Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber 1994

Copyright © Lionel Shriver 1994

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Lionel Shriver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780007578016

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007301751

Version: 04-02-2014

Dedication

To the

NAIROBI PRESS CORPS

whom I can thank for

my most barbaric opinions,

and none of whose number

ever batted an eye

at the premise of this book.

The most dignified thing for a worm to do is to sit up and sit still.

Henry Adams

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

chapter five

chapter six

chapter seven

chapter eight

chapter nine

chapter ten

chapter eleven

chapter twelve

chapter thirteen

chapter fourteen

chapter fifteen

chapter sixteen

chapter seventeen

chapter eighteen

chapter nineteen

endpapers

about the book

Praise for Game Control

About the Author

Also by Lionel Shriver

About the Publisher

chapter one
The Curse of the Uninvited

Not on the list,” the askari declared grandly.

“Perhaps …” the other voice oiled, deceptively polite, “one of the organizers … Dr. Kendrick?” Exaggerated patience made a mockery of good manners.

With the bad luck that would characterize the next five days, Aaron Spring was just passing the entranceway. Swell. The last thing any population conference needed was Calvin Piper.

The Director bustled brusquely to the door. “It’s quite all right,” he assured the African with a sticky smile. “This is Dr. Piper. Is there some problem with his registration?”

“This man is not on my list,” the askari insisted.

“There must have been some oversight.” Spring scanned the clipboard. “Let’s enter him in, so this doesn’t happen again.”

The Kikuyu glared. “Not with that animal.”

Reluctantly, the Director forced himself to look up. Wonderful. A green monkey was gooning on Calvin’s shoulder, teeth bared. Spring slipped the askari twenty shillings. That was not even a dollar, but the price of this visit was just beginning.

The interloper looked interestedly around the foyer, as if pointing out that he had not been here for some time and things might have changed.

“So good to see you.” Spring shook his predecessor’s limp hand.

“Is it?”

“You’re just in time to catch the opening reception. What happened with your registration, man?”

“Not a thing. What registration?”

“There must have been some mistake.”

“Not a-tall. I wasn’t invited.”

Spring winced. Piper had a slight British accent, though his mother was American and he’d spent years in DC. The nattiness of Piper’s tidy sentences made Spring’s voice sound twangy and crass.

The Director led his ward through the sterile lobby. The Kenyatta International Conference Centre was spacious but lacked flair—wooden slatted with the odd acute angle whose determination to seem modern had guaranteed that the architecture would date in a matter of months. Kenyans were proud of the building, the way, Spring reflected, they were so reliably delighted by anything Western, anything they didn’t make. All the world’s enlightened élite seemed enthralled with African culture except the Africans themselves, who would trade quaint thatch for condos at the drop of a hat.

“Couldn’t you at least have left the monkey home?” he appealed.

“Come, Malthus is a good prop, don’t you think? Like Margaret Meade’s stick.”

God rest her soul, Spring had always abhorred Meade’s silly stick. “Just like it.”

Spring hurried ahead. Having assumed the leadership of USAID’s Population Division six long, fatiguing years before, surely by now he might be spared the pawing deference the Director Emeritus still, confound the man, inspired in him. He reminded himself that much of his own work that five years had been repairing the damage Piper had done to the reputation of population assistance worldwide. And by now Spring was well weary of his own staff’s nostalgic stories of Piper’s offensive mouthing off to African presidents. Why, you would never guess from their fond reminiscences that many of those same staff members had ratted on this glorified game-show host at their first opportunity. All right, Spring was aware he wasn’t colourful—he did not travel with a green monkey, he did not gratuitously insult statesmen, he did not detest the very people he was employed to assist, and his pockets did not spill black, red and yellow condoms every time he reached for his handkerchief.

Behind his back Spring vilified Piper, but perhaps to compensate for going all gooey face to face. Here was a character whose politics, having veered so far left they had ended on the far right instead, Spring deplored as uncompassionate and irresponsible. Spring aspired to despise Piper, but he would never get that far. He would only be free to dislike the urbane, unruffleable, horribly wry has-been once sure that Piper adored and respected him first—that is, never.

And Piper made him feel fat. Piper was the older although he didn’t look it, and was surely one of those careless types who never gave a thought to what they ate, while Spring jogged four joyless miles a day, and had given up ice-cream.

“You ruined that Kuke’s day, you know,” Calvin was commenting about the askari. “He loved barring my way. You get a lot of wazungu rolling their eyes about Africans and bureaucracy, how they revel in its petty power—but how they don’t understand it, wielding stamps and forms like children playing office. I’ve come to believe they understand bureaucracy perfectly well. After all, most petty power isn’t petty a-tall, is it? These tiny people can stick you back on your plane, impound your whisky, cut off your electricity and keep you out of conferences you so desperately wish to attend. Bureaucracy is a weapon. And there is no pleasure greater than turning artillery on just the people who taught you to use it.”

“Calvin,” implored the Director, “do keep your theories quiet this week. I’m off for some wine.”

Leaving the man toothpicking pineapple to his ill-tempered monkey, Spring felt sheepish for having let the rogue inside. He was haunted by childhood fairy-tales in which the aggrieved, uninvited relative arrives at the christening anyway, to curse the child.

It was a mistake to exhort Calvin to keep his mouth shut. Had Spring encouraged enthusiastic participation in the interchange of controversial ideas, Piper might have loitered listlessly in the back, thumbing abstracts. Instead Calvin perched with his pet in the front row of a session on infant mortality, making just the kind of scandal sure to see its way into the Nairobi papers the next day.

“Why are we still trying to reduce infant mortality,” Piper inquired, “when it is precisely our drastic reduction of the death rate that created uncontrolled population growth in the first place? Why not leave it alone? Why not even let it go up a little?” He did not say “a lot”, but might as well have.

The room stirred. Coughs. Heads in hands.

The moderator interceded. “It is well established by now, Dr. Piper, that reduction of infant mortality must precede a drop in fertility. Families have extra children as an insurance factor, and once they find most of those children surviving they adjust their family size accordingly, etc. This is kindergarten demography, Dr. Piper. We can dispense with this level of discussion. Ms Davis—”

“On the contrary,” Calvin pursued. “All of Africa illustrates that fallacy. Death rates have been plummeting since 1950, and birth rates remain high. So we keep more children alive to suffer and starve. I would propose instead that this conference pass a resolution to retract all immunization programmes in countries with growth rates of higher than 2 per cent—”

The session went into an uproar. “Moderator!” cried a woman from the Population Reference Bureau. “Can we please have it on record that this conference does not support the death of babies?”

The next day the headline in Nairobi’s Daily Nation read, “Pop Council Conference: Let Children Die”.

Like everyone else, she had heard he was there, caught the flash of defiant black hair, the screech of his sidekick, and had craned across the rows to find that at least at a distance he hadn’t changed much. When dinners roiled with the infant mortality affair, she found herself sticking up for him: “He just likes to be outrageous. It’s a sport.”

“At our expense,” the woman from the Population Crisis Committee had snapped, and Eleanor got a whiff of what even passing association with Calvin Piper had come to cost you.

His arrival changed the whole conference for her. She found herself drifting off with an obscure secretive smile as if she were still the girl she had been then. Yet she never sought him out. She conceded as the conference convened for its final address that she was afraid to introduce herself in case he drew a blank, which would irremediably damage a memory she still held dear. There weren’t many of those left.

Eleanor knew copious conferees, but not beyond the level of talking shop, so while many parties would take advantage of free air fare to bask for a week in Malindi, Eleanor had not joined up. She was beyond Africa as entertainment. Besides, had she bundled off to the coast, she could picture the evenings all too well: the men getting sozzled at a cheap veranda bar, telling Third World snafu stories; Eleanor increasingly chagrined as they dared one another to be a little bit racist, until they were actually using the word “wogs”. She would have to decide whether to object and make a scene and tighten everyone up but at least defend her principles, or to slip off to her room to pick the flaking skin from the back of her neck, worrying into the mirror, her nose gone hard.

As the rest scattered officiously with planes to catch, Eleanor wandered down the steps with nothing to do. It was too early for dinner and her own flight back to Dar es Salaam was not until the next day She could stroll back to her hotel and pack, but she travelled so lightly now that she was fooling herself—it would take five minutes.

So she dandered down to Kaunda, listlessly scanning shops, most of whose proprietors were Asian, and hardly appreciated by Kenyans for their enterprise. The goods for sale—film, antique colonial silver and the endless taka-taka of soapstone wart-hogs, banana-leaf elephants, and ebony rhinoceroses—did not cater to residents but to the scattering of travellers down the walk, unselfconsciously trussed in khaki safari gear and dopey little hats. Along with the encrusted, sun-scorched backpackers who lay knackered on curbs, Eleanor wondered how the tourists could bear their own cliché, though there was surely some trite niche into which she herself fitted all too neatly. The well-meaning aid worker on a junket. Eleanor sighed.

Everywhere, animals. With the T-shirts covered in zebra stripes, lions’ manes and cheetah spots, you would never imagine that Kenya had a population problem of a human variety. Stifled by the tinny, tacky shame of it all, Eleanor veered from the town centre towards River Road, where the giraffe batiks gave way to jikos, sufurias and mounds of second-hand clothes, among which she was more at home. Touts beat the sides of matatus for still more fares when their passengers were already bulging out of the windows. These privately run minibuses formed the core transport system of Kenya, painted in jubilant zigzags, with names like “Sombo Rider and Road Missile” or “Spirit of Jesus Sex Mashine”, “I Luv Retreads” and “See Me After Job” on the bumpers. Oh, River Road was as tasteless as downtown really, but with a jostling, exuberant trashiness that Eleanor relished. Everyone hustling for a bob, no one in this part of town would fritter their shillings on soapstone wart-hogs in a million years.

Gradually, however, she grew nervous. While the eyes of pedlars and pedestrians just a few blocks away were beseeching or veiled, here they glared, unmistakably hostile. Children pointed at Eleanor, shouting, “Mzungu!” Tall, muscular men knocked her shoulders on purpose. Matatus side-swiped her path as she tried to cross the street. Much as she marvelled at the energy and ingenuity of the neighbourhood, this was their part of town and she didn’t belong here. Everywhere on this continent her complexion blinked like an airstrip light. The one relief of trips to Boston was to walk down the streets and blend in.

She retreated back to Trattoria for tea, tired from her meagre foray, feeling after the feeble excursion that she had been a terribly long way.

Yet when she bent dutifully over papers from the conference, the print blurred, “The Cultural Context of High Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa” having no apparent bearing on the dusty villages to which she bounced her Land Rover monthly. This persistent malaise had been wheedling its way into odd moments over tea with increasing frequency. Perhaps she had malaria again.

She kicked herself for not saying hello to Calvin Piper. If he hadn’t remembered her she could have reminded him. Surely there was no great risk to her precious hope chest of girlhood adventures. Eleanor realized she’d just turned 37 and she was still shy.

She discovered that she had left a scarf on the back of her chair in the last assembly, and hurried to retrieve it before the building closed. She was relieved by mission, however mundane.

The conference centre was still open, though cleared out. In the main hall pages splayed the aisles like wings of dead white birds. On the way to her chair she picked up papers. Eleanor was like that—she tidied. In hotels, she made her own bed and rinsed her own water glasses and hung her towels so neatly they looked unused. Her insistence on being no trouble often got other people into it, with the suggestion they were not doing their job. Today was no exception. A girl in a green uniform came rushing up and waved at Eleanor’s armful. “No, no.” The girl took the pile firmly from the white woman’s hands.

“It seemed such a chore,” Eleanor said in Swahili, flustered and pinkening. She pointed towards her seat, thinking she had to explain (Eleanor always thought she had to explain, when no one wanted to hear really), nodding and smiling too much.

Of course the scarf was gone—what continent did she think she was on? Looking lamely about, Eleanor was about to scuttle out, for the empty hall disturbed her. The party-being-over sensation reminded her too keenly of her recent life lately—so much purpose and opinion suddenly gone slack.

Laughter caught her unawares. In the stripe of chairs, the far rows were rearranged around a familiar gleam of hair, and a monkey.

She drew closer to find Calvin sitting with several other lingerers from the Population Council Conference, none of whom she knew. Their laughter was of a seditious sort, as at something you were not supposed to say.

“Eleanor Merritt.” He did remember.

“I’m sorry to intrude, but—”

“You were forever sorry.” He pulled up a chair for her between him and an older woman, who shot her an icy smile. “Eleanor works for Pathfinder: opulent funding, international profile and well run—” he paused—“for a waste of time. But Ms Merritt has risen high. From hard work, no doubt. She cares about humanity. Ms Merritt,” he submitted to the group, “is a good person.”

“Not always,” she defended. “Sometimes I’m a shrew.”

Calvin laughed. “I would love to see it. Promise me.”

He had called her bluff. She could hardly remember being a shrew; not because she was gracious but because she was a coward. Eleanor vented her temper exclusively on objects—pens that wouldn’t write, cars that wouldn’t start, the telephones-cum-doorstops that littered any Third World posting. The more peaceable her relations with people, the more the inanimate teemed with malevolence.

“The Pathfinder Fund,” Calvin explained, “belongs to that dogged IUD-in-the-dyke school, flogging the odd condom while the population happily doubles every eighteen years. When the fertility rate plummets from 6.9 to 6.87, they take credit, and Ford slips them a cheque.”

“It is incredibly arrogant,” said Eleanor, “to march into someone else’s culture and tell them how many children to have. Raising the status of women and giving them power over their own reproduction is the best way to reduce the birth rate—”

“There is nothing wrong with arrogance,” said Calvin, “so long as you are right.”

“Besides,” interjected the upright, withered woman at Eleanor’s side, “improving the status of women is not pursued as an end in itself, but with an eye to a declining birth rate. You do not get your funding from Ford by promising to give women control over their lives, but by claiming you can reduce population growth. It’s duplicitous. If they were no guiding hand of population control, you wouldn’t pull in any money, would you?”

“All that matters,” Calvin dismissed, “is that family planning does not work. I am reminded of those women in Delhi employed by the city to mow metropolitan lawns. They use scissors. I picture those tiny clinics pitched in the middle of oblivious, fecund hordes much like Eleanor sent to mow the whole of Tsavo game park with her Swiss Army knife.”

Eleanor hugged her elbows. Calvin put a hand on her knee. “You think I’m criticizing you. No, I’m agog you keep snipping away. It’s bloody marvellous.”

“Can you suggest what else there is to do?”

“We sorted things out for India not ten minutes ago,” he noted brightly. “Institute free amniocentesis. As soon as the mother finds out it’s a girl, the foetus mysteriously disappears. Produce an entire generation of sons. In sixty, seventy years 840 million Asians would die out completely. Neat, don’t you agree?”

Eleanor was acutely sensitive to when people were waiting for her to leave. Calvin stopped her. “Dinner?”

He’d ridiculed her work. He’d abused her in front of his friends. Eleanor said she’d be delighted, and worried what to wear.

Described in guidebooks as “a restaurant that wouldn’t look out of place in Bavaria or rural England”, The Horseman was in the heart of Karen, if Karen could be said to have one. Named after Karen Blixen, the suburb was one of the last white enclaves of Kenya, museumed with mummified women who got too much sun when they were young, women who never carried their own groceries. They were the last of the English to say frightfully. Yet they still gave their change to little boys outside the dukas, and Karen’s beggars were flush.

Aware that ladies are advised to arrive at engagements a tad late, Eleanor took a taxi to Karen early.

“Madam! Please, madam!”

In the car-park she was accosted by a hawker carrying some heavy black—thing. It took her a moment to discern the object, at which point she was hooked into a dialogue that would cost her. “Only 150, I work very hard, madam! You see, msuri sana. Please, madam! I have six children and they are so hungry …”

The kempt and ingenuous young man held before her a carving of an enormous African family. The carving was awful enough to start with, but had been mucked over with tar. Eleanor was reluctant to touch it.

“I don’t—” she fumbled. “I’m travelling, I can’t—”

“Please, madam!”

The please-madams were not going to stop. She could not claim to have no money, she could not simply walk away from a man who was speaking to her, and some forms of freedom must be bought.

Consequently, she met Calvin in the lounge of The Horseman trying to keep the big dark monster from her dress.

“For me? You shouldn’t have.”

“I shouldn’t have,” she confessed woefully. “He wouldn’t go away.”

“There’s the most miraculous word in the English language: no. Most children learn it before the age of two.”

“This is just what I need,” she said, as the head waiter led them to their table, glancing at her souvenir with disapproval. “A carving of the happy twelve-child family for my clinic.”

“You haven’t changed,” Calvin lamented.

Eleanor could no more focus on the menu than on conference papers at Trattoria. The prospect of food was mildly revolting: a warning sign. In the company of men she’d no interest in she was voracious.

Calvin decided for them both. “The game,” he announced, “is delectable.” His smile implied a double entendre that went right past her.

“So,” he began. “You’re still so passionate?”

She blushed. “In what regard?”

“About your work,” he amended. “The underprivileged and oppressed and that.”

“If you mean have I become jaded—”

“Like me.”

“I didn’t say—”

“I said. But it’s hard to picture you jaded.”

“I could learn. I see it happen in aid workers every day. You keep working and it doesn’t make any difference until eventually you find your efforts comic. But when you start finding all sympathy maudlin and all goodwill suspect, you think you’ve gotten wise, that you’ve caught the world on, when really you’ve just gotten mean.”

“You think I’m mean?”

“You were, a little,” she admitted. “At the KICC this afternoon. This is Eleanor, Exhibit A: the hopeless family planning worker, beavering away in her little clinics among the—‘fecund hordes’?”

He smiled and said as gently as one can say such a thing, “You still don’t have a sense of humour.”

“I don’t see why it’s always so hilarious to believe in something.”

“Why didn’t you tell me to sod off?”

“Because when people are wicked to me, I don’t get angry, I get confused. Why should anyone pick on Eleanor? I’m harmless.”

“It’s harmless people who always get it in the neck. Why can’t you learn to fight back?”

“I hate fighting. I’d rather go away.”

They talked, as expatriates did incessantly, about Africa, though Eleanor suspected this was the definition of being a stranger here. Real Africans, she supposed, never sat around at dinner talking about Africa.

“I should feel lucky,” said Calvin. “Not everyone gets to witness the destruction of an entire continent in his lifetime. Of course, if I had my way I would kick every sunburnt white boy off this continent. But not without putting mortality back where we found it, so these witless bastards don’t reproduce themselves into spontaneous cannibalism. Import a few tsetse fly, sprinkle the Ngongs with tubercle bacillus, unpack the smallpox virus the WHO keeps in cold storage in Geneva. Did you know that we preserve diseases? The eagles are endangered, but the germs are safe.”

“What about development?”

“Develop into what, mind you? Pizza Hut? No, what Africa could use is some good old-fashioned regression.”

“It’s seen plenty of that.” Her smoked trout starter was exquisite, and only made her ill.

“Not enough. I’d remove every felt-tip, digestive biscuit and gas-guzzling pick-up from Algiers to Cape Town.” Calvin disposed of his boar pâté in a few bites. “Go back to Homo sapiens as pack animals, huddled around fires, cowering in trees and getting shredded by lions to keep the numbers down. No campaigns for multiparty democracy, no crummy tabloids, no Norwegian water projects. Just life, birth and death in the raw, busy enough and awful enough that you never have a chance to think about it before a hyena bites off your leg.”

“Back to the garden,” Eleanor mused.

“You never saw it, Eleanor, but when I first came to Kenya in 1960 this country was paradise.” He gestured to the tarry horror that would not quite fit under her chair. “No watu with their hands out every time you tie your shoe.”

“Don’t you imagine any twenty-year-old here for the first time is just as knocked out?”

“What knocks them out is it’s grotty and crowded and nothing works. And all right, so the Africans should get their Walkmans like everyone else. So Africa isn’t special. But when I came here it was. So there’s nowhere to go, nowhere special. So it’s every man’s right to be garish, filthy and completely lacking in foresight. Terrific.”

Eleanor glanced warily at their waiter as he brought her main course; he spoke English. “You sound like a child who’s had his playground closed.”

“Don’t imagine I’m reminiscing about how smoothly the country ran under colonial rule. No, when there was no telephone system not to work, no electricity to go off, no water piping to over-extend—now, that is working smoothly.”

“Well,” ventured Eleanor cautiously, “Africans do have a right to telephones, electricity and running water—don’t they?”

Calvin withered her with a look of excruciating weariness.

“Then, you should be happy,” Eleanor backed off, relieved the waiter was no longer listening. “Most Africans have no such amenities, do they? Of which I’m painfully, and constantly, aware. In shops, I put a chocolate bar on the counter, next to a woman with two kilos of posho and a little fermented milk with which she has to feed the whole family for a week—I put the candy back. Everywhere I go on this continent I feel ashamed. I’m tired of it, Calvin. I am dying, dying of shame.”

“They like posho. Africans do not identify with your life at all. They see white people the way you look at oryx.”

“Hogwash. They want cars and I have one. Try and tell me they don’t resent that.”

“Give your flipping car away, then.”

“That won’t change anything.”

“That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said. And at least—” he pointed to her hartebeest—“you now eat your dinner.”

In 1972 they had both attended a Population and Environment conference in Nairobi, when the KICC was brand-new and conferences had seemed better than junkets; at least to Eleanor, who was only twenty-one, an intern with the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and fresh from the Peace Corps. Calvin had just joined USAID himself, and asked her to dine at the Hilton. His fourteen-year seniority had daunted her then, and maybe that’s why she’d felt compelled to make a fool of herself: because he was so much older and more important and she had no idea why he would go out with her. She was only aware in later years, once her looks had begun to slip, that she had once been rather pretty.

Half-way through dinner at the luxury hotel, she had been overcome by nausea. Calvin had done most of the talking; she was sure he would pick up the bill and could not see how her company had earned so much as a hard roll. She was gripped by anxiety that she had no personality at all, and concluded that if she had failed to concoct it by twenty-one it was time to make one up.

“I can’t eat this,” she announced, fists on the cloth. “I’m sorry. The idea of our sitting here paying hundreds of shillings for shellfish while people right outside the door starve—it makes me sick.”

Calvin nimbly kept eating. “If you truly have ambitions to work in the Third World, young lady, you’ll have to develop a less delicate stomach.”

“How can you!” she exclaimed, exasperated as he started on another prawn. “After we’ve spent all day forecasting worldwide famine by the year 2000!”

“That’s just the kind of talk that whets my appetite.”

“Well, it kills mine.”

“If you feel so strongly about it,” he suggested, “go feed them your dinner.”

Eleanor had picked up her plate and left the restaurant. One of the waiters came running after her, since she’d marched off with their china. Eleanor looked left and right and had to walk a couple of blocks to find a beggar, and was promptly confronted with the logistical problem of delivering her food aid and returning the plate. So she stood dumbly by the cripple with elephantiasis, whose eyes were either uncomprehending or insulted. He rattled his tin, where she could hardly muck shrimp, now could she? It struck her, as saffron sauce dripped from the gilt-edged porcelain, that just because you could not walk did not mean you had no standards of behaviour, which parading about Nairobi with a half-eaten hotel entrée after dark clearly did not meet. She groped in her jeans for the coins she knew were not there; her notes were back in her purse. Shrugging, she turned under the stern, disparaging gaze of the dispossessed and shuffled back to the Hilton, where the waiter stood outside with hands on hips. Eleanor ducked around the corner and scraped the rest of her dinner into the gutter.

Back at the table, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him she’d thrown it away, but she didn’t regale him with tales of the grateful needy either. Instead she sulked, quieter and less entertaining than ever. At the end of the meal, Calvin inquired, with that delicate ironic smile he had refined even as a young man, whether her friends outside would like dessert. Eleanor glowered and asked for tea.

They had taken a walk and ended up in Calvin’s room at the Norfolk, and at three in the morning he had had to ring room service for sandwiches when Eleanor confessed she was famished.

I’ll grant that was histrionic,” she recalled, studying the glistening red game on her fork while the waiter filled her wine glass with an obsequious flourish. “But I still feel self-conscious, eating in places like this. I may finish my dinner, but I haven’t changed my mind that it’s unfair.”

“So tell me,” asked Calvin, “if you had your way, you’d make the world over into one big Scandinavia? Generous dole, long paid maternity leaves and every meal with a compulsory salad. Where every can is recycled and the rivers run clean.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Justice is a bore. Order is a bore. No one on this planet has any vision.”

“Well, we’re hardly in danger of all that perfection.”

“They are in Scandinavia. And look at them: they shoot themselves in the head.”

“So you think it’s better, less boring, that we sit carving slices of kongoni with good silver while half this city can’t find a pawpaw tonight?”

“You’re focused on the wrong level, Eleanor,” he said impatiently. “Prawns to beggars. Your sensation of unfairness doesn’t help anyone, does it?”

“I’m still ashamed,” she said staunchly.

“But it is not white, well-off Eleanor who feels ashamed, it is Eleanor. If you were Number Two wife grinding maize, you would feel ashamed—of your shabby clothes, of the woeful prospects for your ten malnourished children, of the fact you could not read. By what, really, are you so mortified?”

She shrugged. “Being here, I guess. Not Africa, anywhere. In some regards I’ve chosen perfectly the wrong field, though I doubt by accident. We all talk about over-population, but most of us don’t regard the problem as applying to ourselves. We think that means there are too many of them. I don’t. I think it includes me. I feel unnecessary. I feel a burden. I think that’s my biggest fear, too, being a burden. I’m constantly trying to make up for something, to lighten the load of my existence. I never quite do enough. I use non-returnable containers and non-biodegradable plastic and non-renewable petroleum for my car. I cost too much. I’m not worth the price.”

“Is this what they mean by low self-esteem?”

Eleanor laughed.

“Why not jump off a bridge?”

“That would hurt my parents. I’m trapped.”

“You can’t possibly have persuaded yourself this shame of yours has the least thing to do with environmental degradation and African poverty?”

“Some,” she defended. “I know that sounds pretentious. At any rate they make it worse.”

“So you have not remained passionate. You realize what you do for a living doesn’t make a hair’s dent in population growth, which is the only thing that would pull this continent’s fate out of the fire. You refuse to become jaded. So what has happened to you? I haven’t seen you in sixteen years.”

She smiled wanly. “I think it’s called ordinary depression. And,” she groped, “I get angry, a little. Instead of helping the oppressed, I seem to have joined them: they oppress me. And after all these years in Africa, I’ve grown a little resentful. OK, I’m white, but I didn’t colonize this place and I was never a slave trader and I didn’t fashion a world where some people eat caviare and the rest eat corn. It’s not my fault. It’s not my personal fault. Anger may be too strong a word, but I am getting annoyed.”

“You are finished, madam?” He had been waiting for her to conclude for five minutes.

“Yes, it was very good. I’m sorry I couldn’t eat it all, perhaps you could—”

“Don’t even think about it,” Calvin interrupted.

It was true that a doggie bag back at her hotel would only rot. “Never mind,” she added. “But thank you. The food was lovely. Asante sana, bwana.” The waiter shot her a smile that suggested he was not used to being thanked, though she couldn’t tell if he thought she was especially nice or especially barmy.

“If you want my advice,” Calvin continued. “You’re not married, are you?”

He might have asked earlier. “No.”

“You could use some small, private happiness.”

“Right,” Eleanor muttered, “mail order.”

“At least buy yourself a new dress.”

“What’s wrong with this one?”

“It’s too long and dark and the neck is much too high. And at your age, should you still be wearing bangs?”

“I’ve always worn bangs!”

“Exactly. And do you realize that you do not have to look at the world the way you have been taught? There are perspectives from which starving people in Africa do not matter a toss. Because your dowdy sympathy is not helping them, and it is certainly not helping you.”

They ordered coffee and Calvin cheerfully popped chocolates. “I am advising that you don’t merely have to get married,” he pursued. “There are intellectual avenues at your disposal. You can allow yourself to think abominations. There are a few ineffectual restraints put on what you may do, but so far no one can arrest you for what goes on in your head.”

“I don’t see what kind of solution that is, to get nasty.”

“This is a short life, Eleanor—thank God.” He spanked cocoa from his hands. “And what happens in it is play. Rules are for the breaking. If you knew what I thought about, you’d never speak to me again.”

She ran her thumb along her knife. “Are you trying to frighten me?”

“I hope so. You’re better off avoiding my company. It has even occurred to me—this we share—that I should no longer be here myself.”

“You mean Africa?”

“I do not mean Africa.”

“What are all these atrocities in your head you think would put me off?”

“For starters, I’m no longer persuaded by good and evil.”

“That’s impossible. You can’t live without morality.”

“It’s quite possible, and most people do. They manipulate morality to their advantage, but that is a process distinct from being guided by its principles. Moreover—” His fingers sprang against each other and his eyes were shining—“I don’t like human beings.”

“Thanks.”

“Astute of you to take it personally. Most people imagine I mean everyone but them.”

“You’re trying awfully hard to ensure I don’t dine with you again. Why isn’t it working?”

“Because you agree with me on much of what I’ve said, and especially on what I haven’t. All these dangers you skirt, Eleanor—cynicism, apathy, fatigue: the pits in which you fear you’ll stumble—they are all yourself. You are an entirely different person than you pretend, Ms Merritt, and I suppose that is frightening. Though my advice would be, of course: jump in the pit.

“Alternatively, you can claim, no Dr. Piper, I really am a prim, right-thinking spinster, and I will die of malaria in the bush helping improve maternal health. As well you may.”

The waiter brought the bill, folded in leather and presented on a silver tray like an extra treat. Eleanor asked, “How do you make a living now?”

“Spite.”

“I don’t know that paid.”

“It doesn’t pay for one’s victims, that’s definite.”

She considered fighting over the bill, or suggesting they split it, but somehow, with Calvin, she’d let him pay. For how many bills had she grabbed, how many had she divided painfully to the penny? She felt a rebellion from a funny place, one she did not know very well, but about which she was curious.

“Good,” he commended, signing his name. “You didn’t. That,” he announced, “was from the pit.”

“You said you don’t like people. Do you include yourself?”

“First and foremost. I know what I am. I told you, I shouldn’t be here. But that kind of mistake, it’s been made all through history.” He helped her with her jacket. “Sometimes, however, I remember what I was. I can get wistful. It’s disgusting.”

“You mean you were different before USAID kicked you out?”

“Once I was division head, my friend, I was already an error. No, before that. Perhaps another time.”

“I thought I was supposed to avoid you.”

“You won’t. I can rescue you, which you require. But my airlift will cost you, cost you everything you presently are. You can content yourself that means losing little enough.”

“You’re being unkind, Calvin.”

“I am being sumptuously kind, Ms Merritt.”

Eleanor considered abandoning the sticky carving under the table, but couldn’t saddle the staff with its disposal. Dutifully, she hauled it out, as if the heavy dark lump inside her had become so tangible that it sat by her feet at dinner.

Calvin gave her a ride to town. Eleanor mentioned there was a good chance Pathfinder would transfer her to Nairobi.

“I know,” said Calvin. “They are going to put you in charge of Anglophone Africa. Otherwise I might not have bothered to see you tonight.”

“What a lovely thought.”

“It was. You don’t tend to notice when you’re being flattered.”

He dropped her at the Intercontinental. In parting, he was a perfect gentleman—regrettably.

chapter two
Family Planning from the Tar Pits

It was nearly a year before Eleanor was transferred to Nairobi, and not a very good one. She neglected to visit her clinics with her former regularity, and spent many an afternoon with a wet towel around her neck rather than drive to Morogoro to deliver pills that clients persistently took all at once.

Furthermore, Tanzanian villages, and Dar itself, were beginning to waft with the gaunt, empty-eyed spectre of widespread HIV. Weak, matchstick mothers would arrive at Pathfinder’s clinics and there was absolutely nothing to do. The irony of trying to prevent more births in towns where up to half the adult population was dying was not lost on Eleanor, nor was it lost on her patients. Contraception in these circumstances transformed from a perverse Western practice to flagrant insanity. And it shattered Eleanor to watch families bankrupt themselves on bogus witchdoctor therapies, even if she conceded that her own people’s medicines were no more effective.

Through the long, white days with little to distract her, she did think of Calvin. She abjured herself to expect little, despite his mystical talk. So many wazungu, after a steady newspaper diet of possessed grandmothers, curses of impotence and whole villages running riot from the spirits of the ancestors, began to talk a pidgin witchcraft of their own.

She pondered the contradiction between the icy things he said and the warmth she felt in his presence, as if Calvin’s coldness calloused the same helpless sympathy she fell prey to herself. There are people who find it easy to be generous in theory but can’t be bothered by the real problems of anyone who smells bad; there are others attracted to being hard in theory but who will involve themselves, impulsively, in finding you a house. That, if she didn’t miss her guess, was Calvin.

Eleanor employed a mental exercise—with that car, not always hypothetical—that sorted her friends out in a hurry: it is past midnight, she is driving back to her prefab, she is still miles out. The Land Rover stalls; the battery is old, scummy and shorting out. She has a radio, but you do not call the AAA in Tanzania. Whom does she raise on shortwave? And whom, even if it means curling up in the seat till morning, does she not? Oddly, she knew she could call Calvin, who would arrive jolly as you please with a crate of beer, to make a night of it. She thought he was a nice man. To the very end, she would maintain he was a nice man.

“Duplicitous” as her organization had so recently been described, the idea of family planning as a means of population control in a country where contraceptive prevalence remained below 5 per cent was absurd, so Eleanor didn’t think in terms of demographics any more. She regarded herself as providing an everyday service, even if Pathfinder did get its support from agencies with bolder designs. She consoled herself there were times in her own life that she was grateful for the Pill, and to extend this opportunity for pleasure without consequences seemed a reputable calling, if not very glamorous. For she no longer imagined she was preventing worldwide famine or raising the standard of living for the poor. In lowering the sights of her work, she found it duller, but no longer ridiculous. She had helped a few unmarried girls escape the wrath of their families; a handful of already overworked mothers—and in this country women did everything—find a contraceptive they could hide from their husbands, whose precious manhood would be insulted if they discovered their wives used birth control.

In Eleanor’s case, the pills had worked a bit too well. As she drew into her late thirties, the age at which many of her clients became grandmothers, even her own workers felt sorry for her. Among some tribes of East Africa a childless woman was a contagion, isolated in a separate hut outside the village, not allowed to touch pregnant wives, and sometimes stoned for being hexed. In Eleanor’s darker moods the word barren would take on an interior complexion as she scanned the hot, dead landscape, unsure why she was here, her face so dry—she was out of moisturizer again. She submitted good-naturedly to nurses’ teasing about visiting gentlemen from USAID or Ford, but the men never stayed longer than a few days and were odiously well behaved (or simply odious). It was when the teasing stopped that the situation got under her skin, the downcast shaking heads when one more prospect had fled. These were the times, in private, when she snapped pens that didn’t write, threw the phone to the floor and pulled maliciously at condoms, stretching them at her desk and burning holes in the rubber with smoking matches.

It’s funny how you just assume you will get married.

No, if you were born when Eleanor was, you don’t say married; you say, or something like it, since the word is sullied from too many wiped hands. But still you have a picture in your mind of a time when everything will be different; when there are no more days you simply haven’t a taste for; when something is settled. In a furry, indistinct form Eleanor had always seen a whole other life beginning at about thirty-five; she was now thirty-seven. Pole-pole, she was admitting to herself, like cracking open a door, that all women did not get married—or something like it—and though she was an independent, successful Career Girl, the grey shaft of her future that slatted through that crack split down her head like the slice of an axe.

Eleanor looked forward to Nairobi, at least a city where she could buy face cream; all that shops in Dar stocked was curling shelf-paper. And she was ready for the extra remove of a higher position. While Eleanor had been pressuring Pathfinder to integrate contraceptive services with broader health care, in the interim her clinics were barraged with cases of young children with ringworm and TB, and the nurses could only offer depo-provera. Mothers would come in for vitamins and walk out with spermicide, a little dazed, not sure what had happened. It was painful and impolitic. Eleanor didn’t want to watch any more; she was ready for one giant step back from suffering, and she was nagged by the insipid mystery of what anyone was suffering for.

She even considered declining the post and returning to the States, but while like any astute Westerner she knew she would never belong in Africa, she no longer fitted in the US either. When she returned for meetings in Boston, she found conversation banal. These days all that the women talked about was aerobic dancing, calories consumed per lap while running circles in tiny shorts, while on the other side of the world their counterparts kept in shape by trudging ten miles for water and carting fifty pounds of firewood. Most Americans assumed a blank, tolerant expression as she described the food dependency created by Third World cash crops; they saved their own indignation for passive smoking. She wondered if she would ever be able to return to a country that was sinking millions of dollars into research on fat and sugar substitutes that had no food value at all.

The night before Eleanor left, her staff threw her a party, driving in from clinics all over Tanzania with beans and curried goat. As nurses corked the basin in her prefab and filled it with vodka and passion fruit squash, they traded the latest rumours on side-effects. The usual fear that an IUD could lance a man’s penis had become so elaborated that it was now commonly accepted that the device could stick a man and woman together permanently until they were surgically separated in hospital. Eleanor remarked that any contraceptive which would stick a man and woman together permanently might fetch a pretty penny in the States.

For all the jollity and risqué repartee, Eleanor went to bed depressed, feeling she had gone into a line of work for which she was no longer qualified. Staring one more night up at the mosquito netting draping to the sides of her bed, with its taunting resemblance to a bridal canopy, Eleanor felt presumptuous advising any other woman about making love when she herself had forgotten what it was like.

That morning her secretary’s tap on her office door was unusually timid. “Yes?”

“Excuse me, memsahib,” said Mary, who would ordinarily call her Eleanor and speak in Swahili. “I have trouble.” Her boyfriend, she went on to explain, had beaten her because she refused to give him all her Pathfinder salary, and she was sure he would only spend the money on beer. She had to look out for her children. She had been to the police before, and they had arrested him, but he had bribed his way out of custody and returned last week to beat her again. Indeed, Eleanor knew this story, for Mary had shown up for work with a swelling on her temple from a spanner, and the wound had still not healed.

“So you see,” she concluded, touching the bandage, “if he is to be locked away for good I must pay the police myself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I am afraid … Soon I will be unable to leave my house and go to work for the fear he is waiting …”

Eleanor, absorbed in packing the last bits of her office away and checking her watch for how much time there was before the plane, was taking a while to get the message. “Mary, I have to—”

“My money for this month—” She looked to her hands. “It is finished.”

Eleanor was a soft touch anyway, and the party the night before had melted her all the more. Besides, she had been raised on the importance of empowering battered women. She peeled off some notes from her small remaining roll of Tanzanian currency.

Mary had no sooner thanked her and departed than the knocking began again. One of the driver’s children needed glasses—without them the boy was falling badly behind in school. The roll got smaller.

By the time the tapping resumed a sixth time, however, Eleanor was at her wits’ end. She needed to put finishing touches on the project reports for her successor, the electricity was off again, the low-battery light was winking on the computer and in an hour she had to leave for the airport. When she opened the door, Eleanor was sick with disappointment. The little nurse who stood there, Nomsa, had never said much but had been unusually sweet and competent, with a shy, fragile smile, always willing to stay late in the day. She did immaculate work and had never asked for anything before and Eleanor had thought she was special. But there she stood like the rest, hands guiltily clutched behind her back, all dressed up as if she were on her way to church.

“I don’t have any more!” Eleanor cried.

Nomsa backed out of the doorway with wide eyes, nimbly stooped at the step and ran away. Only when Eleanor was locking up her office for the last time did she spot the little package in crumpled, resmoothed Christmas wrapping paper and a banana-leaf bow.

Perhaps it was that picture of being rescued in the scrub at midnight that inspired her to ring Calvin to meet her flight, for the dark plain, in her head, was where she found herself, even as the wheels touched down in the unremitting good weather of daytime Kenya.

“Your people took their time. While your promotion was coming through,” he announced as he took her bag, “eighty-three million bawling babies have bounced on to the planet from nowhere.”

He installed her in a new Land Cruiser. “Spite must be paying mighty well,” she observed.

“Fantastically,” said Calvin.

Something about Calvin discouraged empty chat, so they sat in silence much of the way, Calvin closed off in dark glasses. She had so looked forward to seeing him, always a mistake, and slumped an extra inch lower in the seat, confessing to herself that he was a stranger. Having heard about him for seventeen years had created a sensation of false intimacy. For all the gossip, she would not recall anyone who knew him personally well. Even at their dinner last year, he had used opinion to protect his life. She’d known enough such people, and stared out of the window at the wide, dry fields, not so different from Tanzania, thinking, another African city, the same set of problems from higher up, why was this improvement? What was ever going to change in her life? And what was wrong with it that demanded Calvin’s promised salvation? How could she turn to this man she barely knew and assert, I see it’s bright out, but I am in the dark; I am broken down in the savannah, and the stars are mean; my battery is full of tar?

As they drew into town, the verges thickened with herds of pedestrians in plastic shoes and polyester plaids. Where were all these people going? From where had they come? As the population density multiplied, the muscles visibly tightened on Calvin’s arms.

“Most of the arable land in this country,” said Calvin, “has been subdivided already down to tracts the size of a postage stamp. Farmers grow their mingy patch of maize and still have eight kids. That’s real child abuse. What are those children to do? So they all head for the city. Nairobi is growing at 8 per cent a year. No jobs. I don’t know how any of these hard-lucks eat. Meanwhile their people back in the village expect them to send money. From where? They should never have come here. They should have stayed home.”

“But I thought you said there was no work for them in the countryside.”

“I mean real home. The big, happy, careless world of nonexistence. Where the rent is low and the corn grows high.”

Eleanor never knew what to say when he talked this way.

“Nothing,” Calvin growled on, “rankles me like these pink-spectacled tulip-tiptoers who claim technological advance is going to sort everything out pretty. You should hear Wallace Threadgill gibber about hybrid crops and the exciting future of intensive agriculture: multiple storeys of artificially lit fields like high-rise car-parks. How likely is that, in a country where just a dial tone is an act of God? I assure you, Africans are not the only ones who believe in magic.”

They were passing Wilson Airport, where several dozen Kenyans gripped the chain-link, transfixed by take-offs. Later she’d discover they could gawk at banking two-seaters all day. She admired their sense of wonder, but how many of those men on the wrong side of the fence would ever board an aeroplane?

At last they arrived at Eleanor’s new home, a two-storey terraced-house, what Africans think an American would like. The rooms were square and white, and there was too much furniture, cheap veneer and brand-new. The kitchen was stacked with matching heat-proof dishware and matching enamel cooking pots with nasty little orange daisies.

“Imagine,” sighed Eleanor, “coming all the way to Africa for this.”

“Early New Jersey,” he conceded.

“I’d rather they’d put me down in a slum.”

“Not these slums. Stroll through Mathare enough afternoons and you will come to love your Corningware coffee cups. You will return home to take deep, delighted lungfuls of the faintly chemical, deodorized air wafting off your plastic curtains. You will never forget, after the first few days, to lock your door, and you will sleep with the particular dreamless peace of a woman without ten other people in the same bed.”

Eleanor collapsed into a vinyl recliner, which stuck to her thighs. “I’m supposed to be grateful? I’m supposed to run about merrily flushing the toilet and being amazed?”

Calvin turned towards the door, and Eleanor’s imagination panicked through her evening. It was now late afternoon. The light would soon be effervescent, although Eleanor would be immune to it, and in the way of the Equator would die like a snapped overhead. Supposing she found a shop, she would return to New Jersey with white bread, an overripe pineapple, a warm bottle of beer. She wouldn’t be hungry; she’d nothing to read; and she hadn’t seen a phone. So she’d haggle with the pineapple, dig the spines out and leave the detritus to collect fruit flies by morning. Back in the recliner, she would quickly kill the beer with syrupy fingers, staring at her noise-proof ceiling tiles, listening to the hum of neon—she should have bought a second beer but now it was too late; she wasn’t sleepy and it was only eight o’clock—the time of tar.

Hand on the doorknob, Calvin laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said, finally raising his sun-glasses, “I won’t abandon you here.” He lifted her lovingly as the chair sucked at her skin with its promise of evenings to come, already imprinted with the sweaty impression of a Good Person and her too-effective family planning, lying in wait for tomorrow night and another tacky expanse of brown vinyl hell.

When he drove her out she didn’t ask where they were going since she didn’t care, so long as it was away from that chair.

“The driving here,” Calvin ventured mildly, “now that is population control.”

For some time they were stuck behind a lorry full of granite, with a boy splayed on the rocks, craning over the exhaust pipe to take deep lungfuls of black smoke. Eleanor shuddered.

“It gets them high,” Calvin explained.

“It’s carbon monoxide!”

The sun had barely begun to set when Calvin pulled into the Nairobi Game Park, which suited her. She hated safaris, but did enjoy animals, especially tommies and hartebeests, the timid step and frightened eyes with which she identified. The park, so close to the centre of town, was an achievement of preservation in its extent. Yet after an hour of teeming the criss-crossed dirt tracks, they had seen: one bird. Not a very big bird. Not a very colourful bird. A bird.

Calvin parked on a hill, with a view of the plains, and nothing moved. “Had enough?”

“How strange.”

“The sprawl of Ongata Rongai has cut off migrations. All that granite in the backs of lorries, it’s for more squat grey eye-sores up the road. Happy homes for the little nation builders. The animals can’t get back in the park.”

However, as the horizon bled, the plain rippled with shadow like the ghosts of vanquished herds galloping towards the car, the air cooling with every wave as their one bird did its orchestral best. The hair rose on Eleanor’s arms. “It’s gorgeous, Dr. Piper. Sorry.”

Defeated, he reversed out to reach the gate before it closed.

I’ve worked in India,” Calvin resumed with a more contemplative voice in the sudden dark. “There’s something attractive about reincarnation—with a basis in physics—that energy is neither created nor destroyed. But when you’ve a worldwide population that doubles in forty years, the theory has some simple arithmetic problems: where do you get all those extra souls? So I reason the species started out with, say, a hundred whole, possibly even noble spirits. When we exceeded our pool of a hundred, these great souls had to start subdividing. Every time a generation doubles, it halves the interior content of the individual. As we’ve multiplied, the whole race has become spiritually dilute. Like it? I’m a science fiction fan.”

“Is that how you feel? Like a tiny piece of a person?”

“Perhaps. But from the zombies I’ve seen walking this town, there must be a goodly number of folk who didn’t get a single sliver of soul at all.”

“You’ve an egregious reputation, Calvin. But that’s the first time I’ve heard you say something truly dangerous.”

“Stick around.”

He pulled into a drive, and she guessed they were near Karen again.

Calvin’s home was modestly sized, and in daylight she would find it a surprisingly sweet brick cottage creepered with bougainvillaea, when she pictured the lair of a famous doomsayer more like the flaming red caves of Apocalypse Now. In fact, most of the conservation Jeremiahs with which this neighbourhood was poxed lived in pristine, lush, spacious estates that made you wonder where they got their ideas from. Inside, too, Eleanor was struck by how normal his rooms looked, though he did not go in for the carvings and buffalo bronzes that commonly littered the white African household. Instead she found the room towered with journals and mountainous tatters of clippings. The bookshelves were lined in science fiction, with a smattering of wider interests: Chaos, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Executioner’s Song and a biography of Napoleon. All the records and CDs were classical save a recording of Sweeney Todd. There was a touch of the morbid in his Francis Bacon prints, their faces of hung meat, and in the one outsized bone on his coffee table that could only have come from an elephant, but the femur had blanched in the sun until porous like driftwood. It was not deathly, merely sculptural, suggesting that anything killed long enough ago retires from tragedy to knick-knack.

She inspected two framed photos on the wall. The first was of a black diver in a wet suit, her hood down and short hair beaded. The face itself was small, the chin sharp and narrow; but the eyes were enormous and at this angle showing an alarming amount of white. The girl had great buck teeth which were somehow, in their startling, unapologetic dominance of the thin lower lip, attractive. The smile was carnivorous, and she was clutching a diving knife—“what little good it did her”, Calvin would remark later. Though the young woman was beautiful in some inexplicable way, the face was haunting and a little fearsome, all eyeball and grin, and the contours of cheek or chin, the tiny body they guarded, would always seep away in Eleanor’s memory however many times she’d study the photo when Calvin wasn’t in. It was a face you wouldn’t want to come upon in the dark, though that is exactly when it would float before her, gloating with all that underworldly power that Eleanor herself felt cheated of.

The second photo was of Calvin, posed in a cocky stetson and muddy safari gear, one hand akimbo and the other on a blunderbuss, with a rumpled grey mountain range behind him. Calvin, too, was grinning here. He did not have the girl’s enormous teeth, but both sinister smiles and sidelong glances alluded to the same unsaid. They seemed to be looking at each other. Eleanor felt excluded.

In the safari photo Calvin could not have been more than twenty-five, and the image challenged her original assessment from across the conference hall that he had not changed. Oh, he’d lost some hair, which lengthened his forehead and made him look more intelligent; and the weather had leathered him, for here he was seamless and by the time she met him he had already slipped into that indeterminate somewhere between thirty-five and sixty that certain men seem able to maintain until they’re ninety-two and of which women, who have no such timeless equivalent, are understandably jealous. Yet none of this transformation was interesting. In the picture his stare was searing; now Calvin’s eyes had gone cold. They no longer glinted like sapphire but glared like marble.

She did a double take. The mountain range was a stack of dead elephants.

“In the early sixties I culled for the Ugandan game authorities,” Calvin explained. “They were the first on the continent to realize they had a population problem. Despite a two-year gestation, elephants multiply like fury. And they devastate the land—tear trees up by the roots, trample the undergrowth. By the time we arrived the vegetation was stripped, and other species were dying out. Left to their own devices, elephants eliminate their own food supply. In earlier times, they’d migrate to wreck some other hapless bush, and slowly the fauna they plundered would grow back. Now, of course, there’s nowhere for them to go. Once they’ve ruined their habitat, they starve, by the tens of thousands. In short order the species is in danger of extinction. So we were brought in to crop. We took out seven elephants a day for two years.”

“That sounds horrendous.”

“Those were the best years of my life. And the work was a great cure for sentimentality. In culling, you have to shoot whole families. Orphans get peckish.”

“No wonder you have no feeling for infant mortality.”

“That’s right,” he agreed affably. “And it was a professional operation, with full utilization: we’d cut out the tusks, carve up the carcasses and fly the meat back to Kampala. Not bad, elephant meat. A little tough.”

“I’m confused—I thought the problem with elephants was poaching.” She fingered one of the stacks of clippings: deforestation, ozone holes, global warming—fifteen solid inches of disaster, teetering from constant additions on the edge of his end table, like the world itself on the brink.

“It is now,” he carried on. “But as soon as you clean up the poaching, over-population sets in again. Why, in Tsavo—Starvo, as it is better known—the Game Department insisted for years their elephants were dying off because of poaching, but that yarn was a front for their own mismanagement. You got game wardens carving out the tusks of emaciated carcasses to make it look as if the animals had been poached; but the real story was the monsters had over-reproduced and torn the place apart until there wasn’t a leaf in the park. It was grotesque. I begged David Sheldrick to let me in there to cull, but no-no.” It was hard to imagine Calvin Piper imploring anyone. “He hated me.”

“Lots of people seem to hate you.”

“Flattering, isn’t it? As usual in issues of any importance, the conflict degenerated to petty vendetta. I said the problem was population; Sheldrick said it was poaching; and the lousy animals got lost in the shuffle. All that mattered to Sheldrick was being right.”

“What mattered to you?”

“Being right, what do you think?”

“Over-population—I thought elephants were endangered.”

“Oh, they are,” he said lightly. “Then, so are we.”

“What’s happening in Starvo now?”

“A few sad little herds left. Now the problem’s poaching, all right. While the elephant community spends its time firing furious, bitchy articles at each other, I’ve retired from the fight. The absurdity of the poaching-population controversy is that they are both problems. If you successfully control poaching but restrict migration, the ungainly pachyderms maraud through the park and then they starve. If you fail to control poaching, they’re simply slaughtered. The larger problem is that humans and elephants cannot coexist. The Africans despise them, and if you’d ever let one of those adorable babies loose in your vegetable patch you’d see why. The only answer, as much as there is one, is stiff patrolling and a regular cull—what they do in South Africa.”

“They would.”

Calvin smiled. “South Africans aren’t squeamish. But here culling has become unpopular. The bunny-huggers have decided that it traumatizes the poor dears; that we create whole parks full of holocaust survivors. And you would like this, Eleanor: they’re now trying to develop elephant contraceptives.”

“Do they work?”

He laughed. “Do they work with people? You should know.”

“I suppose the acceptance rate is rather low.”

“It’s technologically impractical. All that money towards dead-end research just because young girls who take snaps have weak stomachs. But in East African parks, it won’t come to over-population. As human numbers here go over the top, the desperation level rises as steadily as the water table goes down. You know that Kenya has imported the SAS? They use the same shoot-to-kill on poachers as they do on the IRA. Still, as long as a pair of tusks will fetch sterling pound for pound, the poachers will keep trying. And I don’t blame the wretches. If I were some scarecrow villager, I’d probably shoot elephants wholesale. The dinosaurs are doomed anyway, so someone should cash in.”

Calvin’s green monkey had screamed and run away when Eleanor first walked in, but since had climbed to a balcony overhanging the living room with a basket from the kitchen. For the past five minutes, he had been pitching gooseberries from overhead, and the accuracy with which they landed on Eleanor suggested the target was not arbitrary. She had tried politely to pick the green berries from her hair, but the squashed ones were staining her dress. “Um,” she finally objected. “Calvin?”

“Malthus!” Calvin picked up the handful of gooseberries she had neatly piled on the table and threw them back at the monkey, who scurried down the stairs, to assume a glare through the grille from the patio more unsettling than pitched fruit. “Sorry. Malthus doesn’t like guests. Don’t take it personally. Malthus, I suspect, doesn’t even like me.”

“This culling work—” She collected herself, still finding pulp in her cuff. “Is that what got you into demography?”

“Quite. Ah, but graduate school was deadly dry after Murchison Falls … Perhaps demographics was a mistake. Since then my life has been conducted on paper. It’s not my nature. I like aeroplanes, projects, a little bang-bang.”

“Was the work dangerous?”

“Not at all. Shooting those massive grey bull’s-eyes in open grassland was easy as picking off cardboard boxes. And they’re supposed to be so intelligent, but they’re hopelessly trusting. That isn’t intelligent.”

“You don’t talk about elephants with much affection.”

“They make me angry.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“So in your view the elephants have had it?”

It was a little queer. While she had noticed the cold in Calvin’s eyes, they had at least remained dark and clear; but as she watched, a film cast over them. Calvin sat down abruptly as if someone had pushed him. “It doesn’t matter.”

Eleanor cocked her head. “That’s odd. I was getting the impression only a moment ago that wildlife meant a great deal to you.”

“A moment ago it did.” Calvin’s body gave a short jerk, as if starting at the wheel. “Curry,” he said.

Trying to be conversational, Eleanor asked while nibbling her chicken, “What do you think of the AIDS situation in Kenya? Do you expect it will take off?”

“I think far too much is being made of that virus,” he said irritably. “What’s one more deadly disease?”

He didn’t seem to want to discuss it, so she let the subject drop.

chapter three
In the Land of Shit-Fish

For all her training in contraceptive counselling, Eleanor’s work in family planning had less to do with babies than with vehicles. In every organization she was juggling transport, half its fleet forever broken down. Eleanor hated cars; like telephones, computers and other people, they seemed determined to take advantage. While a Land Rover formally came with her job, she was constantly having to lend it back out. Today a botched backstreet abortion case had turned up in their Mathare North Clinic and hers was the only car available to drive the girl discreetly to Kenyatta Hospital for a D and C. As Director she might have refused, but Eleanor Merritt was not that kind of director. And she hardly wanted to admit to her brand-new staff that she was too frightened to drive to Mathare Valley by herself.

As Eleanor turned into the slum, a billboard at its entrance advertised VACATIONAL TRAINING FOR YOUTH, like a promotion for holidays in the South Seas at the entrance of Dante’s Inferno. Far off to the very horizon quilted cardboard and corrugated tin. The road was lined with purveyors, squatting beside piles of plastic shoes, sacks of dried beans, but these were the high-inventory salesmen. Between them, women balanced four potatoes into a pyramid, stacked five small onions, or fussily rearranged three limes that would not pile. Grimmest of the wares were the fish. Brown and curled, dried in the sun, their stacks resembled thin leather sandals more than food, or even, she thought reluctantly, shit on your shoe.

“Mzungu! Mzungu!” The Land Rover attracted attention, and the road had a surface like the moon, so in no time she could barely crawl, surrounded by whooping ragamuffins.

It was curious, though: these kids seemed so good spirited, rolling cigarette-pack trucks on bottle-cap wheels, twirling Mercedes hubcaps on coat-hangers and throwing shrivelled banana skins at starving goats. On whatever cast-off crusts and sandal-fish they had reproduced a few cells, many of the older ones had grown fetching—the girls, superbly tall, who hid behind their hands; the boys, with taut, hairless chests and supple shoulders, who shot her sly, salacious grins she could not help but return. As Calvin would say: they were too dumb to be miserable. Her mind was developing an echo.

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.”

“Well, I don’t blame you. It must be so discouraging. Everyone giving food aid to those poor Ethiopians, who just keep having more babies. And frankly …” Her voice had dropped.

“Sorry?”

“This AIDS palaver. I’ve heard it said, you know, that it’s Nature’s way. Of keeping the balance. Do you think me just too monstrous?”

Wallace was about to say “Yes” when a cold draught raised the hairs on his neck. Even facing away from the door he could feel the room tingle. The girl who didn’t really care if she was a monster clapped delightedly. “Calvin!” she cried, and scampered off.

Wallace forced himself to turn slowly, by which time Evil Incarnate, Inc. had already set up shop at the big round table on the opposite side of the room. Too insecure to arrive without a protective claque, Piper had gathered his dwarfs around him, commanding the whole table so that no one could get at the food, and annexing most of the available chairs in one swoop. Arms extended languidly on either side, he took an audience as his due. That ghastly simian was always a draw, though gurgling fans got their comeuppance soon enough—already, from the sound of a yelp and covering titter, the hateful beast had managed to bite a hand that fed it. Shortly, standing room behind the circle filled up, while energy bled from other corners. Alternative conversations grew lack-lustre while trickles of prima donna pessimism drizzled to Threadgill’s ear: “You realize there are actually some people who believe that human population can expand infinitely?”

Wallace smiled. So Piper had noticed he was here.

Calvin was the prime of a type. They saw only mayhem and degradation, for you can only see what you are, and squalor was what these deformities were made of. Piper would never perceive the canniness of the planet or the ingenuity of his own race, for his vista was smeared with greenhouse gases and acid rain. Would Calvin ever bother to read articles about new high-yield hybrid crops? Or Simon’s irrefutable evidence that far from being a drag on a poor country’s economy, population growth was its greatest asset?

For as often as nihilists concocted “solutions”, they raised the prospect of any salvation to prove it wouldn’t work. All progress was palliative, and their favourite phrase was “too little, too late”. Some were content with keening, others with debauchery. Clubs of Rome lived high, having already consigned their people to the trash heap. There was money in fear, but you had to move quick—Famine! 1975 didn’t sell well in 1976. How many copies of The Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb now yellowed in Oxfam outlets? These gremlins had squealed that civilization was finished ever since it had started. They were a waste and an irritant, but they were decorative.

Should they remain in self-important think-tanks competing over who could concoct the most gruesome scenario for the year 2000, Wallace was content to let them hand-wring their lives away. Another sort of dread merchant, however, he could not conscionably ignore.

Because Calvin Piper had never been all talk. To give credit where due, the man was bright, effective and fantastically well connected. He was a seducer. His ideas, in their extremity, had a sensual thrill. He would never be satisfied with predicting disaster—he would help make it happen.

Wallace might have relaxed when Calvin was fired, reduced back to the Bacon spoiling on the walls of his Karen lair, unemployed. Wallace knew better. The very appearance of inactivity over at that cottage gave him chills. Calvin could not bear to be still; he did not have the spiritual sophistication. Released from the constraints of bureaucracy, Calvin was less demoted than unleashed. Why, that scoundrel had had no visible means of support for the last six years. But look at him: his slacks were linen, his shoes kid and outside the A-frame undoubtedly sat his new four-wheel-drive. What, pray, was he living on? Wallace may have dwelt in the realms of the ancestors for most of the day, but he was still aware that it was on the detail level that you found people out.

It was late enough for Wallace, who liked to be in bed by nine o’clock, to make his exit, but he did not want to appear to be fleeing because Calvin had arrived. Wallace might be repelled but he certainly wasn’t frightened. And there was one woman creeping over to his side of the house who stood out from the rest, if only because of her outfit. Long hem, high neck: she was hiding. Brown hair sloped either side of her face as she tiptoed towards the veranda, hoping to make it the distance of the living room without being caught. When he looked closely, he thought her rather prettier than much of the Lycra-nippled competition, but she did not have the conviction to match. That was half the game with beauty, keeping your head high, and she stared at her sensible shoes. Beauty was deception, and you had to have the shyster’s smooth sleight of hand to pull it off. This one thought of herself as ordinary; consequently, she was. Wallace didn’t think about these things any more, though as the theory fell to hand like the drop of an apple there must have been a time when he thought of little else.

He almost left her alone, so apparent was her desperation to be overlooked, but were she allowed to achieve what she thought she wanted—solitude—she would be miserable. More, he couldn’t resist a woman whose instinct with Calvin Piper on stage was to sneak in the opposite direction.

“Pardon—” At his hand on her sleeve, she jumped. “Have you a clue where I might get a spot of tea?”

She stumbled through something about the kitchen, leaving him in no doubt that contact with another human being was the most fearsome thing that had ever happened to her.

He returned with his cup to find her on the veranda as if they had an assignation. “Astonishing sky, isn’t it?” A moan of assent. About her frantic desire that he should go away he had no illusion. But winning her from a bogus trip to the loo was a snap. “Sorry,” he introduced, after an unencouraging but obligatory exchange about where she was from and where she lived. “I’m Wallace Threadgill. And yourself?”

That was all it took. She stopped leaning over the railing and gaping dolefully at the Jasper Johns Equatorial skyscape and faced him with keen reassessment. “Eleanor Merritt.” Though she needn’t, she shook hands, and he was struck by the fact that now, far from wishing he would disappear, she was suddenly worried he might leave.

“And what brings you to this blithe bacchanalia?”

She laughed, dry. “Awful, aren’t they. I always promise myself I won’t go. And then the alternative is staying home …”

“What’s wrong with home?”

“Malicious furniture.” Her eyes kept darting to his face, then back over the rail.

“I’m surprised you’re not attending to our charming ersatz host. Funny, you’d never know, would you, that this wasn’t his house? And how high are the chances that he and his whole band of cronies weren’t even invited?”

“Some people are very—comfortable, socially.” A diplomat. “I’m not. I like to think I’ve improved, but I doubt it. Every time I walk into a party I feel thirteen: dressed like a ninny, terrified of dancing and wishing I’d brought a book.”

“How does such a shy creature come to be in Africa?”

“Family planning,” she groaned.

“Ah.” That explained the shift.

“And you—you’re the heretic.”

He smiled. “Quite. And how long have you—?”

“Nearly twenty years. I was with the UNFPA before Pathfinder, and the Peace Corps before that.”

“Peace Corps I could have predicted.”

She stood more upright. “Everyone finds the Peace Corps so hilarious. That we’re a sad little sort. But it’s done some fine—”

“Look at you. You’re already getting kali.”

“I just don’t think it’s fair—”

“Perhaps you and I are such natural enemies that we should acknowledge irreconcilable differences and skip the fisticuffs.” He made a motion as if to part.

“No, please—” She touched his arm. “I have always wanted to talk to you. More than ever now.”

“Why? Are you questioning your faith?”

“Let’s say my convictions have been challenged. They are not bearing up well.”

“But you have a life’s work to defend. No doubt you believe in its merit and conduct it conscientiously. But in my experience, your kind find my message unsettling. They listen only just so long as it takes to invent all the reasons I’m a hairbrain. They march off with their fences built even higher than before, having learned nothing. I’m a little tired of wasting my time. It’s more than likely we have little to say to one another.”

“I’m not afraid of information.”

“Then you are a brave young lady. The entire population industry is mortified by information. That’s why they make it up. So they can live safely in their fairy-tale future, where we are all balancing tiptoe on one leg in the remaining three square inches apportioned to us, packed on all sides by the seething, copulating ruck, fallen angels on the head of a pin. But look around you.” He waved his hand at the Ngong Hills as a voluptuous breeze ruffled her soft brown hair; indeed, from here there was not a glimmer of human habitation in sight.

“My confidence in what I do has been shaken,” she admitted. “We’ve had so little effect.”

“Large families will persist. But you can make people ashamed of their children, just as Jesuits made women ashamed of their breasts. You see, I don’t simply believe that population programmes are inadequate; I believe they are evil.”

“That’s going a bit far.”

“Let me tell you a story,” Threadgill intoned, leading her to a porch chair and seating himself at an instructive angle.

“I was Kenyan-born,” he began, “but educated in Britain. It was the late sixties, when horrors were foretold for the land that I still cared for very much. You may remember, in those days it was to be thirty-three billion by the turn of the next century—and isn’t it intriguing that twenty years later the same prophets are now saying fourteen? So I enrolled in Oxford’s new Population Studies programme, and went from there to work for the Population Reference Bureau in DC. My life was numbers. We ran the profession’s first computer simulations, and when the zeros trilled off perforated sheets my blood would pound. Money pumped into the field and I could travel. Reports with their daunting digits stacked my desk. At night my colleagues and I would gather at exclusive clubs and loudly compare the multiple nightmares sponsored by our competing organizations. Everywhere we went, our lapels flashed ZPG.

“My work was going well and I was important. Yet the better it went, the more my soul was sick. I drank heavily. My relations with women were frantic and short-lived, and I was careful not to beget children. I began to develop health problems—I was pre-ulcerous and probably an alcoholic. Inside I was heavy, and though I was free to see the sights of the world the earth was a bleak and hopeless coal to me, and showed itself in dark pieces. Every new country appeared distraught and degraded, perched on a precipice, about to fall apart.

“One day I was walking out of the Kenyatta Centre, during one of those costly conferences we were so fond of. I ran into a young Luhya I did not know, with his small son. He was angry and accosted me. ‘You are the enemy of the smile on this child’s face!’ he cried. The boy looked at me, and he had supernatural eyes. I realized the man was right, that my work was all about preventing his son’s conception. I was relieved that his parents had prevailed over my reports. I wasn’t sure of myself then, as you are not now, and until I was sure again I would cast my ZPG pin in the gutter.

“I entered into a different sort of research, the kind where you are not given the answers before you begin. I was astonished at what I found. Most of all, I was amazed that the facts I uncovered were easily available to everyone, and I became appalled by a conspiracy of despair, a pact of gloom to which I had signed my own name.

“Because the holocaust of the population explosion is a myth. That we are all dropping into a fetid cesspool is a myth. Life on earth, historically, has done nothing but improve. And the profusion of our species is not a horror but a triumph. We are a thriving biological success story. There is no crisis of ‘carrying capacity’—since the Second World War, the species has only been better fed. Per capita calorie production continues to rise. Incidence of famine over the last few hundred years has plummeted. Arable land is on the increase. Pollution levels are declining. Resources are getting cheaper. The only over-population I uncovered was in organizations like the one I worked for, which were a scandal.

“Yet when I attempted to publish these findings, I was turned away from every journal and publisher I approached. I finally found one feisty university press. But that spelt the end of me. Once word was out I had parted with orthodox demography, I lost my funding. I became a clown for my fellows. There is nothing so absurd to a Western academic as an optimist.

“I lost my livelihood, but I inherited the earth. The illness with which I had been afflicted lifted. I felt no more need for alcohol, tobacco or the flesh of dead animals. When I went abroad, even poor countries appeared lush, whole and at peace. Their people were fruitful. It was my society that had sickened me. My society that hated its own children. And now I have recovered and know boundless joy.

“So I returned to Kenya. Since then I have been working with game parks to encourage their utilization by the Masai, for I believe setting man’s persistence against Nature’s to be a mistake. It was pointless, you understand, to pursue a position with university population programmes or family planning donors when my purpose would be their destruction. Recently, I have been offered a contract by the World Health Organization, helping with their sero-prevalence research. A dreadful disease stalks the land. These doctors need Swahili speakers who know the people and the country well. I know little of medicine, but I am grateful to be of any assistance I can.”

“Mmm.” Eleanor seemed to nudge herself out of a queasy trance. “There’s a lot of money in AIDS right now.”

“You have lived far too long in the company of those who profit from suffering.”

“I didn’t mean that’s why you—”

“Please. This issue is grave to me. The money is quite irrelevant.”

Eleanor picked flakes of varnish pensively off the arm of her chair. He could see she disagreed with everything he said. “If ‘orthodox demography’ is a lie,” she said at last, “why do most people believe that population growth is a threat, except you and a straggle of your disciples?”

“If I were to use your way of thinking, I would say money. The population conspiracy is based entirely around this ‘explosion’ hypothesis, and without its ranks of whole organizations are unemployed. But the idea preceded its institutions. And ‘over-population’ has taken hold on the common man, who has no apparent vested interest in these unwieldly ‘charities’. Why?” He leaned forward and fisted his hand. “Self-hatred. Copious quantities of people are therefore intrinsically repellent. Have you noticed the metaphors that population biologists enjoy? Oh, the politic will say humans breed ‘like rabbits’, but give them a few drinks and the bunnies turn to rats. The literature is strewn with allusions to flies, maggots, cancers.”

“Why, if Westerners find one another’s company grotesque, would they choose to live in New York City?”

“Density is in the interests of the species. It promotes competition, which begets invention. The more of us there are, the cleverer we get. And if crowding does become as desperate as the Cassandras predict, you can bet the solutions will be nothing short of spectacular. We are magnificent creatures. Why, the rise of population and urbanization in Europe made the Industrial Revolution possible. How can you proceed from a history like that to claiming that population growth is economically oppressive?”

She twirled her empty wine glass. “If the field’s reasoning is so illogical, what motivates the US to pour so much money into Third World fertility decline?”

“Because there is only one thing an American hates more than himself and that is anyone else. You remember the early days, when African governments were convinced that family planning programmes were racist?”

“The genocide superstition.”

“That was no superstition. Those programmes are racist. I don’t mean to suggest that diligent women like yourself are not well meaning. But there are siroccos in the air by which you have been swept. We’ve a demographic transition afoot, all right, and the population moguls are trying their pathetic best to forestall the inevitable. In their moribund, corrupt self-loathing, Europe, America and Russia are under-reproducing themselves into extinction.”

“Wattenberg,” provided Eleanor.

“Quite. But Wattenberg mourns the collapse of the world of pallor, where I see the demise of ‘developed countries’ as a blessing. Riddled with homosexuality, over-indulgence and spiritual poverty, the West has lost its love of its own children, and so of humanity itself. The very myth of ‘over-population’ is a symptom of our disease. It is a sign of universal self-correction that a people grown so selfish they will no longer bear children because they want Bermuda vacations will naturally die out. The sallow empire is falling. In its place will rise a new people. A hundred years hence the planet will be lushly peopled by richer colours of skin, the hoary old order long before withered and blown to ash.”

“I’m beginning to understand why every press in DC wasn’t leaping to publish you.”

“Africans have an ancient, wise civilization and they will survive us all. For consultants to arrive on this continent to convince its governments that Africans are on the brink of extinction at the very point in history when their tribes are expanding over the earth—well—I find it humorous. What I do not find humorous is when African leaders believe the tall tales they are told. That the Kenyan government now promotes contraception is the product of mind control.”

“Do you have any children?”

“No. I am celibate. I am trying to make up for my former blindness, but very likely I, too, am beyond salvation, and truncating my lineage is part of my destiny. However, I have come to believe that I will be called to a final purpose before I die.”

“AIDS?”

“Perhaps. Or even grander than that. I see before us a great light, but before we break into the new aurora we have a war to fight. Have you ever watched a wounded animal charge? It is dying, but from damnation the more dangerous—desperate and with nothing to lose. That is the West, shot but standing, and its death throes will shake the earth.”

Eleanor stood and gazed listlessly through the glass doors at Calvin’s table. “I don’t suppose you listen to a lot of Mozart?”

In the blessed peace between CDs, Wallace extended his hand to the whispering trees, where crickets churned. “I have no need. The forest is my symphony.”

“Right,” said Eleanor.

He followed her off the porch, but stopped at the door as she drifted towards the black hole at the far end, like everyone else. “You are in peril,” he cautioned her, “and allied with misanthropes. Have you ever had a baby?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you should. You might change your profession.”

“According to your vows, you’re hardly volunteering to help.”

“That was not a proposition.”

“Well, Dr. Threadgill, no one else is volunteering either. Besides, I’d just have one more of those selfish little Americans who demand big plastic tricycles for Christmas and make wheedly noises on aeroplanes with hand-held hockey games.”

“You are terribly unhappy.”

“So everyone seems intent on telling me.”

“Stop by sometime. We’ll talk again.”

“The tented camp on Mukoma, right? I might at that.”

The poor woman was then sucked into orbit around the cold dark centre like the rest, another innocent particle lured by the inevitable gravity of super-dense nothingness. Wallace turned back to the healthy fresh air of the veranda because he couldn’t bear to watch.

As Eleanor left Wallace to his porch she wondered how a man of such unbounded elation could be so depressing. His eyes were ringed as if he had trouble sleeping. His cheeks sagged and his body was sunken. Worst of all was the smile, which curled up as if someone had to lift strings. It was a marionette smile, mechanical, macabre.

She might dismiss him as a kook, but in his time Threadgill had been widely published. Further, since he’d left the field revisionism had gained a respectable foothold. It was no longer considered laughable to debate the effects of population growth on the poor. As a result, the discipline was divided and disturbed. The hard-liners like Calvin were more rabid than ever, driven to a corner. The born-again optimists, being novelties, got spotlights on MacNeil-Leher. In the middle, the majority of the population profession was increasingly cautious. No one was quite sure whether demographers were brave pioneers who, diaphragms in hand, would change the face of history and shoulder the greatest challenge of our time, taking on the root cause of environmental decay and poverty, or were instead gnome-like recorders, accountants of births and deaths who, when they ventured beyond their role of registrar with bungling programmes of redress, were ridiculed by their own forecasts in ten years’ time. The population community was no longer confident of its calling, and the last thing Eleanor Merritt required was to feel less needed or more unsure.

Leaving Wallace Threadgill’s morbid euphoria for Calvin Piper’s genial despair reminded Eleanor of plane trips, Dar to DC, entering a tiny compartment and promptly changing hemispheres. In thirty feet she got jet lag. Seriously entertaining contrary positions felt dangerous. If she could accept every creed for a kind of truth and call any man a friend, then she could also be anyone; arbitrary, she disappeared. It was possible to be too understanding. Eleanor wondered if it was preferable to keep the same insufferable, obdurate opinions your whole life, piggishly, even if they were wrong, since they are bound to be, because once you opened the emergency exit to the wide white expanse of all it was plausible to believe you broke the seal on your neat pressurized world and got sucked into space. Lurching from Threadgill to Piper made her airsick.

Eleanor had come to the party on her own, having arranged to join Calvin’s coterie here once they were through with “a meeting”. The way he’d announced he was occupied for the early evening reminded Eleanor of the cryptic explanations for why her stepfather would not be home yet one more night. Ray would be at “a meeting”, no of-what or about-what for a twelve-year-old child. At thirty-eight, Eleanor resented don’t-worry-your-pretty-head-about-it from a superannuated layabout.

As soon as Calvin had established himself at the table, they closed in around their—leader, she was tempted to say, though what was there to lead? When all the chairs were scrabbled up, Eleanor had shrugged and drifted to the porch, where she had hung on through that interminable recitation on the off-chance she might get up the nerve to ask one truly interesting question. She never did. It was too potty. Why in heaven’s name would Wallace think Calvin Piper invented HIV?

She retrieved a straight-back from the kitchen and wedged between Calvin and the ageing shrew in pink. The woman pretended not to notice and refused to move the extra three inches that would have allowed Eleanor in. She was stuck, then, slightly behind the two, not quite in the circle and not quite out, which was destined to be Eleanor’s relation to this crowd for the indefinite future.

Malthus gargoyled on Calvin’s shoulder, daring Eleanor to tickle his chin. Nothing would make Malthus happier than to take off her middle finger to the second knuckle.

The woman’s name, incredibly, was Bunny.

“The whole race is lemming off the cliff,” she despaired, “while demographers fuddle over fertility in Popua in 1762.”

“Lemmings,” Eleanor intruded bravely, “did you know they throw themselves off a precipice in response to population pressure? They crowd off cliffs. When Walt Disney filmed the rodents, the crew trapped hundreds and then had to drive them over the edge, beating sticks.”

“It must be terribly frustrating if subjects won’t obligingly commit suicide when your camera is rolling.”

That was Wallace, passing comment on his way for more tea. Only Wallace heard Eleanor at all. It was a perfectly serviceable party anecdote, but when Eleanor told stories that worked for everyone else they dropped, lemming-like, to sea.

Eleanor took being ignored as an opportunity to study the round-table. Bunny showed all the signs of having once been quite an item, and would still qualify as well kept—thin and stylishly coiffed, with unpersuasive blonde hair tightly drawn from a face once striking, now sharp. But she had retained the mannerisms of beauty. Sitting at an angle with her cigarette coiling from an extended arm, she spread a calf on her other knee as if posed perpetually for a shutter she had failed to hear click twenty years ago. Such miracles of taxidermy might have cautioned Eleanor to age with more grace, but she herself had never felt dazzling, and perhaps this was the compensation: that in later years, at least she would not delude herself she had retained powers she never thought she wielded in the first place.

Eleanor conceived few dislikes, being more inclined to give strangers a break, and another after that, as if beginning a set of tennis with first serve in. When company repeatedly made remarks that were out of bounds, she would promptly provide them with incestuous childhoods, crippling racial discrimination or tragic falls down the stairs to explain the viper, the thief, the moron. But Eleanor’s distaste for Bunny was instantaneous. British, the woman only turned to Eleanor once, to translate that “nick” meant steal. Eleanor suggested, “Be sure to tell Calvin. He’s American, too, you know.”

“Only half,” said Bunny coolly.

Bunny was loud and over-animated, but Eleanor was convinced that as soon as Bunny strode out of earshot of Calvin Piper all that environmental indignation would fall by the wayside like paper wrapping.

The rigid man to Calvin’s right was the only guest in a suit and tie. Every once in a while his mouth would quirk with annoyance. He gave the impression that he disapproved of their contingent’s retirement to some petty Nairobi social fritter; he’d have preferred to continue meeting. His surface was metallic. His name was Grant. Tall, grave and grey, he was one of those people, she supposed, who had been told the fate of the world rested on his shoulders and actually believed it. He reminded her of the men you found in Washington shuttle lounges, furrowed over computers, using their oh-so-precious five minutes before take-off to write that crucial report on sales of soap. You would never catch them out with a mere magazine, though Eleanor was always convinced that behind their PCs they were secretly weaving sexual fantasies and the screen was blank.

On the other side of the table, a small, nervous Pakistani and a corpulent Kikuyu were exchanging stories about murderous eight-year-olds in Natal. The Pakistani, Basengi, could not sit back in his chair or keep his hands still. He would pick up his glass and put it down again without taking a sip, and his place was rubbled with a shrapnel of potato crisps. His eyes worried about the room as if, should his glance not pin every object down to its appointed place, all of their host’s possessions would run away. He perpetually wiped his palms on his trousers. “Louis, you hear so often ‘innocent children’,” he said. “I never meet innocent children. They are like us. They are little barbarians.”

“A woman’s view, Eleanor?” asked Louis. “Do you believe we are all born saints? Do we only learn to slit throats from watching grown-ups butcher each other first or does the idea pop up of its own accord?”

“I suppose it’s some of both,” Eleanor stuttered, flattered to be brought in finally. “Of course I’ve seen malicious children. Horrid children. But I’ve also seen children that, yes, were pure. Generous, affectionate and utterly without guile. Some children are innocent. Then, so are some adults.”

The African chuckled. His laugh was splendid, booming and amoral, and from it Eleanor could picture this prankster as a boy—a plotter, a snitcher of sweets. “Name one.”

“Eleanor Merritt.”

She turned to Calvin, surprised. “From you,” she considered, “I wonder if that isn’t an insult.”

“Ray Bradbury, Louis,” Calvin commended. “All the kids in his stories are holy terrors. For Bradbury, the question isn’t whether children have the capacity for evil. It’s whether they have a special capacity.

“Yet if we concede that kids have roughly the same proportion of treachery, dishonesty and cussedness as the rancorous adults they become, why do the little nippers occupy an exalted moral position? Why in war is it especially appalling to kill women and children? Why is it so much more tragic when the roof falls in on a kindergarten than on a shoe factory?”

“Maybe it’s all that life unlived,” said Eleanor.

“Well, doesn’t that make them lucky? And won’t there be plenty more drooling, farting, upchucking runts to replace them? No, it’s this myth of innocence, which is maudlin tripe. Why, you have to kill ten adults to get the same size headline in the States that you can score with one dead toddler.”

“These days,” said Bunny, “you’ll earn far better coverage with cruelty to rats.”

“Mice!” cried Calvin. “She’s right! There’s a lab where I started my density experiments in DC. I had to move operations, because you would not believe the restrictions. The mice eat better than the staff. They have clean little beds made for them every night. They have their own vet, their own surgeon, and if you’re caught so much as pricking a paw without due cause, the approval of the Animal Care Committee or adequate anaesthesia, you’re out on your ear. Humidity and temperature control, vitamins—those mice are pampered brats. I began to detest them personally. Noses in the air, they swaggered across their gilded cages, pugnacious in their confidence that they couldn’t be made to suffer without your funding going to hell. I wasn’t a scientist. I was a mouse-sitter.

“However,” he continued, and no one would interrupt, “some of the Little Lord Fauntleroys have since escaped. I gather there’s a huge population of pests in the basement. The janitors kill them mercilessly by the dozen every night. None of the scuttling hoards in the basement is protected by the Animal Care Committee. They’re exactly the same species, but slaughtered with impunity and no one cares. No vitamins. No fluffed pillows. Just the usual desperate foraging and sticky traps.”

“Life is cheap in the under class,” said Louis.

Eleanor was struck that while Calvin spoke of people as vermin, he spoke of vermin as people—she had never heard him describe his relationship to any human population as personally as his relationship to those mice.

“These animal rights people,” Basengi was saying excitedly, “they are crazy. They have started shooting and bombing in London. And yes, you cannot do the simplest experiment in universities any more. This alone is a very good reason to keep our own—”

“Basengi,” said Calvin sharply.

The Asian clapped his mouth shut and mashed another crisp. The others, too, resettled in their chairs and reached for their drinks and laughed, at nothing. It was hard to get conversation going again. Three rose to go. When Calvin himself stood up, half the remaining party began collecting their coats.

“Grant, you will remember to—?” asked Calvin.

“Yes.”

“And Louis, you will call—?”

“Right away.”

“And send me—?”

“Of course.”

Bunny loitered behind after the others had left, conferring with Calvin in a low voice, inclined as far forward as Malthus would allow. Eleanor positioned herself determinedly at Calvin’s other side as the threesome drifted towards the door. With an irritated glance at Eleanor as if to say, well, we can’t talk about anything with you here, she resorted to the monkey.

“Malthus doesn’t despise Bunny quite as much as everyone else, does he?” she said in that gurgling falsetto people use compulsively with pets. In a show of bravado, she reached to stroke the green monkey’s head. Malthus promptly shrieked his claws across the back of her hand.

“Yes,” said Eleanor, as Bunny tried to hide the fact that Malthus had drawn blood. “I can see you have a special relationship.”

To keep from bleeding on her dress, Bunny was forced to find a napkin. When she returned she assessed Calvin and Eleanor side by side, as she might eye a skirt and blouse in the mirror that, no, from any angle, simply didn’t quite go.

“You’re all right?” asked Calvin.

“A mere love-scratch,” she smiled with a salacious arch of the brow. “I’ve drawn worse in my time, believe me.” She was one of those slimy sorts who would get sympathy by refusing to ask for it.

“So nice to see you again,” Bunny offered to Eleanor, and then pre-empted to Calvin. “Shall we?”

Eleanor cursed herself for having her car. Bunny had contrived to ride with Calvin, leaving Eleanor to dribble down the stairs by herself, while Bunny earnestly wittered in Calvin’s ear, her bandaged hand slipped around his elbow.

Eleanor said “Kwa heri! Asante sana!” to the askari, while the rest of the party stumbled around him as if skirting lawn furniture. She joined the line of cars filing from the drive of the great bright A-frame, beamed with security floodlights. In the front another guard raised the heavy metal gate, riveted with warning signs—PROTECTED BY … —with crude paintings of little men beside outsized Alsations. Off in the distance, a burglar alarm yowled; a Securi-firm van U-turned and sputtered away. As she drifted down to the corner, the barking of razor-backs marked her progress. Every property, with big recessed houses and plush gardens, came with its sultry, sleepy Masai with a rungu, stationed by more gates and more warning placards. At the turning, a uniformed patrol with batons trudged through its midnight round. Funny, most of these wazungu had come thousands of miles to this continent, only to spend a great deal of money keeping Africa out.

The guards looked so tired. Imagine staying up all night, every night, stationed by some rich white home, with absolutely nothing to do. Though she supposed they were grateful for a job—the work paid an average of seventy-five dollars a month. Driving back across town, Eleanor considered Calvin’s proposition that Africans do not identify with your life at all. They see white people the way you look at oryx.

Supposing you work at an enormous house for a childless mzungu couple and they throw generous parties at least once a week. Afternoons you slog up the stairs with crates of beer and soda whose empties you will cart back down the next day. You lug trunk-loads of meat, vegetables and crinkling packets of crisps to the kitchen, and sometimes you glance at the price tags of the items on top—that 120 shillings for American ketchup would buy posho for a week. Later that night, you help direct Mercedes to pack tightly in limited parking space. Music pounds out of the windows for hours while women’s laughter pierces from the veranda, where you can sometimes see men put their hands up ladies’ shirts. Finally these inexplicably malnourished women weave down the stairs, congratulating each other on avoiding the chocolate cake. They never speak to you. They are always drunk. In the morning, the housegirl is cleaning glasses by eight, so that by the time the inhabitants arise a little before noon the spilled drinks are wiped away. You cart the garbage from the bin and later sift through it for the empty vodka and wine bottles—Africans never throw away containers. If it hasn’t been fed to the dogs, the rubbish is full of leftover meat, salad and crunchy bits, but it is spoiled with cigarette butts and you are not, after all, starving. It never occurs to your employers to deliver what they cannot eat to the fire where you keep guard over their CD player. You know your employers treat you better than average, pay you more than many askaris on this street, though you have calculated in the copious time on your hands that this household spends more on Team Meat and Hound Meal than it does on your salary. At least next pay day you will be allowed to go back to your village and share the money with your wife, to feed your five children. Perhaps you shouldn’t complain. But you watch, week after week, as these tipply, giggly, shamefully underclad girls fall insensible one more night into cars you have never learned to drive because you can only afford matatus, keeping awake until sunrise, aware that if you are caught drinking yourself you will lose your job.

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