The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon

by Alexander McCall Smith

  But then she heard it. This time it was nothing to do with the creaking of the roof or the nudging of the wind. This time it was much clearer: the sound of motion, the sound of something sliding over something else. She edged away from the bed in the direction of the door. Then, very carefully, she bent down so that she could peer, from a safe distance, under the bed.

  The snake was lying under the bed, stretched out, its upper body bent near the neck so that the head was pointed back in Mma Makutsi’s direction and it looked directly at her. She saw its eyes, tiny points of reflected light; she saw the tongue move in a rapid flicker. It was watching her.

  She did not scream, but moved very silently and deliberately. It had been drummed into her as a little girl in Bobonong that when confronted with danger one should not make sudden movements: they could trigger an attack from whatever it was that posed the danger. You must never run away from a lion, her mother had told her; the lion will think you are inviting him to chase you. He cannot help it.

  Now, although there was a big difference between a lion and a snake, Mma Makutsi considered that the principle would be the same. Resisting every temptation to move as quickly as possible, she slowly rose and walked backwards out of the room, half-expecting the snake to dart out from under the bed and pursue her. But it did not, and she was able to close the door behind her and walk swiftly to the telephone in the kitchen.

  Phuti Radiphuti, called out of his meeting with his suppliers, promised to come home immediately.

  ‘But listen, Phuti,’ Mma Makutsi said. ‘It’s no good just putting that snake out with a stick. You have to solve the problem permanently. That snake has to go.’

  There was silence at the other end of the line.

  ‘Phuti, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I am here.’

  ‘And so is the snake,’ said Mma Makutsi.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ said Phuti.

  Mma Makutsi sighed. ‘Surely there is nothing to think about. The snake must be killed; otherwise he will always be coming back into the house. Maybe he thinks it’s his house already. Then all he will have to do is bite both of us and he will have it all to himself.’

  ‘There is a dog,’ said Phuti.

  ‘It’s not dogs; it’s snakes.’

  Phuti laughed weakly. ‘There is a well-known dog. He belongs to the accountant here in the store. He’s called Mealies.’

  Mma Makutsi let her irritation show. ‘I don’t want to talk about dogs,’ she said peevishly, ‘whatever they’re called. I want you to come home and hit that snake on the head. That is what you need to do.’

  Phuti’s voice was persuasive. ‘This dog is a famous snake-catcher. I have seen him do it. The snake doesn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘Then it’s a pity that he’s not our dog.’

  ‘I can borrow him. Other people have done that – they’ve borrowed Mealies and he’s dealt with snakes. That is what we need to do.’

  Mma Makutsi was doubtful, but agreed that Mealies could be tried – as long as he could arrive within the next half hour. ‘I cannot wait in the house with a snake for longer than that, Phuti.’

  ‘I’ll fetch him,’ said Phuti. ‘He will be there.’

  Phuti was as good as his word, arriving at the house only fifteen minutes later. With him was Mealies, an odd-looking dog with a thickset, muscular body and short, bowed legs that looked as if they had been taken from a much smaller dog and grafted on. Mma Makutsi met her husband as he emerged from his truck and watched with interest as he let the dog out of the back.

  ‘He’s a very peculiar-looking dog,’ she remarked. ‘Are you sure that he —’

  He held up a hand to stop her. ‘He’s a famous snake-catcher, Mma. You’ll see.’

  He led the dog into the house while Mma Makutsi busied herself in the kitchen. She did not want to see what happened; she had seen a dog killing a snake in Bobonong and had not liked the sight. In spite of everything, she had felt sorry for the snake, which was a creature like the rest of us who just wanted to go on living. But her mind was made up on that cobra: you simply could not allow a highly venomous snake to take up residence in your house. It was a matter of survival, really.

  She heard Phuti opening the bedroom door and then she heard the dog growling. This was followed by a furious barking and the sound of something being knocked over. Then silence.

  ‘Phuti?’ she called.

  ‘He has done it,’ Phuti called out from the bedroom. ‘That snake is no more.’

  She averted her eyes as Phuti carried the snake out by its tail. She caught a glimpse of a mangled head and she saw a small drop of snake blood, red and glistening, fall on the tiled floor. She shuddered.

  ‘Take it outside, Phuti – I don’t want to see it.’

  Mealies, looking pleased with himself, the white fur around his jaws now stained red, swaggered into the kitchen on his short and bandy legs.

  ‘You should reward him,’ said Phuti. ‘Give him some meat.’

  Mma Makutsi looked down at the dog, who was gazing up at her expectantly. Crossing the kitchen to the fridge, she extracted a large piece of steak and cut off a small corner. This she tossed to the dog, who caught it in his jaws, swallowing it in a single gulp. Phuti now returned and washed his hands in the sink.

  ‘I’ve left him outside,’ he said. ‘That will scare his wife away. They often come in twos.’

  She looked away. She had wanted the snake killed – it was her doing – and now she had made a widow.

  Phuti stood beside her. ‘The important thing is that you are all right,’ he said. ‘It’s not good to be frightened when…’ He reached over and placed a hand gently on her stomach.

  She laid her own hand gently on top of his. ‘I had a fright, but now I am feeling better. And he is feeling better too.’ She glanced down at her stomach; she was sure it was a boy.

  ‘How much longer?’ he asked. ‘I keep forgetting.’

  She shrugged. ‘Three weeks. Twenty-one days, in fact.’

  He let out a low whistle. ‘Have you talked to Mma Ramotswe about maternity leave yet?’

  ‘I’ll talk to her soon,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to bother people about our baby, Phuti. Just you. Just in case…’

  He understood. ‘But now you can speak,’ he said. ‘Now the baby will be almost ready. Nothing can go wrong at this stage.’

  She was worried by his saying things like that. There were plenty of things that could go wrong, even at this stage; men simply did not understand.

  ‘I’ll speak to her tomorrow,’ she said.

  ‘Tomorrow? Don’t forget, then. It’s not fair to keep her waiting.’

  She smiled at him, her Phuti, the father of her unborn child, the man who had brought her to all this – this house, this state of comfort, this happiness.

  After dinner, they spent an hour or so in the room they had prepared for the baby. Phuti had found the necessary furniture in the Double Comfort Furniture Store: a cot, a changing table and a chest of drawers. There was also an easy chair for Mma Makutsi to use when she came to comfort the baby at night, and a pair of curtains with a rabbit design. Now they set to sorting out a pile of baby clothes that Mma Makutsi had bought at a sale at Riverwalk and checking the contents of a drawer that she had stocked with baby oil, powder and a selection of other supplies.

  Phuti was tired, and went to bed early. Mealies was to stay overnight, to be returned to his owner the following day, and he was bedded down on an old blanket on the kitchen floor. They had given him more steak, and a bowl of sorghum porridge mixed with gravy. This had been wolfed down with gusto, and the dog now looked even more barrel-like as he stretched out on the blanket.

  Mma Makutsi was still getting used to her new kitchen and was happy to stand for long periods simply gazing at its pristine surfaces, at its capacious fridge and its numerous cupboards and shelves. She did this for a while after Phuti had gone to bed, and then, since it was a warm evening, she decided to go out into the
yard with a final cup of tea before retiring.

  Most of the garden was uncleared bush, but Phuti had made an attempt to cut the grass in the immediate curtilage of the house, giving it the appearance of a rough, half-cultivated field. This would be the beginnings of a lawn, she hoped, once they had the time to tend to it. She had already planted several small bushes that Mma Ramotswe and Mr J. L. B. Matekoni had given them as a housewarming present, and these were surrounded by neatly arranged rings of stones. She had never had a proper garden and was excited by the prospect of creating a small oasis of green in the surrounding brown. She would have a shelter, perhaps, under which chairs could be set out, allowing people to sit and drink tea in the fresh air. It was a thrilling prospect.

  Sipping at her tea, she took a few steps away from the light spilling out of the kitchen door in order to accustom her eyes to the darkness. The sky above Botswana was a great expanse of stars – uncountable thousands of them – so dense in places as to give an impression that the heavens were decked with gossamer curtains of white. She looked for the reassuring presence of the Southern Cross, the only constellation she could name, and soon found it, hanging over the horizon above Lobatse.

  She looked down. There was a shape in the grass not far from where she stood, and she gave a start. But she quickly remembered: Phuti Radiphuti had left the snake outside to deter its mate, and this was it, this thing that looked like an abandoned piece of hosepipe. She felt a momentary pang of sympathy. She had brought this life to an end, but she had to do it; she had to. There would be the baby coming soon and you simply could not have cobras in the house when you had a baby.

  She moved forward to get a better view. The head was bent back, as one would expect; a dog will snap the snake’s neck at first bite, knowing instinctively that there will be no second chance. She peered down at the snake and frowned. It was much smaller than she remembered. Had she thought it bigger when it was under the bed? Perhaps shock could have that effect? But no – this was definitely a smaller snake.

  The realisation came quickly. The dog had caught a snake in their bedroom, but not the right one. That meant that Phuti was in the room with a cobra. She turned on her heels and began to run inside. She dropped her cup. She felt a pain, sudden, sharp and overwhelming, which stopped her in her tracks. She doubled up. She cried out.

  Chapter Four

  This Shall Be Botswana

  The following morning Mma Ramotswe, as usual, spent the first fifteen minutes of her day in her garden inspecting her plants and taking advantage of the fresh morning air. It would be another hot day, she could tell: there was always something in the air at the onset of such a day. It was a matter of sound, she thought – one of those sounds you could hear but not quite hear, a tiny, distant thrumming that reminded you that at noon the heat would be like a physical blow falling from the sky. The rains would come soon, or so everybody hoped, and they would bring relief not only to people and cattle but also to the land itself. Yet there could still be seemingly interminable weeks of this heat before that happened.

  Mr J. L. B. Matekoni usually drove Motholeli to school as it was easier to get her wheelchair into the back of his truck than into Mma Ramotswe’s van. Puso could have gone with them, but he preferred to make his own way there, feeling that this was a badge of being the age he was. It was not a long walk and he picked up friends on the way. They did not rush, but spent time on the way tossing stones at paw-paw trees, finding interesting sticks with which to stage mock fights, and generally ensuring that they only arrived within seconds of the sounding of the bell that announced the start of the school day.

  ‘Ask her about it,’ mumbled Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, as he finished the last of his breakfast.

  ‘Ask Mma Makutsi about what she wants to do?’

  He wiped the crumbs from his lips and stood up. ‘Yes. You can’t let it go on for much longer. You have to know. What happens in the office if she suddenly goes off to look after a baby and nothing is arranged? What then?’

  Mma Ramotswe thought for a moment. She could not imagine what it would be like if Mma Makutsi were no longer there in the office, sitting behind her desk, the lenses of her large round spectacles catching the light from the window, flashing the world back at itself. It was such a familiar sight that it made it hard to envisage what it would be like if that chair were empty and those comments – often helpful but sometimes not as constructive as they might be – were not being made. It would be a strange silence indeed.

  The view from Bobonong, she mused; was that how the world looked to Mma Makutsi? It seemed an odd thing to say, and yet all of us had a view from somewhere; a view of the world from the perspective of who we were, of what had happened to us, of how we thought about things. Her view was the view from Mochudi, where she had been born and brought up by her late father, that great man, Obed Ramotswe. And his view had been the view from where? The view from Botswana, she decided: the view of the world that seemed essentially and naturally right, because it was a view that understood how things really were and how God must surely have intended them to be when He first made Botswana. She smiled to herself as she savoured the idea that God had looked at the world, seen a wide stretch of land and had said, This shall be Botswana. He had given it the Kalahari; He had given it the good land along the eastern border, and had added, for good measure, the Makadikadi Salt Pans. But then, just as He was about to give it wide and reliable rivers, He was distracted somehow and forgot to finish what He was doing, or found that He had already given all His rivers away and had only a few left for Botswana… It was easily done when you were making a world, especially one as demanding as this, where there were so many people who thought they should have more rivers than they actually had, and who enviously eyed the land – and the rivers – of others.

  ‘What then, Mma Ramotswe?’

  She was brought back to where she was – not in the sky, looking down on Botswana, but in a very real and immediate part of Botswana, namely the kitchen of her house on Zebra Drive, where her husband was about to leave for work and where there were still many chores to do before she herself could leave for her office.

  ‘When Mma Makutsi goes off on maternity leave,’ she answered, ‘then I shall have to get another assistant.’

  Mr J. L. B. Matekoni looked unconvinced. ‘Easier said than done, you know.’

  He was right – she knew that. No doubt she would find somebody who fancied the idea of being her secretary. And this time, she resolved, the post would be very clearly and unambiguously described as a secretarial one, with no suggestion that it was a stepping stone to being an assistant detective or, as Mma Makutsi was at pains to insist, an associate detective, whatever that was. Yes, there would be many applicants for the job, but would any of them be as well qualified and efficient as Mma Makutsi?

  It was difficult to see this happening, for the simple reason that there were presumably no secretaries with anything like Mma Makutsi’s ninety-seven per cent in the final examinations of the Botswana Secretarial College. Mma Makutsi had reported that a young woman from Mahalapye had recently managed to get eighty-three per cent in the finals – a very creditable mark but still a whole fourteen per cent shy of her own.

  ‘It was her shorthand that let her down,’ Mma Makutsi had said, adding in a resigned tone: ‘It always is, you know.’

  Mma Ramotswe had replied, ‘Yes, it always is,’ as if she knew about these things. Perhaps she should have said, ‘Yes, and I am let down too, as mine is very rusty,’ but she did not.

  Now, she too stood up from the breakfast table. If she had to get a new secretary, then that was what she would do. And even if she ended up with a secretary whose shorthand let her down – and that seemed to be something that it was simply impossible to avoid – she would make the best of it and the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency would continue in whatever way it could.

  She would have to speak to Mma Makutsi that day. At least she did not have to broach the subject of pregnancy
itself; at least Mma Makutsi had told her about that. It would be far more difficult for an employer if the employee had not said anything about being pregnant. That would not be easy, she thought, because if you went up to somebody and said, Are you pregnant? the question might be taken the wrong way. It might sound as if you had said, Are you pregnant yet? Or, Are you pregnant yet again? Both of these could be considered rude by some people, and would almost certainly be so viewed by Mma Makutsi, who was very sensitive to slight.

  Another way of doing it would be to introduce the subject into the conversation by simply making a remark that suggested you knew. You could, for example, give somebody a cup of tea and then say something like, Would you like a piece of cake as well – now that you’re pregnant? That would allow the other person to answer, Well, cake is always welcome when one is eating for two. Or she might say, What makes you think I’m pregnant? That could be awkward, because you could hardly say, I thought you were pregnant because you’re looking so large. There were some people who became larger simply because of fattening foods, of cake or the like, or because they were traditionally built by nature rather than because of… because of anything else. They might resent an inference that they were too large, and indeed there were those who might be trying to become pregnant and not yet succeeding; they might be upset if you reminded them of something they wanted but were not achieving. Or there might be people who could conclude that you thought that they should be pregnant, and they, in turn, might think, What business is it of yours whether or not I’m pregnant? There was no getting away from it: it was very difficult all round and even a discussion of maternity leave would have to be handled very carefully. There were undoubtedly many employees who were easy, with whom you could raise any issue without having to take care to be tactful, but Mma Makutsi, for all her many merits, was certainly not one of those.