Lionel Shriver - Game Control

She even considered declining the post and returning to the States, but while like any astute Westerner she knew she would never belong in Africa, she no longer fitted in the US either. When she returned for meetings in Boston, she found conversation banal. These days all that the women talked about was aerobic dancing, calories consumed per lap while running circles in tiny shorts, while on the other side of the world their counterparts kept in shape by trudging ten miles for water and carting fifty pounds of firewood. Most Americans assumed a blank, tolerant expression as she described the food dependency created by Third World cash crops; they saved their own indignation for passive smoking. She wondered if she would ever be able to return to a country that was sinking millions of dollars into research on fat and sugar substitutes that had no food value at all.

The night before Eleanor left, her staff threw her a party, driving in from clinics all over Tanzania with beans and curried goat. As nurses corked the basin in her prefab and filled it with vodka and passion fruit squash, they traded the latest rumours on side-effects. The usual fear that an IUD could lance a man’s penis had become so elaborated that it was now commonly accepted that the device could stick a man and woman together permanently until they were surgically separated in hospital. Eleanor remarked that any contraceptive which would stick a man and woman together permanently might fetch a pretty penny in the States.

For all the jollity and risqué repartee, Eleanor went to bed depressed, feeling she had gone into a line of work for which she was no longer qualified. Staring one more night up at the mosquito netting draping to the sides of her bed, with its taunting resemblance to a bridal canopy, Eleanor felt presumptuous advising any other woman about making love when she herself had forgotten what it was like.

That morning her secretary’s tap on her office door was unusually timid. “Yes?”

“Excuse me, memsahib ,” said Mary, who would ordinarily call her Eleanor and speak in Swahili. “I have trouble.” Her boyfriend, she went on to explain, had beaten her because she refused to give him all her Pathfinder salary, and she was sure he would only spend the money on beer. She had to look out for her children. She had been to the police before, and they had arrested him, but he had bribed his way out of custody and returned last week to beat her again. Indeed, Eleanor knew this story, for Mary had shown up for work with a swelling on her temple from a spanner, and the wound had still not healed.

“So you see,” she concluded, touching the bandage, “if he is to be locked away for good I must pay the police myself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I am afraid … Soon I will be unable to leave my house and go to work for the fear he is waiting …”

Eleanor, absorbed in packing the last bits of her office away and checking her watch for how much time there was before the plane, was taking a while to get the message. “Mary, I have to—”

“My money for this month—” She looked to her hands. “It is finished.”

Eleanor was a soft touch anyway, and the party the night before had melted her all the more. Besides, she had been raised on the importance of empowering battered women. She peeled off some notes from her small remaining roll of Tanzanian currency.

Mary had no sooner thanked her and departed than the knocking began again. One of the driver’s children needed glasses—without them the boy was falling badly behind in school. The roll got smaller.

By the time the tapping resumed a sixth time, however, Eleanor was at her wits’ end. She needed to put finishing touches on the project reports for her successor, the electricity was off again , the low-battery light was winking on the computer and in an hour she had to leave for the airport. When she opened the door, Eleanor was sick with disappointment. The little nurse who stood there, Nomsa, had never said much but had been unusually sweet and competent, with a shy, fragile smile, always willing to stay late in the day. She did immaculate work and had never asked for anything before and Eleanor had thought she was special. But there she stood like the rest, hands guiltily clutched behind her back, all dressed up as if she were on her way to church.

“I don’t have any more!” Eleanor cried.

Nomsa backed out of the doorway with wide eyes, nimbly stooped at the step and ran away. Only when Eleanor was locking up her office for the last time did she spot the little package in crumpled, resmoothed Christmas wrapping paper and a banana-leaf bow.

Perhaps it was that picture of being rescued in the scrub at midnight that inspired her to ring Calvin to meet her flight, for the dark plain, in her head, was where she found herself, even as the wheels touched down in the unremitting good weather of daytime Kenya.

“Your people took their time. While your promotion was coming through,” he announced as he took her bag, “eighty-three million bawling babies have bounced on to the planet from nowhere.”

He installed her in a new Land Cruiser. “Spite must be paying mighty well,” she observed.

“Fantastically,” said Calvin.

Something about Calvin discouraged empty chat, so they sat in silence much of the way, Calvin closed off in dark glasses. She had so looked forward to seeing him, always a mistake, and slumped an extra inch lower in the seat, confessing to herself that he was a stranger. Having heard about him for seventeen years had created a sensation of false intimacy. For all the gossip, she would not recall anyone who knew him personally well. Even at their dinner last year, he had used opinion to protect his life. She’d known enough such people, and stared out of the window at the wide, dry fields, not so different from Tanzania, thinking, another African city, the same set of problems from higher up, why was this improvement? What was ever going to change in her life? And what was wrong with it that demanded Calvin’s promised salvation? How could she turn to this man she barely knew and assert, I see it’s bright out, but I am in the dark; I am broken down in the savannah, and the stars are mean; my battery is full of tar?

As they drew into town, the verges thickened with herds of pedestrians in plastic shoes and polyester plaids. Where were all these people going? From where had they come? As the population density multiplied, the muscles visibly tightened on Calvin’s arms.

“Most of the arable land in this country,” said Calvin, “has been subdivided already down to tracts the size of a postage stamp. Farmers grow their mingy patch of maize and still have eight kids. That’s real child abuse. What are those children to do? So they all head for the city. Nairobi is growing at 8 per cent a year. No jobs. I don’t know how any of these hard-lucks eat. Meanwhile their people back in the village expect them to send money. From where? They should never have come here. They should have stayed home.”

“But I thought you said there was no work for them in the countryside.”

“I mean real home. The big, happy, careless world of nonexistence. Where the rent is low and the corn grows high.”

Eleanor never knew what to say when he talked this way.

“Nothing,” Calvin growled on, “rankles me like these pink-spectacled tulip-tiptoers who claim technological advance is going to sort everything out pretty. You should hear Wallace Threadgill gibber about hybrid crops and the exciting future of intensive agriculture: multiple storeys of artificially lit fields like high-rise car-parks. How likely is that, in a country where just a dial tone is an act of God? I assure you, Africans are not the only ones who believe in magic.”