Game Control (7 page)

  '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 pushstarted, 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.

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 overpopulated 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

  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, mat

tresses 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!