The Double Comfort Safari Club - By Alexander McCall Smith Page 0,4

drive straight. People who go from one side of the road to the other. People who drink while they drive—not driving after you’ve been drinking, but driving while you’re drinking. There are all of these things.” He turned to Mma Mateleke. “Aren’t there, Mma?”

Mma Mateleke glanced at her watch. She did not seem particularly interested in this conversation. “Maybe,” she said. “There are many instances of bad behaviour, but I do not think that we have time to talk about them right now.” She turned to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “Could you take a look, Rra, and see what is wrong with this car of mine?”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni moved towards the car and opened the driver’s door. He would never mention the fact to Mma Mateleke, but he did not like her car. He found it difficult to put his finger on it, but there was something about it that he distrusted. Now, sitting in the driver’s seat and turning the key in the ignition, he had a very strong sense that he was up against electronics. In the old days—as Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni called everything that took place more than ten years ago—you would never have had to bother very much about electronics, but now, with so many cars concealing computer chips in their engines, it was a different matter. “You should take this car to a computer shop,” he had been tempted to say on a number of occasions. “It is really a computer, you know.”

The ignition was, as Mma Mateleke had reported, quite unresponsive. Sighing, he leaned under the dashboard to find the lever that would open the bonnet, but there was no lever. He turned to unwind the window so that he could ask Mma Mateleke where the lever was, but the windows, being electric, would not work. He opened the door.

“How do you get at the engine on this car?” he asked. “I can’t see the lever.”

“That is because there is no lever,” she replied. “There is a button. There in the middle. Look.”

He saw the button, with its small graphic portrayal of a car bonnet upraised. He pressed it; nothing happened.

“It is dead too,” said Mma Mateleke, in a matter-of-fact voice. “The whole car has died.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni climbed out of the car. “I will get it open somehow,” he said. “There is always some way round these things.” He was not sure that there was.

Mr. Ntirang now spoke. “I think that it is time for me to get on with my journey,” he said. “You are in very good hands now, Mma. The best hands in Gaborone, people say.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni was a modest man, but was clearly pleased with the compliment. He smiled at Mr. Ntirang, almost, if not completely, ready to forgive him his earlier display of bad driving. He noticed, though, an exchange of glances between Mma Mateleke and Mr. Ntirang, glances that were difficult to read. Was there reproach—just a hint of reproach—on Mma Mateleke’s part? But why should she have anything over which to reproach this man who had stopped to see that she was all right?

Mr. Ntirang took a step back towards his car. “Goodbye, Rra,” he said. “And I hope that you get to the bottom of this problem. I’m sure you will.”

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni watched as the other man got into his car and drove off. He was interested in the car, which was an expensive model, of a sort that one saw only rarely. He wondered what the engine would look like, mentally undressing the car. Mechanics did that sometimes: as some men will imagine a woman without her clothes, so they will picture a car engine without its surrounding metal; guilty pleasures both. He was so engaged in this that Mr. Ntirang was well on his way before Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni realised that the red car was being driven back to Gaborone. Mma Mateleke had said, quite unambiguously, that Mr. Ntirang had been on his way to Lobatse, and Mr. Ntirang had nodded—equally unambiguously—to confirm that this was indeed true. Yet here he was, driving back in the direction from which he had come. Had he forgotten where he was going? Could anybody be so forgetful as to fail to remember that they were driving from Gaborone to Lobatse, and not the other way round? The answer was that of course they could: Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni himself had an aunt who had set out to drive to Serowe but who had turned back halfway