Morality for Beautiful Girls (18 page)

“I came up here with my wife. She is from this part, and she was very happy to be back. They gave us a nice place to live, and my wife is now very contented. You will know, Mma, how important it is to have a wife or a husband who is contented. If you do not, then you will never have any peace. Never. I also have a contented mother-in-law. She moved in and lives at the back of the house. She is always singing because she is so happy that she has her daughter and my children there.

“I was looking forward to working with the cattle, but as soon as I met the brother who lives up here, he asked me what I had done and I said that I had been a cook. He was very pleased to hear this and he said that I should be the cook in the house. They were always having big, important people up from Gaborone and it would impress them if there was a real cook in the house. I said that I did not want to do this, but he forced me. He spoke to my wife and she took his side. She said that this was such a good place to be that only a fool would not do what these people wanted me to do. My mother-in-law started to wail. She said that she was an old woman and she would die if we had to move. My wife said to me: ‘Do you want to kill my mother? Is that what you are wanting to do?’

“So I have had to be the cook in this place, and I am still surrounded by cooking smells when I would rather be out with the cattle. That is why I am not contented, Mma, when all my family is very contented. It is a strange story, do you not think?”

HE FINISHED the story and looked mournfully at Mma Ramotswe. She met his gaze, and then looked away. She was thinking, her mind racing ahead of itself, the possibilities jostling one another until a hypothesis emerged, was examined, and a conclusion reached.

She looked at him again. He had risen to his feet and was closing the door of the boiler. Within the water tank, an old petrol drum converted for the purpose, she heard the bubbling of heating water. Should she speak, or should she remain silent? If she spoke, she could be wrong and he could take violent exception to what she said. But if she held back, then she would have lost the moment. So she decided.

“There’s something that I’ve been wanting to ask you, Rra,” she said.

“Yes?” He glanced up at her briefly, and then busied himself again with the tidying of the wood stack.

“I saw you putting something into the food yesterday. You didn’t see me, but I saw you. Why did you do it?”

He froze. He was on the point of lifting up a large log, his hands stretched around it, his back bent, ready to take the weight. Then, quite slowly, his hands unclasped and he straightened himself up.

“You saw me?” His voice was strained, almost inaudible.

Mma Ramotswe swallowed. “Yes. I saw you. You put something in the food. Something bad.”

He looked at her now, and she saw that the eyes had dulled. The face, animated before, was devoid of expression.

“You are not trying to kill them, are you?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but no sound came.

Mma Ramotswe felt emboldened. She had made the right decision and now she had to finish what she had begun.

“You just wanted them to stop using you as a cook, didn’t you? If they felt that your food tasted bad, then they would just give up on you as a cook and you could get back to the work that you really wanted to do. That’s right, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“You were very foolish, Rra,” said Mma Ramotswe. “You could have harmed somebody.”

“Not with what I used,” he said. “It was perfectly safe.”

Mma Ramotswe shook her head. “It is never safe.”

The cook looked down at his hands.

“I am not a murderer,” he said. “I am not that sort of man.”

Mma Ramotswe snorted. “You are very lucky that I worked out what you were doing,” she said. “I didn’t see you, of course, but your story gave you away.”

“And now?” said the cook. “You will tell them and they will call the police. Please, Mma, remember that I have a family. If I cannot work for these people it will be hard for me to find another job now. I am getting older. I cannot …”

Mma Ramotswe raised a hand to stop him. “I am not that sort of person,” she said. “I am going to tell them that the food you used was bad, but that you could not tell it. I am going to tell the brother that he should give you another job.”

“He will not do that,” said the cook. “I have asked him.”

“But I am a woman,” said Mma Ramotswe. “I know how to make men do things.”

The cook smiled. “You are very kind, Mma.”

“Too kind,” said Mma Ramotswe, turning to go back towards the house. The sun was beginning to come up and the trees and the hills and the very earth were golden. It was a beautiful place to be, and she would have liked to have stayed. But now there was nothing more to do. She knew what she had to tell the Government Man and she might as well return to Gaborone to do it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

AN EXCELLENT TYPE OF GIRL

I
T HAD not been difficult to identify Motlamedi as unsuitable for the important office of Miss Beauty and Integrity. There were three further names on the list, though, and each of them would have to be interviewed for a judgement to be made. They might not be so transparent; it was rare for Mma Makutsi to feel sure about somebody on a first meeting, but there was no doubt in her mind that Motlamedi was, quite simply, a
bad girl.
This description was very specific; it had nothing to do with
bad women
or
bad ladies
—they were quite different categories. Bad women were prostitutes; bad ladies were manipulative older ladies, usually married to older men, who interfered in the affairs of others for their own selfish ends. The expression
bad girl,
by contrast, referred to somebody who was usually rather younger (certainly under thirty) and whose interest was in having a good time. That was the essence of it, in fact—a good time. Indeed there was a subcategory of bad girls, that of
good-time girls.
These were girls who were mainly to be found in bars with flashy men, having what appeared to be a good time. Some of these flashy men, of course, saw themselves as merely being
one of the boys,
which they thought gave them an excuse for all sorts of selfish behaviour. But not in Mma Makutsi’s book.

At the other end of the spectrum, there were
good girls.
These were girls who worked hard and who were appreciated by their families. They were the ones who visited the elders; who looked after the smaller children, sitting for hours under a tree watching the children play; and who in due course trained to be nurses or, as in Mma Makutsi’s case, undertook a general secretarial training at the Botswana Secretarial College. Unfortunately, these good girls, who carried half the world upon their shoulders, did not have much fun.

There was no doubt that Motlamedi was not a good girl, but was there any possibility, Mma Makutsi now glumly asked herself, that any of the others might prove to be much better? The difficulty was that good girls were unlikely to enter a beauty competition in the first place. It was, in general, not the sort of thing that good girls thought of doing. And if her pessimism were to prove justified, then what would she be able to say to Mr Pulani when he came to her for her report? It would not be very useful to say that all the girls were as bad as one another, that none of them was worthy of the title. That would be singularly unhelpful, and she suspected that she would not even be able to put in a fee note for that sort of information.

She sat in her car with the apprentice and looked despairingly at her list of names.

“Where to now?” asked the apprentice. His tone was surly, but only just so; he realised that she was, after all, still Acting Manager, and both he and his colleague had a healthy respect for this remarkable woman who had come to the garage and turned their working practices upside down.

Mma Makutsi sighed. “I have three girls to see,” she said. “And I cannot decide which one to go to next.”

The apprentice laughed. “I know a lot about girls,” he said. “I could tell you.”

Mma Makutsi cast a scornful glance in his direction. “You and your girls!” she said. “That’s all you think of, isn’t it? You and that lazy friend of yours. Girls, girls, girls …”

She stopped herself. Yes, he was an expert in girls—it was well-known—and Gaborone was not such a large place. There was a chance, probably quite a good chance, that he actually knew something about these girls. If they were bad girls, as they almost certainly were, or, more specifically, good-time girls, then he would probably have encountered them on his rounds of the bars. She signalled for him to draw over to the side of the road.

“Stop. Stop here. I want to show you this list.”

The apprentice drew in and took the list from Mma Makutsi. As he read it, he broke into a smile.

“This is a fine list of girls!” he said enthusiastically. “These are some of the best girls in town. Or at least three of them are the best girls in town. Big girls, you know what I mean, big, excellent girls. These are girls that we boys are very appreciative of. We approve of these girls. Oh yes! Too much!”

Mma Makutsi’s heart skipped a beat. Her intuition had been right; he had the answer to her quest and now all that she had to do was to coax it out of him.

“So which girls do you know?” she asked. “Which are the three you know?”

The apprentice laughed. “This one here,” he said. “This one who is called Makita. I know her. She is very good fun, and she laughs a lot, especially when you tickle her. Then this one, Gladys, my, my! Ow! One, two, three! And I also know this one here, this girl called Motlamedi, or rather my brother knows her. He says that she is a very clever girl who is a student at the university but she doesn’t waste too much time on her books. Lots of brains, but also a very big bottom. She is more interested in being glamorous.”

Mma Makutsi nodded. “I have just been speaking to that girl,” she said. “Your brother is right about her. But what about that other girl, Patricia, the one who lives in Tlokweng? Do you know that girl?”

The apprentice shook his head. “She is an unknown girl that one,” he said, adding quickly, “But I am sure that she is a very charming girl, too. You never know.”

Mma Makutsi took the piece of paper away from him and tucked it into the pocket of her dress. “We are going to Tlokweng,” she said. “I need to meet this Patricia.”

They drove out to Tlokweng in silence. The apprentice appeared to be lost in thought—possibly thinking about the girls on the list—while Mma Makutsi was thinking about the apprentice. It was very unfair—but entirely typical of the injustice of the relations between the sexes—that there was no expression quite like
good-time girl
that could be applied to boys like this ridiculous apprentice. They were every bit as bad—if not worse—as the
good-time girls
themselves, but nobody seemed to blame them for it. Nobody spoke of
bar boys,
for example, and nobody would describe any male over twelve as a
bad boy.
Women, as usual, were expected to behave better than men, and inevitably attracted criticism for doing things that men were licensed to do with impunity. It was not fair; it had never been fair, and it would probably never be fair in the future. Men would wriggle out of it somehow, even if you tied them up in a constitution. Men judges would find that the constitution really said something rather different from what was written on the page and interpret it in a favour of men.
All people, both men and women, are entitled to equal treatment in the workplace
became
Women can get some jobs, but they cannot do certain jobs (for their own protection) as men will do these jobs better anyway.

Why did men behave like this? It had always been a mystery to Mma Makutsi although latterly she had begun to glimpse the makings of an explanation. She thought that it might have something to do with the way in which mothers treated their sons. If the mothers allowed the boys to think that they were special—and all mothers did that, as far as Mma Makutsi could make out—then that encouraged boys to develop attitudes which never left them. If young boys were allowed to think that women were there to look after them, then they would continue to think this when they grew up—and they did. Mma Makutsi had seen so many examples of it that she could not imagine anybody seriously challenging the theory. This very apprentice was an example. She had seen his mother come to the garage once with a whole watermelon for her son and she had seen her cut it for him and give it to him in the way in which one would feed a small child. That mother should not be doing that; she should be encouraging her son to buy his own watermelons and cut them up himself. It was exactly this sort of treatment which made him so immature in his treatment of women. They were playthings to him; hewers of watermelon; eternal substitute mothers.

THEY ARRIVED at plot 2456, at the gate of the neat, mud-brown little house with its outhouse for the chickens and, unusually, two traditional grain bins at the back. The chicken food would be kept there, she thought; the sorghum grain that would be scattered each morning on the neatly swept yard, to be pecked at by the hungry birds on their release from the coop. It was obvious to Mma Makutsi that an older woman lived here, as only an older woman would take the trouble to keep the yard in such a traditional and careful way. She would be Patricia’s grandmother, perhaps—one of those remarkable African women who worked and worked into her eighties, and beyond, and who were the very heart of the family.

The apprentice parked the car while Mma Makutsi made her way up the path that led to the house. She had called out, as was polite, but she thought that they had not heard her; now a woman appeared at the door, wiping her hands on a cloth and greeting her warmly.

Mma Makutsi explained her mission. She did not say that she was a journalist, as she had done on the visit to Motlamedi; it would have been wrong to do that here, in this traditional home, to the woman who had revealed herself to be Patricia’s mother.

“I want to find out about the people in this competition,” she said. “I have been asked to talk to them.”

The woman nodded. “We can sit at the doorway,” she said. “It is shady. I will call my daughter. That is her room there.”

She pointed to a door at the side of the house. The green paint which had once covered it was peeling off and the hinges looked rusty. Although the yard appeared well kept, the house itself seemed to be in need of repair. There was not a great deal of money about, thought Mma Makutsi, and pondered, for a moment, what the cash prize for the eventually elected Miss Beauty and Integrity could mean in circumstances such as these. That prize was four thousand pula, and a voucher to spend in a clothing store. Not much of the money would be wasted, thought Mma Makutsi, noticing the frayed hem of the woman’s skirt.

She sat down and took the mug of water which the woman had offered her.

“It is hot today,” said the woman. “But there will be rain soon. I am sure of that.”

“There will be rain,” agreed Mma Makutsi. “We need the rain.”

“We do need it, Mma,” said the woman. “This country always needs rain.”

“You are right, Mma. Rain.”

They were silent for a moment, thinking about rain. When there was no rain, you thought about it, hardly daring to hope for the miracle to begin. And when the rain came, all you could think about was how long it would last.
God is crying. God is crying for this country. See, children, there are his tears. The rain is his tears.
That is what the teacher at Bobonong had said one day, when she was young, and she had remembered her words.

“Here is my daughter.”

Mma Makutsi looked up. Patricia had appeared silently and was standing before her. She smiled at the younger woman, who dropped her eyes and gave a slight curtsey.
I am not that old!
thought Mma Makutsi, but she was impressed by the gesture.

“You can sit down,” said her mother. “This lady wants to talk to you about the beauty competition.”

Patricia nodded. “I am very excited about it, Mma. I know that I won’t win, but I am still very excited.”

Don’
t be too sure about that,
thought Mma Makutsi, but did not say anything.

“Her aunt has made her a very nice dress for the competition,” said the mother. “She has spent a lot of money on it and it is very fine material. It is a very good dress.”

“But the other girls will be more beautiful,” said Patricia. “They are very smart girls. They live in Gaborone. There is even one who is a student at the university. She is a very clever girl that one.”

And bad,
thought Mma Makutsi.

“You must not think that you will lose,” interjected the mother. “That is not the way to go into a competition. If you think that you will lose, then you will never win. What if Seretse Khama had said: We will never get anywhere. Then where would Botswana be today? Where would it be?”

Mma Makutsi nodded her agreement. “That is no way to set out,” she said. “You must think: I can win. Then you may win. You never know.”

Patricia smiled. “You are right. I shall try to be more determined. I shall do my best.”

“Good,” said Mma Makutsi. “Now tell me, what would you like to do with your life?”

There was a silence. Both Mma Makutsi and the mother looked expectantly at Patricia.

“I would like to go to the Botswana Secretarial College,” replied Patricia.

Mma Makutsi looked at her, watching her eyes. She was not lying. This was a wonderful girl, a truthful girl, one of the finest girls in Botswana, quite beyond any doubt.

“That is a very fine college,” she said. “I am a graduate of it myself.” She paused, and then decided to go ahead. “In fact, I got 97 percent there.”

Patricia sucked in her breath. “Ow! That is a very high mark, Mma. You must be very clever.”

Mma Makutsi laughed dismissively. “Oh no, I worked hard. That was all.”