my mother, like the other fathers. One day, though, he fell off our bicycle under the wheels of a bus from the city, and his leg was broken, and the bananas were ruined, and after that he couldn’t ride the bicycle. In our district women don’t ride bicycles, except as passengers, side-saddle. The village men don’t like women who ride. They think sitting astride does something to a woman. So we had to pay one of the uncles to sell our bananas, and he always complained that the bicycle was crooked.

My mother sold maize and potatoes by the roadside, and beautiful pyramids of tomatoes, as neat as the triangles I drew at school. I loved the hot sweet smell of our tomatoes. The bazungu in jeeps paid good prices for our vegetables, white people travelling through Africa, and thanked us too much, and took photographs, although we had doubled the price for them. I practised my English: ‘Hallo, how are you?’ Some of the other children had bad manners: ‘Hallo, how are you, give me money.’ Then the bazungu looked pink and unhappy, and got back into their jeeps and drove away.

We had five books. My family was lucky. My father was a barman when he was young in the big hotel for white people near Kasese, near Kilembe mines where they mined copper and cobalt. All the young men wanted to go to Kilembe, to make their fortunes and have adventures, and my mother said it was all the fashion to be courted by a Kilembe boy. My father sent home money, and he brought things back with him, some sheets and pillows, and knives and forks. He said he was happier after they sacked him, when he came back home and looked after the farm, but if so, why did he drink so much? He brought us three novels in English, which careless bazungu had left in the hotel. I read them until they broke into islands. Her Destiny, The Shores of Love, and another title I cannot remember where everyone was stabbed in an English castle. You had to guess the murderer. I did not really care about it. And we had a Bible. And a hymn book.

The Bible is the single most beautiful book. I read it nearly every day, at home. And we had a copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern, pages 49 to 306. Though many of our neighbours had the everyday prayer book with the hymns we usually sang in the church, no one else had Ancient and Modern. The covers were lost, with hymns 1 to 73. When I came to Kampala, to university, Maama sent it with me, and in the nearby church, it was the book they used, but they had half a dozen copies for five hundred people. So I sang from our book, and was the envy of others. The rest just stood there humming and moving their lips, trying to say the words after me. Maama said the book was mine, when I left Uganda. By that time, though, I had read hundreds of books, all the shelves of my friend the professor who taught me at Makerere University. I loved Charles Dickens, and Chinua Achebe. I loved Mrs Jellyby, and Becky Sharp. For a week I wanted to be pale like Becky. I wanted to make a life, like her. I loved the poets, and the playwrights. But I was still grateful for our family hymn book.

We children played outside as dusk fell. We were the only house with a jacaranda. Most people had purple potato trees, which had no special evening sweetness. The sun drew the perfume from the creamy yellow flowers. There were little gold weaver-birds which danced and settled. We chattered like birds and ate sugar cane. Being a child was light, and easy.

(Yet every so often we were woken by gunfire. Sometimes there were rumours that soldiers were hiding from other soldiers in the bush near by. One thin man, haggard-faced, very important, came and stayed the night with us, and I was told to tell nobody, and not to speak to him, or look at him. But I risked a glance, and he was handsome, and he smiled at me as if he had seen me. I thought he was a hero. My secret hero. Now he is in the government, and people say things about corruption. I think it is harder to be a hero, once you become the power in the land.)

Our parents told us to go to the city. At night, they talked about the city lights. They said they shone like stars in the distance, though all we could see was low dark hills. The first time I saw the lights for myself was when my father took me to boarding school. There they were, a line of stars on the horizon, and a kind of humming, like a thousand bees. A thousand bees going after money. And they did shine like stars, growing brighter and brighter, until I was dazzled, and forgot about the village.

I managed to move from the country to the city. I made the great journey between worlds. It kills some people, and drives some of us mad. I did not want this to happen to my children. You see them, walking on the streets of London, the ghosts of Africans attacked by spirits, with matted hair, laughing and shouting. I thought, ‘My children will be born in the city. My children will never suffer like that.’ I meant to have three, or four, or five, not the nine or ten they have in the village. I was proud I knew about family planning. And yet my life has not gone to plan.

In the end, I had only one child, a son. And no one can predict what their children will suffer. Sometimes I find I am arguing with God. Is it true that he sees every sparrow that falls? Can he see Jamil? Does he care for him?

I had names for my daughters, but they never came. Life in London was all rushing and running. I loved Omar at first, and we knew such happiness. He made me laugh, as my father had. He liked my cooking. We liked our car. But later there was never enough money to pay the instalments or the petrol or insurance, and my student grant from the government lapsed, and I stopped my MA and became a cleaner. After all my dreams, and my parents’ dreams, this was the future I had seen on the horizon. The shining lights were just empty offices that had to be cleaned before the sun came up. And a hundred dusty bulbs, in dusty houses.

I thank Jesus that those days are over. Now when the maids come for sheets, they knock politely. It calms my soul, the clean, blank whiteness, the way the maids bow their heads to me. ‘Happy birthday, Miss Mary.’ ‘Happy birthday, Miss.’ The older ones don’t know their own birthdays, but the young ones think they know it all. I do not let them take liberties, though I praise Benedicta, who is polite.

I am proud to be the Linen Store Keeper. Now I am important, and my life is in order. The white sheets muffle the noise of the city, and the noise of the past, all those foreign cities, the dirt and the mess of the years I lost.

The sounds in the village were always the same. The city is a muddle of shouts and machines, but the sounds in the village spoke to me. The thump of the wooden pestle on its mortar as the women crushed ground-nuts for ground-nut sauce. Thud-ah, thud-ah like the beats of my heart. And little quick voices of weaver-birds. They dart through the branches like bright yellow thread.

But now my blood has grown red and loud. When I close my eyes, I am still in the city. There are horns blaring and beggars begging, their feet tipped like flippers from polio. They sit in a line outside the phone-shops. When I lie in the darkness, I no longer see my family home’s white jacaranda, with its buds that opened into yellow-white stars. I am in the city, and it is in me.

I picked up my letter from the Post Office. It is a strange building, flat and red. They say government spies live on top of the posta. The spies, if they’re there, are welcome to watch me. I do not care about the government. The queues were long because I went at lunchtime. There are fifty queues, and the rules are always changing. I went to my box, clutching my key. The metal felt slippery and hot in my hand. I held it so tight that it marked my palm.

I was so excited when I saw there was a letter. God had sent me a letter on my birthday. I am not a child, wanting cards and presents, but a letter from my son is my heart’s desire. Jamil had remembered my birthday, a miracle! I felt the whole post office was smiling at me. Trying to hurry, I dropped my letter, and had to clutch it up from the dusty floor.

I saw my own name, in blue ink, swimming closer. At first I was sure it was Jamie’s writing. My eyes caressed it; my heart leapt and thudded.

Then it snapped into focus, and everything was wrong. Neat angular writing. Not my Jamie’s. I recognised it, somehow, but it was not his.

And then my skin stood up in small pimples like the legs of a chicken dead on a table.

The writer-woman’s writing. Yes, it was her.

I am still not ready to open it.

.

4

Justin is dreaming about his childhood. It is six pm, and he is still in bed. He has thrown off the thick cloud of duck-down duvet his mother got out for him yesterday and lies sprawled on his back in a sheen of chilled sweat, streaks of blonde hair slicked across his pillow.

In the dream, all his school-friends have come for tea. He is still at his local primary school, so the friends are every shape and colour. It is his birthday, they are smiling at him. Mary Tendo is making the tea, plates and plates of white bread and red sweet jam, the food he always liked best as a boy, though his mother never allowed white bread. Mary used to buy it when his mother was out. And chocolate biscuits, and crisps, and baked beans.

But now they are eating a small white giraffe that Mary has bought for him as a treat. The giraffe is quite tough, and starts wriggling, but he wants to eat it to please Mary, though the other children push it away. Now it cocks up its head and looks at him, big reproachful eyes, a long tremulous lip. Suddenly it gets up from the table. It is his mother, who has just come home. Her teeth are big and sharp and yellow and she smells very strongly of giraffe.

Justin cries out, afraid, and wakes, and sits up, and sees he is alone in a darkening room. Outside the window, it is raining again. He scratches furiously, and goes back to sleep.

Two rooms away in the big suburban villa, bought for a song twenty years ago, Vanessa Henman is exercising hard, driving herself through her hundredth stomach crunch, her neck tendons cording, her vertebrae clicking. She tries to support her head with her hands but it’s almost impossible to relax it: the head seems to go on working on its own, such a heavy head, such a narrow neck, too long, far too long, for the rest of her body. 100, 101, 102 – and then she remembers she need only do 100, but a voice in her head insists she go on, and for neatness she aims for 110, but the demon drives her to 120. Until ten years ago she ran every day, but the bones in her hips began to ache.

‘You have to accept you are getting older,’ the doctor had said to her, quite gently, when she went to ask him to deal with the pain, a decade ago when it still seemed new. ‘None of us is getting any younger, Mrs Henman. It’s probably best to give up the running.’

‘Dr Henman, actually,’ she’d snapped at him. (She flushes pink now, remembering.) ‘I can’t give up running, it’s part of me. In any case, I’m only in my forties.’

Had she known the future, she would have kissed him. For after that meeting with Dr Truman, she had taken up Pilates instead of running, made friends with Fifi, her Pilates teacher, and co-written a book which had made her name and earned them both a lot of money, The Long Lean Line: Pilates for Everyone. It hit the beginning of the craze for Pilates: Vanessa was on every radio show, though Fifi, who was younger, got the television dates, and starred alone in the video, which had almost caused an argument between them, and Vanessa had to be forgiving. They had followed it up with another three, The Long Lean Line 2, 3 and 4.

Though it seems the vein might soon be exhausted. She’s had a phone call from her editor. ‘I’m talking to Marketing, Vanessa darling. Maybe we’re coming to the end of the line. No, sorry, of course I’m not trying to be funny.’

In any case, novels are her métier. She published two novels in the 1980s, which were ‘very well reviewed’, as she always points out. On the strength of them, she got the job she still holds, as Lecturer in Creative Writing at one of the new universities. She started that department, and designed the course, which over the years has grown increasingly popular.

But the students always ask her what she’s written recently. They only half-smile, and look slightly disappointed, when she tells them about her Pilates books.

‘They have made me a lot of money,’ she assures them. ‘Remember there is money to be made from non-fiction.’

‘Most of us want to write fiction, and novels,’ a brave, and ignorant, student protested. She gave him B- for his next two assignments.

Creative Writing, she has come to understand, is a magnet for the unteachable. Two in ten students are actually mad. In recent years she has too often caught herself listening to a student describing the plot of his novel, the two-hour tutorial extending like a desert, as a voice in her ear hisses, quite loudly, ‘This person is insane. Both of us must be. The story he is telling me is not worth telling. Nothing at all in this exchange is real. Why aren’t I writing my own novels?’ She is starting a new module this term, called ‘Autobiography and Life Writing’. Perhaps this will encourage the students to make sense: or perhaps the madness will just come out.

At least she is still all right for money, though there is the enormity of Justin, the problem of Justin, a limp dead weight, sucking up her energy, her time, her money, weighing on her like a mountain of debt. Every time he breathes, he becomes more costly. How can she write novels with him in the house?

Vanessa frowns as she trots downstairs. And the stair-carpet’s filmed with a faint spume of hair, her own yellow-blonde hair, which tends to fall out. She is temporarily without a cleaner, since the last one met Justin naked on the landing. ‘I just don’t feel right with men around,’ the woman had whined, as she handed back their keys. Vanessa told herself she could manage without; these days one had to pay cleaners a fortune, and they didn’t do it half as well as oneself. But she’s finding herself too busy to clean, though she sometimes attacks a pan or a surface with furious vigour for ten minutes or so.

Justin is a liability. How can she keep cleaners with a nudist about?

It is time for another conference with Tigger – her nickname for Trevor, Justin’s father. She gave him up two decades ago, once she realised he had no ambition, and refused to take things seriously; including her writing, including her. He wouldn’t read the parenthood manuals she bought him. They separated when the boy was just a baby, one and a half, just beginning to talk (it hurt that he said ‘Dadda’ before ‘Mumma’). But Tigger still hung around the house all the time. Though in the last year, since things went wrong for Justin, Tigger has too often been otherwise engaged, falling for a stupid young would-be artist not so much older than his son, some kind of Indian who doesn’t speak English.

Typical, she thinks, typical of men. All right, he still phoned and he still sent money, he even came round to do trivial jobs, but he seemed to think his loyalty was to this young girl, just because she happened to be living with him.

Vanessa chops carrots into crisp orange rings, so forcefully she almost cuts off a finger. Usually she is too busy for vegetables, except for the pre-cooked, supermarket kind, but Fifi has suggested that Justin ought to have some, that he is simply short of vitamin C, and that is why he lies in the dark and sleeps. So Vanessa has bought a book called Salads for Life, and is making a mixed salad to share with Justin, though the last one simply sat by the side of his bed, growing limp and brown as the shadows lengthened.

It doesn’t matter, she won’t give up, she will do the right things, even if no one else does, though Justin’s father has let her down, though Mary Tendo has not answered her letter, though Fifi is often unsympathetic, and her hips still ache, and her students are thick. She will keep up standards: she is a stoic.

These thoughts are comforting. She chops less fiercely, approving the marriage of reds and oranges, tomatoes and carrots, garnet-bright grapes, of apple-white celeriac and slivers of spring onion, the light and dark greens of the moonlets of cucumber, the silver-pale edges of the iceberg’s frills, the curves of the onion like the bole of a lute, and all of it sitting like grace on the plate, indisputably good for them, and she has made it.

It matters to Vanessa to do things right.

.

5 MARY TENDO

It is early morning. The sky is red as kisses, the passionate kisses of my friend the accountant who said goodbye to me ten minutes ago. (That is what I call him when the bolder young maids try to find out about my private life. In fact, I am happy that Charles is an accountant, and I like to think of him that way, though in my heart I also call him my kabito, my sweetheart.)

There are too many people on this taxi. It is a joke, the law that says maximum fourteen. The driver is greedy, and instructs the boy to hang out of the door and take on more people from the crowds of early morning workers at each stop. There are seventeen of us now, and three live chickens which squawk as we rock into the ruts of red earth where the heavy rains have dug into the road that roars up and down the hills of Kampala. A man in front of me has AIDS, or TB. He is very thin, and coughs horribly, and cannot hide it with his bony hand, and everyone tries to move away, but we are packed together like the dried bananas I took with me when I went to London. I think the chicken is pecking my calves, but my legs are pressed hard against a sticky plastic suitcase that belongs to the fat woman next to me, and I cannot turn round to shoo it away.

I am holding my birthday present on my lap. It is the computer I have always wanted. Not the big heavy thing I had imagined, but a silver laptop, a thing of beauty. It is nearly new, and it is easy to use. I love it more than anyone can imagine. I have longed for one for years, so I can write down the stories unravelling in my head like pieces of ribbon. I will write about my youth, like Hemingway. Already I have written a sentence on it. ‘dear charles thank you for my present. it is my new baby! yours sincerely mary.’ I have not got the hang of the capitals yet. I am clutching it tightly, in case it gets dirty.

At least the boy keeps the sliding door open so air without germs comes into the taxi. It smells of warm rain and earth and flowers, the red-tulip-flowered trees called kabakanjagala which means ‘the King loves me’. (King Ronald still loves us, though he does not really rule us. Now we are ruled by Museveni, and he loves us so much he doesn’t want to leave us. So people whisper he might rig the elections. I think it would be better if he loved us less.)

I spent last night with my friend the accountant who lives in a new flat in the suburb of Bukoto. Charles took me to a smart café, western-style, which opened recently on the Jinja Road, where we had a big table with a white cloth just for the two of us, and small portions, and the waiter was a boy who called me ‘Madam’, though I thought he was laughing at me behind his eyes, and most of the other guests were bazungu, nearly as white as the tablecloths. I think I would rather have gone to Jimmy’s, where you eat smoking hot pork under the stars, delicious muchomo, with your fingers. But in the end I had a very nice birthday, a very nice night with my friend the accountant, and was too busy to read my letter. Now it is morning, although in London it will still be the middle of the night.

Henman is in London. Henman is sleeping. Does she still live in that big empty house, so much too big for only two people?

I worked for her, nearly a decade ago. Miss Henman. Vanessa Henman. Nessie. I spent eight years with her, at first twice a week, then every afternoon, because she found me useful. With her son Justin, who was like my own, but what? But easier to love. (Not that I loved him more than Jamie. I have never loved anyone more than Jamie.)

Easier to love, because not mine. I did not have to fight with his father. Indeed, I liked the little boy’s father, though the writer-woman seemed to despise him, and talked about him jeeringly, both in his presence and his absence. She called him ‘Tiger’, an animal’s name.

In fact this Trevor was very clever. He mended the washing-machine and the boiler. He made the radiators work one winter when there was snow on the ground outside and the heating broke and we nearly froze to death. I became worried about Justin. English children are pale as ice. His little fingers were blue like the sea, the blue-grey sea that is a wall around England. But he said, ‘My dad is coming soon. I know my dad will be able to fix it.’ And his mother was screaming, ‘Why isn’t he here?’ But then Trevor arrived, and like magic, fixed it.

Little blond Justin. Pointy nose, grey eyes. I think he looked very like his father. An English face with sharp small features, except his mouth, which was round, like a rose. He liked to be kissed. He liked to kiss. He liked to be with me when I worked in the kitchen. I liked it too. Children make me smile. All my adult life I have felt short of children.

He wasn’t allowed in his mother’s room. He couldn’t be around her when she was working. He was always with me. I liked him there. The more I liked him, the less I liked her.

I met the writer-woman through a postcard in the newsagent. ‘Nice friendly family requires trained cleaner.’ Trained? What did she mean? Not to do doo-doo on her floor? I was trained to be a teacher or a writer like her. I have been to Makerere University, ‘the best university in Africa’. (Everyone says that who hasn’t been there, and I always smile and agree with them, although bits of Makerere are falling down.)

I went round to see her, smiling, smiling. She shook my hand as if we were equals (I was never equal to the people I cleaned for. I knew all about them, all their dirtiness, the secret habits that no one else knew, the places they left snot, or sanitary towels, the fruit they left to moulder in the bins meant for paper. And so, I was superior.)

And yet, not all of them were bad. Even the Henman is not all bad.

That day she was alone with her small son, who was pulling at her skirt and snatching at her sleeve. I saw she could not make him behave. I saw he needed her to look at him. At the same moment, I started to love him.

I asked her, where was the family? She looked puzzled, and then she laughed. ‘You are from Africa, of course. This is a single-parent family. That means, it is just me and my boy. Women like me rather like it that way.’ She said it with a strange, show-off face that made me think she did not really like it.

‘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?

.

6

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.

.

7 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 I 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.