She could do something more about decorating the room, she thought. But then if she was going to get married in January, when she would move to Phuti Radiphuti’s house, there seemed little point in doing much to her own place. The landlord would be pleased, no doubt, if she went to the hardware store and bought some paint for the walls, but again there seemed to be no point in doing that. Indeed, there seemed to be little point in doing anything.

No sooner had she reached that conclusion, than she realised how absurd it was. Of course there was a point in doing something. Mma Makutsi was not one to waste her time, and she now told herself that her resignation should be a challenge to her to work out a new routine of activity. Yes, she would take advantage of this and do something fresh, something exciting with her life. She would…She thought. There must be something. She could get a new job, perhaps. She had read about a new employment agency which had opened which would specialise, it had been announced, in the placing of high-class secretaries. “This agency is not for everyone,” the press announcement had read. “We are for the cream of the crop. We are for people who go the extra mile—every day.”

Mma Makutsi had seen the advertisement in the Botswana Daily News and had been struck by the wording. She liked the expression go the extra mile, which had the ring of a journey to it; and that, she thought, was what life really was—it was a journey. In her case, the journey had started in Bobonong, and had been by bus, all the way down to Gaborone. And then it had become a metaphorical journey, not a real one, but a journey nonetheless. There had been the journey to her final grade at the Botswana Secretarial College, with the marks as milestones along the way: sixty-eight per cent in her first examination, seventy-four in the second; then on to eighty-five per cent; and finally, in a seemingly impossible leap, ninety-seven per cent, and the glory that had come with that. That had surely been a journey.