Game Control

by Lionel Shriver

  ‘Life is cheap in the under class,’ said Louis.

  Eleanor was struck that while Calvin spoke of people as vermin, he spoke of vermin as people—she had never heard him describe his relationship to any human population as personally as his relationship to those mice.

  ‘These animal rights people,’ Basengi was saying excitedly, ‘they are crazy. They have started shooting and bombing in London. And yes, you cannot do the simplest experiment in universities any more.

  This alone is a very good reason to keep our own—’

  ‘Basengi,’ said Calvin sharply.

  The Asian clapped his mouth shut and mashed another crisp. The others, too, resettled in their chairs and reached for their drinks and laughed, at nothing. It was hard to get conversation going again.

  Three rose to go. When Calvin himself stood up, half the remaining party began collecting their coats.

  ‘Grant, you will remember to—?’ asked Calvin.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Louis, you will call—?’

  ‘Right away.’

  ‘And send me—?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Bunny loitered behind after the others had left, conferring with Calvin in a low voice, inclined as far forward as Malthus would allow. Eleanor positioned herself determinedly at Calvin’s other side as the threesome drifted towards the door. With an irritated glance at Eleanor as if to say, well, we can’t talk about anything with you here, she resorted to the monkey.

  ‘Malthus doesn’t despise Bunny quite as much as everyone 61

  else, does he?’ she said in that gurgling falsetto people use compulsively with pets. In a show of bravado, she reached to stroke the green monkey’s head. Malthus promptly shrieked his claws across the back of her hand.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eleanor, as Bunny tried to hide the fact that Malthus had drawn blood. ‘I can see you have a special relationship.’

  To keep from bleeding on her dress, Bunny was forced to find a napkin. When she returned she assessed Calvin and Eleanor side by side, as she might eye a skirt and blouse in the mirror that, no, from any angle, simply didn’t quite go.

  ‘You’re all right?’ asked Calvin.

  ‘A mere love-scratch,’ she smiled with a salacious arch of the brow.

  ‘I’ve drawn worse in my time, believe me.’ She was one of those slimy sorts who would get sympathy by refusing to ask for it.

  ‘ So nice to see you again,’ Bunny offered to Eleanor, and then pre-empted to Calvin. ‘Shall we?’

  Eleanor cursed herself for having her car. Bunny had contrived to ride with Calvin, leaving Eleanor to dribble down the stairs by herself, while Bunny earnestly wittered in Calvin’s ear, her bandaged hand slipped around his elbow.

  Eleanor said ‘ Kwa heri! Asante sana!’ to the askari, while the rest of the party stumbled around him as if skirting lawn furniture. She joined the line of cars filing from the drive of the great bright A-frame, beamed with security floodlights. In the front another guard raised the heavy metal gate, riveted with warning signs—PROTECTED

  BY…—with crude paintings of little men beside outsized Alsations.

  Off in the distance, a burglar alarm yowled; a Securi-firm van U-turned and sputtered away. As she drifted down to the corner, the barking of razor-backs marked her progress. Every property, with big recessed houses and plush gardens, came with its sultry, sleepy Masai with a rungu, stationed by more gates and more warning placards. At the turning, a uniformed patrol with batons trudged through its midnight round. Funny, most of these wazungu had come thousands of miles to this continent, only to spend a great deal of money keeping Africa out.

  The guards looked so tired. Imagine staying up all night, every night, stationed by some rich white home, with absol-62

  utely nothing to do. Though she supposed they were grateful for a job—the work paid an average of seventy-five dollars a month.

  Driving back across town, Eleanor considered Calvin’s proposition that Africans do not identify with your life at all. They see white people the way you look at oryx.

  Supposing you work at an enormous house for a childless mzungu couple and they throw generous parties at least once a week. Afternoons you slog up the stairs with crates of beer and soda whose empties you will cart back down the next day. You lug trunk-loads of meat, vegetables and crinkling packets of crisps to the kitchen, and sometimes you glance at the price tags of the items on top—that 120 shillings for American ketchup would buy posho for a week.

  Later that night, you help direct Mercedes to pack tightly in limited parking space. Music pounds out of the windows for hours while women’s laughter pierces from the veranda, where you can sometimes see men put their hands up ladies’ shirts. Finally these inexplicably malnourished women weave down the stairs, congratulating each other on avoiding the chocolate cake. They never speak to you.

  They are always drunk. In the morning, the housegirl is cleaning glasses by eight, so that by the time the inhabitants arise a little before noon the spilled drinks are wiped away. You cart the garbage from the bin and later sift through it for the empty vodka and wine bottles—Africans never throw away containers. If it hasn’t been fed to the dogs, the rubbish is full of leftover meat, salad and crunchy bits, but it is spoiled with cigarette butts and you are not, after all, starving. It never occurs to your employers to deliver what they cannot eat to the fire where you keep guard over their CD player.

  You know your employers treat you better than average, pay you more than many askaris on this street, though you have calculated in the copious time on your hands that this household spends more on Team Meat and Hound Meal than it does on your salary. At least next pay day you will be allowed to go back to your village and share the money with your wife, to feed your five children. Perhaps you shouldn’t complain. But you watch, week after week, as these tipply, giggly, shamefully underclad girls fall insensible one more night into cars you have never learned to drive because you can only afford matatus, keeping awake until sunrise, aware 63

  that if you are caught drinking yourself you will lose your job.

  Calvin, are you going to tell me that’s like looking at oryx?

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  5

  What Some Women Will Put Up With

  ‘Calvin, who are those people?’

  ‘Just think of us as butterflies over Tokyo,’ he said obscurely.

  ‘And why do you put up with that Bunny person? I hate the way she keeps touching your arm.’

  ‘Now, why—’ he brushed her temple—‘would that bother you?’

  Eleanor blushed and turned away. ‘Bunny Morton works for Worldwatch. Keeps me informed. And she has money.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Basengi,’ Calvin proceeded, ‘is a jumpy but brilliant economist.

  So is Grant, if a pompous bore. Louis is a biologist; upper-class Kenyan, schooled in Britain, sharp.’

  ‘They make me uncomfortable.’

  ‘Come, come. Drinking all night and passing comment on the world in which we no longer participate is the common solace of the unemployed.’

  ‘They’re so grovellingly attentive to you. And you sit there as if holding court. They’re all eager and they laugh too much at your jokes. They goon forward on their elbows and never interrupt. Like a pack of dogs with their tongues out.’

  ‘So—’ He sat beside her on his couch, close but not too, and Eleanor felt the calculation in the distance down to the quarter-inch.

  ‘I surround myself with yes-men and sycophants.’

  ‘They ignore me.’ With Calvin right beside her she could no longer look at him when she talked.

  ‘They ignore most people.’ He put his arm on the back of the couch, though his fingers did not, quite, touch her shoulder.

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  ‘What do they pay attention to, then?’

  ‘The fate of mankind, of course.’ His face remained deadpan.

  Eleanor could never tell in such moments whether he was being genuinel
y pretentious or taking the mickey out of his gullible new friend. She suspected that he wasn’t sure when he was larking himself; that maybe when the whole world seemed funny you became incapable of making a joke.

  Eleanor swilled her remaining wine to rise for a refill. When she returned, she sat an extra inch further away. ‘I met Wallace Threadgill last night.’

  ‘Did he regale you with his conversion? You are the enemy of the smile on this child’s face?’

  ‘Quite a set piece, isn’t it?’ But Eleanor could not concentrate on anything save the precise proximity of the fingers on his right hand, which had moved to exactly the same pencil-width distance from her shoulder as before. Eleanor was beginning to feel physically sick.

  She wished he would do something with that hand or take it away.

  ‘He claimed I was in danger.’

  ‘You are.’

  Calvin finally touched her sleeve, only to cross the room. He paged his clippings—census inaccuracies, crop failings and the odd small, personal account of sheer meanness.

  ‘I found a choice morsel this morning,’ he said, waving fresh newsprint. ‘Mexico dumps ten million gallons of raw sewage a day into the Tijuana River—among other things. The river glows red at night. If you step in the water with gum boots, the plastic melts.

  Wetbacks slithering for San Diego wrap themselves in garbage bags, but those dissolve, too. What is the problem? In sixty years, Tijuana’s population has gorged from 500 to two million. Get Wallace to explain to you how density is increasing ingenuity and healthy competition in Mexico. Take him to the border and get him to describe how muy magnifico the human race is, how the more the better. Ask if he’d like to go for a swim.’

  Eleanor rested her head back on the couch, following a large moth as it smack-smacked against the ceiling. She had never been a complainer. She never fixed on what she lacked; she’d known since childhood to make do. Consequently, she wouldn’t give it a second thought when the Land Rover’s

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  clutch cable snapped and she had to walk five miles to the nearest garage, when there was no more beer, or toilet paper, or water in the taps. And just as she would not fantasize about a shower, she would not fantasize about men. She would fall asleep designing a broader-based health care clinic, because much as she might have enjoyed a hand on her cheek, she did not regard tenderness as what she deserved; it was instead one more luxury to prove she could do without. However, unlike beer or toilet paper, arms around her waist, lips to her temple would flash single frame through her day, with all the craftiness of subliminal advertising. Late Tanzanian nights, in the flicker of her paraffin lantern, figures had flitted in the shadows, and she would glimpse a whole couple intersticed behind the mosquito netting over her bed. As with all spectres, if she stared them straight down they would evanesce, but if she ever leaned her head back and closed her eyes as she was doing now, a mouth would spread over her neck.

  She opened her eyes again— smack-smack. The fingers on her shoulder had been an accident, because look, one brush and he’d dived for a polluted river across the room. She would be well behaved. But in that case it was 8 p.m, she was tired and she did not have too suffer Tijuana.

  ‘Calvin. I have heard nothing but demography all day. All week.

  Sometimes, I think, my whole life. Please. I do not want to talk about the population of anywhere on earth. Nor do I wish to discuss environmental decay, the demise of African wildlife or tiny children with machetes in Natal. Much less wellington-melting sewage in Mexico.’

  ‘Good gracious.’

  She had rarely seen him awkward. He shuffled his article back into its pile and shambled to the couch in silence. When he edged into the crook of the sofa he looked trapped.

  ‘You are still quite—pretty, did you know that?’ he asked in a defeated voice.

  ‘No, I don’t. In Dar es Salaam, I lived for two years without a mirror. It’s queer, not seeing your own reflection. You become like anyone else you haven’t met for a long time—you forget what you look like. Though there’s something right about that. The all-looking-out. I’ve wondered if you were ever meant to look into your own eyes.’

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  ‘But no one ever tells you? That you’re pretty?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m telling you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Would you stay tonight?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  At dinner, Calvin had a hard time adhering to Eleanor’s restrictions: he would slide into toxic waste as easy as slipping in a puddle, but then wipe his feet again and apologize, nimbly sidestepping the live slave-trade in Mozambique, necklacing in Soweto. Eleanor could hear the deletions in Calvin’s discourse, bleeped like Lenny Bruce on prime-time. The effort was charming, though it was alarming, once you siphoned the scum from Calvin’s monologue, how little was left.

  She did get him to talk about music. Though she’d have pegged him for Wagner, he preferred Debussy and Elgar. While his recitation of his favourite pieces was a bit tedious, she was relieved to isolate at least one passion—St Matthew—outside population growth.

  Walton, Barber and Ravel got them through the better part of a roast chicken; Chopin, Copland and Albinoni dispatched a little rice. Yet by coffee Calvin had a constipated expression, and implored, ‘You don’t mind—?’

  ‘Oh, go ahead,’ Eleanor granted.

  ‘Yesterday I read about a uranium mining town in East Germany called Crossen. The incidence of still births and deformed babies is ten times too high; cancer and skin diseases rife—the works, the whole village is poisoned, nobody lives past forty-five, right? You know what the company does about it? They distribute free wigs.’

  Calvin laughed heartily for the first time in an hour. ‘Thanks,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘I needed that.’

  ‘Some day I’ll teach you to hold forth about gardening.’

  ‘It’s far more likely I shall teach you to hold forth about uranium poisoning.’ He led her back to the couch.

  Though resolved sleeping arrangements should have eased their earlier clumsiness, when Calvin put his arm around her 68

  shoulder something was peculiar. His body was still. His hand draped at her upper arm exerted no pressure, and she studied it with disturbed curiosity. The fingers were long and languid, the wrist small boned, and despite its manly slashings of old white scars, the hand seemed feminine. Then, it was girlish less from appearance than from what it was doing: nothing. His body against hers felt uncannily at rest. She could feel his chest expand at her breast, and his breathing was so Zen-slow Wallace Threadgill would tip his hat.

  Eleanor may not have been seduced in a long time, but she was dead sure this wasn’t it.

  Without urgency, he lifted the hand and moved her head to his shoulder; his eyes were closed. ‘Why don’t you tell me about yourself?’ he asked quietly. ‘You never say anything about yourself.’

  ‘You’re one to talk.’

  ‘No, I tell you everything, if you know how to listen. I’m not nearly so secretive as I would like.’

  ‘Me, what’s to know?’ Though he was not groping into the folds of her dress, their voices, gone low and soft, did mingle and inter-weave, and Eleanor was reminded that the best sex she’d ever had was in conversation. ‘I didn’t grow up in East Africa. My father wasn’t in the British Army. I didn’t shoot elephants in my youth. I was never the eccentric head of the largest population donor agency in the United States. I’m not very interesting, Calvin.’

  ‘Leave that for me to decide. Tell me anything. Tell me about your childhood.’

  ‘I was born in Virginia,’ she despaired.

  He laughed. ‘Is there anything you’re not ashamed of?’

  ‘My father. Or not my real father,’ she hurried. ‘Ray. I’m proud of Ray. Bright, dedicated—’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Justice, I suppose.’

  ‘
What a thorn in the side.’

  ‘He’s a US senator!’

  Calvin laughed again; Eleanor amused him more often than she’d like. ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you display a character flaw. Does he make you feel more important?’

  ‘Well—yes.’

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  ‘You don’t mean Raymond Bass? I’ve met him.’

  ‘He was one of your supporters. He voted you oodles of money.’

  ‘He was not one of my supporters when I retired. Then, no one was.’

  ‘No one could afford to be.’

  ‘We are already back to me. Go on.’ He smoothed her hair. ‘You were born in Virginia.’

  ‘My mother was a schizophrenic. I lived in a strange world until I was nine, a little like flipping the channel all the time. I never knew what programme I’d wake up in. You learn to be cooperative with a schizophrenic; if she says she’s Jacqueline Kennedy, then your mother is Jacqueline Kennedy. What was the phrase in the sixties?

  “Go with the flow”? You develop sea legs.

  ‘But then she was put away, and for three years I was kicked about from relative to friend. That life, it wasn’t so different from being with my mother. With all these foster arrangements, they had their own kids, they were being nice, and I knew they’d only be nice for so long. So I kept being cooperative. I learned to keep my head down.

  In school I kept my hand down. In fact, I wouldn’t even—oh, Christ.’

  She giggled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just remembered an ordeal I haven’t thought about for a long time. Fourth grade. Mrs Henderson—funny how you never forget those names—that was my teacher. I was living with my Aunt Liz, who called me into the house one day after school. Mrs Henderson had phoned, it seems. Liz wanted to know if, in class, did I have a problem, uh, did I need to go to the bathroom. And the real story was yes, after lunch I was too embarrassed to raise my hand, so I would hold it in, and eventually it would get, well, bad. You know how little girls will grip themselves? I guess I did that, at my desk.