The Impostor (13 page)

‘I told you, Canning. I know nothing about golf.’

‘Well, all right. But you’ve got to appreciate the beauty of the scheme. Just listen to this.’

And he’s off again, animated and ardent, laying out his plans. Adam tries to listen, but his mind can only catch at fragments. How the lodge will become a luxury hotel. How half of the current land will be sold off to raise funds to construct another two hundred and fifty
rondawels
of varying sizes. How the most important principle will be exclusivity. Membership will be very expensive and limited and the only people allowed to play will be members and their guests, or hotel guests. No stay, no play.

How they will exploit the interest in fossils by building a dinosaur theme park.

How they will put up an equestrian centre and riding trails. How they plan a small zoo, with whatever animals are left on the farm.

How they are looking at building a casino.

How the khaki-clad workers from
Nuwe Hoop
will be right there, on tap, to work as caddies and groundskeepers and general staff at the hotel. The satellite village has been
very
conveniently placed, at a distance but also close enough. It’s a win-win situation for everybody.

How the new road, the pass over the mountains, is projected to bring six times the current amount of traffic through here in just two years.

How membership–has he said this already?–will be very limited. Three hundred places only. Hence the name of the course. Ingadi three hundred.

Ingadi means ‘garden’ in Zulu.

‘Personally,’ Canning says, ‘I wanted a Xhosa name. This was never a Zulu area, of course. Eluhlangeni–isn’t that a beautiful word?–means ‘in the place of creation’ or some such shit in Xhosa. That’s the name I’d use. Ingadi just doesn’t have the same ring. Not much poetry to it, I’m sure you’ll agree. But Enoch Nandi is our black empowerment partner, and he’s a Zulu, and he wants a Zulu name. So Ingadi it is. Who am I to argue, I’m only the dumb whitey who’s put up the land. So, hey, cool, whatever.’

When Canning stops talking at last, the silence is profound. Adam looks out over the nearby ridge to the sun-baked plains, but now the vista has altered. He can only see what will come.

‘What are you thinking?’ Canning says at last.

‘Just that…all of this is going to end.’

‘Yes. I suppose it is.’ He slaps Adam on the back. ‘But don’t worry, Nappy. We’ll stay in touch. I’m planning to move down to Cape Town very soon, and we’ll see a lot of each other. You won’t be stuck out here for ever, will you? Well, I’m glad I told you. It’s been weighing on me. It’s going to be public knowledge very soon, so I wanted to let you know first.’ He dusts bits of bread off his lap and starts packing the picnic away. ‘We’d better think about heading back.’

Adam hates Canning all the way down the
kloof
. He stares at that chunky pink back in front of him, and keeps replaying that moment in his mind, when Canning had almost fallen and he, Adam, had put a hand out to save him. In his fantasies now, he doesn’t extend a hand.

Canning is whistling an inane melody, the same three or four bars, over and over, and the tall enclosing walls echo and amplify it. By the time they emerge into Gondwana again, the sun is going down, and the sky is a bloodbath of violent colour overhead. As they go through the woods toward the lodge, Canning falls back into step with Adam. ‘By the way. I wanted to say…I would encourage you to buy in, I would make a plan to get you membership. But the fact is, it’s not a good idea.’ He puts an arm conspiratorially over Adam’s shoulders and draws him in. ‘This is just between ourselves, Nappy. Not a word to anybody. But Mr Genov–he’s my partner in this, you know–wants to
lose
money with this scheme. Not right now, but in a couple of years. I don’t know the details, I don’t
want
to know…but when the time is right, it’s all going to turn belly-up. For tax reasons, or maybe he just needs to move money around…I don’t ask. I’ll be long gone by then.’

This is too much. The travesty that Canning is cooking up is made of greed and absurdity, with a big moral hollowness at the core. An infantile desire is rising in Adam, to throw himself on the ground and wail and beat with his fists, but he does nothing, he just keeps on walking passively under Canning’s sheltering arm. It’s only when they have come to where Baby is waiting outside the lodge, and Canning has clapped his hands together and suggested he mix a round of cocktails for everybody, that Adam’s moment of rebellion takes place. In a small, strangled voice he says, ‘I wish you wouldn’t call me Nappy.’

‘Sorry…?’

‘My name is Adam. I wish you’d call me by my name.’

The note of anguish has been fetched up from deep inside, all the way from his childhood, and it silences both of them. They are staring at him, stupefied, as he goes on half-heartedly:

‘I hate being called Nappy. It’s a cruel, stupid name…I’ve always hated it.’

‘Adam,’ Canning says at last, ‘I’m sorry.’

He is immediately overcome by shame and self-consciousness. He is making a big scene about nothing. ‘It doesn’t matter. Forget it.’

‘No. No. I didn’t realize–’

‘Leave it, Canning. I shouldn’t have spoken–’

‘Of course you should. I apologize. How insensitive I’ve been, please forgive me…’

They make up clumsily in the twilight. Adam just wants this moment to pass, but as Canning embraces him, patting his back and murmuring into his ear, he gazes over his shoulder and into Baby’s eyes. A certain look goes between them.

Things are awkward for a while. It’s all
Adam
this and
Adam
that, his name being pointedly wielded. They get through their evening around the fire and then he makes an excuse and heads for bed, but he can’t sleep. His mind is full of the devastation that is to come. Twisting and turning, he sees people in checked pants, driving little carts, carrying striped umbrellas, tramping all over the landscape. It feels like betrayal, but of what exactly he isn’t sure.

It takes a few hours before it strikes him that the betrayal is personal. He’s the one who’s been stabbed in the back. There is no reason for it, but he has come to feel that this extraordinary green oasis belongs to him; it reminds him, on an almost cellular level, of the landscape of his childhood. His visits out here have been like a return to a lost, forgotten part of his life. He has been thinking that it will never come to an end. But now he knows that it
will
end, and probably soon. And the person responsible is sleeping next door, perhaps ten feet away: Canning’s snores carry through the darkness–leisurely, unconscious, the snores of a drunk man. Adam has to sit up and block his ears.

Canning
. Even now, it is hard to conjure up his face. He is a powerful blandness that came sidling in from out of frame, and now occupies the whole picture. He seemed so nebulous, so trustworthy–but he cannot be trusted. All of the talk about how important Adam is, what an old dear friend he is; yet now he is to be sidelined again, exiled from the garden, back to where he came from. Canning wanted Adam as a witness, nothing more.

But as a witness to
what
, exactly? The word ‘revenge’ has been mentioned, there have been cryptic allusions to an important conversation between them, yet Adam is no clearer now than he was at the beginning. Canning’s father is dead, and you cannot take revenge on the dead. What’s happening is being played out, on some useless symbolic level, for the benefit of an audience. Well, Adam doesn’t want to be part of the audience any more. It comes to him now that he should pack his things and leave this place and never, never come back. It was a mistake to think that he could fit in, however tangentially, with these people; they are too different from him, too caught up in their avarice and ambition. He has nothing in common with them.

The snoring from next door is more powerful than ever. There is no chance now that he will be able to fall asleep, and no point, in any case, in waiting for morning. Better to leave in the dark, without goodbye; that way, the departure will certainly be final.

Having made up his mind, he moves into action. He switches on the lamp next to the bed. He has no idea what the time is, but it feels like the dead hollow after midnight. He gets dressed and moves around the room, packing up all the clothes and other bits and pieces he’s left here over the last while. In a few minutes the room is bare and functional again: an ordinary hotel room, ready for the next guest.

When he steps out the door, onto the grass, another figure is standing there, dressed in a luminous white robe. He gets such a fright that he drops his bag, but even before it hits the ground he recognizes her.

‘I heard you moving around,’ she says.

‘Yes, I, uh…I just stepped out for some air.’

They both look down at his bag, but by unspoken resolve neither of them mentions it. They move a few steps towards each other, then stop again.

‘The snoring is terrible,’ she says. ‘Did it wake you too?’

‘Actually, I’ve been awake for a while.’

There is silence between them after that. He moves closer to her, but stops again, unsure of himself. He can feel the heat coming off the front of her body; he can hear the sound of her breathing. ‘I want…’ he says, ‘I would like…’ but his nerve fails him. It is easier, somehow, to act: he walks the last few steps towards her and then they are grabbing at each other, blundering and fumbling in the dark. Their mouths miss, then realign and collide. He has an instant of clarity: this is what they’ve been moving towards, since the first time he saw her in almost this very spot.

Fusion, and then confusion: both of them hear a break in the snoring from the
rondawel
behind them. Canning makes a mumbling, glottal sound in his throat; he is rising towards the surface. They pull away from each other, though they stay half-embraced. Their moment is tapering to a close.

She puts a hand up against his chest and speaks smoothly, efficiently. ‘He has an important phone call tomorrow afternoon,’ she says. ‘It’ll take a long time. We’ll go for a walk together to the cottage–his father’s place.’

He shakes his head slowly. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not there.’

‘It’s the one place he’ll never come to.’

Part of his mind considers this, admiring the cunning of its logic, even as he watches her let go of him and walk swiftly away, back inside the dark room. He himself doesn’t move, standing there in the deep blue shadows, waiting for something, he’s not sure what, to show him which direction to go in. He could continue with his exit, pick up his bag, head on towards the car and the road to town. The other way is indistinct, though he understands too well what she’s proposed. But he
can’t
–can he?–go through with it. To betray Canning like that. In his childhood home.

He’ll never know
.

‘But
I
will.’

Bear it, then
.

‘He doesn’t deserve it. A shabby betrayal.’

His whole life is a betrayal too
.

‘Of what?’

But he knows what. He pictures the landscape again, plundered and deformed, sold out for money and revenge. And this image leads him now to a deeper sadness in himself: he has moved here, to the countryside, because he wanted to speak with childlike simplicity about nature, but he finally understands he’s been deserted by that voice. A great complexity has sprung up between him and the world. His childhood–the time when things could be simple and beautiful–has gone for ever, corrupted and covered over by all the accretions of his life, till it has disappeared from sight. He can no longer look at a river, a branch, a stone, and see it for what it is. Instead he sees his own history, written in metaphors. He has lost his innocence, and in this moment Canning is responsible.

He picks up his bag, he goes back inside.

12

There is something in a secret that wants to be told. The guilt doesn’t touch Adam until later, when he’s back at home. Then what happened, what he did, begins to eat at him.

That was dirty. The wife of your oldest friend
.

‘He’s not my oldest friend! I don’t even remember him from back then.’

Does that make it better? He trusts you
.

‘But he can’t be trusted himself.’

What has he ever done to you? He’s looked after you, invited you in, fed you
…
and now this
.

‘It happened, all right? It wasn’t planned, it just happened.’

Not true. Of course it was planned.

‘I couldn’t just walk away.’

Why not
?

He needs a human listener, somebody fallible who understands. Of course, he doesn’t explain it to himself like this. He doesn’t tell himself:
I have a guilty conscience, I have nobody to talk to, therefore I am seeking out my neighbour, who is a man I barely know
. But these are the reasons, when Blom is in his workshop one night, that Adam stands thinking for a long moment before crossing through the fence. Lifting the wire strands and stepping through is easy, but he feels he has done something forbidden.

He approaches the shed cautiously. The metallic shrieking is loud and he can see the radiant rain of sparks. But he’s not prepared for the weirdness of what he encounters when he gets to the doorway. In his blue overalls and goggles, in the glare of the blowtorch, Blom is an apparition from another planet. He is bent over a twisted piece of metal, with metal all around him, and fire in his hand. He is so much a part of what he’s doing that he doesn’t see Adam there, until he hears his name.

Then Blom gets a terrible fright. He goes berserk, screaming and flailing and trying to run, the blowtorch scorching a wild signature on the air. It is comical as well as terrifying, but eventually he goes quiet and stands very still, breathing.

‘I’m sorry,’ Adam says.

‘I thought…’ Blom says, ‘…I thought…’

I thought you’d come to kill me
.

Fear has a stink, indistinguishable from the smell of burned metal. But almost immediately the mood turns: the blue man is delighted to see him. A smile breaks out on his old leather face. ‘You came to visit me in the end,’ he says. ‘Let me get the brandy to celebrate!’

Adam waits in the shed, while Blom hurries off to the house. There is only one chair, small and lopsided, which he perches on carefully, looking around. The shed is a low, cramped place, lit by a gas-lamp hung up in the corner. The effect is stark, with the metal walls and the tools and the pieces of scrap, all bleached of colour against their own shadows, like a photographic negative. When Blom comes back, he too looks unnaturally pale, drained of colour and blood by the light. He pours brandy and Coke into enamel mugs for both of them, then crouches down close to Adam, leaning against the wall. ‘You want to see my poems?’ he says.

‘All right. Show me.’

Adam has imagined some kind of conversation between them, however stilted and uneven, from which his confession might evolve. He hasn’t banked on this childlike excitement from his neighbour, who is rummaging amongst the burglar bars and security gates, all in various stages of construction, picking out from between the straight lines and right angles a series of other, less evident shapes. Adam has been aware of them, till now, as small, inexplicable knots at the edge of his consciousness, but he hasn’t looked directly at them until Blom starts setting them down in front of him. Even then he has to stare hard before he can make them out.

‘My poems!’

The blue man is full of pride. And it does occur to Adam that these imitations of the natural world–animals and insects and trees and stars–are what he himself is aspiring to, in words. But the metal sculptures are obvious and sentimental images, the kind of African kitsch that tourists might buy at the side of the road.

That judgement must show in his face, because Blom slumps visibly, becoming downcast. ‘Not poems like yours,’ he mutters. ‘Just my little hobby.’

‘No, no,’ Adam says quickly. ‘They’re very nice.’

‘Just passing the time. Nothing important.’ With the tip of his toe, the blue man knocks one of his creations on its side.

‘No, Blom…
Mr
Blom…I like them. It’s just that I never expected something like this from you.’

And it is truly surprising–that such tough, tobacco-stained hands should have given rise to anything imaginary. Blom is a little mollified, but a silence has opened between them now, full of distance and nearness, in which the only sound is an occasional slurp of brandy. This hasn’t worked out as Adam wanted; he hasn’t voiced any of his guilt. Instead it’s his neighbour who seems on the verge of some urgent revelation.

‘You really like them?’ he says eventually.

‘Yes, I do. They’re very pretty.’

He stares at Adam for a moment, as if weighing him up. Then he says suddenly, ‘I made one for you.’ He goes to the corner of the shed and takes out one final sculpture; he gives it carefully to Adam, as if it might break.

And this one is different. It is indisputably
real
. Not pretty at all–full of spikes and power, there’s something unwholesome about it, though it’s hard to say what, because there’s no discernible outline or shape. Adam is silenced by it, not least because of one particular element that Blom has worked in.

‘I used the peacock feather you gave me.’

‘Yes, I see that.’

‘Are you angry?’

‘Why would I be angry?’

But he does, in fact, feel somehow angry. There is a glowing eye-shape in the plumage, which seems to stare directly at him. The sense of accusation is profound. Neither of them speaks for a long time and then Adam gets quickly to his feet.

‘Well, thank you for everything,’ he says. ‘I’d better be going.’

The whole encounter has been off-key, and he doesn’t try to conceal his distaste for the horrible metal gift. He has to fight a desire to hurl it away–into the weeds and darkness–as he crosses back to his side of the fence. No, it has been a very unsatisfactory visit.

And it becomes even more so in his mind, every time he goes past the sculpture. He has set it down, for want of a better place, on top of his notebook. Whenever he walks through the room he sees it there–or it, somehow, sees him. Sometimes he stops and glowers at it. The guilt of what’s happened with Baby is somehow embodied in it, inseparable from the taste of cheap brandy. Around the gorgeous colours of the peacock feather, the contorted shape is eloquent with its torque and twist; it disturbs him in a deep, wordless way. But however much he stares, the metal never softens into meaning. In the end, he always walks away.

His affair with Baby–if that’s what it is–changes everything. He continues to go out to Gondwana for his weekly visits, ostensibly to see Canning. But his real motive now is the occasional hour or two that he spends at the cottage with Baby. There is obvious secrecy and danger to these assignations, but they become easier to arrange as Canning is drawn further into plans and preparations for his golf course. His mind is increasingly abstracted, he must deal with more and more meetings and phone calls. At these times he throws Adam and Baby together. ‘Will you two look after each other?’ he might say. ‘Why don’t you go for a walk?’ It’s almost as if he’s complicit in what they’ve set up between them.

So the opportunities come freely and seemingly naturally, till it’s possible almost to feel relaxed about it. Nevertheless, Baby keeps up a cool, convincing front of detachment from Adam while they’re in public. And she often insists that he goes ahead of her to wait, so that they’re not seen arriving at the cottage together.

Sometimes the wait is a long one and on a couple of occasions she has failed to turn up at all. He comes to know the drab, stark interior of the place very well. Everything in it is there for a purpose. The materials are what must have been immediately to hand, from the thatch of the roof to the stone walls to the floors made of mud and dung–polished, so Baby has told him, with ox blood. The one possible concession to aesthetic taste is the assortment of dead animals, standing or hanging around in dubious decoration.

Adam thinks he has, by extension, a sense of the man who lived here too. Beauty and violence together: it would be easy to hate the old man. But Adam has a sneaking fascination with him. It’s his guilty secret that he suspects they might have been alike; that they might have understood one another far too well. The house resembles, in its roughness and simplicity, the one where Adam lives in town. But the affinity runs deeper than that. He can painfully imagine the hours and hours of loneliness here, generating who knows what spectres as company. And Adam can also embrace, with a whole heart, the fantasy of being at the middle of a huge wilderness, with its amoral Beauty. The poems he could write here! Canning’s father liked to shoot animals, of course, which is a pity; but it could’ve been his way of fixing that essential Beauty in place. Perhaps not so different to a poem, when you came down to it: just another kind of shooting.

For Baby, the house has no history, no shadows; it’s just a backdrop to her meetings with Adam. They meet in order to fuck (no other word for it), always in the
Oubaas
’s bed, where–he keeps remembering–Canning was probably conceived. He notices, after that first time, that the place has been swept out and linen has been spread on the mattress. A pragmatic arrangement. And of course, when he is lying on the bed, under the stuffed yellow snarl of the leopard on the wall, the world shrinks to a small zone of significance for him too. But he cannot shake off–even in these most intimate moments–the idea of a connection between Canning’s father and himself that passes through his black lover, using her as a medium.

He looks forward to their sessions with a kind of primal excitement. There is an intensity to their joinings that borders on violence. Often he discovers marks and bruises on himself afterwards, made perhaps by her nails, her teeth. He can never remember receiving these tiny injuries; when he’s in bed with her, the clamour of consciousness draws in on a point of white heat, where past and future converge. He becomes somebody else, a creature he doesn’t know: this stranger-self is a powerful, goatish, reckless figure, who fornicates without restraint and talks dirty and doesn’t care what damage he’s doing.

It isn’t love; it’s something else. At certain moments it feels closer to hate. Or rapture, maybe–or just a kind of furious narcissism. He is throwing off all the restraints and inhibitions that have shackled and deformed him his whole life. It’s strong and scary, like catching fire. Afterwards he comes back slowly, to the world and to himself. These returns are painful, with words taking shape in him, and everything that attaches to the words.

Later, they lapse into murmurous conversations on the bed while they lie twined together. A genuine tenderness does enter things here, deepened by its absence elsewhere. This kind of languid indulgence is cued into him by the past; by previous involvements he’s had. But even in her most unguarded moments, she is never entirely disarmed. He wonders how many other beds she has lain on like this, with how many other men; and he doesn’t quite believe anything she says.

When he’d first met her, he had wanted to know about her life. But since Canning has told him too much, he doesn’t want to know more. His curiosity has frozen on the edge of a deep drop, and she notices the change. Once she says to him:

‘Why don’t you ask questions any more? You used to bother me all the time. ‘Where do you come from?’ ‘Who chose your name?’ You asked about everything. And now nothing.’

‘What I really wanted,’ he says, ‘was this. What we’re doing.’ He lifts a strand of her hair, winds it around his finger, tugs gently. ‘What does anything else matter?’

‘It might matter a lot,’ she says. ‘Ask me something.’

‘What?’

‘Anything. Ask me any question you like, and I’ll tell you the truth. But just one question.’

In this moment he believes her sincerity. There is something hard and pointed in her stare, like two nails pushing into his flesh. Under the challenge he senses in her a reckless desire to tell the truth, to reveal herself, and he draws back from it.

‘Why did you marry Canning?’ he asks.

She goes very still and after a second she sits up. ‘Why do you call him that?’ she says. ‘Why don’t you use his first name?’

‘First name, surname, what does it matter?’

‘It’s childish. You do it nastily. You don’t like him.’

‘I do like him,’ he says, and hears the complicated idiocy of his position. Nevertheless, in spite of everything, it’s true: he
does
like Canning. At least in part.

She rolls off the bed and starts to gather up her scattered clothing. After she’s dressed she will touch up her makeup. He knows this single-minded routine; he has watched it numerous times; he’s fascinated and a little scared at how instantly she leaves him behind.