Game Control. Lionel Shriver

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      The Asian clapped his mouth shut and mashed another crisp. The others, too, resettled in their chairs and reached for their drinks and laughed, at nothing. It was hard to get conversation going again. Three rose to go. When Calvin himself stood up, half the remaining party began collecting their coats.

      “Grant, you will remember to—?” asked Calvin.

      “Yes.”

      “And Louis, you will call—?”

      “Right away.”

      “And send me—?”

      “Of course.”

      Bunny loitered behind after the others had left, conferring with Calvin in a low voice, inclined as far forward as Malthus would allow. Eleanor positioned herself determinedly at Calvin’s other side as the threesome drifted towards the door. With an irritated glance at Eleanor as if to say, well, we can’t talk about anything with you here, she resorted to the monkey.

      “Malthus doesn’t despise Bunny quite as much as everyone else, does he?” she said in that gurgling falsetto people use compulsively with pets. In a show of bravado, she reached to stroke the green monkey’s head. Malthus promptly shrieked his claws across the back of her hand.

      “Yes,” said Eleanor, as Bunny tried to hide the fact that Malthus had drawn blood. “I can see you have a special relationship.”

      To keep from bleeding on her dress, Bunny was forced to find a napkin. When she returned she assessed Calvin and Eleanor side by side, as she might eye a skirt and blouse in the mirror that, no, from any angle, simply didn’t quite go.

      “You’re all right?” asked Calvin.

      “A mere love-scratch,” she smiled with a salacious arch of the brow. “I’ve drawn worse in my time, believe me.” She was one of those slimy sorts who would get sympathy by refusing to ask for it.

      “So nice to see you again,” Bunny offered to Eleanor, and then pre-empted to Calvin. “Shall we?”

      Eleanor cursed herself for having her car. Bunny had contrived to ride with Calvin, leaving Eleanor to dribble down the stairs by herself, while Bunny earnestly wittered in Calvin’s ear, her bandaged hand slipped around his elbow.

      Eleanor said “Kwa heri! Asante sana!” to the askari, while the rest of the party stumbled around him as if skirting lawn furniture. She joined the line of cars filing from the drive of the great bright A-frame, beamed with security floodlights. In the front another guard raised the heavy metal gate, riveted with warning signs—PROTECTED BY … —with crude paintings of little men beside outsized Alsations. Off in the distance, a burglar alarm yowled; a Securi-firm van U-turned and sputtered away. As she drifted down to the corner, the barking of razor-backs marked her progress. Every property, with big recessed houses and plush gardens, came with its sultry, sleepy Masai with a rungu, stationed by more gates and more warning placards. At the turning, a uniformed patrol with batons trudged through its midnight round. Funny, most of these wazungu had come thousands of miles to this continent, only to spend a great deal of money keeping Africa out.

      The guards looked so tired. Imagine staying up all night, every night, stationed by some rich white home, with absolutely nothing to do. Though she supposed they were grateful for a job—the work paid an average of seventy-five dollars a month. Driving back across town, Eleanor considered Calvin’s proposition that Africans do not identify with your life at all. They see white people the way you look at oryx.

      Supposing you work at an enormous house for a childless mzungu couple and they throw generous parties at least once a week. Afternoons you slog up the stairs with crates of beer and soda whose empties you will cart back down the next day. You lug trunk-loads of meat, vegetables and crinkling packets of crisps to the kitchen, and sometimes you glance at the price tags of the items on top—that 120 shillings for American ketchup would buy posho for a week. Later that night, you help direct Mercedes to pack tightly in limited parking space. Music pounds out of the windows for hours while women’s laughter pierces from the veranda, where you can sometimes see men put their hands up ladies’ shirts. Finally these inexplicably malnourished women weave down the stairs, congratulating each other on avoiding the chocolate cake. They never speak to you. They are always drunk. In the morning, the housegirl is cleaning glasses by eight, so that by the time the inhabitants arise a little before noon the spilled drinks are wiped away. You cart the garbage from the bin and later sift through it for the empty vodka and wine bottles—Africans never throw away containers. If it hasn’t been fed to the dogs, the rubbish is full of leftover meat, salad and crunchy bits, but it is spoiled with cigarette butts and you are not, after all, starving. It never occurs to your employers to deliver what they cannot eat to the fire where you keep guard over their CD player. You know your employers treat you better than average, pay you more than many askaris on this street, though you have calculated in the copious time on your hands that this household spends more on Team Meat and Hound Meal than it does on your salary. At least next pay day you will be allowed to go back to your village and share the money with your wife, to feed your five children. Perhaps you shouldn’t complain. But you watch, week after week, as these tipply, giggly, shamefully underclad girls fall insensible one more night into cars you have never learned to drive because you can only afford matatus, keeping awake until sunrise, aware that if you are caught drinking yourself you will lose your job.

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