Free The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine by Alexander McCall Smith

“That is very strange, isn’t it? One is so small and the other is so big.”
    Samuel looked doubtful. “It cannot be true, Mma. The people who say that are not telling the truth. A very small creature cannot be the cousin of a very big animal. That cannot be true.”
    She shrugged. “Why are you not at school?”
    He shook his head. “I do not go to school. They do not want me in that place.”
    “They do, you know.”
    “No, Mma, they do not.”
    She switched tack. “How old are you, Samuel?”
    He hesitated, and she realised that he did not know.
    “I think you are ten. That is how old you are, I think.”
    He appeared to accept this.
    “And where do you live? Where do you sleep at night?”
    His voice was flat as he gave his answer. “I sleep at a house over there.” He pointed to behind the old police station. “There is a woman who lets me sleep in her yard if I keep watch. I wake up if there is anybody who comes to steal and I shout out.”
    “She gives you food?”
    “She gives me food and she washes my clothes for me. She sometimes gives me money if I do things for her. I wash her car. She gives me money for that, but not very much, as she is always giving money to her three real children. I am not her real child.”
    Mma Ramotswe listened carefully. There were a thousand stories like this, just in this town. If you went out into the country, to the small, out-of-the-way places, you would find a thousand more, and a thousand after that.
    “She is kind to you, Samuel? This lady with the house—she is kind to you?”
    “Except when she beats me, Mma. She sometimes beats me—maybe each week. She has a stick.”
    “Beats you for what?”
    “When I am a rubbish boy. When I break something in the yard, or when she has been drinking beer. When she is drinking too much beer, then she likes to beat me. It is a hobby for her.”
    Mma Ramotswe winced. She knew the world was far from perfect and there were things that occurred that could turn the stomach, and did. She knew too that these things had a way of happening under one’s nose, even in Botswana, for all that it was a fine country that did its best by people. Seretse Khama, the first President of Botswana, who had led the country in the first days of independence, who had held its hand as it went through that doorway, had made it clear that people should treat one another with courtesy and decency, and this is what people, by and large, had done—except in a few dark corners, where that other side of human nature, the side that does not like the sun, had flourished.
    She reached across again to lay a reassuring hand on him, and this time he did not flinch. When, she wondered, had this boy last had a human arm around his shoulders; when had he last been able to lay his head on a comforting breast; when had he last felt that he was loved?
    “And your money?” she said. “This money that you get from people who park their cars—what do you spend that on? Food? Fat cakes? Coca-Cola?”
    He did not answer immediately, and she repeated her question. “What happens to it, Samuel?”
    She was not prepared for his answer. “She takes it from me.”
    “ ‘She’? The lady with the yard?”
I might have said,
she thought,
the lady with the stick.
    He nodded. “She says I am working for her. She says if I try to run away she will tell the police about me and they will come and beat me. She says that if I am not careful she will make me go and live in the bush and I will die…There are still lions in this country, Mma. They will eat me, won’t they?”
    It took Mma Ramotswe a moment to compose herself. Then she said, “There are still lions in Botswana, Samuel. Yes, there are lions, but they are not close by. They are not in the bush near here.” And she thought:
Lions are harmless by comparison with the creatures that move among us.
    She made up her mind. There are some decisions that require a great deal of thought, and others that require