The Miracle at Speedy Motors

by Alexander McCall Smith

  LOOK, THE HEART IS BLEEDING

  DURING MMA RAMOTSWE’S ABSENCE with Mr. Polopetsi, Mma Makutsi had spent her time tidying the office. It was a task that she always enjoyed, as she prided herself on being a ruthless disposer of unnecessary things. That was something that she had learned at the Botswana Secretarial College, where it had been stressed time and time again—almost to the point of becoming a mantra—A tidy office is an efficient office. And they had been given examples of real-life cases where untidiness in an office had led to disaster. One of these was that of a firm of quantity surveyors who had lost the contract for the construction of a large dam when the carefully prepared tender documents had gone missing in their notoriously untidy office. There had not been time to prepare another set before the deadline and the contract had gone to a rival. “Later on,” said the lecturer, “the documents were found under the chair of the head secretary. She had been sitting on them.”

  That had brought laughter, even from Violet Sephotho, the undisputed ringleader of the glamorous girls in Mma Makutsi’s year; she, who normally heard very little of what was going on, so busy was she with the painting of her nails in the back row. She it was who had walked into a well-paid job with her miserable fifty-one per cent or whatever it was, while Mma Makutsi, with her distinguished record, had been turned down, sometimes with not so much as an interview.

  No, Mma Makutsi was not one to clutter, and she had soon built up a small pile of things that she judged ready to go. There was a box of old pencils that Mma Ramotswe had salvaged, but never used; that would not be missed. There were several promotional writing pads, given to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni by a tyre salesman, that had been ignored on a shelf and were now yellowed with age. There were various items of evidence garnered in old investigations: a tie left behind in a room and then discovered by a suspicious husband; the tie of a paramour, a thin, brightly coloured tie, that looked guilty. “A man who would wear a tie like that could do anything,” Mma Ramotswe had observed.

  Mma Makutsi gathered the items together and began to look around for something to put them in. Then she saw the rain clouds, and moved over to the window to look out at them. It was the sight that everybody was waiting for; the beginnings of a rainy season, they hoped, that would bring life to the land again. Rain was what mattered in Botswana—mattered above all else.

  Mma Makutsi sent up a silent prayer. This season had to be good, or the level in the great dam that held Gaborone’s water would remain perilously low. And if that happened, there would be water rationing again and people’s gardens, such as they were, would wither and give up. But her prayer was not for Gaborone, but for the north, for her people up in Bobonong, who needed the rain more desperately than she did. For them, good rains meant fat cattle and sleek goats, not to mention good yields of sorghum for the making of flour.

  And then it started. There was a wind and a movement in the trees, followed by the rain. Mma Makutsi saw the first drops hit the white earth of the garage yard, throwing up what looked like tiny worms of water and sand. Then these merged into one and became a silver shimmer of rapidly growing puddles; even the thirsty earth could not absorb this sudden munificence of water. She saw Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni running through the rain to his truck, sheltering his head with an old newspaper. He had urgent business to attend to, it seemed; a car stuck in the rain somewhere? A window left open at home and suddenly remembered—

  The appalling thought struck her—the new bed—and she screamed. She had left her handsome new bed in the open, stacked against the side wall of the house, and now…She gave another cry and ran to the door. The two apprentices were standing near the front of the garage, watching the downpour. One of them, Charlie, was whittling away at a small stick with his penknife when Mma Makutsi called out as she ran towards him.

  “Charlie! You have to drive me. I need to go home. Now. Right now.”

  Charlie looked up from his whittling. “Why not wait? This will not last very long.” He made some additional remark to the younger apprentice, which Mma Makutsi did not hear properly but which sounded like, “I am not a taxi service.”

  She bit her tongue. No, indeed, he was not a taxi service. He had been one, though, and had crashed the taxi on the first day, but she felt that it would not be helpful to mention that now.

  “Please, Charlie,” she begged. “I have left something out in the rain. I have left a bed outside.”

  Charlie smiled. “Then it will have become a water bed, Mma,” he said. “They are very fashionable and expensive. You have made one for nothing now.” He glanced at the younger apprentice for an appreciation of his wit. There was a smile of encouragement.

  Mma Makutsi resisted the strong temptation to reach out and slap this annoying young man. “Charlie,” she said, “if you do not take me, I shall walk out in this storm and I will be struck by lightning. But before I walk out, I shall hide a note in the office saying, If I become late—for any reason, even if it’s made to look like an act of God—it is Charlie’s fault.”

  The look of confidence on Charlie’s face faded. “They will know it was lightning—”

  Mma Makutsi cut him off. “I can see that you are not a detective,” she said. “I can see that. How do you know that lightning has struck if nobody saw what happened? Lightning comes and goes—bang, like that.”

  “You would be burned up,” said Charlie. “There would be big electricity marks.”

  “Big electricity marks?” Mma Makutsi mocked. “And what are those, can you tell me?”

  “Burns,” said Charlie.

  Mma Makutsi was silent for a moment. Then she smiled the smile of one who knew something that another did not. “That’s what you think,” she said. “Well, it’s obvious that you have never dealt with a case of lightning. That is very obvious.” She said no more; she had not dealt with a case of lightning either, but how was Charlie to know that?

  The younger apprentice looked nervous. “You should take Mma Makutsi, Charlie,” he urged. “I do not want her to be struck by lightning.”

  “Thank you,” said Mma Makutsi. “I would not like that to happen to you either.” The you was pointed, and plainly excluded Charlie; it was clear that her concern as to the control of lightning damage was limited, and that beyond that the forces of nature could do their worst.

  Charlie hesitated, and then reluctantly agreed. “We must go now, though, Mma,” he said. “We cannot stand about here discussing it.”

  Again Mma Makutsi had to struggle to control herself. She had not asked for any discussion, and it was Charlie who had caused the delay. She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “Thank you, Charlie,” she said. “You are very kind.” It was what Mma Ramotswe would probably have said, and she wondered, for a moment, if she was suddenly acquiring Mma Ramotswe’s patience. But no, she decided, she would never be as understanding as her employer, especially when it came to Charlie, who would try the patience of a saint, even if not that of Mma Ramotswe.

  They ran out, ignoring the rain, and set off in Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s towing truck. “I’m sorry about your bed,” Charlie said. “I would not like you to think that I was not sorry for you, Mma.”

  Mma Makutsi inclined her head. “Thank you. I feel very silly about it. I did not think it would rain today. I was not thinking.”

  “Nobody knew that there would be rain,” said Charlie. “Everybody thought that it would go on being dry.”

  “And we should never complain about rain,” said Mma Makutsi. “It would be a very dangerous thing for a Motswana to complain about rain.”

  Charlie agreed; that would be unheard of. “This is very good rain,” he said, negotiating a small lake of floodwater that had built up beside the road.

  Mma Makutsi said nothing. She was thinking of what she would find at the end of the journey, which she was sure would be a sodden mess. Oh, if only she had thought! Who would leave a bed, of all things, outside, exposed to the elements? Well, the answer to that was she would, as she had just done
.

  She directed Charlie down the narrow road that led to her house. Any hopes she might have cherished that the rain in this part of town might have been gentler were dashed by the sight of the large puddles of mud-brown water beside the road and, on occasion, on it. Although the rain itself was now easing off, there was no doubt that there had been as much of a downpour here as anywhere else; perhaps more.

  “That is my house,” she said in a subdued tone, pointing it out to Charlie.

  “It is a nice place, Mma,” said Charlie. “I wouldn’t mind living in a place like that. At the moment I’m staying…” He tailed off. They had both seen the bed at the same time, and were now staring at the drooping, sodden item propped up against the side of the house.

  Mma Makutsi groaned. “It is ruined,” she said. “It is completely ruined.”

  There was no sign of Charlie’s jaunty cheekiness as they alighted from the truck and walked up the small path that led to Mma Makutsi’s house.

  “I’m so sorry, Mma,” said Charlie. “I don’t think the rain has done the bed any good. Was it an old one?”

  Mma Makutsi stared at the bed that had been her pride and joy. “It was brand-new,” she said, her voice faltering with emotion. “It had never been slept in. Not once.”

  Charlie poked at the surface of the velvet heart-shaped headboard. He did not exert much pressure, but the waterlogged cloth gave way under his finger, exposing sodden padding material behind. He picked at this, twisted it between his fingers, and then dropped it. “What is this red bit, Mma? Or should I say, what was it?”

  “A heart,” muttered Mma Makutsi. “The headboard was a heart.”

  “Why?” asked Charlie. “Why have a heart?”

  Mma Makutsi did not answer. She had moved round to examine the side of the bed. The rain, she saw, had penetrated everywhere and there was a steady dripping of water from the lower edge of the mattress. She hardly dared raise her eyes to the velvet heart, but she did so now and saw that the water dripping from that part of the ruined bed was dyed red, as if it were blood. And she said to Charlie, in her sorrow, “Look, the heart is bleeding,” and he reached out and touched her lightly on the shoulder. It was an uncharacteristically sympathetic gesture from the young man, who was normally all jokes and showing-off, but who now, in the face of this little tragedy, proved himself capable of understanding, and did.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AS IF THE WORLD ITSELF WAS BROKEN

  WHEN MMA RAMOTSWE arrived back at the office, having dropped Mr. Polopetsi off at his home, there was no sign of Mma Makutsi. The office door was unlocked, and the younger apprentice said that Mma Makutsi and Charlie had dashed off together to deal with something that had been left out in the rain. They had not said when they would be back.

  “And Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni?” asked Mma Ramotswe. “Has he been washed away too?”

  The apprentice thought this very funny. “He went off in his truck. He said that there was a car, an important car, that would not start because of the rain, and he went to fix it. There are some cars that do not like all this rain, Mma. You see, the water can get in the distributor—you know what a distributor is, do you, Mma? It is the part that sends the electricity to the—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Women know about distributors these days. But why has everybody gone off like this? What if a client were to come here?”

  The apprentice shook his head. “There have been no clients, Mma. I have not seen any, and I have been here all the time except when I went off to the shops for some meat.”

  Mma Ramotswe sighed. She had spoken to people about the importance of not leaving the business unattended, but nobody, it seemed, listened. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni heard what she had to say, perhaps, but was such a kind man that he would often disappear at the drop of a hat if one of the customers of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors was in any sort of trouble. Mma Potokwane, of course, knew this full well, and would not hesitate to impose upon him to fix anything that went wrong at the orphan farm, but there were others as well, presumably including this person who had summoned him in the middle of the thunderstorm purely because his car would not start.

  She sighed again. It was no use thinking about it and getting hot under the collar because whatever she said she would never be able to change the way people were. Of course she believed in the possibility of change; she had seen many who had become better people from a single experience or from the example of another, but that change was in the big matters, change in the outlook of the heart. It was not change in the little things of life, such as leaving the business unattended—those were things which never changed.

  The rain had now eased off and the sky in the east, which had been dark purple with the storm, was now light again, although there was still cloud, great banks of it, white now, touched gold by the sun, and a rainbow too, arched over the land and dipping down like a pointer to the horizon somewhere beyond Mochudi.

  The apprentice, standing beside her, suddenly tugged excitedly at the sleeve of her dress. “Look, Mma Ramotswe! Look!”

  She looked in the direction in which he was pointing and immediately saw what he had seen. Flying ants. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the air was filling with flying ants, rising up from their secret burrows in the rain-softened ground, gaining altitude on beating wings, dipping down again. It was a familiar sight following the rains, one of those sights that took one back to childhood no matter what age one was, and brought to mind memories of chasing these ants, grabbing them from the air, and then eating them, for their peanut-butter taste and crunchiness.

  “Go and catch some,” she said to the apprentice.

  He handed her the spanner he was holding and rushed out in the last few drops of rain to snatch at the termites, a boy again. He caught some easily, and de-winged them before stuffing them into his mouth. Above him there were other, hungrier dangers for the ants; a flock of swifts, materialising from nowhere, had swept in and were dipping and swooping over their aerial feast. The apprentice looked up at the birds and watched them, and smiled; and she smiled back. What does it matter, she thought, if businesses are left unattended, if people are not always as we want them to be; we need the time just to be human, to enjoy something like this: a boy chasing ants, a dry land drinking at last, birds in the sky, a rainbow.

  She stayed at the office for half an hour or so, enough time to brew herself a pot of red bush tea and to set her thoughts in order. The accidental discovery of the letter in the van had shocked and disturbed her. Mr. Polopetsi’s explanation of having found the letter in the garage was feasible enough, but there had been something about the manner in which he had made these protestations that did not ring true. He had hesitated, and when people hesitated it meant that either they were lying or they were thinking about your reaction to what they were about to say. But if she gave Mr. Polopetsi the benefit of the doubt and decided that he was hesitant merely because he feared her reaction to his explanation, she still had to answer why he would have harboured this fear. There was nothing wrong in what he had done—picking up a letter addressed to her and pocketing it with a view to passing it on later; so why should he have been furtive? It did not make sense, and that meant that he must have written the letter himself. It was an appalling conclusion—one that made her sit quite still, her head in her hands, even letting her cup of bush tea get cold, as she pondered the enormity of what she had inadvertently discovered: she had an enemy in the heart of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, somebody whom she had trusted. And what had she done to deserve that? She could not answer that question. Pick as she might over all her dealings with the seemingly innocuous Mr. Polopetsi, she could not think of a single thing that she had done which would justify his enmity; not one thing. But then she thought: enmity does not require an unjust act to bring it into existence; sometimes simple envy is quite enough. Envy extended its tentacles into the chambers of the human heart, strangled what it found. Mr. Polopetsi was a poor man who had suffered great inju
stice—now he had so very little, while she had so much. That was what must have turned him. There might be an explanation for his behaviour, then, but that was very different from there being an excuse.

  Mma Ramotswe shivered. The rain had lowered the temperature and the office was cool and dark. The sky had darkened again, grey shading into cloud-white; the sun had disappeared. She was alone in the office now, with only the apprentice outside, and, in the distance, the sound of cars moving through flooded sections of the road, some with their headlights still on from the storm. The absence of sun disconcerted her; it was as if the country was suddenly out of favour, deserted by its constant daytime companion.

  She tried to work, making a list of the names she had been given by the woman in Otse—the names of Mma Sebina senior’s friends in Gaborone. The act of writing these down brought home to her that the investigation was posing a fundamental dilemma: whether or not to believe the client. This was one of the most difficult situations that somebody in her position could face. If the client was lying—for whatever reason—then the whole premise upon which inquiries were based could be false. And in this case it looked as if any time spent on meeting and talking to the friends of Mma Sebina’s mother would be wasted. There would be more point, she thought, in trying to persuade Mma Sebina to come to terms with the fact that her mother really was her mother. That is what Mma Ramotswe felt she should do, although she wondered why she should do it. Of course the answer to that was that Mma Ramotswe was there to help people, and anybody who was actively denying that her mother was her mother surely needed some help.

  She set aside the list and looked up at the ceiling. The place where rainwater had previously penetrated the roof was now damp again. It was not something to worry about unduly; rain was so infrequent in Botswana that a leaky roof simply was not a problem. And if the water stained the ceiling board, then it would merely add to the many other marks up there—the places where insects had died, the sites of struggles between flies and geckos, the tiny battlegrounds. A dripping of water was a flood of biblical proportions for the creatures of the ceiling, but nothing of any importance to the people below.