ABSTRACT
Barbara, a 60-year-old entrepreneur living in London, remembers her first years in England in the early 1980s when she would take every opportunity to listen to the cassette tapes that her children sent her, even during her part-time cleaning jobs. She still remembers her excitement when she realised that the owners were still out as she turned the key to open the door of their apartment as that meant that she could listen to her tapes freely. Barbara suddenly looked forward to her two hours of cleaning: She closed the door, opened her bag and took out a brown envelope that had just arrived that morning. Inside was a tape, a red 90-minute SHARP. She recognised her daughter’s handwriting which read: ‘To Inay’. She rushed to the living room, turned on the stereo and put the tape in. The voice of her husband and her three daughters filled the room. She could hardly hold back the tears, and sat there listening to their news for a while. Lia had got top grades at school. Cory had bought a new pair of shoes with the money she had sent them last month. Anita needed some books for her tutorials. The land had been harvested and things had gone well but the roof was leaking and needed to be fixed soon. Elsie, their neighbour, was pregnant again, but her husband from Saudi had stopped sending money. Christy, her niece, was getting engaged to Nino. Relieved that there were no bad news and aware of the job waiting for her, Barbara went to the cleaning cupboard to get the dusters. She wiped the windows, dusted the surfaces and swept the floor, washed the dishes and ironed the clothes whilst listening to the recorded Sunday mass and sermon from her village church followed by her daughters singing songs after the Sunday lunch – they had made lechon, her favourite dish. When the tape was over, she hoovered the floor, put everything back in the cupboard, took her cassette out of the stereo put in back in its case and in her bag, locked the door and went down the stairs towards
her basement studio where she would cook some rice and listen to her cassette once again.
