The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine

by Alexander McCall Smith

  He looked grateful. “Can I hide, Mma? Can I hide down below the seat?”

  “Of course you can. You do not need to see this lady. But what about your things? How will I know what is yours?”

  “I do not have many things, Mma. You can leave them.”

  “If that is what you want.”

  He nodded. “I am frightened of that lady, Mma.”

  “Of course you are. But you need not be, now that I am with you. I am going to tell her that you are going. That is all. I am not going to talk to her about it—I am simply going to tell her.”

  She nosed the van into the short driveway of the house. There was a well-placed acacia tree that provided a wide circle of shade, and she parked under this. As she did so, the boy slipped off the seat beside her, to crouch in the footwell of the van. She patted him on the back and smiled. “You will be all right, Samuel. You will be safe there.”

  She got out of the van and walked up to the front door of the house. There was a gauze fly screen in its top panel, but this had been ripped and not repaired. She knocked and called out, “Ko, ko!”

  Somewhere within the house there was stirring.

  “Who is that?”

  Mma Ramotswe cleared her throat. “I have come to see you, Mma. It is important. I have something for you.”

  In Mma Ramotswe’s experience, that always worked. If you told people that you had something for them, then they always responded quickly. Now, from deep within the house, there came the sound of footsteps.

  A woman of about Mma Ramotswe’s age appeared. She was stocky, but much lighter than Mma Ramotswe, and she was wearing a faded pink dress and bright orange shoes. Mma Ramotswe’s eyes ran down her to the shoes. She thought, Even Mma Makutsi would think these shoes are too much…

  “Yes, Mma?” said the woman. “What is it you have for me?”

  “I have something for you,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But maybe it is best for you to invite me in.”

  Not to invite a visitor to enter was a grave discourtesy, but it did not surprise Mma Ramotswe at all.

  “Of course,” said the woman. “I am forgetting my manners, Mma. You must come in.”

  The other woman’s tone had become unctuous. She wants whatever it is I have, thought Mma Ramotswe; that is why.

  They entered the living room. It was untidy, and shabby too. Against one wall stood a stained and greasy sofa on which a number of magazines had been strewn. There was an empty beer bottle on the low table and an ashtray full of stompies, the stubbed-out ends of cigarettes. There was the stale smell of lingering tobacco smoke, mingled with cooking odours of an indeterminate nature.

  Mma Ramotswe went right to the point. “There is a boy called Samuel. I have just met him.”

  The woman’s reply was sneering. “Yes, there is that boy,” she said. “So what? I am looking after him because his mother is late.”

  Mma Ramotswe frowned. “She is not late. She is down in Lobatse.”

  The woman seemed genuinely surprised. “Oh no, Mma. That woman is late. She died last year.”

  Mma Ramotswe thought quickly. “But Samuel said to me that she is living down there. He said that…Well, I’m afraid that he said she was a prostitute. I don’t think he understood.”

  The woman laughed. It was a crude, rather raucous laugh. “Yes, she was a prostitute. And that is why she died, you see. I have not told that boy that his mother is late. Why should he know? He will be unhappy if he learns that, don’t you think?”

  For a short while Mma Ramotswe was speechless. But then she recovered and said, “I am very sorry to hear that his mother is late.”

  “Well, many people die, Mma,” said the woman. “He is lucky that I am here to look after him.”

  It was too much for Mma Ramotswe to bear. “You are not looking after him, Mma. You are using him as a thief—as your thief. That is what you are doing.”

  This elicited a sharp response. “How dare you say that, Mma! You come in here and you say things like that to me…in my own house. You watch your tongue, fat lady. You just watch your tongue.”

  “But my tongue has some more things to say, Mma. I am taking that boy away from you. I am taking him to a safe place for children.”

  The woman let out a howl of rage. “You are not taking that boy! He is mine. You are not taking him, you big cow!”

  As she hurled the insult, the woman advanced threateningly on Mma Ramotswe, and then, without any warning, launched herself upon her, intent on scratching her. Mma Ramotswe felt a nail scrape against her neck, and parried with her forearm. Then, exerting as much force as she could muster, she pushed her weight against the other woman.

  It happened as if rehearsed one hundred times. As Mma Ramotswe’s superior weight came to bear on her, the woman was momentarily unbalanced, and then, almost in slow motion, fell to the floor. Without waiting, Mma Ramotswe lowered herself to sit upon her opponent. It always worked; it always worked.

  From beneath her there came muffled cries and a frantic thrashing movement. But there was no release.

  “I am going to sit here for a few minutes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “During that time, you can think about things. You can think about what you will say to the police if I go to tell them that you have been keeping that boy here and taking his money. You can think about what you will say when they ask you how he got that money.”

  There was silence.

  “Have you started to think about that, Mma?” continued Mma Ramotswe. “Because once you have thought about all that, you can think about how it will be much easier for you if you let him go without any fuss. If that happens, then there will be no trouble for you.”

  She waited for a short time before she spoke again. “Have you thought about all that, Mma?”

  The reply was terse—necessarily, as the woman was still winded. “I have thought about it. You can take him.”

  Mma Ramotswe rose to her feet, allowing the woman beneath her to gasp for air and reinflate. She did not enjoy sitting on people, but every so often it was necessary, and in this case it was entirely justified by self-defence. If people came at you and started to scratch you, then of course you had the right to sit on them. Even Nelson Mandela, she told herself, who was a good and gentle man, would have agreed with that.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I THINK THIS IS A COLLEGE FOR GHOSTS

  MMA RAMOTSWE did not stay long at Mma Potokwane’s—it was not necessary. Relieved at the ease with which her mission had been accomplished, she drove out of the Orphan Farm gate shortly after two o’clock, slightly light-headed at the significance of what she had achieved within the last couple of hours. A young life that had been bleak at eleven o’clock that same morning now had a very different feel to it. It was not a big change in the overall scale of things; it was not something that would be noted by more than a handful of people—at the most—but it was something to be pleased with, something even to sing about. And she did sing as she drove back along the Tlokweng Road, dredging up from memory a song she had last sung many years before, when she was still a young girl in Mochudi. A teacher had taught them the words of a traditional Setswana song about a boy who lets a trapped bird free and who is later saved by the very bird he liberated. The boy was lost in the bush, she recalled, and the bird remembered him and flew in front of him, leading him back to the path. We are all lost in the bush, she thought—every one of us, even if we do not know it. And somewhere there will be a bird that will lead us back to the place we need to be…Was that true? She smiled. Life was not that simple, even if there were songs that made us think it was. But we could still sing them; we could still open the window of our van and sing them out into the passing air, unconcerned as to whether people would be puzzled, or amused perhaps, at the sight of a traditionally built lady in a small white van singing out at the top of her voice for no discernible reason…

  She felt vaguely guilty about not having been at home to make Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s lunch, as she had promised she would.
She knew that he would be content with the sandwich that he would have made, but it was not just the food, it was the breaking of a promise. Of course he would understand; in her work things were always cropping up and requiring a change of plans—except for one thing: she was now on holiday.

  She considered dropping in on him to explain what had happened, but decided against it. It would not do, she felt, to turn up at the garage—which of course shared its premises with her own office—on the very first day of her holiday. It would imply that she did not trust Mma Makutsi to run things while she was away, and she did not want anybody to think that. No, she would telephone the garage when she got home and tell him then what had happened.

  But before she returned to Zebra Drive there was shopping to be done. She did not have a long list, but there were things that needed to be bought for that evening’s meal and to replace some of the ancient foods she had cleared off the pantry shelves. Desiccated coconut—something that Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni loved on the rare occasions when they had a curry—was no use if it had somehow absorbed moisture and turned hard and yellow. And brown sugar, normally so useful for making the banana loaf that Puso and Motholeli so hankered after, was similarly spoiled when ants had somehow worked their way into the package and established a thriving city, like a tiny termite mound, complete with tunnels and all the public buildings that ants create for themselves.

  She parked in her usual place at Riverwalk, greeting Mma Motang, the elderly woman who was parking next to her and whom she recognised from church, the woman who always volunteered to help with tea after the service and who invariably succeeded in pouring almost more tea into the saucer than into the cup—which did not matter too much, as we all have our failings, and everyone simply poured the tea from the saucer back into the cup; and it cooled the tea too, and made it unnecessary to blow across the surface before taking a sip. That could have unfortunate consequences, as had happened when the chairman of the vestry, a solemn accountant, had inadvertently blown tea over the shirt of the Minister of Roads, who had been invited to the cathedral to give a talk entitled “Life’s Journey: Taking the Right Turnings.” The minister had made little of it, but his shirt was stained with small brown dots, and his wife, a rather sour-faced woman, had stared in a very hostile way at the chairman.

  Her elderly neighbour’s parking was not all that it might have been, and she bumped into Mma Ramotswe’s van, braked sharply and reversed, scraping the paintwork as she did so. Mma Ramotswe turned off the van’s engine and sighed. It was not the other woman’s fault—well, it was, she supposed, but not her fault in any real sense. Things like this just happened, particularly if you were a bit shaky, as Mma Motang was. And did it matter all that much if the side of your van took the occasional blow? We all took blows in this life, and if you were a van, then this was just the sort of blow that came your way.

  Mma Ramotswe got out of the van and walked round to Mma Motang. She saw that the other woman was sitting bolt upright, her hands covering her face in shame.

  “Don’t worry, Mma Motang,” she said. “We all hit other cars. I do it all the time. Almost every day.”

  Mma Motang lowered her hands. “I am very stupid, Mma. I was paying attention, but I thought I had more room.”

  “That is not your fault,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Cars are too big these days. That is why they are always bumping into things. If there is any fault, it is the fault of the people who are making all these big cars.”

  If there was comfort in this remark, it was not enough to console Mma Motang. “My husband will be very cross,” she said, shaking her head. “He will tell me that I should not be driving. He says that women are always bumping into other cars. He will say that this is just more proof.”

  Mma Ramotswe could not let that pass. “There are many men who say things like that. They are wrong. Women drive much more slowly than men. It is men who drive around at high speed and cause all those bad accidents. I have seen it many times, Mma. It is men themselves. We women just drive around and bump into things very slowly. We do not cause all that much damage.”

  “But he will not see it that way, Mma. He will not look at it like that.”

  Mma Ramotswe made a gesture that was unambiguously dismissive of those who thought as Rra Motang did. “There are some men who have not become as modern as they should.”

  “He is one of them,” agreed Mma Motang. “That is definitely him.”

  “None of our husbands is completely modern,” said Mma Ramotswe, with a smile. “They try—some of them—but they do not always succeed. The old Adam in them comes out, I’m afraid.” She liked the expression “the old Adam,” which she had heard somebody use on a Radio Botswana discussion programme. Others had heard it too, and it had been dropped, by Mma Gabane Gabane, no less, into that conversation in the President Hotel, that conversation about that feckless woman from Francistown. “Let a man into a stationery cupboard and the old Adam comes out,” she had said—or something like that.

  Mma Motang was still considering the consequences of her accident. “He’ll hear about it when the insurance claim comes in,” she said. “He will be very upset by that.”

  “Insurance claim?” said Mma Ramotswe. “There will be no insurance claim, Mma.”

  “But I have scraped your paintwork, Mma.”

  Mma Ramotswe laughed. “That is always happening to me. It happened only this morning—a bad scrape—much worse than the one you made.”

  “But—”

  “There are no buts, Mma. The insurance people are very busy with all sorts of serious claims. I do not want to make their life more difficult by going to them with a tiny scrape that will need a magnifying glass to see. I do not want to trouble those poor insurance people.”

  Mma Motang’s relief showed immediately. “Then my husband need not hear about this?”

  Mma Ramotswe had an idea. “No, he need not, Mma. And if he asks you what happened today, you can simply reply: ‘I bumped into Mma Ramotswe in the supermarket parking lot.’ And he will think nothing of it, and you will have told him the whole truth.”

  It took Mma Motang a moment or two to appreciate the joke, but when she did her anxious expression became one of delighted amusement. “I bumped into Mma Ramotswe…Yes, I did, Mma, I did!”

  They walked into the supermarket together. Mma Motang had a long shopping list, and bade farewell to Mma Ramotswe as they went their separate ways. “You are a very kind person, Mma Ramotswe,” she said as they parted. “God bless and keep you, Mma.”

  Mma Ramotswe acknowledged the blessing with a smile, but said nothing. She had been reminded—there in the middle of the supermarket—of her last moments with her father, her dear daddy, the late Obed Ramotswe, who was now in that other Botswana, the one beyond this Botswana, where there were herds of slow-moving white cattle and where all the late people from Botswana were together once more; and she remembered how the minister had come to see him to say goodbye, and how he had used those precise words as he laid his hands upon her late father’s brow: “God bless and keep you, Obed Ramotswe.”

  She stood quite still. Late people do not altogether leave us, she thought; they are still with us in memories such as that, wherever we are, no matter what time of day it was or how we were feeling, they were there, still shining the light of their love upon us.

  She was not sure how long she stood like that, lost in thought and memory. Nobody paid her any attention, assuming that she was trying to remember whatever it was that she had come to buy and had forgotten. One woman almost asked her where the butter was, as she looked like one who would know about butter, but she saw how deep in thought she was and refrained from disturbing her.

  It was the impact of a shopping cart that roused her from the reverie. A man had turned the corner too quickly, and the shopping cart he had been pushing, a cart piled high with the booty of half an hour’s wandering the aisles, collided with Mma Ramotswe’s still-empty trolley.

  “Oh, I’m very sor
ry, Mma,” said the man, and then, looking up, “Mma Ramotswe! It is you I have bumped into.”

  Mma Ramotswe was surprised to see Mr. Polopetsi. “Rra…I had not expected to see you.” She had not expected to see anyone, but Mr. Polopetsi was even more unexpected than anybody else.

  “I wasn’t looking where I was going,” he said. “I turned that corner and…well, it is very good to see you anyway.”

  “This is the second time I’ve been bumped into this morning,” said Mma Ramotswe. “If things happen in threes, then I am going to drive home very carefully.”

  “It’s always a good idea to drive very carefully,” said Mr. Polopetsi. “Especially with all these lunatics they are putting on the roads these days.” He shook his head in despair. Then he continued, “Sometimes, you know, I think that they have the driving licence office down at that place for lunatics near Lobatse. They give them all a licence when they let them out.”

  “It is not the lunatics who drive badly,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is young men.” She thought of Charlie. “As for those poor people, many of them are very nice, Rra. I had a cousin who was a registered lunatic. He was very kind.” She remembered him fondly—that quiet, rather withdrawn man, who told anybody who cared to listen that he was related to a family of zebras on his mother’s side.

  Mr. Polopetsi looked abashed. “I am very sorry, Mma. I did not mean to be rude. And I know we shouldn’t call them lunatics any more. I did not mean to be offensive.”

  She smiled at him to set him at his ease. “Of course not, Rra. How are…”

  She started her question just as he began his. “How is your…”

  She laughed. “You go first, Rra.”

  “I was going to ask how your holiday was going. Are you already feeling rested?”

  “It is going very well, thank you. I am very rested already.” But she thought: My van has been damaged twice; I have been scratched by a violent woman and have had to sit on her; I have removed a little boy from near-slavery, and I have narrowly avoided being run over by a shopping cart…She decided not to mention any of this, but instead asked him how things were going in the office.