Game Control Read Free Page A

'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—'
      'Like me.'
      'I didn't say—'
      'I said. But it's hard to picture you jaded.'
      'I could learn. I see it happen in aid workers every day. You keep working and it doesn't make any difference until eventually you find your efforts comic. But when you start finding all sympathy maudlin and all goodwill suspect, you think you've gotten wise, that you've caught the world on, when really you've just gotten mean.'
      'You think I'm mean?'
      'You were, a little,' she admitted. 'At the KICC this afternoon. This is Eleanor, Exhibit A: the hopeless family planning worker, beavering away in her little clinics among the—"fecund hordes"?'
      He smiled and said as gently as one can say such a thing, 'You still don't have a sense of humour.'
      'I don't see why it's always so hilarious to believe in something.'
      'Why didn't you tell me to sod off?'
      'Because when people are wicked to me, I don't get angry, I get confused. Why should anyone pick on Eleanor? I'm harmless.'
      'It's harmless people who always get it in the neck. Why can't you learn to fight back?'
      'I hate fighting. I'd rather go away.'
      They talked, as expatriates did incessantly, about Africa, though Eleanor suspected this was the definition of being a stranger here. Real Africans, she supposed, never sat around at dinner talking about Africa.
      'I should feel lucky,' said Calvin. 'Not everyone gets to witness the destruction of an entire continent in his lifetime. Of course, if I had my way I would kick every sunburnt white boy off this continent. But not without putting mortality back where we found it, so these witless bastards don't reproduce themselves into spontaneous cannibalism. Import a few tsetse fly, sprinkle the Ngongs with tubercle bacillus, unpack the smallpox virus the WHO keeps in cold storage in Geneva. Did you know that we preserve diseases? The eagles are endangered, but the germs are safe.'
      'What about development?'
      'Develop into what , mind you? Pizza Hut? No, what Africa could use is some good old-fashioned regression.'
      'It's seen plenty of that.' Her smoked trout starter was exquisite, and only made her ill.
      'Not enough. I'd remove every felt-tip, digestive biscuit and gasguzzling pick-up from Algiers to Cape Town.' Calvin disposed of his boar pâté in a few bites. 'Go back to Homo sapiens as pack animals, huddled around fires, cowering in trees and getting shredded by lions to keep the numbers down. No campaigns for multiparty democracy, no crummy tabloids, no Norwegian water projects. Just life, birth and death in the raw, busy enough and awful enough that you never have a chance to think about it before a hyena bites off your leg.'
      'Back to the garden,' Eleanor mused.
      'You never saw it, Eleanor, but when I first came to Kenya in 1960 this country was paradise.' He gestured to the tarry horror that would not quite fit under her chair. 'No watu with their hands out every time you tie your shoe.'
      'Don't you imagine any twenty-year-old here for the first time is just as knocked out?'
      'What knocks them out is it's grotty and crowded and nothing works. And all right, so the Africans should get their Walkmans like everyone else. So Africa isn't special. But when I came here it was. So there's nowhere to go, nowhere special. So it's every man's right to be garish, filthy and completely lacking in foresight. Terrific.'
      Eleanor glanced warily at their waiter as he brought her main course; he spoke English. 'You sound like a child who's had his playground closed.'
      'Don't imagine I'm reminiscing about how smoothly the country ran under colonial rule. No, when there was no telephone system not to work, no electricity to go off, no water piping to over-extend—now, that is working