Alexander Mccall Smith - Ladies' Detective Agency 05 (10 page)

The furnishing and
decoration of the new house was a matter of the utmost importance, and had been
the subject of lengthy discussion with Mma Ramotswe. There were long hours at
the office when nothing very much happened, and these might be spent in
conversation, or crocheting perhaps, or in simply looking up at the ceiling,
with its little fly tracks, like miniature paths through the bush. Mma Ramotswe
had strong views on the subject of decoration, and had put these into effect in
the house on Zebra Drive, where the living room was unquestionably the most
comfortable room Mma Makutsi had ever seen. When she had first visited Mma
Ramotswe at home, Mma Makutsi had stood for a moment in the living room
doorway, marvelling at the matching suite of sofa and chairs, with their thick
cushions, so inviting for a tired or discouraged person, and at the treasures
on the shelves—the commemorative plate of Sir Seretse Khama and the Queen
Elizabeth II tea cup, with the Queen smiling out in such a reassuring way; and
the framed picture of Nelson Mandela with the late King Moshoeshoe II of
Lesotho; and the illuminated motto which called for peace and understanding in
the house. She had stood there and realised that there had been little beauty
in her life; that she had never had a room which in any way expressed her
striving for something better, but that perhaps one day she would. And now it
was happening.

Mma Ramotswe had been generous. When she first heard of
the move, she had taken Mma Makutsi to the house on Zebra Drive and she had
gone through the whole place, room by room, identifying household effects which
she could pass on to her assistant. There was a chair which nobody used any
more, but which had a bright red seat. She could have that. And then there were
the yellow curtains, which had been replaced by a new set; Mma Makutsi had
scarcely dared to ask for those, but they had been offered, and she had
accepted with alacrity.

Now, sitting at her desk in the morning, it
seemed to her that her life could hardly get any better. There was her new home
to look forward to, furnished in part with Mma Ramotswe’s generous gifts;
there was the prospect of having a little spare money in her pocket, rather
than having to count every thebe
;
and there was the knowledge that she
had a good job, with good people, and that her work made things better, at
least for some. Since she had started at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective
Agency, she had managed to help quite a number of clients. They had gone away
feeling the better for what she had done for them, and that, more than any fee,
made her work worthwhile. So those glamorous girls who had gone to work in
those companies with new offices; those girls who had never achieved much more
than fifty per cent in the examinations at the Botswana Secretarial College;
those girls may have highly paid jobs,
but did they enjoy their work
?
Mma Makutsi was sure that they did not. They sat at their desks, pretending to
type, watching the hands of the clock approach five. And then, exactly on the
hour, they disappeared, eager to get as far away as possible from their
offices. Well, it was not like that for Mma Makutsi. Sometimes she would be
there in the office well after six, or even seven. Occasionally she found that
she was so absorbed in what she was doing that she would not even notice that
it had become dark, and when she walked home it would be through the night,
with all its sounds and the smells of wood-smoke from cooking fires, and with
the sky up above like a great black blanket.

Mma Makutsi rose from her
chair and went to look out of the window. Charlie, the older apprentice, was
getting out of a minibus which had drawn off the main road. He waved to
somebody who remained inside, and then began to walk towards the garage, his
hands stuck in his pockets, his lips moving as he whistled one of those
irritating tunes which he picked up. Just as he reached the garage, he began a
few steps of a dance, and Mma Makutsi grimaced. He was thinking of girls, of
course, as he always did. That explained the dance.

She drew back from
the window, shaking her head. She knew that the apprentices were popular with
girls, but she could not imagine what anybody saw in them. It was not that they
had much to talk about—cars and girls seemed to be their only
interest—and yet there were plenty of girls who were prepared to giggle
and flirt with them. Perhaps those girls were in their own way as bad as the
apprentices themselves, being interested only in boys and make-up. There were
plenty of girls like that, Mma Makutsi thought, and maybe they would make very
good wives for these apprentices when they were ready to marry.

The
door, which was ajar, was now opened and the apprentice stuck his head
round.

“Dumela, Mma,” he said. “You have slept
well?”

“Dumela, Rra,” Mma Makutsi replied.
“Yes, I have. Thank you. I was here very early and I have been
thinking.”

The apprentice smiled. “You must not think too
much, Mma,” he said. “It is not good for women to think too
much.”

Mma Makutsi decided to ignore this remark, but after a
moment she had to reply. She could not let this sort of thing go unanswered; he
would never have said something like that if Mma Ramotswe had been present, and
if he thought that he could get away with it then she would have to disabuse
him of that idea.

“It is not good for men if women think too
much,” she retorted. “Oh yes, you are right there. If women start
thinking about how useless some men are, then it is bad for men in general. Oh
yes, that is true.”

“That is not what I meant,” said
the apprentice.

“Hah!” said Mma Makutsi. “So now you
are changing your mind. You did not know what you were saying because your
tongue is out of control. It is always walking away on its own and leaving your
head behind. Perhaps there is some medicine for that. Maybe there is an
operation that can fix it for you!”

The apprentice looked cross.
He knew that there was no point in trying to better Mma Makutsi in an argument,
but anyway he had not come into the office to argue; he had come in to impart
some very important news.

“I have read something in the
paper,” he said. “I have read something very
interesting.”

Mma Makutsi glanced at the paper which he had
extracted from his pocket. Already it had been smudged with greasy
fingerprints, and she wrinkled her nose in distaste.

“There is
something about Mr J.L.B. Matekoni in here,” said the apprentice.
“It is on the front page.”

Mma Makutsi drew in her breath.
Had something happened to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni? Newspapers were full of bad news
about people, and she wondered whether something unpleasant had happened to Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni. Or perhaps Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had been arrested for something
or other; no, that was impossible. Nobody would ever arrest Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
He was the last person who would ever do anything that would send him to jail.
They would have to arrest the whole population of Botswana before they got to
Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

The apprentice, relishing the interest which his
comment had aroused, unfolded the newspaper and handed it to Mma Makutsi.
“There,” he said. “The Boss is going to do something really
brave. Ow! I’m glad that it’s him and not me!”

Mma
Makutsi took the newspaper and began to read. “Mr J.L.B. Matekoni,
proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, and a well-known figure in the
Gaborone motor trade,” began the report, “has agreed to perform a
parachute jump to raise money for the Tlokweng orphan farm. Mma Silvia
Potokwane, the matron of the orphan farm, said that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni made the
surprise offer only a few days ago. She expects him to be able to raise at
least five thousand pula in sponsorship. Sponsorship forms have already been
distributed and many sponsors are coming forward.”

She read the
report aloud, the apprentice standing before her and smiling.

“You see,” said the apprentice. “None of us would have
imagined that the Boss would be so brave, and there he is planning to jump out
of an aeroplane. And all to help the orphan farm! Isn’t that good of
him?”

“Yes,” said Mma Makutsi. It was very kind, but
she had immediately wondered what Mma Ramotswe would think of her fiancé
making a parachute jump. If she had a fiancé herself, then she was not
sure whether she would approve of that; indeed the more she thought about it
the more she realised that she would not approve. Parachute jumps went wrong;
everybody knew that.

“They go wrong, these parachute
jumps,” said the apprentice, as if he had picked up the direction of her
thoughts. “There was a man in the Botswana Defence Force whose parachute
didn’t open. That man is late now.”

“That is very
sad,” said Mma Makutsi. “I am sorry for that man.”

“The other men were watching from the ground,” the apprentice
continued. “They looked up and shouted to him to open his emergency
parachute—they always carry two, you see—but he did not hear
them.”

Mma Makutsi looked at the apprentice. What did he mean:
he didn’t hear them?
Of course he wouldn’t hear them. This
was typical of the curious, ill-informed way in which the apprentices, and so
many young men like them, viewed the world. It was astonishing to think that
they had been to school, and yet there they were, with a good Cambridge
Certificate. As Mma Ramotswe pointed out, it must be very difficult being the
Minister of Education and having to deal with raw material like this.

“But he would never be able to hear them,” said Mma Makutsi.
“They were wasting their breath.”

“Yes,” said
the apprentice. “It is possible that he had fallen asleep.”

Mma Makutsi sighed. “You would not fall asleep while you were jumping
from an aeroplane. That doesn’t happen.”

“Oh
yes?” challenged the apprentice. “And what about falling asleep at
the wheel—while you’re driving? I saw a car go off the Francistown
Road once, just because of that. The driver had gone to sleep and the next
thing he knew he had hit a tree and the car rolled over. You can go to sleep
anywhere.”

“Driving is different,” said Mma Makutsi.
“You do that for a long time. You become hot and drowsy. But when you
jump out of an aeroplane, you are not likely to feel hot and drowsy. You will
not go to sleep.”

“How do you know?” said the
apprentice. “Have you jumped out of an aeroplane, Mma? Hah! You would
have to watch your skirt! All the boys would be standing down below and
whistling because your skirt would be over your head. Hah!”

Mma
Makutsi shook her head. “It is no good talking to somebody like
you,” she said. “And anyway, here’s Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni’s truck. We can ask him about this parachute business. We can
find out if what the paper says is true.”

MR
J.L.B. Matekoni parked his truck in the shade under the acacia tree beside the
garage, making sure to leave enough room for Mma Ramotswe to park her tiny
white van when she arrived. She would not arrive until nine o’clock, she
had told him, because she was taking Motholeli to the doctor. Dr Moffat had
telephoned to say that a specialist was visiting the hospital and that he had
agreed to see Motholeli. “I do not think that he will be able to say much
more than we have said,” Dr Moffat had warned. “But there’s
no harm in his seeing her.” And Dr Moffat had been right; nothing new
could be said.

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was pleased that he was getting to
know the children better. He had always been slightly puzzled by children, and
felt that he did not really understand them. There were children all round
Botswana, of course, and nobody could be unaware of them, but he had been
surprised at how these orphans thought about things. The boy, Puso, was a case
in point. He was behaving very much better than he had in the past—and Mr
J.L.B. Matekoni was thankful for that—but he was still inclined to be on
the moody side. Sometimes, when he was driving with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni in his
truck, he would sit there, staring out of the window, and saying nothing at
all.

“What are you thinking of?” Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would
ask, and Puso would shake his head and reply, “Nothing.”

That could not be true. Nobody thought of nothing, but it was difficult to
imagine what thoughts a boy of that age would have. What did boys do? Mr J.L.B.
Matekoni tried to remember what he had done as a boy, but there was a curious
gap, as if he had done nothing at all. This was strange, he thought. Mma
Ramotswe remembered everything about her childhood and was always describing
the details of events which had happened all those years ago. But when he tried
to do that, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni could not even remember the names of the other
boys in his class, apart from one or two very close friends with whom he had
kept in touch. And it was the same with the initiation school, when all the
boys were sent off to be inducted into the traditions of men. That was a great
moment in your life, and you were meant to remember it, but he had only the
vaguest memories.

Engines were different, of course. Although his
memory for people’s names and for people themselves was not terribly
good, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni remembered virtually every engine that he had ever
handled, from the large and loyal diesels which he had learned to deal with
during his apprenticeship to the clinically efficient, and characterless,
motors of modern cars. And not only did he remember the distinguished
engines—such as that which powered the British High Commissioner’s
car—but he also remembered their more modest brothers, such as that which
drove the only NSU Prinz which he had ever seen on the roads of Botswana; a
humble car, indeed, which looked the same from the front or the back and which
had an engine very like the motor on Mma Ramotswe’s sewing machine. All
of these engines were like old friends to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni—old friends
with all the individual quirks which old friends inevitably had, but which were
so comfortable and reassuring.