Acting as a Cleaning Lady

By Susannah Donim

Chapter 3 – Maria’s First Job

Dave, now Maria, begins earning his pay as a cleaning lady. It turns out not to be as bad as he expected.

At half-past seven on Monday morning, we – that is, Sally and Maria – rang Dorothy’s doorbell. We’d already apologised for having to be here this early, but Sally had to be at work by eight-thirty. The old lady wasn’t at all bothered. She told Sally that she didn’t sleep much at her age. She was always up at six.

It was a chilly morning so I was wearing dark glasses, my headscarf, and an old coat of Sally’s over my cleaning lady costume, and carrying my handbag. Also, having learned my lesson at Anna and Phil’s, I had an old basket full of essential cleaning materials, in case Dorothy was as under-equipped as my sister.

“Listen, are you sure this is… well... right?” I asked Sally, in Spanish. “We’re deceiving an elderly, handicapped lady for monetary gain.”

“We’re not robbing her,” she said, reasonably. “You’ll be working your balls off for her… well not balls, obviously; you’ve already put them out of reach… as it were. You’ll be doing her a real service, something she desperately needs. You’re not proposing to attack her, or rifle through her drawers or anything, are you? You want a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work – as a humble cleaning lady.”

She was still cackling at my discomfiture when the door opened to silence any further conversation. Dorothy blinked nervously at us in the morning sunlight.

“Morning, Dorothy,” said my wife cheerfully. “I’m Sally and this is Maria.”

I smiled and bobbed something that might have been a sort of curtsey. Then I realised she wouldn’t have been able to see me smiling.

“Oh, do come in,” Dorothy said warmly. “It’s so kind of you to help. Let’s go into the kitchen first, then I can show you around. Do you want to hang your coats up?” She pointed to a row of coat hooks behind the front door.

She was a lovely old lady – early eighties, I guessed. She ushered us in and led the way confidently. She obviously knew her way around her own home, despite her poor eyesight.

On the way to the kitchen we passed her sitting room. I noticed all the furniture was round the outside of the room against the walls, so there was nothing in the middle of the room for her to trip over. There was an occasional table beside each armchair; a television in the opposite corner; and plenty of bookshelves, but there were no books or magazines on any of the chairs or tables. I made a mental note to dust the bookshelves carefully. They probably hadn’t been touched since Dorothy’s eyesight began to fail.

The kitchen was laid out in a similar fashion, except for a counter dividing the room in half, with a chair each side. I imagined that as she lived alone she would take many of her meals here. There was a radio at one end of the counter.

We refused her offer of coffee as Sally was pressed for time, and began our tour of the house. Dorothy led the way, giving instructions to Sally in English, which she translated into Spanish for me, although of course I understood everything Dorothy said. I just nodded, smiled and said “Si, si,” and “Si, si, Señora,” in a breathy, high-pitched Spanish accent. Dorothy showed no sign of suspecting I was anything other than what I appeared to be.

Apart from the kitchen and breakfast room, the ground floor consisted of two reception rooms and a cloakroom with toilet and washbasin. Up the first flight of stairs were four bedrooms, one with an en suite, and a family bathroom. A second flight of stairs led up to two more small bedrooms, which had no furniture to speak of and were clearly used for storage.

I had a notebook in which I recorded everything she wanted me to do. I wrote in Spanish, just in case, though it was fairly obvious she wouldn’t be able to read my scrawl anyway. When we finished the tour we returned to the kitchen.

The house had clearly not been cleaned properly for some weeks. The kitchen and toilets were looking grubby, and there was dust everywhere. But it wasn’t untidy like Anna and Phil’s place. Even the memorabilia and junk in the attic rooms were all neatly packaged up and labelled in boxes and suitcases. I wouldn’t need to be making continual trips out to the bins with rubbish. I guessed I could complete the job comfortably in three days. Sally relayed my estimate to Dorothy.

“Would you like her to do some washing and ironing for you too?” she asked.

“Oh would she?” Dorothy smiled at me. “I do find that difficult these days, particularly the ironing.”

That would probably mean four days, and very nearly another mortgage payment sorted. Sally had clearly realised the same thing. She opened the discussion of payment. Dorothy actually offered a rate even higher than Anna had paid me, and Sally accepted happily. I was glad there was no need for any negotiation. Sally is a tough negotiator but I already liked Dorothy too much to want to make her uncomfortable.

“Maria doesn’t have a bank account over here,” Sally said, “but if you make out a cheque to me, I’ll pay her in cash.”

Dorothy was fine with that. I felt I had joined the ranks of generations of cleaning ladies who worked hard and saw their wages commandeered by their spouses. At least I could trust Sally not to blow my hard-earned money on booze and fags.

“I should offer to make lunch, shouldn’t I?” I suggested in Spanish. “She must struggle with the cooker controls.” Sally nodded.

“Maria’s asking if you’d like her to make lunch for you both later on,” she interpreted.

“Oh I don’t think…” Dorothy began.

“It really would be no trouble,” Sally pressed. “She’d be happy to help out,” she said on my behalf.

At Dorothy’s invitation I checked her cupboards. For today I suggested chicken soup from a tin, and bread and cheese. She was happy with that. I told Sally that I would bring something from home to make lunch for the next three days. She relayed the message and Dorothy looked very pleased. She asked Sally to tell me to help myself to coffee and biscuits whenever I wanted. I smiled and asked Sally to thank her. This speaking-through-an-interpreter business felt a little silly but it was obviously necessary, and it would be so easy to make a mistake and answer Dorothy directly in English!

Sally left to go to the bank and I got to work.

I started at the top of the house flicking away spider-webs with a long-handled feather duster; dusting all the lower surfaces – mantelpieces, shelves, table tops; vacuuming to remove the dust; wiping down all the paintwork with a cloth, a sponge and a washing-up bowl full of soapy water; and finally cleaning the insides of all of the windows.

The hardest part of the work was moving all the heavy boxes so that I could vacuum thoroughly. I hoped Dorothy wouldn’t be suspicious that I was capable of moving such weights.

Each of the attic rooms took me about three-quarters of an hour. When I’d finished the second one, I made my way back downstairs to make myself a cup of coffee and empty the dirty water from my bowl. Dorothy was in the kitchen on the telephone. She smiled at me; I smiled back. I didn’t know if her vision was up to seeing that.

“Yes, she’s here now,” she said into the phone. “She seems very nice…”

I studiously ignored what I was hearing, as I wasn’t supposed to understand an English conversation.

“Well, I haven’t had the chance to look at anything she’s done yet… I might not be able to tell how thorough she is anyway…”

This was a little worrying – not that I was ashamed of my work, but who on earth was she talking to? And why were they interested?

“… with my eyesight, you know…? Well, why don’t you come round after she’s gone and see for yourself?”

It was getting harder to concentrate on being oblivious to what I was hearing. I just hoped that the mysterious person at the other end of the telephone didn’t turn up while I was still here. Should I have asked Sally to tell Dorothy that I was too shy to meet anyone? I dismissed that idea as soon as I’d thought of it. Anybody would be suspicious of that.

After my coffee break I carried on with the much larger bedrooms on the first floor and managed to get one more done by lunchtime. But now, and for the rest of the day, I was worrying about being seen at close quarters by someone with 20-20 vision.

I came down at about ten past one to find Dorothy dozing in an armchair in the sitting room. I didn’t disturb her yet but went into the kitchen to start preparing our meal. I deliberately made more noise than necessary with the saucepan and the grill, in the hope that she would wake up without me needing to go and rouse her.

As planned, I heated the chicken soup and made some cheese on toast and a pot of tea to wash it down. It was all just about ready when Dorothy appeared. She smiled and sat down at the kitchen counter.

Lunch was a strange affair. As I served the meal the two of us communicated almost entirely by sign language. I worked out what she was trying to say most of the time, and bobbed, and whispered, “Si, Señora,” as appropriate; but I was never sure she had caught any of my signals, given her vision issues.

Still she ate hungrily, and we each returned to our morning activities: me to scrubbing the bathroom, Dorothy to dozing in the sitting room.

Progress was a little slower in the afternoon as the other bedrooms were in a poorer state. I suspected Dorothy had grandchildren who came to stay and who were still at the stage of knocking over any vessel containing liquid. I spent a lot of time with carpet shampoo and scrubbing brush. More than once it occurred to me to wonder whether she would appreciate what I was doing. Did she know about the many orange juice and milk stains? Would her eyesight be up to seeing how much better the carpet looked after I’d finished?

I took her in a cup of tea and a plate of chocolate digestives at about half past three, but otherwise saw no one for the rest of the afternoon as I laboured away. At one point it occurred to me that I was actually enjoying myself, and I began to wonder why. I had always been a bit of a neatness freak, but still…

Sally returned to collect me at about five-thirty. Dorothy asked her to tell me how pleased she was with the rooms I had cleaned, and how much she appreciated my work.

“So how was it?” Sally asked in Spanish as we left, just in case someone was hiding behind one of the road’s tall privet hedges.

“Oh it was fine. I’m quite used to cleaning now, as you know.”

“This was the first time you’ve done it in drag though,” she mocked.

“It’s just wearing a costume – playing a part. No biggie. Though all the tight shapewear and padding is quite uncomfortable. The wig too. I’m pretty sweaty underneath. I’ll need all clean underwear tomorrow.”

“Yes, I can tell you do need a shower,” she said, sniffing me ostentatiously. “The trouble is, you don’t smell woman-sweaty; you smell boy-sweaty. I think we’d better dowse you in girly anti-perspirant tomorrow, just in case.”

“Anyway I can put up with it all for the moment,” I said. “It’s a fairly painless way to earn the extra money we need to keep ourselves in the black.”

“But don’t you find it all a little demeaning?” she said after a little thought. “Someone with your qualifications doing unskilled labour, and female labour, at that?”

“But it was all your idea!” I protested. “Yours and Anna’s. Anyway, that’s a bit sexist, isn’t it? Given that I can’t make use of my elite qualifications at the moment, I definitely prefer cleaning toilets – even in a bra and knickers – to emptying bins or digging holes in the road. And as for unskilled labour, there’s nothing wrong with that. We can’t all run British Airways or Microsoft.”

* * *

And so the week progressed. Sally came with me each morning to take and translate any additional instructions. I brought a light lunch in each day. I dusted and scrubbed and wiped and polished and vacuumed, and gradually the house began to sparkle. Dorothy was delighted. On Wednesday I started putting in loads of washing between cleaning sessions. By Thursday morning there was only the kitchen left to clean and a huge pile of ironing to get through.

On each day that week I finished early enough to shower, wash my shapewear, organise our dinner, and still spend an hour on my computer. Being Maria during the day and Dave in the evening was hard work but altogether a fulfilling and satisfying experience.

There was one disturbing episode however – well, three episodes, in fact. I kept overhearing Dorothy talking about me on the phone. Obviously she completely believed in the fictional Maria and her inability to understand English, or else she would have been more discreet. Each time she reported to her caller how satisfied she was with my work and invited her (I heard enough of the caller’s voice to know she spoke to three different women) to come round in the evening to see for herself.

It sounded like other local ladies might be interested in Maria’s services. In principle I’d be very happy with the work and the money, as I couldn’t earn anything as myself at the moment, and I felt I was letting my wife down with no salary. But we both knew my disguise wasn’t good enough to be around sharp urban women in full possession of their faculties. It was time for Maria to go back to Spain. The only problem was my sexy olive skin. I needed to return to pale white Dave as soon as possible. I determined to find out all I could about exfoliating.

* * *

On the Thursday afternoon I had just finished putting all of Dorothy’s newly washed and pressed clothes back in her wardrobes and drawers when Sally came by to collect me. Perfect timing. A smiling Dorothy pushed a large cheque into Sally’s hand and said she hoped I would be available for a couple of hours a week for the foreseeable future. Sally promised to see what could be arranged. I was standing behind Dorothy shaking my head vigorously. So Sally backtracked a little, saying she wasn’t sure how much longer Maria would be staying in the UK, but she would discuss it with me.

Back at home, she wanted to talk about it further.

“I hadn’t realised just how good you are at cleaning,” she began. “I mean, I know you keep our place looking amazing, but you’ve really impressed your sister – and Dorothy.”

“Well, it’s not rocket science,” I began modestly. “It’s just a matter of being organised and following a few simple principles…”

“No doubt, but I don’t think you could be as good at it as you are, unless you were actually enjoying yourself.”

“Well I wouldn’t go that far,” I said. “I find it… restful. While my body gets on with the physical work, my mind wanders free. I get creative. I’ve got a couple of new ideas for my digital currency app to test out tonight.”

“I think it’s more than that. I think you really like being a cleaning lady!”

This was a little embarrassing. I hoped she wasn’t losing her respect for me as her husband. She must have guessed what I was thinking.

“No, don’t worry,” she hastened to say. “I think it’s great. Since you can’t make any money in software engineering at the moment, it’s a great side-line to have. People will always need cleaning ladies.”

She went off to fetch a bottle of wine, chortling to herself.

* * *

I was still in bed at eight o’clock the next morning when my slumber was disturbed by Anna bursting in, followed by my wife. Sally was fully dressed and ready to leave for the bank, but I was surprised to see my sister. Her bursting into my bedroom while I was trying to sleep was nothing new – she’d been doing it all my life – but I didn’t think that dedicated lady of leisure ever got up much before nine.

“Sorry to disturb you so early,” Anna began, quite plainly not in the least sorry, “but this can’t wait, and you both need to hear it.”

She sat down heavily on the bed, narrowly avoiding squashing my foot.

“Who’s died?” I asked, suppressing a yawn.

Anna tutted. Sally grinned.

“No one’s died, idiot! Dorothy called me last night. Three of her friends are desperate for Maria to clean their houses – and they’re promising big money. Between them you can make enough to cover all your mortgage payments up until the Tribunal.”

Anna sat back in triumph. I looked at the two dominant women in my life. I yawned and stretched.

“I thought we were clear about this,” I began. “There is no Maria! She’s a fiction, make-believe, play-acting. For God’s sake, Anna, she’s not real!”

“She’s real enough to make nearly nine hundred pounds in four days. Don’t you want to keep this house?”

“Of course we do, but I thought we all agreed: I could only get away with pretending to be Maria with Dorothy because of her poor eyesight. Anyone else would soon see through me. And they’d probably call the police – a man getting into their homes under false pretences. It’s tantamount to rape!”

“You’re exaggerating,” she scoffed. “Anyway all we need to do is improve your disguise. I’ve even found a service that can do that. It’s called Transformations.”

Sally perked up. “What do they do?”

“They use computers and 3D printing to make masks and prosthetics and stuff to disguise people. Apparently they’re very big in the cross-dressing and transgender communities.” I must have been looking sceptical. “They’re very discreet. You can be anonymous. They don’t advertise. You have to know someone…”

“They must be expensive,” said Sally dubiously.

“Don’t worry about that,” Anna said. “It’s just a one-off cost. Then you can make seven or eight hundred a week! You’ll have plenty of customers. Phil and I can cover any up-front spending and you can pay us back whenever you’re ready; there’s no hurry. Or maybe you can do something else for me...”

“I don’t know…” I began.

I knew they could afford it easily – I’d seen their bank statements and credit card bills when I was tidying their place, but I wasn’t keen to be beholden to my sister, of all people.

“Well it can’t hurt to go and see them, can it?” said Sally. “If they can’t make you a more realistic Maria, or if it’s too expensive, we won’t be any worse off, will we?”