The old woman’s flat is on the fourth floor of a red-brick block in a good neighborhood, not flashy but I can tell it’s expensive. “I don’t know why you’re here!” she shouts. She is tiny, sitting like a bundle of sticks in the middle of her reclining armchair, but her voice is strong.
“Your son has asked me to come and help you,” I say. “He is concerned about you, Rita.”
Her son is so concerned that he lives on the other side of the world and pays someone he’s never set eyes on to look after her, though to be fair, he thinks I’m the one who cared for his aunt in her last days. That was a friend of mine from church.
When I first came to London, I was a nanny for a rich family, the Fishers. The girl was ten when I started, the boy eight, and the youngest just a baby. I was with those children night and day for four years. I saw them grow. I fed them and wiped their tears and taught them things. They were like my own flesh and blood. But when the youngest started school, the mother said they didn’t need me any longer. She told me she was going to work from home and take care of all the things I’d been doing. I knew this was a lie. The real reason was that she could see that the youngest boy had come to love me best and she couldn’t bear it. She wanted me gone.
If I had kept my mouth shut she would have helped me to find another family to go to, but I was upset. I spoke my mind. So she threw me out right away. I spent a week sleeping on night buses until someone at my church said I could stay with her until I got back on my feet.
Rita’s son thinks my name is Ann. My friend’s real name is longer and more beautiful, but these people lose heart if you ask them to remember anything complicated.
“My mother doesn’t need much, Ann,” he said in our telephone interview, “just a bit of help with the housework, some cooking, someone to talk to. She’s very independent.”
Four hours a day, six days a week. Who can live on that? Plus, the money has to go through my friend’s bank account and she will take some of it for her trouble. I don’t have a choice. I’ve told my parents that I can’t send them anything for a while. This is just a start.
* * *
Rita watches me as I move around her sitting room with a dust cloth. Someone else must have been doing this work before me. I can see where they dusted and where they let it pile up: behind the ornaments, on window ledges, on top of the television set. It’s a big flat. Some of the dust is piled in layers, like cloth.
“How old are you?” she asks. “Forty? Fifty? Sixty? I can’t tell these days.”
I smile and shake my head. “Old enough,” I say.
“Where do you come from? Colombia? Venezuela? Brazil? Are you illegal?”
Illegal? Wasn’t I born on God’s earth, just like her? But we can’t have that conversation. I know that. So I say nothing.
“Are you married? Do you have children?”
I pretend not to hear.
I did have a child once, when I was very young. I had to leave him with my mother while I went to the city to work. He got ill and God took him before I could get back home. That was a long time ago. I have looked after many others since, and for the past four years I had those beautiful, borrowed children, but now their mother has taken them back. I know the littlest one will be longing for me as I long for him. He’ll be crying, especially at night. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the softness of his hair, the pressure of his little fingers on my arm. I think of the way his head breaks out in a fine coating of sweat as he drops off to sleep. Who will wipe his forehead now so that he doesn’t catch cold? These feelings are painful. But I know they will fade in the end.
I don’t share any of this with the old woman because it’s none of her business. I smile at her in a false way. “What would you like for lunch, Rita?”
“Call me Mrs. Barker,” she says, snapping her dentures. “Not hungry.”
If Rita doesn’t eat, God will take her, and I will not get paid so I must do my best.
“I will ask you again later, Rita,” I say. “Now I hoover.”
“Mrs. Barker,” she says. “And don’t bother. I do my own housework.” Even she doesn’t really believe that.
* * *
After five days in the job, my phone rings. It’s a Friday evening. I’m on a city bus full of people as tired as dogs, standing between a man with a lot of parcels and a woman with a baby in a pram. It’s a struggle to get the phone out of my pocket. I’m hoping it will be one of my friends calling to invite me somewhere, but the screen says: Craig. This is the name of Rita’s son.
He wants to know how I think it’s going. “What’s your impression?”
I don’t say that his mother doesn’t seem to like me any better yet. Every day she tells me she enjoys her privacy. And she always complains about my food. It’s too salty, too bland, too tough, too wet, too dry. I can never get it right.
“Your mother is a strong person,” I say. “She has many opinions. But her body is weaker than she likes to think.”
“She’s almost ninety,” he tells me, and he leaves a gap for me to say: Wow! or What an incredible age! But I don’t feel saying any of those things, so I just wait.
I imagine him in a clean office, leaning back in an expensive chair while he takes these few minutes to ease his conscience. Surely he can hear the catastrophe of noise around me? The shrieks of the teenagers running upstairs, the hiss of the doors, the roar of the engine as the bus takes off again. But even if he hears he probably doesn’t understand. This is the sound of my time, and he is stealing it from me.
“It’s early days, isn’t it?” he says. “I guess we can’t expect too much, can we?”
I don’t know why, but this makes me even more angry. Can’t expect too much? I used to be top of my class at school. I was the best at spelling, the best at reading and mathematics. I could have gone to university if the situation had been different. Expect! And we? Who is this we?
Next to me, the baby in the pushchair wakes up and begins to scream. I glance down at its purple, sweating face.
At the other end of the phone, Rita’s son is still talking. “Do you mind, um—?” I can hear he has forgotten that my name is supposed to be Ann. “Do you mind if I check in with you like this, every now and then? Occasionally? For an update?”
“If you want,” I say. Anything to be rid of him.
* * *
When I arrive at the start of the second week, I notice a bad smell. At first I think it’s because I forgot to empty the kitchen bin on Saturday. But the closer I get to Rita, the more I can smell it. I see that the dress she’s wearing looks a lot like the one she had on last week. Maybe not just a lot like, maybe exactly the same. How did I not see this before? Why didn’t her son let me know? This woman can’t wash and dress herself anymore.
“It gets so hot in here,” I say. “How about I help you take a shower and we change your clothes?”
Silence.
“You will feel more comfortable.”
She’d like to tell me to go to hell, but her longing to be clean is stronger. Without a word, she gets up from her chair, grabs hold of her walker and leads the way to her bedroom where there’s a bathroom with a walk-in shower I didn’t even know about. All this time I’ve been cleaning the other bathroom and the toilet off the hallway. It’s a very big place.
We pick a fresh set of clothes from the cupboards and move to this bathroom.
At first, I feel a strong resistance. I don’t want to touch this person. She doesn’t like me. I’m not sure I like her. But once we begin, all the steps lay themselves out in my mind and the task doesn’t seem so difficult anymore. How many little bodies have I not bathed over the years? Why should this be any different.
I adjust the shower temperature so that it’s not too hot and let the water run while I get her undressed. I help her onto the shower stool and she sits quietly while I soap and sponge her flanks, her neck and breasts and belly, her arms, her long crooked back. I kneel down to soap her feet and between her toes. Then I wash her fine grey hair and rinse, rinse, till every part of her is shining.
“All done, Mrs. Barker,” I say. Today she has earned her title.
I turn off the shower and cover her in towels. I dry her bit by bit, then dress her in the clean clothes, and when it’s done, we are both very tired. I help her over to the bed and she’s asleep in a second. I’m going to have to wake her before I leave to make sure she eats. Next time, I say to myself, I should do things the other way around: food first, then washing. We are learning how to do things, Rita and I.
* * *
Some days later, when I let myself in, I hear voices coming from the sitting room. As usual, Rita is in her reclining chair. Nearby, on the sofa, is a large woman in a navy pantsuit. She doesn’t get up. She gives me a long, careful look, the kind of look a butcher might give a sheep.
“You must be Ann.”
“Yes.”
Is she a social worker? A nurse? My friend has warned me to be very careful with such people. They will be suspicious. They might ask me for qualifications, certificates, police checks.
“Perhaps you could make us a cup of tea, Ann,” says the woman. “How do you take it these days, Mother? Still three sugars? No wonder you don’t have any teeth left.”
Rita jerks her head at me. “She knows.”
“I’ll have mine black, please, Ann, not too strong, no sugar, and with a slice of lemon if there is such a thing.”
I tell her that Mrs. Barker’s son does her shopping online. He does not order lemons.
The woman raises an eyebrow. “I should look into that some time. What does he buy? Expensive ready meals covered in plastic, no doubt. Full of e-numbers.”
“Don’t go sticking your nose into everything, Denise,” says Rita, but her voice sounds small.
I go into the kitchen to make these cups of tea. The daughter follows. She smells of perfume and cigarettes. She says she’s been working abroad and now that she’s back she doesn’t think it’s necessary for me to come every day. “Perhaps just a couple of hours a week,” she says. “To clean.”
I feel a hot wave of rage, but I remember to push it back down. “Mrs. Barker’s son is the person who employs me,” I say. “I will wait to hear from him.”
“Fine,” says the woman. “I’ll get him to call you.”
“YOU CAN’T MOVE IN HERE, DENISE,” Rita shouts from the other room. “I won’t HAVE it!”
Denise doesn’t seem to care that I hear this. I am of no account. She is looking through the cupboards, touching the glassware and crockery. I can see her calculating her inheritance.
“These cut-glass tumblers shouldn’t go in the dishwasher, Ann,” she says. “In fact, they’re far too valuable for daily use. Once you’ve made the tea perhaps you can move them to the hall cupboard. I’ll show you which shelf.” I can hear her scolding her mother when she goes back to the sitting room. “I see things have been allowed to slip while I’ve been away. What was wrong with the agency I found for you? I thought they were excellent.”
Later that evening, Craig rings me. He tells me that he’s just spoken to his mother. Then there is silence. Far away, on the other side of the world, he seems to be struggling with some great difficulty. I say nothing. I don’t see why I should help him get rid of me.
But I’m wrong. That’s not why he’s called. With a lot of stammering and throat clearing, he tells me that his mother has decided she can no longer manage on her own. “I don’t know your domestic situation, Ann, but my mother… well, she seems to have taken to you. She would like you to be her live-in carer.” Then he names what seems to me to be an unbelievable amount of money, although later my friend tells me it should be more.
I want to say yes right away, but I know I need to talk to my friend. “I need to check some things first,” I say.
“I will call you tomorrow,” he says. “Thank you, Ann.”
* * *
The next morning, I get up early and travel to the neighborhood where I used to live with the Fisher family, to the school where I used to take the middle child every day. I stand on the opposite side of the road watching the stream of little ones until I see my children, the ones I used to care for. The middle boy has grown, but it’s the youngest that takes the whole of my attention. I can’t see him clearly because of his coat, but I see enough to know that he’s turning into a fine child. I long for him to notice me. I want to wave and see his face light up, hear his voice call out my own true name so that I can run across the road and take him in my arms. But I control myself. It wouldn’t be fair. There’d be no time to explain why I had to leave. He’d be upset. He has a whole day of school ahead of him.
They go into the playground together with a girl I’ve never seen before. I wait for the bell. After a minute or so this girl comes out again so I cross the road and start to walk beside her.
I tell her that I saw her come in with the Fisher boys. “Are you their new nanny?”
She tugs a set of headphones out of her ears. “Excuse me?” She has one of those open faces that belong to people who’ve not (yet) had any trouble in their lives. I repeat my question and she tells me everything. She is in her first year of studying geography at university. Her family is too far away for her to live at home, so she rents a room from the Fishers, which she gets a bit cheaper in exchange for taking the children to school in the mornings. In the afternoons the boys go to the after-school club and the mother or the father collects them at six. “I can’t do the pickup because I have a waitressing job in the evenings. Oh! I’m so tired all the time. London is so expensive. SO expensive. I don’t know how anyone manages to live here.”
“Didn’t they have a nanny before?” I ask. “What happened to her?”
The girl frowns, searching her memory. They did tell her the story, she says. “I think she stole something valuable. A phone, maybe? A piece of jewelry?”
I stop walking and close my eyes. I vaguely hear the girl saying she can see her bus and, “See you tomorrow!” but I don’t reply. My voice doesn’t work and there is the great hole in my chest where my heart used to be. I know I will never see my boy again. He is lost to me now.
* * *
When I get to Rita’s, there is no sign of the daughter. I wait for Rita to ask me to be her live-in carer. Nothing. First, she wants the window open, then she wants it closed. She complains that the tea I bring her is cold and the lunch is too hot. I want to throw her plate against the wall, but I have learned what happens when you are alone among strangers and you show your true feelings. Only the rich have that luxury.
We go through the whole of my four hours until finally, just as I am getting ready to leave, she says, “So are you moving in or not?”
I sit down near her on the sofa. “Is that what you want?’
Rita shrugs her shoulders. She is so stubborn. She can’t bear to have to ask for this.
I tell her that I have other work, which isn’t true but she doesn’t know that. “What if I give up all my other jobs and I move here, Mrs. Barker, and then your daughter tells me to go, what then?”
Rita gives me a sharp glance. “My son is the one who decides.”
I don’t reply.
“He said he spoke to you yesterday and you needed time to think. Well? You’ve had time. What do you say?”
Still, I don’t speak.
“I’ll tell him to offer you more money,” she says.
I nod. I name the sum my friend said I should ask for. And Rita laughs, thin shoulders heaving. “Not such a doormat after all, eh! Hah! I like that.”
As I leave, she yells, “Call me Rita!” as if this is a great treat for me.
This time, I tell myself, it will be easier. This time I will defend myself better. They will not get my heart.
* * *
The heatwave passes. The trees lose their leaves and then we’re into winter. In Rita’s flat it’s hard to notice the difference between seasons because she likes the heating turned up high, but I have a break in the afternoons and I try to go for a walk as often as I can. I pay attention to the changes: the calm days, the stormy ones. This is my life passing. But I’m able to send money to my parents again, and to my sister and her family, and perhaps her oldest girl will be able to go to university. That is something.
In the evenings, Rita likes me to watch television with her. She enjoys darts, snooker and Formula One racing, programs that remind her of the years when she and her husband used to run a pub. His name was Alf, she tells me. He was clever as a snake. He worked out how to cheat the brewery so he could save. Then he put that money into the stock market and turned it into more, which meant they were able to buy this flat and send both children to private schools. “More fool us,” she says. “Look how they turned out.”
“They’re making money, aren’t they?”
Rita clacks her false teeth. “Money’s not the only thing in life, Ann.”
I don’t want to start an argument so I say nothing.
Alf died of a stroke, she tells me. He was only fifty-six. “But that was a long time ago,” she says. “And he had a shocking temper.” About Denise she says, “We won’t see her for a good while now. She’s got herself another fancy job overseas. Tax free salary, company car, blah blah, all that. It won’t last. There’s always some bust-up and then she’s back meddling in my affairs again.”
I think of my parents who live near my sister so that she can look after them for nothing. Is that a good or a bad thing? I don’t know any more, I only know that the world is divided into those who, like Rita’s children, can buy other people’s time and those—like me and the geography student—who must sell.
* * *
It’s not even six months before Denise is back again, still smelling of tobacco and perfume, perhaps a little heavier than before, a little redder in the face.
We are watching a tense moment in the darts grand slam and Rita is not pleased to be interrupted. “What happened? Fired again?”
Denise stands for a moment watching as the challenger attempts a nine-darter. He leans forwards and Rita and I hold our breath. He’s the player Rita is backing. We’ve started taking bets, dropping buttons in two jars beside the TV. The inset picture shows how the dart finds its target with that satisfying clunk.
“WOWZA!!!” Rita shouts. “That’s my boy!”
I get up and drop another button in the Rita jar. “You win again, Mrs. Barker,” I say. It’s always a good day when Rita wins. But now, Denise picks up the remote and snaps off the TV.
“Ann, perhaps you could go for a walk? I’d like some time alone with my mother.”
Rita’s eyes are still on the screen. “No need to barge in like this, Denise. Whatever you want to say, you can say in front of—”
Denise fixes me with a look. “Ann? If you don’t mind.”
“I will be in my room.”
After about half an hour, Denise comes to find me, frowning, mouth turning down at the corners. She says she’s shocked by her mother’s decline. “Horrified!”
I try to gather up some of my old anger to defend myself. I want to tell her that Rita has gained a little weight since I moved in; that she is always clean; that I trim her nails and cut her hair; that I massage her skin with cream to stop it cracking; that we’ve been doing sudoku in the morning after breakfast and she’s brilliant at calculating the score in darts. I reach deep into myself looking for the energy of rage, but I’ve gone soft these past months.
“Thank goodness I’m back in London, that’s all I can say,” Denise says as she leaves. “There are going to be some changes around here, I can promise you that.”
* * *
Denise organizes an endless circus of people to come to the flat: doctors, nurses, paramedics, psychiatrists. They ask Rita to write her name and to tell them when she was born. They get her to draw a clock face and put the hands at twelve noon. They take blood. They ask if she is getting more forgetful? Does she struggle to remember names? Has she ever got lost in the flat?
“Nope,” says Rita, clacking her dentures like crocodile.
We all know what Denise is up to.
“Don’t worry,” Rita tells me. “Craig won’t let her put me in a home. He knows it would kill me.”
I’m not so confident. Craig seems weak to me, and Denise is as strong as a lion. I call my brother and sister and tell them my parents must save as much as they can from the money I send. I don’t know how much longer this job will last.
After a couple of weeks, Denise comes in and almost before she has taken off her coat she starts shouting about safety. “You’re not SAFE, here, Mother!!! The situation is INTOLERABLE! I refuse to have you on my conscience! I lie awake at night worrying—” Whitish spittle is collecting in the corners of her mouth. Her color is high. I wonder if she’s a dehydrated.
“What’s the trouble?” Rita says calmly. “Hotel bill due? Maxed out your credit card?”
Denise’s nicely powdered face twists into an ugly shape. “How dare you, Mother! I’m concerned for your WELFARE!!” On and on she goes. I can see a blue vein pulsing at her temple.
“Please, Miss Barker,” I say. “Your mother is an elderly person. Noise is not good for her. Would you like a glass of water?”
“NOISE!!!” She is shouting into my face. “How DARE YOU! My own mother! You’ve no right—”
And then she goes quiet. A wave seems to pass through her body. Her mouth falls open. Her eyes roll back in her head. I reach her just in time to stop her hitting her head on the drinks cabinet. I lower her to the carpet, put her in the recovery position, reach for the phone.
From the other side of the room, I hear Rita’s voice: “Just like her father.”
* * *
From the windows of Rita’s flat we watch the spring arrive, creeping from one tree to the next, like a slow flood of brightness. There are daffodils in the window boxes of the flats across the street. When I cook, I keep the kitchen window open so that I can hear the chatter of songbirds arriving from the south. How many more springs will Rita see? I try not to worry about that.
We watch a lot of snooker. We’re still making bets. When the Rita or the Ann jar of buttons is full to the top, we have a small sherry. “Cheers,” we say, “Bottoms up!”, “Here’s mud in your eye!” —all these little sayings that Rita has been teaching me.
Sometimes Denise calls out to me from her room. She has carers who visit four times a day, but I’ve told Craig I don’t mind helping in between. Even if she can’t talk so well anymore, she’s learning ways to show me what she wants: a glass of water, her nose or mouth wiped, sometimes a trip to the toilet. It’s nothing to feel ashamed about, I tell her. We all have bodies.
At one o’clock and seven o’clock, I wheel Denise to the kitchen and the three of us eat together, and on Sundays Craig rings to ask us how things are. He is growing more confident. He makes jokes. He teases. “How are my girls?” he’ll say. Once that would have put me in a rage. But I just smile and say, “We are good thank you, Craig.” My friend’s daughter has shown me how to set up a company for them to pay into, so I get all the money every month. They can call me whatever they like.
Rita and I get along well now. We laugh a lot. Sometimes I think about telling her the truth. I imagine myself saying: “Ann? What are you talking about? There is no Ann. My real name is—!”
But I know it would be like a firecracker in the mouth: five seconds of entertainment, then no more teeth. I can never allow myself to forget that I am the horse and they are the riders, even Denise who cannot walk anymore. So I keep my own true name to myself, something they cannot buy, something that belongs to me alone.
Vicky Grut’s debut collection, Live Show, Drink Included was published by Holland Park Press and shortlisted for the Edge Hill University Short Story Prize in 2019. Individual stories appeared in the Harvard Review and Best British Short Stories, 2019. She lives in London. www.vickygrut.com @vickygrut.bsky.social