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The Curse of the Uninvited

      Not on the list,” the askari declared grandly.

      “Perhaps …” the other voice oiled, deceptively polite, “one of the organizers … Dr. Kendrick?” Exaggerated patience made a mockery of good manners.

      With the bad luck that would characterize the next five days, Aaron Spring was just passing the entranceway. Swell. The last thing any population conference needed was Calvin Piper.

      The Director bustled brusquely to the door. “It’s quite all right,” he assured the African with a sticky smile. “This is Dr. Piper. Is there some problem with his registration?”

      “This man is not on my list,” the askari insisted.

      “There must have been some oversight.” Spring scanned the clipboard. “Let’s enter him in, so this doesn’t happen again.”

      The Kikuyu glared. “Not with that animal.”

      Reluctantly, the Director forced himself to look up. Wonderful. A green monkey was gooning on Calvin’s shoulder, teeth bared. Spring slipped the askari twenty shillings. That was not even a dollar, but the price of this visit was just beginning.

      The interloper looked interestedly around the foyer, as if pointing out that he had not been here for some time and things might have changed.

      “So good to see you.” Spring shook his predecessor’s limp hand.

      “Is it?”

      “You’re just in time to catch the opening reception. What happened with your registration, man?”

      “Not a thing. What registration?”

      “There must have been some mistake.”

      “Not a-tall. I wasn’t invited.”

      Spring winced. Piper had a slight British accent, though his mother was American and he’d spent years in DC. The nattiness of Piper’s tidy sentences made Spring’s voice sound twangy and crass.

      The Director led his ward through the sterile lobby. The Kenyatta International Conference Centre was spacious but lacked flair—wooden slatted with the odd acute angle whose determination to seem modern had guaranteed that the architecture would date in a matter of months. Kenyans were proud of the building, the way, Spring reflected, they were so reliably delighted by anything Western, anything they didn’t make. All the world’s enlightened élite seemed enthralled with African culture except the Africans themselves, who would trade quaint thatch for condos at the drop of a hat.

      “Couldn’t you at least have left the monkey home?” he appealed.

      “Come, Malthus is a good prop, don’t you think? Like Margaret Meade’s stick.”

      God rest her soul, Spring had always abhorred Meade’s silly stick. “Just like it.”

      Spring hurried ahead. Having assumed the leadership of USAID’s Population Division six long, fatiguing years before, surely by now he might be spared the pawing deference the Director Emeritus still, confound the man, inspired in him. He reminded himself that much of his own work that five years had been repairing the damage Piper had done to the reputation of population assistance worldwide. And by now Spring was well weary of his own staff’s nostalgic stories of Piper’s offensive mouthing off to African presidents. Why, you would never guess from their fond reminiscences that many of those same staff members had ratted on this glorified game-show host at their first opportunity. All right, Spring was aware he wasn’t colourful—he did not travel with a green monkey, he did not gratuitously insult statesmen, he did not detest the very people he was employed to assist, and his pockets did not spill black, red and yellow condoms every time he reached for his handkerchief.

      Behind his back Spring vilified Piper, but perhaps to compensate for going all gooey face to face. Here was a character whose politics, having veered so far left they had ended on the far right instead, Spring deplored as uncompassionate and irresponsible. Spring aspired to despise Piper, but he would never get that far. He would only be free to dislike the urbane, unruffleable, horribly wry has-been once sure that Piper adored and respected him first—that is, never.

      And Piper made him feel fat. Piper was the older although he didn’t look it, and was surely one of those careless types who never gave a thought to what they ate, while Spring jogged four joyless miles a day, and had given up ice-cream.

      “You ruined that Kuke’s day, you know,” Calvin was commenting about the askari. “He loved barring my way. You get a lot of wazungu rolling their eyes about Africans and bureaucracy, how they revel in its petty power—but how they don’t understand it, wielding stamps and forms like children playing office. I’ve come to believe they understand bureaucracy perfectly well. After all, most petty power isn’t petty a-tall, is it? These tiny people can stick you back on your plane, impound your whisky, cut off your electricity and keep you out of conferences you so desperately wish to attend. Bureaucracy is a weapon. And there is no pleasure greater than turning artillery on just the people who taught you to use it.”

      “Calvin,” implored the Director, “do keep your theories quiet this week. I’m off for some wine.”

      Leaving the man toothpicking pineapple to his ill-tempered monkey, Spring felt sheepish for having let the rogue inside. He was haunted by childhood fairy-tales in which the aggrieved, uninvited relative arrives at the christening anyway, to curse the child.

      It was a mistake to exhort Calvin to keep his mouth shut. Had Spring encouraged enthusiastic participation in the interchange of controversial ideas, Piper might have loitered listlessly in the back, thumbing abstracts. Instead Calvin perched with his pet in the front row of a session on infant mortality, making just the kind of scandal sure to see its way into the Nairobi papers the next day.

      “Why are we still trying to reduce infant mortality,” Piper inquired, “when it is precisely our drastic reduction of the death rate that created uncontrolled population growth in the first place? Why not leave it alone? Why not even let it go up a little?” He did not say “a lot”, but might as well have.

      The room stirred. Coughs. Heads in hands.

      The moderator interceded. “It is well established by now, Dr. Piper, that reduction of infant mortality must precede a drop in fertility. Families have extra children as an insurance factor, and once they find most of those children surviving they adjust their family size accordingly, etc. This is kindergarten demography, Dr. Piper. We can dispense with this level of discussion. Ms Davis—”

      “On the contrary,” Calvin pursued. “All of Africa illustrates that fallacy. Death rates have been plummeting since 1950, and birth rates remain high. So we keep more children alive to suffer and starve. I would propose instead that this conference pass a resolution to retract all immunization programmes in countries with growth rates of higher than 2 per cent—”

      The session went into an uproar. “Moderator!” cried a woman from the Population Reference Bureau. “Can we please have it on record that this conference does not support the death of babies?”

      The next day the headline in Nairobi’s Daily Nation read, “Pop Council Conference: Let Children Die”.

      Like everyone else, she had heard he was there, caught the flash of defiant black hair, the screech of his sidekick, and had craned across the rows to find that at least at a distance he hadn’t changed much. When dinners roiled with the infant mortality affair, she found herself sticking up for him: “He just likes to be outrageous. It’s a sport.”

      “At our expense,” the woman from the Population Crisis Committee had snapped, and Eleanor got a whiff of what even passing association with Calvin Piper had come to cost you.

      His arrival changed the whole conference for her. She found herself drifting off with an obscure secretive smile as if she were still the girl she had been then. Yet

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