Game Control

“Not to me. Population is all I care about.”

She slowed. It was a stark admission if it was true. If he also intended a personal warning, she picked it up. “That’s appalling.”

“Perhaps.” Calvin used mildness as a weapon. “So,” he proceeded, “did you give out a birth control pill today? Fob off a condom on a little boy for a balloon?”

“Why are you so snippy?”

“I’m taking the neighbourhood out on you.”

“It is hard to handle.”

“Get used to it. Mathare Valley will spread over all of Africa in fifty years. I’m not such a Pollyanna that I predict worldwide famine. Why, what do these people survive on? But they do survive. No, we will be fruitful and multiply ourselves right into an open sewer. Whether ten people can eke out a few years in eight feet square is not the question. Look around you: it is obviously possible. But—” He nodded at a mincing radio. “You don’t get much Mozart in a slum.”

“Fine, so one of the values we have to protect for the future is human rights—”

“Human rights! No one has the right to produce ten children for whom there is no food, no room, no water, no topsoil, no fuel and no future. No one has a right to bring any child into the world without Mozart.”

She glanced at him sidelong with wary awe. “Do you ever talk to these people, Calvin? Whose little soul-slivers you’re so concerned about?”

“I sometimes think,” he considered, “that’s not in their interests. One gets attached and loses perspective. Culling in Uganda, members of our team would occasionally form an affection for certain elephants. This maudlin naming, cooing and petting—it made them less professional. And the work a great deal more difficult.”

“The parallel eludes me.”

He smiled. “It was meant to.”

Their accumulation of tittering children on the way back did not seem heartbreaking and inexplicably buoyant as it had on the way in, but plaguesome instead. As they did not realize Eleanor spoke Swahili, she picked up comments about her ugly dress and porridge complexion and funny hair. One of them screamed that he could see her bra strap, and she had to stop herself from adjusting her collar right away. An older boy carped to his friend about wakaburu come to tour the slums when they were “tired of the other animals”. Eleanor allowed herself a tiny nasal whine, jaw clenched.

“Why don’t you say something?” asked Calvin.

“Like what?”

Calvin turned on his heel and menaced, “Nenda zaku!” The crowd froze. “Washenzi! Wamgmyao! Futsaki!”

It was magic. Thirty or forty children seeped back to the trickles of raw sewage from which they’d come.

“Now, that should have been you,” said Calvin.

“I don’t use that kind of language.”

“Go home and practise, then. Your Swahili’s better than mine. What do you think it’s for?”

Eleanor was both mortified and grateful. The valley was suddenly so quiet.

She told Calvin about tea with Peter.

“Don’t tell me. He wanted you to take him to America.”

She kicked at the road. “Probably.”

“Haven’t you had thousands of these encounters?”

“Sure.”

“They still affect you.” He was impressed.

“In some ways, it’s worse than ever. Not prurient. Not interesting, not new. Still painful.”

“They all think you’re a magic lantern, don’t they? That you own Cadillacs and a pool.”

“In his terms,” she soldiered liberally, “I am rich—”

“Aren’t you tired of saying these things? How many times have you made that exact same statement?”

She sighed. “Hundreds.” She added, “I had a feeling the next time I stopped by Mathare I would avoid Peter.”

They had reached the car, from which point they could see the whole valley of shanties bathed in a perverse golden light, under which hundreds of handsome adolescent boys cut out magazine pictures of motor cycles under cardboard with a candle. “Eleanor,” said Calvin quietly, taking her by the shoulders, “don’t you sometimes just want them to go away?”

She squirmed from his hands and huddled into the seat. Though the air was stuffy, she did not unroll a window, but sat breathing the smell of new upholstery: soft leather, freshly minted plastic. She buckled the seat belt, tying herself to the motakari, as if the hands of Mathare threatened to drag her out again. She locked the door. “Yes,” she said at last. “But there’s only one way to manage that. For me to go away.”

“They would follow you. You will always have 661 million black wretches breathing down your neck. By the time you’re ninety? Well over two billion.”

“I’m sick of these figures.”

“In a little over a hundred years this continent’s population will quadruple—”

“Calvin, please!”

“By 2000 Mexico City will have thirty million people. These are not just numbers, Eleanor. We’re talking billions of disgruntled, hungry, filthy Homo sapiens, starting to turn mean, they will all want a Walkman. They will all want you to take them to America.”

“I have been trying my whole adult life—”

“You would be far more generous to launch into Mathare with a machine-gun.”

“I don’t think that kind of joke is very funny.”

“It isn’t a joke.”

Eleanor folded her arms. “You have no business undermining my work just because you’ve fallen by the sidelines.”

“Women tend to interpret any argument as personal attack. There is such a thing as fact outside whatever petty professional bitterness I might still harbour. I will remind you that I singly have raised more funding for population programmes than any man on earth. Family planning? You are riding, Ms Merritt, with the father of family planning, so that if I tell you it is a waste of time, I at least expect you to listen.”

“Yes …” she drawled, balled up on the other side of the car. “I remember stories, all right. Of you walking into Julius Nyrere’s office and dumping a bag of multi-coloured condoms on his desk. ‘How many children do you have?’ you asked. Oh, that went the rounds, Mr. Diplomat.”

“Fine, that was a stunt, and I pulled a lot of them. Some worked, some didn’t. That one backfired.”

“I’ll say.”

They were driving down the long hill towards Lang’ata, where trailing through the scrub Kenyans filed six abreast and chest to back from town to outlying estates. With so many marching feet skittling into the distance in unbroken lines, it was hard to resist the image of ants streaming to their holes. Or it was now. Eleanor didn’t used to look at Africans and think insects.