Game Control (3 page)

  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.

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.