Morality for Beautiful Girls by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

had to do was to get him to see a doctor and be treated. She closed the book and glanced at the synopsis on the back cover.
This very treatable disease
… it said. This cheered her even further. She knew what she had to do, and her list, even if it had appeared that morning to be a long and complicated one, was now less mountainous, less daunting.
     
    SHE WENT straight from the Botswana Book Centre to Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. To her relief, the garage was open and Mma Makutsi was standing outside the office, drinking a cup of tea. The two apprentices were sitting on their oil drums, the one smoking a cigarette and the other drinking a soft drink from a can.
    “It’s rather early for a break,” said Mma Ramotswe, glancing at the apprentices.
    “Oh, Mma, we all deserve a break,” said Mma Makutsi. “We have been here for two and half hours already. We all came in at six and we have been working very hard.”
    “Yes,” said one of the apprentices. “Very hard. And we have done some very fine work, Mma. You tell her, Mma. You tell her what you did.”
    “This Acting Manager is a No. 1 mechanic,” interjected the other apprentice. “Even better than the boss, I think.”
    Mma Makutsi laughed. “You boys are too used to saying nice things to women. That will not work with me. I am here as an acting manager, not as a woman.”
    “But it’s true, Mma,” said the elder apprentice. “If she won’t tell you, then I will. We had a car here, one which had been sitting for four, five days. It belongs to a senior nurse at the Princess Marina Hospital. She is a very strong woman and I would not like to have to dance with her. Ow!”
    “That woman would never dance with you,” snapped Mma Makutsi. “What would she be doing dancing with a greasy boy like you, when she can dance with surgeons and people like that?”
    The apprentice laughed off the insult. “Anyway, when she brought the car in she said that it stopped from time to time in the middle of the traffic and she would have to wait for a while and then start it again. Then it would start again and go for a while and then stop.
    “We looked at it. I tried it and it started. I drove it over to the old airport and even out on the Lobatse Road. Nothing. No stopping. But this woman said that it was always stopping. So I replaced the spark plugs and tried it again. This time it stopped right at the circle near the Golf Club. Just stopped. Then it started again. And a very funny thing happened, which that woman had told us about. The windscreen wipers came on when the car stopped. I didn’t touch them.
    “So, early this morning I said to Mma Makutsi here: ‘This is a very strange car, Mma. It stops and then starts.’
    “Mma Makutsi came and looked at the car. She looked in the engine and saw that the plugs were new and there was a new battery too. Then she opened the door and got in, and she made a face like this, see. Just like this, with her nose all turned up. And she said: ‘This car smells of mice. I can tell that it has a mouse smell.’
    “She began to look about. She peered under the seats and she found nothing there. Then she looked under the dash and she started to shout out to me and my brother here. She said: ‘There is a nest of mice in this car. And they have eaten the insulation off the wires right here. Look.’
    “So we looked at those wires, which are very important wires for a car—the ones which are connected to the ignition, and we saw that two of them were touching, or almost touching, just where the mice had gnawed off the covering. This would mean that the engine would think that the ignition was off when the wires touched and power would go to the wipers. So that is what happened. In the meantime, the mice had run out of the car because they had been found. Mma Makutsi took out their nest and threw it away. Then she bound the wires with some tape that we gave her and now the car is fixed. It has a mouse problem no longer, all