With the storm outside, the room was darkened further than what must have been its usual gloom. She looked about her. The concrete floor was shattered here and there, as if by small, localised earthquakes. There was a smell, and there was a person, a man sitting on his haunches at the far end of the room, staring at her. He was an old man, and his face was criss-crossed by lines. She saw his eyes, though, which caught the light, dim though it was, from what had once been the window.

She gave a start. The man smiled. “Do not be afraid, Mma. This is my house, but you are welcome to shelter from the rain.”

She took in what was on the floor. A bag from which a few old clothes, rags really, spilled. A few cans, open and abandoned. A single bicycle wheel, salvaged for some reason and then forgotten.

She took a step forward, and then another. She squatted down beside him, remembering this easy, chairless way of sitting that is so natural in Africa.

“I come from up there,” the old man said, pointing north.

She nodded. He spoke Setswana in the accent of an age ago.

“So this is your house,” she said. “I always thought that there was nobody here.”

“There is always somebody,” he said.

Mma Makutsi looked up at the failed ceiling. The drumming of the rain on the roof was less insistent now. She would be able to continue her walk soon. She reached into the pocket of her blouse. She had a fifty-pula note in it, now damp from the rain. She gave it to the man, and he took it, examining it carefully as one might examine an important document.

“Thank you, Mma. You do not have to pay to visit my house, though.”

“This is a present, Rra. It is not payment.”

He put the note away, somewhere in the rags that were his clothes. Then they waited, in silence, for the storm to abate and for the sky to appear again. Mma Makutsi rose to her feet and went to look out of the door. There were stretches of water where once there had been red earth. These would drain quickly, as the water percolated deep down into the thirsty heart of Botswana, somewhere far below the Kalahari.

She turned to say goodbye to the man whose house she had visited. He raised a hand and smiled. She thought: This is the first time I have given anybody fifty pula. It felt very strange; very satisfactory.

On the way out, her shoes suddenly addressed her. The boots were silent, having to cope with the challenge of the wet that was all about. But this came from the shoes in the bag, who said, quite clearly, We saw that, Boss. We were proud.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE PRIVATE CHAIR