‘I know culling makes a lot of sense,’ a girl in several kilos of Ethiopian silver was moaning. ‘But I simply can’t bear it—’
Sifting aimlessly between the gaggles, ex-hunters fetched themselves another drink. As masters will come to resemble their dogs, the thick-necked, snouty, lumbering intrepids suggested the animals they’d shot. Hunting had been illegal in Kenya for years now. Grown puffy and cirrhotic with nothing to murder, most of these anachro-nisms were reduced to trucking pill-rattling geriatrics and shrill, fibre-obsessed Americans around the Mara, or had secured contracts with Zanzibar, where the gruff lion-slayers now picked off over-populated crows.
On its outer edges, the throng was laced with the independently wealthy and the entrepreneurial élite. If they deigned to work, husbands ran light industries and were sure to own at least one aeroplane, a house in Lamu and a camp in the Ngurumans. Not particularly bright, few of these spoiled, soft-handed colonials would have done well in Europe or America, while in Africa they’d little commercial competition. The baby-
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fat faces beamed with self-satisfaction. Here their dress ran to sports jackets, but out in the wilderness they were given to orange Bermudas and loafers without socks. Their conversation, anywhere, was entirely about cars. ‘I had my Daihatsu kitted out with…forgot about one of those bloody unmarked speed-bumps and cracked my engine block…found a way to get around the duty on…’ Wallace didn’t need to listen very hard.
Their wives, on the other hand, were at least an eyeful. Balanced on legs no thicker than high heels, these emaciated elegants could raise millions on a poster:
SAVE THE ENDANGERED CAUCASIAN FEMALE
Anna has not eaten in three days. She is five foot eight and weighs little over a hundred pounds. Anna requires a full litre of vodka just to survive the cruel leisure of one more back-biting social function.
She needs your help. For just a thousand pounds a week, you could adopt a rich white lady in Africa.
As if to torment themselves, Nairobi’s physics-defying two-dimen-sional 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, mat-45
tresses 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.
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‘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 Incarn-ate, 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 47
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 de
corative.
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
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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.
He almost left her alone, so apparent was her desperation to be overlooked, but were she allowed to achieve what she thought she wanted—solitude—she would be miserable. More, he couldn’t resist a woman whose instinct with Calvin Piper on stage was to sneak in the opposite direction.
‘Pardon—’ At his hand on her sleeve, she jumped. ‘Have you a clue where I might get a spot of tea?’
She stumbled through something about the kitchen, leaving him in no doubt that contact with another human being was the most fearsome thing that had ever happened to her.
He returned with his cup to find her on the veranda as if they had an assignation. ‘Astonishing sky, isn’t it?’ A moan of assent. About her frantic desire that he should go away he had no illusion. But winning her from a bogus trip to the loo was a snap. ‘Sorry,’ he introduced, after an unencouraging but obligatory exchange about where she was from and where she lived. ‘I’m Wallace Threadgill.
And yourself?’
That was all it took. She stopped leaning over the railing and gaping dolefully at the Jasper Johns Equatorial skyscape and faced him with keen reassessment. ‘Eleanor Merritt.’ Though she needn’t, she shook hands, and he was struck by the fact that now, far from wishing he would disappear, she was suddenly worried he might leave.
‘And what brings you to this blithe bacchanalia?’
She laughed, dry. ‘Awful, aren’t they. I always promise myself I won’t go. And then the alternative is staying home…’
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‘What’s wrong with home?’
‘Malicious furniture.’ Her eyes kept darting to his face, then back over the rail.
‘I’m surprised you’re not attending to our charming ersatz host.
Funny, you’d never know, would you, that this wasn’t his house?
And how high are the chances that he and his whole band of cronies weren’t even invited?’
‘Some people are very—comfortable, socially.’ A diplomat. ‘I’m not. I like to think I’ve improved, but I doubt it. Every time I walk into a party I feel thirteen: dressed like a ninny, terrified of dancing and wishing I’d brought a book.’
‘How does such a shy creature come to be in Africa?’
‘Family planning,’ she groaned.
‘Ah.’ That explained the shift.
‘And you—you’re the heretic.’
He smiled. ‘Quite. And how long have you—?’
‘Nearly twenty years. I was with the UNFPA before Pathfinder, and the Peace Corps before that.’
‘Peace Corps I could have predicted.’
She stood more upright. ‘Everyone finds the Peace Corps so hilarious. That we’re a sad little sort. But it’s done some fine—’
‘Look at you. You’re already getting kali.’
‘I just don’t think it’s fair—’
‘Perhaps you and I are such natural enemies that we should acknowledge irreconcilable differences and skip the fisticuffs.’ He made a motion as if to part.
‘No, please—’ She touched his arm. ‘I have always wanted to talk to you. More than ever now.’
‘Why? Are you questioning your faith?’
‘Let’s say my convictions have been challenged. They are not bearing up well.’
‘But you have a life’s work to defend. No doubt you believe in its merit and conduct it conscientiously. But in my experience, your kind find my message unsettling. They listen only just so long as it takes to invent all the reasons I’m a hairbrain. They march off with their fences built even higher than before, having learned nothing.
I’m a little tired of wasting my time. It’s more than likely we have little to say to one another.’
‘I’m not afraid of information.’
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‘Then you are a brave young lady. The entire population industry is mortified by information. That’s why they make it up. So they can live safely in their fairy-tale future, where we are all balancing tiptoe on one leg in the remaining three square inches apportioned to us, packed on all sides by the seething, copulating ruck, fallen angels on the head of a pin. But look around you.’ He waved his hand at the Ngong Hills as a voluptuous breeze ruffled her soft brown hair; indeed, from here there was not a glimmer of human habitation in sight.
‘My confidence in what I do has been shaken,’ she admitted.
‘We’ve had so little effect.’
‘Large families will persist. But you can make people ashamed of their children, just as Jesuits made women ashamed of their breasts.
You see, I don’t simply believe that population programmes are inadequate; I believe they are evil.’
‘That’s going a bit far.’
‘Let me tell you a story,’ Threadgill intoned, leading her to a porch chair and seating himself at an instructive angle.
‘I was Kenyan-born,’ he began, ‘but educated in Britain. It was the late sixties, when horrors were foretold for the land that I still cared for very much. You may remember, in those days it was to be thirty-three billion by the turn of the next century—and isn’t it intriguing that twenty years later the same prophets are now saying fourteen? So I enrolled in Oxford’s new Population Studies programme, and went from there to work for the Population Reference Bureau in DC. My life was numbers. We ran the profession’s first computer simulations, and when the zeros trilled off perforated sheets my blood would pound. Money pumped into the field and I could travel. Reports with their daunting digits stacked my desk.
At night my colleagues and I would gather at exclusive clubs and loudly compare the multiple nightmares sponsored by our competing organizations. Everywhere we went, o
ur lapels flashed ZPG.
‘My work was going well and I was important. Yet the better it went, the more my soul was sick. I drank heavily. My relations with women were frantic and short-lived, and I was careful not to beget children. I began to develop health prob-51
lems—I was pre-ulcerous and probably an alcoholic. Inside I was heavy, and though I was free to see the sights of the world the earth was a bleak and hopeless coal to me, and showed itself in dark pieces.
Every new country appeared distraught and degraded, perched on a precipice, about to fall apart.
‘One day I was walking out of the Kenyatta Centre, during one of those costly conferences we were so fond of. I ran into a young Luhya I did not know, with his small son. He was angry and accosted me. “You are the enemy of the smile on this child’s face!” he cried.
The boy looked at me, and he had supernatural eyes. I realized the man was right, that my work was all about preventing his son’s conception. I was relieved that his parents had prevailed over my reports. I wasn’t sure of myself then, as you are not now, and until I was sure again I would cast my ZPG pin in the gutter.
‘I entered into a different sort of research, the kind where you are not given the answers before you begin. I was astonished at what I found. Most of all, I was amazed that the facts I uncovered were easily available to everyone, and I became appalled by a conspiracy of despair, a pact of gloom to which I had signed my own name.
‘Because the holocaust of the population explosion is a myth. That we are all dropping into a fetid cesspool is a myth. Life on earth, historically, has done nothing but improve. And the profusion of our species is not a horror but a triumph. We are a thriving biological success story. There is no crisis of “carrying capacity”—since the Second World War, the species has only been better fed. Per capita calorie production continues to rise. Incidence of famine over the last few hundred years has plummeted. Arable land is on the increase. Pollution levels are declining. Resources are getting cheaper.
The only over-population I uncovered was in organizations like the one I worked for, which were a scandal.
‘Yet when I attempted to publish these findings, I was turned away from every journal and publisher I approached. I finally found one feisty university press. But that spelt the end of me. Once word was out I had parted with orthodox demography, I lost my funding.