The Full Cupboard of Life

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The rent of the new rooms was almost three times the rent which she was currently paying, but, rather to her surprise, she found that she could easily afford it. Her financial position had improved out of all recognition since she had started her part-time typing school, the Kalahari Typing School for Men. This school met several evenings a week in a church hall and offered supportive and discreet typing instruction for men. There had been many takers—she had been obliged to keep a waiting list—and the money which she had made had been carefully husbanded. Now there was enough for the deposit and more: if she chose to empty her account, she would be able to pay at least eight months’ rent and still send a substantial sum back to her family in Bobonong. She had already doubled the amount that she sent to them, and had received an appreciative letter from an aunt. “We are eating well now,” her aunt had written. “You are a kind girl, and we think of you every time we eat the good food which you make it possible for us to buy. Not all girls are like you. Many are interested only in themselves (and I have a long list of such girls), but you are interested in aunties and cousins. That is a very good sign.”

  Mma Makutsi had smiled as she had read this letter. This aunt was a favourite of hers and one day she would pay for her to come on a visit to Gaborone. The aunt had never been out of Bobonong and it would be a great treat for her to come all the way down to Gaborone. But would it be an altogether good idea, she wondered? If you had never been anywhere in your life it could be disturbing suddenly to discover a new place. The aunt was content in Bobonong, but if she were to see how much bigger and more exciting was Gaborone, then she might find it hard to return to Bobonong, to all those rocks, and baked land, and hot sun. So perhaps the aunt would stay where she was, but Mma Makutsi could perhaps send her a picture of Gaborone, so that she would have some idea of what it was like to be in a city.

  Mma Makutsi made her way out of her room and walked towards the tap at the side of the neighbouring house. She and the other people who used this tap paid the neighbour twenty pula a month for the privilege, and even then they were discouraged from using too much water. If the tap was left running while one doused one’s face under it, then the owner was apt to appear and make a comment about the shortage of water in Botswana.

  “We are a dry country,” she had once said while Mma Makutsi was trying to wash her hair in the running water.

  “Yes,” said Mma Makutsi from under the stream of deliciously cool water. “That is why we have taps.”

  The owner had stormed off. “It is people like you,” she had remarked over her shoulder, “it is people like you who are causing droughts and making all the dams empty. You be careful or the whole country will dry up and we shall have to go somewhere else. You just be careful.”

  This had irritated Mma Makutsi, as she was a careful user of water. But one had to turn the tap on sometimes; there was no point just standing there and looking at it, even if that is what the tap’s owner would really have wanted.

  This morning there was no sign of the owner, and Mma Makutsi got down on her hands and knees and allowed the water to run over her head and shoulders. After a while, she changed her position and put her feet under the water, in this way experiencing a satisfactory tingling sensation that went all the way up her calves to her knees. Then, washed and refreshed, she returned to her room. She would make breakfast now, and give her brother Richard a bowl of freshly boiled porridge … She stopped. For a few moments she had forgotten that Richard was no longer there, and that the corner of her room which she had curtained off for his sickbed was now empty.

  Mma Makutsi stood in her doorway, looking down at the place where his bed had been. Only four months ago he had been there, struggling with the illness which was causing his life to ebb away. She had nursed him, doing her best to make him comfortable in the morning before she went off for work, and bringing him whatever small delicacies she could afford from her meagre salary. They had told her to make sure that he ate, even if his appetite was tiny. And she had done so, bringing him sticks of biltong, ruinously expensive though they were, and watermelons, which cooled his mouth and gave him the sugar that he needed.

  But none of this—none of the special food, the nursing, or the love which she so generously provided—could alter the dreadful truth that the disease which was making his life so hard could never be beaten. It could be slowed down, or held in check, but it would always assert itself in the long run.

  She had known, on that awful day, that he might not be there when she came back from work, because he had looked so tired, and his voice had been so reedy, like the voice of a thin bird. She had toyed with the idea of staying at home, but Mma Ramotswe was away from the office during the morning and there had to be somebody there. So she had said goodbye to him in a fairly matter-of-fact way, although she knew that this might be the last time she spoke to him, and indeed her intuition had been right. Shortly after lunchtime she had been summoned by a neighbour who looked in on him several times a morning, and she had been told to come home. Mma Ramotswe had offered to drive her back in the tiny white van, and she had accepted. As they made their way past the Botswana Technical College, she had suddenly felt that it was too late, and she had sat back in her seat, her head sunk in her hands, knowing what she would find when she arrived at her room.

  Sister Banjule was there. She was the nurse from the Anglican Hospice and the neighbour had known to call her too. She was sitting by his bedside, and when Mma Makutsi came in she rose to her feet and put her arm around her, as did Mma Ramotswe.

  “He said your name,” she whispered to Mma Makutsi. “That is what he said before the Lord took him. I am telling you the truth. That is what he said.”

  They stood together for several minutes, the three women; Sister Banjule in the white uniform of her calling, Mma Ramotswe in her red dress, that she would now change for black, and Mma Makutsi in the new blue dress that she had treated herself to with some of the proceeds of the typing school classes. And then the neighbour, who had been standing near the door, led Mma Makutsi away so that Sister Banjule could ensure in private the last dignities for a man whose life had not amounted to much, but who now received, as of right, the unconditional love of one who knew how to give just that. Receive the soul of our brother, Richard, said Sister Banjule as she gently took from the body its stained and threadbare shirt and replaced it with a garment of white, that a poor man might leave this world in cleanliness and light.

  SHE WISHED that he could have seen her new place, as he would have appreciated the space and the privacy. He would have loved the tap too, and she would have probably ended up being as bad as the woman who watched the water, telling him off for using too much. But that was not to be, and she accepted that, because she knew now that his suffering was at an end.

  The new place, when she moved into it, would be much closer to work. It was not far from the African Mall, in an area which everybody called Extension Two. The streets there were nothing like Zebra Drive, which was leafy and quiet, but at least they were recognisably streets, with names of their own, rather than being the rutted tracks which dodged this way and that round Naledi. And the houses there were neatly set in the middle of small plots of land, with paw-paw trees or flowering bushes dotted about the yards. These houses, although small, were suitable for clerks, or the managers of small stores, or even teachers. It was not at all inappropriate that somebody of her status—a graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College and an assistant detective—should live in a place like that, and she felt proud when she thought of her impending move. There would be less smell, too, which would be good, as there were proper drains and not so much litter. Not that Botswana smelled; anything but, though there were small corners of it—one of these near Mma Makutsi’s room—where one was reminded of humanity and heat.

  The fact that Mma Makutsi had two rooms in a house of four rooms meant, in her mind, that she could say that she would now be living in a house. My house—she tried the words out, and a
t first they seemed strange, almost meretricious. But it was true; she would shortly be responsible for half a roof and half a yard, and that justified the expression my house. It was a comforting thought—anther milestone on the road that had led her from that constrained life in Bobonong, with its non-existent possibilities and its utter isolation, via the Botswana Secretarial College, with its crowning moment of the award of ninety-seven per cent in the final examinations, to the anticipated elevation to the status of householder, with a yard, and paw-paw trees of her own, and a place where the washing could be hung out to dry in the wind.

  The furnishing and decoration of the new house was a matter of the utmost importance, and had been the subject of lengthy discussion with Mma Ramotswe. There were long hours at the office when nothing very much happened, and these might be spent in conversation, or crocheting perhaps, or in simply looking up at the ceiling, with its little fly tracks, like miniature paths through the bush. Mma Ramotswe had strong views on the subject of decoration, and had put these into effect in the house on Zebra Drive, where the living room was unquestionably the most comfortable room Mma Makutsi had ever seen. When she had first visited Mma Ramotswe at home, Mma Makutsi had stood for a moment in the living room doorway, marvelling at the matching suite of sofa and chairs, with their thick cushions, so inviting for a tired or discouraged person, and at the treasures on the shelves—the commemorative plate of Sir Seretse Khama and the Queen Elizabeth II tea cup, with the Queen smiling out in such a reassuring way; and the framed picture of Nelson Mandela with the late King Moshoeshoe II of Lesotho; and the illuminated motto which called for peace and understanding in the house. She had stood there and realised that there had been little beauty in her life; that she had never had a room which in any way expressed her striving for something better, but that perhaps one day she would. And now it was happening.

  Mma Ramotswe had been generous. When she first heard of the move, she had taken Mma Makutsi to the house on Zebra Drive and she had gone through the whole place, room by room, identifying household effects which she could pass on to her assistant. There was a chair which nobody used any more, but which had a bright red seat. She could have that. And then there were the yellow curtains, which had been replaced by a new set; Mma Makutsi had scarcely dared to ask for those, but they had been offered, and she had accepted with alacrity.

  Now, sitting at her desk in the morning, it seemed to her that her life could hardly get any better. There was her new home to look forward to, furnished in part with Mma Ramotswe’s generous gifts; there was the prospect of having a little spare money in her pocket, rather than having to count every thebe; and there was the knowledge that she had a good job, with good people, and that her work made things better, at least for some. Since she had started at the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, she had managed to help quite a number of clients. They had gone away feeling the better for what she had done for them, and that, more than any fee, made her work worthwhile. So those glamorous girls who had gone to work in those companies with new offices; those girls who had never achieved much more than fifty per cent in the examinations at the Botswana Secretarial College; those girls may have highly paid jobs, but did they enjoy their work? Mma Makutsi was sure that they did not. They sat at their desks, pretending to type, watching the hands of the clock approach five. And then, exactly on the hour, they disappeared, eager to get as far away as possible from their offices. Well, it was not like that for Mma Makutsi. Sometimes she would be there in the office well after six, or even seven. Occasionally she found that she was so absorbed in what she was doing that she would not even notice that it had become dark, and when she walked home it would be through the night, with all its sounds and the smells of wood-smoke from cooking fires, and with the sky up above like a great black blanket.

  Mma Makutsi rose from her chair and went to look out of the window. Charlie, the older apprentice, was getting out of a minibus which had drawn off the main road. He waved to somebody who remained inside, and then began to walk towards the garage, his hands stuck in his pockets, his lips moving as he whistled one of those irritating tunes which he picked up. Just as he reached the garage, he began a few steps of a dance, and Mma Makutsi grimaced. He was thinking of girls, of course, as he always did. That explained the dance.

  She drew back from the window, shaking her head. She knew that the apprentices were popular with girls, but she could not imagine what anybody saw in them. It was not that they had much to talk about—cars and girls seemed to be their only interest—and yet there were plenty of girls who were prepared to giggle and flirt with them. Perhaps those girls were in their own way as bad as the apprentices themselves, being interested only in boys and make-up. There were plenty of girls like that, Mma Makutsi thought, and maybe they would make very good wives for these apprentices when they were ready to marry.

  The door, which was ajar, was now opened and the apprentice stuck his head round.

  “Dumela, Mma,” he said. “You have slept well?”

  “Dumela, Rra,” Mma Makutsi replied. “Yes, I have. Thank you. I was here very early and I have been thinking.”

  The apprentice smiled. “You must not think too much, Mma,” he said. “It is not good for women to think too much.”

  Mma Makutsi decided to ignore this remark, but after a moment she had to reply. She could not let this sort of thing go unanswered; he would never have said something like that if Mma Ramotswe had been present, and if he thought that he could get away with it then she would have to disabuse him of that idea.

  “It is not good for men if women think too much,” she retorted. “Oh yes, you are right there. If women start thinking about how useless some men are, then it is bad for men in general. Oh yes, that is true.”

  “That is not what I meant,” said the apprentice.

  “Hah!” said Mma Makutsi. “So now you are changing your mind. You did not know what you were saying because your tongue is out of control. It is always walking away on its own and leaving your head behind. Perhaps there is some medicine for that. Maybe there is an operation that can fix it for you!”

  The apprentice looked cross. He knew that there was no point in trying to better Mma Makutsi in an argument, but anyway he had not come into the office to argue; he had come in to impart some very important news.

  “I have read something in the paper,” he said. “I have read something very interesting.”

  Mma Makutsi glanced at the paper which he had extracted from his pocket. Already it had been smudged with greasy fingerprints, and she wrinkled her nose in distaste.

  “There is something about Mr J.L.B. Matekoni in here,” said the apprentice. “It is on the front page.”

  Mma Makutsi drew in her breath. Had something happened to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni? Newspapers were full of bad news about people, and she wondered whether something unpleasant had happened to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. Or perhaps Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had been arrested for something or other; no, that was impossible. Nobody would ever arrest Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. He was the last person who would ever do anything that would send him to jail. They would have to arrest the whole population of Botswana before they got to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

  The apprentice, relishing the interest which his comment had aroused, unfolded the newspaper and handed it to Mma Makutsi. “There,” he said. “The Boss is going to do something really brave. Ow! I’m glad that it’s him and not me!”

  Mma Makutsi took the newspaper and began to read. “Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, and a well-known figure in the Gaborone motor trade,” began the report, “has agreed to perform a parachute jump to raise money for the Tlokweng orphan farm. Mma Silvia Potokwane, the matron of the orphan farm, said that Mr J.L.B. Matekoni made the surprise offer only a few days ago. She expects him to be able to raise at least five thousand pula in sponsorship. Sponsorship forms have already been distributed and many sponsors are coming forward.”

  She read the report aloud, the apprentice
standing before her and smiling.

  “You see,” said the apprentice. “None of us would have imagined that the Boss would be so brave, and there he is planning to jump out of an aeroplane. And all to help the orphan farm! Isn’t that good of him?”

  “Yes,” said Mma Makutsi. It was very kind, but she had immediately wondered what Mma Ramotswe would think of her fiancé making a parachute jump. If she had a fiancé herself, then she was not sure whether she would approve of that; indeed the more she thought about it the more she realised that she would not approve. Parachute jumps went wrong; everybody knew that.

  “They go wrong, these parachute jumps,” said the apprentice, as if he had picked up the direction of her thoughts. “There was a man in the Botswana Defence Force whose parachute didn’t open. That man is late now.”

  “That is very sad,” said Mma Makutsi. “I am sorry for that man.”

  “The other men were watching from the ground,” the apprentice continued. “They looked up and shouted to him to open his emergency parachute—they always carry two, you see—but he did not hear them.”

  Mma Makutsi looked at the apprentice. What did he mean: he didn’t hear them? Of course he wouldn’t hear them. This was typical of the curious, ill-informed way in which the apprentices, and so many young men like them, viewed the world. It was astonishing to think that they had been to school, and yet there they were, with a good Cambridge Certificate. As Mma Ramotswe pointed out, it must be very difficult being the Minister of Education and having to deal with raw material like this.

  “But he would never be able to hear them,” said Mma Makutsi. “They were wasting their breath.”