The Lubetkin Legacy

Violet: Mary Atiemo

Violet doesn’t plan on staying in the flat for long. When she’s saved up some money from her amazing salary, she’ll find something better — not a council flat. This place is convenient for work, and she was lucky to get it at short notice, but she viewed it in a hurry and didn’t notice how tatty the decor was and how rough the neighbourhood. On the day she arrived she watched someone being carried out on a stretcher. And there are those strange alarming shrieks from the flat next door, which sound like someone possessed by a shetani. Besides, it’s too big for one person. The smooth-talking estate agent had persuaded her it would be easy to find some room-mates, but now she isn’t sure she’s ready for another flat share after her last disastrous experience.

When she first came to London, she’d done casual office work and waitressing to fund her internship with an NGO and shared a zero-housework flat in Hammersmith with a girl from Singapore and two boys from uni, one of whom was her boyfriend, Nick. The Singaporean girl, who used to borrow her clothes, eventually borrowed Nick too. She came home early one day to find them having a shower together.

Her friend Jessie, who had just moved into a flat in Croydon with her boyfriend, let her sleep on the sofa in the sitting room. But a month on a sofa is a long time.

The agency that found her this flat in Madeley Court specialises in student lettings, and it is furnished with seven narrow beds, seven desks, seven wooden chairs, seven small chests of drawers, and a small round table in the kitchen. How did seven people squeeze into here? Maybe they were dwarves? She smiles, remembering the movie she saw with Jessie, when they were both at primary school in Bakewell.

When she got the flat, Jessie lent her a spare duvet, pillows, a set of yellow crockery and a frying pan. She texts Jessie a ‘Thank You’, with a picture of yellow crockery on the kitchen shelf.

She opens another door off the sitting room/bedroom, and finds it leads out on to a balcony with a view — she hadn’t expected that. Leaning on the parapet, looking down on the flowering tops of the cherry trees and the splashes of yellow from the daffodils in the verges, she breathes deeply and closes her eyes. The sunlight on her skin touches her memory with the view from her grandmother’s veranda in Langata, Nairobi, the Nandi Flame trees and the dazzling blood lilies. It’s been a long while since she remembered that time in her childhood. A man with a bald head is pushing his bicycle across the green. Looks like the same old guy she saw in Luigi’s. Maybe he lives nearby.

She’s only been in her new job for a month — thinking of it still makes her stomach flip with excitement. Tonight she’s meeting up with her friends at the Lazy Lounge to celebrate her birthday. So now is her only chance to sort out her flat and explore her new neighbourhood. She puts on her trainers and decides to go out for a run while the weather holds.

It’s a mixed sort of area, where old-fashioned terraces rub shoulders with scruffy council estates, little artsy shops, galleries and studios tucked up the side streets, and further away a lively street market. She passes several building sites bristling with cranes where modern offices and apartments are shooting up, and from time to time she catches the dark gleam of a river or canal threading its way between the streets.

In terms of clothes shops the area is disappointing, but there are plenty of cafés and eateries with cheap and interesting menus, two supermarkets — Lidl close by and Waitrose a bit further away. She stocks up in both places, spending freely, especially on treats for herself. She buys a kettle in a quaint little hardware store halfway up a side street, where she also splurges on a cafetière. As an afterthought she buys a blue plastic bucket with a mop, a dustpan and brush, some rubber gloves and detergent, just in case the agency cleaner never shows up.

By the time she’s unpacked her shopping there’s still no sign of the cleaner, and she is resigned to doing it herself. But first she plugs in the kettle to try it out, and spoons coffee — Kenya AA of course — into the cafetière.

Just as she pours on the water and breathes in the dark aroma, the doorbell rings. A young black girl is standing there, so young and skinny she looks like only a kid, wearing a blue overall and carrying a mop and bucket, a brush and some rubber gloves. Violet peers at her name badge: Homeshine Sanitary Contractors. Mary Atiemo. That’s a Kenyan name.

‘Cleaning contractor,’ says the girl with a broad smile. Her front tooth is chipped. Violet’s grandmother Njoki used to say that dental deficiency is a sign of untrustworthiness. She was full of funny ideas like that.

‘You’re late,’ says Violet. ‘I was just going to do it myself.’

‘Sorry, please,’ says the girl. ‘No bus. Please, let me clean it for you. No clean, no pay today.’

Tears well into her eyes. Violet hesitates. She looks a bit useless, lost in her too-big uniform, twig thin, smaller than the mop she’s carrying, this scrap of a girl standing on the grey concrete walkway, with a grey thundery sky looming behind her.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Kenya. Nairobi,’ Mary Atiemo says. ‘Kibera. You know Kenya?’

‘I was born in Nairobi,’ she replies. She remembers Kibera; it’s a slum not far from her grandmother’s house. Once or twice she glimpsed its dirty twisted alleys from the back seat of the car and shuddered. How has this slum girl from that wretched insanitary place got to be a ‘sanitary contractor’ in London, standing here on her doorstep just as she’s standing on the doorstep of her exciting new life? It seems a bad omen, as if the past won’t let her go.

‘My mother is Kenyan,’ she adds, to put the girl at ease.

The girl’s smile widens till it takes up half her face. ‘Shikamoo.’

‘Marahaba,’ Violet replies, cringing at the deference in the girl’s voice.

Suddenly a clap of thunder rattles the rooftops, and rain sheets down like a monsoon.

‘You’d better come in. I’ve just made some coffee. Would you like some? It’s from Kenya.’

Mary Atiemo nods. ‘That would be fine. In my home we only used to drink tea.’

Despite her small size, Mary Atiemo is a wizard of a cleaner. She sweeps the floors, bags the garbage, then fills up the bucket at the sink, squirts in some detergent, sloshes it around the floor, and chases it furiously with the mop. Scraps of food, shreds of grime, cigarette butts, every type of filth, all float up on the frothy water to be captured in the strands of the mop, swirled into the bucket and flushed down the loo. She cleans the grey fingerprints off the woodwork, the grime off the cooker, the yellow stains off the toilet, and the black ring around the bath. Just watching makes Violet feel exhausted and she thinks, with her new salary, it would be nice to have a cleaner to come in once in a while.

‘Do you have a phone number?’ she asks the girl. ‘Maybe you can come and clean another time.’

The girl looks embarrassed. ‘We’re not allowed to have a phone. Mr Nzangu doesn’t let us work for somebody else. But give me your number, please, and I’ll get in touch when I can.’

She writes down her name and number on a bit of paper. The girl slips it into the pocket of her overall, gathers up her cleaning things and disappears out into the rain.