To the Land of Long Lost Friends

by Alexander McCall Smith

  And now, as Charlie sat in the Happy Chicken Caf, waiting for Queenie-Queenie to arrive, he glanced surreptitiously at Mr. Potso through the open kitchen hatch. After a few minutes, the chef appeared from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a scrap of kitchen towel.

  “Have you ordered?” Mr. Potso demanded.

  Charlie shook his head. “I am waiting for company,” he said.

  “Company?”

  “Yes, company, Rra.”

  The chef rolled his eyes. “And if everyone came in here and waited for company? What then? There would be the whole of Botswana sitting here, just in case any company dropped by. And all the people wanting to buy fried chicken, where would they be? Standing outside, I think.”

  Charlie bit his lip. “I will be ordering chicken when my girlfriend comes.”

  The chef rolled his eyes again, and Charlie’s gaze was drawn to the mucus-white of the eyeballs. He did not like Mr. Potso, and, in particular, he did not like his eyes.

  “So, you have a girlfriend. It seems that anybody can get a girlfriend these days.”

  Charlie said nothing.

  “Even people you never thought would find a girlfriend,” Mr. Potso continued. “Even those people seem to be able to find somebody.” He shook his head in mock wonderment.

  Pearly appeared from the kitchen. Mr. Potso looked in her direction and left Charlie.

  “That is the number one useless man in the country,” Charlie muttered to himself, and felt all the better for the observation, however private and unheard it may have been. He might have dwelt on his humiliation had it not been for the arrival a minute or so later of Queenie-Queenie.

  “You’ve been waiting for hours,” she said. “My fault. All my fault.”

  “I have not been waiting long,” said Charlie. “Just ten minutes, maybe. Listening to that useless chef.”

  Queenie-Queenie glanced towards the kitchen door. “You do not need to listen to that man,” she said. “My father says he’s a rubbish man. No good. That’s what my father says.”

  Charlie brightened. “I don’t pay any attention to what he says. I never have.”

  Queenie-Queenie smiled. “He’s jealous of you, I think. He’s jealous because you are so handsome and clever. That is why he’s rude to you, Charlie.”

  Charlie demurred. “I do not think that I—” He broke off. He could not believe what she had just said. She had said that he was handsome and clever. Nobody, let alone a girl, had said that to him before.

  “Anyway,” said Queenie-Queenie. “We have better things to do than think about that man.”

  “I know,” said Charlie.

  Queenie-Queenie sat down opposite him. “Are you going to have chicken?”

  Charlie affected nonchalance. He could say that he had already eaten, and that he did not want anything more. That was not true, of course; he had not eaten, and the smell of the fried chicken wafting in from the kitchen was impossibly tempting. But the truth of the matter was that he could not afford two helpings of chicken—one for him and one for her.

  “I’m not all that hungry,” he said. “You have some chicken.”

  She looked at him with concern. “If you don’t eat meat, then you’ll get thin. You’ll get knocked over. You should not be too thin.”

  “If you eat too much fried chicken,” said Charlie, “then your arteries get clogged up with chicken fat. I have read all about that.”

  Queenie-Queenie was not impressed. “Then why are chickens not all dead?” she demanded. “If chicken fat was so dangerous, then chickens would be dying all the time. But they are healthy, Charlie. You see them all over the place. They are very healthy.”

  “They are different,” said Charlie. “We have these arteries, you see; chickens do not have arteries.” He paused. “Or I don’t think they do.”

  Queenie-Queenie made an insouciant gesture. “I don’t think we should talk about all that. There are so many things they say we should not do. Don’t eat this, don’t eat that. Don’t cross the road in case you get run down. Don’t get out of bed in the morning in case you slip on the mat and break your ankle. We’re warned about these things all the time.”

  “We could talk about other things,” agreed Charlie. “There are many things to talk about.”

  “Such as marriage,” said Queenie-Queenie. “That is one of the things that people can talk about.”

  Charlie had not expected this. Their relationship had been an on-off affair, and they had separated before this. He was hesitant. “Maybe,” he said. “That is one thing, I think, but there are many others, of course.”

  “But none of them as important as marriage,” persisted Queenie-Queenie.

  “I never said it was not important,” said Charlie.

  Queenie-Queenie was studying him, and he found it slightly disconcerting. “It has been very hot,” he said, in an attempt to change the subject. “The rain will have to come soon, I think.”

  Queenie-Queenie ignored this comment about rain. People were always talking about it—rain, rain, rain—and none of that talk, she felt, would make the rain come any sooner. If anything, it could tempt the rain to stay away, just to spite those rain-obsessed people. But no, she should not think that way: everything depended on rain, and if the weather spirits—not that they existed, of course—should ever know that she was thinking along these seditious lines, then it might make matters worse. So she put such thoughts out of her mind, and looked again at Charlie.

  “Marriage is the number one thing,” she said to Charlie. “If you can think of a more important question than that of who you spend your life with, then I’d like to know what that question is.” She stared at him expectantly, and then added, “No? No suggestions?”

  Charlie looked up at the ceiling. “Some people say that money is more important,” he said, and added, hurriedly, “I am not saying that. That’s not me. But there are people who say that. Money—everything is about money.”

  Queenie-Queenie wrinkled her nose. “Money is nothing, Charlie. Love is everything. That is the difference between the two: money, nothing; love, everything.”

  Charlie frowned. Queenie-Queenie came from a family that had money—money and trucks. If you had money and trucks behind you, then it was easy to say that money was nothing—and trucks, for that matter. It was only too easy. But if you came from where he came from, which was nowhere, really, and you had no money at all, you would never say that.

  Queenie-Queenie expanded on her theme. “If I had a choice, Charlie, between money, here on this hand, and love, here on this hand…” She held her hands out towards him, and Charlie saw how soft the skin was, and the carefully tended nails. He swallowed hard. These were not hands that had been obliged to do the laundry or mix the mortar for the wall of the lelapa, the low mud-wall that bounded the traditional Botswana household. These were not even hands that had needed to do the kitchen work that most women had to do, and in the more progressive households, was even expected of men. These hands had done nothing.

  “If I had to choose between the two of them,” Queenie-Queenie continued, “what do you think I would choose, Charlie? You tell me. Think about it for a little while, and then you tell me what I would choose.”

  Charlie sat back in his seat. Mr. Potso poked his head out from the kitchen to stare at Queenie-Queenie. Then he transferred his gaze to Charlie, curling an eyebrow as if to say, Her! What’s she doing with somebody like you?

  Charlie echoed her question. “Which one would you choose?”

  “Yes, which one?”

  Charlie made a hopeless gesture. “Oh, I know that. I know that you would choose love. That is what you’ve already said. You said that money is not the big thing…”

  Queenie-Queenie raised a finger. “No. Wrong. Money.”

  Charlie could not conceal his surprise. “But you sai
d…”

  “I didn’t. I was talking about both. I never said that I would prefer love to money. I said that if I had money, then I would also like to have love. Love is more important than money—I did say that—but you can’t live on love by itself. You need money. You have to eat. So what you do is you make sure that you have money in the first place, then love will come. You say, ‘I am ready now for love, because I have money,’ and love will come.”

  Charlie listened to this in silence. When she had finished speaking, he simply said, “Oh.”

  “So you agree with me?” asked Queenie-Queenie.

  He did not answer immediately, and so she said, “I’m glad that we agree about this important thing.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, not knowing what he intended to say, but feeling that he should at least express a view. But before he could say anything, Queenie-Queenie continued, “That is why you do not need to ask me to marry you. I know that this is what you would like to do because we both think the same way about this thing.”

  He struggled to make sense of what she was saying. He did not need to ask her to marry him: What did that mean? That he should not ask? Or that he should? Or did it mean that they did not have to talk about the matter any longer?

  He said, “Well, that is very interesting, Queenie. But are you going to order some fried chicken?”

  She looked at him reproachfully. “This is no time for fried chicken.”

  Mr. Potso was staring at them again, this time more intently. “Potso thinks it is. Look at him. He is always thinking that we should order something. All the time.”

  She did not follow his gaze. Potso was nothing to her.

  “No,” she said. “You do not need to ask me to marry you, Charlie. These days, women can ask men to marry them. So if anybody asks us when you asked me, you can just say, ‘It was not necessary—we decided to get married and that was it.’ No need for formalities—not these days.”

  “Ha!” he said. “But we didn’t decide, did we?”

  This brought a flat rebuttal. “Yes, we did.”

  “When?”

  “Just a few moments ago. I said that we agreed, and you said nothing. You didn’t say, ‘I do not agree.’ You didn’t say anything like that.”

  “I didn’t know that we had agreed. How could I tell, Queenie?”

  She brushed this aside. “That doesn’t matter any longer. We don’t need to go over the past—unlike some people. They are always saying ‘You said this thing’ or ‘You said that thing’ and disagreeing with one another all the time.”

  He looked away, summoning up the courage to tell her. He had no money. That was the issue. He could not pay what her family would be expecting. He could not even pay for two helpings of peri-peri chicken.

  “I am very keen on you, Queenie,” he said at last. “Every time you look at me, I think—here inside me, right here—I think, You are so lucky to have this lady. But then I think, How can I ever marry somebody like her when I have no money? How can I go to her relatives—to her father, to her uncles—and say all I have is a couple of hundred pula. They would laugh at me and say, ‘Voetsek, you useless nothing man! Do not come around here unless you have at least thirty thousand pula, maybe forty.’ ”

  Queenie-Queenie laughed. “But you don’t just have a couple of hundred pula. You must have more than that.”

  Charlie shook his head. “That is the truth, Queenie. I have almost no money left.”

  “What have you spent it on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why do you say ‘left’? If you have no money left, that means you have had some and it is gone now.”

  Charlie looked miserable. “It was never there. An apprentice detective does not get paid very much money.”

  “But you will not be an apprentice forever, Charlie.”

  He shook his head. “Sometimes I think I will. I was an apprentice mechanic for a long, long time. And I never became a fully qualified mechanic. Fanwell did, but I did not. And now I’m an apprentice detective but nobody can tell me how long that will last. Maybe forever, I think. I will be a very old man one day and still an apprentice. And then I will be dead and I will probably be an apprentice dead person too.”

  Charlie had not expected Queenie-Queenie to laugh, but that is how she responded. And once her laughter died away, she said, “But Charlie—you do not have to worry about that. My brother, Hector, is always making money on deals that he does. You’ve met him. You like him. He buys things cheaply and then sells them on. He is very clever that way. He will make you a partner in one of his deals and that way you will have the money very soon. I will tell my father that you are just getting the money together and will soon be talking to my uncles about the bogadi. No problem, Charlie. No problem. We can get married soon.”

  Charlie remained silent.

  “You see?” said Queenie-Queenie after a few moments. “You see, Charlie? Simple.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  MEN ARE WEAK, MMA

  MMA RAMOTSWE always fed the children early on school nights. This was to give them time to do their homework in their rooms before lights out at eight-thirty. Of course, both Puso and Motholeli protested that their bedtime was far earlier than that of any of their friends—indeed, earlier than any known bedtime of any child in all of southern Africa, but Mma Ramotswe was not one to be persuaded by such pleading. She knew it was true that some children stayed up until midnight, or even beyond, but she knew from a teacher friend what the consequences of that were.

  “We have children coming to school in the morning half asleep, Mma,” said her friend. “Then they doze through their lessons and nothing goes into their heads.”

  “And their parents?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “What are the parents doing?”

  The teacher laughed. “They are drinking beer or dancing, maybe. I don’t know. One thing I do know is that they are not there making sure that their children go to bed at a reasonable time, as people did in the old days, Mma.”

  “Because many of us didn’t have electricity,” said Mma Ramotswe. “We had paraffin lamps when I was young. Then we had electricity later on.”

  “You went to bed when it got dark,” said the teacher. She paused. A look came to her face that is the look that sometimes comes to those who think of the past. “You cannot uninvent things, Mma. Electricity is a good thing, I suppose. And water that comes in a tap.”

  “And pills for TB and other diseases.”

  The teacher nodded. “All of that, Mma. That is all progress, and nobody would want to stop progress, would they, Mma?”

  She looked at Mma Ramotswe. There was a note of wistfulness in her voice, a note suggesting that there were, perhaps, times when one might want to do just that—to stop progress. Not that one could admit it publicly, of course; progress was one of those things that everybody was expected to believe in, and if you did not, then you might be mocked and accused of living in the past. And yet, were there not things about the old Botswana that were good and valuable, just as there were things like that in every country? The habit of not being rude to people; the habit of treating old people with respect because they had seen so many things and had worked hard for so many years; the habit of keeping some things private that deserved to be kept private, and not living one’s life in a showy way, under the eyes of half the world; the habit of being charitable, and not laughing at others, or speaking ill of them. These were things that everybody respected in the old Botswana, in that time, still remembered by some, before people learned to be selfish.

  The teacher sighed. Spilled milk was spilled milk. “But there is still a problem of children who are half asleep in the morning.”

  At least that would not be a problem for Puso and Motholeli, Mma Ramotswe thought. And despite all their protests, when it came to eight-thirty they tended to be so tired anyway that
they fell fast asleep within a few minutes of their light being switched off. That meant that she could busy herself with making dinner for Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, who sometimes did not arrive home from the garage until just before eight.

  That evening she had prepared a stew for him, served with a generous helping of pumpkin. That was his favourite meal, and she made sure that she served it at least twice a week. You could not give a man too much meat, she believed, although Mma Makutsi had recently drawn her attention to an article in the press that seemed to contradict that traditional Botswana wisdom.

  “They’re saying that you should have red meat only once a week,” Mma Makutsi warned. “I have read about this, Mma. They say that you shouldn’t eat red meat more than once a week.”

  Mma Ramotswe had listened carefully, but this went against everything she, and a whole generation of Botswana women, had had instilled in them by their mothers. “I don’t think they can be talking about Botswana,” she said, once Mma Makutsi had finished. “I think that advice is for Americans. Over there I think they should not eat too much meat—it’s different here, Mma. We have always liked meat.”

  “The Americans like meat too,” said Mma Makutsi. “They are always eating hamburgers, Mma. All the time.”

  “Well, that must be the reason for those articles, Mma. It is because the Americans are eating too many hamburgers. They are being told not to eat so many. We do not eat hamburgers—we like steak. That is different, Mma. That is well known.”

  Mma Makutsi shook her head. “No, Mma, you are wrong there. This is advice from the United Nations. It is for all people, not just Americans. They are saying: do not eat too much red meat. That is what they are saying.”

  Mma Ramotswe sighed. “But we cannot stop feeding men meat. They will be very angry if we do that. They will say, ‘Where is our meat, then?’ ” She paused. “And there is another thing I can tell you, Mma Makutsi. If you stop giving your husband good Botswana beef, you know what happens? Men are weak, Mma. They will go to some other lady who will say, ‘I will cook you lots of meat.’ That is what will happen. Even a very mild man is capable of doing that, Mma.”