Free To the Land of Long Lost Friends: No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (20) by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

Mr. Potso simply sighed and said that anybody could fry chicken and that there was no great art to getting crisp results. And when Charlie agreed with a view that Mr. Potso had expressed as to the competence of a local politician, Mr. Potso had pointed out that he was not at all serious in his earlier comments and that in reality he believed the opposite of what he said. “Sometimes people mean the opposite of what they say, Charlie,” he had said. “You should be able to work that out by now.”
    After that, Charlie had given up, concluding that for some inexplicable reason Mr. Potso was determined to thwart him. From then on, although he remained polite to the chef, he warily kept his distance.
    And now, as Charlie sat in the Happy Chicken Caf, waiting for Queenie-Queenie to arrive, he glanced surreptitiously at Mr. Potso through the open kitchen hatch. After a few minutes, the chef appeared from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a scrap of kitchen towel.
    “Have you ordered?” Mr. Potso demanded.
    Charlie shook his head. “I am waiting for company,” he said.
    “Company?”
    “Yes, company, Rra.”
    The chef rolled his eyes. “And if everyone came in here and waited for company? What then? There would be the whole of Botswana sitting here, just in case any company dropped by. And all the people wanting to buy fried chicken, where would they be? Standing outside, I think.”
    Charlie bit his lip. “I will be ordering chicken when my girlfriend comes.”
    The chef rolled his eyes again, and Charlie’s gaze was drawn to the mucus-white of the eyeballs. He did not like Mr. Potso, and, in particular, he did not like his eyes.
    “So, you have a girlfriend. It seems that anybody can get a girlfriend these days.”
    Charlie said nothing.
    “Even people you never thought would find a girlfriend,” Mr. Potso continued. “Even those people seem to be able to find somebody.” He shook his head in mock wonderment.
    Pearly appeared from the kitchen. Mr. Potso looked in her direction and left Charlie.
    “That is the number one useless man in the country,” Charlie muttered to himself, and felt all the better for the observation, however private and unheard it may have been. He might have dwelt on his humiliation had it not been for the arrival a minute or so later of Queenie-Queenie.
    “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,”