Game Control

by Lionel Shriver

  Eleanor hugged her elbows. Calvin put a hand on her knee. ‘You think I’m criticizing you. No, I’m agog you keep snipping away. It’s bloody marvellous.’

  ‘Can you suggest what else there is to do?’

  ‘We sorted things out for India not ten minutes ago,’ he noted brightly. ‘Institute free amniocentesis. As soon as the 8

  mother finds out it’s a girl, the foetus mysteriously disappears.

  Produce an entire generation of sons. In sixty, seventy years 840 million Asians would die out completely. Neat, don’t you agree?’

  Eleanor was acutely sensitive to when people were waiting for her to leave. Calvin stopped her. ‘Dinner?’

  He’d ridiculed her work. He’d abused her in front of his friends.

  Eleanor said she’d be delighted, and worried what to wear.

  Described in guidebooks as ‘a restaurant that wouldn’t look out of place in Bavaria or rural England’, The Horseman was in the heart of Karen, if Karen could be said to have one. Named after Karen Blixen, the suburb was one of the last white enclaves of Kenya, mu-seumed with mummified women who got too much sun when they were young, women who never carried their own groceries. They were the last of the English to say frightfully. Yet they still gave their change to little boys outside the dukas, and Karen’s beggars were flush.

  Aware that ladies are advised to arrive at engagements a tad late, Eleanor took a taxi to Karen early.

  ‘Madam! Please, madam!’

  In the car-park she was accosted by a hawker carrying some heavy black— thing. It took her a moment to discern the object, at which point she was hooked into a dialogue that would cost her. ‘Only 150, I work very hard, madam! You see, msuri sana. Please, madam!

  I have six children and they are so hungry…’

  The kempt and ingenuous young man held before her a carving of an enormous African family. The carving was awful enough to start with, but had been mucked over with tar. Eleanor was reluctant to touch it.

  ‘I don’t—’ she fumbled. ‘I’m travelling, I can’t—’

  ‘Please, madam!’

  The please-madams were not going to stop. She could not claim to have no money, she could not simply walk away from a man who was speaking to her, and some forms of freedom must be bought.

  Consequently, she met Calvin in the lounge of The Horseman trying to keep the big dark monster from her dress.

  9

  ‘For me? You shouldn’t have.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have,’ she confessed woefully. ‘He wouldn’t go away.’

  ‘There’s the most miraculous word in the English language: no.

  Most children learn it before the age of two.’

  ‘This is just what I need,’ she said, as the head waiter led them to their table, glancing at her souvenir with disapproval. ‘A carving of the happy twelve-child family for my clinic.’

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ Calvin lamented.

  Eleanor could no more focus on the menu than on conference papers at Trattoria. The prospect of food was mildly revolting: a warning sign. In the company of men she’d no interest in she was voracious.

  Calvin decided for them both. ‘The game’, he announced, ‘is delectable.’ His smile implied a double entendre that went right past her.

  ‘So,’ he began. ‘You’re still so passionate?’

  She blushed. ‘In what regard?’

  ‘About your work,’ he amended. ‘The underprivileged and oppressed and that.’

  ‘If you mean have I become jaded—’

  ‘Like me.’

  ‘I didn’t say—’

  ‘I said. But it’s hard to picture you jaded.’

  ‘I could learn. I see it happen in aid workers every day. You keep working and it doesn’t make any difference until eventually you find your efforts comic. But when you start finding all sympathy maudlin and all goodwill suspect, you think you’ve gotten wise, that you’ve caught the world on, when really you’ve just gotten mean.’

  ‘You think I’m mean?’

  ‘You were, a little,’ she admitted. ‘At the KICC this afternoon. This is Eleanor, Exhibit A: the hopeless family planning worker, beavering away in her little clinics among the—“fecund hordes”?’

  He smiled and said as gently as one can say such a thing, ‘You still don’t have a sense of humour.’

  ‘I don’t see why it’s always so hilarious to believe in something.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me to sod off?’

  10

  ‘Because when people are wicked to me, I don’t get angry, I get confused. Why should anyone pick on Eleanor? I’m harmless.’

  ‘It’s harmless people who always get it in the neck. Why can’t you learn to fight back?’

  ‘I hate fighting. I’d rather go away.’

  They talked, as expatriates did incessantly, about Africa, though Eleanor suspected this was the definition of being a stranger here.

  Real Africans, she supposed, never sat around at dinner talking about Africa.

  ‘I should feel lucky,’ said Calvin. ‘Not everyone gets to witness the destruction of an entire continent in his lifetime. Of course, if I had my way I would kick every sunburnt white boy off this continent. But not without putting mortality back where we found it, so these witless bastards don’t reproduce themselves into spontaneous cannibalism. Import a few tsetse fly, sprinkle the Ngongs with tubercle bacillus, unpack the smallpox virus the WHO keeps in cold storage in Geneva. Did you know that we preserve diseases? The eagles are endangered, but the germs are safe.’

  ‘What about development?’

  ‘Develop into what, mind you? Pizza Hut? No, what Africa could use is some good old-fashioned regression.’

  ‘It’s seen plenty of that.’ Her smoked trout starter was exquisite, and only made her ill.

  ‘Not enough. I’d remove every felt-tip, digestive biscuit and gas-guzzling pick-up from Algiers to Cape Town.’ Calvin disposed of his boar pâté in a few bites. ‘Go back to Homo sapiens as pack animals, huddled around fires, cowering in trees and getting shredded by lions to keep the numbers down. No campaigns for multiparty democracy, no crummy tabloids, no Norwegian water projects. Just life, birth and death in the raw, busy enough and awful enough that you never have a chance to think about it before a hyena bites off your leg.’

  ‘Back to the garden,’ Eleanor mused.

  ‘You never saw it, Eleanor, but when I first came to Kenya in 1960

  this country was paradise.’ He gestured to the tarry horror that would not quite fit under her chair. ‘No watu with their hands out every time you tie your shoe.’

  11

  ‘Don’t you imagine any twenty-year-old here for the first time is just as knocked out?’

  ‘What knocks them out is it’s grotty and crowded and nothing works. And all right, so the Africans should get their Walkmans like everyone else. So Africa isn’t special. But when I came here it was.

  So there’s nowhere to go, nowhere special. So it’s every man’s right to be garish, filthy and completely lacking in foresight. Terrific.’

  Eleanor glanced warily at their waiter as he brought her main course; he spoke English. ‘You sound like a child who’s had his playground closed.’

  ‘Don’t imagine I’m reminiscing about how smoothly the country ran under colonial rule. No, when there was no telephone system not to work, no electricity to go off, no water piping to over-extend—now, that is working smoothly.’

  ‘Well,’ ventured Eleanor cautiously, ‘Africans do have a right to telephones, electricity and running water—don’t they?’

  Calvin withered her with a look of excruciating weariness.

  ‘Then, you should be happy,’ Eleanor backed off, relieved the waiter was no longer listening. ‘Most Africans have no such amen-ities, do they? Of which I’m painfully, and constantly, aware. In shops, I put a chocolate bar on the counter, next to a woman with two kilos of posho and a little fermented milk with which she has to f
eed the whole family for a week—I put the candy back. Everywhere I go on this continent I feel ashamed. I’m tired of it, Calvin. I am dying, dying of shame.’

  ‘They like posho. Africans do not identify with your life at all. They see white people the way you look at oryx.’

  ‘Hogwash. They want cars and I have one. Try and tell me they don’t resent that.’

  ‘Give your flipping car away, then.’

  ‘That won’t change anything.’

  ‘That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said. And at least—’ he pointed to her hartebeest—‘you now eat your dinner.’

  In 1972 they had both attended a Population and Environment conference in Nairobi, when the KICC was brand-new and conferences had seemed better than junkets; at least to Eleanor, who was only twenty-one, an intern with the United Nations Fund for Population Activities and fresh from the Peace Corps.

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  Calvin had just joined USAID himself, and asked her to dine at the Hilton. His fourteen-year seniority had daunted her then, and maybe that’s why she’d felt compelled to make a fool of herself: because he was so much older and more important and she had no idea why he would go out with her. She was only aware in later years, once her looks had begun to slip, that she had once been rather pretty.

  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 13

  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?’

  14

  ‘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-return-able 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

  15

  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.’

  16

  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.’