Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked confused. “But I thought that the boys dealt with it,” he said. “Charlie told me that …”
Mma Makutsi let out a peal of laughter. “Them? Oh, Rra, you should have seen them. They threw spanners at it and made it all angry. They were no use at all. No use.”
Mma Ramotswe smiled at her husband. “They did their best, of course, but …” She broke off. Nobody was perfect, she thought, and she herself had not handled the situation very well. None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well. Snakes were one of the tests which life sent for us, and there was no telling how we might respond until the moment arrived. Snakes and men. These were the things sent to try women, and the outcome was not always what we might want it to be.
CHAPTER THREE
FREE FOOD MAKES YOU FAT
IT TOOK EVERYBODY some time to settle down after the incident with the cobra. The apprentices, convinced that they had played a vital role in dealing with the snake, were full of themselves for the rest of the day, embroidering the truth at every opportunity as they told the story in detail to every caller at the garage. Mr Polopetsi, the new employee whom Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had taken on at the garage—on the understanding that he could also help out, when required, in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency—heard all about it when he arrived an hour or so later. He had been sent by Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to collect tyres from a depot on the other side of town, a job which often required a long wait. Now, returning in the truck which was used for garage business, he was regaled with an account of the event by Charlie, who this time was careful to mention the presence of the manager of the Mokolodi Game Reserve, even if only in a supporting role.
“Mma Makutsi was very lucky,” he said once Charlie had finished the tale. “Those snakes strike like lightning. That quick. You cannot dodge them if they decide to strike.”
“Charlie was too quick for it,” said the younger apprentice. “He saved Mma Makutsi’s life.” He paused, and then added, “Not that she thanked him for it.”
Mr Polopetsi smiled. “I am sure that she is very grateful,” he said. “But you boys should remember that nobody is too quick for a snake. Keep out of their way. I saw some very bad snake-bite cases when I was working at the hospital. Very bad.” And he remembered, as he spoke, the woman who had been brought in from Otse; the woman who had been bitten by a puff-adder when she had rolled over in the night and disturbed the fat, languid snake that had slid into her one-room hut for the warmth. He had been on duty in the pharmacy and had been standing outside the entrance to the emergency department when she had been carried out of the government ambulance, and he had seen her leg, which had swollen so much that the skin had split. And then he had heard the next day that she had not lived and that there were three children and no father or grandmother to look after them; he had thought then of all the children there were in Africa who now had no parents and of what it must be like for them, not to have somebody who loved you as your parents loved you. He looked at the apprentices. They did not think of things like that, and who could expect them to? They were young men, and as a young man one was immortal, no matter what the evidence to the contrary.
At a garage there is no time for thinking such thoughts; there is work to do. Mr Polopetsi unloaded the new tyres, with their pristine treads and their chalk markings; Mr J.L.B. Matekoni attended to the delicate task of adjusting the timing on an old French station wagon—a car he did not like, which always went wrong and which in his view should have been given a decent burial a long time ago; and the two apprentices finished the servicing of Bishop Mwamba’s well-behaved white car. Inside the adjoining office of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi shuffled papers about their desks. They had very little real work to do, as it was a slack period for the agency, and so they took the opportunity to do some filing, a task in which Mma Makutsi took the lead, on account of her training at the Botswana Secretarial College.
“They used to say that good filing was the key to a successful business,” she said to Mma Ramotswe as she looked through a pile of old receipts.
“Oh yes,” said Mma Ramotswe, not with great interest. She had heard Mma Makutsi on the subject of filing on a number of occasions before and she felt that there was very little more to be said on the subject. The important thing, in her mind, was not the theory behind filing but the simple question of whether it worked or not. A good filing system enabled one to retrieve a piece of paper; a bad filing system did not.
But it seemed that there was more to be said. “You can file things by date,” Mma Makutsi went on, as if lecturing to a class. “Or you can file them by the name of the person to whom the document relates. Those are the two main systems. Date or person.”
Mma Ramotswe shot a glance across the room. It seemed odd that one could not file according to what the paper was all about. She herself had no office training, let alone a diploma from the Botswana Secretarial College, but surely a subject-based system was possible too. “What about subject matter?” she asked.
“There is that too,” Mma Makutsi added quickly. “I had forgotten about that. Subject matter too.”
Mma Ramotswe thought for a moment. In her office they filed papers under the name of the client, which she thought was a perfectly reasonable system, but it would be interesting, she thought, to set up a system of cross-referencing according to the subject matter of the case. There would be a large file for adultery, in which she could put all the cases which dealt with that troublesome issue, although it would probably be necessary to subdivide in that case. There could be a section for suspicious husbands and one for suspicious wives, perhaps, and even one for male menopause cases now that she came to think about it. Many of the women who came to see her were worried about their middle-aged husbands, and Mma Ramotswe had read somewhere about the male menopause and all the troubles to which it gave rise. She could certainly add her own views on that, if anybody should ask her.
MMA RAMOTSWE and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni went home for lunch at Zebra Drive, something they enjoyed doing when work at the garage permitted. Mma Ramotswe liked to lie down for twenty minutes or so after the midday meal. On occasion she would drop off to sleep for a short while, but usually she just read the newspaper or a magazine. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would not lie down, but liked to walk out in the garden under the shade netting, looking at his vegetables. Although he was a mechanic, like most people in Botswana he was, at heart, a farmer, and he took great pleasure in this small patch of vegetables that he coaxed out of the dry soil. One day, when he retired, they would move out to a village, perhaps to Mochudi, and find land to plough and cattle to tend. Then at last there would be time to sit outside on the stoep with Mma Ramotswe and watch the life of the village unfold before them. That would be a good way of spending such days as remained to one; in peace, happy, among the people and cattle of home. It would be good to die among one’s cattle, he thought; with their sweet breath on one’s face and their dark, gentle eyes watching right up to the end of one’s journey, right up to the edge of the river.
MMA RAMOTSWE returned from the lunch break to find Mma Makutsi waiting for her at the office door. The younger woman seemed agitated.
“There’s a woman waiting inside.”
Mma Ramotswe nodded. “Has she said what she wants, Mma?” she asked.
Mma Makutsi looked rather annoyed. “She is insisting on talking to you, Mma. I offered to listen to her, but she said that she wanted the senior lady. That is what she said. The senior lady. That’s you.”