Mma Potokwane inclined her head sadly. “I’m afraid so, Mma.”
From Mma Makutsi’s corner of the room there came a sound that could have been anything. It could have been some sort of uncontrolled stomach eruption—a belch of distress, perhaps—or it could have been a growl of unsuppressed anger, or a moan of extreme despair. Whatever it was, it left nobody in any doubt that this was not welcome news. And, when the power of speech returned, all she could do was to hiss, “Her!”
“Yes,” said Mma Potokwane, her voice grave. “I heard from somebody in the council office. She told me that Violet’s papers are already in. She’s standing as an independent. No party—just an independent. And I heard, too, that there are no other candidates.” Now came the most shocking disclosure of all. “And so, if Mma Ramotswe doesn’t stand—and of course she has a perfect right to say no, I’d never dispute that—but if she doesn’t stand, then Violet Sephotho will be elected to the council unopposed.”
“Without anybody voting?” asked Charlie. “Just like that?”
Mma Potokwane nodded. “That’s the way it works, Charlie.”
Charlie looked directly at Mma Ramotswe. “But you can’t let that happen, Mma. She’s a terrible woman.”
On this, if on no other subject, Mma Makutsi and Charlie saw eye to eye. Now she rose from her chair and went across the room to the kettle. More tea, and more thought, would be required if the bombshell that was this new disclosure were to be dealt with. And there would have to be a realignment of views.
She did not turn to speak to Mma Ramotswe; instead, her remarks appeared to be addressed to the teapot. “That makes everything different,” she said. “There are times when you have to put personal feelings to one side. There are times when you have to do your duty to Botswana.”
Mma Potokwane agreed. “Well said, Mma Makutsi.”
Charlie looked thoughtful. “That’s probably true.”
“So,” continued Mma Makutsi, “we must all stand together.”
Charlie liked that. “Together,” he muttered. “United. Together.”
Mma Potokwane flourished the nomination form. “This is all that stands between us and…”
Mma Makutsi spun around. “Disaster,” she said, her voice rising with emotion. “Oh, Mma Ramotswe, you cannot let this happen.”
Mma Ramotswe gestured helplessly. “But surely there must be other people who could stand,” she said. She looked at Mma Potokwane. “What about you, Mma Potokwane?”
The response came quickly. “Impossible, Mma. I would love to be able to help, but I have the Orphan Farm to run. That is a double full-time job.”
Mma Ramotswe was not ready to give up. “Or you, Mma Makutsi? How about you?”
“Out of the question,” said Mma Makutsi. “Phuti would not want me on the council. He doesn’t like that sort of thing.”
“Or even Charlie,” tried Mma Ramotswe. “Charlie, you would get the young vote. All those hundreds of girls would love to vote for you.”
In spite of the united front that seemed to be developing, this was too much for Mma Makutsi. “Charlie? Charlie, stand for election?” she mocked.
“Why not?” snapped Charlie.
Mma Makutsi said nothing.
“I don’t think we should put Charlie under any pressure,” said Mma Potokwane rapidly. “He is still a young man and has many other things to do.”
“You see,” crowed Charlie. “So don’t look at me.”
Silence returned. Mma Potokwane held out the form. “I think you should sign, Mma,” she said gently. “You will be a very good member of the council and you will save us all from that woman.” Then she added, almost inaudibly, “I think it’s your duty, Mma.”
Mma Ramotswe looked at the piece of paper and made her decision. Up until that moment she would have stuck to her guns, but Mma Potokwane had said something that changed everything. It was one word that did it: duty. If her friend thought it was her duty, then it was her duty. Mma Potokwane was the one person she thought was entitled to speak about duty with unchallengeable authority. That was because she herself had never swayed in discharging what she saw as her obligation to all the children she had looked after. She had never, not for one moment, questioned or complained about that. It was simply her duty, and she had carried it out, and would continue to do so until she could do it no more. That was the sort of woman Mma Potokwane was, and that was the sort of person who was now asking her to do something which, by comparison, was a small thing indeed. How could she refuse?
“Mma Makutsi,” she said. “I’ll need a pen, please.”
How easy it was, she thought, to sign your life away. Just a few strokes of the pen on paper, and your life could take a different, and wholly uncharted, course. Just like that.
CHAPTER SIX
UNTIL AFRICA IS FULL OF CHINA SHOES
CHARLIE STEPPED OUT of the minibus that had taken him a short distance down the Tlokweng Road in the direction of town. It was the same minibus that he normally caught at the end of every working day to travel home to Old Naledi, but on this occasion he disembarked well short of his usual stop. It was shortly after five o’clock, and he was due to meet a young woman in the coffee bar near the parking lot at the Riverview Mall. Any meeting with a young woman was important in Charlie’s eyes, but this one was especially so, and before he left work he had been careful to ensure that the front of his shirt was clean, that his hands were well scrubbed, and that any grease under his fingernails—something that all mechanics were used to—had been prised out with a sharpened matchstick. It was so much easier to keep presentable if you were an office worker, Charlie thought; they did not have motor oil dripping down on their heads when they had a car up on the ramp, nor dust sticking to their clothing when they wrestled with the changing of a tyre. They could look as neat and tidy at five o’clock in the evening as at eight in the morning, never having to work up a sweat, but sitting quite comfortably under the cooling blades of an office fan, not exerting themselves in any way—except mentally, of course, but thinking never made you sweat, nor stained your clothing, nor led to bruises and bumps. No wonder that men who worked in office jobs—civil servants, bank managers, and the like—seemed to find so little trouble in meeting and marrying glamorous, eligible girls. Such men had no personal freshness issues; such men found it only too easy to look cool, collected, well groomed, and presentable, even on the hottest days of the Botswana summer.
As he made his way over to the coffee bar, Charlie gave an appraising glance at the cars in the parking lot. This was a mechanic’s habit, at least one of the things he had picked up during the years of his unfinished apprenticeship—and retained, unlike so much else that had been so quickly lost. While most people saw the person first and then the car, with mechanics it was different: the car was recognised before its driver. Indeed, Charlie had seen Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni himself instinctively appear to greet a car before he enquired of a client about his health and whether he had slept well, and all the other things that a formal greeting in Botswana might entail. Charlie had seen this, and had smiled; he had always been a wry observer of human foibles, and was becoming all the more so now that he had embarked on his training as a part-time detective. A part-time detective…The words thrilled him. I am not just a mechanic, he thought. I am not just any old person who has to get under cars for a living; I am an actual detective, engaged in investigative work for Botswana’s premier detective agency—indeed, for Botswana’s only detective agency. And since that was the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and therefore staffed by ladies, he was the only male private detective in the whole country—or probably in a whole number of countries, if you included Zambia to the north and Swaziland and Lesotho off to the east—and you should include them, he thought, because he did not think much was happening in any of them from the detection point of view. The Zambians were perfectly nice people, but he did not t
hink they had many issues of the sort that would require the services of a detective agency, and the same, he decided, could be said of Swaziland and Lesotho, both very small countries where everybody would be presumed to know everybody else’s business anyway. There was little call for discreet investigation when you already knew the answer to the issue you were addressing. So, thought Charlie, he really was an international private detective, and if somebody in Zambia, for instance, wanted something looked into, he would have to come to Botswana to find the necessary trained operative. That was a lovely expression that Charlie had heard Mma Makutsi use on one occasion and that he had purloined for his own use. Trained operative…
And yet, and yet…In spite of all this, in spite of having been plucked out of the garage by Mma Ramotswe and being given the chance of a new career, in spite of being able to call himself an international private detective (in training), life was still not quite what Charlie would have liked it to be. For a start, he had no car, and surely if there was anything that an international private detective should have it was a car. Could you imagine any of those people—the people you saw in films—agreeing to meet a client somewhere as soon as he managed to get there by bus? That would impress nobody—least of all the client. And then there were his clothes. International private detectives tended to wear well-cut suits, and Charlie had no suit at all, well cut or otherwise. On most days he made do with a pair of khaki trousers that would be protected against grease—he hoped—by the work overalls provided by Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. When not working in the garage and assigned to the agency, he would abandon these overalls and make do with the khaki trousers, one of the four shirts he possessed, and the better of his two pairs of shoes. He was allowed to keep these shoes behind the filing cabinet in the office so that he might change into them when he moved between his mechanic’s job and his detection role. They looked smart enough, but they had a fatal flaw: a crack in the left sole; and that sole, being made of a toughened rubber substance, could not be fixed.
“Leather’s different,” said the shoe-repair man who plied his trade under an acacia tree on the other side of the Tlokweng Road. “Leather you can take off, see. Then you put on a new bit of leather that you can cut from a bigger piece. You nail it on, see, but this stuff”—he gestured contemptuously to the exposed sole of Charlie’s shoe—“this stuff can only be fixed by some special glue. It has to dissolve rubber. Sorry.”
Charlie enquired whether supplies of the special glue might be obtained.
The repair man shook his head. “No,” he said. “They make those things over in the China place and they don’t send us any. You have to go and ask those China fellows if they have any.” He sighed. “And they wouldn’t give you any, because if we can fix their shoes like that, then we won’t buy any new pairs. They want us to be buying their shoes all the time—more and more China shoes, all the time, until Africa is full of China shoes and things. All China stuff.”
Charlie resigned himself to living with his damaged footwear. The crack was a small one and only occasionally let in a small grain of sand. That could be irritating—and sharp against the sole of the foot—but it was not something that would be detected by anybody else, and it would certainly not diminish him in the eyes of any client. The khaki trousers were a greater cause for concern in that respect; if there was any colour that an international detective did not choose for his trousers, then Charlie imagined it would be khaki. But his situation was what it was, and his trousers were the colour they were, and Charlie decided to accept the situation, at least for the time being. Things would improve—he was sure of that—and for the time being he had a new girlfriend, and an attractive one at that. Oh, yes, things would improve, even if your left shoe had a crack in its sole, your trousers were the wrong colour, and you had to travel everywhere by crowded—and badly maintained—minibus. You could put up with the indignity of all that if you had a girlfriend called Queenie-Queenie who was head-turningly pretty and who had a good job in the This-Way Fashion House, a shop that advertised itself as the place for “ladies in executive positions” to choose the clothes that would help them to get where they wanted to get “in every department of life.” Queenie-Queenie wore a badge that announced her as a Senior Sales Consultant, a job title that sounded almost as good as International Private Detective, although, as Charlie remarked to himself, no private detective would ever wear a badge announcing his occupation. That was a pity, perhaps, as it would certainly impress those with whom one came into daily contact—particularly on that crowded minibus, where fellow passengers were frequently so careless as to where they put their elbows.
* * *
—
QUEENIE-QUEENIE, who was already in the coffee bar waiting for Charlie, glanced first at her watch and then at the group of four young men who were occupying the neighbouring table. She had not seen them before, and there was something about them suggestive of somewhere other than Botswana. Perhaps it was their clothing; perhaps it was the way they talked—they were speaking Setswana, as far as she could hear, but there was an unfamiliar note to their voices. There were plenty of people over the border in South Africa whose mother tongue was Setswana, but there were differences, both subtle and unsubtle, in intonation and even vocabulary. These young men looked as if they might come from Johannesburg, or somewhere like that—there was that ring of the big city to them, and in their eyes Gaborone, for all its new buildings and its prosperity, was nowhere much. Well, let them think that, Queenie-Queenie told herself. She could have gone off to live in Johannesburg if she had wanted to, but she did not. Better to be a big fish in a small pond, she thought, rather than a small fish in a big one. What happened to small fish? Everybody knew the answer to that: they were eaten by bigger fish.
Queenie-Queenie thought of the very obvious contrast between these young men and Charlie. It could not have been more marked: the boys at the table—and that was how she thought of them, as boys—were dressed flashily, and expensively. Charlie would arrive in his khaki trousers and his plain shirt. They would have money in their pockets; Charlie usually had little of that, sometimes only just enough to pay for two cups of coffee, and, if he did that, he would sometimes find himself short of the tiny amount—no more than a couple of pula—that he needed for his minibus fare home. The contrast went further than that. If they had known about Charlie’s comparative penury, these young men would probably have merely shrugged, or even smiled. They would never guess that she would find that penury attractive; that Charlie’s struggles added to, rather than detracted from, his appeal. Charlie had character, she thought, and character so often came from having to battle for what you had in life. Well-off young men—like those at the nearby table—would not know what it was like to scrimp and save. And that, she thought, made them Charlie’s inferior—at least in all the things that counted.
People might have thought it surprising that an elegant, attractive young woman—especially one named Queenie-Queenie and working in a fashionable dress shop—should favour the underdog rather than his flashy contemporaries. People might also have thought that somebody like Queenie-Queenie would have lamented Charlie’s inability to give her what many young women of her age group might consider a good time—meals eaten out at a restaurant; evenings in one of those bars where they played the latest music so loudly as to inhibit all but the most basic conversation; presents of those violet-scented chocolates, Lovers’ Choice, that they sold in the Pick ’n’ Pay supermarket. But the absence of these things was a matter of complete indifference to Queenie-Queenie; she did not bother about any of this, because her real and over-riding concern was family. She was deeply and unconditionally attached to her parents, her various uncles and aunts, and her only sibling, her brother, Hercules, one-time runner-up substitute in the Mr. Botswana Competition, an annual muscle-building prize challenge sponsored by the country’s principal maker of traditional beer. She was also determined that, as soon as she was able
, she would find a suitable young man to marry, and present her parents with grandchildren and Hercules with nephews and nieces. That such a domestic set of ambitions should have existed in the breast of a young woman who looked as glamorous as Queenie-Queenie was something that the casual observer would not even guess at—and that was precisely Charlie’s position when he first met her: he had no idea.
Charlie did not know it, but the family to which Queenie-Queenie was so attached was one of the wealthiest in Botswana. It was also one of the most closely knit, and most cautious—in a nation renowned for its reticence and general caution. The head of this family was Lucas Modikwe, the son of a small-scale road haulage contractor from Ghanzi. The contractor had been the fons et origo of the family’s prosperity: he had started with one vehicle, a pensioned-off Bedford truck of uncertain and possibly illegal provenance, and had progressed by dint of hard work to the ownership of a fleet of sixteen cattle trucks. These had plied their trade between Ghanzi and other cattle-raising districts in the west of the country and Lobatse, the headquarters of the national livestock industry, down in Botswana’s southeastern corner. The cattle trucks had been followed by buses, and eventually by refrigerated transport to bring vegetables and other frozen foods from factories as far away as Durban, on the Indian Ocean. By the time that the grandfather died, the family business had become large enough to support four uncles—the husbands of Lucas’s sisters—and their total of eleven sons, all working in one capacity or another in the office and marshalling yards in Gaborone. Presiding over all this, though, was Lucas Modikwe, father of Queenie-Queenie and Hercules, and husband of Mma Tippy Modikwe. He owned eighty per cent of the company’s shares, the remainder being held, in diluted holdings, by the uncles and their sons. Everybody understood what the share register would anyway reveal: Lucas Modikwe could do as he liked with this sprawling and prosperous company. He also decided, in a general way, what the family’s attitude would be towards those with whom they came into contact, whether as employees, customers, supplicants, or suitors.
The Colors of All the Cattle Page 7
