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they will abscond with not only your credit cards but the wires from your walls and the pump from your garden, the shoes from your feet and the clip from your hair, and leave you nothing but your life if you’re lucky and you still care to keep it. You think I’m being racist, but if I were on the other side of the fence I’d do the same and should.
There are too many of them, pet. And plenty are enchanting and only want ordinary comfort, and work, if there were such a thing.
It’s not their fault. And it’s going to get worse.’
She could not believe that, coming to him for a little sympathy over fleecing and treachery, she only got more population. ‘You’re saying that Florence has every right to run up charges on my credit card. That theft is the solution to social inequality.’
‘It’s not the solution because there is none—’ He paused. ‘Yet. But it’s fair, anyway, in your own terms.’
‘I thought—’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘That you were always trying to get me to splurge on prawns and not issue excuses for every abominable behaviour like fabric-softener coupons in Woman’s Day.’
‘I am trying to keep 500 dollars in perspective. I still find it amazing you can walk down the street in Nairobi with ten shillings in your pocket and not have your throat slit ear to ear. Credit card fiddle is civilized; it still obeys the rules, going into a shop and signing slips instead of smashing the window and bundling off with as much as she can carry. Kenyans are uncannily biddable, but when the desperation level tops up they won’t stay so compliant. And you’re alarmed that your parking boy takes three of five cassettes?’
‘Next time he’ll take all five.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Next time he’ll take the car.’
Eleanor was coming to realize that a great deal could be fearsome from the poor.
Early that evening, Solastina entered the living room with a particular inability to meet Calvin’s gaze which Eleanor recognized at once. ‘My daughter, bwana. She is very sick.’ She explained that her eyes were infected, and that without costly antibiotics she might go blind. Health care was subsidized in Kenya, but it was not free.
Calvin asked questions about symptoms and treatment with 98
uncharacteristic patience. Solastina knew the name of the drug; the story sounded legitimate. To Eleanor’s astonishment, Calvin produced 2,000 shillings without hesitation, warning Solastina,
‘Whatever you do, don’t go to Kenyatta. That should be enough for Nairobi Hospital, and if it’s not, come back for more. Understand?’
When the servant had thanked Calvin and left, Eleanor studied this man who was becoming only more of a puzzle.
‘Two months ago,’ he explained, ‘my gardener’s youngest son had a bad case of malaria and might have died. I wouldn’t give him five bob.’
‘This—capriciousness is meant to teach your wards something about arbitrary Western charity?’
‘I don’t fund terminal illnesses. But I think being blind must be bloody awful. Live people torture me; I do not feel sorry for the dead. Rather envy them, in fact.’
‘You regard this as a logical position.’
‘I am regretful about auto accidents where a good Rugby player loses his legs. If instead the chap is decapitated, I don’t bat an eye.
Surely you’ve attended to those stories of recovered flat-liners, floating above their bodies feeling peaceful, no doubt for the first time in their lives. Why I should pity such people is beyond me.’
‘What if you were the one with malaria?’
‘I don’t bother with chloroquine, even on the coast. I don’t dread my own death more than anyone else’s, and take no steps to avoid it. I neglect inoculations, ignore cholesterol and only decline cigarettes because I don’t enjoy them. I like nothing more than to take aeroplanes during a bout of Iranian terrorism. I don’t look both ways before crossing the street and the only reason I drive carefully is to avoid a collision I might survive. The irony of this sang-froid is that, as a consequence, nothing ever happens to me. I have reasoned that nothing happens because everything bad has already occurred. In that I regard most of life as a stringing together of calamities, mine is already over.’
He said all this cheerfully, and was now feeding pieces of banana to Malthus, as if he had not just been talking about death but the funny thing that happened at the store today.
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The malaria tale was harsh, but he’d been generous with Solastina, more so than Eleanor all week.
Later that night, calmed, Eleanor deleted the paragraph that named the thief from her letter to VISA. It was true she was only operating on a hunch—a good hunch—but Florence would have to be caught red-handed or let be.
Back in the office, she continued to be curt with Florence, who didn’t noticeably miss Eleanor’s earlier mateyness. She would rather have the dresses, Eleanor fumed. Meanwhile the petty cash accounting at Pathfinder was looking dicey. Peter wanted a bicycle. One of the Pathfinders’s vehicles was hijacked in Kisumu, though God knows what the thugs would do with an entire van-load of foaming contraceptive tablets. When her Land Rover’s window was smashed one night while she and Calvin were at the Japanese Club, the vandals only got a jacket; she no longer listened to cassettes in the car. Rather than stockpile all the more tolerance and compassion for those less fortunate than herself, Eleanor’s shame was beginning to ferment, and what began as perpetual embarrassment burbled into suppressed, impotent rage.
Wallace was a consultant with the National AIDS Control Programme and had helped design a bus campaign, a series of ads in the Standard and a leaflet for the airport that, while sufficiently stern, did not frighten tourists into turning heel to book for home. With such a paucity of medical strategies, the job felt akin to selling insurance. When he heard the car drive up, he was hard at work, coloured pencils everywhere, on an AIDS postage stamp.
At first Wallace didn’t recognize the woman who marched towards him as the same shy, awkward lady at that party six months ago who wished she’d brought a book. She was stylishly dressed for one thing. When she stepped on his dog Oracle’s tail and he yelped, she did not bend down, ruffle its ears and apologize, but barely glanced with a look that life was rough and it could lick its wounds on its own time. Perhaps he’d misread her.
She took a seat around his campfire, refusing to small-talk about the elegance of his platform tent. She would not sit for parables. She was harder work.
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‘I’m sorry, but this idea you have that everything is only getting hunkier and dorier simply flies in the face of my daily life.’ She had already begun before the water had boiled for tea.
‘Your own life,’ Wallace explored, ‘is growing both less hunky and less dory at the same time?’
‘Wallace, Nairobi is collapsing! Not in the future, now!’ She sounded hysterical. ‘Graft is rife, theft incessant. There hasn’t been any water downtown for three weeks. They have to douse all the toilets in Nyayo House with Jik to keep them from stinking. The fire trucks sell their water for domestic use, and then when there’s an alarm the trucks are dry. In Karen—’
‘Karen?’ He looked up from his contented doodling with coloured pencils. ‘I recall you live in Parklands.’
She blushed. ‘A friend of mine has no water, then. Don’t evade the point. It’s population, Wallace.’
‘Why do you want to regard Africa as falling apart?’
Wallace’s resident wart-hogs had arrived for their early evening feed and snuffled contentedly in posho a few feet away. One female had piglets, and they leaped and squealed around their mother, tails high like splayed paintbrushes—ruined, but with which some child has had a wonderful time. Overhead, the jacaranda’s pale lavender tinged to violet as the light ripened to mango. It was all Wallace could do not to burst out laughing. They lived in paradise and this poor woman had shut herself in a mean little outhouse with a lot of books, pulling the door to with all her might, and then complained that
it smelled in here and it was crowded.
Eleanor allowed herself to be captivated by the piglets for a moment or two, but with resolute perversity resumed. ‘I look around me—’ refusing to do exactly that—‘I can’t help what I see.’
‘How do you manage from day to day with such perpetual anxiety?’
‘With difficulty.’ She was growing out her bangs, which had reached that awkward length, not yet long enough to tuck behind her ears, so they kept drooping forward and trailing dismally over her eyes.
His camp was within the fencing of Giraffe Manor. As if to torture her, one of the exquisite creatures wafted near the fire, 101
nibbling at the tender leaves of the jacaranda. That sublime sub-aqueous ripple: he half expected the vision to turn her to salt.
‘Haven’t you noticed, even when cities “collapse”, that people manage?’
‘That’s what—’ She stopped. ‘I mean, yes. But in what condition?
What happens to the libraries? Did you know that the Kenya Museum is infested with rats?’
Wallace smiled; with the wart-hogs, the giraffe, the sunset—at a certain point you positively had to admire the woman. ‘Rats, is it?’
He flicked the flies amiably from his face with his cow-tail wisk, as Eleanor swatted with annoyance.
‘The danger is not only extinction—’ swat!—‘but another Dark Ages.’
‘I believe we are in the Dark Ages.’
‘I’ve also heard it proposed that we are living in the golden years of humanity.’
‘You don’t sound like a woman who is seeing a great deal of gold lately.’ He poured her a solicitous cup of tea. ‘You said you’ve been in the population field for so many years. Why did you choose it?’
‘Well, I’d give you a different answer now from what I would have done a short while ago.’
‘That’s not surprising. Everything you’ve said in the last hour has been different from what you said a short while ago.’
‘I could admit I was trying to please my stepfather, but there’s more to it. I grew up being told there were too many people. I’ve always felt unnecessary. Now I’ve come full circle: I resent feeling unnecessary. Does that make any sense?’
‘You are turning malignant.’
‘I didn’t say that. It just seems—I know you don’t believe this—that everything is getting worse. That things are going to get worse still.
I do feel, Wallace, as if something awful is about to happen.’
The giraffe, as if acknowledging that this latrine-dweller was beyond his illumination, shimmered back to the forest again. Wallace noted that at least Eleanor looked after the apparition’s departure with regret.
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‘Perhaps for you the awful has already occurred.’
‘How do you mean?’
He bent towards her with concern. ‘Where do you get all these terrible pictures, Eleanor? What is tormenting you?’ Though he might have asked, Who?
‘The terrible pictures are in Mathare, Wallace. I’m not making them up.’
‘So what do you propose to do about them?’
Eleanor sighed. ‘The family planning side is discouraging. I know this sounds cold, but I wonder if something like AIDS coming along isn’t fortuitous. Maybe it’s lucky we can’t cure it yet. Maybe we should let it run its course.’
Wallace was convinced that the woman he had met six months ago would have been incapable of this statement. ‘You have let him go too far.’
‘Who?’
‘You know who. I’m sorry. You should have come here earlier. It may already be too late.’
‘I haven’t a notion what you’re on about.’
‘Have you slept with him?’
Her face went hot. ‘That’s none of your business.’
Wallace tapped his cane, victorious. ‘You see. You do know who I’m on about.’
Eleanor folded her arms in stolid silence.
‘I will give you this much credit,’ said Wallace. ‘I do not believe you have any idea who, or what, you are contending with. If you did, you would run a mile. By now it is much harder to get out. Soon it may be impossible. You’re a woman. Any woman wants to love one man more than all humanity, and she will sell her entire race down river for his sake. You have to know this about yourself and be watchful. In mountain climbing, there is a move any climber knows well: the kind you can make in one direction but cannot take back. You can get quite stuck this way, out on ledges from which there is no return. If you think several moves ahead, however, you predict the danger and avoid it. You can step somewhere else.’
‘That’s just what I’ve been saying about population.’
‘You see, your illness is already advanced. I am talking about your soul, and you are talking population growth. So tell me: how bad is it?’
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‘Nothing is bad.’
‘You just told me everything is bad. I believe you. My dear lady, why did you come here today?’
Eleanor rubbed her face. ‘Things have been happening lately. I’m changing—I think it’s necessary, but I’m nervous. I’m not as nice.
For some obscure reason, I thought you’d understand.’
Wallace nodded. He was used to seekers making pilgrimages to his camp for spiritual advice. ‘How deep in are you, Eleanor? Have you made the fateful move yet? Or can you still get back?’
‘I don’t want to get back.’
‘I know you don’t. I realize he is, on the face of it, handsome and even charming. But inside that head is a fetid, cankerous sore. He had already infected you, and if you let him he will destroy you.
Calvin Piper is an evil man.’
‘You throw around evil a bit too casually for my tastes.’
‘I use the word rarely,’ said Wallace, taking a moment to reflect that this wasn’t exactly true, though he didn’t use it nearly as often as he wanted to. ‘You would at least concede that Piper is a racist?’
‘Calvin’s not a racist. He hates everybody. Besides, he even had an African lover, didn’t he?’
‘If you regard seducing the servants as a sure sign of racial open-mindedness, most of the slave owners of the American South would qualify as founding members of the United Negro College Fund.
Furthermore, your friend Calvin is a sadist.’
‘Rot!’
‘I’ve known him longer than you. We first met in Kenya, when Piper was involved in that Ugandan culling scheme. I’ll tell you this much: he enjoyed it.’
‘I’m sure he liked the bush, the planes, the camaraderie. He has said you couldn’t remain heartbroken and get the job done. That’s a far cry from finding it fun.’
‘Hunters enjoy killing. That’s what the sport is about.’
‘Not Murchison Falls. Without culling, all the elephants would have starved. However paradoxically, cropping was an act of love.’
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‘You poor duped little lamb! I would submit to you that Calvin reviles elephants.’
‘Wallace! I’m sorry, but we seem to be talking about two different people. It’s true he has a warped sense of humour, and some of his opinions are extreme, but they’re for effect. He likes to offend to make people think, and rhetoric doesn’t hurt anybody—’
‘Don’t be so sure.’
‘He is also, despite what sounds like vitriol, very warm. I came here knowing hardly anybody, and he’s been wonderful to me—’
‘I’m sure he has.’
‘I didn’t mean in some sleazy, filchy way.’
‘No, that’s not what Piper wants—or all he wants. You have minion-potential.’
‘What a lovely thought.’
‘Piper loves followers. He has plenty, more than you realize. But they curl up over time, into distorted, boggy little gnomes. I’ve watched them grow physically shorter.’
‘Hold on, Calvin is a friend of mine—’
‘You’re aware Piper and I were once good friends as well?’
‘No, I w
asn’t. I admit he doesn’t talk about you as a long-lost brother either.’
‘So if I were you I would assume something happened. Something did. To Piper. He once had a markedly different personality. On the outside, he maintains a magnetism, though I myself am repelled.
Young, he was full of life: Africa was his garden. There was always, however, a little spoiled spot in him. He was never able to accept defeat, injury, disappointment. He still can’t, and that makes him vengeful. The spoiled spot has spread over the field of his mind like potato blight. If you could reach behind his eyes, you would find nothing but noxious brown ooze.’
‘I think he’s sad.’
‘And you’re going to make him happy?’ asked Wallace sardonic-ally.
‘It’s true he’s sad about women. But he’s also profoundly disturbed by what’s happening to this continent and this planet. He and I share a deep concern over the growth of population and the fate of our ecosystem—’
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‘If you believe that, you are not only under Piper’s spell, you are an imbecile.’
‘Well, thank you very much!’ She stood up.
‘You cannot imagine for a minute Calvin Piper is a philanthropist.
And sit down. The fact is, “over-population” is a chimera, and without it Piper is a nonentity. As the man himself begins to have doubts, the more drastic he’ll become. Piper’s about to fly out of orbit, mark my words.’
‘What in God’s name can be so dangerous about a demographer?’
‘Darkness does not distinguish between professions.’
‘The most untoward thing Calvin ever did was ship contraceptives and vacuum aspirators to countries where they were illegal. So he disguised copper-sevens as Christmas ornaments. As a result he lost his job. But he was still supporting something I believe in.’
‘All right. Why don’t you find out something for me, then? I’ve been digging in data bases. Mind, his name was not on the top—minions—but Piper was definitely behind it. Why don’t you discover for me why Piper has a grant from the WHO, quite a large one, and what it is actually for.’