The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (12 page)

T
here were two places called Mokolodi. There was the small game reserve to the south of Gaborone, barely a mile off the Lobatse Road, and there was the farm with its large stone house, the original Mokolodi, where Mma Ramotswe’s friend Gwithie lived. They had all been one large farm in the past, until the land was given to the children of Botswana for a nature reserve. Mma Ramotswe knew the reserve well, and had some years previously helped them with an issue of superstitious staff being frightened by the presence of a ground hornbill. That bird! Now here was Mma Soleti being driven into a state of fear by a single feather. It was ridiculous, completely ridiculous, that otherwise sensible people should believe in things like that. Except that they did. People believed all sorts of things and were not easily persuaded that what they feared was really harmless. And the things they believed by day were often different from the things they believed at night. The shadows you saw on the ground at midday were just that: shadows caused by some very ordinary object that blocked out the sun. The shadows you saw by night, by contrast, could be the shapes of things with no name: things that moved silently and changed their form; things that could touch the skin with icy coldness; things that could draw the breath out of your body and leave you gasping for air. It was all very well saying that such things did not exist, but to the people who saw them and felt them they were as real as the ground beneath their feet.

The gates of Mokolodi were topped, as it happened, with an ornamental hornbill worked in iron. This was the ordinary hornbill, though – the cousin of the bird that spent much of its time grounded – and it did not have the same power to frighten. Perhaps, she thought, if you wanted gates to do the job of discouraging unwanted visitors, you might put the ground hornbill there.

She passed through the gates and drove up to the main house. Here she parked in the shadow of the house itself – a cool well of shade that would keep the cab of the van from feeling like an inferno when she returned to it. As she got out, her friend appeared from the side of the house, a gardening trowel in one hand and a basket of plant cuttings in another.

Gwithie put down the basket and walked over to the van to welcome Mma Ramotswe.

‘Mmapuso,’ said Mma Ramotswe as she got out of the car. ‘
Dumela
, Mmapuso.’ She used the name by which the other woman was generally known – Mmapuso, the mother of Puso. She too had a Puso, the same name as one of Mma Ramotswe’s foster children. Mmapuso had lost hers some time ago now, but the name remained.

The two old friends embraced and then Mma Ramotswe took Gwithie’s hand and pressed it, not once but several times. No words were exchanged, but the gesture of sympathy was understood. They had both lost the one thing in this life that is hardest to lose.

They went into the garden at the side of the house, crossing an expanse of grass that was dominated by a large jacaranda tree whose umbrella branches stretched out to provide an enticing circle of shade. In spite of the late dry season, the beds around the edge of the grass still had colour, surviving on the tiny amounts of water doled out to them by a drip-feed system of irrigation. The husbandry of water was well understood here: the using of every precious drop, the giving of water to those plants that needed it while the waxy desert plants like cacti were left to wait until the rain eventually brought them relief.

They made their way to the shade and sat down on chairs arranged around a low wooden table. On a tray by one of the chairs was a teapot with two cups.

‘In case of visitors,’ said Gwithie, pointing to the extra cup.

‘Very wise,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘Tea and cake is always…’ She had not intended to mention cake, but somehow it came out and she felt embarrassed.

‘Oh,’ said Gwithie. ‘Cake. Yes, well, I must do some more baking. I had one last week but we had the grandchildren in the house and cake doesn’t seem to last very long when children are in the house.’

‘Of course.’ Mma Ramotswe laughed, but she was disappointed. She could always bake herself a fruitcake – she had copied out Mma Potokwani’s recipe by hand into her own recipe book and she made a perfectly good version herself – but somehow the eating of one’s own cake was different from the eating of another’s.

‘Next time you come to see me,’ said Gwithie, ‘I promise you we shall have cake. Several slices, in fact.’

As her friend poured the tea, Mma Ramotswe looked out over the garden. Beyond the trees at its edge, the ground rose up to make a ridge, and beyond that were the hills looking down over the game reserve. There was no other building in sight. It was a small corner of undisturbed bush – Botswana in its untouched state. This was the land that Obed Ramotswe had known: the grey-green acacia scrub that ran for hundreds of miles along the country’s border to the east and, to the west, into the great Kalahari. This was the land over which the great dome of African sky presided; the sky that would, they all hoped, soon fill with towering, rain-filled thunderclouds from somewhere far away – the annual gift of the wetter and more temperate lands beyond their borders.

‘Rain,’ remarked Mma Ramotswe. She did not need to say anything more.

Gwithie shrugged. ‘Next week? I have somebody who helps me in the kitchen who has an uncanny habit of knowing when the rains will start. She’s been right year after year. It’s extraordinary.’

‘And she says next week?’

Gwithie nodded. ‘Towards the end of next week, and she says the rains will be good.’

‘I am very happy to hear that,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘My own garden is looking very sad now. It is very thirsty. And my husband’s vegetables…’ She sighed. Mr J. L. B. Matekoni grew beans, but the plants had shrivelled under the onslaught of the sun and she found it hard to imagine that they would recover once the rains arrived. But plants did survive the harshness of even prolonged drought; they somehow kept themselves alive. The soil could be dry and dusty, parched and apparently lifeless, and yet under it there would be seeds and roots ready to spring into life within hours of the first rainfall.

‘Things will grow, in spite of everything.’ Gwithie paused. ‘Were you on your way somewhere?’

‘I was passing by,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘I had to go to the Molapo Farm. You must know the place – it’s on the other side of the Lobatse Road, not far really.’

‘I know it,’ said Gwithie. ‘We used to see a bit of Edgar Molapo. We don’t know his sister at all well. She keeps to herself, and always has done.’

‘I met her for the first time this morning.’

Gwithie was looking at her with interest. ‘You were there professionally?’

Mma Ramotswe was careful. Even with friends, she knew the importance of confidentiality. Her clients told her things that she should not reveal and she always observed that trust, difficult though it was at times.

‘Nothing serious,’ she said non-committally.

Gwithie did not press her. ‘They say that the farm is going to Edgar’s nephew from Swaziland.’

‘So they say,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘Do you know him – the boy?’

Gwithie shook her head. ‘He used to come over to Botswana a lot when he was younger. We never saw him then.’

‘He speaks very good Setswana,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘He must have spent a lot of time in this country.’

‘Yes,’ said Gwithie. ‘I met him the other day. But we spoke in English.’

Mma Ramotswe was interested. ‘He came here? With the aunt?’

‘Yes,’ said Gwithie. ‘They were interested in buying cattle from a man who’s been working on one of the buildings here. Some complicated transaction, so Edgar’s sister came over to do it. She brought the boy – well, I suppose he’s a young man now – with her. He was interested in some fruit trees I’ve been trying to grow and I showed him. Nice young man.’

‘He is,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘He has good manners.’

Gwithie seemed to remember something. ‘It was a bit odd, though. He said something that made him very flustered.’

Mma Ramotswe leaned forward. ‘Yes?’

‘He referred to his aunt as his mother. He said, “I must show this to my mother.” I then asked him where his mother was, and he turned round to point at the aunt who was talking to somebody at the other end of the fruit garden. And then he stopped and he seemed dismayed by the slip. He said something like, “I mean my aunt. I mean my aunt.” I made nothing of it, but it struck me as odd.’

Mma Ramotswe was silent.

‘A slip of the tongue, no doubt,’ said Gwithie.

Mma Ramotswe put down her teacup. ‘No doubt,’ she said, while thinking: Of course, of course
.
Quite suddenly, seated under the tree with her friend, with the air so still and hot, with a fly buzzing about the lip of the milk jug on the tea-tray, with all Botswana yearning for rain, it became clear to her. It had not occurred to her before because there was no reason for her to suspect that there was any other relationship between Mma Molapo and the young man who claimed to be Liso. She had been acting on the assumption that he was either her nephew or he was not, and the second of these options had not included the possibility that he was even more closely related to her – that he was a son. But now it seemed so obvious. If Mma Molapo had a son, then she would undoubtedly prefer him to succeed rather than her nephew. So if the nephew proved to be hard to locate, or had vanished altogether, then all she would have to do would be to substitute her son. And if he succeeded, then she could stay exactly where she was; whereas a nephew may well have views of his own as to whether his aunt continued to live on the property. The problem, though, would be that it would not work. There must be many people who had seen the boy over the years – neighbours and people who worked on the farm – and they would know if suddenly a different young man came along and claimed to be the person they had seen over the years. So a substitution was impossible, and that meant that Liso could not be Mma Molapo’s son.

Gwithie said a few words that Mma Ramotswe, sunk in thought, did not catch. Now she repeated them.

‘I’m sorry, Mmapuso,’ said Mma Ramotswe. ‘I was thinking of… something I hadn’t been thinking about… before, that is.’

‘I asked whether you would like to come for a walk with me,’ said Gwithie. ‘A brief walk.’

Mma Ramotswe knew where they would be going.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I would like to go with you, Mma. Of course I would.’

They made their way through thick acacia bush, following a rough twin-tracked road. The earth was red here, and there was little vegetation to hide it, with only the acacia trees providing a note of green. The track curved and then dipped down towards the lake that, though diminished by the dry season, was still home to a small family of hippos and flocks of water birds.

Neither spoke much on this walk, although Gwithie stopped at one point and drew Mma Ramotswe’s attention to a plant by the side of the track.

‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘I have a soft spot for this plant. It has quite a few Setswana names but the one I use is
kgaba
. Do you know it?’

Mma Ramotswe tried to remember. Her father had shown her plants when he had walked through the bush with her, and he had taught her the Setswana names, but she had had difficulty in remembering them. The old words, people said, were slipping away, remembered only by a handful of elderly people. The world as described in Setswana was becoming smaller and smaller with each year that passed. Gwithie, she knew, was working on a book of wild flowers and had gone out of her way to learn the old names before they were lost.

She peered at the plant. Like everything else it was struggling, and a thin layer of red dust had coated its leaves. But she thought she knew its blade-shaped leaves, and she nodded.

Gwithie reached down to touch the plant gently, as a doctor might touch a patient. ‘People use this for a variety of complaints,’ she said. ‘Like almost everything in the bush, it has its uses. This is good for arthritis and rheumatism, apparently. And you can also eat it as a sort of spinach.’ She straightened up, smiling as she spoke. ‘It can also be used to treat children who fail to look after their parents,’ she continued. ‘And to bind together the members of football teams.’

Mma Ramotswe laughed. ‘It must be a very busy plant,’ she said.

They continued on their walk. Now the track drew near the edge of the lake and she knew that this was the spot. Mma Ramotswe had been there on that sad day, and she remembered.

They stood before the rock, a natural boulder that had been used by rhinos as a rubbing stone. She saw the smooth parts of the stone where, for generations and for centuries, the animals had rubbed their hide. These were their landmarks, the monuments of animals that had once been plentiful; now, in many places, only the stones remained. As she stood there, she recalled a fragment of a story that her father had told her a long time ago, just a line of it:
Our brothers, the rhinos, who are gone now.

A small brass plaque with the name
Puso Kirby
was attached towards the base of the rubbing stone. Underneath were the words:
Light of Our Lives
.

Mma Ramotswe took her friend’s hand. ‘Yes, Mma,’ she said. ‘This is his place.’

Gwithie was looking out over the waters of the lake. ‘You know, Mma,’ she said, ‘on the day that we lost him we heard a leopard nearby. We very rarely hear those creatures – they are so shy and secretive – but we heard a leopard. There is no mistaking them. And it was here when we buried him.’

Mma Ramotswe said nothing, but she pressed her friend’s hand in sympathy.

‘And then,’ Gwithie continued, ‘there was an extraordinary thing. I don’t expect people to believe it, but it happened. When the children came, much later, to see their father’s grave, as we were walking down here, we saw the leopard. He was following us, but we felt no fear – not for one moment.’

Mma Ramotswe looked at her. ‘Do you think it was him? His spirit?’

Gwithie lowered her eyes, and her head moved slightly. Her voice was quiet. ‘Why should I not think that?’