SHE DROVE OUT to Tlokweng along one of the back roads—a roundabout way that gave her time to get over the tension that Mma Makutsi’s odd mood had injected into the day. Driving, she found, always helped her to unwind, and as she made her way slowly along the winding dirt road she found herself smiling again. The one thing you could not say about Mma Makutsi was that she was dull; far from it—Mma Makutsi was what her friend Mma Moffat would have described as a character. And it was better to be a character, she felt, than to be one of those people who spoke about nothing at all, and probably thought about nothing too; such people were soporific and could be marketed by some enterprising person as walking sleeping pills. Yes, that was a good idea: if you had difficulty sleeping you could phone up one of these people and, for a small charge, they would come to your house and sit and look at you, and you would gradually nod off to sleep. You would have to pay them first, though, as otherwise they would have to wake you up to collect their fee, and that would defeat the purpose of calling them in the first place … And there could be another service for people who felt sleepy but for some reason needed to keep awake. They could phone for Mma Makutsi, and she would come and talk about this and that and make the sort of remarks that would keep people on their toes, puzzling over what she meant, or getting irritated and hot under the collar because they disagreed with what she was saying. Makutsi Wake-up Services would be a good name for such a concern. There were so many possible businesses …

She turned a corner, and there was another small business, set back from the road—one she had not seen before. The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon. She slowed down. The premises was a tin shed—not much more than a shack—topped with a freshly painted notice announcing the name of the concern and laying claim to national pre-eminence in the field. Famous throughout Botswana, the notice claimed. First consultation free. No appointment necessary.