Game Control (6 page)

  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 onechild 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.'