Alexander Mccall Smith - Ladies' Detective Agency 05 (9 page)

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni said nothing. He felt that the whole day had taken an
unsatisfactory turn—right from the beginning. He had encountered a
shocking case of dishonesty, he had been suspected of listening in at doors
(when all he had been doing was listening in), and now there was this
uncomfortable expectation on the part of Mma Ramotswe that he would confront
the unpleasant mechanics at First Class Motors. This was all very unsettling to
a man who in general only wanted a quiet life; who liked nothing more than to
be bent over the engine of a car, coaxing machinery back into working order.
Everything, it seemed to him, was becoming more complicated than it need be,
and—here he shuddered as the thought occurred to him—there was also
hanging over him the awful threat of an involuntary parachute descent. This was
far worse than anything else; a summons to a seat of judgment, an undischarged
debt that sooner or later he would have to pay.

He turned to Mma
Ramotswe. He should tell her now, as it would be so much easier if there was
somebody to share his anxiety. She might accompany him to see Mma Potokwane to
make it clear to her that there would be no parachute jump, at least not one
made by him. She could handle Mma Potokwane, as women were always much better
at dealing with other dominant women than were men. But when he opened his
mouth to tell her, he found that the words were not there.

“Yes?” said Mma Ramotswe. “What is it, Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni?’

He looked at her appealingly, willing her to help him
in his torment, but Mma Ramotswe, seeing only a man staring at her with a vague
longing, smiled at him and touched him gently on the cheek.

“You
are a good man,” she said. “And I am a very lucky woman to have
such a fiancé.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni sighed. There were cars
to fix. This hill of problems could wait for its resolution until that evening
when he went to Mma Ramotswe’s house for dinner. That would be the time
to talk, as they sat in quiet companionship on the verandah, listening to the
sounds of the evening—the screeching of insects, the occasional snatch of
music drifting across the waste ground behind her house, the barking of a dog
somewhere in the darkness. That was when he would say, “Look, Mma
Ramotswe, I am not very happy.” And she would understand, because she
always understood, and he had never once seen her make light of another’s
troubles.

But that evening, as they sat on the verandah, the children
were with them, Motholeli and Puso, the two orphans whom Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had
so precipitately fostered, and the moment did not seem to right to discuss
these matters. So nothing was said then, nor at the kitchen table, where, as
they ate the meal which Mma Ramotswe had prepared for them, the talk was all
about a new dress which Motholeli had been promised and about which it seemed
there was great deal to say.

CHAPTER SEVEN

EARLY MORNING AT TLOKWENG ROAD SPEEDY MOTORS

M
MA MAKUTSI woke early that day, in spite of having been to
bed late and having slept very little. She had arisen at five, just before the
first signs of dawn in the sky, and had gone outside to wash at the tap which
she shared with two other houses. It was not ideal this sharing, and she looked
forward to the day when she would have her own tap—and perhaps even a
shower. This day was coming, which was one of the reasons why she had found it
difficult to sleep. The previous afternoon she had found a couple of rooms to
rent in another, rather better, part of town, which made up almost
half—and the best half, too—of a low-cost house, and which had
rudimentary plumbing all of their own. She had been told that it would not be
expensive to install a simple shower, and was assured that this could be
arranged within a week or two of her moving in. The information had prompted
her into paying a deposit straightaway, which meant that she could make the
move in little more than a week.

The rent of the new rooms was
almost three times the rent which she was currently paying, but, rather to her
surprise, she found that she could easily afford it. Her financial position had
improved out of all recognition since she had started her part-time typing
school, the Kalahari Typing School for Men. This school met several evenings a
week in a church hall and offered supportive and discreet typing instruction
for men. There had been many takers—she had been obliged to keep a
waiting list—and the money which she had made had been carefully
husbanded. Now there was enough for the deposit and more: if she chose to empty
her account, she would be able to pay at least eight months’ rent and
still send a substantial sum back to her family in Bobonong. She had already
doubled the amount that she sent to them, and had received an appreciative
letter from an aunt. “We are eating well now,” her aunt had
written. “You are a kind girl, and we think of you every time we eat the
good food which you make it possible for us to buy. Not all girls are like you.
Many are interested only in themselves (and I have a long list of such girls),
but you are interested in aunties and cousins. That is a very good
sign.”

Mma Makutsi had smiled as she had read this letter. This
aunt was a favourite of hers and one day she would pay for her to come on a
visit to Gaborone. The aunt had never been out of Bobonong and it would be a
great treat for her to come all the way down to Gaborone. But would it be an
altogether good idea, she wondered? If you had never been anywhere in your life
it could be disturbing suddenly to discover a new place. The aunt was content
in Bobonong, but if she were to see how much bigger and more exciting was
Gaborone, then she might find it hard to return to Bobonong, to all those
rocks, and baked land, and hot sun. So perhaps the aunt would stay where she
was, but Mma Makutsi could perhaps send her a picture of Gaborone, so that she
would have some idea of what it was like to be in a city.

Mma Makutsi
made her way out of her room and walked towards the tap at the side of the
neighbouring house. She and the other people who used this tap paid the
neighbour twenty pula a month for the privilege, and even then they were
discouraged from using too much water. If the tap was left running while one
doused one’s face under it, then the owner was apt to appear and make a
comment about the shortage of water in Botswana.

“We are a dry
country,” she had once said while Mma Makutsi was trying to wash her hair
in the running water.

“Yes,” said Mma Makutsi from under
the stream of deliciously cool water. “That is why we have
taps.”

The owner had stormed off. “It is people like
you,” she had remarked over her shoulder, “it is people like you
who are causing droughts and making all the dams empty. You be careful or the
whole country will dry up and we shall have to go somewhere else. You just be
careful.”

This had irritated Mma Makutsi, as she was a careful
user of water. But one had to turn the tap on sometimes; there was no point
just standing there and looking at it, even if that is what the tap’s
owner would really have wanted.

This morning there was no sign of the
owner, and Mma Makutsi got down on her hands and knees and allowed the water to
run over her head and shoulders. After a while, she changed her position and
put her feet under the water, in this way experiencing a satisfactory tingling
sensation that went all the way up her calves to her knees. Then, washed and
refreshed, she returned to her room. She would make breakfast now, and give her
brother Richard a bowl of freshly boiled porridge … She stopped. For a
few moments she had forgotten that Richard was no longer there, and that the
corner of her room which she had curtained off for his sickbed was now
empty.

Mma Makutsi stood in her doorway, looking down at the place
where his bed had been. Only four months ago he had been there, struggling with
the illness which was causing his life to ebb away. She had nursed him, doing
her best to make him comfortable in the morning before she went off for work,
and bringing him whatever small delicacies she could afford from her meagre
salary. They had told her to make sure that he ate, even if his appetite was
tiny. And she had done so, bringing him sticks of biltong, ruinously expensive
though they were, and watermelons, which cooled his mouth and gave him the
sugar that he needed.

But none of this—none of the special food,
the nursing, or the love which she so generously provided—could alter the
dreadful truth that the disease which was making his life so hard could never
be beaten. It could be slowed down, or held in check, but it would always
assert itself in the long run.

She had known, on that awful day, that
he might not be there when she came back from work, because he had looked so
tired, and his voice had been so reedy, like the voice of a thin bird. She had
toyed with the idea of staying at home, but Mma Ramotswe was away from the
office during the morning and there had to be somebody there. So she had said
goodbye to him in a fairly matter-of-fact way, although she knew that this
might be the last time she spoke to him, and indeed her intuition had been
right. Shortly after lunchtime she had been summoned by a neighbour who looked
in on him several times a morning, and she had been told to come home. Mma
Ramotswe had offered to drive her back in the tiny white van, and she had
accepted. As they made their way past the Botswana Technical College, she had
suddenly felt that it was too late, and she had sat back in her seat, her head
sunk in her hands, knowing what she would find when she arrived at her room.

Sister Banjule was there. She was the nurse from the Anglican Hospice
and the neighbour had known to call her too. She was sitting by his bedside,
and when Mma Makutsi came in she rose to her feet and put her arm around her,
as did Mma Ramotswe.

“He said your name,” she whispered to
Mma Makutsi. “That is what he said before the Lord took him. I am telling
you the truth. That is what he said.”

They stood together for
several minutes, the three women; Sister Banjule in the white uniform of her
calling, Mma Ramotswe in her red dress, that she would now change for black,
and Mma Makutsi in the new blue dress that she had treated herself to with some
of the proceeds of the typing school classes. And then the neighbour, who had
been standing near the door, led Mma Makutsi away so that Sister Banjule could
ensure in private the last dignities for a man whose life had not amounted to
much, but who now received, as of right, the unconditional love of one who knew
how to give just that.
Receive the soul of our brother, Richard,
said
Sister Banjule as she gently took from the body its stained and threadbare
shirt and replaced it with a garment of white, that a poor man might leave this
world in cleanliness and light.

SHE WISHED that he
could have seen her new place, as he would have appreciated the space and the
privacy. He would have loved the tap too, and she would have probably ended up
being as bad as the woman who watched the water, telling him off for using too
much. But that was not to be, and she accepted that, because she knew now that
his suffering was at an end.

The new place, when she moved into it,
would be much closer to work. It was not far from the African Mall, in an area
which everybody called Extension Two. The streets there were nothing like Zebra
Drive, which was leafy and quiet, but at least they were recognisably streets,
with names of their own, rather than being the rutted tracks which dodged this
way and that round Naledi. And the houses there were neatly set in the middle
of small plots of land, with paw-paw trees or flowering bushes dotted about the
yards. These houses, although small, were suitable for clerks, or the managers
of small stores, or even teachers. It was not at all inappropriate that
somebody of her status—a graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College and
an assistant detective—should live in a place like that, and she felt
proud when she thought of her impending move. There would be less smell, too,
which would be good, as there were proper drains and not so much litter. Not
that Botswana smelled; anything but, though there were small corners of
it—one of these near Mma Makutsi’s room—where one was
reminded of humanity and heat.

The fact that Mma Makutsi had two rooms
in a house of four rooms meant, in her mind, that she could say that she would
now be living in a house.
My house—
she tried the words out, and
at first they seemed strange, almost meretricious. But it was true; she would
shortly be responsible for half a roof and half a yard, and that justified the
expression
my house
. It was a comforting thought—anther
milestone on the road that had led her from that constrained life in Bobonong,
with its non-existent possibilities and its utter isolation, via the Botswana
Secretarial College, with its crowning moment of the award of ninety-seven per
cent in the final examinations, to the anticipated elevation to the status of
householder, with a yard, and paw-paw trees of her own, and a place where the
washing could be hung out to dry in the wind.