atomic bomb, he’d use that; it was graphic. The speech would be the most moving of his career. It would get quoted in full in the New York Times. No demographer in the history of the field would have organized a more spectacular cameo.
Therefore, imagine Calvin’s surprise when a warder arrived to let him out. Surely Eleanor had bribed her way in for another visit, but there was no little room and she was nowhere in sight. They left him loitering in the hall, with no guard. He had to go and find one.
‘Sorry,’ said Calvin. ‘Whom am I supposed to see? Where do I go?’
‘You go home,’ said the lump.
‘I can’t imagine anyone raised the bail for me. It must be astronom-ical.’
‘No bail,’ said the guard, bored. ‘You are free. Get out.’
Mystified, Calvin wandered out into the smoggy, sunny glare of hideous downtown Nairobi, which he had hoped to have left behind for ever. Bereft, he wandered to a news-stand and bought the Standard.
Population Poison Revealed As Hoax
WHO officials announced yesterday that the substance found with Dr Calvin Piper, ostensibly a toxin to depopulate the Third World, has been analysed as harmless. Lab technicians found traces of vinegar, pili-pili, sugar, flavourings and common household bleach. The conspiracy has been dismissed as a hoax, and some suspect Dr Piper has merely staged an elaborate publicity stunt. President Moi issued a statement that the Piper ‘goo’ was a ‘sick joke’.
Dr Piper has been released, as there is no evidence of wrong-doing besides, said the President, ‘offending good taste and common decency, and wasting wananchi’s time’. He had no wish to detain Dr Piper further, as the Kenyan justice system was reserved for prosecuting dangerous criminals, and not ‘schoolboy pranksters’.
‘Impossible!’ cried Calvin on the street. He about-faced to Nyayo House and ran up the stairs (the elevators were broken again) to his QUIETUS office, which he feared had been looted for evidence. The door, however, was unharmed but
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padlocked, with a notice advising its tenants that entry was forbidden due to non-payment of rent.
Back on the street, he found a pay phone and, after dialling ten times with an irate queue forming behind him, he got through to Pachyderm. ‘This is Piper. Where’s Norman?’
The secretary was cool. ‘Oh, Norman’s been expecting you’d like to talk to him. He said he’d lunch at the Norfolk.’ She hung up without saying goodbye.
Calvin scuttled towards the hotel lobby to wash up, but he reeked so much that security wouldn’t let him in. He glanced in the door glass at his pilled beard and bath-mat hair. Decency be damned, he wanted some answers.
Norman was out on the terrace, with a dapper bow-tie. The microbiologist was munching buns with Campari and soda, perusing the Hot ‘n’ Snackies on which he rested his eye an extra beat before looking up.
Calvin threw the Standard on the table. ‘What’s this about vinegar and bleach? Did you suspend some shy little protein in that liquid they didn’t find?’
‘The only thing suspended in that salad dressing,’ Norman purred,
‘was your disbelief.’ He took another nibble on his roll and dabbed his chin.
‘But it killed Malthus.’
‘I’m not surprised. We cooked up quite a porridge: Worcestershire, Peptang, mango chutney, Ribena and Marmite, dusted with a little Omo, sprinkled with Vim and garnished with a generous spray of Doom. I imagine such a breakfast would do in the heartiest monkey.’
‘What about the photographs?’
‘We found a little village not far from the lab. Told them we were making a movie. They were only too delighted to cooperate. Especially the kids. Dead sweet. Lolling on the ground with their tongues out—regular scene-stealers, every one. Then we threw a picnic. It was a hoot, Pipe, you should have been there.’
‘I wasn’t invited. You’re going to explain to me, I hope, why I have spent eight days in the holding cells of Nyayo house so you could have a picnic?’
‘We never expected you to get arrested,’ said Norman, 269
sounding injured. ‘All in good fun and that. Say, you couldn’t sit in the next chair? You smell like a long drop.’
‘I will not. I’ve suffered for your little joke, the least I can do is ruin your lunch.’
Norman kept a napkin over his nose. ‘It wasn’t just a joke, Pipe.
It was research.’
‘Into what?’
‘Your character. See, Pachyderm’s a bloody lot of work, my mutu.
We’ve been putting in serious hours. We’d gotten somewhere, but we were still looking at five more years. Life’s short. I’ve found the project theoretically enthralling, but I didn’t want to waste my time if you were going to oo-worms in the eleventh hour. And I can’t say what tipped me off, but I wasn’t sure you’d follow through. They aren’t obvious at first, but you’ve your soft spots.’
‘You sound like Panga,’ muttered Calvin.
‘Now I suppose we’ll never know,’ Norman bemoaned. ‘What we turned up instead was a nasty leak in QUIETUS. You should thank me. Better to find it now than later, when there’s something spicier than Worcestershire in that sauce. And now you’ve learned something: next time you initiate an illegal international conspiracy, you’ll find a girlfriend who keeps her mug shut.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t spread rumours about Eleanor being a grass.’
‘It’s common knowledge, boyo. And from what I hear, she’s in no shape to worry about local gossip.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Word’s out she had a nervous breakdown—has been experiencing humours—whatever the latest lingo is for falling apart. Checked into Nairobi Hospital. Kept raving about how she was going to murder billions of people, so of course they put her on medication.
I think your friend Wallie took her home with him.’
‘If she wasn’t ga-ga before,’ Calvin grumbled, ‘Threadgill should finish the job.’
‘It’s a pity about Pachyderm, though.’ Norman reclined philosoph-ically. ‘I still think the idea was nifty. And what do you want me to do with the lab?’
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‘What else,’ said Calvin blackly. ‘Convert it to a summer camp for disadvantaged parking boys.’
After showering, Calvin went to retrieve Eleanor from Threadgill’s ward. He approached the camp, diffident. Ducking his head under the tent flap, Calvin found Wallace sitting by the bed, murmuring over a thick black book. For Eleanor’s sake, Calvin hoped it was Hans Christian Andersen, but when he crept nearer to the bed he saw the text was illustrated with spiritual diagrams of intersecting circles: WATER, WINDS OF VOID.
‘Sh-sh.’ Wallace held a finger to his lips and delicately led Calvin back outside. Calvin glanced at a chair, splayed with that morning’s papers, his name on the front page. Neither he nor Threadgill mentioned it, decorously. So sententious when they’d last met, now Wallace was humble, soft spoken, polite.
‘Is Eleanor all right?’
‘She’s heavily sedated.’
‘No doubt by your bedtime stories,’ said Calvin, but wryly, almost with affection. ‘I want to take her home.’
He had expected resistance, but inexplicably their antagonism had collapsed. ‘Yes,’ said Wallace. ‘I think you should.’ He brought Eleanor’s prescriptions, and went carefully through the dosages, counter-indications and side effects.
Back in the tent, threading his way between two dozen half-drunk mugs of cold tea, Calvin leaned beside Eleanor, who was sluggish and failed to recognize him. Calvin bundled her in his arms to the car.
For several days he fed her soup and the rest of the time she slept.
She had moments of lucidity, when she would gasp with gratitude that he had rescued her from Threadgill’s edifying lectures on the Orb of the Over-Conscious. ‘Another week of Greater Galactic Love,’
she confided, ‘and I’d have founded a Pachyderm lab myself.’
Calvin waited until she was st
rong enough, and then slowly, carefully, explained that Norman had pulled their leg. Somehow the pathogen made of mango chutney did not pick her up much.
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‘You think I was the informer,’ said Eleanor, dragging herself up on the pillow. She still had a complexion of boiled arrowroot.
‘Is that what made you snap? That I didn’t trust you?’
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘I was mortified that I didn’t turn you in. I should have. I couldn’t forgive myself. Everyone in QUIETUS was convinced I rang Special Branch. Bunny started making threatening phone calls. But they gave me too much credit. If I had any integrity, I’d have handcuffed you personally. Do you believe me?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure, then, that I didn’t go to the police?’
‘Naturally.’
‘So who do you think it was? It doesn’t sound like Norman.
Bunny?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Calvin. ‘I rang them myself.’
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ENDPAPERS:
The Cool Rats
May you have as many children as possible until their excrement buries you up to the neck.
TRADITIONAL KAMBA MARRIAGE BLESSING
There was talk in the Kenyan government of deporting Calvin Piper for sedition, but the man had become such an international liability that both the British and the American embassies went to lengths to keep him in his adoptive country and out of theirs. Calvin himself was content to remain in Africa because he hated it.
He and Eleanor refined a ritual argument: she pushing him to admit why he’d rung Special Branch, when success, to all appearances, was in reach. ‘Because,’ he explained, ‘it would have been too much trouble.’
One day she pushed him further. ‘That’s ridiculous. You’d already gone to enormous trouble.’
‘I was interested in the theory. I was interested in the computer model. I was interested in the economics, and even in your AIDS
research. But practically, QUIETUS seemed laborious. I couldn’t be bothered frankly.’
‘Not even to save the world?’
‘I keep telling you, “the world” does not require saving. the little pear-shaped orb on which we spin will manage with pond scum.’
He dribbled lime juice over Eleanor’s fresh samosas; she had finally refused servants and was consequently becoming an excellent cook.
‘It’s only the human race that needs saving, and I had to face the contradiction Thread-273
gill astutely hung me on: I couldn’t care less. Why should I rescue 5.3 billion wet-nosed, sticky-bummed whingers too pig thick to stop reproducing themselves like fruit flies? Let them rut, let them foul their own nest, let them starve. All a matter of sublime indifference to me.’
Eleanor was irked. ‘Come on. Didn’t you finally decide QUIETUS
was repugnant?’
‘I still think it was a laudable and logical plan of action. Furthermore, QUIETUS was intellectually courageous. It so happens that intellectual courage is the only kind I’ve got. On that score Panga had my number: in the field I’m a kitty cat. I’m a great tactician, but as a soldier I shoot myself in the foot.’
‘You did cull elephants.’
Calvin confessed, ‘It wasn’t pleasant.’
‘Somewhere in that concession lurks the nascent seeds of full-fledged moral revulsion.’
‘Purely aesthetic. They stank,’ said Calvin. ‘But there was one more reason I wanted us stopped.’
‘I’m on tenterhooks.’
‘I don’t believe in conspiracies. Not that they don’t exist; more that they don’t succeed. The CIA made a horlicks of Cuba, Argentina.
How can we be dead sure that AIDS wasn’t concocted by the Penta-gon? Because it works. Pachyderm was inspired if all went according to plan, but I was gradually convinced that that was the one advent I could more or less discount. In short: Sod’s Law.’
Calvin promptly lost all interest in population. He left his Population and Development Reviews in their mailing wrappers. In short order, he was in danger of having no interests at all. For someone who valued interest over love, demographic dispassion threatened personality collapse.
For Calvin refined a theory in relation to all the problems of the day which he called Muddling Through, a position somewhere between apathy and religious conviction: everything would sort out somehow. Population, after all, was self-correcting: if the earth could not support more people, then it would not. An orbiting voyeur, he would watch an unfolding wonder or imploding apocalypse with equal fascination. He continued to think the world was getting uglier, he continued
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to hum Mozart in preparation for a future without cellos, he continued to see Africa as he knew it in its paradisiacal days as spiralling down the toilet—but these were diverting opinions with no more consequence than the atrocities he still taped to his wall.
Moreover, Calvin theorized that because your projects never have the results you expect and because your reasons for executing them are never the ones you tell yourself they are, whatever you do it is critical to do it as little as possible.
For the removed, congenitally sardonic conclusion of his life, Calvin had a role model. When he and Norman conducted their density experiments with Norwegian rats, they had identified a variety of types, all adaptions to overcrowding: the hyper-sexed, the homosexual, the delinquent mother. The researchers discerned a small, discreet subsection of males, however, which Norman had christened the Cool Rats. These unruffled loners refused to take part in the struggle for dominance. They ignored all the other rats of both sexes, and all the other rats ignored them. They moved passively through the community like somnambulists. They were never attacked or approached for play. And these were the sleekest, healthiest animals in the pen, with thick, unmolested fur. The Cool Rats were pretending they weren’t there. Calvin was suffering stress in density and Calvin bought sun-glasses.
It was necessary, however, to earn a living. Only a fraction of funds from QUIETUS remained, though donors were too embarrassed to demand them back. He still owned the NFD lab, now derelict, though the sale of the equipment barely covered some hefty chemical bills which piqued him, as Peptang was only forty-five shillings. Eleanor’s salary was promptly withdrawn, for news of her link to Calvin had spread to Pathfinder, and that was the end of her family planning career for the next 5,000 years. Calvin’s reputation was as biodegradable as egg-carton styrofoam.
With Eleanor’s well-organized, brisk assistance, he cleared out Pachyderm and started a pottery. He was surprised to find he’d a knack. A natural mathematician, Calvin had a strong sense of symmetry and centred easily on the wheel. It was hard work which made his shoulders ache, but quiet, meditative and, most important, useless. There wasn’t a soul
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who couldn’t live without his silly pots. Consequently, he made lots of them. Besides, Panga was always trooping carelessly through and knocking over whole racks with her bayonet.
As for Eleanor, she gave her change to panhandlers when she felt like it; other afternoons she wasn’t in the mood. Much as she might sometimes wish, and violently, that the huddled masses with their demands for glasses and basketball shoes would go away, they weren’t going to. Their existence did not rely on her humour. She contented herself that their business in the NFD employed a dozen Turkana at good wages who could be proud of their work, and that was better for any country than hand-outs. She did sometimes miss her job, weary of delivering cartons of tacky tusk-handled coffee mugs to tourist traps, the same tiny Pachyderm stamp on the bottom of each cup, and resented Calvin for sabotaging her profession. Then, their arrangement came with its compensations: small private happiness, and she could always discuss with shopkeepers the benefits of smaller families, how much more feasible it was with fewer children to send them all to school. Ordinary economics was increasingly persuasive in East Africa, more so than ‘development theory’ or appeals to environmental preservation, and Kenya
’s fertility rate continued to drop.
She would occasionally stop by to see Peter Ndumba. He had learned to count on her for one birthday present, end of story, though jockeyed dates to celebrate twice a year; in return, she gladly accepted their meals of beans and corn, and took second helpings.
VISA at last caught the culprit with her credit card, and it wasn’t Florence after all. The thief was from Pathfinder all right, but she was perfectly well off, and she was white.
Often on Saturday nights when Eleanor and Calvin returned from packing an exhausting order at Pachyderm, Wallace Threadgill would stop by for a nip. After the demise of QUIETUS, his vows had gradually slipped and, well, he was becoming a bit of a drunk.
His contract had run out with the WHO, whose administrators had found his theories tiresome, and after a few whiskies the Orbs and Circles of Time and Fullnesses of Being would all start to reel in an incoherent,
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off-centre miasma. He was rather endearing, squiffy, though he and Calvin still got into ferocious arguments. On certain evenings Wallace would pull her aside and apologize with a maudlin droop on her shoulder, saying that he was ‘very, very sorry, so very sorry’, though he’d never say for what, and she wondered if he wasn’t a trifle sweet on her. And he was awfully hard to get rid of when she and Calvin wanted to go to bed, with forty elephant-trunk candlesticks to glaze and fire the next day. Bunny Morton wanted a banquet set.
There we leave Calvin Piper, humming over his wheel, spattered in slip, easing the lip from humble clay. Eleanor wanted children.
Well, he would reflect, sponging on more water, if the rest of these low-lifes could reiterate, maybe he should stick them with half a dozen little Calvins out of sheer spite. He moulded a handful of mud as it spun under his fingers, a turning, dirty globe, for according to the eminently sensible Ms Merritt, this was about as much of the earth as he should ever be entrusted with at one time.
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