The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (4 page)

She was worried by his saying things like that. There were plenty of things that could go wrong, even at this stage; men simply did not understand.

‘I’ll speak to her tomorrow,’ she said.

‘Tomorrow? Don’t forget, then. It’s not fair to keep her waiting.’

She smiled at him, her Phuti, the father of her unborn child, the man who had brought her to all this – this house, this state of comfort, this happiness.

After dinner, they spent an hour or so in the room they had prepared for the baby. Phuti had found the necessary furniture in the Double Comfort Furniture Store: a cot, a changing table and a chest of drawers. There was also an easy chair for Mma Makutsi to use when she came to comfort the baby at night, and a pair of curtains with a rabbit design. Now they set to sorting out a pile of baby clothes that Mma Makutsi had bought at a sale at Riverwalk and checking the contents of a drawer that she had stocked with baby oil, powder and a selection of other supplies.

Phuti was tired, and went to bed early. Mealies was to stay overnight, to be returned to his owner the following day, and he was bedded down on an old blanket on the kitchen floor. They had given him more steak, and a bowl of sorghum porridge mixed with gravy. This had been wolfed down with gusto, and the dog now looked even more barrel-like as he stretched out on the blanket.

Mma Makutsi was still getting used to her new kitchen and was happy to stand for long periods simply gazing at its pristine surfaces, at its capacious fridge and its numerous cupboards and shelves. She did this for a while after Phuti had gone to bed, and then, since it was a warm evening, she decided to go out into the yard with a final cup of tea before retiring.

Most of the garden was uncleared bush, but Phuti had made an attempt to cut the grass in the immediate curtilage of the house, giving it the appearance of a rough, half-cultivated field. This would be the beginnings of a lawn, she hoped, once they had the time to tend to it. She had already planted several small bushes that Mma Ramotswe and Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had given them as a housewarming present, and these were surrounded by neatly arranged rings of stones. She had never had a proper garden and was excited by the prospect of creating a small oasis of green in the surrounding brown. She would have a shelter, perhaps, under which chairs could be set out, allowing people to sit and drink tea in the fresh air. It was a thrilling prospect.

Sipping at her tea, she took a few steps away from the light spilling out of the kitchen door in order to accustom her eyes to the darkness. The sky above Botswana was a great expanse of stars – uncountable thousands of them – so dense in places as to give an impression that the heavens were decked with gossamer curtains of white. She looked for the reassuring presence of the Southern Cross, the only constellation she could name, and soon found it, hanging over the horizon above Lobatse.

She looked down. There was a shape in the grass not far from where she stood, and she gave a start. But she quickly remembered: Phuti Radiphuti had left the snake outside to deter its mate, and this was it, this thing that looked like an abandoned piece of hosepipe. She felt a momentary pang of sympathy. She had brought this life to an end, but she had to do it; she had to. There would be the baby coming soon and you simply could not have cobras in the house when you had a baby.

She moved forward to get a better view. The head was bent back, as one would expect; a dog will snap the snake’s neck at first bite, knowing instinctively that there will be no second chance. She peered down at the snake and frowned. It was much smaller than she remembered. Had she thought it bigger when it was under the bed? Perhaps shock could have that effect? But no – this was definitely a smaller snake.

The realisation came quickly. The dog had caught a snake in their bedroom, but not the right one. That meant that Phuti was in the room with a cobra. She turned on her heels and began to run inside. She dropped her cup. She felt a pain, sudden, sharp and overwhelming, which stopped her in her tracks. She doubled up. She cried out.

T
he following morning Mma Ramotswe, as usual, spent the first fifteen minutes of her day in her garden inspecting her plants and taking advantage of the fresh morning air. It would be another hot day, she could tell: there was always something in the air at the onset of such a day. It was a matter of sound, she thought – one of those sounds you could hear but not quite hear, a tiny, distant thrumming that reminded you that at noon the heat would be like a physical blow falling from the sky. The rains would come soon, or so everybody hoped, and they would bring relief not only to people and cattle but also to the land itself. Yet there could still be seemingly interminable weeks of this heat before that happened.

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni usually drove Motholeli to school as it was easier to get her wheelchair into the back of his truck than into Mma Ramotswe’s van. Puso could have gone with them, but he preferred to make his own way there, feeling that this was a badge of being the age he was. It was not a long walk and he picked up friends on the way. They did not rush, but spent time on the way tossing stones at paw-paw trees, finding interesting sticks with which to stage mock fights, and generally ensuring that they only arrived within seconds of the sounding of the bell that announced the start of the school day.

‘Ask her about it,’ mumbled Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, as he finished the last of his breakfast.

‘Ask Mma Makutsi about what she wants to do?’

He wiped the crumbs from his lips and stood up. ‘Yes. You can’t let it go on for much longer. You have to know. What happens in the office if she suddenly goes off to look after a baby and nothing is arranged? What then?’

Mma Ramotswe thought for a moment. She could not imagine what it would be like if Mma Makutsi were no longer there in the office, sitting behind her desk, the lenses of her large round spectacles catching the light from the window, flashing the world back at itself. It was such a familiar sight that it made it hard to envisage what it would be like if that chair were empty and those comments – often helpful but sometimes not as constructive as they might be – were not being made. It would be a strange silence indeed.

The view from Bobonong, she mused; was that how the world looked to Mma Makutsi? It seemed an odd thing to say, and yet all of us had a view from somewhere; a view of the world from the perspective of who we were, of what had happened to us, of how we thought about things. Her view was the view from Mochudi, where she had been born and brought up by her late father, that great man, Obed Ramotswe. And his view had been the view from where? The view from Botswana, she decided: the view of the world that seemed essentially and naturally right, because it was a view that
understood
how things really were and how God must surely have intended them to be when He first made Botswana. She smiled to herself as she savoured the idea that God had looked at the world, seen a wide stretch of land and had said,
This shall be Botswana
. He had given it the Kalahari; He had given it the good land along the eastern border, and had added, for good measure, the Makadikadi Salt Pans. But then, just as He was about to give it wide and reliable rivers, He was distracted somehow and forgot to finish what He was doing, or found that He had already given all His rivers away and had only a few left for Botswana… It was easily done when you were making a world, especially one as demanding as this, where there were so many people who thought they should have more rivers than they actually had, and who enviously eyed the land – and the rivers – of others.

‘What then, Mma Ramotswe?’

She was brought back to where she was – not in the sky, looking down on Botswana, but in a very real and immediate part of Botswana, namely the kitchen of her house on Zebra Drive, where her husband was about to leave for work and where there were still many chores to do before she herself could leave for her office.

‘When Mma Makutsi goes off on maternity leave,’ she answered, ‘then I shall have to get another assistant.’

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni looked unconvinced. ‘Easier said than done, you know.’

He was right – she knew that. No doubt she would find somebody who fancied the idea of being her secretary. And this time, she resolved, the post would be very clearly and unambiguously described as a secretarial one, with no suggestion that it was a stepping stone to being an assistant detective or, as Mma Makutsi was at pains to insist, an associate detective, whatever that was. Yes, there would be many applicants for the job, but would any of them be as well qualified and efficient as Mma Makutsi?

It was difficult to see this happening, for the simple reason that there were presumably no secretaries with anything like Mma Makutsi’s ninety-seven per cent in the final examinations of the Botswana Secretarial College. Mma Makutsi had reported that a young woman from Mahalapye had recently managed to get eighty-three per cent in the finals – a very creditable mark but still a whole fourteen per cent shy of her own.

‘It was her shorthand that let her down,’ Mma Makutsi had said, adding in a resigned tone: ‘It always is, you know.’

Mma Ramotswe had replied, ‘Yes, it always is,’ as if she knew about these things. Perhaps she should have said, ‘Yes, and I am let down too, as mine is very rusty,’ but she did not.

Now, she too stood up from the breakfast table. If she had to get a new secretary, then that was what she would do. And even if she ended up with a secretary whose shorthand let her down – and that seemed to be something that it was simply impossible to avoid – she would make the best of it and the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency would continue in whatever way it could.

She would have to speak to Mma Makutsi that day. At least she did not have to broach the subject of pregnancy itself; at least Mma Makutsi had told her about that. It would be far more difficult for an employer if the employee had not said anything about being pregnant. That would not be easy, she thought, because if you went up to somebody and said,
Are you pregnant?
the question might be taken the wrong way. It might sound as if you had said,
Are you pregnant yet?
Or,
Are you pregnant yet again?
Both of these could be considered rude by some people, and would almost certainly be so viewed by Mma Makutsi, who was very sensitive to slight.

Another way of doing it would be to introduce the subject into the conversation by simply making a remark that suggested you knew. You could, for example, give somebody a cup of tea and then say something like,
Would you like a piece of cake as well – now that you’re pregnant?
That would allow the other person to answer,
Well, cake is always welcome when one is eating for two
. Or she might say,
What makes you think I’m pregnant?
That could be awkward, because you could hardly say,
I thought you were pregnant because you’re looking so large.
There were some people who became larger simply because of fattening foods, of cake or the like, or because they were traditionally built by nature rather than because of… because of anything else. They might resent an inference that they were
too
large, and indeed there were those who might be trying to become pregnant and not yet succeeding; they might be upset if you reminded them of something they wanted but were not achieving. Or there might be people who could conclude that you thought that they
should
be pregnant, and they, in turn, might think,
What business is it of yours whether or not I’m pregnant?
There was no getting away from it: it was very difficult all round and even a discussion of maternity leave would have to be handled very carefully. There were undoubtedly many employees who were easy, with whom you could raise any issue without having to take care to be tactful, but Mma Makutsi, for all her many merits, was certainly not one of those.

She drove past the traffic circle at the university and then along the road towards the part of town known as the Village. Although she remembered it when it was a sleepy collection of meandering, tree-lined streets, it was less of a village now, since several large blocks of flats had been built on its periphery. Blocks of flats could change everything, thought Mma Ramotswe. They were designed for people, but people were not necessarily designed for them. These flats at the edges of the Village, though, were made more human by the washing that was hung out to dry from their balconies; by the children who congregated in their doorways, or played with skipping ropes and dogs on their pathways; by the music that the residents listened to, melodies that drifted out of the open windows and throbbed with life. All of this made it harder for large new buildings to deaden the human spirit. It was like the bush: you could clear it and build something where once there had been nothing but trees and grass and termite mounds, but if you turned your back for a moment, Africa would begin to reclaim what had always been hers. The grass would encroach, its seeds carried by the wind; birds would drop the seeds of saplings that would then send tiny shoots up out of the ground; the termites would marshal their exploratory troops to begin rebuilding their own intricate cities of mud in the very places they had claimed once before. And sooner or later the bush would have covered all your efforts and it would be as it was before, the wound on nature completely healed.

By the time she reached the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had already arrived for work at his garage, Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, with whom the agency shared premises. He was talking to a client who had brought in a car for repair – one of his regular clients, Mma Ramotswe noticed; one of that unfortunate category of people whose cars always seemed to be breaking down but who could not bring themselves to part with them and buy a new model. Mma Ramotswe understood that attitude only too well; she loved her van and had resisted every effort on the part of Mr J. L. B. Matekoni to trade it in for something newer. And when he had eventually succeeded, she had pined for her late van until it had been recovered, restored and given back into her ownership, where it was surely destined to be.

She nodded a greeting to the client, whom she knew slightly, before making her way into the office. Mma Makutsi was sometimes in before her. Good time-keeping, she had often pointed out, was one of the lessons learned in the Botswana Secretarial College – at least by those who were willing to learn, and that did not include people like Violet Sephotho, who learned nothing except, perhaps, how to distract men. This morning, though, it was Mma Ramotswe who opened up the office, pulling up the blind on the main window, filling the kettle, and brushing the ants off the top of the filing cabinet. The presence of the ants on the cabinet was a mystery; they were there every morning, a long line of pinheaded creatures, marching obediently across the painted metal wastes on some quite unfathomable mission. Mma Makutsi had suggested that the ants were there before the filing cabinet or the building itself; that this was some ancient ant highway that they still felt compelled to follow. She had been opposed to ant powder, as had Mma Ramotswe. These insects did not bite, nor did they have that curious unpleasant smell that the larger Matabele ants had – and they had none of the aggressive instincts of those warriors. Every child had been bitten at one time or another by a Matabele ant and, remembering the pain, learned to leave a wide berth when those determined black ants were on the march.

She filled the kettle and prepared her first cup of tea. It was, in fact, her third of the day, but she did not count the two that she had at home before she reached the office; those cups were merely preparatory and therefore exempt from tally. Her cup of tea in her hand, she stood by the window looking out at the acacia tree behind the office. She had not given much thought to yesterday’s conversation with Mma Sheba, but now she wondered whether there was much that she could do. It seemed to her to be very odd that Mma Sheba should doubt the word of Rra Edgar’s sister. She was, after all, the boy’s aunt and if she said that Liso was the same boy who had been coming to stay on the farm every school holiday since he was very young, then that should be the end of the matter. Surely it would be easy enough to talk to the people who worked on the farm, or to the neighbours, and ask them whether Liso was the same boy. And if they said yes, which they no doubt would, then that would be the end of it. Why, she wondered, could Mma Sheba not have done that herself? And what interest, for that matter, would the aunt have in telling lies?

She was distracted from these considerations by the arrival of Phuti Radiphuti’s car. He usually dropped off Mma Makutsi on his way to the Double Comfort Furniture Store, and that was what he would be doing now. Phuti was getting out of the car, yet she noticed immediately that he was not wearing his normal working outfit of neatly pressed black trousers, white shirt and tie. Instead, he was wearing a pair of denim jeans and an open-necked shirt. And where was Mma Makutsi, Mma Ramotswe wondered. Was she ill? She had rarely missed a day’s work since she started; she came in even when she was beginning to go down with flu and had to be sent back to her bed. Something must be wrong or… She saw Phuti’s expression. This was not a man about to deliver bad news, and at that moment she knew what he had come to say.

She opened the door as Phuti approached.

‘
Dumela
, Rra. This is a surprise…’

‘Mma Ramotswe, Mmmmmma…’

His mouth was open; he was stammering.

‘It’s all right, Rra, I am not in a hurry. I’m listening.’

‘Itttt… it’s…’

She reached out to take his hand. There was a momentary doubt that this was bad news rather than good, but his expression belied that. No, this man was a father. Any new father, whether or not he was given to stammering, might be expected to be nervous and to behave just like this.

She decided to take the initiative. ‘Has she had it?’