Eleanor collapsed into a vinyl recliner, which stuck to her thighs.
‘I’m supposed to be grateful? I’m supposed to run about merrily flushing the toilet and being amazed?’
Calvin turned towards the door, and Eleanor’s imagination pan-icked through her evening. It was now late afternoon. The light would soon be effervescent, although Eleanor would be immune to it, and in the way of the Equator would die like a snapped overhead.
Supposing she found a shop, she would return to New Jersey with white bread, an overripe pineapple, a warm bottle of beer. She wouldn’t be hungry; she’d nothing to read; and she hadn’t seen a phone. So she’d haggle with the pineapple, dig the spines out and leave the detritus to collect fruit flies by morning. Back in the recliner, she would quickly kill the beer with syrupy fingers, staring at her noise-proof ceiling tiles, listening to the hum of neon—she should have bought a second beer but now it was too late; she wasn’t sleepy and it was only eight o’clock—the time of tar.
Hand on the doorknob, Calvin laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, finally raising his sun-glasses, ‘I won’t abandon you here.’ He lifted her lovingly as the chair sucked at her skin with its promise of evenings to come, already imprinted with the sweaty impression of a Good Person and her too-effective family planning, lying in wait for tomorrow night and another tacky expanse of brown vinyl hell.
When he drove her out she didn’t ask where they were going since she didn’t care, so long as it was away from that chair.
‘The driving here,’ Calvin ventured mildly, ‘now that is population control.’
For some time they were stuck behind a lorry full of granite, with a boy splayed on the rocks, craning over the exhaust pipe to take deep lungfuls of black smoke. Eleanor shuddered.
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‘It gets them high,’ Calvin explained.
‘It’s carbon monoxide!’
The sun had barely begun to set when Calvin pulled into the Nairobi Game Park, which suited her. She hated safaris, but did enjoy animals, especially tommies and hartebeests, the timid step and frightened eyes with which she identified. The park, so close to the centre of town, was an achievement of preservation in its extent.
Yet after an hour of teeming the criss-crossed dirt tracks, they had seen: one bird. Not a very big bird. Not a very colourful bird. A bird.
Calvin parked on a hill, with a view of the plains, and nothing moved. ‘Had enough?’
‘How strange.’
‘The sprawl of Ongata Rongai has cut off migrations. All that granite in the backs of lorries, it’s for more squat grey eye-sores up the road. Happy homes for the little nation builders. The animals can’t get back in the park.’
However, as the horizon bled, the plain rippled with shadow like the ghosts of vanquished herds galloping towards the car, the air cooling with every wave as their one bird did its orchestral best. The hair rose on Eleanor’s arms. ‘It’s gorgeous, Dr Piper. Sorry.’
Defeated, he reversed out to reach the gate before it closed.
‘I’ve worked in India,’ Calvin resumed with a more contemplative voice in the sudden dark. ‘There’s something attractive about rein-carnation—with a basis in physics—that energy is neither created nor destroyed. But when you’ve a worldwide population that doubles in forty years, the theory has some simple arithmetic problems: where do you get all those extra souls? So I reason the species started out with, say, a hundred whole, possibly even noble spirits.
When we exceeded our pool of a hundred, these great souls had to start subdividing. Every time a generation doubles, it halves the interior content of the individual. As we’ve multiplied, the whole race has become spiritually dilute. Like it? I’m a science fiction fan.’
‘Is that how you feel? Like a tiny piece of a person?’
‘Perhaps. But from the zombies I’ve seen walking this town, 27
there must be a goodly number of folk who didn’t get a single sliver of soul at all.’
‘You’ve an egregious reputation, Calvin. But that’s the first time I’ve heard you say something truly dangerous.’
‘Stick around.’
He pulled into a drive, and she guessed they were near Karen again.
Calvin’s home was modestly sized, and in daylight she would find it a surprisingly sweet brick cottage creepered with bougainvillaea, when she pictured the lair of a famous doomsayer more like the flaming red caves of Apocalypse Now. In fact, most of the conservation Jeremiahs with which this neighbourhood was poxed lived in pristine, lush, spacious estates that made you wonder where they got their ideas from. Inside, too, Eleanor was struck by how normal his rooms looked, though he did not go in for the carvings and buffalo bronzes that commonly littered the white African household.
Instead she found the room towered with journals and mountainous tatters of clippings. The bookshelves were lined in science fiction, with a smattering of wider interests: Chaos, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Executioner’s Song and a biography of Napoleon. All the records and CDs were classical save a recording of Sweeney Todd. There was a touch of the morbid in his Francis Bacon prints, their faces of hung meat, and in the one outsized bone on his coffee table that could only have come from an elephant, but the femur had blanched in the sun until porous like driftwood. It was not deathly, merely sculptural, suggesting that anything killed long enough ago retires from tragedy to knick-knack.
She inspected two framed photos on the wall. The first was of a black diver in a wet suit, her hood down and short hair beaded. The face itself was small, the chin sharp and narrow; but the eyes were enormous and at this angle showing an alarming amount of white.
The girl had great buck teeth which were somehow, in their startling, unapologetic dominance of the thin lower lip, attractive. The smile was carnivorous, and she was clutching a diving knife—‘what little good it did her’, Calvin would remark later. Though the young woman was beautiful in some inexplicable way, the face was haunting and a little fearsome, all eyeball and grin, and the contours of
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cheek or chin, the tiny body they guarded, would always seep away in Eleanor’s memory however many times she’d study the photo when Calvin wasn’t in. It was a face you wouldn’t want to come upon in the dark, though that is exactly when it would float before her, gloating with all that underworldly power that Eleanor herself felt cheated of.
The second photo was of Calvin, posed in a cocky stetson and muddy safari gear, one hand akimbo and the other on a blunderbuss, with a rumpled grey mountain range behind him. Calvin, too, was grinning here. He did not have the girl’s enormous teeth, but both sinister smiles and sidelong glances alluded to the same unsaid.
They seemed to be looking at each other. Eleanor felt excluded.
In the safari photo Calvin could not have been more than twenty-five, and the image challenged her original assessment from across the conference hall that he had not changed. Oh, he’d lost some hair, which lengthened his forehead and made him look more intelligent; and the weather had leathered him, for here he was seamless and by the time she met him he had already slipped into that indeterm-inate somewhere between thirty-five and sixty that certain men seem able to maintain until they’re ninety-two and of which women, who have no such timeless equivalent, are understandably jealous. Yet none of this transformation was interesting. In the picture his stare was searing; now Calvin’s eyes had gone cold. They no longer glinted like sapphire but glared like marble.
She did a double take. The mountain range was a stack of dead elephants.
‘In the early sixties I culled for the Ugandan game authorities,’
Calvin explained. ‘They were the first on the continent to realize they had a population problem. Despite a two-year gestation, elephants multiply like fury. And they devastate the land—tear trees up by the roots, trample the undergrowth. By the time we arrived the vegetation was stripped, and other species were dying out. Left to their own devices, elephants eliminate their own food suppl
y. In earlier times, they’d migrate to wreck some other hapless bush, and slowly the fauna they plundered would grow back. Now, of course, there’s nowhere for them to go. Once they’ve ruined their habitat, they starve, by the tens of thousands. In short order 29
the species is in danger of extinction. So we were brought in to crop.
We took out seven elephants a day for two years.’
‘That sounds horrendous.’
‘Those were the best years of my life. And the work was a great cure for sentimentality. In culling, you have to shoot whole families.
Orphans get peckish.’
‘No wonder you have no feeling for infant mortality.’
‘That’s right,’ he agreed affably. ‘And it was a professional operation, with full utilization: we’d cut out the tusks, carve up the carcasses and fly the meat back to Kampala. Not bad, elephant meat.
A little tough.’
‘I’m confused—I thought the problem with elephants was poaching.’ She fingered one of the stacks of clippings: deforestation, ozone holes, global warming—fifteen solid inches of disaster, teeter-ing from constant additions on the edge of his end table, like the world itself on the brink.
‘It is now,’ he carried on. ‘But as soon as you clean up the poaching, over-population sets in again. Why, in Tsavo—Starvo, as it is better known—the Game Department insisted for years their elephants were dying off because of poaching, but that yarn was a front for their own mismanagement. You got game wardens carving out the tusks of emaciated carcasses to make it look as if the animals had been poached; but the real story was the monsters had over-reproduced and torn the place apart until there wasn’t a leaf in the park. It was grotesque. I begged David Sheldrick to let me in there to cull, but no-no.’ It was hard to imagine Calvin Piper imploring anyone. ‘He hated me.’
‘Lots of people seem to hate you.’
‘Flattering, isn’t it? As usual in issues of any importance, the conflict degenerated to petty vendetta. I said the problem was population; Sheldrick said it was poaching; and the lousy animals got lost in the shuffle. All that mattered to Sheldrick was being right.’
‘What mattered to you?’
‘Being right, what do you think?’
‘Over-population—I thought elephants were endangered.’
‘Oh, they are,’ he said lightly. ‘Then, so are we.’
‘What’s happening in Starvo now?’
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‘A few sad little herds left. Now the problem’s poaching, all right.
While the elephant community spends its time firing furious, bitchy articles at each other, I’ve retired from the fight. The absurdity of the poaching-population controversy is that they are both problems.
If you successfully control poaching but restrict migration, the un-gainly pachyderms maraud through the park and then they starve.
If you fail to control poaching, they’re simply slaughtered. The larger problem is that humans and elephants cannot coexist. The Africans despise them, and if you’d ever let one of those adorable babies loose in your vegetable patch you’d see why. The only answer, as much as there is one, is stiff patrolling and a regular cull—what they do in South Africa.’
‘They would.’
Calvin smiled. ‘South Africans aren’t squeamish. But here culling has become unpopular. The bunny-huggers have decided that it traumatizes the poor dears; that we create whole parks full of holocaust survivors. And you would like this, Eleanor: they’re now trying to develop elephant contraceptives.’
‘Do they work?’
He laughed. ‘Do they work with people? You should know.’
‘I suppose the acceptance rate is rather low.’
‘It’s technologically impractical. All that money towards dead-end research just because young girls who take snaps have weak stomachs. But in East African parks, it won’t come to over-population. As human numbers here go over the top, the desperation level rises as steadily as the water table goes down. You know that Kenya has imported the SAS? They use the same shoot-to-kill on poachers as they do on the IRA. Still, as long as a pair of tusks will fetch sterling pound for pound, the poachers will keep trying. And I don’t blame the wretches. If I were some scarecrow villager, I’d probably shoot elephants wholesale. The dinosaurs are doomed anyway, so someone should cash in.’
Calvin’s green monkey had screamed and run away when Eleanor first walked in, but since had climbed to a balcony over-hanging the living room with a basket from the kitchen. For the past five minutes, he had been pitching gooseberries from overhead, and the accuracy with which they landed on
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Eleanor suggested the target was not arbitrary. She had tried politely to pick the green berries from her hair, but the squashed ones were staining her dress. ‘Um,’ she finally objected. ‘Calvin?’
‘Malthus!’ Calvin picked up the handful of gooseberries she had neatly piled on the table and threw them back at the monkey, who scurried down the stairs, to assume a glare through the grille from the patio more unsettling than pitched fruit. ‘Sorry. Malthus doesn’t like guests. Don’t take it personally. Malthus, I suspect, doesn’t even like me.’
‘This culling work—’ She collected herself, still finding pulp in her cuff. ‘Is that what got you into demography?’
‘Quite. Ah, but graduate school was deadly dry after Murchison Falls…Perhaps demographics was a mistake. Since then my life has been conducted on paper. It’s not my nature. I like aeroplanes, projects, a little bang-bang.’
‘Was the work dangerous?’
‘Not at all. Shooting those massive grey bull’s-eyes in open grassland was easy as picking off cardboard boxes. And they’re supposed to be so intelligent, but they’re hopelessly trusting. That isn’t intelligent.’
‘You don’t talk about elephants with much affection.’
‘They make me angry.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So in your view the elephants have had it?’
It was a little queer. While she had noticed the cold in Calvin’s eyes, they had at least remained dark and clear; but as she watched, a film cast over them. Calvin sat down abruptly as if someone had pushed him. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Eleanor cocked her head. ‘That’s odd. I was getting the impression only a moment ago that wildlife meant a great deal to you.’
‘A moment ago it did.’ Calvin’s body gave a short jerk, as if starting at the wheel. ‘Curry,’ he said.
Trying to be conversational, Eleanor asked while nibbling her chicken, ‘What do you think of the AIDS situation in Kenya? Do you expect it will take off?’
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‘I think far too much is being made of that virus,’ he said irritably.
‘What’s one more deadly disease?’
He didn’t seem to want to discuss it, so she let the subject drop.
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3
In the Land of Shit-Fish
For all her training in contraceptive counselling, Eleanor’s work in family planning had less to do with babies than with vehicles. In every organization she was juggling transport, half its fleet forever broken down. Eleanor hated cars; like telephones, computers and other people, they seemed determined to take advantage. While a Land Rover formally came with her job, she was constantly having to lend it back out. Today a botched backstreet abortion case had turned up in their Mathare North Clinic and hers was the only car available to drive the girl discreetly to Kenyatta Hospital for a D
and C. As Director she might have refused, but Eleanor Merritt was not that kind of director. And she hardly wanted to admit to her brand-new staff that she was too frightened to drive to Mathare Valley by herself.
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 34
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 hub-caps 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.
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