Game Control Read Online Free PDF Page B

asked for anything before and Eleanor had thought she was special. But there she stood like the rest, hands guiltily clutched behind her back, all dressed up as if she were on her way to church.
      'I don't have any more!' Eleanor cried.
      Nomsa backed out of the doorway with wide eyes, nimbly stooped at the step and ran away. Only when Eleanor was locking up her office for the last time did she spot the little package in crumpled, resmoothed Christmas wrapping paper and a banana-leaf bow.

    Perhaps it was that picture of being rescued in the scrub at midnight that inspired her to ring Calvin to meet her flight, for the dark plain, in her head, was where she found herself, even as the wheels touched down in the unremitting good weather of daytime Kenya.
      'Your people took their time. While your promotion was coming through,' he announced as he took her bag, 'eighty-three million bawling babies have bounced on to the planet from nowhere.'
      He installed her in a new Land Cruiser. 'Spite must be paying mighty well,' she observed.
      'Fantastically,' said Calvin.
      Something about Calvin discouraged empty chat, so they sat in silence much of the way, Calvin closed off in dark glasses. She had so looked forward to seeing him, always a mistake, and slumped an extra inch lower in the seat, confessing to herself that he was a stranger. Having heard about him for seventeen years had created a sensation of false intimacy. For all the gossip, she would not recall anyone who knew him personally well. Even at their dinner last year, he had used opinion to protect his life. She'd known enough such people, and stared out of the window at the wide, dry fields, not so different from Tanzania, thinking, another African city, the same set of problems from higher up, why was this improvement? What was ever going to change in her life? And what was wrong with it that demanded Calvin's promised salvation? How could she turn to this man she barely knew and assert, I see it's bright out, but I am in the dark; I am broken down in the savannah, and the stars are mean; my battery is full of tar?
      As they drew into town, the verges thickened with herds of pedestrians in plastic shoes and polyester plaids. Where were all these people going? From where had they come? As
    the population density multiplied, the muscles visibly tightened on Calvin's arms.
      'Most of the arable land in this country', said Calvin, 'has been subdivided already down to tracts the size of a postage stamp. Farmers grow their mingy patch of maize and still have eight kids. That's real child abuse. What are those children to do? So they all head for the city. Nairobi is growing at 8 per cent a year. No jobs. I don't know how any of these hard-lucks eat. Meanwhile their people back in the village expect them to send money. From where? They should never have come here. They should have stayed home.'
      'But I thought you said there was no work for them in the countryside.'
      'I mean real home. The big, happy, careless world of nonexistence. Where the rent is low and the corn grows high.'
      Eleanor never knew what to say when he talked this way.
      'Nothing,' Calvin growled on, 'rankles me like these pink-spectacled tulip-tiptoers who claim technological advance is going to sort everything out pretty. You should hear Wallace Threadgill gibber about hybrid crops and the exciting future of intensive agriculture: multiple storeys of artificially lit fields like high-rise carparks. How likely is that, in a country where just a dial tone is an act of God? I assure you, Africans are not the only ones who believe in magic.'
      They were passing Wilson Airport, where several dozen Kenyans gripped the chain-link, transfixed by take-offs. Later she'd discover they could gawk at banking two-seaters all day. She admired their sense of wonder, but how many of those men on the wrong side of the fence would ever board an aeroplane?

    At last they arrived at