The Full Cupboard of Life

CHAPTER NINE

AT THE end of that day’s work Mma Ramotswe so engineered matters that she was standing at the door of her tiny white van at precisely the time-one minute to five-that the two apprentices came out of the garage entrance, wiping their greasy hands on a handful of the loose white lint provided by Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni knew all about oil-dermatitis, the condition which stalked mechanics and which had struck several of his brother mechanics over the years, and he made every effort to drum the lesson into the heads of his apprentices. Not that this worked, of course; they were still inclined to limit themselves to a quick plunge of the hands into a bucket of lukewarm water, but at least on occasion they resorted to lint and made some effort to do it properly. There was an old barrel for the used lint, and for other detritus of their calling, but they tended to ignore this and now Mma Ramotswe saw the lint tossed casually to the ground. As they did so, the older apprentice looked up and saw her watching them. He muttered something to his friend, and they dutifully picked up the lint and walked off to deposit it in the barrel.

“You are very tidy,” called out Mma Ramotswe when they re-emerged. “Mr J.L.B. Matekoni will be pleased.”

“We were going to put it there anyway,” said the younger apprentice reproachfully. “You don’t have to tell us to do it, Mma.”

“Yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I knew that. I thought perhaps you had just dropped it by mistake. That sometimes happens, doesn’t it? I have often seen you drop things by mistake. Sweet papers. Chip bags. Newspapers.”

The apprentices, who had now drawn level with the tiny white van, looked at their shoes sheepishly. They were no match for Mma Ramotswe, and they knew it.

“But I don’t want to talk about litter,” said Mma Ramotswe kindly. “I can see that you have been working very hard today, and I thought I would drive you both home. It will save you waiting for a minibus.”

“You are very kind, Mma,” said the older apprentice.

Mma Ramotswe gestured to the passenger seat. “You sit in there, Charlie. You are the older one. And you,” she looked at the younger apprentice and pointed to the back of the van, “you can go there. Next time you can ride in front.”

She had a rough idea where the two young men lived. The younger one stayed with his uncle in a house beyond the Francistown Road brewery and the older one lodged with an aunt and uncle near the orphan farm at Tlokweng. It would take over half an hour to deliver them both, and the children would be waiting for her at home, but this was important and she would do it cheerfully.

She would deliver the younger one first, skirting the edge of the town, driving past the university and the Sun Hotel and the road to Maru-a-Pula. Then Nyerere Drive bore left, past the end of Elephant Road, and ran down to Nelson Mandela Drive, which she still thought of as the old Francistown Road. They crossed the dry course of the Segoditshane River and then the older apprentice directed her to a side road lined by a row of small, well-kept houses.

“That is his uncle’s place over there,” he said, pointing to one of the houses. “He lives in that shack on the side. That is where he sleeps, but he eats inside with the family.”

They stopped outside the gate and the younger apprentice jumped out of the van and clapped his hands in gratitude. Mma Ramotswe smiled and said through the open window, “I am glad that I saved you a walk.” Then she waved and they drove off.

“He is a good boy,” said Mma Ramotswe. “He will make a good husband for some girl one day.”

“Hah!” said the older apprentice. “That girl will have to catch him first. He is a quick runner, that boy. It will not be easy for the girls!”

Mma Ramotswe pretended to look interested. “But what if a very beautiful girl with lots of money saw him? What then? Surely he would like to marry a girl like that and have a large car? Perhaps even one of those German cars that you think are so smart. What then?”

The apprentice laughed. “Oh, I would marry a girl like that double-quick. But girls like that won’t look at boys like us. We are just apprentice mechanics. Girls like that want boys from rich families or with very good jobs. Accountants. People like that. We just get ordinary girls.”

Mma Ramotswe clucked her tongue. “Oh! That is very sad. It is a pity that you don’t know how to attract more glamorous girls. It is a great pity.” She paused before saying, almost as an aside, “I could tell you, of course.”

The apprentice looked at her incredulously. “You, Mma? You could tell me how to attract that sort of girl?”

“Of course I could,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I am a woman, remember? I used to be a girl. I know how girls think. Just because I am a bit older now and I do not run round looking at boys doesn’t mean that I have forgotten how girls think.”

The apprentice raised an eyebrow. “You tell me then,” he said. “You tell me this secret.”

Mma Ramotswe was silent. This, she thought, was the difficult part. She had to make sure that the apprentice would take what she had to say seriously, and that meant that she should not be too quick to impart the information.

“I don’t know whether I should tell you,” she said. “I cannot just tell anybody. I would only want to tell a man who would be kind to these glamorous girls. Just because they are glamorous doesn’t mean that they do not have their feelings. Maybe I should wait a few years before I tell you.”

The apprentice, who had been smiling, now frowned. “I would treat such a girl very well, Mma. You can count on me.”

Mma Ramotswe concentrated on her driving. There was an elderly man on a bicycle ahead of them, a battered hat perched on his head, and a red hen tied to the carrier on the back of his cycle. She slowed down, giving him a wide berth.

“That hen is making its last journey,” she said. “He will be taking it to somebody who will eat it.”

The apprentice glanced behind him. “That is what happens to all hens. That is what they are for.”

“They may not think that,” said Mma Ramotswe.

The apprentice laughed. “They cannot think. They have very small heads. There are no brains in a chicken.”

“What is in their heads, then?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

“There is just blood and some bits of meat,” said the apprentice. “I have seen it. There is no brain.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. “Oh,” she said. There was no point in arguing with these boys about matters of this sort; they were usually quite adamant that they were right, even if there was no basis for what they said.

“But what is this thing about girls?” the apprentice persisted. “You can tell me, Mma. I may talk about girls a lot, but I am very kind to them. You ask Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He has seen how well I treat girls.”

They were now nearing the Tlokweng Road, and Mma Ramotswe thought that the time was ripe. She had aroused the apprentice’s attention and now he was listening to her.

“Well then,” she began, “I will tell you a very certain way to attract the attention of one of these glamorous girls. You must become well-known. If you are well-known-if your name is in the papers-then these girls cannot resist you. You look about you and see what sort of man has that sort of lady. It is always the ones who are in the papers. They get those girls every time.”

The apprentice looked immediately defeated. “That is not good news for me,” he said. “I shall never be well-known. I shall never get into the papers.”

“Why not?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “Why give up before you have started?”

“Because nobody is ever going to write about me,” said the apprentice. “I am just an unknown person. I am not going to be famous.”

“But look at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Look at him. He was in the papers today. Now he is well-known.”

“That is different,” the apprentice retorted. “He is in the papers because he is going to do a parachute jump.”

“But you could do that,” said Mma Ramotswe, as if the idea had just occurred. “If you were to jump out of an aeroplane you would be all over the papers and the glamorous girls would notice all right. They would be all over you. I know how these girls think.”

“But…” began the apprentice.

He did not finish. “Oh yes they would,” Mma Ramotswe went on. “There is nothing-nothing-that they like more than bravery. If you jumped out of the plane-maybe instead of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who is possibly too old to do that these days-then you would be the one who would get all the attention. I guarantee it. Those girls would be waiting for you. You could take your pick. You could choose the one with the biggest car.”

“If she had the biggest car then she would also have the biggest bottom,” said the apprentice, smiling. “She would need a big car to fit her bottom in. Such a girl would be very nice.”

Mma Ramotswe would normally not have let such a remark pass without a sharp retort, but this was not the occasion, and she simply smiled. “It seems simple to me,” she said. “You do the jump. You get the girl. It’s perfectly safe.”

The apprentice thought for a moment. “But what about that Botswana Defence Force man? The one whose parachute didn’t open. What about him?”

Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “You are wrong there, Charlie. His parachute would have openedif hehad pulled the cord. You yourself said to Mma Makutsi that that man had probably gone to sleep. There was nothing wrong with his parachute, you see. You are much cleverer than that man. You will not forget to pull the cord.”

The apprentice thought for a moment. “And you think that the papers will write about me?”

“Of course they will,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I shall get Mma Potokwane to talk to them again. She is always giving them stories about the orphan farm. She will tell them to put a big photograph of you on the front page. That will certainly be read by the sort of girl we are talking about.”

Mma Ramotswe slowed down. A small herd of donkeys had wandered onto the road ahead of them and had stopped in the middle, looking at the tiny white van as if they had never before encountered a vehicle. She brought the van to a halt, glancing quickly at the apprentice as she did so. Psychology, she thought; that is what they called it these days, but in her view it was something much older than that. It was woman’s knowledge, that was what it was; knowledge of how men behaved and how they could be persuaded to do something if one approached the matter in the right way. She had told the apprentice no lies; there were girls who would be impressed by a young man who did a parachute jump and who had his photograph in the papers. If men were prepared to use psychology, which they usually were not, then they too could get women to do what they wanted them to do. Perhaps it was fortunate, then, that men were so bad at psychology. Men got women to do what they wanted through making them feel sorry for them, or making them feel guilty. Men did not do this deliberately, of course, but that was the effect.

The apprentice leaned out of his window and shouted at the donkeys, who looked at him balefully before they began to move slowly out of the way. Then, sitting back in his seat, he turned to Mma Ramotswe. “I think I will do it, Mma. I think that maybe it is a good idea to help the orphan farm. We should all do that we can.”

WHEN MMA RAMOTSWE returned to Zebra Drive it was already beginning to get dark. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s truck was parked at the side of the house, in the special spot that she had set aside for him, and she tucked the tiny white van into its own place near the kitchen door. Lights were on in the house, and she heard the sound of voices. They would be wondering, she thought, where she was, and they would be hungry.

She went into the kitchen, kicking off her shoes as she entered. Motholeli was in her wheelchair, behind the kitchen table, chopping carrots, and Puso was stirring something on the stove. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, standing just behind the boy, was dropping a pinch of salt into the mixture in the pot.

“We are cooking your dinner tonight,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “You can go and sit down, with your feet on a stool. We will call you when everything is ready.”

Mma Ramotswe gave a cry of delight. “That is a very big treat for me,” she said. “I am very tired for some reason.”

She went through to the sitting room and dropped into her favourite chair. Although the children helped in the kitchen, it was unusual for them to cook a full meal. It must have been Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s idea, she reflected, and the thought filled her with gratitude that she had such a man who would think to cook a meal. Most husbands would never do that-would regard it as beneath their dignity to work in the house-but Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was different. It was as if he knew what it was like to be a woman, to have all that cooking to do, for the rest of one’s life, a whole procession of pots and pans stretching out into the distance, seemingly endless. Women knew all about that, and dreamed about cooking and pots and the like, but here was a man who seemed to understand.

When they sat down to table half an hour later, Mma Ramotswe watched proudly as Mr J.L.B. Matekoni and Puso brought in the plates of good rich food and set them at each place. Then she said grace, as she always did, her eyes lowered to the tablecloth, as was proper.

“May the Lord look down kindly on Botswana,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And now we thank Him for the food on our plates which has been cooked so well.” She paused. There was more to be said about that, but for the time being she felt that what she had said was enough and since everybody was very hungry they should all begin.

“This is very good,” she said after the first mouthful. “I am very happy that I have such good cooks right here in my own house.”

“It was Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s idea,” said Motholeli. “Maybe he could start a Tlokweng Road Speedy Restaurant.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni laughed. “I could not do that. I am only good at fixing cars. That is all I can do.”

“But you can jump by parachute,” said Motholeli. “You can do that too. They were talking about it at school.”

There was a sudden silence, and it seemed as if a cloud had passed over the gathering. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s fork paused where it was, half way to his mouth, and Mma Ramotswe’s knife stopped cutting into a large piece of pumpkin. She looked up at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who held her glance only for a moment before he looked away.

“Oh that,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That is all a mistake. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni was going to do a parachute jump, but now Charlie, the apprentice at the garage, has offered to do it instead. I have already spoken to Mma Potokwane about it and she is very pleased with the new arrangements. She said that she was sure that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would want to give that young man a chance, and I said I would ask him what he thought.”

They all looked at Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, whose eyes had opened wide as Mma Ramotswe spoke.

“Well?” said Mma Ramotswe, returning to her task of cutting the pumpkin. “What would you like to do, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni? Would you like to give that boy a chance?”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni looked up at the ceiling. “I could do, I suppose,” he said.

“Good,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You are a very generous man. Charlie will be very pleased.”

Mr J.L.B. Matekoni smiled. “It is nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

They continued with the meal. Mma Ramotswe noticed that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni appeared to be in a very good mood and made several amusing remarks about the day’s events, including a joke about a gearbox, which they all laughed at but which none of them understood. Then, when the plates were cleared away and the children were out of the room, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni left his chair and, standing over Mma Ramotswe’s chair, he took her hand and said, “You are a kind woman, Mma Ramotswe, and I am very lucky to have found a lady like you. My life is a very happy one now.”

“And I am happy too,” said Mma Ramotswe. She was not going to be a widow after all, and she had managed to make it seem as if it had been his decision. That was what men liked-she was sure of it-and why should men not be allowed to think that they were getting what they liked, occasionally at least? She saw no reason why not.