The Impostor (18 page)

‘Uh, no, I don’t think so. I’m going to take a walk around here, take a last look at everything.’

‘Yes, do. Say goodbye to all of it. It’s not going to stay like this much longer.’

Then Canning and his famous guest are gone. Adam is left behind, at the centre of a sudden quietness. He sits at the table for a long time, looking out of the window and thinking. He shouldn’t be here and it’s not too late to escape. He even pretends that he might, though he knows that he won’t or can’t, as he gets up and goes to the door.

There is a hint of warmth in the air, the first trace perhaps of returning summer, as he walks across the grass. The door of the
rondawel
is ajar and he slips through without knocking, pushing it closed behind him. She has just emerged from the bathroom and is sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing only a robe, drying her wet hair with a towel. She has her back to him and she doesn’t turn at the click of the door, but she says, ‘It’s so nice to see you again.’

This is a voice he hasn’t heard; she is speaking to him out of the newfound distance between them, as if they don’t know each other. But the sociable remoteness is at odds with the intimate setting and her half-exposed body. He walks through that clutter of personal debris, the cups and magazines and clothes, to where she is. His hand takes the towel from hers and runs it over her hair. There’s a hint of roughness in the motion; something in him wants to hurt her, though it’s with genuine tenderness that he pulls the robe off her shoulders. A single drop of water on her backbone seems to hold, in crystalline fragility, everything that’s happened between them. He bends down and drinks it off her skin.

‘You know this can’t go on,’ she says. She’s speaking quietly now, the distance between them closed up. ‘They’re starting to build here, this whole place will be full of workers any day now.’

‘One last time,’ he says.

She hesitates, then with a movement like a shrug she lets the robe drop. He undresses slowly too, letting each garment fall to the floor, till he’s completely naked. Along with the
rondawel
, this is something new for them; usually they are half-clothed, ready to conceal themselves at the first sign of interruption. But today they are in another zone, leisurely and sad, playing at husband and wife. The circular dark room is circled in turn by a halo of silence, from beyond which the noises of the forest leak in. He wonders whether they would hear the sound of Canning’s car if it returned and whether, at this point, it would matter.

The sex itself takes on the same melancholic quality. The shape of her, the bones and blood and warm flesh, throws him back almost entirely into himself, so that he is caught up in the labyrinthine complexity of his own loneliness. The room falls away; he loses himself, his sense of time and place; he is nowhere. It’s not ecstasy, not even pleasure–more like blankness. Then the world draws in upon an infinitely tiny point, through which he eventually falls and flows.

Reality reassembles by degrees. First the sensations at the outer reaches of his body, and then everything beyond: the bed with its tangled sheets. The woman lying beneath him. The ochre floor, splotched with sunlight that comes in through the shutters. And something else. A tiny sound, slowly encroaching. He can’t place it, can’t work it out. A faintly rushing noise, like wind or blood. An angel, dragging huge wings on the ground.

He raises himself on his elbows to look at her. The expression on her face is one he hasn’t seen before. He’s used to the prepared masks, one after the other, but now he’s looking through time at a little girl in her: frightened and helpless and without a plan.

The sound is right outside the door.

Fear has shrunk him inside her. Then they are unjoined and clawing for their clothes. The great timeless unity of love-making has flown apart into its constituent elements of bodily fluid, and terror, and one missing sock.

When the door opens, they freeze. But it’s not an angel, or even Canning. It’s the old black woman, Ezekiel’s wife, he can’t remember her name, in a ragged dress, trailing a broom in one hand–the sound they’ve been hearing. She is so ubiquitous, so everyday and familiar, that they hadn’t considered her. Till now.

She has also stopped, quite still, in amazement, at the centre of the irrevocable moment. He has a curious, dissociated image through her eyes: the madam and the master’s friend, undressed on the bed, electrified, afraid. Their vulnerability is rude and primal. Then the frieze breaks. The old lady’s hand flies up to her mouth, her eyes are wide. In the same instant, Baby is off the bed, covering herself, screeching. She is wild, cracked-open, out of control. The language that spews out of her is raw and dirty–a torrent of abuse from the street, its well-spring in the gutter, not in these fake, elegant surroundings–but afterwards, it is the
sound
that Adam will remember, rather than the clotted words flying with the consistency of fists.

As she backs out of the room, the old lady’s fear has a bumbling, cartoonish quality. She is wearing bright red lipstick crayoned onto her mouth and outsized tennis shoes on her feet. Adam sees these details, he knows they are evidence of poverty, but his hysteria finds them funny. When the door slams closed on her at last, he starts to giggle uncontrollably.

He remembers her name. Her name is Grace.

Baby is breathing hard. ‘What are you laughing at?’ she says.

He wipes his eyes. ‘Where did you learn to
talk
like that?’

She turns her stare on him now, and the look on her face is frightening. Not a little girl any more; she is somebody else completely. ‘
Shut up
,’ she tells him, and he does. Instantly.

After a moment he says, ‘What are we going to do now?’

‘I’ll take care of it.’

‘How?’

‘Leave it to me.’

‘Should I offer her money…?’

‘No,’ she says, her voice as cold as her eyes. ‘I told you, I’ll take care of it. But you’d better go now. You’d better get dressed and go.’

17

When he thinks of her now, it’s with a slow after-burn of grief. His last memory of her–the cold, hard look on her face–can’t be separated from the turmoil that stirs in him when he imagines the bulldozers, the havoc they are wreaking out there. He has to turn away from all that, the disturbing prelude to the future. Instead he sits down to read through his poems. There, he thinks, he will find some lasting trace of her, or of how he used to feel about her, before everything went wrong.

There are about twenty poems in all, a nice little stack. He has thought of them as a good start towards a new collection, built around the themes of love and nature. But almost as soon as he begins to read, a deep gloom comes over him. It’s not just that the emotion which runs through the poems embarrasses him; it’s that the poems themselves are
bad
. The free-flowing language clangs on his inner ear as strained and uncontrolled; what he’d thought of as high, pure feeling has come out on the page as mawkish sentiment, full of rhetoric and cliché.

It’s only now that the full extent of his folly is clear to him. His melancholy is like lucidity: he has been a fool, coming to live out here, chasing after the past. He isn’t–he never was–a poet; except briefly and badly, as a young man long ago. He has been dabbling in a fantasy version of himself, which he must put away for ever. The whole saga has been a case of mistaken identity.

On a murderous impulse he carries the poems outside. It is painfully obvious to him now that the last half a year has had the illusion of momentum and purpose because of his dealings with the Cannings. That’s what has filled up the time. Without the pair of them, his life would be like an old skin with no bones or meat to give it dimension. Well, the moment has come to move on, to purge himself of illusions. And no better way to begin a purge than with a symbolic act.

He finds a clear spot, sheltered from the wind, on the trampled expanse of mud at one corner of the yard. As he strikes the match, his eye falls on the ugly heap of dead weeds he’s piled up nearby. And yes, why not? Get rid of all the dross at one go, turn it into ash.

In minutes the bonfire is huge, much bigger than he’d imagined. It’s been a couple of weeks since the last rain, so the weeds have had time to dry out; the brown stalks roar, sprouting new leaves of flame. In the yellow conflagration, everything becomes one: no way to tell the difference between poetry and parasite. The hot heart of destruction lets exaltation loose in him; he has a primitive urge to dance, and does in fact caper a bit. But then becomes uneasy at the burning fragments that whirl away in spirals–the thatched roof is very close.

In the end he hurries off to get a bucket and is carrying it out, slopping water over his feet, when a figure emerges from the smoke. He takes a second to recognize his visitor, because his smarting eyes are blinking away tears.

The mayor tells him severely, ‘This is against municipal regulations. No fires in a hundred metres of any residence.’

‘Yes, I was trying to put it out.’

‘I just happened to be driving past when I saw. This is a hazard, you shouldn’t have lit it in the first place. I could slap a big fine on you.’

Adam throws the water, unleashing a hissing cloud of steam. But the flames still grope and flicker, and he has to go inside to fill the bucket again. Only then does the circle of heat die down. His moment of triumphant release has become an inconsequential smouldering, which he keeps stubbing and stamping with his feet. A crisped scrap of paper, still with his words inscribed on it, goes drifting past his face.

‘I’m sorry,’ he tells the mayor. ‘I didn’t realize it was against the rules.’

‘And the three aliens are still there. You could be fined for that as well.’

‘I forgot all about them. I’ll cut them down later.’

His visitor continues to linger, arms folded in disapproval. It seems he wants personally to oversee the chopping down of the foreign trees, but abruptly his whole demeanour changes. He catches at Adam’s sleeve; he whispers, ‘Don’t tell anybody.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s all right, forget the trees, forget the fire. I won’t fine you. But you mustn’t say anything to anybody.’

‘About what?’

‘You know what about!’ This whole exchange has taken place in low voices, as if they’re meeting furtively in the middle of a crowd. But now, as the steam begins to thin out, the mayor straightens up. In a clearer, braver voice, he says, ‘I’m talking about the payment.’

Adam stares at him. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

His confusion is genuine, but the mayor smiles broadly in approval. ‘That’s the way,’ he says. ‘I like your thinking.’ He gives Adam a slow, oily wink, then drops his voice confidingly again. ‘It wasn’t for me anyway,’ he whispers. ‘I hope you believe me. Every cent of it was for the party. I did it for my country.’

He drives back out to Gondwana. Part of his mind watches himself through the wrong end of a telescope: seeing Adam Napier heading out on that same lonely stretch of road, going back to that same place again. He’s made this journey so often by now that it’s like entering a zone of dead time; he’s almost not present, and he only comes to himself again when he reaches the gate and the guard won’t let him through. He’s a man Adam’s seen many times before, but he’s wearing a new attitude of aloofness today, staring at a point somewhere above the car. No, he says, nobody can go in. Absolutely nobody. Mr Canning’s orders.

‘But I’m an old friend of his. You know me. I’ve been here plenty of times.’

‘No visitors today.’

‘Can’t you check with him? I’m sure he doesn’t mean me.’

The man shakes his head. He touches casually at the shiny holster on his belt. Adam senses the futility of this dialogue and he turns the car and drives back towards town. But when he’s out of sight of the guard and the gate, he slows down. He remembers the day, driving around the farm with Canning, when they’d found evidence of poachers forcing their way in. He too is about to cross a line, one inscribed on the earth and also inside himself.

When he comes to a rest area on the far side of the road, he pulls over. There is a place to leave the car, near a concrete table and seat. He opens the boot, takes out the metal crowbar used to crank up the jack. Then he crosses the tar, to the other side.

The fence is tall and strong, cutting up the view into a grid of lozenges. He is a novice at infiltration, but he sees that the bottom of the fence, in certain places, doesn’t connect properly with the ground. He crouches down and goes to work on the wire. When the sound of an engine approaches, he flattens himself into the scrub, but nobody even slows down. His adrenaline is high and he is almost thrilled, in a panic-stricken way, at the skills he’s acquiring, the instincts he’s discovering in himself.

It doesn’t take long to get through. He emerges on the other side as a dirty new-born on his knees, freshly minted from mud. Adam the intruder. Adam the thief. Then he sets off at a trot towards the tall smudge of dust in the sky, perhaps a kilometre distant.

By the time he arrives, he is hot and gasping, basted in sweat. The scene has entirely transformed. On the last occasion he’d stood here, the earth had been whole and complete, but it has since been ripped open and all its innards have come spilling out. Huge piles of rubble rise in grotesque brown cones. The exposed soil is raw and primitive, showing the layers and striations beneath the surface. Men in khaki uniforms are swarming everywhere, appearing and disappearing in the endless fug of dust. Under the lowering sun, this angry, oblivious industry takes on an infernal glow.

He stands staring in amazement. The violent energy of the spectacle is unreal, like something he’s cooked up in his brain; and there is something dreamlike, too, in how irrelevant his tiny troubles have become. Nobody pays him any mind; he is one more meaningless observer. But when he spots Canning’s diminutive figure, standing on top of a low hill nearby, his resolve returns to him and he climbs determinedly up.

He knew Canning would be here: while this labour is in progress, he will be close by every day, watching. He has set the frenzy in motion and is now more than ever the invisible spectator, separate, apart. And despite the policy at the gate, he shows no surprise at Adam’s arrival; he seems absorbed in the furious panorama spread out below. ‘Oh, it’s you, hello,’ he says despondently.

Adam can’t speak at first; he’s breathing too hard from the climb. When he recovers, he says, ‘You lied to me.’

Canning blinks in astonishment. ‘How do you mean?’

‘That parcel I took to the mayor. It was money. You were bribing him.’

‘Oh. Right. Yes.’ He looks away again, his dejection like boredom. ‘Well, of course it was money.’

‘But you told me it was just papers.’

‘Yes. Well. I said what you wanted to hear. But you knew it was money. What else would it be?’

‘How could you
do
that to me?’

‘It’s business, Adam. It’s the way things work. If everybody just plays their part, it’s no big deal.’ His bland, oval face is passionless as he explains: ‘It’s like nature, you see. Strong animals eat the weaker animals. You have to do anything, use any tactic, to survive. I thought you’d understand, Adam, you of all people–I mean, that’s what your poems are about. The natural world. Where only the powerful will win.’

‘That’s
not
what my poems are about.’

‘Maybe not. Maybe I didn’t understand them. I’m not a creative person, of course. I’m just a businessman.’ He seems to deflate a little, like a plastic man with a puncture. When he speaks again, he sounds on the verge of tears. ‘Oh, this is terrible,’ he says in a small voice. ‘This isn’t what I wanted at all.’

‘What did you want?’

‘I wanted you to be part of it. That’s why I got you to take the money. Of course I could’ve done it another way, I could even have paid him myself. But I wanted you involved somehow. It was just a symbolic thing. Nothing serious.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Canning turns his stricken face towards him. ‘You were my hero, Adam. My whole life, since school, you’ve been my big hero. You’re the cause of this, don’t you see? All this,’ and he gestures at the breaking and building of the landscape below, ‘all this is because of you.’

‘You keep saying that, but I didn’t want this to happen.’

‘You know what’s funny?’ Canning says sadly. ‘Now that it’s started, I don’t want it to happen either. But it’s too late now. There’s no way to stop it.’

A long silence follows. ‘You pulled me in,’ Adam says at last, ‘you made me an accomplice. But I didn’t know what I was doing. We’ve been playing a game, Canning–a big, ugly game. But the game’s over now. It’s time to tell the truth. I want you to know something. I’m not going to cover for you. If they ask me, I’m going to tell them everything I know. What I saw, what I heard, what you got me to do. I’ll even tell about this conversation we’re having now.’

‘I understand.’ Canning is almost whispering. ‘But that isn’t very wise.’

‘How so?’

‘Because you’ll make Mr Genov very upset.’

‘Well, I’m sorry about that.’ He turns and starts down the slope.

Canning’s voice carries behind him. ‘Wait a minute…Does this mean we’re not friends any more? This isn’t how I wanted it…I apologize for everything, Nappy.’ After a moment, a faint correction comes: ‘Sorry, I mean Adam!’

The whole way back to his car, Adam wonders whether that last slip was intentional.