One by one, I fished them from the shitty water, averting my eyes from the sight and my nose from the stench. I held them with the tips of my fingers, and shook the remaining muck from the depths of the fabric. The squeezing seemed to last a lifetime, for overused, over-stained garments never brightened even if you squeezed them with manic constancy. Padlock was an additional factor; if she was dissatisfied with their appearance, she was always ready to take the fabrics down from the line to soak again, even if they were already dry and stiff, and order you to wash them. “You will wash them till I tell you to stop,” she would say, heading for her Command Post. This was the room adjacent to the living room. It was fitted with a Singer sewing machine, and Padlock spent her day there pedaling away and receiving her customers.
I would listen to the rumblings of the treadle and the humming of the needle until the sounds became intermixed, and in my imagination her foot got stuck underneath the treadle, her finger trapped under the furious needle. The din ate up all her cries for help, and the more I became disgusted with my job, the more she suffered. I would look to see whether Loverboy, a twenty-year-old pimpled, arrogant fellow renowned as the only person in the city who gave Padlock the gift of spontaneous laughter, was around. He often came in the afternoon, swaggering like a conquering pirate, looked the place over and entered the Command Post to watch Padlock work. Sometimes he brought her clothes for repair; sometimes he came empty-handed, to collect finished work or just to talk. When he was around, I would sneak to the door and try to catch what they were saying. They mostly talked about the past. Padlock told him about her parental home, her convent days, her wedding and the like.
Loverboy received these morsels of her past with an ironical air, sticking disdainful needles of criticism into the parts which did not appeal to him and rewarding the bits that he liked with loud laughter and corroborating remarks. In general, he waded through her life with the insolence of a lovable pirate. The remarkable thing was that Padlock seemed to enjoy every bit of it. I could hear them laughing, Loverboy freely, Padlock discreetly, as if she were straining a precious liquid through cotton cloth. At first I was at a loss as to what to do about this pimpled figure who handled Padlock as casually as secondhand clothes. I would watch him entering the courtyard, his legs striding, his arms held wide, his chest forward, and wonder, and also feel paralyzed. He looked like a fabulous, gargantuan weapon I could neither handle dexterously nor use crudely.
At first I used to ignore him, looking the other way when he turned up and speaking only when spoken to, but with time I faced him when he arrived and greeted him politely. He would return my greeting brashly, screw his nose up at the filthy mess in the basin or in my hands and trot into the house with a few athletic bounds. Once inside, he would engage Padlock there for long periods of time. Lusanani, who had befriended me by asking whether Padlock was my real mother, would come over and stand at the edge of the yard where Padlock stood to supervise shitting sessions, and we would talk. “She is not your real mother, is she?” she would ask, her head cocked.
This irritated me at first, till I found a riposte: “Is Hajj your real husband?” I would ask, and she would laugh. It was the laugh of mates, of people in almost the same boat, with a shared burden. I would look at her, imagining how she had gone through her first pregnancy, and how the baby had been delivered. Her body was young, firm, supple. I would get sudden urges to jump up, slip my hand up her dress and explore. Then I would be seized by the feeling that I was too young for that, and that even if I asked her to reveal herself to me, she would refuse. I would have visions of Hajj Gimbi on top of her, wheezing, squealing, sweating. Then I would hate her, him too. I would start wishing that on his way home the front tire of his motorcycle would burst so he would fall down on the asphalt, preferably in front of an oncoming truck, and his little mouth would be silenced for good. I would, at other times, see him on top of a tall building, spilling paunch-first over the railing and flying upside down like the late Fr. Lule. With him out of the way, Lusanani would be mine, and I would not have to wash those filthy nappies, or do anything else I loathed.
Meanwhile, we talked about the city, the taxi park, the Indians in the shops, the soldiers in their jeeps, the children at her home. We would begin eagerly, bursting with words, and then slow down, till we started repeating ourselves like an old couple. Many times she spotted Padlock too late. By the time she dropped out of sight, Padlock would be on me, her guava switch cutting into my calf or backside. I would look at her with disappointment: So she hadn’t caught her foot under the treadle! So she hadn’t caught her finger under the needle! So she hadn’t screamed herself hoarse in tortured solitude!
Padlock misread insolence into my look, and misinterpreted my open-eyed reception of pain as a challenge to her authority. “Village trash! She spoiled you rotten, but I’ll teach you a lesson.” And the switch would move with the fury of a buffalo shaking egrets off the wounds on his back.
I lamented the dismissal of Nantongo, the housegirl, who was Padlock’s first and last incursion into the vertiginous world of status symbols. No prosperous household was complete without a housegirl. When Nantongo was around, I had less to worry about. She cleaned, cooked, washed — she did everything. During the short time between my arrival and her departure, all household work revolved around her. She washed Padlock’s football-field-sized bedsheets. She would rub and squeeze that white cotton fabric till I feared that she would end up like Fingers. She washed nappies and baby clothes with the stoic efficiency of a machine. Her frail hands were always moving, curling and uncurling like crazed millipedes, doing something every moment. Her back was always bent or straining with this or that task. Yet her face remained open, affable, unmarked by bitterness, as if all the labor were mere wind blowing over it. “Your mother is her own worst enemy,” she told me one day, as if that explained everything. I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t, and in order not to appear stupid, I desisted from inquiring any further.
The only noticeable improvement since Nantongo’s departure was the subsidence of Padlock’s tirades. When the girl was around, Padlock quarrelled with her at length, delivering sermons in a cold, grating, disembowelled voice just this side of a whine. It was as if the girl were driving pins under her nails. “You never wash the stains out of my bedsheets. You drink the baby’s milk. You wear my clothes before you wash them. You dribble the sauce on your way from the kitchen to the dining room. You abuse my children, pinching them, threatening them, treating them badly.”
“Should I keep quiet when they call me names?”
“She is answering her employer back! What an ingrate! Who do you think is interested in seeing the inside of your mouth or in counting your molars? You teach my children bad manners. How can I keep you under my roof? You look at everybody as if you were going to swallow them. Didn’t they teach you to respect authority where you came from, eh?”
“But Mrs.—”
“You are showing me your teeth once again! You are showing me the roof of your mouth! For once, listen to what your superiors have to tell you. What kind of a man would want a girl without manners who eats like a lawnmower?”
Me, me, me, I wanted to say. Others too. I had seen men dallying with one-legged or clubfooted women. I had seen men in love with one-eyed women. Uncle Kawayida’s mother had buckteeth. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.