The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Nice one, Boss!

  Pretending not to notice at first, she began to walk a little bit more purposefully.

  Yes, said the insistent, rather chirpy voice. Put your best foot forward!

  She glanced down at her shoes. She had a few more shoes these days, and this was a workaday pair that she had never paid much attention to. But now they were making their presence felt.

  It’s smart wedding shoes—with diamonds, we hear. So you’ll be forgetting about us, we suppose. Well, we won’t be forgetting about you, Boss! Know what we mean?

  She decided to ignore her shoes. It was absurd, anyway; shoes could not talk, and it was just a trick of the mind, of the same sort that made one think that somebody has said something when they have just been clearing their throat or humming a snatch of tune. The creaking of shoe leather could produce just the same illusion, she thought, and was probably best dealt with by the application of a spot of polish, or a lick of dubbin.

  In your dreams, said the shoes.

  She was now at the point along the road where a path led off into a stand of gum trees that had been planted forty years ago, when Gaborone was only a small town. The city had grown, of course, but these eucalypts still formed its boundary at this point; beyond them lay a stretch of rough bush—government land—and then the dam that provided the city with its precious water. It was an odd juxtaposition, as the border zones of towns can so often be. On one side lie the works of man—streets and pavements, storm drains, buildings—on the other is nature, and the transition can be so sudden, so sharply delineated. Here the tar and concrete just stopped without warning, and were no more, their place taken by trees, undergrowth, anthills. And the smells were different too: on one side the acrid odour of cars and hot road surfaces and wafting cooking vapours, which on the other side became the scent of dust and grass and dried bark, and cattle somewhere not far away.

  A path led off into this stretch of bush, as paths will lead off in Africa, well defined, tramped bare by passing feet, appearing like dusty veins when viewed from above. These paths knew where they were going, and would meander—never a straight line—turn and twist until they reached some human place, a collection of huts perhaps, a rough wooden stockade for cattle or goats, some place of gathering or labour. Or they would peter out, as if the people whose feet had made the path had suddenly remembered something and turned back, or had just forgotten why it was that they were walking that way and had given up, handing the land back to nature.

  Mma Makutsi knew where this path led because she had followed it before on one or two occasions and, taking the right fork after five minutes or so, it had brought her out where she thought it would: near the traffic lights at the corner of the Riverwalk shops. She decided to follow it now because it was easier than walking alongside the Tlokweng Road, with its traffic and its stony surface. The path was more peaceful too, because the only sounds were those of birds and, sometimes, the distant and sporadic ringing of cattle bells; some herds, by ancient right, still wandered among these trees. Occasionally, very occasionally, there might be the sound of some other creature in the bush, the startled cracking of twigs as a small antelope was disturbed—a timid duiker, perhaps, or a little bushbuck. There were many of them over by the dam, attracted by the water that would ensure their survival in the surrounding vleis and low boulder-strewn hills or kopjes, creatures clinging to life in the interstices of a bigger, stronger world.

  Mma Makutsi walked on. There was no life about, although she could see from the sand on the path that cattle had been this way not long before. She was thinking of the shoes, and making a mental list of the things she had to find out about them. Colour? Would they go with her dress, which was to be ivory. Comfort? She would have to stand for long periods on her wedding day and at the parties; the shoes should not be too tight or she would feel very uncomfortable. Fabric or leather? Her skin, which was troublesome, did not react well to some synthetic materials, so it was important the shoes have leather lining rather than some sort of plastic. Heels? Again there was a comfort issue—

  She gave a start, her heart leaping in fright. A sudden noise; a small crashing sound; something in the bush. Instinct took over, and she took a step back and half turned to run; it could be a snake, a cobra or a mamba, which could be very dangerous if she had walked between the snake and its hole. Mambas loved these old anthills, with their cool chambers and the safety of their darkness, and mambas were so quick, so evil, so filled with old hatred for people.

  A warthog. It had come through the undergrowth and now it wandered on to the path, saw Mma Makutsi not far away and for a moment itself froze, as she had. Then, turning round sharply, its ridiculous tail erect like an aerial, it trotted off, back into the safety of the sheltering bush.

  Mma Makutsi relaxed. “Sorry,” she said after the retreating creature. “Sorry. This is your place.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  A SMALL, INCONSEQUENTIAL BOY

  THE ROAD TO LOBATSE runs south from Gaborone, heading straight for a pass that opens through low-lying hills on either side. Like all roads in Botswana, for many of those who passed that way regularly each stretch could evoke its memories: here was where we broke down, by that culvert, and waited for help under that tree—the sun was so hot that day; here we turned off once to visit a distant cousin who lived five miles down that track, so bumpy that we were all shaken up and bruised by the time we reached our destination; here lived a man who kept a mangy lion in a large enclosure; here is the turn-off to Mokolodi; here we bought melons from a woman who had flies swarming about her eyes but seemed unconcerned. For Mma Ramotswe, too, there were memories, going right back; of trips by bus when she was a girl, to see her cousin in Lobatse; of a journey with Note, her abusive husband, who broke her heart and then broke it again; of the time she drove this way with her father, just before he died, and he said that he thought he would never see those hills again but no doubt would find some just like them in that place to which he would shortly go, to that other Botswana just beyond that final darkness.

  Mr. Botsalo Moeti had eventually told Mma Ramotswe where he lived. His earlier vagueness on this, bordering on reluctance, had puzzled her. Did he not trust her? Was his fear so great? “A road off to the right,” he had said. “There is no notice, but if you look for a large thorn tree beside the road just after Otse, then that is the place; there is the chassis of a very old car in the bush. That is my sign.”

  She saw the tree, and then the remains of the car. These old vehicles were to be seen here and there—in the dry air of Botswana they barely rusted, but became covered in vegetation and dust and merged with the landscape. Often enough they were beautiful old cars or trucks, tractors too, reminders of a time when such things were built with grace and a sense of human proportion, like the implements to be found in an old kitchen, battered and well used, modest and simple. She had suggested once to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni that he rescue one of these ancient vehicles some day and tow it back to the garage for restoration. He had laughed, and explained that you could not do something like that; that everything would be solidly fused together now, that the wind would have eroded the cables so that they would turn to dust if touched, that there would be nothing left where once there were dials and tubes and leather seats. The ants would have eaten all those, he said; it would be an exhumation, not a towing. “Cars are just like us, Mma Ramotswe,” he went on to say. “When their heart stops—finally stops—then there is nothing left. The life has gone from them. That is true, Mma Ramotswe. That is how it is.”

  He paused, and then added, “And I do not think they go to heaven, Mma Ramotswe. There is no heaven for cars.” He spoke rather wistfully, as such a heaven would be a fine place for a mechanic, surrounded by all the cars that ever were, all those wonderful old cars with their intricate engines and their beautiful, handmade interiors.

  He had not meant to be unkind, he had simply wanted to explain the finite life of machinery. Women knew many things, he felt,
and there was little, if anything, that he could tell Mma Ramotswe about the world; except when it came to machines. Then, in his view, women seemed less interested; they wanted machines to work, but they did not necessarily want to understand why they worked or, more important, why they went wrong. Love was usually quite enough to stop people going wrong, but would not always work with machinery. One of his clients had just demonstrated that. She had brought in her car, which was behaving erratically. “I love it,” she said. “I am kind to it. And now it has decided to turn against me. What have I done, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, to deserve this?”

  “It is not love,” he had said. “It is oil.”

  That is what Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni thought about how women treated cars; but the world was changing, and even as he entertained these thoughts, he began to feel slightly guilty. He was a fair man, who disliked prejudice, but he had yet to be persuaded that women were good with cars. Not that he would ever have dared express such views to Mma Potokwane, for instance, or even Mma Makutsi. These ladies were feminists, he had been told, as he had once informed the apprentices when admonishing them about the things they talked about in the garage, often at the tops of their voices.

  “You should watch what you say,” he had warned. “What if Mma Potokwane is sitting in the office there and hears these things you say? Or even Mma Makutsi, who has very good hearing? These ladies are feminists, you know.”

  “What is that?” asked Fanwell. “Do they not like to eat meat?”

  “That is vegetarian,” said Charlie, scornfully. “Feminists are big, strong ladies. Ow!”

  “They are ladies who do not like to hear young men say foolish things about women,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “They will punish you if you do not watch out.”

  Charlie had grinned. “If the feminists take over, Fanwell, they will make men sit by the roadside and sell tomatoes. That is their main plan. For you too. That is what is going to happen, big time. Ow!”

  Mma Ramotswe steered the blue van off the road. The track—for it was not much more than that—led very quickly to a gate fastened to its post with a twist of wire. She opened this, making sure to close it behind her to keep cattle from straying on to the Lobatse road. That was a major cause of accidents, cattle at night, invisible in the darkness until the last moment when they turned their heads and the driver saw their eyes caught in the headlights, looming large. Everybody knew somebody who had hit a cow, who had lost their vehicle as a result, sometimes their life too.

  The track was in good enough condition; a grader, it seemed, had passed along it not all that long ago and had evened out the worst of the ridges and filled the deepest of the holes. This makeshift pact with nature would last until the next rains came, when the dry season’s work would be undone with all the quick impatience that nature has for the puny works of man. The first floods of the rainy season were the worst, as the land, parched bone-dry from the winter, would shrug off the sudden deluge, sending it off in red-brown torrents through networks of eroded dongas. Only later would the land drink in the rain and spring to life once more.

  On either side of the track, the grey-green bush stretched out, a landscape of struggling shrubs, leaves shrivelled and dusty, filling in the space between the endless forests of thorn trees. The more established acacia provided some cover from the sun, casting pools of shade under which, here and there, cattle clustered, their tails twitching listlessly against the flies. The prevailing note was one of somnolence and stasis, a note taken up and orchestrated by hidden choirs of screeching cicadas: this was a Botswana that had existed since the days when cattle-herding peoples first came to this land; this was a Botswana that was a hundred years from the world of Gaborone, from the world of cars, of white buildings, of commerce and diamonds. But it was the real heart of her country, the heart that she hoped, when her time came to leave this earth, she would see, in her mind’s eye at least, before the final darkness set in. And for all that she belonged to Gaborone, and to that other world, Mma Ramotswe belonged here too, and felt beside her quite strongly the presence of her father, the late Obed Ramotswe. As she gazed out through the tangle of acacia, she felt he was there, seated beside her in the van, his familiar old hat resting on his lap, looking out at the cattle and rehearsing in his mind the possible bloodlines of these beasts he knew so well.

  Her reverie ended as the van encountered a particularly deep pothole, teetering for a moment before toppling over the rim of the miniature void. Forward momentum prevailed, and the van was soon back on the level, but the creaking and protest from somewhere under the engine made Mma Ramotswe wonder how her white van would have coped with the challenge—not as well, she suspected.

  The track changed direction; now came the first signs of human activity: a dip tank, rust-red, with an empty drum lying by its side. The sight brought back a memory—the stench of the dip, that harsh chemical smell, not unlike a mixture of tar and vinegar, which she remembered from her father’s cattle post all those years ago. It was an unpleasant smell in itself, but tolerated, perhaps even hankered after, for its association with cattle, and with the life that was led about cattle. Beyond the dip tank there was a rickety enclosure made of stakes of rough-hewn wood—the trunks of small trees—driven into the ground and tied together with wire and strips of bark. Again, this prompted recollections of those long weeks spent out on the lands and at the distant cattle posts, and of the sound of the cattle lowing in the night when disturbed by some movement in the bush: some pair of eyes betraying the presence of a hyena or jackal.

  Then she saw the house, standing beside a large thorn tree that had thickened considerably, its upper branches making a dense crown, like a head of unruly hair among the ranks of the well-barbered. It was not an imposing house, but it was more than the single-room structures that served many who lived out in the bush. The roof, like the roofs of almost all farmhouses, was made of corrugated iron, bolted on and painted red. This covered not only the main part of the house, but the shady verandah that ran the length of the front, the space between the whitewashed pillars gauzed in against flies. Behind the house, in a cluster several hundred yards away, was a small group of buildings that made up the servants’ quarters. There were always such dwellings—the abode of the cook, or the man who tended the yard, or the woman who did the washing and ironing; so normal and unexceptionable as to attract no attention, the places where lives were led in the shadow of the employer in the larger house. And the cause, Mma Ramotswe knew from long experience, of deep resentments and, on occasion, murderous hatreds. Those flowed from exploitation and bad treatment—the things that people would do to one another with utter predictability and inevitability unless those in authority made it impossible and laid down conditions of employment. She had seen shocking things in the course of her work, even here in Botswana, a good country where things were well run and people had rights; human nature, of course, would find its way round the best of rules and regulations.

  As she nosed the van into a patch of shade under the large thorn tree beside the house, the thought came to her that the solution to Mr. Moeti’s problem might be simpler than he imagined. It always surprised her that people could be so blind to the obvious; that a person could mistreat a servant and then show surprise when the one they abused hit back. She had seen this time and time again, and she had even thought of writing to Clovis Andersen and proposing a new rule for inclusion in a future edition of The Principles of Private Detection. This rule would state, quite simply: If you are looking for somebody who hates your client, then first of all look under the client’s own roof. And now, getting out of the van and looking over towards the house, she studied the red iron roof under which, perhaps, resentments were burning. The roof looked back at her, impassive and tight-lipped under her suspicion, and she remembered a proposition that was already included in Clovis Andersen’s great work which was just as pertinent to this situation as was any suggestion of hers: Don’t think you know all the answers, Mr. Andersen had written, and
had gone on, with admirable economy, to explain why this should be so: because you don’t.

  A figure appeared on the verandah. Smoothing out the creases in her dress, Mma Ramotswe walked towards the house. The figure now revealed itself as a woman, clad in a dull shift dress over which an old blue gingham apron had been donned.

  Mma Ramotswe called out the universal greeting of the Tswana world—“Dumela, Mma”—and the woman responded appropriately, though in a rather strange, high-pitched voice.

  “I have come to see Mr. Moeti. Is he in the house?”

  The woman nodded. “He is sleeping.”

  Mma Ramotswe looked at her watch. “He said I should come.”

  The woman looked at her blankly. “But he is sleeping, Mma. He cannot talk if he is sleeping.”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. “No, nobody can do that. But perhaps he would like you to wake him up.”

  The woman shook her head. “Men do not like to be woken up, Mma. Sorry.”

  Mma Ramotswe frowned. There was something strange about this woman, a deliberate obduracy that went beyond the reluctance of a servant to disturb an employer. She wondered: Is this her? Is this the one? That might seem impossibly simple, but Mma Ramotswe had often found a culprit on very first enquiry. People gave themselves away, she thought; they so often did. Guilt shone out of their eyes like the beam of a hunter’s lamp in the darkness. What, she wondered, would happen if she were to come right out and ask this woman: Why did you do what you did to the cattle?