He had dived with Panga several more weekends. The panic never recurred. If Eleanor didn’t miss her guess, Panga never suggested a trip to the coast, but she never rejected a proposal either, and doggedly hauled bottles and wet suits to the car. She never once would have intimated that she didn’t enjoy it. Then, Eleanor noted, the woman had something to prove, and when you are trying to prove a lie you can never set about your demonstrations enough times.
There was a Second World War wreck near Diani, so he hired a boatman who knew the site. The weather was splendid. At the time, Calvin had been in that fulgent humour that he could now only re-count like a statistic: I-was-exuberant—it was technical information about the past, the number on a cheque-stub, an old address.
For the second dive of the day, Calvin estimated they’d enough air left for a quick twenty-five-minute foray, though Panga’s bottle, since she still breathed too fast, was lower than his own. He wanted Panga to get used to carrying the surface marker buoy, a balloon attached to a reel of line that kept the boatman apprised of their location. The quick-release clip with which the reel fastened to her stab jacket jammed, however, and, not thinking, he knotted it to a loop as a substitute. (‘Stupid.’) And he could swear he told her to tie off to the wreck once they found it, but maybe he hadn’t. Probably the knot on the jacket was too tight. (‘Easy to say now.’) All went according to plan until they found the hulk, and it a wink the current washed Panga from view. Calvin toured around the silenced rotors, blades poking from the heap like the ribs of rotting elephants. In death, he remarked, machines achieve an increasingly animate aspect, just as animals become objects; they meet in the middle. He had bonged the sides of the carcass, trying to attract Panga’s attention, casting about overhead, unable to find the yellow line of the buoy. Calvin
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sighed into his regulator, the bubbles disgruntling overhead. He’d looked forward to this dive, all month inundated by the smelly crawl of unwanted babies across his desk, stuck in the traffic jams of spewing lorries full of rocks for more dumpy houses in this low-rent Eden, bustled by the siafu of pedestrians in town, hustled by legless beggars and shrill homeless scruff—he didn’t want his brief respite from the multitudes cut short. Panga had been drilled, however, that if they ever got separated she should surface. Reluctantly he drifted back to the loud, jabbering, overrun world up top.
When he emerged, however, several hundred feet away there was the buoy, diddling in the poppled calm, and opposite the boat and its lone attendant: no Panga. Calvin checked his own air, and he hadn’t more than ten minutes left himself. For the first time in water Calvin discovered what panic felt like. He lashed on to self-possession like tying his body to a post, and finned like the blazes on snorkel to the buoy. Calvin descended the line more quickly than was advisable, neglecting to clear his ears because he could not distinguish the pressure of the water from the pressure of imminent disaster.
The line led to the wreck itself; she had not tied off. He followed the nylon hand over hand and switched on his torch, remembering that Panga didn’t have one and the dark of the corrupted corridors must have crowded her; he explained that it is almost as frightening underwater to run out of light as to run out of air. Still the cord proceeded in and out of portholes and through doorways. Air supply very low, but finally the rope led outside the wreck. At that moment the sun broke from behind a cloud, filtering through the sea and cruelly improving visibility.
For overhead, dangling at the end of the line like a hooked fish, was Panga. She listed to and fro in the current, relaxed underwater at last. As he rose, the bright yellow strap that bound her diving knife to her thigh caught the sun. The story was laid out for him: in trailing the rope through the wreck and out the other side, she had exhausted the reel and run out of line. It was knotted, he remembered, to her jacket. She had struggled towards the surface and been tied down. But he wanted Eleanor to taste the irony: here was a woman so
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adroit with knives that she was nicknamed after one, but that was in deserts. It had never occurred to her these edges applied to the undersea. Calvin slipped out his own dagger and cut her free, as she might have done for herself. He tried to inflate her jacket, but there was nothing in her tank but a sigh. The artificial respiration in the boat was merely a schoolroom exercise.
If you can scissor your own life into unrelated pieces of paper, that was where Calvin snipped his in half. For he despised his mother, 300 rancorous pounds of gin, and his father was going senile; he was an only child. None of his colleagues had ever been invited that step closer that would make them friends. According to Calvin, Panga was his lifeline to every attachment he had ever knotted to his own kind, though what he described as a cord Eleanor saw as a thread.
The slice through sentiment took effect right away. He left Panga’s body carelessly in the bottom of the boat, curled as it had once been in shame, now in common abandonment. That was where it started, his merciless lack of sympathy for the dead. What did a little frenzy cost her? Did she feel bad? For Calvin that sprinkling of terror on a pretty day cost all he had.
To the boatman he must have seemed hard. They had dredged up his diving partner drowned and Calvin merely acted terse, out of sorts, jerking the anchor as if the accident were an inconvenience.
The boatman asked if they should ring a hospital at the dock. ‘What in God’s name for?’ asked Calvin incredulously, and that was their only discussion all the way to shore.
He drove her to the Mombasa morgue; Eleanor could see him sloping the Kamba over his shoulder with her fins batting at his thighs. Kenyan morgues were hellholes; thieves were always running off with the refrigeration. Here, too, he was surely curt and unceremonious and dropped her with the rest, willy-nilly on the floor, trying not to retch. Calvin planned to notify the family, he informed the attendant, who would have eyed him with slatternly savvy—did the bwana want to take the wet suit back? Of course the mzungu did not feel anything,
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because the corpse was black. And there would be no investigation; this was Africa.
Gunning off from the morgue, Calvin found he’d been in such a clench of fury that his jaw ached. He was afraid the anger wouldn’t last, and did not feel prepared for what came next. The Nairobi—Mombasa road was death in the dark, and he had had enough of that, so when he passed a calamine-pink square signposted
‘The Love-Stone Inn’, Calvin pulled in.
Ensconced in the stark hotel room, with its squeaky campbed, one blanket and rickety wooden chair, Calvin stood under the swaying bare bulb convinced that the next few decisions he made, however trivial, could have profound consequences. He might go to sleep, but sleep was like diving, and he was not about to be lured into depths. With robotic determination, Calvin went to his briefcase and pulled out the latest addition to his library, Bitter Pills: Population Policies and Their Implementation in Eight Developing Countries. He put on his spectacles with all the grim resolution of a pilot donning his goggles for a bombing mission. He had never read any book with such intensity. He claimed that it did not matter which work it was, so long as the word population was somewhere in the title. This was his field. This was the issue he had given his life to.
Gradually the sun rose outside the window and he switched off the light. He turned his last few pages. Calvin could remember every point he contended, every anecdote of potential utility; he later employed some of them with Eleanor’s stepfather. He slid the volume victoriously back into his briefcase. Calvin willingly admitted to no longer loving anyone, yet could not be accused of not loving any thing. He had salvaged a passion with Bitter Pills in a Gethsemene of a night after which he was resurrected as the demon of demography.
Unlike the tale of the poisoned girlfriends, Eleanor did not find this story romantic. She didn’t care for that book at the end, not one bit.
‘You say you “saved something”. Saved what?’
He must have sensed she wasn’t bowled over, but
wouldn’t go to lengths. ‘My work.’
‘Don’t you think a more competent response to that event would have been a good long cry?’
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‘A little therapy, is it? I’d forgotten, the latest fashion in the States is grief. Perhaps Americans can afford to be keen, since in comparison to the rest of the world they’ve come to so little of it.’
‘Did you think her drowning was your fault?’
‘I made some misjudgements. But I believe you’re missing the point.’
‘I’m asking if you feel guilty.’
He rankled. ‘It doesn’t matter if I feel guilty. That is not the moral of our story. There isn’t even a moral, but a fact, which does not lend itself to interpretation of any kind. Anything you might say about it, who is to blame, dwarfs before the big, stupid, immutable truth.’
‘Which is?’
‘ Panga is dead.’
Eleanor was getting cross herself. ‘That’s your excuse?’
‘I didn’t ask to be excused.’
‘You regard lying next to a—’ She finished with effort—‘an attractive woman night after night like an inert vanilla pudding as perfectly normal?’
‘I have never aspired to norms.’
‘Oh, right. We wouldn’t want any passing relationship to intrude on your preoccupation with the fact that there are far too many of us to relate to.’
‘I’m aware you find me insensitive. On the contrary, I am stifled by crowds because they asphyxiate me with suffering. Indeed, that is my shorthand definition of over-population: when you can no longer contain the whole of your race’s anguish in your head without going insane. If I were as hard as you seem to think, I might easily share this planet with 5.3 billion failed romances, degenerative rheumat-isms and disfiguring scars. As it is, I can’t bear it.’
‘Then there’s no room for any of us, is there? You can’t even hold your own anguish in your head.’ She added as an afterthought, ‘Let alone mine.’
As a display of his stupendous sensitivity, he let the remark slide.
‘So you’re trying to tell me that the reason you’re so pathologically obsessed with population that you can’t have sex and never, never think about anything else at all aside from
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the odd cup of cold coffee is that your girlfriend had an accident?’
Calvin rose and picked up Stand on Zanzibar, shoving it angrily on to a shelf. ‘For some reason, while capable of following the quixotic emotional logic of their own history, most people still expect others’ lives to read with the undemanding linearity of Babar Goes to the Circus. Yes, that is the “answer”, as much as I have one: Panga is dead. If that doesn’t make tidy story-book sense, I am terribly sorry.’
‘It fascinates me,’ she said to his back, ‘that nowhere in exploring your problems does the information feature that you lost your job and your career is in the sewer. That’s too linear, I suppose.’
He scooped up Malthus, who clambered to the usual shoulder and leered. Pointedly, Calvin chose a chair further from this harpy with no sympathy for his terrible experiences, and stationed himself with the monkey as if posing for a portrait. What a team.
‘Pardon,’ he said stiffly, recomposed. ‘Which problems are these?’
Eleanor guffawed. ‘You have almost nothing but!’
‘Nonsense. The fact is, USAID did me a favour.’
‘Like fun they did.’
‘They stopped wasting my time. I no longer fritter my evenings popping finger sausages with congressmen to fund a sprinkling of unattended clinics. I am back,’ he announced, ‘to elephants.’
‘It’s always gratifying when you see fit to entrust me with the intimate details of your research.’
If anything, these carps of hers only drove him to be more secretive still. He smiled, curling the monkey’s tail around his finger. ‘Furthermore, I have found personal catastrophe professionally enlightening.
Disaster on a small scale makes disaster on a global one easier to grasp. If my own life can fall apart, the earth I walk is not, therefore, a reliable place. Employed family men have no business in the sciences of dread, for no matter what our dedicated professional studies, his stable universe is a faithful dog. My universe has bitten me on the leg. Big bad things do happen, because they have happened to me.’
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‘You do feel terribly sorry for yourself.’
He considered, looking in Malthus’s eyes. ‘I do often feel sorry for myself, but I am oblivious to my future. An attitude I fear extends rapidly to the rest of the species.’
‘Why do you bother prophesying disaster all day if our future doesn’t matter to you?’
‘I don’t bother, always,’ he said lightly. ‘Have I ever told you about neutrality?’
Eleanor felt a queasy foreboding. ‘No.’
‘It’s a term I’ve coined for a little affliction of mine that doesn’t seem to be curable and lately is getting worse. The condition kicks in at the most arbitrary times. Everything goes horribly equal. I feel intensely interested in people, but I don’t care what happens to them.
I experience curiosity but never revulsion. I am not upset by the torture of political prisoners in Somalia, but I might be intrigued by the techniques. Barbarisms from Caligula to Pol Pot fail to excite my distress or even regret. If anything I’m rather grateful for a monster or two just for the variety, like a few bombastic chords in a quiet quartet. That’s it—the world goes to music. Now, there’s trivial music or loud or dull, but there’s no such thing as wicked music.
Do you understand? I become an impartial voyeur who isn’t fussed what occurs as long as something does and I get to watch. I do recall that once this intellectual weightlessness descended on me while I listened to some medical chap depict the consequences of all-out nuclear war. The details made Nevil Shute sound like Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Of course, neutral, I found the prospect of no more life on earth perfectly interesting. All I could say afterwards was,
“Well. What is wrong with rock?” I remember feeling very peaceful myself, but the conversation came to a complete halt and in two minutes flat the whole dinner party of guests came up with reasons why they had to leave early.’
She stood up. ‘I might have called it an early night myself.’
‘You haven’t understood a word I’ve said.’
‘I’ve understood perfectly well. I think you’re depressed. I think you’re incredibly cut off and withdrawn and terrified to have feelings because then you might get hurt. And I’m quite tired of listening to men describe how they’ve turned into emotional fence posts as if it’s some kind of achievement. It’s
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flagrant cowardice. Now let’s go to sleep. I know I’m not an exotic black mercenary, but you could at least put an arm around me. I seem to have caught a chill.’
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9
The Enigma Variations
Eleanor woke the next morning curt, and plumped the impression of her head from the pillow as if trying to irradicate any trace of her presence from the bed.
Calvin had risen irritable as well. ‘After all my effort describing a severe and congenital case of the existentials,’ he said at breakfast,
‘you make the momentous pronouncement that I am depressed. It is so like a woman to reduce philosophy to petty distress. I sometimes worry if your sex is capable of pure thought. Nothing seems real to women besides feelings.’
‘And nothing is real to men but facts. Do you think we’d have names for emotions if they didn’t exist?’
‘By that logic, witches and dwarfs and goblins are all leaping about the room because we have words for them.’
‘In your house?’ Eleanor drawled. ‘Maybe they are.’
‘Perhaps in future,’ he announced, while scanning his latest issue of Omni, ‘I should keep my confidences to myself. They don’t seem to bring us closer, do they?’
‘It’s a little unreasonable to expect me to get weep
y over one of your old lovers. Especially if she explains why I spend most nights curled around a doorstop.’
‘No one is forcing you to sleep with me.’
‘No one is forcing you to be celibate. Do you think she’s watching or something?’
‘Yes,’ he said coolly. ‘Panga has been in Eritrea, but she got back last week.’
‘Weirdo,’ Eleanor muttered.
‘I’m afraid you disappointed me last night,’ he continued, in glasses, still reading. ‘I’m sometimes convinced you have 124
no interest in what I’ve been through, least of all in anything I think.
You seem solely concerned with how I care for you.’
‘In which case I’m not concerned with very much.’
‘You cheat yourself, Eleanor. You are in the presence of major historical forces. They are far more fascinating than whether I hold your hand.’
‘Well, maybe I’m just a dizzy, air-headed nit who only cares about boys. That’s why I’m thirty-eight, single, childless and have spent my whole life working in Third World population assistance. I set myself up in Dar es Salaam to find a man, and I chose to look for one in a hot, smelly, barren garbage heap because I’m an idiot.’
‘I was trying to give you some advice. If you’re insistent on conducting your mental life on the trifling level of relationships, I can’t stop you…now, hold on!’ He interrupted her indignant departure with a hand on her arm. ‘When are you coming back?’
‘Tomorrow,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Maybe.’
‘Tonight.’
‘Why should I?’
‘I’ve grown accustomed to your face,’ he sang merrily, Rex Harrison. ‘Come here straight from work. I won’t be back till eight; take the key. Put your feet up with this month’s Demography; then we’ll step out. Now you may go. You’re late.’ He went back to his magazine.
Eleanor might have taken heart that she was getting a reaction, and any was more important than what kind; and that if it behooved Calvin to deride relationships this implied that they actually had one.
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