Game Control (40 page)

  'Sh-sh.' Wallace held a finger to his lips and delicately led Calvin back outside. Calvin glanced at a chair, splayed with that morning's papers, his name on the front page. Neither he nor Threadgill mentioned it, decorously. So sententious when they'd last met, now Wallace was humble, soft spoken, polite.

  'Is Eleanor all right?'

  'She's heavily sedated.'

  'No doubt by your bedtime stories,' said Calvin, but wryly, almost with affection. 'I want to take her home.'

  He had expected resistance, but inexplicably their antagonism had collapsed. 'Yes,' said Wallace. 'I think you should.' He brought Eleanor's prescriptions, and went carefully through the dosages, counter-indications and side effects.

  Back in the tent, threading his way between two dozen half-drunk mugs of cold tea, Calvin leaned beside Eleanor, who was sluggish and failed to recognize him. Calvin bundled her in his arms to the car.

For several days he fed her soup and the rest of the time she slept. She had moments of lucidity, when she would gasp with gratitude that he had rescued her from Threadgill's edifying lectures on the Orb of the Over-Conscious. 'Another week of Greater Galactic Love,' she confided, 'and I'd have founded a Pachyderm lab myself.'

  Calvin waited until she was strong enough, and then slowly, carefully, explained that Norman had pulled their leg. Somehow the pathogen made of mango chutney did not pick her up much.

  'You think I was the informer,' said Eleanor, dragging herself up on the pillow. She still had a complexion of boiled arrowroot.

  'Is that what made you snap? That I didn't trust you?'

  'No,' she sighed. 'I was mortified that I didn't turn you in. I should have. I couldn't forgive myself. Everyone in QUIETUS was convinced I rang Special Branch. Bunny started making threatening phone calls. But they gave me too much credit. If I had any integrity, I'd have handcuffed you personally. Do you believe me?'

  'Yes.'

  'You're sure, then, that I didn't go to the police?'

  'Naturally.'

  'So who do you think it was? It doesn't sound like Norman. Bunny?'

  'Don't be silly,' said Calvin. 'I rang them myself.'

TRADITIONAL KAMBA MARRIAGE BLESSING

There was talk in the Kenyan government of deporting Calvin Piper for sedition, but the man had become such an international liability that both the British and the American embassies went to lengths to keep him in his adoptive country and out of theirs. Calvin himself was content to remain in Africa because he hated it.

  He and Eleanor refined a ritual argument: she pushing him to admit why he'd rung Special Branch, when success, to all appearances, was in reach. 'Because,' he explained, 'it would have been too much trouble.'

  One day she pushed him further. 'That's ridiculous. You'd already gone to enormous trouble.'

  'I was interested in the theory. I was interested in the computer model. I was interested in the economics, and even in your AIDS research. But practically, QUIETUS seemed laborious. I couldn't be bothered frankly.'

  'Not even to
save the world
?'

  'I keep telling you, "the world" does not require saving. the little pear-shaped orb on which we spin will manage with pond scum.' He dribbled lime juice over Eleanor's fresh samosas; she had finally refused servants and was consequently becoming an excellent cook. 'It's only the human race that needs saving, and I had to face the contradiction Thread

gill astutely hung me on: I couldn't care less. Why should I rescue

5.3 billion wet-nosed, sticky-bummed whingers too pig thick to stop reproducing themselves like fruit flies? Let them rut, let them foul their own nest, let them starve. All a matter of sublime indifference to me.'

  Eleanor was irked. 'Come on. Didn't you finally decide QUIETUS was repugnant?'

  'I still think it was a laudable and logical plan of action. Furthermore, QUIETUS was intellectually courageous. It so happens that intellectual courage is the only kind I've got. On that score Panga had my number: in the field I'm a kitty cat. I'm a great tactician, but as a soldier I shoot myself in the foot.'

  'You did cull elephants.'

  Calvin confessed, 'It wasn't pleasant.'

  'Somewhere in that concession lurks the nascent seeds of fullfledged moral revulsion.'

  'Purely aesthetic. They stank,' said Calvin. 'But there was one more reason I wanted us stopped.'

  'I'm on tenterhooks.'

  'I don't believe in conspiracies. Not that they don't exist; more that they don't succeed. The CIA made a horlicks of Cuba, Argentina. How can we be dead sure that AIDS wasn't concocted by the Pentagon? Because it works. Pachyderm was inspired if all went according to plan, but I was gradually convinced that that was the one advent I could more or less discount. In short: Sod's Law.'

  Calvin promptly lost all interest in population. He left his
Popula
tion and Development Reviews
in their mailing wrappers. In short order, he was in danger of having no interests at all. For someone who valued interest over love, demographic dispassion threatened personality collapse.

  For Calvin refined a theory in relation to all the problems of the day which he called Muddling Through, a position somewhere between apathy and religious conviction: everything would sort out somehow. Population, after all, was self-correcting: if the earth could not support more people, then it would not. An orbiting voyeur, he would watch an unfolding wonder or imploding apocalypse with equal fascination. He continued to think the world was getting uglier, he continued

to hum Mozart in preparation for a future without cellos, he continued to see Africa as he knew it in its paradisiacal days as spiralling down the toilet—but these were diverting opinions with no more consequence than the atrocities he still taped to his wall.

  Moreover, Calvin theorized that because your projects never have the results you expect and because your reasons for executing them are never the ones you tell yourself they are, whatever you do it is critical to do it as little as possible.

  For the removed, congenitally sardonic conclusion of his life, Calvin had a role model. When he and Norman conducted their density experiments with Norwegian rats, they had identified a variety of types, all adaptions to overcrowding: the hyper-sexed, the homosexual, the delinquent mother. The researchers discerned a small, discreet subsection of males, however, which Norman had christened the Cool Rats. These unruffled loners refused to take part in the struggle for dominance. They ignored all the other rats of both sexes, and all the other rats ignored them. They moved passively through the community like somnambulists. They were never attacked or approached for play. And these were the sleekest, healthiest animals in the pen, with thick, unmolested fur. The Cool Rats were pretending they weren't there. Calvin was suffering stress in density and Calvin bought sun-glasses.

  It was necessary, however, to earn a living. Only a fraction of funds from QUIETUS remained, though donors were too embarrassed to demand them back. He still owned the NFD lab, now derelict, though the sale of the equipment barely covered some hefty chemical bills which piqued him, as Peptang was only forty-five shillings. Eleanor's salary was promptly withdrawn, for news of her link to Calvin had spread to Pathfinder, and that was the end of her family planning career for the next 5,000 years. Calvin's reputation was as biodegradable as egg-carton styrofoam.

  With Eleanor's well-organized, brisk assistance, he cleared out Pachyderm and started a pottery. He was surprised to find he'd a knack. A natural mathematician, Calvin had a strong sense of symmetry and centred easily on the wheel. It was hard work which made his shoulders ache, but quiet, meditative and, most important, useless. There wasn't a soul

who couldn't live without his silly pots. Consequently, he made lots of them. Besides, Panga was always trooping carelessly through and knocking over whole racks with her bayonet.

  As for Eleanor, she gave her change to panhandlers when she felt like it; other afternoons she wasn't in the mood. Much as she might sometimes wish, and violently, that the huddled masses with their demands for glasses and basketball shoes would
go away
, they weren't going to. Their existence did not rely on her humour. She contented herself that their business in the NFD employed a dozen Turkana at good wages who could be proud of their work, and that was better for any country than hand-outs. She did sometimes miss her job, weary of delivering cartons of tacky tusk-handled coffee mugs to tourist traps, the same tiny Pachyderm stamp on the bottom of each cup, and resented Calvin for sabotaging her profession. Then, their arrangement came with its compensations:
small private happi
ness
, and she could always discuss with shopkeepers the benefits of smaller families, how much more feasible it was with fewer children to send them all to school. Ordinary economics was increasingly persuasive in East Africa, more so than 'development theory' or appeals to environmental preservation, and Kenya's fertility rate continued to drop.

  She would occasionally stop by to see Peter Ndumba. He had learned to count on her for one birthday present, end of story, though jockeyed dates to celebrate twice a year; in return, she gladly accepted their meals of beans and corn, and took second helpings.

  VISA at last caught the culprit with her credit card, and it wasn't Florence after all. The thief was from Pathfinder all right, but she was perfectly well off, and she was white.

  Often on Saturday nights when Eleanor and Calvin returned from packing an exhausting order at Pachyderm, Wallace Threadgill would stop by for a nip. After the demise of QUIETUS, his vows had gradually slipped and, well, he was becoming a bit of a drunk. His contract had run out with the WHO, whose administrators had found his theories tiresome, and after a few whiskies the Orbs and Circles of Time and Fullnesses of Being would all start to reel in an incoherent,

off-centre miasma. He was rather endearing, squiffy, though he and Calvin still got into ferocious arguments. On certain evenings Wallace would pull her aside and apologize with a maudlin droop on her shoulder, saying that he was 'very, very sorry, so very sorry', though he'd never say for what, and she wondered if he wasn't a trifle sweet on her. And he was awfully hard to get rid of when she and Calvin wanted to go to bed, with forty elephant-trunk candlesticks to glaze and fire the next day. Bunny Morton wanted a banquet set.

  There we leave Calvin Piper, humming over his wheel, spattered in slip, easing the lip from humble clay. Eleanor wanted children. Well, he would reflect, sponging on more water, if the rest of these low-lifes could reiterate, maybe he should stick them with half a dozen little Calvins out of sheer spite. He moulded a handful of mud as it spun under his fingers, a turning, dirty globe, for according to the eminently sensible Ms Merritt, this was about as much of the earth as he should ever be entrusted with at one time.

About the author

Meet Lionel Shriver

About the book

Read on

Author's Picks

Have You Read?

A
H WAN OW
! It took a while for my mother to decode the first words from my crib as "I want out." Since,
Ah wan ow
has become something of a running theme.

  I wanted out of North Carolina, where I was born. I wanted out of my given name ("Margaret Ann"—the whole double-barrel; can you blame me?), and at fifteen chose another one. I wanted out of New York, where I went to university at Columbia. I wanted out of the United States.

1999 tore me decisively from Belfast, a town that addictively commands equal parts love and loathing. As
We Need to Talk About Kevin
attests, I'm a sucker for ambivalence.

  Though returning regularly to New York, I've lived in London ever since. I'm not sure if I've chosen this city so much as run out of wanderlust here. London is conventional for me, and I'm a bit disappointed in myself. But I've less appetite for travel than I once did. I'm not sure if this is from some larger grasp that people are the same everywhere and so why not save the plane fare, or from having just gotten lazy. My bets are on the latter.

  At least the novels are still thematically peripatetic. Their disparate subject matter lines up like the fruit on slot machines when you do not win the jackpot: anthropology and a May-December love affair (
The Female of the Species
), rock-and-roll drumming and jealousy (
Checker and the Derailleurs
), the Northern Irish troubles and my once dreadful taste in men (
Ordinary Decent Criminals
), demography and AIDS in Africa (
Game Control
), inheritance (
A Perfectly Good Family
), professional tennis and career competition in marriage (
Double Fault
), terrorism and cults of personality (
The New Republic
, my
real
seventh novel, which has never seen the light of day), and high school massacres and motherhood (
We Need to Talk About Kevin
). My latest,
The
Post-Birthday World
, is a romance—about the trade-offs of one man versus another and
snooker
, believe it or not—whose nature seems in context almost alarmingly innocent.