Game Control (12 page)

  'No, it—might be nice.' She closed her briefcase and hid it by the bin. She did not know whether to undress or not. She slipped off her shoes.

  'I could loan you a T-shirt if you'd feel more comfortable.'

  'Yes. Maybe so.' With her back to Calvin, Eleanor scrabbled into the oversized T. Funny, she'd made love to him seventeen years ago; how strange that you returned to being bashful having once been so intimate. Hadn't he seen her breasts before? She supposed they were prettier then.

  She slipped under the sheet, thinking that this made two celibates in one weekend. Much as he dismissed the man as a nincompoop, Calvin had a fair bit in common with Wallace Threadgill. They were both fanatics, and they were both, according to their habits, destined to die out. Well, thought Eleanor, pulling her impromptu nightdress down her skinny thighs,
no big loss.

  She felt a little silly about the shirt when Calvin stripped to nothing, and as he strode to turn off the light she noticed, resentfully, that he still had the body of a twenty-five-year-old. Probably he always slept in the buff, and since tonight was like going to bed on any ordinary night, why change habits?

  Eleanor turned on her side away from him; he put his arm around her waist and instantly fell asleep. His
companion
was not so lucky, though she did get a chance to employ yet another skill most single women have perfected by the age of thirty-eight: how to cry with a man's arm around you without waking him up.

Eleanor got through half of breakfast with hollow cheer, insisting on making coffee, though that was Solastina's job. Calvin said little, perhaps waiting for her to run out of twitter. Since Eleanor was never very good at twitter, she did so by the second cup.

  'Are you disappointed,' he asked, 'because you couldn't have something you wanted or have I merely offended your pride?'

  'I just don't understand.'

  'You didn't answer my question.'

  'You're acting as if it's some kind of abnormal impulse.'

  'It has become abnormal for me.'

  'Why?'

  'If you have ever been happy once, that spoils you. The misery that follows is your only comfort. I have come to love mine. I'm rather protective of it, in fact.'

  'You don't seem miserable to me.'

  'Quite so. The misery mellows into nothing in particular.'

  'So what's the point? Why not?'

  'Long after an emotion has passed it is possible to pay tribute to it. The less you can recall the feeling, the more important that tribute becomes. Ask widows who visit graves on Sundays. Their diligence redoubles once the loved one fades. The diligence is all that remains. And I am hardly going to visit the Mombasa morgue. Instead, I practise abstinence. It's easy, though you are an attractive woman. A bit like dropping something on the road, you aren't sure where. That side of me is lost.'

  'Impossible. It's never lost.'

  'Sex can be surgically removed, like a tumour.'

  'More like cutting off your head.'

  'Think of me as the victim of an accident, then—with an injury people feel awkward discussing.'

  'You look intact to me.'

  'I'm not. But being a cripple has its compensations. What do we call the handicapped now?
Differently enabled
? Other capacities gain ground.'

  'This woman. She's the one on the wall? Who you said was a missionary?'

  '
Mercenary
,' Calvin corrected, and had a good laugh. 'Oh, Panga. I hope you caught that.'

  'So what happened?'

  'In due course,' said Calvin. 'But you and I need to get this established. Don't imagine I'm restraining myself. I am without sexual desire, and don't feel sorry for me either. Imagine how liberating it must feel. You remember the enthusiasm you once felt for history in high school, when what really made your heart race was the boy in the front row, and impressing him with your politics? I am no longer subject to ulterior fascinations. I'm never distracted by whereis-she-now while polishing off July's
Population Bulletin
. Shouldn't you envy me?'

  'I might, a little,' she admitted, 'if I could believe it. Maybe everyone fantasizes about being out from under. But I don't believe it.'

  He took her hand. 'You think it's your fault and I'm being polite. Please, my lack of interest is not from lack of interest in you. On the other hand, if you are looking for passionate involvement you will need to go elsewhere. I confess I should be sorry to see less of you.'

  Eleanor realized with a thud that she had been seeing Calvin about five times a week. How this had occurred she couldn't fathom, but insidiously he was all her social life in Nairobi; just as insidiously, all her life. And here he was, offering to sacrifice her to the sticky clutches of the brown chair.

  She took his hand and sandwiched it between her palms, stroking his forefinger across her forehead. 'Threadgill is right. I'm in trouble.'

  'You are only safe when you're dead.'

  'I'm beginning to look forward to it.'

  'I assure you it's quite pleasant.'

  'How do you know?'

  'I am pre-dead.'

  She sighed. 'Calvin, sometimes you get just too strange.'

  'Pre-death is supremely useful. A man without feelings is a merciless sword. The limits dissolve like cotton candy. Did you know there are no rules really? That most of the ones you obey you make up? I could teach you a great deal I'm not sure you want to know.'

'Everyone around me lately talks like J. R. R. Tolkien.'

'No hobbits and fairies,' said Calvin. '
Gormenghast
.'

  Eleanor was poorly read in fantasy, but she didn't like the sound of that word.

  'My dear,' he advised her, 'the whole of this century has increasingly closed the gap between science fiction and fact. I have a hard time finding any novel sufficiently outlandish…'

  'Isaac Asimov has been upstaged by history, it is reliably more fantastic to read the newspaper. Old hat.'

  'Yes. Clichéd, isn't it?' His mouth stirred in a particularly rich, thick smile, double cream. 'Now, I've some appointments this morning, but my afternoon could be tidied up with a few phone calls. Could you get free?'

  'This morning I've got to hand out awards to the CBD agents who have brought in the most new clients, but I should be through by two. Why?'

  'Because we are going to buy you a new dress and matching shoes. And you will jump up and down if I have to fill your overly large knickers with fire ants. Now, let me see about those calls.' Though there was a phone in the living room, he rose to ring elsewhere.

  She stopped him. 'You never tell me anything but jokes and veiled, mystic warnings from cheap sci-fi.'

  'Then I must be highly entertaining.' He jingled down the hall with his keys and spent a good minute or so unlocking a door there; and then she heard him secure the dead-bolt on the other side.

As he'd promised, Calvin swept her from Mathare to the YaYa Centre. Kenya's styles are conservative, but at last he seized upon a short, sleeveless black dress with a scandalous neckline and rhinestones on one shoulder. He located sheer seamed black stockings and precariously high black patent shoes with twinkles on the heels. He brought Eleanor home and made her put her hair up.

  'I feel like a total whore,' she complained.

  He led her to the mirror. Eleanor had long legs, and now you could see most of them. The new push-up black lace bra made the best of her modest endowment. She had never noticed before, but with her hair raised she seemed to have a

long, lean neck to which the little gold pendant drew attention. Walking in these shoes, however, would take practice. She was both pleased and a little frightened. 'You don't think I look ridiculous?'

  'You looked ridiculous in that
plaid
.'

  In fact, it only took the evening for Eleanor to master her shoes. This time when she strode to the Ladies' in the Horseman, diners turned their heads. Despite Calvin's generous offer to special-order buttered rice, Eleanor had lobster and frozen lemon soufflé. She did not cart the claws out to beggars on the pavement or try to doggiebag her jacket potato. While Calvin might have had 'no feelings', he was a terrific lot of fun, and Eleanor was rapidly developing sufficient feelings for the both of them.

  By Nairobi standards they'd spent a fortune, but Calvin paid for everything and assured her that there was plenty more where that came from. Eleanor had the fleeting impression of what it must feel like to be a Mafia princess. It seemed she had acquired a sugar daddy who was determined to make up for the fact not that he repulsed her but that she found him attractive. She was clearly in training for a new life, one which she could assume much more gracefully than old Eleanor, saver of tinfoil and hoarder of plastic bags, would ever have expected. Perhaps anyone is capable, she posited nervously, of becoming their opposite, since, in its abstract absolute, black was white.

Wipe your muddy hands on his clean white towel. Don't rinse your glass.
Leave the dirty pan in the sink
. Advice teased over Eleanor's shoulder as she went about her business in Calvin's house. Sometimes she took it; with Nairobi's red clay, that towel would never be the same. Later, more pressing:
Why do you ask so few questions? What are you
afraid of
? The snicker. Eleanor felt continually mocked.

  Lord, what was she not afraid of? Tentatively, she did ask questions. 'Calvin…Where's this from?'

  'That's Panga's
kukri
.'

  Eleanor hefted the knife up and down. She had not seen it on the table before; no, it had not been there before. The weapon was daunting. Its short handle wrapped in leather, the blade was broad and curved, weighted forward. Traditionally when a Gurkha lost a wager, he was obliged to lop off his own left hand. This would do the trick—wickedly sharp, with a nick at its base so the blood would drip from the knife and not down your arm.

  'How would a Kamba get hold of a
kukri
?'

  'Stole it,' he said crisply. 'She worked as household staff, you know, during those rare little lulls in African massacre. Swiped it from some ex-Army pillock who served in Burma, when she was employed to not-clean his kitchen. In my experience, even with the most trustworthy there's one perfect temptation they can't resist. With Panga, it's knives. Like the Masai and cattle, she thinks they all rightfully belong to her. All knives are therefore borrowed. In her book, she doesn't steal; she takes them back.' His present tense was unsettling.

  Over the weeks, more bevels carved Eleanor's path: machetes, bowies, bayonets, a samurai scimitar with a sharkskin scabbard. They were neither cast carelessly in a corner nor arched decoratively on the wall. The blades were placed, squarely, where Eleanor would find them, then removed, just as peremptorily as they appeared. When she cajoled, 'Are you trying to tempt me to domestic violence?' Calvin acted perplexed.

  There was one more photograph of Panga besides the one in the diving hood. Eleanor found it by accident—if indeed she was finding anything in this apparently innocent cottage by accident—scrabbling for a handkerchief in the drawer beside his bed: crinkled, out of focus, black and white. Leaning on a hijacked Red Cross van, its roof flame—cut off to mount a machine-gun, there was the same lanky black woman in tatty hair, jauntily cradling an AK—47 like its mother. She wore shabby khaki, sleeves and ankles rolled up, and no shoes.

  'Do you think she would be jealous?' supposed Eleanor, studying the photo that morning. 'Of me?'

  'I don't imagine you bother Panga in the slightest,' he said tersely.

  'Why
not
?'

  'She is only jealous of women the least bit like her,' he said impatiently. 'There's no question that given half a chance Panga would make quick work of Bunny Morton; any day now I expect to find Bunny's individually wrapped packets stacked in the freezer like steak. But I can't think of two females with less in common than you and that hellcat.'

  'I don't see how we're different as all that.'

  Calvin laughed. 'Where do you chart the resemblance exactly?'

  Eleanor glowered.

  'Are you jealous of her?'

  'Intensely,' she confessed.

  But Eleanor was being less than candid. She was also entranced. She found the story, as she pulled its details from Calvin tooth by tooth, incredibly romantic. In fact, she wondered if she wasn't more taken by the tale than by Calvin himself. And later she would need an explanation, though

Panga had first arrived on Calvin's doorstep, delivered by the extended family of his housegirl, who had married off to Machakos. Sinewy arms akimbo, flounced in a floral print, she looked 'for all the world', he said, 'like a Doberman pinscher got up in a dress'.

  He spoke to her in his stiff pidgin, the weak, ungrammatical Swahili Eleanor deplored. While in time he would realize Panga's English was better than she let on, she first feigned incomprehension, loitering to eavesdrop, trying to maintain a stupid look on her face, which for such a weasel of a woman must have required cunning concentration. Panga liked the advantage, Eleanor decided, knowing more than you thought. It was good military strategy.

  When he showed the new housegirl the detergents, brooms and pots, she would have gazed at the ceiling, insolent. The job was beneath her, and Panga would not easily, like that
askari
the other night, watch spoiled, rich
wazungu
titter through his house without comment.

  Eleanor, who compulsively swabbed the ring of her bath and swept up toast crumbs even in a house with servants, admired Panga's atrocious housekeeping more than her employer had. In the heavy red clay that settled daily in the dry season, Calvin would find a few disdainful swipes on his bureau, with nothing moved; on the glass table in the nook he drew pictures all through breakfast, if he was not picking the hard crust of old dinners from his plate. Panga's idea of dish washing was drawn from quick decampments at dawn with the rebels on your trail, a swish in a stream and you legged it. Wonderful, thought Eleanor, rinsing, drying and returning her coffee cup to its cupboard, upside-down to keep out dust.