Blue Shoes and Happiness (20 page)

“She's very small,” Mma Ramotswe whispered to Mr Polopetsi. “Look at her!”

Mr Polopetsi's jaw had opened with surprise. “Look at her,” he echoed. “Look at her.”

Aunty Emang was ushered into the office by Mma Makutsi. Mma Ramotswe stood up to greet her, and did so politely, with the traditional Setswana courtesies. After all, she was her guest, even if she was a blackmailer.

Aunty Emang glanced about the office casually, almost scornfully.

“So this is the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency,” she said. “I have heard of this place. I did not think it would be so small.”

Mma Ramotswe said nothing, but indicated the client's chair. “Please sit down,” she said. “I think you are Aunty Emang. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” said the woman. “I am Aunty Emang. That is me. And you are this lady, Precious Ramotswe?” Her voice was high-pitched and nasal, like the voice of a child. It was not a voice that was comforting to listen to, and the fact that it emanated from such a tiny person made it all the more disconcerting.

“I am, Mma,” said Mma Ramotswe. “And this is Mma Makutsi and Mr Polopetsi. They both work here.”

Aunty Emang looked briefly in the direction of Mma Makutsi and Mr Polopetsi, who was standing beside her. She nodded abruptly. Mma Ramotswe watched her, fascinated by the fact that she was so small. She was like a doll, she thought; a small, malignant doll.

“Now this letter you wrote to me,” said Aunty Emang. “I came to see you because I do not like the thought of anybody being worried. It is my job to help people in their difficulties.”

Mma Ramotswe looked at her. Her visitor's small face, with its darting, slightly hooded eyes, was impassive, but there was something in the eyes which disturbed her. Evil, she thought. That is what I see. Evil. She had seen it only once or twice in her life, and on each occasion she had known it. Most human failings were no more than that—failings—but evil went beyond that.

“This person who says that she knows somebody who is a blackmailer is just talking nonsense,” went on Aunty Emang. “I do not think that you should take the allegation seriously. People are always inventing stories, you know. I see it every day.”

“Are they?” said Mma Ramotswe. “Well, I hear lots of stories in my work too, and some of them are true.”

Aunty Emang sat quite still. She had not expected quite so confident a response. This woman, this fat woman, would have to be handled differently.

“Of course,” Aunty Emang said. “Of course you're right. Some stories are true. But why would you think this one is?”

“Because I trust the person who told me,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I think that this person is telling the truth. She is not a person to make anything up.”

“If you thought that,” said Aunty Emang, “then why did you write to me for my advice?”

Mma Ramotswe reached for a pencil in front of her and twisted it gently through her fingers. Mma Makutsi saw this and recognised the mannerism. It was what Mma Ramotswe always did before she was about to make a revelation. She nudged Mr Polopetsi discreetly.

“I wrote to you,” said Mma Ramotswe, “because you are the blackmailer. That is why.”

Mr Polopetsi, watching intently, swayed slightly and thought for a moment that he was going to faint. This was the sort of moment that he had imagined would arise in detective work: the moment of denouement when the guilty person faced exposure, when the elaborate reasoning of detection was revealed.
Oh, Mma Ramotswe
, he thought,
what a splendid woman you are!

Aunty Emang did not move, but sat staring impassively at her accuser. When she spoke, her voice sounded higher than before, and there was a strange clicking when she started talking, like the clicking of a valve. “You are speaking lies, fat woman,” she said.

“Oh, am I?” retorted Mma Ramotswe. “Well, here are some details. Mma Tsau. She was the one who was stealing food. You blackmailed her because she would lose her job if she was found out. Then there is Dr Lubega. You found out about him, about what happened in Uganda. And a man who was having an affair and was worried that his wife would find out.” She paused. “I have the details of many cases here in this file.”

Aunty Emang snorted. “Dr Lubega? Who is this Dr Lubega? I do not know anybody of that name.”

Mma Ramotswe glanced at Mma Makutsi and smiled. “You have just shown me that I was right,” she said. “You have confirmed it.”

Aunty Emang rose from her chair. “You cannot prove anything, Mma. The police will laugh at you.”

Mma Ramotswe sat back in her chair. She put the pencil down. And she thought, How might I think if I were in this woman's shoes? How do you think if you are so heartless as to blackmail those who are frightened and guilty? And the answer that came back to her was this: hate. Somewhere some wrong had been done, a wrong connected with who she was perhaps, a wrong which turned her to despair and to hate. And hate had made it possible for her to do all this.

“No, I cannot prove it. Not yet. But I want to tell you one thing, Mma, and I want you to think very carefully about what I tell you. No more Aunty Emang for you. You will have to earn your living some other way. If Aunty Emang continues, then I will make it my business—all of us here in this room, Mma Makutsi over there, who is a very hard-working detective, and Mr Polopetsi there, who is a very intelligent man—we shall all make it our business to find the proof that we don't have at the moment. Do you understand me?”

Aunty Emang turned slightly, and it seemed for a moment that she was going to storm out of the room without saying anything further. Yet she did not leave immediately, but glanced at Mma Makutsi and Mr Polopetsi and then back at Mma Ramotswe.

“Yes,” she said.

 

“YOU LET HER GO,” said Mma Makutsi afterwards, as they sat in the office, discussing what had happened. They had been joined by Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who had finished work in the garage and who had witnessed the angry departure of Aunty Emang, or the former Aunty Emang, in her expensive car.

“I had no alternative,” said Mma Ramotswe. “She was right when she said that we had no proof. I don't think we could have done much more.”

“But you had other cases of blackmail,” said Mr Polopetsi. “You had that doctor and that man who was having an affair.”

“I made up the one about the man having an affair,” said Mma Ramotswe. “But I thought it likely that she would be blackmailing such a person. It's very common. And I think I was right. She didn't contradict me, which confirmed that she was the one. But I don't think that she was blackmailing Dr Lubega. I think that he is a man who needed money because he liked it.”

“I am very confused about all this,” said Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. “I do not know who this doctor is.”

Mma Ramotswe looked at her watch. It was time to go home, as she had to cook the evening meal, and that would take time. So they left the office, and after saying goodbye to Mr Polopetsi, she and Mr J.L.B. Matekoni gave Mma Makutsi a ride home in Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's truck. The tiny white van could stay at the garage overnight, said Mma Ramotswe. Nobody would steal such a vehicle, she thought. She was the only one who could love it.

On the way she remarked to Mma Makutsi that she was not wearing her new blue shoes that day. Was she giving them a rest? “One should rotate one's shoes,” said Mma Ramotswe. “That is well known.”

Mma Makutsi smiled. She was embarrassed, but in the warm intimacy of the truck, at such a moment, after the emotionally cathartic showdown they had all just witnessed, she felt that she could speak freely of shoes.

“They are a bit small for me, Mma,” she confessed. “I think you were right. But I felt great happiness when I wore them, and I shall always remember that. They are such beautiful shoes.”

Mma Ramotswe laughed. “Well, that's the important thing, isn't it, Mma? To feel happiness, and then to remember it.”

“I think that you're right,” said Mma Makutsi. Happiness was an elusive thing. It had something to do with having beautiful shoes, sometimes; but it was about so much else. About a country. About a people. About having friends like this.

 

THE FOLLOWING DAY was a Saturday, which was Mma Ramotswe's favourite day, a day on which she could sit and reflect on the week's events. There was much to think about, and there was good reason, too, to be pleased that the week was over. Mma Ramotswe did not enjoy confrontation—that was not the Botswana way—and yet there were times when finding oneself head-to-head with somebody was inevitable. That had been so when her first husband, the selfish and violent Note Mokoti, had returned unannounced and tried to extort money from her. That moment had tested her badly, but she had stood up to him, and he had gone away, back into his private world of bitterness and distrust. But the encounter had left her feeling weak and raw, as arguments with another so often do. How much better to avoid occasions of conflict altogether, provided that one did not end up running away from things; and that, of course, was the rub. Had she not faced up to Aunty Emang, then the blackmail would have continued because nobody else would have stood up to her. And so it was left to Mma Ramotswe to do so, and Aunty Emang had folded up in the same way that an old hut made of elephant grass and eaten by the ants would collapse the moment one touched its fragile walls.

Now she sat on her verandah and looked out over her garden. She was the only one in the house. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni had taken Puso and Motholeli to visit one of his aunts, and they would not be back until late afternoon, or, more likely, the evening. That particular aunt was known for her loquaciousness and had long stories to tell. It did not matter if the stories had been heard before—as they all had—they would be repeated that day, in great detail, until the sun was slanting down over the Kalahari and the evening sky was red. But it was important, she thought, that the children should get to know that aunt, as there was much she could teach them. In particular, she knew how to renew the pressed mud floor of a good traditional home, a skill that was dying out. The children sometimes helped her with this, although they would never themselves live in a house with a mud-floored yard, for those houses were going and were not being replaced. And all that was linked to them, the stories, the love and concern for others, the sense of doing what one's people had done for so many years, could go too, thought Mma Ramotswe.

She looked up at the sky, which was empty, as it usually was. In a few days, though, perhaps even earlier, there would be rain. Heavy clouds would build up and make the sky purple, and then there would be lightning and that brief, wonderful smell would fill the air, the smell of the longed-for rain, a smell that lifted the heart. She dropped her gaze to her garden, to the withered plants that she had worked so hard to see through the dry season and which had lived only because she had given them each a small tinful of water each morning and each evening, around the roots; so little water, and so quickly absorbed, that it seemed unlikely that it would make a difference under that relentless sun. But it had, and the plants had kept in their leaves some green against the brown. When the rains came, of course, then everything would be different, and the brown which covered the land, the trees, the stunted grass, would be replaced by green, by growth, by tendrils stretching out, by leaves unfolding. It would happen so quickly that one might go to bed in a drought and wake up in a landscape of shimmering patches of water and cattle with skin washed sleek by the rain.

Mma Ramotswe leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She knew that there were places where the world was always green and lush, where water meant nothing because it was always there, where the cattle were never thin and listless; she knew that. But she did not want to live in such a place because it would not be Botswana, or at least not her part of Botswana. Up north they had that, near Maun, in the Delta, where the river ran the wrong way, back into the heart of the country. She had been there several times, and the clear streams and the wide sweeps of Mopani forest and high grass had filled her with wonder. She had been happy for those people, because they had water all about them, but she had not felt that it was her place, which was in the south, in the dry south.

No, she would never exchange what she had for something else. She would never want to be anything but Mma Ramotswe, of Gaborone, wife of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, and daughter of the late Obed Ramotswe, retired miner and fine judge of cattle, the man of whom she thought every day, but every day, and whose voice she heard so often when she had cause to remember how things had been in those times. God had given her gifts, she thought. He had made her a Motswana, a citizen of this fine country which had lived up so well to the memory of Sir Seretse Khama, that great statesman, who had stood with such dignity on that night when the new flag had been unfurled and Botswana had come into existence. When as a young girl she had been told of that event and had been shown pictures of it, she had imagined that the world had been watching Botswana on that night and had shared the feelings of her people. Now she knew that this was never true, that nobody had been at all interested, except a few perhaps, and that the world had never paid much attention to places like Botswana, where everything went so well and where people did not squabble and fight. But slowly they had seen, slowly they had come to hear of the secret, and had come to understand.

She opened her eyes. The old van driven by Mma Potokwane had arrived at the gate, and the matron had manoeuvred herself out of the driver's seat and was fiddling with the latch. Mma Potokwane had been known to come to see Mma Ramotswe on a Saturday morning, usually to ask her to get Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to do something for the orphan farm, but such visits were rare. Now, the gate unlatched and pushed back, Mma Potokwane got back into the van and drove up the short driveway to the house. Mma Ramotswe smiled to herself as her visitor nosed her van into the shady place used by Mr J.L.B. Matekoni to park his truck. Mma Potokwane would always find the best place to park, just as she could always be counted upon to find the best deal for the children whom she looked after.