Cleaningwoman

Cleaning Woman’, which is taken from Magi Gibson’s latest collection Washing Hugh Macdiarmid’s

Socks (Luath Press, £7.99), illustrates the age-old issue of art versus food. Strindberg and Stevenson both stayed in the Hôtel Chevillon in France, which is now an International Artists’ Retreat; their shades might prefer it if Manuela, the titular “cleaning woman,” took a page out of their book and loafed creatively, but she doesn’t want to lose her job. She needs “money for her kids” – plus, there’s a dress she wants to order online... At the Hôtel Chevillon, Manuela, cloth in hand, disturbs the dust of artists come here to create. On the burnished wooden stair, discarded thoughts, delicate as spider webs, drift before her busy broom, and as she polishes and sprays the ghosts of Stevenson and Strindberg rush unhappily from room to room – and wish to God she’d stop, pick up a book, sit down and read! Or linger in a studio, lie back on an old chaise longue, daydream. Or dip a finger in the oils, gaze at the river, indulge in lazy play. Manuela will have none of it. She’s here to work. She needs the money for her kids, that frock she’d like to order online soon. She wants her pay. She scrubs, wipes, cleans, ticks off the chores, ignores the artists with their manuscripts, their canvases, their agonies, their dreams.