The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine (5 page)

Standing beside the van, feeling for the key in her bag, her eye was drawn to the side of the driver's door. It was unmistakable: a scratch, deep enough to be a gouge, had been made in the paintwork. On the ground below, a small line of white flecks marked where the fragments of paint had fallen.

She caught her breath. Then, dropping her bag, she emitted an involuntary wail as she bent down to examine the damage. Then she saw the nail, the instrument with which this assault on her tiny white van had been perpetrated. This had been tossed casually aside, as the knife of a careless murderer might be left at the scene of the crime—a further insult to the feelings of those who came upon the victim.

“My van,” she muttered. “My van.”

She stood up and looked around her. There was no doubt about the identity of the culprit; the boy had warned her of this, and now he had done exactly what he had threatened to do. The car park was largely deserted, although there was a man approaching from the square. He was heading towards a large Mercedes-Benz at the other end of the car park, and it occurred to Mma Ramotswe that the boy might be watching, hoping to collect his tip for looking after that car. She took a step away from the van to take advantage of the cover provided by the tree. She was not fully concealed—she was appreciably wider in girth than the tree—but she was certainly less obvious.

The man approached his car, and as he did so the lights flashed in obedience to his remote unlocking fob. And that, it seemed, was the signal for the boy to appear, as he did seemingly from nowhere, but probably from behind a parked truck on the other side of the road. Running towards the man, he held out his hand and was rewarded with a couple of coins. He inclined his head gratefully, and then skipped back to his station on the other side of the road, unaware that Mma Ramotswe had returned and was watching him from behind her tree.

Mma Ramotswe lost no time. Striding out from behind her tree, she quickly crossed the road and intercepted the boy just as he was looking in the other direction and was therefore unaware of her approach.

“Now, young man,” she said, reaching out and grabbing him by the scruff of the neck. “You are going to come with me. I want to show you something.”

The boy struggled, but, had this been the boxing ring, he was a bantamweight in the grip of a champion heavyweight. He tried to kick himself free but was simply lifted up off the ground and held there while his scrawny legs kicked uselessly at the air. Then he was slowly lowered and the grip around his collar was reinforced by Mma Ramotswe's other hand grabbing the seat of his trousers. Carried bodily through the air, he was taken back to the van and lowered beside his handiwork.

“Why did you do this to my van?” she asked. “Why did you do it?”

The boy opened his mouth to speak, but managed no more than a half-strangled groan.

“Why?” repeated Mma Ramotswe. “Why have you done such a wicked thing to my van?”

The boy now began to whimper, and then, with a sudden shudder, started to cry. Between his sobs words could be made out—the truncated, isolated words of one who weeps as he speaks. “You must not…spank me, Mma. I do…not want to be spanked. I am…a bad boy, but you must…not spank me, Mma.”

Mma Ramotswe slackened her grip.

“Please, Mma,” sobbed the boy. “Please.”

“I am not going to spank you.” She sighed. “You will not be spanked.”

The boy continued to cry. “I am very sorry, Mma. I am a rubbish, no-good boy.”

She abandoned her grip altogether. “You must stop crying,” she said. “It is no good crying.”

She wanted to put her arms around him. She wanted to pick up this ridiculous little boy and comfort him. You could not harden your heart to tears such as these, whatever the boy had done—even if he had taken a nail to an innocent van. You simply could not.

“Listen,” she said. “You stop crying and then you can tell me some things. I will open the door, and once the van is cool, we can sit in there and you can tell me who you are and where you live.”

“I live nowhere,” he said between sobs. “I am just a rubbish boy.”

She reached for the handkerchief she kept tucked into her bodice and wiped at his cheeks. “Hush,” she said. “You stop crying and then we can talk.”

He looked up at her. “You are not going to spank me, then, Mma?”

“I am not going to spank you. There is no need for spanking.”

T
HE BOY LOOKED
at Mma Ramotswe, shooting a glance at her and immediately dropping his gaze to his feet and the dusty rubber mat on the van's floor. Her eyes remained upon him, and in the brief moment that he had looked at her, he knew that he was looking into the heart of something that was much bigger than anything else, much kinder, something that had nothing to do with the things that made his life so difficult—the threats, the beatings, the shouted abuse, the constant and necessary furtiveness.

Mma Ramotswe reached out to touch him gently on the shoulder. He flinched, and she felt the instinctive, self-defensive contraction. A boy of this size, particularly one who lived like this, would be all sinew and muscle, a tight spring of humanity, ready to run. “Where is your mother?” she asked. “Is she near here or…” Her hand waved in the direction of the hinterland, vaguely to the north and west, to some ill-defined land of absent mothers. It occurred to her that she might as well point skywards—there were so many children now whose mothers had fallen victim to that cruel disease.

She removed her hand. “Is your mother late?”

She realised that she did not even know what he was called, and this made her question seem cold. Before he could answer, she asked him his name.

“I am just called Samuel,” the boy said. “There is a Setswana name that I do not use. It is one of those names that makes me look stupid. So I use my other name, which is Samuel.”

Mma Ramotswe nodded. She knew about the habit of giving comic, sometimes absurd names to children.
The one who screams and screams.
Or,
The one who is always hungry.
People went through their lives with these names, and never got round to doing something about it.

She would not ask him his Setswana name. Instead she said, “Then you should forget about that name and just call yourself by your other name. Samuel is a very good name for a boy.” She paused, and then added, “For a big man too. I know a Samuel who is very strong. When I hear the name now, I think of him—of this strong man who is called Samuel.”

She saw that he was calming down. The readiness to flee, the tensing of the muscles, was draining out of him, and he now sat back a bit in the seat. She repeated her question about his mother, but now added his name. “Is your mother late, Samuel?”

The boy shook his head. “She is not late, Mma. She is living over that side, over there. Down near Lobatse.”

He pointed south.

“That is not too far away,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Just one hour maybe.”

He nodded, but she could tell that it was not a journey that he made frequently—if at all.

“Tell me about her.”

He looked up sharply. He opened his mouth to speak, but thought better of it, and looked down at the floor again, his brow furrowed.

“There is something wrong, isn't there?”

“There is nothing wrong, Mma. She is down there—that is all.”

“All right, Samuel. Your mother is there. And your father? Where is your daddy?”

He simply shook his head, and again she knew: he would have no idea who his father was.

“Is she working?” asked Mma Ramotswe.

The question seemed to encourage the boy. He looked up and announced proudly, “She is a prostitute, Mma. She has a very good job as a prostitute. An uncle told me that.”

Mma Ramotswe caught her breath.
He does not understand. He does not know what he has said.

She gazed out of the van window. The sun was now more or less overhead, foreshortening shadows, making the solid things of this world, the buildings, the cars, the fences and signs, sharp and distinctive against the washed-out background that heat can create. It was like looking at things against the light; you saw the thing, starkly outlined, but you did not see what lay behind it—just the glare.

Did the sun make a sound? She had heard some people say that you could hear the sun when it was high in the sky like this, that it made a faint sound—not too loud, but audible nonetheless; a sound that could reverberate in your head if you stood out there long enough; a sound like the beating of wings somewhere high in the sky. She did not think this could be so; the sun would make the noise of a great furnace, but it was so far away and you would never get near enough to hear what it really sounded like.

She turned to him. “You do not see her, do you, Samuel?”

He bit his lip.

“She is very busy.”

Mma Ramotswe sighed. “Of course she is.” She fiddled with her key ring; a loop of twisted wire to which a tiny lump of fur had been bound.

“That fur,” she said. “You see it? It's from a dassie.”

The dassie was a rock rabbit, a small, rather surprised-looking creature that lived in the crevasses at the foot of rocky hills; against all likelihood, the dassie was related to the elephant.

“It's the cousin of the elephant,” Mma Ramotswe said, smiling. “That is very strange, isn't it? One is so small and the other is so big.”

Samuel looked doubtful. “It cannot be true, Mma. The people who say that are not telling the truth. A very small creature cannot be the cousin of a very big animal. That cannot be true.”

She shrugged. “Why are you not at school?”

He shook his head. “I do not go to school. They do not want me in that place.”

“They do, you know.”

“No, Mma, they do not.”

She switched tack. “How old are you, Samuel?”

He hesitated, and she realised that he did not know.

“I think you are ten. That is how old you are, I think.”

He appeared to accept this.

“And where do you live? Where do you sleep at night?”

His voice was flat as he gave his answer. “I sleep at a house over there.” He pointed to behind the old police station. “There is a woman who lets me sleep in her yard if I keep watch. I wake up if there is anybody who comes to steal and I shout out.”

“She gives you food?”

“She gives me food and she washes my clothes for me. She sometimes gives me money if I do things for her. I wash her car. She gives me money for that, but not very much, as she is always giving money to her three real children. I am not her real child.”

Mma Ramotswe listened carefully. There were a thousand stories like this, just in this town. If you went out into the country, to the small, out-of-the-way places, you would find a thousand more, and a thousand after that.

“She is kind to you, Samuel? This lady with the house—she is kind to you?”

“Except when she beats me, Mma. She sometimes beats me—maybe each week. She has a stick.”

“Beats you for what?”

“When I am a rubbish boy. When I break something in the yard, or when she has been drinking beer. When she is drinking too much beer, then she likes to beat me. It is a hobby for her.”

Mma Ramotswe winced. She knew the world was far from perfect and there were things that occurred that could turn the stomach, and did. She knew too that these things had a way of happening under one's nose, even in Botswana, for all that it was a fine country that did its best by people. Seretse Khama, the first President of Botswana, who had led the country in the first days of independence, who had held its hand as it went through that doorway, had made it clear that people should treat one another with courtesy and decency, and this is what people, by and large, had done—except in a few dark corners, where that other side of human nature, the side that does not like the sun, had flourished.

She reached across again to lay a reassuring hand on him, and this time he did not flinch. When, she wondered, had this boy last had a human arm around his shoulders; when had he last been able to lay his head on a comforting breast; when had he last felt that he was loved?

“And your money?” she said. “This money that you get from people who park their cars—what do you spend that on? Food? Fat cakes? Coca-Cola?”

He did not answer immediately, and she repeated her question. “What happens to it, Samuel?”

She was not prepared for his answer. “She takes it from me.”

“ ‘She'? The lady with the yard?”
I might have said,
she thought,
the lady with the stick.

He nodded. “She says I am working for her. She says if I try to run away she will tell the police about me and they will come and beat me. She says that if I am not careful she will make me go and live in the bush and I will die…There are still lions in this country, Mma. They will eat me, won't they?”

It took Mma Ramotswe a moment to compose herself. Then she said, “There are still lions in Botswana, Samuel. Yes, there are lions, but they are not close by. They are not in the bush near here.” And she thought:
Lions are harmless by comparison with the creatures that move among us.

She made up her mind. There are some decisions that require a great deal of thought, and others that require little, or even none. Sometimes, in the case of this last group, you know in your heart, and straightaway, what you must do.

“Where is this place, Samuel? I want to see this lady.”

He seemed unwilling. “She will be very cross with me, Mma, if I take you there.”

I'm sure she will,
thought Mma Ramotswe. She leaned forward so that she was looking directly into his face. He stared at her, eyes wide. “Listen to me, Samuel,” she said. “I am going to take you away from that lady. She is very bad. I am going to take you to another lady who is kind-kind. She will not beat you. She will give you a place in a room that is very clean. There will be other children who will be your brothers and your sisters.”

She paused. She was not sure that he was taking it in. And she wondered, too, whether she could commit Mma Potokwane in this way. It was all very well making such an offer, but did she know that there was a place in the children's home, or would there be a waiting list? Everything, it seemed to Mma Ramotswe, had a waiting list—except the government taxman and the call, when it came, to leave this world. You could not argue with the agents of either of these: you paid, and you went.
But I am just on the waiting list…
No, there is no waiting list for these things…

Samuel was mute.

“I am telling you, Samuel,” she continued. “There is a good place for you. I shall take you there, in this van, straightaway after we have seen this bad lady.”

He gasped. “But you must not call her that, Mma. She is not a bad lady. She will beat you.”

Mma Ramotswe tried not to laugh. “Will she?” she asked. “I do not think she should try, Samuel. It is I who will beat her if she tries anything. I am a traditionally built lady, you know, and if there are any bad people who try to push me around—or to beat me—then I can sit on them very quickly. And if I do that, then they cannot breathe—all the air goes out of their lungs and they cry out, ‘I am not fighting any more, Mma.' ”

He looked at her with astonishment, but she realised that she had won for him whatever battle he had been fighting within. She decided to press home. “So, that is all fixed up, then. You tell me where this place is and we shall go and fetch your things. Then we shall go to this other place.”

She looked at her watch. She should be back at home preparing Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni's lunch, but he would assume that she had been delayed and he would make himself a sandwich. He enjoyed any excuse to make himself a sandwich that would always have too much of everything in it—too much salad cream, too much cheese, too much ham (if there was any in the house), and too much butter. She called it his “Too-Much Sandwich,” but he laughed at this and said that when you worked under cars all day a “Too-Much Sandwich” was justified, even if it was far from healthy.

“It is over that way,” he said, pointing to a small road that ran off in the direction of Extension Two. “It is not far away.”

THE HOUSE
had once been a good one—one of the larger bungalows built by the government in the late nineteen-sixties for an employee of one of its departments, and then sold on to its occupant. It would have been lived in by tenants, ending up by some circuitous route in the hands of the woman who now owned it. It had not been properly maintained, and she saw at once that the yard was ill kempt, which spoke volumes, as it always did. If you did not keep your yard in reasonable order, then your whole life would be similarly untidy. A messy yard told Mma Ramotswe everything she needed to know about its owner.

She could tell that the boy was anxious, and she sought to reassure him. “You can stay in the van, if you like,” she said. “You do not have to get out.”

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?”