The Miracle at Speedy Motors

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni pushed the wheelchair round to the front of the house and with the help of the doctor lifted it up the three low steps onto the verandah. Then they followed the doctor through the front door and down a short corridor. The floor of the corridor was lined with wide planks which had been recently varnished and reflected the little light that penetrated the gloom of the interior.

  “This is a fine house,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni nervously.

  “It is too old,” said the doctor. “But it will last me out. Then the white ants will finish their job of eating it. They are waiting for that.”

  “They will eat the whole country one day,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “They are waiting for us to let them.”

  The doctor laughed. “They do not like the creosote I use,” he said. “That spoils their appetite.”

  He opened a door and led them into a large room furnished with a desk and a few chairs; a bookcase under the window was stuffed with yellowing journals and papers. There was a kitchen table of some sort, raised up by the positioning of bricks beneath its legs so that it was high enough to be an examination couch. A sheet had been draped over this; a sheet with a red line through it, signifying hospital ownership.

  Suddenly Motholeli started to cry. The doctor became aware of it first and bent down to comfort her. “You mustn’t be frightened,” he said. “There is nothing to be frightened of.” He turned to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Perhaps it might have been better if the mother…”

  “The mother is late. There is just my wife, and she…”

  The doctor nodded. “The child will be all right,” he said. And with that he leaned over and lifted Motholeli out of the chair and placed her on the table. She reached out and held on to the sleeve of his shirt. Her head was bent.

  “Maybe…” began Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Maybe…” He did not know what to do. He could not bear her sobbing, which was louder now.

  “Hush,” said Dr. Mwata. “There is nothing to cry about. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “No,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “This will not hurt.”

  Motholeli looked at him. She was trying to stifle her sobs, and was succeeding now.

  “There,” said Dr. Mwata. “There, you see.”

  He had taken a small rubber hammer out of his pocket and was tapping at her knees. Then he slipped off her shoes and pinched the skin of her ankles. “Can you feel that?” he asked. “Or this? Over here? This?”

  The examination continued for ten minutes or so. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni looked away, staring out of the window, his back turned so that the doctor might conduct his examination in private. There was an old metal windmill outside, and the wooden blades were turning slowly in the breeze, driving a borehole pump; he could hear the mechanical sucking noise, the rattling of a loose spar on the windmill tower; this was not a well-kept place, but the doctor must be busy, even if he had retired. You could not expect an educated man to worry about pumps and boreholes; there were plenty of other people to attend to such things. In the distance, towards the South African border, the clouds were building up again; there would be more rain, he thought, which was a good sign. Yesterday’s storm had laid the dust, and if rain followed later today it would begin to fill the rivers and dams. They could at least hope.

  Dr. Mwata cleared his throat. “That is all I need to see,” he said, patting Motholeli on the shoulder. “You have been a very good girl. Now the Daddy can lift you off the table.”

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni stepped forward and placed the child back in her wheelchair. He was occasionally referred to as the Daddy by people who did not know, but the word remained strange in his ears.

  Dr. Mwata now took Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s arm. “You and I should go for a walk, Rra.” He turned to Motholeli. “I will ask the lady in the kitchen to make you something to drink. She will look after you for a little while. The Daddy and I will not be long.”

  He went to the door and called out down the corridor. A few moments later a woman appeared. She was a large woman wearing a housecoat and a pair of commodious blue slippers. She stared at Motholeli while her employer gave instructions. “You must give this girl some milk. And bread with plenty of honey on it.”

  The men went outside, leaving the house from the back door. The yard at the back was neglected too—a patch of land which merged, without fence or marker, into the scrub bush. A few bricks had been placed in the ground in a circle, a forlorn attempt at decoration or the abandoned beginning of a flower bed; apart from that there was nothing.

  “This is a nice place,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. He did not know what to say; I am just a mechanic, he thought.

  The doctor glanced at him and then looked away. “We could walk over that way. There is a water tank.” He paused. “We will have rain later on, I think.”

  “I think so too,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Your cattle—”

  “They are not mine,” the doctor interrupted him. “They belong to my son. He is the one who has cattle. I have never had a cattle post. Nothing like that.”

  “You are a doctor. You don’t have time for that. You have more important things to do.”

  The doctor nodded. “Maybe. But sometimes the things that doctors do may not seem to be all that important. When I was a doctor up on the mines, most of the time I was giving medicals to men before they were signed on. I had to make them run a mile in the heat and then take their pulse. I looked in their mouths for obvious signs of infection, into their eyes, while all the time, you know, the thing that was going to do the real damage was invisible. No microscope would show you it was there. But it was there. And it was years before we knew what it was and what it would do to our people.” He stopped walking and looked at Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Do you know what I’m talking about, Rra?”

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni did not meet his eyes. He looked at the ground. “I do.”

  They had stopped walking while the doctor spoke; now they resumed. “I lost heart,” said Dr. Mwata. “What could I do? We had the drugs, but could we ever get them to people in time? And then they came and said to me that I was too old to carry on. But I did not want to leave medicine altogether. And so I have found a way of helping, particularly those people who have been told by other doctors that nothing can be done. I take on lost causes, you could say. Like that saint. What do they call him? St. Jude, I think. The Catholics have this saint who will help them when nobody else will.”

  They were nearing the water tank, a low-built, half-crumbling concrete construction to which an old lead pipe ran up from the ground.

  “Do you think that you can help her?” asked Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Do you?”

  They were at the side of the tank. At the edge of the concrete, where it rose up from the sandy soil, a snake had abandoned its old skin, the slough a gossamer tube, twisted by the wind, but still a perfect mould of the creature that had been within. Dr. Mwata reached down and picked it up, delicately holding it so that the sun shone through the crinkle of tiny scales.

  “What sort of snake do you think this came from, Mr. Matekoni?”

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni shook his head. “I cannot tell,” he said.

  “It is a puff adder,” said Dr. Mwata. “Look at this bit here—you can tell from that. See?”

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni shuddered. “I am glad that he is no longer in his skin,” he said.

  This remark appeared to amuse Dr. Mwata. “Yes, indeed. I have had to treat people for bites from these,” he said. “Very nasty. The venom kills tissues. You never fully recover from one of these bites. The muscle around the bite will always be in pretty bad shape. Even with treatment.” He dropped the skin, which floated down to the ground. He looked at Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “You ask whether I can do anything. Well, the answer is yes. I think so.”

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni stood quite still. He was aware, though, that the wind had picked up and that the high purple clouds which he had seen in the distance were coming their way. But this was not a time to think about rain;
this was a time to think about what the doctor had said. He could help. There was something he could do.

  “You can help? You can perform an operation, Rra?”

  Dr. Mwata shook his head. “We must get back to the house, Rra. No, I cannot perform an operation, but I do know of a place, a place in Johannesburg, where there are people who work with people who are paralysed. They work with them and see whether they can get the mind to tell the body to move. They could see her and try. I know them. I have sent people to them before and I have had good results.”

  “They could walk?”

  Dr. Mwata hesitated. “Yes. They were able to walk.”

  “And Motholeli?”

  “Maybe.” He was silent, licking the tip of a finger and holding it up into the wind. It was the sort of wind that preceded rain; stronger now, cooler. Suddenly he said, “Do you believe in miracles, Mr. Matekoni?”

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was tongue-tied. Did he believe in miracles? He was not sure. He had seen old engines start when he never thought they would; he had seen cars continue against all the mechanical odds. These were the miracles of the world of mechanics, but there was always a reason, a mechanical reason, to explain them. “I don’t think so,” he said.

  The doctor seemed surprised. “But you want one to happen, don’t you?”

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni thought about this. Did he want a miracle to happen? Of course he did. He gave his answer. “Yes.”

  “And do you think miracles are free?” asked Dr. Mwata. He spoke quietly, and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni almost did not hear him.

  “Yes, surely…”

  The doctor looked at him quizzically, and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni realised that this was not the answer that he had expected.

  “No. Maybe they aren’t free.”

  Dr. Mwata seemed satisfied with this answer. “Precisely.”

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni looked up at the sky. He thought that he had felt the first drop of rain, but it could not have been that, as the sky directly above was still clear. “How much does a miracle cost?” he asked.

  “Twenty-five thousand pula,” said Dr. Mwata.

  Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was aware that Dr. Mwata was watching his reaction to this information. The doctor’s body, he thought, those long limbs, had become tense. And he noticed too that when he said, “Yes, I shall pay,” the tension disappeared, as if a taut string had suddenly been cut. But this means nothing, he told himself. If there was a chance of a miracle—the remotest chance—he would take it. And was it unreasonable that one should have to pay for a miracle, when all else in this life seemed to cost money, except love, perhaps, which cost nothing, could often be unconditional, and, what was more, made one want to believe in the possibility of miracles?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE PAST

  MMA RAMOTSWE had a living to be earned, of course: more than one, if one took into account Mma Makutsi’s salary as an associate detective and the contribution which the agency made to Mr. Polopetsi’s pay as a part-time helper, mostly in the garage but sometimes in the agency. That could change, thought Mma Ramotswe: if it was true that Mr. Polopetsi was the author of the anonymous letters, as she feared he was, he would have to go. Her earlier decision that she might respond to his treachery with love—a solution which had seemed attractive in that moment of peace on the hillside at Mochudi—had been replaced by a more realistic assessment of the situation. She did not relish the thought of dismissing him, but she saw no real alternative. One could not harbour a snake in the bosom of a business, no matter how charitable one felt, and no matter how understanding one was.

  But now the immediate task was to attend to a matter that would bring in fees to keep everybody alive. Mma Sebina’s case was problematic: she could be lying, but so far Mma Ramotswe only had the word of that strange woman in Otse who claimed to have been present at the birth. Faced with these starkly contradictory testimonies, Mma Ramotswe had decided to work on the assumption that Mma Sebina was telling the truth and that the mother had done so too. Two testimonies to one; simple arithmetic, if nothing else, pointed in that direction. Of course, if she found somebody else who had light to throw on the mystery, then that might tip matters the other way. For all she knew, further inquiries might make the score two all, but time would settle that uncertainty.

  At least she had the names of some more of the elder Mma Sebina’s friends, and that gave her something to work on. She had set Mma Makutsi to work on the tracing of these people—a task which her assistant always performed quickly and effectively, principally through resort to the Botswana telephone directory, but also through the judicious use of a cousin in the tax office. This cousin was happy to reveal the addresses of taxpayers to Mma Makutsi, whom she had long admired. So when Mma Ramotswe had given her the names of the friends of Mma Sebina’s mother, it had taken Mma Makutsi not much more than a day to come up with a neatly typed list of names and addresses. There had been four names on the list; three had been traced, and only one still had a question mark pencilled in against it. Of the three names for which an address had been found, two were in Gaborone: one lived in a flat near the new magistrates’ court, the other in a house a few blocks away from the Grand Palm Hotel. Both had telephone numbers.

  On the morning after her trip to Mochudi, Mma Ramotswe left the office to seek out the woman who lived near the Grand Palm Hotel. She had had a short discussion with Mma Makutsi before she left, but it had touched only briefly on the Sebina case. Mma Makutsi was more concerned about the ruined bed and the imminent return to town of Phuti Radiphuti.

  “He will be back tomorrow, Mma Ramotswe,” she said. “And the first thing he will ask is: How is the new bed? And what will I say to that? It is no longer? Is that what I will say?”

  “We must tell him before he asks,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And remember, I have offered to do this thing for you. I will go to see him and tell him what happened.”

  Mma Makutsi winced. “Oh, Mma…”

  Mma Ramotswe smiled. “For goodness’ sake, Mma Makutsi! It is only a bed. There are many beds in this country. There are millions of beds…”

  She stopped. Were there millions of beds in Botswana? Was that, perhaps, an exaggeration?

  Mma Makutsi noticed the hesitation. Be Accurate had been the motto of the Botswana Secretarial College, and she could not let this wild statement pass. “I think that there are less than two million people in this country,” she said. “And not everyone has a bed. There are some people who have no bed at all, and then there are all those people who share a bed. So there are not millions of beds, Mma Ramotswe. There are maybe…”

  Charlie had come in at this point, bearing the mug from which he drank his tea. “Beds?” he said. “What is all this about beds?”

  “We are having a private conversation about beds,” snapped Mma Makutsi. “This is women’s talk. It is none of your business.”

  Charlie made a face. “You and that Phuti man—have you got one bed or two?”

  Mma Makutsi’s eyes widened in anger. “That is none of your business!”

  “Just asking,” said Charlie.

  “You should not ask these personal questions,” said Mma Ramotswe gently. “It is not polite, Charlie.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Modern people talk about these things quite freely,” he said. “You ladies must be more up to date.”

  Mma Ramotswe shook a finger at him, but playfully. “You are a naughty boy, Charlie.”

  “He is a stupid boy,” muttered Mma Makutsi.

  “I am a man,” said Charlie. “I am not a boy. And anyway, Mma, talking of beds, I saw a bed just like yours the other day. You know, the one that got ruined in the rain. The one with the heart. I saw one on sale. Cheap, cheap. Shop-soiled, I think, but very cheap.”

  Mma Makutsi, who had turned to look pointedly away during this exchange, now spun round. Where was this bed? she demanded. And the price? Charlie told her, and she looked thoughtful.

  Mma Ramotswe, grasping t
he situation, shook her head. “It is better to tell the truth,” she said. “It is always better, Mma.”

  Mma Makutsi pursed her lips. “Except sometimes,” she muttered.

  She spoke so softly that Mma Ramotswe did not hear what she said. And she had things to do before she left to speak to the woman who lived near the Grand Palm Hotel.

  THERE ARE NOT enough trees in this part of town, thought Mma Ramotswe, as she searched for somewhere to park her tiny white van. That was the trouble with those new developments: the first thing that builders did when they arrived to start their work was to cut down all the trees. Then, even if they planted new trees, it would take years before there was enough shade to cover a person, let alone a vehicle. Some people resorted to shade netting, which provided shelter from the sun, but ultimately there was nothing to beat the shade provided by a tree; leafy, natural shade that made patterns on the ground.

  She settled for the grossly inadequate cover provided by a small thorn tree that had somehow escaped the builders’ notice. Then, checking the plot number on the fence against the number on her piece of paper, she pushed open the gate and called out Ko, Ko, as was polite, before entering. Of course, these days one might have to walk up the path uninvited and call out again at the door, but Mma Ramotswe preferred to do things in the proper way. And this morning her call resulted in the appearance of a woman at the side door of the house. She was drying her hands on a small towel; caught in the midst of housework. She was much older than Mma Ramotswe—by thirty years or so—and there was a stiffness to her movements as she beckoned her visitor to come up the path.

  Mma Ramotswe introduced herself. “You do not know me, Mma. I am Precious Ramotswe.”

  The woman listened attentively, with the manner that older people have with names. She belonged to a Botswana where names meant something, connected people with places, cousins, events; even with cattle.

  “Ramotswe? There was an Obed Ramotswe in Mochudi, I think. He…”

  “Was my father. He is late now. My father.”