“You’ve been waiting for hours,” she said. “My fault. All my fault.”
“I have not been waiting long,” said Charlie. “Just ten minutes, maybe. Listening to that useless chef.”
Queenie-Queenie glanced towards the kitchen door. “You do not need to listen to that man,” she said. “My father says he’s a rubbish man. No good. That’s what my father says.”
Charlie brightened. “I don’t pay any attention to what he says. I never have.”
Queenie-Queenie smiled. “He’s jealous of you, I think. He’s jealous because you are so handsome and clever. That is why he’s rude to you, Charlie.”
Charlie demurred. “I do not think that I—” He broke off. He could not believe what she had just said. She had said that he was handsome and clever. Nobody, let alone a girl, had said that to him before.
“Anyway,” said Queenie-Queenie. “We have better things to do than think about that man.”
“I know,” said Charlie.
Queenie-Queenie sat down opposite him. “Are you going to have chicken?”
Charlie affected nonchalance. He could say that he had already eaten, and that he did not want anything more. That was not true, of course; he had not eaten, and the smell of the fried chicken wafting in from the kitchen was impossibly tempting. But the truth of the matter was that he could not afford two helpings of chicken—one for him and one for her.
“I’m not all that hungry,” he said. “You have some chicken.”
She looked at him with concern. “If you don’t eat meat, then you’ll get thin. You’ll get knocked over. You should not be too thin.”
“If you eat too much fried chicken,” said Charlie, “then your arteries get clogged up with chicken fat. I have read all about that.”
Queenie-Queenie was not impressed. “Then why are chickens not all dead?” she demanded. “If chicken fat was so dangerous, then chickens would be dying all the time. But they are healthy, Charlie. You see them all over the place. They are very healthy.”
“They are different,” said Charlie. “We have these arteries, you see; chickens do not have arteries.” He paused. “Or I don’t think they do.”
Queenie-Queenie made an insouciant gesture. “I don’t think we should talk about all that. There are so many things they say we should not do. Don’t eat this, don’t eat that. Don’t cross the road in case you get run down. Don’t get out of bed in the morning in case you slip on the mat and break your ankle. We’re warned about these things all the time.”
“We could talk about other things,” agreed Charlie. “There are many things to talk about.”
“Such as marriage,” said Queenie-Queenie. “That is one of the things that people can talk about.”
Charlie had not expected this. Their relationship had been an on-off affair, and they had separated before this. He was hesitant. “Maybe,” he said. “That is one thing, I think, but there are many others, of course.”
“But none of them as important as marriage,” persisted Queenie-Queenie.
“I never said it was not important,” said Charlie.
Queenie-Queenie was studying him, and he found it slightly disconcerting. “It has been very hot,” he said, in an attempt to change the subject. “The rain will have to come soon, I think.”
Queenie-Queenie ignored this comment about rain. People were always talking about it—rain, rain, rain—and none of that talk, she felt, would make the rain come any sooner. If anything, it could tempt the rain to stay away, just to spite those rain-obsessed people. But no, she should not think that way: everything depended on rain, and if the weather spirits—not that they existed, of course—should ever know that she was thinking along these seditious lines, then it might make matters worse. So she put such thoughts out of her mind, and looked again at Charlie.
“Marriage is the number one thing,” she said to Charlie. “If you can think of a more important question than that of who you spend your life with, then I’d like to know what that question is.” She stared at him expectantly, and then added, “No? No suggestions?”
Charlie looked up at the ceiling. “Some people say that money is more important,” he said, and added, hurriedly, “I am not saying that. That’s not me. But there are people who say that. Money—everything is about money.”
Queenie-Queenie wrinkled her nose. “Money is nothing, Charlie. Love is everything. That is the difference between the two: money, nothing; love, everything.”
Charlie frowned. Queenie-Queenie came from a family that had money—money and trucks. If you had money and trucks behind you, then it was easy to say that money was nothing—and trucks, for that matter. It was only too easy. But if you came from where he came from, which was nowhere, really, and you had no money at all, you would never say that.
Queenie-Queenie expanded on her theme. “If I had a choice, Charlie, between money, here on this hand, and love, here on this hand…” She held her hands out towards him, and Charlie saw how soft the skin was, and the carefully tended nails. He swallowed hard. These were not hands that had been obliged to do the laundry or mix the mortar for the wall of the lelapa, the low mud-wall that bounded the traditional Botswana household. These were not even hands that had needed to do the kitchen work that most women had to do, and in the more progressive households, was even expected of men. These hands had done nothing.
“If I had to choose between the two of them,” Queenie-Queenie continued, “what do you think I would choose, Charlie? You tell me. Think about it for a little while, and then you tell me what I would choose.”
Charlie sat back in his seat. Mr. Potso poked his head out from the kitchen to stare at Queenie-Queenie. Then he transferred his gaze to Charlie, curling an eyebrow as if to say, Her! What’s she doing with somebody like you?
Charlie echoed her question. “Which one would you choose?”
“Yes, which one?”
Charlie made a hopeless gesture. “Oh, I know that. I know that you would choose love. That is what you’ve already said. You said that money is not the big thing…”
Queenie-Queenie raised a finger. “No. Wrong. Money.”
Charlie could not conceal his surprise. “But you said…”
“I didn’t. I was talking about both. I never said that I would prefer love to money. I said that if I had money, then I would also like to have love. Love is more important than money—I did say that—but you can’t live on love by itself. You need money. You have to eat. So what you do is you make sure that you have money in the first place, then love will come. You say, ‘I am ready now for love, because I have money,’ and love will come.”