Lionel Shriver - Game Control

As if to torment themselves, Nairobi’s physics-defying two-dimensional were all clustered around the buffet, one licking a surreptitious drip of meat-juice off her finger, another fondling a leaf of lettuce. Wallace disapproved of gluttony, but he had no time for greedy ascetism either. Fasting was for mental purification, not miniskirts. And their ensembles, over-accessoried and keenly co-ordinated, betrayed how long they had spent trying on earlier combinations and taking them off. Most of their mumble was inaudible as they confided in one another who was copulating with whom, for in the week since their last party the couplings would have done a complete musical chairs. With the sexual turnover in this town, gossip was a demanding and challenging career. The remarks from the buffet he could hear, however, regarded the timeless servant problem. “George had his camera disappear, and with nobody coming forward, just looking, like, duh, what’s a camera, I was sorry but I had to sack the lot …”

“You have to draw the line right away. Little by little, they bring their whole families, until the shamba is overrun, mattresses and plastic bowls; it’s hardly your house any more! Cheeky bastards!”

“And when we took her on she said she had one child , can you believe it! Of course she had six, and now she’s pregnant, again —”

“You really have to employ all the same tribe, sweety, or they’re at each other’s throats morning and night.”

Add a few pilots, a sprinkling of journalists waiting for some Africans to starve, for another massacre in Somalia or the rise of another colourful dictator whose quaint cannibalism they could send up in the Daily Mirror , and that, in one room, was mzungu Nairobi—inbred, vain, pampered, presumptive and imminently extinct, thank heavens.

Wallace declined to mingle, and perched on a three-legged stool, rocking on his chaplies with his cane between his legs, rearranging the straggles of his faded kikoi . It was times like these, while around him the bewildered got motherless, that he might have missed his pipe, but Wallace had given it up and regarded himself as beyond desire.

He had noted before that the mentally mangled found the proximity of perfect contentment and inner peace an upsetting experience and so they tended to avoid him. Conversations with Wallace had a habit of dwindling. Why? Just try explaining how we-are-all-one when your companion is fidgeting for a refill of whisky and looks so palpably disheartened at the demise of the banana crisps. So he was surprised when one of the paper dolls tore herself away from ogling the buffet table of forbidden fruit and sidled over to the fire. Perhaps, so tiny, she was cold.

“So what’s your line?” she asked distractedly, no doubt having just learned her husband was bedding her best friend. “KQ? WWF? A & K? I’d guess …” she assessed, “UN, but not with those sandals. NGO. Loads of integrity. SIDEA?”

“I did,” he conceded, “once work in population research.”

“Oh, brilliant! I know this sounds awful, but when I read about a plane crash or an earthquake, I think, well, good. There are too many people already.”

“And what if you were on the plane?”

“I suppose then I shouldn’t have to think anything about it whatsoever.” She giggled.

“I’ve given up population work rather.”

“Well, I don’t blame you. It must be so discouraging. Everyone giving food aid to those poor Ethiopians, who just keep having more babies. And frankly …” Her voice had dropped.

“Sorry?”

“This AIDS palaver. I’ve heard it said, you know, that it’s Nature’s way. Of keeping the balance. Do you think me just too monstrous?”

Wallace was about to say “Yes” when a cold draught raised the hairs on his neck. Even facing away from the door he could feel the room tingle. The girl who didn’t really care if she was a monster clapped delightedly. “Calvin!” she cried, and scampered off.

Wallace forced himself to turn slowly, by which time Evil Incarnate, Inc. had already set up shop at the big round table on the opposite side of the room. Too insecure to arrive without a protective claque, Piper had gathered his dwarfs around him, commanding the whole table so that no one could get at the food, and annexing most of the available chairs in one swoop. Arms extended languidly on either side, he took an audience as his due. That ghastly simian was always a draw, though gurgling fans got their comeuppance soon enough—already, from the sound of a yelp and covering titter, the hateful beast had managed to bite a hand that fed it. Shortly, standing room behind the circle filled up, while energy bled from other corners. Alternative conversations grew lack-lustre while trickles of prima donna pessimism drizzled to Threadgill’s ear: “You realize there are actually some people who believe that human population can expand infinitely?”

Wallace smiled. So Piper had noticed he was here.

Calvin was the prime of a type. They saw only mayhem and degradation, for you can only see what you are, and squalor was what these deformities were made of. Piper would never perceive the canniness of the planet or the ingenuity of his own race, for his vista was smeared with greenhouse gases and acid rain. Would Calvin ever bother to read articles about new high-yield hybrid crops? Or Simon’s irrefutable evidence that far from being a drag on a poor country’s economy, population growth was its greatest asset?

For as often as nihilists concocted “solutions”, they raised the prospect of any salvation to prove it wouldn’t work. All progress was palliative, and their favourite phrase was “too little, too late”. Some were content with keening, others with debauchery. Clubs of Rome lived high, having already consigned their people to the trash heap. There was money in fear, but you had to move quick— Famine! 1975 didn’t sell well in 1976. How many copies of The Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb now yellowed in Oxfam outlets? These gremlins had squealed that civilization was finished ever since it had started. They were a waste and an irritant, but they were decorative.

Should they remain in self-important think-tanks competing over who could concoct the most gruesome scenario for the year 2000, Wallace was content to let them hand-wring their lives away. Another sort of dread merchant, however, he could not conscionably ignore.

Because Calvin Piper had never been all talk. To give credit where due, the man was bright, effective and fantastically well connected. He was a seducer. His ideas, in their extremity, had a sensual thrill. He would never be satisfied with predicting disaster—he would help make it happen.

Wallace might have relaxed when Calvin was fired, reduced back to the Bacon spoiling on the walls of his Karen lair, unemployed. Wallace knew better. The very appearance of inactivity over at that cottage gave him chills. Calvin could not bear to be still; he did not have the spiritual sophistication. Released from the constraints of bureaucracy, Calvin was less demoted than unleashed. Why, that scoundrel had had no visible means of support for the last six years. But look at him: his slacks were linen, his shoes kid and outside the A-frame undoubtedly sat his new four-wheel-drive. What, pray, was he living on? Wallace may have dwelt in the realms of the ancestors for most of the day, but he was still aware that it was on the detail level that you found people out.

It was late enough for Wallace, who liked to be in bed by nine o’clock, to make his exit, but he did not want to appear to be fleeing because Calvin had arrived. Wallace might be repelled but he certainly wasn’t frightened. And there was one woman creeping over to his side of the house who stood out from the rest, if only because of her outfit. Long hem, high neck: she was hiding. Brown hair sloped either side of her face as she tiptoed towards the veranda, hoping to make it the distance of the living room without being caught. When he looked closely, he thought her rather prettier than much of the Lycra-nippled competition, but she did not have the conviction to match. That was half the game with beauty, keeping your head high, and she stared at her sensible shoes. Beauty was deception, and you had to have the shyster’s smooth sleight of hand to pull it off. This one thought of herself as ordinary; consequently, she was. Wallace didn’t think about these things any more, though as the theory fell to hand like the drop of an apple there must have been a time when he thought of little else.