The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (18 page)

‘I am Mma Ramotswe,’ she said, offering her hand. ‘And this is Mma Makutsi, my assistant.’

‘Associate,’ corrected Mma Makutsi.

‘My associate.’

They shook hands.

‘You are Mma Manchwe?’ asked Mma Ramotswe.

The woman nodded. ‘I am. That is me. I am the owner of this business and I shall be very pleased to do some copying for you ladies, if that is what you need. You’ll find that my charges are competitive.’

‘I’m sure they are,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘But that, Mma, is not why we are here.’

Mma Manchwe’s eyes narrowed, but only slightly. Mma Makutsi noticed, though, and glanced at Mma Ramotswe: proof – if it were still needed.

‘We are from the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,’ Mma Ramotswe said.

It seemed to take Mma Manchwe a few moments to absorb this information. Then her head went back and she laughed. ‘That place! The ladies’ detective place? I’ve seen that sign of yours, Mma – that funny sign.’

Mma Ramotswe sensed Mma Makutsi stiffen beside her. ‘I do not see why the sign is funny, Mma,’ she said mildly. ‘You have a sign too. A business needs a sign.’

Mma Manchwe was unapologetic. ‘But it says something about the problems of ladies, doesn’t it? It says something like:
For the problems of ladies and others
.’ She paused, looking almost incredulously at her visitors. ‘Don’t you think that sounds a little bit… a little bit
gynaecological
?’

Mma Makutsi drew in her breath sharply. ‘I do not think that, Mma. I do not think that any reasonable person would think that at all. In fact, I think only a person with a very crude mind would think that, Mma.’

Mma Ramotswe reached out to touch Mma Makutsi’s forearm. ‘I do not think that she meant it unkindly, Mma,’ she said.

Mma Manchwe was placatory. ‘Of course not, Mma,’ she said, looking anxiously at Mma Makutsi. ‘I was just saying.’

Mma Makutsi was not to be so easily pacified. ‘There are many people who just say things, Mma,’ she said icily. ‘There are fewer people who think before they open their mouths. That is something I have observed, you know. I have seen it many, many times.’

Mma Ramotswe touched Mma Makuti’s arm again. ‘We all understand that, Mma.’ She turned to face Mma Manchwe again. ‘We are working on behalf of Mma Soleti, Mma. I believe you know this lady.’

Mma Manchwe did not flinch. As she replied, her voice was even, and she held Mma Ramotswe’s gaze without that falling away of eyes that can signify fear or distrust. ‘That lady, Mma? Do I know her? I do. And I am very thankful to her. She may not know that, but I am.’

Mma Makutsi shot a puzzled glance at Mma Ramotswe. ‘You are thankful, Mma? Why?’

Mma Manchwe shrugged. ‘Why should I not be thankful to the lady who took a great load off my shoulders? If you were walking along carrying a big heavy burden on your shoulders, Mma, and somebody came along and took it off you, would you not be thankful? Would you not want to shake her hand and say: “Thank you very much for taking this great weight off my back”?’

For a while there was silence, to be broken at last by Mma Makutsi. ‘You are not her enemy, Mma?’

Mma Manchwe laughed again. It was a loud, irritating laugh – one that was impossible to ignore. ‘Enemy? I have no enemies in this world, Mma – not one. I am a Christian, you see, and a Christian does not have enemies. If you have enemies, then your biggest enemy is yourself. Do you know that, Mma?’

‘But that lady went off with your husband, Mma,’ protested Mma Makutsi. ‘Any woman would feel very angry about that. It is human nature to feel that way.’

‘Not if you had a husband like mine,’ Mma Manchwe countered. ‘Do you know him? I don’t think you do. He is a man who is very kind to ladies – many ladies. Ten, twelve, maybe more. Oh yes, he is a very kind man.’

Mma Ramotswe sighed. ‘A philanderer?’

‘A very big philanderer. The biggest in the country. Head of the No. 1 Men’s Philandering Agency.’ She shook her head. ‘That poor woman learned about that very quickly. Two months, I think, and then, bang, he is gone. On to the next lady. Goodbye Mma Soleti. Ha!’

Mma Ramotswe sighed again.

Yes,’ said Mma Manchwe, ‘you may sigh, Mma. But you will notice that I am not sighing. And that is because I am pleased that Mma Soleti came and took that man away. I am grateful to her, you know. She is a very big heroine as far as I am concerned.’

Mma Ramotswe glanced at Mma Makutsi, who was pursing her lips. She turned to address Mma Manchwe. ‘So, Mma,’ she said, ‘you would never wish to harm that lady?’

Mma Manchwe seemed genuinely surprised. ‘Harm her? Why should I want to harm her?’ She stopped. She was looking at Mma Ramotswe with some distrust now. ‘Why are you asking me, Mma? Are you wanting to get somebody to help
you
harm her? Is that what’s happening?’

Mma Makutsi intervened. ‘Certainly not,’ she exploded. ‘We would never do that sort of thing, Mma.’

‘I am only asking,’ said Mma Manchwe. ‘You never know these days.’ She looked at her watch before she continued. ‘I’m sorry, Mma Ramotswe and Mma…’

‘Makutsi. Makutsi.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry, Mma Makutsi, but I am going to have to get on with my work. Let me give you my leaflet here, though, as it explains my charges. If you can get a lower per copy price anywhere in Gaborone – and I mean anywhere – then I will do your copying free. How about that? You take that leaflet, Mma, and get back to me if you have any copying to be done. You will get very good service from me – I promise you that.’

Mma Manchwe smiled as she gave them the leaflet. It was not the smile of one who would send a ground hornbill feather to another, nor was it the smile of one who would spread false rumours aimed at destroying somebody’s business. But there was something odd about the smile, thought Mma Ramotswe. Although you could say what it was not, you could not necessarily say what it was.

M
ma Ramotswe was late home that evening. The school that Motholeli and Puso attended had arranged for parents – including, of course, foster parents – to visit their children’s classrooms and speak to their teachers. Since most of the parents worked, these meetings took place after five-thirty, which gave time for everybody to reach the school through the after-work traffic. After a chat with the teachers, the school choirs, of which there were four, were due to entertain the parents before they went home. Both Motholeli and Puso were in a choir, but in different ones. Puso was in a choir of boys whose voices were yet to break, which sang traditional Botswana songs; Motholeli was in a mixed choir – boys and girls – which sang gospel music and occasional jazz.

Motholeli’s teacher was happy with the progress that she had made over the year. ‘She is very good with her hands,’ she said. ‘She is one of those children who will be able to make anything.’

‘She wants to be a mechanic,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘She has always wanted that.’

The teacher nodded. ‘Your husband…’

‘Yes, he is a mechanic. But it is not because of that. He has never tried to persuade her. She is naturally good at it.’

The teacher smiled. ‘And she is brave too.’

Mma Ramotswe lowered her eyes. ‘It is not always easy for her.’

They sat in silence. The teacher knew.

‘I hope that she is able to follow her heart,’ said Mma Ramotswe quietly. ‘I hope that she will be able to be a mechanic, but…’ She did not like to spell it out, and anyway, the doctors had said that they could not tell; the course of the young girl’s illness was unpredictable, even if they could say with certainty that she would always need the wheelchair. ‘But we do not know. There are many things that we do not know about life.’

The teacher fiddled with a piece of paper. Looking after thirty children meant that you gave thirty hostages to fortune. A parent’s heart may be broken once, maybe twice or thrice; as a teacher your heart could be broken thirty times.

‘That she is happy is the main thing, Mma Ramotswe. She is happy in the home you have given her. That is a good thing.’

Puso’s teacher had a more mixed message for Mma Ramotswe. The boy’s schoolwork was good enough, he said, but he had a tendency to daydream.

‘He has always been like that,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘I try to snap him out of it, but it is a very big thing for him. I have asked him what he is thinking about and he says
nothing
. That is what all children say, I think. You ask them what they have been doing, and the answer is nothing. You ask them what they are talking about on the telephone and they tell you it is nothing. They are very busy with this nothing of theirs.’

The teacher nodded. He knew all about that.

‘You cannot get inside their minds,’ Mma Ramotswe continued. ‘I can also see that he is daydreaming, but he will never admit it. He just sits there and smiles at you.’

‘That is better than those children who sit there and frown at you, Mma,’ mused the teacher. ‘We have more and more of those, I’m afraid.’

After the meetings with the teachers, Mma Ramotswe made her way into the school hall, where the choirs were to perform. Puso’s was on first, and she listened intently as they sang one of the songs that she remembered being taught as a girl, all those years ago, in Mochudi. Then Motholeli’s choir came on and sang ‘Shall We Gather By the River?’ She knew that song, and liked it.
Soon we’ll reach the shining river
. She closed her eyes. The voices of the children were pure; their hearts were pure. Some of them had already discovered how hard life could be; others had yet to do so and probably did not fully understand what the world could be. We wanted to protect them, she thought, of course we did, but we knew that we could not and they would have to deal with the disappointments and shocks of life as best they could. All we could do was to give them that one thing that they could use to protect themselves from all of that. At least we could do that. That thing was love, of course.

She stayed to the end, although some of the parents slipped out early. Then they travelled back to the house together, where they saw that Mr J. L. B. Matekoni was already at home and in the kitchen. Leaving the children to do their homework, Mma Ramotswe joined her husband. She was surprised to find him standing over the sink, a pot before him.

‘What are you doing, Rra?’

He turned round almost guiltily.

‘I am cooking the potatoes, Mma Ramotswe. I am helping you with the evening meal.’

She looked over his shoulder and into the pot. It was tricky to work out exactly what he was doing. ‘What is happening inside this pot, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni?’

He shot her a puzzled glance. ‘I thought we might have mashed potatoes. I know you like those.’

‘I do. So you are mashing them now?’

He nodded. ‘And it’s rather hard work, Mma.’

‘You’re mashing them even before you have cooked them, Rra?’

He frowned. ‘You cook them first?’

Mma Ramotswe reached around him and took the pan from his hands. It was half-filled with water in which fragments of raw potato floated morosely, like a soup. Very gently she poured the mixture down the drain. ‘I will show you how to start with new ones,’ she said. ‘You cook the potatoes first and then you take them out and mash them up with butter and salt. That is how mashed potatoes are made, Rra.’

He turned away sheepishly. ‘I was only trying to help, Mma.’

She felt a warm rush of affection for the man beside her. ‘But of course you were, Rra. But I am quite happy to cook mashed potatoes. I do not mind.’

‘I want to be a more modern husband, Mma.’

She nodded. ‘That is a very good thing to want. I think you are quite modern enough, but even if that were not true, I think that you are something even better than that. You are a kind husband, Rra. That is the most important thing, I think. A husband may be very modern, but not kind. That is no good.’

He looked embarrassed. ‘I actually went on a course,’ he said. ‘It was for husbands.’

Mma Ramotswe smiled. ‘I know about that course, Rra. Everybody has been talking about it. But I didn’t know you were going.’

‘It was very… very…’ He searched for the word. ‘Frightening. It was frightening, Mma.’

‘You don’t have to go, Rra,’ she said.

‘No?’

‘No. Not if you don’t want to.’

‘Then maybe I won’t go any more. I will still try to be more modern, though.’

He sat down while she attended to the cooking of the potatoes. She poured him a beer from the fridge and they talked of what had happened to each of them that day. There was much to discuss. There was the story of the snake and Phuti’s aunt. There was the account of the meeting with Mma Manchwe, an enemy who was not an enemy. There were the comments that the teachers had made and the songs that the choirs had sung. For his part, there were events at the garage: a gearbox restored, a braking system replaced, an invoice issued and a bill paid in full.

She sought his views on Mma Manchwe. Could she be lying? Mma Ramotswe wondered.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She is innocent.’

‘Why, Rra?’

‘Because, in general, people are, Mma, unless there is good reason to suspect otherwise. Only in books and films are they not, Mma. In real life it is different, I think.’

The children ate first, so then, because the business of the potatoes had made it run late, husband and wife ate dinner alone. After they had finished, they went out into the garden as it was hot in the house and they wanted fresh air.

There was a wind coming up. They felt it on their skin; it was cooler than the air it replaced, and it bore on it the smell that they had been longing for so intensely – the smell of rain.

‘It will be here soon,’ he said. ‘Later tonight, or maybe tomorrow morning.’

The rain came the following morning. The cool breeze of the previous evening had dropped away and the night had become almost unbearably hot as the humidity built up. By breakfast time both Mr J. L. B. Matekoni and Mma Ramotswe felt quite exhausted, although the day was just beginning.

‘I think we should buy a bigger fridge,’ said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. ‘Then you and I could sit in it, Mma Ramotswe. We could sit in it and drink iced tea all day.’

Mma Ramotswe fanned herself with an old copy of the
Botswana Daily News
. She imagined herself lying in the vegetable tray, perhaps, while Mr J. L. B. Matekoni leaned against the icebox. It would be a refreshing alternative to the heat.

‘I know I’m going to have to work today,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know how I shall manage it. And you in your garage…’ She had given him a large electric fan, and that helped a bit, but the roof of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors was made of tin and there was no insulation from the sun’s rays. People talked about frying eggs on roofs like that. They were right – you could do it – but she thought that today the eggs would burn.

‘I’ll cope,’ said Mr J. L. B. Matekoni. ‘And the rains will definitely come. It’ll cool down.’

By nine o’clock the first clouds had appeared in the sky. At first there was a darkening band of grey on the horizon, which became rapidly larger, filling the lower half of the sky and developing into great rounded masses, stacked high and angry. Grey became purple, and purple shaded into black, to be obscured suddenly by white veils of rain descending, fold upon fold, like great muslin curtains. There was thunder and distant forks of lightning joining sky to earth, the patter of the first drops, and then the steady roar of the downpour. There came the smell of laid dust, and then of lightning – the smell of electricity, if electricity had a smell. And finally the smell of rain, that watery scent that so lifted the heart of anybody who lived in a dry land.

All work stopped at the garage and in the agency. As the rain pelted down, thunderous on the tin roof of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, along with Charlie and Fanwell, joined Mma Ramotswe in her office. She made tea earlier than usual, in case the storm led to a power cut that would prevent the kettle from being boiled.

Charlie was excited by the rain. ‘You’ll get more work coming in, boss,’ he said. ‘All those cars with water in the wrong place and refusing to start. Nice busy time for us!’

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni shook his head. ‘The misfortunes of others are no cause for satisfaction, Charlie,’ he said. ‘You should never take pleasure in the mechanical problems of other people. I’ve told you that before.’

‘Come on, boss,’ said Charlie. ‘If it weren’t for people wrecking their cars, there wouldn’t be enough work for us. Everybody knows that.’

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni stared at him in reproach, but Charlie, unrepentant, continued. ‘Especially women, boss. If it weren’t for all those women breaking their engines, then we wouldn’t have much to do. We’d go hungry, boss – we really would.’

Mr J. L. B. Matekoni shook his head. ‘That’s nonsense, Charlie. Women drivers are more careful than men. Men wreck their cars more often than women do, I’m afraid.’

Charlie laughed. ‘Good try, boss! But don’t worry, you can tell it like it is now that Miss Ninety-seven Per Cent is off having babies.’

Fanwell looked awkward. ‘I don’t know, Charlie. Maybe —’

‘And you don’t have to worry either,’ said Charlie. ‘She can’t hear you. You don’t have to be frightened of somebody who can’t hear you.’ He paused, his face breaking into a broad, mischievous smile. ‘I’m not afraid to say it: put me in the cab with a woman driver at the wheel and you’ll see me hop out pretty smartly.’

It was at that moment, within a second or two of his finishing, that the lightning struck. It did not hit the roof of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, even though its corrugated tin must have been a tempting target; it came to earth a short distance away, striking a small acacia tree and splitting its trunk neatly in two. The impact of the bolt shook the walls of the office, rattling the metal filing cabinet and causing a pane of glass in the window above Mma Ramotswe’s desk to crack. The clap of thunder that accompanied the strike rose briefly above the sound of the rain, and then died away. Now the steady sound of the falling rain asserted itself again.

Charlie stood quite still. He had dropped his mug of tea, and it lay shattered on the floor at his feet, steam rising from the spilled liquid.

Fanwell was staring at him. ‘You see,’ he said, half under his breath. ‘You see.’

Charlie opened his mouth but no intelligible sound emerged. Mma Ramotswe watched him, amused; it was costing her a great effort not to laugh.

‘Perhaps you should be a bit more careful of what you say, Charlie,’ she said at last. ‘You never know who’s listening, do you?’

Again Charlie started to say something, but again no words came. Mma Ramotswe reflected that it would be a very good story to relay to Mma Makutsi, but now there was a broken mug to be picked up off the floor, a pool of tea to be mopped up, and a trip to be made to the office of the Master of the High Court, the custodian and enforcer of the wills of Botswana.

The storm lasted forty minutes or so, stopping even more abruptly than it had started with the sudden cessation of the rain. One moment the air was white with the dense curtains of falling water; the next the curtains had parted, revealing a transformed world. The earth and the objects upon it seemed to shine – as if polished. The shimmering heat was gone; the soil, once hard, was soft again, and breathed; the heat-exhausted leaves on the trees were revived, instantly restored to dark green by the water that had fallen upon them.

The mechanics returned to work, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni saying, ‘Well, that’s the rains arrived, but the cars are still waiting.’

And Mma Ramotswe, gathering up her keys and her notebook, said, ‘Time for us to get back to work too.’ She stopped. The others, leaving the room, did not notice, but she did. She had spoken as if Mma Makutsi were still there.

She looked at the desk that she had tidied herself when Mma Makutsi had first gone off. And she thought, I must do something. There is something I can do for her, and I must do it.