Game Control (29 page)

  'I was warned you chaps wanted money,' Wendell returned. 'So get on with it. What for?'

  'The exponential rise in human population in this century,' Calvin began, 'is the most massive biological transformation this planet has undergone since the last ice age. Every year erosion, overgrazing and salinity are destroying three million acres of productive farmland worldwide. People, Wendell, are worse than elephants.'

  'I've heard all this before. So?'

  'Ninety per cent of population growth in the next hundred years is expected to occur in the Third World. Africa alone will have multiplied itself
four times
in the second half of this century. Nigeria, for example, will rise from a population of thirty million in 1950 to three hundred million in 2025; a tenfold increase in a single lifetime. At that point it will displace the United States as the fourth most populous country in the world—
Nigeria
, Wendell. You know what it's like here—can it afford to get worse?'

  Wendell was fidgeting with the dog.

  'Meanwhile,' Calvin continued, though even the Labrador was beginning to whine, 'fertility has plummeted in developed countries to
below the replacement rate
of 2.2. Only because of age structure and immigration have populations from our own part of the world not yet begun to shrink. The fertility rate in Germany is 1.4. Italy? A Catholic country? 1.2.'

  He finally got BC's attention. 'I'm gobsmacked.'

  It was one of Calvin's favourite figures. 'Small wonder that if you go to New York City now, it's virtually impossible to find a conolli in Little Italy; but you can buy plenty of eggrolls. Have you been to London lately?'

  'Two years back.'

  'A lot of Pakistanis on the street? Running all the shops? Iraqis? West Indians?'

  'Not an Englishman in twenty.'

  'It's a dying race, Wendell. And that's just the start. Population growth where economies are drowning will encourage massive migration to countries that still have their heads above water. Are you getting the picture? Wendell:
we are being

overrun
. Third World countries may not have nuclear bombs, but they have much more powerful weapons: they have babies.'

  Wendell made a gesture of casual despair such as only a man of seventy can afford. This talk of 2025 might have been of the Pleistocene or Mars. He would never submit to such a year, and of that reprieve Eleanor could only be envious. Like most of her generation, she was afraid of the future. How remarkable it must have been to live in the nineteenth century, with its myth of progress.

  However, the money Wendell kept in Britain must have grown as abstract as 2025—with his vodka and slippers? Calvin was offering him a last chance to spend it, and the very old and the very young share a devil-may-care. Since the future is real to neither, they are both rash.

  'What are you suggesting?' asked BC.

  'I can't tell you.'

  Wendell rubbed his chin in baffled amusement. 'You expect me to hand you a blank cheque. To do whatever you please?'

  'That's right.'

  'Cheeky chap.'

  'I dare say.'

  'You're with…one of those aid capers? Because you people have been pouring money into this family planning palaver for years, and from the sound of your own song and dance it hasn't done a speck of good.'

  'I couldn't agree more. I was the head of the Population Division at USAID. I was fired.'

  'Goodness.'

  'I broke the rules. I don't know your views on abortion, but I shipped off vacuum aspirators like Hoovers to Hiltons.'

  'I wouldn't want my daughter to have one,' Wallace admitted. 'But if it meant a few less
watu
—'

  'I wouldn't want
your
daughter to have one either.'

  'Calvin!' Eleanor exclaimed, unable to control herself.

  'My most controversial position', Calvin continued, his glance slicing
shut up
, 'was to advocate the withdrawal of all child survival and infant mortality programmes in Africa.'

  'In English?'

  'The whole reason there are so many people here, Wendell,

is the missionaries trekked in vaccines for smallpox, eradicated tsetse flies, cured yellow fever and improved nutrition. Not so long ago, women had crops of children and most of them died. It was a hard life, but it worked: populations were relatively stable. I advocate going back to traditional death rates. Stop re-hydrating the five-yearold with diarrhoea. I know it sounds callous, but the alternative is he will starve or, should he live to fourteen, knife either of us in the back for a chicken sandwich. The West created a disease with a cure. Only the West can take its nostrums away.'

  'So that's what you're about, getting the nurses out?'

  'I can't tell you more than I have. I'm the head of a private organization whose intentions are drastic; even fantastic. These issues are politically sensitive. It's not in your interests to know too much. Your cheque will not be traceable to us. Your name will not appear in our files. Only our visit here today could implicate you, and you may claim it was social. I'm not trying to be coy, Wendell, but to protect you and my operation both.'

  'How do I know you're not a charlatan?'

  'I am a former department head of USAID, not a ruffian with a crumpled typewritten pledge for radio-television school. I have nothing on paper; printed material could get me arrested. My credentials are easy to check, but if you go looking for my organization you won't find it. I know it sounds outlandish, and I'm asking you to take a great deal on faith. Then, look at it this way: even if this is a flim-flam, what's going to happen to population growth? Nothing. But what will happen if you don't give me support? Nothing. If you fund me, something might improve; if not, everything definitely gets worse.'

  BC chuckled. 'By that reasoning, I should bankroll every confidence artist I meet.' To Eleanor's amazement, he took out his cheque book. 'To whom do I make this out?'

  'The IMF will do nicely.' When Calvin took the cheque decorously, he didn't glance at the amount but slipped it blindly into his wallet.

  'I shall expect a report.'

  'How much we report,' said Calvin affably, 'will depend on

our report of you.' He had successfully switched it around, who trusted whom.

  'How drastic?' asked Wendell with a mischievous smile, as if he knew very well.

  'Drastic,' Calvin assured him, and shook hands.

  'You won't hurt any animals will you?' BC called as they departed.

  'Not on four legs,' Calvin shouted back.

  As they tucked into the jeep, Calvin waved as Wendell stroked his hunt terrier on the porch. Eleanor waved, too, until they were around the bend. The man looked so forlorn. Calvin was already peeping in his wallet. 'Two hundred thousand pounds. Not bad for a day's work.'

  'It stretches my credulity,' said Eleanor, 'that the IMF is behind QUIETUS.'

  'Use your head,' Calvin chided. 'We just received a donation to the International Mortality Fund.'

  Though their mission had been successful, on the flight back Eleanor was acidly silent.

  'You're pouting,' said Calvin.

  'You forewarned me about bigoted balderdash, but not that I'd have to hear it from you.'

  'More complicity,' he assured her. 'But the joke is on BC. He thinks the world is only over-populated with bongos. The truth is it is also over-populated with racist colonialists. After all, what are the chances that a seventy-year-old alcoholic will survive Pachyderm?'

  He could not understand why his rogue sense of justice was of such limited consolation. The poor sweet old man. And what would happen to all those dogs?

Their next target, however, was an American who worked for Lonrho, a calm, well-kept and widely read gentleman of modest appetite who early in the encounter moderated Calvin's extreme forecasts with more complex figures of his own; something felt wrong.

  The house itself had all the right markings, an opulent spread overlooking the game park, steeped in that funny emptiness that can invade interiors when they are too well done—too spare, too tasteful, with a pillow just here and that print

with simply the ideal frame and something in you is dying to toss toys in the corner and invite a homeless person to throw up on the sofa. It was one of those dream houses too clever for its own good, since when Eleanor imagined coming home to such a vision she saw long evenings with no company, walking bereft from one widewindowed, ethnic-carpeted diorama to the next, the phone not ringing. No one would stop by, since the dream house was, as dream houses always are, out in the middle of nowhere, and consequently was steeped in the air of all dressed up and no place to go. After enough ambling from the game-viewing nook to the bathroom—brass fittings, plush towels so terrifyingly white you end up drying your hands on the toilet paper—she would slit her wrists in the tub, not only to make a mess but to force all this calculated architecture to experience an emotion. Something about perfection is hostile.

  Thomas Eggerts shared some of the qualities of his house: he surely took regular exercise, kept his cholesterol low and ate bran cereal. His correspondence would be up to date, and he would never run out of paper-clips. His expression was terminally pleasant, his face unimportantly handsome, and it was so impossible to imagine Thomas doing anything unruly or indulging in substances we have all read are not good for us that Eleanor wondered if discipline itself could become a vice.

  Her foreboding intensified when their host sipped passion fruit squash, which drove Calvin as ever into the arms of the whisky Eggerts clearly kept only for guests. Likewise the presence of American inflection drew Calvin's nattiest British accent.

  'In famine relief camps,' Calvin introduced after their polite statistical fencing, 'aid workers have found that families themselves will select a child to die. The child is not only banned from his own parents' larder, but will get shunted from the pot of porridge even if it's provided by UNICEF. Brothers and sisters will take
posho
out of his hands. Eventually he becomes lack-lustre and won't even try for food. It makes sense, of course. If the parents die, the whole family is lost. The parents come first.'

  'I was running a health clinic in Addis,' Eleanor added. 'A family in a nearby village had a ten-year-old girl they kept in the back room. She was terribly under-nourished, and ill, but not beyond hope. She needed a blood transfusion, and both her parents were compatible. I begged them—one transfusion would save the girl's life. They both refused. They'd already decided she should die. I know it's a small story, but somehow that experience did something to me. I found it harder to run my clinic after that, and applied for a transfer.'

  'The little girl,' said Thomas. 'You were fond of her?'

  'Maybe that was it. Yes, very. She was tiny but unusually beautiful and bright. I found myself thinking, if her own parents won't save her, what am I doing here?'

  'Africans don't have the same relationship to death as we do,' said Calvin.

  'They can't afford to,' said Thomas.

  'In the States,' said Calvin, 'have you noticed how bereaved relatives act indignant? Especially in the upper classes. You get the feeling that over $100,000-a-year Americans believe they've earned themselves out of disease.'

  'I dread the day,' said Thomas, 'that the rich can pay the poor to die for them,'

  'They do already,' said Eleanor.

  'You're quite right,' said Thomas. 'We eat off the curved backs of men with a life expectancy of forty-five. Our breakfast porridge is taken from the hands of those little boys shut out from the UNICEF pot.'

  'It's not that simple,' Calvin scoffed. 'And I've never seen the point of sophomoric, mawkish self-flagellation. As you've said yourself, Eleanor, maldistribution is a fact of life. My point was otherwise: Africans grasp that letting some sections of the population go can be in the interests of the larger community. They are mature about death. The West, in my view, could use a bit more calamity. I watch my own culture growing bathetic and senile. When I read about millions of dollars spent to mend a single hole in some white baby's heart, I want to gag.'

  'All the same,' said Thomas, 'you're not suggesting African parents have no feelings for their children?'

  'No,' said Calvin noncommittally.

  'And you would admit that, even if this triage you describe

is necessary, parents forced to select their own child for starvation are tragic?'

  'I wouldn't call it tragic; I'd call it realistic.'

  'Can you imagine,' he pressed, 'in your own family, how you would feel if your mother instructed you that your baby sister, with whom you played every day, was no longer to be fed?'

  'With difficulty,' said Calvin. 'I was an only child.'

  Thomas sat back. 'Somehow I could have predicted that.' He invited them to his dinner table, though his graciousness was formal for an American; chilly.

  'On the one hand,' Thomas resumed, 'I can see your point that up against the wall circumstances arise where some must be sacrificed for the good of all, but you will not win me from my grief should such a choice be foisted on my own family, or on anyone else's. Without that grief I cease to be a human being as I understand the term. I'll grant you the obscenity of spending millions of dollars to save the life of a single American infant when in the meantime hundreds of thousands of children in Mali are dying of diarrhoea that could be cured for two or three dollars apiece. Yet were our resources sufficiently plentiful, I would spend a million dollars to save the life of any child; as they are not, we have to make painful assessments of how much that life is worth. The wealthy can afford to be precious, and the poor cannot—it's not even a question of values, but economics. However, the opposite extreme of your "sentimental" relation to death in the industrialized world I personally find more frightening: where human life no longer means anything at all. Admire African "maturity" with corpses as you will, when things go wrong on this continent that is how they corrupt: people become firewood. In fact, that is what happens by and large when things go wrong anywhere. Historically, I can't think of a society that has collapsed or degraded itself because its people cared for one another to excess.'