Game Control

Eleanor knew copious conferees, but not beyond the level of talking shop, so while many parties would take advantage of free air fare to bask for a week in Malindi, Eleanor had not joined up. She was beyond Africa as entertainment. Besides, had she bundled off to the coast, she could picture the evenings all too well: the men getting sozzled at a cheap veranda bar, telling Third World snafu stories; Eleanor increasingly chagrined as they dared one another to be a little bit racist, until they were actually using the word “wogs”. She would have to decide whether to object and make a scene and tighten everyone up but at least defend her principles, or to slip off to her room to pick the flaking skin from the back of her neck, worrying into the mirror, her nose gone hard.

As the rest scattered officiously with planes to catch, Eleanor wandered down the steps with nothing to do. It was too early for dinner and her own flight back to Dar es Salaam was not until the next day She could stroll back to her hotel and pack, but she travelled so lightly now that she was fooling herself—it would take five minutes.

So she dandered down to Kaunda, listlessly scanning shops, most of whose proprietors were Asian, and hardly appreciated by Kenyans for their enterprise. The goods for sale—film, antique colonial silver and the endless taka-taka of soapstone wart-hogs, banana-leaf elephants, and ebony rhinoceroses—did not cater to residents but to the scattering of travellers down the walk, unselfconsciously trussed in khaki safari gear and dopey little hats. Along with the encrusted, sun-scorched backpackers who lay knackered on curbs, Eleanor wondered how the tourists could bear their own cliché, though there was surely some trite niche into which she herself fitted all too neatly. The well-meaning aid worker on a junket. Eleanor sighed.

Everywhere, animals. With the T-shirts covered in zebra stripes, lions’ manes and cheetah spots, you would never imagine that Kenya had a population problem of a human variety. Stifled by the tinny, tacky shame of it all, Eleanor veered from the town centre towards River Road, where the giraffe batiks gave way to jikos, sufurias and mounds of second-hand clothes, among which she was more at home. Touts beat the sides of matatus for still more fares when their passengers were already bulging out of the windows. These privately run minibuses formed the core transport system of Kenya, painted in jubilant zigzags, with names like “Sombo Rider and Road Missile” or “Spirit of Jesus Sex Mashine”, “I Luv Retreads” and “See Me After Job” on the bumpers. Oh, River Road was as tasteless as downtown really, but with a jostling, exuberant trashiness that Eleanor relished. Everyone hustling for a bob, no one in this part of town would fritter their shillings on soapstone wart-hogs in a million years.

Gradually, however, she grew nervous. While the eyes of pedlars and pedestrians just a few blocks away were beseeching or veiled, here they glared, unmistakably hostile. Children pointed at Eleanor, shouting, “Mzungu!” Tall, muscular men knocked her shoulders on purpose. Matatus side-swiped her path as she tried to cross the street. Much as she marvelled at the energy and ingenuity of the neighbourhood, this was their part of town and she didn’t belong here. Everywhere on this continent her complexion blinked like an airstrip light. The one relief of trips to Boston was to walk down the streets and blend in.

She retreated back to Trattoria for tea, tired from her meagre foray, feeling after the feeble excursion that she had been a terribly long way.

Yet when she bent dutifully over papers from the conference, the print blurred, “The Cultural Context of High Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa” having no apparent bearing on the dusty villages to which she bounced her Land Rover monthly. This persistent malaise had been wheedling its way into odd moments over tea with increasing frequency. Perhaps she had malaria again.

She kicked herself for not saying hello to Calvin Piper. If he hadn’t remembered her she could have reminded him. Surely there was no great risk to her precious hope chest of girlhood adventures. Eleanor realized she’d just turned 37 and she was still shy.

She discovered that she had left a scarf on the back of her chair in the last assembly, and hurried to retrieve it before the building closed. She was relieved by mission, however mundane.

The conference centre was still open, though cleared out. In the main hall pages splayed the aisles like wings of dead white birds. On the way to her chair she picked up papers. Eleanor was like that—she tidied. In hotels, she made her own bed and rinsed her own water glasses and hung her towels so neatly they looked unused. Her insistence on being no trouble often got other people into it, with the suggestion they were not doing their job. Today was no exception. A girl in a green uniform came rushing up and waved at Eleanor’s armful. “No, no.” The girl took the pile firmly from the white woman’s hands.

“It seemed such a chore,” Eleanor said in Swahili, flustered and pinkening. She pointed towards her seat, thinking she had to explain (Eleanor always thought she had to explain, when no one wanted to hear really), nodding and smiling too much.

Of course the scarf was gone—what continent did she think she was on? Looking lamely about, Eleanor was about to scuttle out, for the empty hall disturbed her. The party-being-over sensation reminded her too keenly of her recent life lately—so much purpose and opinion suddenly gone slack.

Laughter caught her unawares. In the stripe of chairs, the far rows were rearranged around a familiar gleam of hair, and a monkey.

She drew closer to find Calvin sitting with several other lingerers from the Population Council Conference, none of whom she knew. Their laughter was of a seditious sort, as at something you were not supposed to say.

“Eleanor Merritt.” He did remember.

“I’m sorry to intrude, but—”

“You were forever sorry.” He pulled up a chair for her between him and an older woman, who shot her an icy smile. “Eleanor works for Pathfinder: opulent funding, international profile and well run—” he paused—“for a waste of time. But Ms Merritt has risen high. From hard work, no doubt. She cares about humanity. Ms Merritt,” he submitted to the group, “is a good person.”

“Not always,” she defended. “Sometimes I’m a shrew.”

Calvin laughed. “I would love to see it. Promise me.”

He had called her bluff. She could hardly remember being a shrew; not because she was gracious but because she was a coward. Eleanor vented her temper exclusively on objects—pens that wouldn’t write, cars that wouldn’t start, the telephones-cum-doorstops that littered any Third World posting. The more peaceable her relations with people, the more the inanimate teemed with malevolence.

“The Pathfinder Fund,” Calvin explained, “belongs to that dogged IUD-in-the-dyke school, flogging the odd condom while the population happily doubles every eighteen years. When the fertility rate plummets from 6.9 to 6.87, they take credit, and Ford slips them a cheque.”

“It is incredibly arrogant,” said Eleanor, “to march into someone else’s culture and tell them how many children to have. Raising the status of women and giving them power over their own reproduction is the best way to reduce the birth rate—”

“There is nothing wrong with arrogance,” said Calvin, “so long as you are right.”

“Besides,” interjected the upright, withered woman at Eleanor’s side, “improving the status of women is not pursued as an end in itself, but with an eye to a declining birth rate. You do not get your funding from Ford by promising to give women control over their lives, but by claiming you can reduce population growth. It’s duplicitous. If they were no guiding hand of population control, you wouldn’t pull in any money, would you?”

“All that matters,” Calvin dismissed, “is that family planning does not work. I am reminded of those women in Delhi employed by the city to mow metropolitan lawns. They use scissors. I picture those tiny clinics pitched in the middle of oblivious, fecund hordes much like Eleanor sent to mow the whole of Tsavo game park with her Swiss Army knife.”

Eleanor hugged her elbows. Calvin put a hand on her knee. “You think I’m criticizing you. No, I’m agog you keep snipping away. It’s bloody marvellous.”

“Can you suggest what else there is to do?”

“We sorted things out for India not ten minutes ago,” he noted brightly. “Institute free amniocentesis. As soon as the mother finds out it’s a girl, the foetus mysteriously disappears. Produce an entire generation of sons. In sixty, seventy years 840 million Asians would die out completely. Neat, don’t you agree?”

Eleanor was acutely sensitive to when people were waiting for her to leave. Calvin stopped her. “Dinner?”

He’d ridiculed her work. He’d abused her in front of his friends. Eleanor said she’d be delighted, and worried what to wear.

Described in guidebooks as “a restaurant that wouldn’t look out of place in Bavaria or rural England”, The Horseman was in the heart of Karen, if Karen could be said to have one. Named after Karen Blixen, the suburb was one of the last white enclaves of Kenya, museumed with mummified women who got too much sun when they were young, women who never carried their own groceries. They were the last of the English to say frightfully. Yet they still gave their change to little boys outside the dukas, and Karen’s beggars were flush.

Aware that ladies are advised to arrive at engagements a tad late, Eleanor took a taxi to Karen early.

“Madam! Please, madam!”

In the car-park she was accosted by a hawker carrying some heavy black—thing. It took her a moment to discern the object, at which point she was hooked into a dialogue that would cost her. “Only 150, I work very hard, madam! You see, msurisana. Please, madam! I have six children and they are so hungry …”

The kempt and ingenuous young man held before her a carving of an enormous African family. The carving was awful enough to start with, but had been mucked over with tar. Eleanor was reluctant to touch it.

“I don’t—” she fumbled. “I’m travelling, I can’t—”

“Please, madam!”

The please-madams were not going to stop. She could not claim to have no money, she could not simply walk away from a man who was speaking to her, and some forms of freedom must be bought.

Consequently, she met Calvin in the lounge of The Horseman trying to keep the big dark monster from her dress.

“For me? You shouldn’t have.”

“I shouldn’t have,” she confessed woefully. “He wouldn’t go away.”

“There’s the most miraculous word in the English language: no. Most children learn it before the age of two.”

“This is just what I need,” she said, as the head waiter led them to their table, glancing at her souvenir with disapproval. “A carving of the happy twelve-child family for my clinic.”

“You haven’t changed,” Calvin lamented.

Eleanor could no more focus on the menu than on conference papers at Trattoria. The prospect of food was mildly revolting: a warning sign. In the company of men she’d no interest in she was voracious.

Calvin decided for them both. “The game,” he announced, “is delectable.” His smile implied a double entendre that went right past her.

“So,” he began. “You’re still so passionate?”

She blushed. “In what regard?”

“About your work,” he amended. “The underprivileged and oppressed and that.”

“If you mean have I become jaded—”