Blue Shoes and Happiness Read Online Free PDF

regaled with an account of the event by Charlie, who this time was careful to mention the presence of the manager of the Mokolodi Game Reserve, even if only in a supporting role.
    â€œMma Makutsi was very lucky,” he said once Charlie had finished the tale. “Those snakes strike like lightning. That quick. You cannot dodge them if they decide to strike.”
    â€œCharlie was too quick for it,” said the younger apprentice. “He saved Mma Makutsi’s life.” He paused, and then added, “Not that she thanked him for it.”
    Mr Polopetsi smiled. “I am sure that she is very grateful,” he said. “But you boys should remember that nobody is too quick for a snake. Keep out of their way. I saw some very bad snake-bite cases when I was working at the hospital. Very bad.” And he remembered, as he spoke, the woman who had been brought in from Otse; the woman who had been bitten by a puff-adder when she had rolled over in the night and disturbed the fat, languid snake that had slid into her one-room hut for the warmth. He had been on duty in the pharmacy and had been standing outside the entrance to the emergency department when she had been carried out of the government ambulance, and he had seen her leg, which had swollen so much that the skin had split. And then he had heard the next day that she had not lived and that there were three children and no father or grandmother to look after them; he had thought then of all the children there were in Africa who now had no parents and of what it must be like for them, not to have somebody who loved you as your parents loved you. He looked at the apprentices. They did not think of things like that, and who could expect them to? They were young men, and as a young man one was immortal, no matter what the evidence to the contrary.
    At a garage there is no time for thinking such thoughts; there is work to do. Mr Polopetsi unloaded the new tyres, with their pristine treads and their chalk markings; Mr J.L.B. Matekoni attended to the delicate task of adjusting the timing on an old French station wagon—a car he did not like, which always went wrong and which in his view should have been given a decent burial a long time ago; and the two apprentices finished the servicing of Bishop Mwamba’s well-behaved white car. Inside the adjoining office of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi shuffled papers about their desks. They had very little real work to do, as it was a slack period for the agency, and so they took the opportunity to do some filing, a task in which Mma Makutsi took the lead, on account of her training at the Botswana Secretarial College.
    â€œThey used to say that good filing was the key to a successful business,” she said to Mma Ramotswe as she looked through a pile of old receipts.
    â€œOh yes,” said Mma Ramotswe, not with great interest. She had heard Mma Makutsi on the subject of filing on a number of occasions before and she felt that there was very little more to be said on the subject. The important thing, in her mind, was not the theory behind filing but the simple question of whether it worked or not. A good filing system enabled one to retrieve a piece of paper; a bad filing system did not.
    But it seemed that there was more to be said. “You can file things by date,” Mma Makutsi went on, as if lecturing to a class. “Or you can file them by the name of the person to whom the document relates. Those are the two main systems. Date or person.”
    Mma Ramotswe shot a glance across the room. It seemed odd that one could not file according to what the paper was all about. She herself had no office training, let alone a diploma from the Botswana Secretarial College, but surely a subject-based system was possible too. “What about subject matter?” she asked.
    â€œThere is that too,” Mma Makutsi added quickly. “I had forgotten about that.