We Need to Talk About Kevin_ A Novel - Lionel Shriver [63]
Such a young birthday boy, not yet fully comprehending the concept of birthdays, had no reason to grasp the concept of slices. You laughed, and after you’d gone to so much trouble I was glad you could take the mishap as comedy. But as I cleaned his hands with a damp cloth, my chortle was muted. Kevin’s technique of plunging both hands mid-cake and spreading its whole body apart in a single surgical motion was uneasily reminiscent of those scenes in medical shows when the patient is “coding” and some doctor yells, “Crack ’em!” Gorier programs toward the end of the millennium left little to the imagination: The ribcage is riven with an electric hacksaw, the ribs pulled back, and then our handsome ER doc plunges into a red sea. Kevin hadn’t simply played with that cake. He had ripped its heart out.
In the end, of course, we finalized the inevitable swap: I would license you to find us a house across the Hudson; you would license me to take my reconnaissance trip to Africa. My deal was pretty raw, but then desperate people will often opt for short-term relief in exchange for long-term losses. So I sold my birthright for a bowl of soup.
I don’t mean that I regret that African sojourn, though in terms of texture it was badly timed. Motherhood had dragged me down to what we generally think of as the lower matters: eating and shitting. And that’s ultimately what Africa is about. This may be ultimately what every country is about, but I have always appreciated efforts to disguise that fact, and I might have been better off traveling to more decorative nations, where the bathrooms have roseate soaps and the meals at least come with a garnish of radicchio. Brian had commended children as a marvelous antidote for jadedness; he said that you get to re-appreciate the world through their awestruck eyes and everything that you were once tired of suddenly looks vibrant and new. Well, the cure-all had sounded terrific, better than a facelift or a prescription for Valium. But I am disheartened to report that whenever I saw the world through Kevin’s eyes, it tended to appear unusually dreary. Through Kevin’s eyes the whole world looked like Africa, people milling and scrounging and squatting and lying down to die.
Yet amid all that squalor I still couldn’t locate a safari company that could properly be considered budget; most charged hundreds of dollars per day. Likewise, the lodging divided off in a way that eliminated my target market: It was either luxurious and pricey, or filthy and too cut-rate. A variety of Italian and Indian restaurants were a good value, but authentic African eateries served mostly unseasoned goat. Transport was appalling, the train lines prone to simply stop, the aircraft decrepit, the pilots fresh from Bananarama Flight School, the driving kamikaze, the buses bursting with cackling passengers three times over capacity and aflap with chickens.
I know I sound finicky. I had been to the continent once in my twenties and had been entranced. Africa had seemed truly elsewhere. Yet in the interim, the wildlife population had plummeted, the human one burgeoned; the intervening rise in misery was exponential. This time appraising the territory with a professional eye, I discounted whole countries as out of the question. Uganda was still picking corpses from the mouths of crocodiles discarded by Amin and Obote; Liberia was ruled by that murderous idiot, Samuel Doe; even in those days, Hutus and Tutsis were hacking each other to pieces in Burundi. Zaire was in the grip of Mobutu Sese Seko, while Mengistu continued to ransack Ethiopia and Renamo ran amok in Mozambique. If I listed South Africa, I risked having the entire series boycotted in the States. As for the bits that were left,