Game Control (13 page)

  Barring Panga's one specialty, she was a wretched cook as well. The Kamba had contempt for vegetables, and left them on the stove to melt, run out of water, char. If she served sweets, they were commercial and stale, and she all but threw them at him with coffee; considering the quality of Nairobi

cakes, they'd have made formidable weapons. It was only meat she had time for, and even her chicken ran red.

  When on the verge of giving her notice, Calvin began to observe that there were a few things she did commendably, albeit not what she was told. She was fast and accurate with an axe, and splintered a cord in two hours. She could slit the throat of a sheep cleanly, skinning, gutting and butchering the animal in minutes. She could wring the neck of a hen with what looked suspiciously like pleasure, and while she might have made a hash of green beans and aubergines, the
thwack
of her cleaver neatly jointed the fowl in a few strokes. And she was a
fundi
with vehicles, clever at cutting a fan belt out of an inner tube or improvising a new accelerator cable from fence wire. SWAPO could not always send off for parts in the middle of the Namibian desert.

  'I've tinkered with a few cars myself,' said Eleanor.

  'Oh? My fuel pump's packed up in the old Toyota. Want to give it a go?'

  'No, thank you,' she said coldly. 'I have a report to finish. I was just mentioning it, that's all.'

  Once he decided to keep her on a bit more, Panga approached her employer, stooping to English because this was important. Would it be possible,
bwana
, if she could come to work in something other than this dress. He remembered her air, not pleading but martial, as if requesting to stand at ease. He replied that she could work in a polar bear suit as long as she repaired his carburettor, and she refused to smile.

  The next day she appeared, relaxed and cocky, in threadbare fatigues, the sleeves and trousers rolled up, her hard, bony feet bare.

  Panga had a distinctive smell which still lingered in the cottage—strong and tangy, just shy of rancid; it was a classically African aroma of beef fat, smoke and dung. As Eleanor once more slavered on her stern morning deodorant, Calvin commented, 'Panga was filthy.'

  'Oh, terrific,' said Eleanor, tossing the roll-on in disgust. What a waste of imported perfumery, when what clearly got Calvin going was dirt. Trouncing into the living room, Eleanor could imagine the Kamba slinging out from under his Toyota and sauntering to the house, languishing into that armchair

to smooth the grease into her skin like cold cream, relishing the sheen she could raise with the help of a leaky gasket. Blacks, thought Eleanor, really had much nicer skin.

  'When she admitted she was a mercenary, I laughed,' Calvin related. 'A mistake. Panga has a vicious sense of humour about everyone but herself.'

  'A familiar quality.'

  'I find myself quite a cracker,' he defended.

  'Only when you're telling the joke. You have to control everything,' she ventured boldly. 'Especially jokes.'

  Panga had hit on one line of work in Africa where a woman could excel. Far from suffering discrimination, Panga rarely lacked for employment so long as governments had a shelf-life of unrefrigerated milk. Most troops were terrified of female soldiers, more so of Panga in particular. With one look at her protruding, two-jaw grin, the skin mummified to her skull, her AK-47 nursed at her breast like a suckling
toto
, seasoned rebel soldiers would drop their weapons and shriek down the hillside in the opposite direction. No one had ever run from Eleanor, except from sheer awkwardness.

  Panga had no politics. 'She didn't have convictions,' Calvin explained, 'only attitudes.'

  'So she would fight for Idi Amin? Charles Taylor, Mengistu, Mobutu? What about South Africa?'

  Calvin shrugged. 'If they'd have her. Marxists, capitalists, governments or insurgents—as long as they could get their hands on a can of petrol and a round of ammunition or two.'

  'You
admired
that?'

  'Enormously.'

  'You stagger me.'

  'Panga acknowledged only one side of all conflicts: her own. And I respect anyone who can flight, never mind for what. I sometimes think the West is losing its capacity to act, to execute. I can't count the colleagues I've suffered who, after assessing the likely demise of the human race in our lifetime, promptly schedule another
confer
ence
.'

day you realize that if they left town, or fell for someone else, your whole life would cave in.'

  'I suppose…' Calvin drummed his fingers. 'When she started poisoning my girlfriends.'

  'You had girlfriends?'

  He frowned. 'Too many. Whole evenings. Could have been working.'

  'And now you get more done,' she said drily. 'With no girlfriends.'

  'That's right.'

  The early mischief Panga passed off as careless: flies in pasta, fillets all fat. But the pranks got more rancorous, and when Calvin entertained a young lady in the sitting room, Panga clanged so in the kitchen they would have to shout. The night Najma came to dinner, his guest pushed her entrée reluctantly around the plate and only chewed at her salad, whose grit ground audibly like a hand-turned
posho
mill. At last she confessed she hadn't a notion how to go about attacking this creature. Calvin poked at her meat and pried the wings out.

  'Bloody hell!' he exclaimed appreciatively. 'It's a fried bat!'

  He chortled, and that was the end of Najma.

  Panga crossed a line, however, with Elaine Porter, whom Calvin 'truly fancied for a time', albeit in that 'sensible way'—she would have been good-natured, engaging in conversation and interested in current events; in short, made a solid, reasonable choice for a life partner—that Calvin had 'only since recognized as the mark of a relationship destined to go absolutely nowhere'.

  The excess of garnishes might have alarmed him, for the chicken breasts arrived with a diagonal of courgette, a daisy of carrot, a flourish of parsley. He recalled, Elaine was on a rift about rangeland degradation, and between decrying the over-grazing of the Masai and the cultivation of marginal farmland by the Kikuyu she actually ate some. Half-way through, her jaw slowed; she stopped talking and turned the breast upside-down, and then she screamed.

  Calvin claimed Elaine wasn't a dainty woman, more the sort you could take to the bush who wouldn't whine about having to wash her hair. Like Eleanor, you could bring her to

tribal ceremonies and she would taste the blood and milk and manage a smile and claim it was very good. She would not have been given to squealing over ordinary chicken, so Calvin leapt to her plate while Elaine stood trembling on the other side of the room, her hand over her mouth.

  He saw her point. The underside of the chicken was writhing with maggots.

  Calvin tore into the kitchen, where Panga was innocently trickling water over dirty dishes, though it was only by the fact that some of the bowls were in the drainer that you could tell which stack was washed. Panga had a spatial relationship to hygiene: if the dish was on the right side of the sink, it was clean.

  'If I were Kenyan,' growled her employer, 'I'd have you beaten.'

  Panga stood erect with her small, sharp chin in the air—even sitting, though you could say she slouched, her body remained straight, her legs extended as if hoping you would trip on them. She was actually shorter than Eleanor, but seemed taller, because Panga didn't bend. She was most certainly didn't apologize. 'Try.'

  'What's the idea?' He was angry, which may have been the idea at that.

  'You bring these
malayas
, stinking of powder so they make me gag. I serve them alcohol and they giggle. Then the meal. And sweet. So you can take them to your room. In the morning, I wash the
shahawa
from your sheets.'

  'That is what you are paid to do.'

  'Not enough.'

  'Are you telling me you serve my guests food crawling with maggots because you want a raise in salary?'

  She turned to the sink, washing her hands, as if of him. 'I will go to Angola soon. Then you may take as many
malayas
as you like.'

  He had to admit she was the strangest-looking beautiful woman he'd ever met. Eleanor pointed out that protruding teeth, because they were reminiscent of cows, were a mark of loveliness among Kambas, which would help explain Panga's haughty bearing. They were not, however, ordinarily appealing to Calvin. And she was mercilessly thin, the chest at her

collar striated; she hadn't a curve on her, and the boomerang shoulders would be lethal in bed. All tendon and gristle, Panga was inedible. Skinned and roasted you wouldn't get a bite off her, and the strings of her arms would stick in your teeth.

  He had backed out of the kitchen to attend to his date, because Elaine was throwing up.

Calvin and Panga had barely spoken to one another for days. Panga sullenly soaked the parts of her AK in kerosene, or put an edge on her
kukri
, the scrape of that ghastly blade on carborundum grating Calvin's nerves. He hid behind newspapers, scanning nervously for renewed hostilities near by. For once Calvin was a peacemonger. If Renamo resumed hostilities in Mozambique, he would lose his new servant and she was irreplaceable. Where would he ever again find such an appalling housekeeper?

  He decided that inviting any more women to his cottage would be medically dangerous. That Friday night he went out and came back the next morning expecting to find his mattress slashed with a cavalry sabre—something extravagant. His bed was in perfect trim.

  So Calvin announced boldly on the weekend that he was having 'an important, intelligent woman to dine' on Sunday, and she was 'very pretty', so he expected 'an especially good meal'. A gauntlet. Panga coolly dripped oil in her revolver, testing the trigger,
snap
snap.

  It seems that Lisa was a ninny. She was stunning all right, but in the early stages of Euro-gaga over Africa. Not over the people, of course—animals. Eleanor knew the type. She would expect him to spin exhilarating tales of life in the bush without telling a single decent yarn in return. These women never feel, as Eleanor had so disastrously at the Hilton, the need to redeem their company, for Lisa thought if she clapped her hands and hiked her dress, men were more than compensated for their efforts because she had nice legs. Calvin had balked. He valued the collateral of shapely ankles as spare change, and if he were billing Lisa per story she was running a wickedly high tab by the third glass of wine. He was looking forward to dinner and rose, rubbing his hands to suppose out loud, 'I wonder what Panga's cooked up this time!'

  At table, Calvin kept eyeing Lisa's trout for the naked mole rat stuffed up its belly but spotted only lump-meat crab. He fidgeted, and over salad—
washed
—began to despair. Calvin slipped into the kitchen and folded his arms.

  'This is the sneakiest trick yet,' he accused her.

  'There was something wrong with the fish?'

  'Not a thing.
Why
?'

  'You said, special meal.'

  'That was an ordinary meal,' he protested. 'What's wrong? You're not leaving?'

  'I go to Angola, I told you. What do you care? You get another girl. It is easy. Look at you.
Bwana
Piper is very good at getting more girls.'

  'Don't go. Or go if you have to. But come back.'

  She smeared at a plate. 'To this? I am a soldier.'

  'No. Forget the dishes. Work on the jeep,' he proposed feebly.

  'And wash your sheets?'

  'No. Do what you're good at.' He touched the car grille at her collar. 'Get them dirty.'

  She eyed him; he had finally offered her a job worthy of a bucktoothed mercenary.

  'But tonight,' said Calvin, leaning closer, 'you've got to help me. That pinhead is driving me
mwenye wazimu
. I want special coffee. Got it? I want
extra special coffee
.'

  'It is not so easy—just like that—to make special coffee.'

  'You have powerful witchcraft,' he said in her ear. That must have been when he first kissed her—without, Eleanor imagined bitterly, that exasperating passivity with which he still kissed Eleanor herself. He did admit to lingering in the kitchen a long time.

  'Sorry,' he'd explained to Lisa, the door swinging jauntily behind him. 'Trouble with the staff. Bloody difficult to get your hands on a good servant.'

  Panga brought coffee; Lisa might not have been in Kenya long, but she would already have mastered the art of looking straight through black help. The Frenchwoman sipped the better part of the cup without incident, until it looked as if

Calvin was stuck with another two hours of elephant stories over brandy while she waited for him to make a pass. It was going to take a fair bit of yawning and knee-slapping to encourage her departure—'though I could always resort to my secret weapon,' said Calvin.

  'Telling her you're celibate and "don't do that any more" and she's to imagine you like someone who's had a terrible accident?'

  '
Demography
. I find the least census compelling, but mortality/fertility ratios turn most women to stone.'

  He had been readying a good diatribe on Philippine population policy when Lisa yelped. He had to turn away, because he was smiling.

  Calvin tipped her cup. Nice Lisa took it black, providing the fat white slug the proper venue to be appreciated.

'So what happened to Panga? What did you mean about a morgue?'

  'Oh, we had an idyllic life for a couple of years. She stopped cleaning altogether, and the house looked exactly the same. Disappeared regularly to Angola or Rwanda for a month or two. It's always healthy when the woman has a career of her own, isn't it?