Game Control

Even names of hopeless enterprises were buoyant: “Jolly Inn”; “Golden Boy Shoeshine”; “Joystick Hair Salon”. Mangled English worked a peculiar charm: “Annie Beauty Saloon for Browdry”; “Happy Valley Studio: Portrats, Photo Alburms, We also sell rekurds”. Transcribed as the words were heard, the phonetics suggested a larger perspective: that what was received was accepted.

Finally the Land Rover had accumulated so many children that Eleanor ground to a halt. Delicate bips on the horn only drew more urchins to her bumper. She was about to park and proceed on foot when a boy of about sixteen loudly cleared the crowd and motioned her on. He escorted her up the hill.

With the boy’s help, she located the Mathare North Family Planning and Maternity Home, painted in bouncing baby blue, and even more cramped, gungy and obscure than she’d imagined. When she climbed out to thank him, he introduced himself as Peter and begged her to visit his house around the corner. She could not say no. Oh, Calvin, she implored silently. How learning that small word might transform me.

She left the car keys at the clinic and apprehensively followed her new friend.

“Don’t be afraid,” he kept assuring her, though it was Peter who was shaking. When he led her into his room, he opened the window (a cardboard flap) and left the door (a sheet of tin) propped ajar, observing propriety. Still the room was black, and Peter lit a candle with, requiring dexterity with a glorified toothpick, one Kenyan match.

The walls shone with glossy photos from Time and Newsweek—soccer players, motor scooters, skyscrapers—so that if it weren’t for the glint between the cutouts of winebox cartons, Eleanor could easily imagine she was in the bedroom of any adolescent in DC. Likewise when he showed her his notebooks from the mission school, the handwriting was the same round, exacting cursive of students anywhere to whom words did not come easily but who were trying hard.

He insisted on tea as Eleanor began her ritual mumbling about having to leave, and led her out through the back to his family compound, where his younger siblings gathered in the corners to stare at the prize Peter had brought home today. They all shook her hand, exerting no pressure so that her own gentle clasp folded their fingers, and then retreated in new awe of their older brother, who could entertain a mzungu for tea. The service arrived, jam glasses and a beaten pot, the brew generously thick with milk and sugar. The mother’s deferential bearing, a little stooped with too many smiles, made Eleanor feel undeserving, since for the last ten minutes an ugly worry had needled: what will they want?

Quickly a bowl of pinto beans and corn kernels were delivered with tea, and Peter’s mother asked if she would please stay for a meal, the preparations for which, the daughters scurrying, were already under way. When the eldest scuttled off, Eleanor was terrified the girl had gone to shop.

“No, no,” said Eleanor hurriedly, knowing the word when employed on someone else’s behalf. “I can’t.” And certainly she could not. To be polite, Eleanor helped herself to one handful of beans—well cooked, salted and slightly crunchy—but she was mindful of her appetite because of a forthcoming dinner with Calvin. Watching your weight in Mathare Valley was humiliating.

Peter’s mother was pregnant, and dutifully Eleanor drew her into a conversation about family planning, explaining she worked for the clinic near by. The mother nodded and said this was definitely her last child, but Eleanor recognized the desire to please. The same graciousness that produced the beans and would have laid out a bankrupting meal would also tell Eleanor what she wanted to hear. How many times had women claimed to her face they wanted no more children and come in the next month for perinatal care?

Peter walked her to the clinic. A funny formality had entered the occasion, and she was let off easily with providing her address. She yearned to press him with a hundred shillings, but the ruse of hospitality had become real, and neither could violate courtesy with cash. Even in Mathare, paying for your tea was gross. For the life of her she couldn’t fathom why he didn’t slit her throat and steal her watch.

Though Calvin had agreed to retrieve her readily enough, when she found him in the waiting room he looked annoyed. Eleanor chattered nervously with the nurses, asking about the tubal ligation programme, hoping they didn’t know who he was.

“I hate that language,” said Calvin malignantly once they started down the road. He hadn’t dared park a new Land Cruiser in the slum, so they were in for a slog.

“Swahili?”

“Chumba cha kulala, chakula cha mchana, katikati, majimaji, buibui, pole-pole, nene-titi-baba-mimi … Baby babble. The whole continent has never grown up.”

“Do you hate the language or the people?”

“Both.” The statement didn’t seem to cost him much.

“Do you like English?”

“Not particularly. Angular, dry, crowded.”

“Americans?”

“Grabby, fat, empty-headed pond scum.”

She laughed. “Fair-mindedness of a sort.” She was coming to like Calvin best at his most horrid, and was reminded of a story she was fond of as a child, “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts”. A man goes out and feeds peanuts to pigeons, gives coins to beggars and helps old ladies across the street. When he comes home, his wife reports cheerfully how she shortchanged a salesgirl, screamed at a bus driver and had a child’s pet impounded for nipping her leg. They were very happy together, and this suggested to her that she and Calvin had the makings of the perfect couple.

Calvin sighed, casting his gaze over the hillsides winking with tin. “The Chinese, now. I had great hopes for them once. I thought, here was one government that knew the stakes. But their last census was disappointingly large. And now they’re loosening the screws. They’ll be sorry.” He was airy and aloof.

“China has committed a lot of human rights abuse with that one-child programme.”

“I don’t give a tinker’s damn.”

She touched her forehead. “There’s more to life than demography.”

“Not to me. Population is all I care about.”

She slowed. It was a stark admission if it was true. If he also intended a personal warning, she picked it up. “That’s appalling.”

“Perhaps.” Calvin used mildness as a weapon. “So,” he proceeded, “did you give out a birth control pill today? Fob off a condom on a little boy for a balloon?”

“Why are you so snippy?”

“I’m taking the neighbourhood out on you.”

“It is hard to handle.”

“Get used to it. Mathare Valley will spread over all of Africa in fifty years. I’m not such a Pollyanna that I predict worldwide famine. Why, what do these people survive on? But they do survive. No, we will be fruitful and multiply ourselves right into an open sewer. Whether ten people can eke out a few years in eight feet square is not the question. Look around you: it is obviously possible. But—” He nodded at a mincing radio. “You don’t get much Mozart in a slum.”

“Fine, so one of the values we have to protect for the future is human rights—”

“Human rights! No one has the right to produce ten children for whom there is no food, no room, no water, no topsoil, no fuel and no future. No one has a right to bring any child into the world without Mozart.”

She glanced at him sidelong with wary awe. “Do you ever talk to these people, Calvin? Whose little soul-slivers you’re so concerned about?”

“I sometimes think,” he considered, “that’s not in their interests. One gets attached and loses perspective. Culling in Uganda, members of our team would occasionally form an affection for certain elephants. This maudlin naming, cooing and petting—it made them less professional. And the work a great deal more difficult.”

“The parallel eludes me.”

He smiled. “It was meant to.”

Their accumulation of tittering children on the way back did not seem heartbreaking and inexplicably buoyant as it had on the way in, but plaguesome instead. As they did not realize Eleanor spoke Swahili, she picked up comments about her ugly dress and porridge complexion and funny hair. One of them screamed that he could see her bra strap, and she had to stop herself from adjusting her collar right away. An older boy carped to his friend about wakaburu come to tour the slums when they were “tired of the other animals”. Eleanor allowed herself a tiny nasal whine, jaw clenched.

“Why don’t you say something?” asked Calvin.

“Like what?”

Calvin turned on his heel and menaced, “Nenda zaku!” The crowd froze. “Washenzi! Wamgmyao! Futsaki!”

It was magic. Thirty or forty children seeped back to the trickles of raw sewage from which they’d come.

“Now, that should have been you,” said Calvin.

“I don’t use that kind of language.”

“Go home and practise, then. Your Swahili’s better than mine. What do you think it’s for?”

Eleanor was both mortified and grateful. The valley was suddenly so quiet.

She told Calvin about tea with Peter.

“Don’t tell me. He wanted you to take him to America.”

She kicked at the road. “Probably.”

“Haven’t you had thousands of these encounters?”

“Sure.”

“They still affect you.” He was impressed.

“In some ways, it’s worse than ever. Not prurient. Not interesting, not new. Still painful.”

“They all think you’re a magic lantern, don’t they? That you own Cadillacs and a pool.”

“In his terms,” she soldiered liberally, “I am rich—”

“Aren’t you tired of saying these things? How many times have you made that exact same statement?”

She sighed. “Hundreds.” She added, “I had a feeling the next time I stopped by Mathare I would avoid Peter.”

They had reached the car, from which point they could see the whole valley of shanties bathed in a perverse golden light, under which hundreds of handsome adolescent boys cut out magazine pictures of motor cycles under cardboard with a candle. “Eleanor,” said Calvin quietly, taking her by the shoulders, “don’t you sometimes just want them to go away?”

She squirmed from his hands and huddled into the seat. Though the air was stuffy, she did not unroll a window, but sat breathing the smell of new upholstery: soft leather, freshly minted plastic. She buckled the seat belt, tying herself to the motakari, as if the hands of Mathare threatened to drag her out again. She locked the door. “Yes,” she said at last. “But there’s only one way to manage that. For me to go away.”

“They would follow you. You will always have 661 million black wretches breathing down your neck. By the time you’re ninety? Well over two billion.”

“I’m sick of these figures.”

“In a little over a hundred years this continent’s population will quadruple—”

“Calvin, please!”

“By 2000 Mexico City will have thirty million people. These are not just numbers, Eleanor. We’re talking billions of disgruntled, hungry, filthy Homo sapiens, starting to turn mean, they will all want a Walkman. They will all want you to take them to America.”

“I have been trying my whole adult life—”

“You would be far more generous to launch into Mathare with a machine-gun.”

“I don’t think that kind of joke is very funny.”

“It isn’t a joke.”

Eleanor folded her arms. “You have no business undermining my work just because you’ve fallen by the sidelines.”

“Women tend to interpret any argument as personal attack. There is such a thing as fact outside whatever petty professional bitterness I might still harbour. I will remind you that I singly have raised more funding for population programmes than any man on earth. Family planning? You are riding, Ms Merritt, with the father of family planning, so that if I tell you it is a waste of time, I at least expect you to listen.”

“Yes …” she drawled, balled up on the other side of the car. “I remember stories, all right. Of you walking into Julius Nyrere’s office and dumping a bag of multi-coloured condoms on his desk. ‘How many children do you have?’ you asked. Oh, that went the rounds, Mr. Diplomat.”

“Fine, that was a stunt, and I pulled a lot of them. Some worked, some didn’t. That one backfired.”

“I’ll say.”

They were driving down the long hill towards Lang’ata, where trailing through the scrub Kenyans filed six abreast and chest to back from town to outlying estates. With so many marching feet skittling into the distance in unbroken lines, it was hard to resist the image of ants streaming to their holes. Or it was now. Eleanor didn’t used to look at Africans and think insects.

“Demographically, the future has already occurred. That by 2100 we will have between eleven and fifteen billion people is now a certainty.”

“So the answer,” said Eleanor stiffly, “is despair.”

“A large bottle of brandy helps. But no. Not despair. Let’s see if they have Martell.” He swung into a duka, for Calvin did not suffer the same qualms as Eleanor, shelling out 1,200 shillings for imported liquor when everyone else in the queue was counting out ten for a pint of milk.

After another forty-five minutes behind Volkswagens being push-started, hand-drawn carts dropping melons on to the tarmac and a lorry with a broken axle that had spilled its load of reeking fish over both lanes, they retired to Calvin’s cottage. Even at his most insufferable, Calvin’s company was preferable to another evening of the brown chair. On the way home Calvin had picked up his mail at his Karen post box, and he opened a fat manila envelope of newspaper articles on to the table.

“My clipping service,” he explained. “Courtesy of Wallace Threadgill. One of the space travellers. That crew who think if it gets a bit crowded we can book ourselves to Venus and hold our breath. They are quite remarkable. I’ve never figured out what drugs they’re on, but I would love a bottle.”

“Why would he send you clippings?”

“It’s hate mail.”

She peered at the pile. “I thought you weren’t interested in AIDS.” For these were the headlines on top: “Confronting the Cruel Reality of Africa’s AIDS: A Continent’s Agony”; “AIDS Tears Lives of a Ugandan Family”; “My Daughter Won’t Live to Two, Mother Weeps”.

“I’m entirely interested. I just find the alarmist impact projections optimistic. One more virus: we’ve seen them come and go.”

“You find high infection rates optimistic?”

“Threadgill is browned off with me. HIV—he thinks I invented it.”

“That’s preposterous!”

“Not really. And I was honoured. The virus is ingenious. But from my provisional projections, AIDS will not stem population growth even in Africa. HIV has proved a great personal disappointment. Why, I rather resent it for getting my hopes up.”

Eleanor stood and picked up her briefcase. “Disappointment? I refuse to sit here and—”

He poured her a stout double. “Young lady, we are still working on your sense of humour.”

She paused, stayed standing, but finally put the briefcase down. “I think we need to work on yours. It’s ghoulish.”

He smiled. “I was the boy in seventh grade in the back of the class telling dead-baby jokes.”

“You’re still telling them.”

“Mmm.”

“That was quite a leg-pull. Touché.”

She ranged the room, taking a good belt of the brandy. It was an ordinary room, wasn’t it? But the light glowed with the off-yellow that precedes a cyclone, and she was unnerved by a persistent scrish-scrash at the edge of her ear that she couldn’t identify. When she looked at the photograph of the diver, the eyes no longer focused on Calvin but followed Eleanor’s uneasy pace before the elephant bone instead. Their expression was of the utmost entertainment.

chapter four

Spiritual Pygmies at the Ski Chalet

Wallace didn’t attend social functions often any more, but an occasional descent into the world of the pale kaffir was charitable. As he glided over their heads in his airy comprehension of the Fulgent Whole, it was easy to forget that most of his people were still piddling in the dirt with their eyes closed. While Wallace had the loftiest of interior aspirations, he did not believe that individual enlightenment should be placed above your duties to the blind. Revelation came with its responsibilities, if sometimes tedious.

He set up camp on a stool by the fire, scanning the gnoshing, tittering, tinselly crowd as they tried to numb their agony with spirit of the wrong sort. Aside from the Luo domestic staff scurrying with platters, the entire gathering was white. The usual form, in Nairobi. The pallid, both on the continent and on the planet, were being phased out, so they huddled together through the siege in lamentable little wakes like these that they liked to call “parties”.

He glanced around the house, an A-frame with high varnished rafters, like a ski chalet: Aspen overlooking the Ngong Hills. Dotted around the CD player perched a predictable display of travel trophies—bone pipes and toothy masks—whose ceremonial purposes their looters wouldn’t comprehend, or care to.

The herd was mixed tonight. A larger than average colony of aid parasites, each of whom was convinced he and he alone really understood the Samburu. The clamour of authority was deafening: “The problem with schools for the pastoralist is they discourage a nomadic life …”

“And you have to wonder,” a proprietary voice chimed, “if teaching herders to read about Boston is in their interests. When you expose them to wider options, you educate them, in effect, to be dissatisfied …”

“Aldous Huxley,” a woman interrupted. “Brave New World argues that the freedom to be unhappy is a fundamental human right …”

From an opposite corner came the distinctive whine of the conservation clique, always indignant that their sensitive, sweet and uncannily clever pet elephants had been entrusted to brutish natives who didn’t appreciate complex pachyderm kinship structures and had the temerity to worry about their own survival instead. “It’s much too early to lift the ivory ban, much too early …”

“On the contrary, I thought Amboseli was bunged with elephants. Turning to a rubbish tip, a dust bowl—”

Wallace shook his head. These interlopers thought Africa belonged to them.

“I don’t see why Kenya should suffer just because South Africa wants to cash in its ivory stockpiles—”

“Why shouldn’t good game management be rewarded?”

“I know culling makes a lot of sense,” a girl in several kilos of Ethiopian silver was moaning. “But I simply can’t bear it—”

Sifting aimlessly between the gaggles, ex-hunters fetched themselves another drink. As masters will come to resemble their dogs, the thick-necked, snouty, lumbering intrepids suggested the animals they’d shot. Hunting had been illegal in Kenya for years now. Grown puffy and cirrhotic with nothing to murder, most of these anachronisms were reduced to trucking pill-rattling geriatrics and shrill, fibre-obsessed Americans around the Mara, or had secured contracts with Zanzibar, where the gruff lion-slayers now picked off over-populated crows.

On its outer edges, the throng was laced with the independently wealthy and the entrepreneurial élite. If they deigned to work, husbands ran light industries and were sure to own at least one aeroplane, a house in Lamu and a camp in the Ngurumans. Not particularly bright, few of these spoiled, soft-handed colonials would have done well in Europe or America, while in Africa they’d little commercial competition. The baby-fat faces beamed with self-satisfaction. Here their dress ran to sports jackets, but out in the wilderness they were given to orange Bermudas and loafers without socks. Their conversation, anywhere, was entirely about cars. “I had my Daihatsu kitted out with … forgot about one of those bloody unmarked speed-bumps and cracked my engine block … found a way to get around the duty on …” Wallace didn’t need to listen very hard.

Their wives, on the other hand, were at least an eyeful. Balanced on legs no thicker than high heels, these emaciated elegants could raise millions on a poster:

SAVE THE ENDANGERED CAUCASIAN FEMALE

Anna has not eaten in three days. She is five foot eight and weighs little over a hundred pounds. Anna requires a full litre of vodka just to survive the cruel leisure of one more back-biting social function. She needs your help. For just a thousand pounds a week, you could adopt a rich white lady in Africa.

As if to torment themselves, Nairobi’s physics-defying two-dimensional were all clustered around the buffet, one licking a surreptitious drip of meat-juice off her finger, another fondling a leaf of lettuce. Wallace disapproved of gluttony, but he had no time for greedy ascetism either. Fasting was for mental purification, not miniskirts. And their ensembles, over-accessoried and keenly co-ordinated, betrayed how long they had spent trying on earlier combinations and taking them off. Most of their mumble was inaudible as they confided in one another who was copulating with whom, for in the week since their last party the couplings would have done a complete musical chairs. With the sexual turnover in this town, gossip was a demanding and challenging career. The remarks from the buffet he could hear, however, regarded the timeless servant problem. “George had his camera disappear, and with nobody coming forward, just looking, like, duh, what’s a camera, I was sorry but I had to sack the lot …”

“You have to draw the line right away. Little by little, they bring their whole families, until the shamba is overrun, mattresses and plastic bowls; it’s hardly your house any more! Cheeky bastards!”

“And when we took her on she said she had one child, can you believe it! Of course she had six, and now she’s pregnant, again—”

“You really have to employ all the same tribe, sweety, or they’re at each other’s throats morning and night.”

Add a few pilots, a sprinkling of journalists waiting for some Africans to starve, for another massacre in Somalia or the rise of another colourful dictator whose quaint cannibalism they could send up in the Daily Mirror, and that, in one room, was mzungu Nairobi—inbred, vain, pampered, presumptive and imminently extinct, thank heavens.

Wallace declined to mingle, and perched on a three-legged stool, rocking on his chaplies with his cane between his legs, rearranging the straggles of his faded kikoi. It was times like these, while around him the bewildered got motherless, that he might have missed his pipe, but Wallace had given it up and regarded himself as beyond desire.

He had noted before that the mentally mangled found the proximity of perfect contentment and inner peace an upsetting experience and so they tended to avoid him. Conversations with Wallace had a habit of dwindling. Why? Just try explaining how we-are-all-one when your companion is fidgeting for a refill of whisky and looks so palpably disheartened at the demise of the banana crisps. So he was surprised when one of the paper dolls tore herself away from ogling the buffet table of forbidden fruit and sidled over to the fire. Perhaps, so tiny, she was cold.

“So what’s your line?” she asked distractedly, no doubt having just learned her husband was bedding her best friend. “KQ? WWF? A & K? I’d guess …” she assessed, “UN, but not with those sandals. NGO. Loads of integrity. SIDEA?”

“I did,” he conceded, “once work in population research.”

“Oh, brilliant! I know this sounds awful, but when I read about a plane crash or an earthquake, I think, well, good. There are too many people already.”

“And what if you were on the plane?”

“I suppose then I shouldn’t have to think anything about it whatsoever.” She giggled.

“I’ve given up population work rather.”