The Full Cupboard of Life

CHAPTER TEN

MR J.L.B. Matekoni was, of course, immensely relieved that Mma Ramotswe had presented him with the opportunity to withdraw from the parachute jump. She had done it so graciously, and so cleverly, that he had been saved all embarrassment. Throughout that day he had been plagued by anxiety as he reflected on the position in which Mma Potokwane had placed him. He was not a cowardly man, but he had felt nothing but fear, sheer naked fear, when he thought about the parachute jump. Eventually, by mid-afternoon, he had reached the conclusion that this was going to be the way in which he would die, and he had spent almost an hour thinking about the terms of a will which he would draw up the following day. Mma Ramotswe would get the garage, naturally, and she could run it with Mma Makutsi, who could become Manager again. His house would be sold-it would get a very good price-and the money could then be distributed amongst his cousins, who were not well-off and who would be able to use it to buy cattle. Mma Ramotswe should keep some of it, perhaps as much as half, as this would help to keep the children, who were his responsibility after all. And then there was his truck, which could go to the orphan farm, where a good use would be found for it.

At this point he stopped. Leaving the truck to the orphan farm was tantamount to leaving it to Mma Potokwane, and he was not at all sure whether this was what he wanted. It was Mma Potokwane, after all, who had caused this crisis in the first place and he saw no reason why she should profit from it. In one view of the matter, Mma Potokwane would be responsible for his death, and perhaps she should even be put on trial. That would teach her to push people around as she did. That would be a lesson to all powerful matrons, and he suspected that there were many such women. Men would simply have to fight back, and this could be done, on their behalf, by the Attorney-General of Botswana himself, who could start a show trial of Mma Potokwane-for homicide-for the sake of all men. That would at least be a start.

Such unworthy thoughts were now no longer necessary, and after that glorious release pronounced by Mma Ramotswe at the dinner table, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni felt no need to plan his will. That night, after he had returned to his house near the old Botswana Defence Force Club, he contemplated his familiar possessions, not with the eye of one who was planning their testamentary disposal, but with the relief of one who knew that he was not soon to be separated from them. He looked at his sofa, with its stained arms and cushions, and thought about the long Saturday afternoons that he had spent just sitting there, listening to the radio and thinking about nothing in particular. Then he looked at the velvet picture of a mountain that hung on the wall opposite the sofa. That was a fine picture which must have taken the artist a great deal of time to make. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni knew every detail of it. All of this would go over to Mma Ramotswe’s house one of these days, but for the time being it was reassuring to see things so firmly and predictably in their proper place.

It was almost midnight by the time Mr J.L.B. Matekoni went to bed. He read the paper for a few minutes before he put out the light, drowsily dropping the paper by his bedside, and then, enveloped in darkness, he drifted into the sleep that had always come so easily to him after a day of hard work. Sleep was welcome; the nightmare that he had experienced had been a diurnal one, and now it was resolved. There was to be no drop, no plummet to the ground, no humiliation as his fear made itself manifest to all…

That was in the waking world; the sleeping world of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had not caught up with the events of that evening, with the release from his torment, and at some point that night, he found himself standing on the edge of the tarmac at the airport, with a small white plane of the sort used by the Kalahari Flying Club taxi-ing towards him. A door of the plane was opened, and he was beckoned within by the pilot, who, as it happened, was Mma Potokwane herself.

“Get in, Mr J.L.B. Matekoni,” shouted Mma Potokwane above the noise of the engine. She seemed vaguely annoyed that he was holding things up in some way, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni obeyed, as he always did.

Mma Potokwane seemed quite confident, leaning forward to flick switches and adjust instruments. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni reached to touch a switch that appeared to need attention, as an orange light was flashing behind it, but his hand was brushed away by Mma Potokwane.

“Don’t touch!” she shouted, as if addressing an orphan. “Dangerous!”

He sat back, and the little plane shot forward down the runway. The trees were so close, he thought, the grass so soft that he could jump out now, roll over, and escape; but there was no getting away from Mma Potokwane, who looked at him crossly and shook a finger in admonition. And then they were airborne, and he looked out of the window of the plane at the land below him, which was growing smaller and smaller, a miniaturised Botswana of cattle like ants and roads like thin strips of twisting brown thread. Oh, it was so beautiful to look down on his land and see the clouds and the blue and all the air. One might so easily step out onto such clouds and drift away, off to the West, over the great brown, and alight somewhere where the lions walked and where there were springs of water and tall trees and little sign of man.

Mma Potokwane pulled on the controls of the plane and they circled, hugging the edge of the town so far below. He looked down and he saw Zebra Drive; it was so easy to spot it, and was that not Mma Ramotswe waving to him from her yard, and Mma Makutsi, in her new green shoes? They were waving, smiling up at him, pointing to a place on the ground where he might land. He turned to Mma Potokwane, who smiled at him now and pointed to the handle of the door.

He reached out and no more than touched the door before it flew open. He felt the wind on his face, and the panic rose in him, and he tried to stop himself falling, holding onto one of the levers in the plane, a little thing that gave him no purchase. Mma Potokwane was shouting at him, taking her hands off the controls of the plane to shove him out, and now kicked him firmly in the back with those flat brown shoes which she wore to walk about the orphan farm. “Out!” she cried, and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, mute with fear, slipped out into the empty air and tumbled, head over heels, now looking at the sky, now at the ground, down to the earth that was still so far away beneath him.

There was no parachute, of course, just pyjamas, and they were billowing about him, hardly slowing him up at all.This is how it ends, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and he began to think of how good life had been, and how precious; but he could not think of these things for long, for his fall was over in seconds and he landed on his feet, perfectly, as if he might have hopped off an old orange box at the garage; and there he was, out in the bush, beside a termite mound. He looked about him; it was an unfamiliar landscape, perhaps Tlokweng, perhaps not, and he was studying it when he heard his father’s voice behind him. He turned round, but there was no sign of his father, who was there but not quite there, in the way in which the dead can come to us in our dreams. There was much that he wanted to ask his father, there was much that he wanted to tell him about the garage, but his father spoke first, in a voice which was strange and reedy-for a dead man has no breath to make a voice-and asked a question which woke up Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, wrenching him from his dream with its satisfactory soft landing by the termite mound.

“When are you going to marry Mma Ramotswe?” asked his father. “Isn’t it about time?”