The Impostor (15 page)

14

On that same Sunday evening Canning says to him, ‘What are you doing next weekend?’

‘Uh, coming to visit you, probably.’

‘No, you can’t, because we won’t be here. We’ll be in Cape Town, for the launch party.’

‘The launch of what?’ he asks, though of course he knows.

‘Ingadi 300, obviously. What else would we be launching? There’s going to be an official announcement.’

‘That’s great,’ Adam says, while his insides clench up.

‘Yes,’ Canning says, ‘it’s actually happening.’ There’s a pause before he adds, ‘I’d like you to come along.’

‘Where to?’

‘To the party. It’s going to be at Mr Genov’s house. By invitation only. It would mean a lot to me to have you there.’

He thinks about it for a long moment. The idea of the city again, for the first time in more than half a year, fills him with dread. But it’s almost outweighed by the prospect of seeing Baby at the party. Maybe there will be a way to be alone with her somewhere.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘I’ll come.’

Almost immediately, he doubts his choice. Depression drops on him like a cold, grey lid. The golf course is nearly upon them; he should be finding ways to disentangle himself from these people, to put distance between him and them, rather than making the knots more complicated. But he isn’t ready yet to be free and alone again.

On the day that follows, Blom has a visitor. Adam is in the yard, digging up weeds, when he notices a nondescript white car pull up at his neighbour’s door. The man who gets out is tall, with a heavy build and a big grey moustache. He’s dressed in city clothes–dark pants with a white shirt, a jacket slung over his shoulder. The glance that he throws towards Adam is edged with hostility, though he calls out a genial greeting.

Adam watches covertly as the blue man meets his visitor at the door. The two of them clearly know each other, but this is no happy reunion. Rather, there is something formal in the way that they shake hands before passing inside, closing the door behind them. And it’s only now, when somebody has at last come to call, that the absence of any other visitors in Blom’s life becomes overwhelmingly apparent.

The newcomer is there for a while. It’s after a good couple of hours that he emerges again, and then there is a repeat of the handshake, the curt nod of the head, before the car disappears down the hill, going towards the road out of town.

Blom doesn’t go back in immediately. He hangs around the back door, pretending to be interested in something on the ground. It’s been a few weeks since he and Adam have spoken; since their last peculiar encounter, they’ve kept away from each other. But after a long, uncomfortable silence he calls out, ‘That was an old friend of mine.’

‘Oh,’ Adam says. ‘Nice.’ He doesn’t know what other response to offer. Blom gives the unhappy impression that he’s defending himself, though he hasn’t been accused of anything, and after another minute he finally goes indoors.

But that same night there’s a knock on the back door and when Adam answers the blue man is on the concrete outside, that familiar bottle in his hand. The level of brandy is low and Blom is swaying slightly on his feet. He smiles apologetically at Adam and says, ‘Can I speak to you about something?’

Adam hesitates, looking for an excuse. He doesn’t want a repeat of their strained amity; he doesn’t want Blom to get too close. But in the end he steps aside and gestures to his neighbour to pass.

Blom seats himself in the lounge, the bottle on the table next to him. There is something defiant in the splay-legged way he occupies the chair, then casts around him for a moment before sniffing and wiping his nose on his sleeve. ‘I see my baby over there,’ he says abruptly.

‘Baby?’ Adam is jolted into guilt by the name, but then he realizes Blom means the twisted wire sculpture, crouched with tensile intelligence on top of his notebook. ‘Oh, yes, that,’ he says.

‘You don’t like it.’

‘Of course I do.’ There is a pause before he says, ‘Well, no, to be completely honest, I don’t like it. I find it quite ugly.’

If he’d expected Blom to be offended, he gets no reaction. His neighbour’s dark eyes regard him steadily, and he says, ‘Sometimes the truth is ugly.’

‘Maybe so.’

‘Have you got some glasses?’ He indicates the bottle on the table.

Adam is suddenly resentful; he feels invaded by this nervous, knotted man, who’s already half-drunk and appears to be settling in. At the same time it occurs to him that, like his neighbour, he has never had any visitor here except Blom: despite numerous promises, his brother hasn’t come back to see him, nor have Canning and Baby dropped by. Nobody has sat down with him, made small talk and clinked glasses, the way they might do now. His life used to be made of convivialities like these; now it consists mostly of silences and time.

Nevertheless, he wants the blue man out. ‘Mr Blom,’ he says, ‘you wanted to talk about something. I’m busy working at the moment, I haven’t got time to socialize. What is it you wanted to say?’

‘Oh, it’s like that,’ Blom says. ‘You think somebody’s your friend…’ He gets up suddenly and begins striding around the room, giving vent to a big psychic discharge of anxiety. Then he disappears into the kitchen and returns with a glass, which he plonks down on the table. He pours himself a stiff drink, throws himself into the chair and lights a cigarette. As the smoke curls out in blue coils around his head, he glares mournfully at Adam and says, ‘They’re going to kill me.’

‘Who is? What are you talking about?’

‘That man who came today isn’t my friend. I was lying about that. He came to give me a message.’ Changing tack abruptly, Blom says, ‘Why don’t you sit?’

Adam has stayed on his feet in the hope of keeping the conversation short, but now he sighs and sinks down on the couch in resignation. ‘I don’t understand,’ he says.

‘Do you remember that first day when I came here? How I talked about having a new life, being a new person?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘My name isn’t Blom.’

‘Oh,’ Adam says, ‘what is it then?’ He feels exasperated; along with the smoke, bafflement and confusion are swirling around the room.

‘I can’t tell you that.’

They stare at each other with genuine enmity. This is fast becoming the oddest conversation of Adam’s life and he resolves that he will not speak again before Blom does. But the silence goes on and on, until Adam says quietly, ‘You’d better explain what you mean.’

This appears to be the cue that Blom is waiting for. He immediately pulls his chair up close to Adam, so that they are sitting in intimate proximity, and plants a hand on his knee. For a horrible second it seems that Blom might kiss him, but then he bows his head, showing the combed, thin strands of hair, heavy with Brylcreem, across the top of his pate, and their closeness takes on a different quality: this is confession, with Adam in the role of priest.

When Blom starts to speak, his voice is very low; he clears his throat and begins again, and this time the narrative is clearer, though the words still unwind in a colourless monotone. Adam’s eyes slide downward, to Blom’s hand, still splayed out on his knee. He is listening, every word goes through him, but it’s as if what he’s hearing takes on form. He has never noticed the physical qualities of Blom’s hand before: the thick, square tips of the fingers with their yellow stains, the whorl of grey hair on the back of the first joint. The nails, with a half-moon of dirt under their ragged ends. The vein pulsing thickly in the wrist. The edge of an old tattoo, somebody’s name perhaps, showing from under the sleeve. And while Blom tells him who he is and what he’s done, Adam thinks:
with that hand. You did it all with that hand
.

In the end, it’s more to break free of the hand than the words that Adam moves away. He stands up quickly and the blue man does too, his confession breaking off in mid-flow, both of them taking a few steps back and staring wildly at each other, as if seeing one another for the first time. Which perhaps they are.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ Adam says.

Blom rocks his weight from foot to foot; he has the shambling, cowed quality of a captive bear. His gaze drops down to the floor and he mumbles something indistinct.

‘What’s that? I can’t hear you.’

‘Because you’re my friend.’

‘No,’ Adam says, very clearly. ‘I’m not your friend. I don’t want to know these things about you. I can’t help you.’ Despite himself, he feels a pang go through him when he sees the stricken look on the other man’s face. In a lower, gentler voice, he says, ‘I won’t tell anybody, I promise you that. But I’m sorry, Blom, I don’t want to hear about it.’

‘My name isn’t Blom.’

‘Whatever your name is.’

The blue man nods slowly and raises his head; the look that passes between them is fraught with shame and anger on both sides. Then he drains his glass and throws it sideways against the wall. It smashes in a tinkling detonation that makes Adam flinch. Almost instantly, all the menace drains out of his neighbour; he seems to shrink a little inside his blue overalls as he heads to the door. Before he goes out he turns and speaks softly, at an angle, not quite facing the room:

‘Everything I did, I did for you. And other people like you.’

Then he is gone, seeming to fall out of the room, back into the wind and darkness he emerged from. A storm is beginning outside and the door swings to and fro, letting in the first slanting rattle of rain onto the floor. The emptiness of the house is somehow amplified and it takes Adam a while to move. But even after he’s locked the door he feels uneasy and restless and he keeps walking around, checking and rechecking that all the windows are closed. He has the unsettling sensation of expecting a visitor, somebody unwelcome, who anyway doesn’t come.

A little later, his eye falls on the sculpture that the blue man had given him, and suddenly he understands it. There’s nothing very complicated, after all, in what it’s expressing. He doesn’t want it here, anywhere close to him, and he picks it up and goes to the back door. With all the force of his arm he hurls the thing away from him, into the rainy dark. He hears the dull thud as it lands.

Although he’s promised he will not repeat Blom’s secret, and he meant the promise when he made it, he finds himself telling everything to Gavin an hour later. He has called his brother to discuss his visit to Cape Town this coming weekend. But while they are talking a pressure rises in him and he finds himself saying, ‘You won’t believe what just happened to me.’

‘What?’

‘The man next door here, the neighbour–he’s in hiding. He’s got a fake name, a fake identity. He’s on the witness protection programme. Somebody came today to tell him he has to go up to Jo’burg soon to give testimony in a big trial.’

Gavin whistles through his teeth. ‘Why’s that?’

Adam tries to repeat what Blom has told him, but his recollection starts to falter. In making his confession, Blom’s voice had taken on a flat and formless quality, so that no particular detail stood out. Instead it was the fact of deception that had overwhelmed Adam, and which rises again in him now. That a man so apparently ordinary, who looked like somebody’s friendly uncle, should have a past like that…! Adam had taken him at his word–about his name, about his life, about everything–and he has to reconcile this false version of Blom with what he’s learned today. Of course, he knows about such people; there’s been a lot about them recently in the newspapers and on the television. But they were always, somehow, somewhere else, living, as it were, in another country–not in the house next door, digging in the garden, doing metal-work in their spare time. That the dark and dirty past of South Africa should have taken on form and come to visit Adam at home, wanting absolution…well, it’s too much. He stutters and stumbles in his account of it. Gavin grunts a few times to show that he’s listening, but before his brother can finish he breaks in to say, ‘
Ja
, well, there’s a lot of these guys around.’

‘I’ve never met anybody like him.’

‘How do you know? They don’t usually talk about it. I could tell you a few stories about Angola, some incidents I saw up there. Ordinary guys, just like you or me…’