Tony drove slowly through the wet grey sand, deeply carved from small rivers that had formed during the last rainstorm. The headlights revealed random rocks and pebbles sticking out of the sand. One had to be hellishly careful.
“I know everybody wants to stick their noses into everybody else’s business,” said Tony. “They will have something else to gossip about, soon. Right now we are the bee’s knees when it comes to topics.”
Two mining prospectors had invited us to have dinner with them at the restaurant after a gin and tonic in the lobby. We were reluctant to accept, but they seemed starved for conversation, so we caved in. There were worse things than being invited for dinner.
The ‘Kingklip Thermidor’, the hotel’s specialty, had been fresh and tasty and the prospectors had ordered some wine.
“Remember when you went to the loo? The one guy actually told me to leave you and come with him to Orapa. Said he was making a lot of money at the diamond mine. Wanted to take good care of me,” I chuckled. “You should have seen his face when I told him off.”
Tony was quiet. Was he listening to me?
“When did that happen?” he asked in a worried tone.
“Well, when you went to the loo. He just took a chance, I guess.”
“I bet, he won’t offer himself again in a hurry.”
“I wasn’t really cruel to him. Just explained that money can’t buy love and that I would never leave you,” I said. “My sermon had him close to tears.”
“He probably remembered his wife and children in South Africa. And what a dog he is,” Tony said with contempt.
The car creaked along the sandy path. We reached a familiar fork in the road with a piece of trampled-down fence straight ahead.
“Yes, it was definitely worth a little white lie,” I giggled.
It had been one of the lighter moments. There were still these uncomfortable silences between us.
I just couldn’t understand Tony. For one thing, I wasn’t used to the slow pace and lack of urgency in general. I also felt that Tony had exaggerated his zeal to find out the truth about Claire. Or perhaps, I had misunderstood him. Perhaps I just wanted to think that he was as eager to solve the mystery of Claire’s disappearance.
But if that was the case, what was he still doing here in Palapye? Why had he invited me?
I convinced him somehow to come to the local police station with me. The grimy building sat lazily across the railroad tracks next to the grimy post office. Mail was delivered to the post office in a rickety van on a Thursday or Friday and had to be collected. So it was convenient to pop into the police station.
“Good day officer. We are here to inquire about this case…”
Tony pushed a piece of paper across the counter. The attending charge officer looked at the paper and disappeared into a backroom. He came back with an older policeman, who blew us off with no further ado.
“Sorry sir, but we are still investigating.”
I persisted with questions, which were met with an enduring indifference. It was like bouncing off an invisible wall. It was discouraging, but I put it down to things happening very, very slowly in Botswana. I had learned that much.
Then I paid the police station a visit once in a while by myself. Something had to happen sometime. Just how was I supposed to explain the situation to my family and friends back in Cambridge?
I chickened out and wrote about how wonderful Palapye was, how the sunsets glowed between the hills behind the complex. Pure magic. That Tony was helping me find out more about Claire’s disappearance, that the police was being helpful…in other words, I lied through my back teeth.
The sunsets were rather spectacular, but Tony wasn’t being helpful. And especially not the police. What to do?
I would go to Gaborone and speak to the police there — and then to witnesses in Bobonong and Mochudi. Yes, that’s what I would do. In the meantime, I had to find my feet in this strange place.
In the last weeks of the holidays, the vocational training centre was slowly coming back to life. Very slowly.
Except for ground staff and a handful of expatriate teachers, the complex was still deserted. As much as I sometimes wanted to get away from the crowd in England, I now craved the company of a few sensible friends I could talk to. Oh Liz, Diane and Zaheeda, forgive me if I ever took you for granted!
Those were the dinosaur days before communication became easy. No e-mail or mobile telephones. And something like Skype only existed in science fiction movies. In order not to lose my mind, I began to plant flowers and herbs and weeds that looked like flowers in Tony’s garden.
Tony thought it best to leave the project up to me. I spent day after day digging up the sandy soil. Then putting down foul-smelling manure, Tony had ordered by the truckload and digging everything over again. Bulky motsetsi cutoffs from the village lay in great heaps next to the driveway. The ground staff thought it hilarious, how I worked away. For me it was therapeutic.
Neo had assured me that the Motsetsi plants would take root quickly. All I had to do was stick them into the ground along the fence and water often.
So that’s what I did.
A little rock garden was next. A rocky ride over sticks and stones to a dried-up riverbed had yielded a collection of smooth rocks. And it didn’t stop there. Neo mentioned that one could create a vegetable garden with different-sized car tyres.
“Stacked on top of each other and filled with compost, they make a ‘wakah’. It needs little water and maintenance. You can have lettuce and herbs at your fingertips,” he said.
A three-storey wakah tower was built in no time. The constant rain soon helped tiny green leaves to break through the soil. A hardy acacia tree completed the garden.
My hands were dirty and my nails ragged, but I was proud of my achievement.
All that must have been a breath-taking sight for Ethel Poppelmeyer to behold. Ethel was the prim and proper wife of the new school principal. A balding man, whose paunch just fit into his light blue safari suit. They were Tony’s direct neighbours.
We hadn’t been formally introduced yet, but I knew that she lived next-door. She often watched me from behind cream lace-curtains that had travelled with her from England. I suppose there was not much else to watch.
Apparently she thought that Tony and I were living in sin. At least that’s what I’d heard at the Botsalo Hotel. In the English town of Cobblestead, where she was from, such conduct would surely not have been tolerated. I found that amusing.
I went inside to wash after a day’s work, still bits of garden stuck to me. The water ran sparse and brown again. Great. It took me a while to scrub myself clean.
I readied myself to take a cool drink out to the porch, when I noticed Ethel inspecting the empty pre-fab houses on the other side of the road. It had to be Ethel, because there weren’t too many middle-aged women with neatly permed hair around. She came over to inspect the new motsetsi hedge. Come on Bridget, take the first step in the spirit of good neighbourhood, I said to myself.
After all, she took such great interest in my garden work.
“Hello Ethel, I’m Bridget, nice to meet you,” I greeted her, while sauntering down the driveway. Everybody around here used first names to address each other, so I thought nothing of it.
A startled Ethel pushed herself off the fence as if it was electrified. Her eyes under the bushy blonde eyebrows observed me suspiciously. She made a feeble attempt to shake my hand, then changed her mind and began to nervously stroke one of the young Motsetsi plants. She hadn’t realized that I was still at home. You’re letting up, Ethel, I thought with some satisfaction.
“How do you do?”