Game Control

by Lionel Shriver

  Matters really much improved would prove politically awkward, and presidents and PMs would rush to take credit for the new world order. No one would thank him, you could count on that.

  Except a small, perverse cult of votaries after his death, reviled by the majority but still legal in a democracy after all, would keep his portrait on their walls and trade among themselves in a black-market of Piper paraphernalia: old population articles, conference abstracts, crusty condom packets that their owners would claim really landed on Nyrere’s desk.

  Driving back, Calvin contented himself that even if this little diet he planned to put the population on turned into a complete and utter horlicks, he would still have done mankind a favour: something (anything) would have happened. How destitute the world would be without tyrants! For wasn’t any event salvation from the simper-ing daily maw of cups of coffee and go-slow bumps? Weren’t people hungrier for meaning than for virtue? Weren’t world wars, in their very badness, really rather a good thing? So the benevolent Calvin Piper would martyr himself for incident, for a turn of the page.

  For truth be told he did feel a bit peculiar about sprinkling Pachyderm over sparsely settled Iowa and the one-child families of France.

  Calvin consoled himself that Western civilization required regular cathartic upheavals. Wasn’t the First World always stirring up trouble, without which life became one big plumped pillow?

  Because give the West a catastrophe and it was Christmas. Anything but lie in the neatly turned bed it had made. Calvin was amused at wazungu ranting at how nothing in Africa 151

  worked. Why did they imagine they stayed? To wallow in the pleasant obstruction of a country where sending a single parcel took half a day. Suffer any inconvenience to avoid the horrors of efficiency, the grim success of Scandinavia: the racially balanced cur-ricula, the dogged recycling, the healthy salads, the loom of a tall athletic population with white-gold hair, as if fresh from terror. No, give them a little plague, a baptism of disaster and the too-white world would thrive. It needed setbacks to reprieve itself from the organized nightmare of perfectly separated garbage.

  As for the Third World, they’d barely notice. Thirty-five per cent of their people dropping dead overnight would seem perfectly normal. They were used to rotten luck.

  152

  11

  The Battle of the Bunnies and the Rats

  It was not a good day at Pathfinder. The Family Planning International Association had been caught funding abortion; its USAID

  funding was therefore withdrawn overnight. The newly impover-ished FPIA was frantically off-loading projects it could no longer afford on to foster organizations like Eleanor’s. Suddenly her desk was piled high with reports on incompleted role-playing workshops on AIDS and sexuality for Nairobi grammar schools, as if amateur theatrics changed what those kids did in the bushes after class.

  Meanwhile the UN had just released a new study suggesting that world population was likely to reach ten billion as early as 2050. She tucked the booklet in her briefcase to bring home her offering of despair the way other women might arrive with aftershave; Calvin would find the numbers bracing.

  Eleanor was oppressed by the report, for Calvin’s visions of a few bedraggled remnants humming through gaunt crowds trying to remember the fourth movement of the Requiem had started to undermine her. Even as she defended it, she found her work increasingly absurd. The statistics were stifling, and in private moments she confessed that Calvin was right in his way, that the answer would be death, and she wondered why he bothered to arrange it when attrition was bound to arrive of its own accord. While she found her ersatz lover’s solution deranged, she did not, today, find her own any less so. Trying to avert the world’s population from doubling in sixty years by supervising seminars of twenty-five on ‘Adolescent Empowerment’, Eleanor felt much as any scientist might if, concerned about the rising sea level from polar melting, he 153

  spent his days at the shore spooning the ocean into a paper cup.

  At the bottom of her mail was another one of those horrible brown envelopes. Last time he had wanted a computer; that meant America was next. She refused to open the letter at all and instead penned a note, which she immediately sealed, addressed and threw in Outgoing to ensure she didn’t change her mind:

  Dear Peter,

  I hope this finds you in good health, and give my greetings to your family. It was my pleasure to post you the basketball shoes, and I am assuming they fit. The shoes are all I intend to send, however, and I do not wish to receive any more requests for articles of clothing or foreign education. In my country, this behavior would be considered very rude. I have to warn you that should any more demands for favors reach my desk, I shall be forced to return your letters unopened. I try to be generous, but I am a very busy woman, and I am not paid as much as you must think. I’m sorry you have problems, but so do I. Much as the unfairness of the world saddens me, I cannot personally make everything right. If you will take my advice, you will at least encourage your mother to have no more children. That way when you need them she will be able to buy you shoes herself.

  Your friend in Jesus,

  ELEANOR MERRITT

  She lunched with a colleague from Population Health Services who was leaving the profession to administer food aid with Oxfam. That’s all there was left, he said. That’s what was going to be required here, wasn’t it? Family planning was too late. Commonly Eleanor could be relied on for chin-upmanship. Today she played with her soup and concurred: family planning was a farce. There was a funny silence. It was the second time in two days that Eleanor had refused to play her traditional part.

  On her way back to International House from lunch, a parking boy extended the usual hand for her spare shillings—

  154

  ‘Please, madam! I am so ho-ongry! Please, madam!’ but in a tone less a plea than a taunt, or a threat even, that he would nag behind her for blocks until she bribed him to be off. Routinely, she emptied her pockets on these streets, and the urchins had tagged her as a mark. Other children were already running from the other side of Kenyatta Avenue. This time, however, she said, ‘ Hapana!’ and so sharply he stepped back. For good measure she added, ‘It’s my money! I earned it, didn’t I? What did you ever do to earn my money?’ The boy fled, as if from the possessed.

  As Eleanor prepared for a staff meeting that afternoon the rebellion persisted, for she resented being branded a Pollyanna, all trussed up in lace and bows, conveniently ridiculous. She was tired of providing ready target practice for cynics. In earlier meetings she mediated staff conflict and claimed there was always a solution to please everyone (there wasn’t), inviting co-workers with a problem to come to her—which they did, in droves, not just about whether Pathfinder’s clinics should offer tubal ligations without the husband’s consent but about their cramped apartments, their wayward boyfriends…And Eleanor would listen and comfort and stay in the office until nine at night.

  Well, she was sick of it. Often as she had been in trouble with her superiors for ‘loaning’ her own salary to hard-pressed clients, for once Eleanor was sure that if one more sob story walked into her office she would scream.

  Eleanor opened the meeting to announce a change in personnel.

  ‘Would you ask Florence to come in for a moment, please?’

  When the messenger was duly brought before the oval table, looking frightened and unquestionably innocent, Eleanor hesitated, but only a fraction of a second.

  ‘I gather it is common for employees in your position to take modest advantage—to return with insufficient change from the post office, or to take a matatu when we give you money for a taxi and pocket the difference. Do you think we are stupid or don’t care? No, I have noticed, but let small things go. Perhaps my error. You imagined stealing would be overlooked. However, you took my credit card out of my

  155

  wallet and have been using it to run up very high charges on my account.’ Florence’s eyes bulged, b
ut Eleanor kept talking. ‘I have chosen not to have you arrested, but I warn you that if you ever appear in this office again or charge so much as a Crunchie bar on that VISA card I will have the police on your step before you’ve wiped the chocolate from your mouth.’

  ‘No, memsahib, I never, you are mistaken—’

  ‘You misunderstand. I am not asking if you have been stealing, I am telling you. Now clear out of this office immediately.’

  Florence raised her head high and walked out of the room, indignant. Staff shifted nervously in their seats.

  The rest of the meeting was fractious. The orphaned FPIA schemes had to be adopted by various departments, and a few programmes everyone wanted, and most no one wanted. She let them fight. For a full hour, arms folded, not saying a thing. Finally they turned to her, for it was no fun scrapping if no one was trying to stop them.

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘Come, now,’ said the Publications Officer. ‘Someone has to take responsibility for Male Involvement.’

  ‘Do they?’ Eleanor arched her eyebrows. ‘And what’s going to happen if they don’t?’

  ‘Then the programme—’ he scratched his nose—‘would fall between the cracks.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I’m afraid we’re not communicating here.’

  ‘You’re afraid we are. For once.’ She pulled the UN report from her briefcase. ‘Have you seen this?’

  ‘I glanced at it. Just another tale of grief, isn’t it? Everything that office puts out is the same, give or take five billion people. Why?’

  ‘But you do believe it, some of it. If you didn’t you wouldn’t work here, isn’t that right? The pay is lousy. You think we have a population problem. You want to help.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But how much of a dent do you think all these programmes together will make in the growth of African population in the next century? Go on, off the record?’

  ‘Some,’ he declared. ‘We have plenty of evidence from our surveys that contraceptive demand is not being met—’

  156

  ‘We have plenty of evidence that even if we meet that demand growth rates remain sky high.’

  ‘Eleanor,’ he said, with the coaxing used to lure suicides from a ledge, ‘maybe you have had a hard day.’

  ‘Hell yes, I have,’ said Eleanor, who rarely cursed. ‘I’ve had years of bad days. That’s my point.’

  ‘It hardly seems the time, when we’re inundated with newly un-funded projects, to start questioning the viability of our whole enterprise.’

  ‘When is the time? When do we ever admit it, that we’re a gesture, nothing more? Because I for one would be content to feed the FPIA’s abandoned children to the hyenas in Nairobi National Park.’

  ‘What else can we do about population growth,’ he asked hotly,

  ‘besides provide contraceptives?’

  Hadn’t Eleanor asked that not long ago herself. She understood Calvin better now. How delectable to have a secret, even if it was absurd, a malevolent paper pastime of the unemployed. With every phone call from one more hysterical FPIA administrator who wanted to kvetch about USAID, she had fondled QUIETUS in the back of her mind like a skin-hot shilling in her pocket.

  ‘We should obviously resume when you are not so tired,’ the man proceeded, leaving his question rhetorical.

  ‘I’m not tired,’ said Eleanor.

  All the same, the staff dispersed, with tentative pats on Eleanor’s arm. The next morning cups of coffee would arrive every fifteen minutes and someone would have baked her biscuits. They would bribe her with whatever it took to get Eleanor Merritt—sweet, self-sacrificing Eleanor Merritt—back to the same old sucker.

  Eleanor sped to Karen. The UN report was a prize and she was pleased with her outrage in the staff meeting, though she’d best not keep it up or she’d be carpeted. And she was grateful, if by accident, to be included in Calvin’s work. In the most important sense she had at last been invited to his bed, for Calvin was in love with his project.

  ‘Where’s Panga?’ asked Eleanor, glancing around after a kiss.

  157

  ‘Slouched off in a huff. We fought. She thinks I’m a nancy boy.’

  ‘Is she coming with us to Wallace’s?’

  ‘Threadgill makes Panga puke. We’re on our lonesome.’

  When they pulled up at dusk, Wallace seemed to be expecting them. Perched on his three-legged stool, he leaned both hands on his walking stick, staunchly planted between his knees as if warding off demons. His grey locks shaggy, his kikoi bedraggled, his baggy, sleepless eyes harrowing towards the drive, the vision was Old Testament.

  ‘ Habari yako?’ asked Threadgill gravely.

  ‘Swell,’ said Calvin.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘I detest tea,’ he declared, which Eleanor knew to be a lie; he had no feelings about tea whatsoever, along with most comestibles. He liked to spend money on meals, for example, for the sheer profanity of the bill; the food was chaff. He meant he detested Wallace’s tea: quaffs of the pale, the watery, the gutless.

  Prepared, Calvin pulled out a bottle of White Horse. His relation to alcohol, too, was casual. She’d never seen him go out of his way to procure it, nor had it much effect; he’d mentioned once that it

  ‘didn’t help’, whatever needed helping. But he enjoyed its social employ. With heavy drinkers, he ordered Diet Coke; at Wallace’s camp he arrived with spirits. The same perversity applied to accent: Calvin’s pronunciation travelled from straight DC, with As like wide, flat, lettered avenues, to Oxford, where they condescended downhill and cornered on consonants neatly trimmed as hedgerows.

  Yet while most inflections migrate towards company kept, Calvin’s paddled reliably to the opposite shore, American with British expats and English with Washington bureaucrats. Consequently, wherever he went his accent annoyed people enormously.

  Wallace witnessed Calvin’s gallop on his White Horse with a disdain that far better resembled envy. Eleanor was sure Wallace would have relished a shot; Calvin didn’t care. All three lived, it seemed, in a perpetual state of punishment. Wallace denied himself any desire that might scatter his ashen happiness; Calvin allowed himself to think or do anything

  158

  until he was a prisoner of his own freedom; Eleanor not only wallowed in other people’s pain but took responsibility for it, making sure to address herself to problems large enough that she was guaranteed to make no difference. Not one of them around that campfire seemed to be getting what they wanted: Wallace wanted the whisky; Calvin would settle for Wallace’s even bogus joy; Eleanor wanted Calvin.

  ‘This fire is niggardly,’ Calvin complained. It was a cool evening, and the little fog wisping from the skinny sticks had the same emasculated ambience as Threadgill’s tea.

  ‘You of all people should be aware there is a timber shortage in this country.’

  ‘Which only inspires me,’ said Calvin, throwing logs on the smoulder. ‘But aren’t you the prince of abundance? How could there not be enough of anything? I thought resources are limitless.’

  ‘With proper reforestation, the timber in this country could be logged and restored indefinitely. The government has yet to instigate an effective programme; until then we conserve.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Calvin rubbed his hands. ‘The old shortfall between fantasy and fact. For example, people like you are always pointing out that, rationed like kindergarten cookies, the food we produce would feed everyone handily?’

  ‘You know that’s the case.’

  ‘Ever observe that this one-kernel-for-you and one-kernel-for-me is not actually happening?’

  ‘You lost me,’ said Wallace coldly.

  ‘What Calvin means’, Eleanor intruded, recognizing straight away that getting a word in edgewise was going to be a fight, ‘is it’s all very well to suppose if we distributed food equally we would each have enough to eat. But in the whole of human history, maldistribution has been a given. Food pr
oduction must accommodate that reality. To put forward if-we-all-shared-alike is to posit the one social arrangement which will not occur. If our survival as a species is dependent on the evolution of perfect justice, we are doomed.’

  ‘We are certainly doomed,’ said Wallace, turning to Eleanor with an expression of parental disappointment, ‘if everyone thinks like you.’

  Meanwhile Calvin’s overkill of wood was smothering the 159

  fire. Fussing with the logs, he nearly managed to put it out altogether.

  Wallace quipped, ‘You are a genius of destruction.’

  Though Calvin had guessed she’d stay home, Panga drawled from the shadows, shaking her head in disgust. With a single nudge from her calloused foot, the whole stack burst into flame. She strolled off, eye-rolling. Wallace stared after her.

  Calvin knocked back a tot of whisky. ‘Eleanor’s right, but it doesn’t matter. In twenty years, even if we’re equably issued with maize meal chits, none of us will make it through the day without feeling light-headed.’

  ‘On the contrary, we have tripled world food production in the last forty years—’

  ‘And only doubled the population—’

  ‘—Proving once and for all the folly of Malthus’s unfounded assumption that agriculture could only grow arithmetically whereas population grows geometrically.’

  ‘Of course that theory was drivel. Malthus was a reasonable economist but sorry biologist. I’m impatient with the assumption that if you discredit Malthus you undermine modern demography.

  He was right about one thing: that unchecked population growth is deadly, and that sooner or later population will outstrip resources.’

  ‘It hasn’t yet.’

  ‘The Green Revolution can’t loaves and fishes for ever. You’re spot on, Wallace, food production isn’t arithmetic. It increases in fits and starts, and sometimes it goes down.’

  Eleanor rubbed her arms and huddled on her stool. Her head swivelled as the rally rapidly degenerated into a volley of mathematics. There was no point now in trying to intervene; she felt irrelevant, the Girlfriend, without the common compensations of the role when they went home. She was torn between malicious, aggressive boredom and admiration. For Calvin was a seamster with data, and could weave the loops of zeros in and out until he knit a dazzling tapestry of dread, so densely sewn it would take a sharp eye to find the holes. This was a particularly meticulous performance, and Wallace couldn’t quite keep up. Though Calvin’s position came down to the view that the world was a terrible place and only getting 160