“This boy,” Mr. Potso complained to Pearly. “This boy who hangs about sometimes: Who exactly is he?”
“He’s my cousin’s son. Not my close cousin, you know, but one of my mother’s people from way back. I forget exactly where and when, but way, way back.”
Mr. Potso was not impressed with the credentials of this kinship. “There are many people,” he said. “There are so many people who were related a long time ago. We all go back to Adam, remember. We are all his cousins.”
Pearly laughed. “That was a long time ago, Potso.”
“That is what I’m saying,” countered Mr. Potso. “I’m saying if you start looking for relatives, then there are relatives under every stone.” He paused. You have to be careful, he thought; you have to be careful not to push women too far, because sometimes they can turn around and say, I’ve had enough of you. They could do that, and then they turn you out and where are you then? That was why you had to be careful, especially if you had only one eye. You could miss things if you had only one eye.
“All I’m saying,” he continued, “is that once you start picking up relatives, then you can end up with a lot of them. That is all I’m saying.”
“That is true enough, I suppose,” said Pearly. It was not a matter that she had given much thought to, but she was often impressed with Potso’s observations of the world. He might only have one eye, she had once said to a friend, but he sees a lot with that eye of his.
Mr. Potso was emboldened. “And then, if you’re not careful, you end up with one hundred relatives on your doorstep—all of them hungry. All wanting something from you. And then along will come the baboons. They’ll say, ‘Don’t forget about us! We are your cousins too—a long way back. What about us? What have you got for us to eat?’ ”
Pearly laughed. “I don’t think so, Potso. If baboons come to your place, you chase them back into the bush. You say, ‘Get back where you belong.’ That’s what you say, Potso.”
Potso smiled. “They’re clever creatures, Mma. Don’t underestimate them.”
“I don’t. They understand a stick waved at them. I think they are clever enough to understand that.”
Mr. Potso was a keen reader. He had borrowed a book from the library and was reading his way through it, slowly, because of his eyesight problem. “The baboons will say something to you, Mma,” he began. “They’ll say, ‘Have you not heard of this fellow called Darwin?’ That’s what they will say, Mma. Those clever baboons—that’s what they will say.”
“Who is this Darwin, Rra?”
“He is the one who said that people and baboons are cousins, Mma. All people come from baboons in the old days, right at the beginning. They are our ancestors, way back, I think. That is what he said—I’m not saying that, Mma. Not me.”
“Just as well,” said Pearly, and laughed. “You’re reading too much, Potso. There is limited space in our heads, you know. You can’t put more and more stuff in there.”
Charlie knew that Mr. Potso was resentful of him. Like so many young men, it did not readily occur to him that anybody could dislike him; a young man is like a puppy in that regard, assuming without any doubt the approbation of others. Puzzled by the cool disregard of Pearly’s lover, he had tried to ingratiate himself, but without success. He had even tried to win him over with humour, telling Mr. Potso a joke that he had heard and that he thought might appeal to the older man. He had expected laughter and male conspiracy, but had been greeted with a fixed stare.
“And then what happened?” Mr. Potso said eventually.
“Nothing more happened, Rra,” explained Charlie. “That is the end of the story, you see.” He paused. “It is a very amusing story, Rra, I think.”
“So the man put the cattle-brand on the seat of the other man’s trousers,” said Mr. Potso. “What’s so amusing about that?”
“Well, he hadn’t been expecting it—that other man,” said Charlie. “He was a bit surprised, you see.”
“Of course he would be,” said Mr. Potso. “And it must have been very painful for him. I do not think it funny. And he shouldn’t have been seeing that man’s wife, should he?”
Charlie did not try humour again. Nor did he succeed with compliments directed towards Mr. Potso’s fried chicken. When Charlie praised him for the crispness of his chicken wings, Mr. Potso simply sighed and said that anybody could fry chicken and that there was no great art to getting crisp results. And when Charlie agreed with a view that Mr. Potso had expressed as to the competence of a local politician, Mr. Potso had pointed out that he was not at all serious in his earlier comments and that in reality he believed the opposite of what he said. “Sometimes people mean the opposite of what they say, Charlie,” he had said. “You should be able to work that out by now.”
After that, Charlie had given up, concluding that for some inexplicable reason Mr. Potso was determined to thwart him. From then on, although he remained polite to the chef, he warily kept his distance.
And now, as Charlie sat in the Happy Chicken Caf, waiting for Queenie-Queenie to arrive, he glanced surreptitiously at Mr. Potso through the open kitchen hatch. After a few minutes, the chef appeared from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a scrap of kitchen towel.
“Have you ordered?” Mr. Potso demanded.
Charlie shook his head. “I am waiting for company,” he said.
“Company?”
“Yes, company, Rra.”
The chef rolled his eyes. “And if everyone came in here and waited for company? What then? There would be the whole of Botswana sitting here, just in case any company dropped by. And all the people wanting to buy fried chicken, where would they be? Standing outside, I think.”
Charlie bit his lip. “I will be ordering chicken when my girlfriend comes.”
The chef rolled his eyes again, and Charlie’s gaze was drawn to the mucus-white of the eyeballs. He did not like Mr. Potso, and, in particular, he did not like his eyes.
“So, you have a girlfriend. It seems that anybody can get a girlfriend these days.”
Charlie said nothing.
“Even people you never thought would find a girlfriend,” Mr. Potso continued. “Even those people seem to be able to find somebody.” He shook his head in mock wonderment.
Pearly appeared from the kitchen. Mr. Potso looked in her direction and left Charlie.
“That is the number one useless man in the country,” Charlie muttered to himself, and felt all the better for the observation, however private and unheard it may have been. He might have dwelt on his humiliation had it not been for the arrival a minute or so later of Queenie-Queenie.