Minnie

Last week an elderly lady rang our bell. When I saw her I liked her, though I don’t know why. She introduced herself as Minnie and asked for a job. I asked her what she wanted to do. She said: “Cleaning, ironing. I’ll do anything.” So I asked her to come back a few days later for a half day. I was on my way out, so had the chance to watch her walk down the road. She walked very, very slowly, so slowly that my flatmate wondered aloud how she was going to do any work. “You don’t need to walk to iron,” I thought.

I used to have a weird thing about employing a domestic worker. I used to think it was perpetuating an old and horrible system, that it was a sort of modern slavery where, as ever, white people got to have their shirts pressed and their floors polished and their magazines arranged in piles by black people. Now I just think: If I have some money and someone needs a job, why the hell not.

She arrived early on the arranged morning and sat down in the kitchen. We exchanged a few words about who she was, where she was from, and which surfaces needed polishing. I left the room for under a minute and returned to find her fast asleep in her chair. I left her for a while. To get here for 8.30 from Mitchell’s Plain she must have had an early morning. And who cares anyway? She looked quite happy there, gently snoring. I went to the shop to buy detergent and hot cross buns.

Half an hour later I began rattling around in the kitchen. She woke up, muttered a few words about Handy Andy and went back to sleep. She lurched awake a few minutes later, made a cup of tea, grabbed a few hot cross buns and we spoke very briefly about District 6. She lived there in the old days and was moved in the 60s when the white government took over the area. “It was so lekker there,” she said, before falling asleep mid-sentence and spilling her tea on the floor. This shock kept her awake for her longest spell yet, which lasted about four minutes. She excused herself to go to the bathroom, where she went to sleep.

Quietly amused, flatmate Andrew and I decided to leave for the morning, come back at 12 give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she worked like me: Sleep until the last minute, then blitz the job. When we got back we found her fast asleep on the couch. Shoes off, mouth open, utterly comatose. The house was as we’d left it. We left her for a while, walked around the flat not quite knowing what to do, and finally woke her up with a gentle rock. She shot upright, mumbled an apology and excused herself to go to the bathroom, where she fell asleep.

I have never experienced tiredness like that. It was contagious; Andrew and I could hardly speak we were so lethargic. The feeling I got was that at 80 years old or thereabouts she had lived enough, she had done enough, she had ironed enough white collars. She just hadn’t slept enough. She wanted to find a place she could go to sleep for a while. And she sort of found it.

Eventually, we woke her and she left, sleepwalking through the house clutching the taxi-fare we’d given her. We might have paid more had she done more than fill the sink and put the marmite on a different shelf. She didn’t seem happy to have been woken again, and I felt bad for doing it. But, I mean, you know.

As she reached the door she stopped and said: “Same time next week?”