The Impostor (7 page)

‘How old was he?’

‘Sixty-six. Young, really. But his malice wore him out.’

Adam can’t decide whether Canning is speaking ironically or not. Tentatively, he suggests, ‘You seem quite bitter about him.’

‘Bitter?’ Canning snorts and drains his glass. ‘That’s one way of putting it. Well, you know the history. You remember our big conversation at school.’

Adam says quickly, ‘Yes, of course.’

‘You loved your father, didn’t you, Nappy?’

‘Yes, I did,’ Adam says. He feels almost guilty: his love is a form of ambivalence, which is weak compared with what he senses in Canning. Hatred is certainty; certainty is strength.

‘I thought so. I could hear it in your voice earlier, when you spoke about him. Then you can’t understand how I feel.’

‘I suppose not.’

Canning stares moodily at his feet for a long moment. Then he says, ‘We’d better go back, Nappy. It’s getting dark, and my glass is empty.’

They are on the front
stoep
of the lodge, watching the old black man in the yellow hat who’d been on the back of the
bakkie
that morning and is now busy making a fire under an oak tree nearby. An old woman, perhaps his wife, carries out cutlery and condiments and bowls of salad to a table that’s been set up. But the three of them, on whom all this activity is centred, are idle, hovering in the middle of a beautiful vacuum.

Canning has polished off his third cocktail already and is noticeably unsteady on his feet. But the moment his glass is empty he heads off indoors to replenish it, leaving Adam alone with Baby. She has kept herself a little apart, sitting on the railing, half-twined, half-collapsed against a stone pillar, head tilted sideways, eyes closed. She could be asleep–but she suddenly gives a shudder and her eyes snap open. ‘Listen to them,’ she says. ‘Every night at this time. It makes my skin go cold.’

‘What?’

Then he hears it: a scaly clicking and rustling, like something furtive in the sky.

‘It’s the birds,’ she says. ‘They sleep on the roof.’

She is staring at him–but really through him–with an expression of horror. He notices something peculiar: she has green eyes, which he’s never seen in a black person before. And not only that–one eye is distinctly larger than the other. This tiny imbalance seems to reflect a deeper imbalance in her character, which both draws and disturbs him.

‘You don’t like them?’ he says.

She focuses on his face, but her expression doesn’t change. As if she’s answering his question, and perhaps she is, she murmurs, ‘I hate it here.’

‘You’re not serious, are you?’

‘Of course I am. All this space. All this…wildness. They can cover it in cement as far as I’m concerned.’

‘But it’s
beautiful
,’ he says.

She gives a snorting laugh. ‘You look at it once and then what? There’s nothing to do here. It’s boring. Give me the city–the city’s what I like. Clubs and parties and people, something happening.’

‘I moved here to get away from the city.’

She is watching him now with a faint interest. ‘What do you do?’

‘Me? I’m a poet.’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but what do you
do
? What’s your job?’

‘That
is
my job,’ he says, all his self-doubt rising into his throat, making his voice go squeaky.

The interest fades in her face; she glances away. ‘That must be why you like it here.’

‘This is an incredible place,’ he says quietly. Despite himself, he speaks with real feeling, and part of it is an obscure anger towards her. ‘It reminds me…this will sound stupid, but it reminds me of being a boy. The area I grew up in was like this. Green and intense, like life that can’t be squashed down.’

She gives a little toss of her head, and it’s as if she’s shrugging him off. ‘I also grew up in the countryside,’ she says. ‘That didn’t make me love it.’

He has started actively to dislike her. He doesn’t speak for a moment, then he asks, ‘Where did you live?’

‘Oh…in a lot of places. We moved around.’

‘But where? Which part of the country?’

‘Small towns. All over.’ She sounds half-asleep and thoroughly bored with the conversation. ‘I saw enough of nature when I was small. It’s just things trying to get bigger, things screwing and eating each other. Don’t talk to me about nature.’

Canning suddenly emerges from the house in a loud, illogical flurry. ‘Where are you two? Ah, yes, over there. Have you been getting better acquainted? That’s good. You’re my two favourite people on the planet, I want you to like each other. But come over to the fire, it’ll be time to put the meat on soon. Great to have you here, Nappy.’

The old black man has disappeared, and the fire is an enticing point of light and heat. As Adam steps down from the
stoep
behind Canning, he looks back to where Baby is sitting unmoving on the railing, but his eye is caught by a flare of light in the sky. Against the glow, the row of peacocks on the roof is stamped out in strange silhouette.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he says. ‘What is that?’

‘What?’

‘That light, way up there.’

It wells up again, a spooky yellow blaze, like a god searching through the clouds with a torch.

‘Cars going through the pass,’ Canning says flatly. To his wife he calls plaintively, ‘Why don’t you come and join us?’

Her only answer is to slide off the railing and disappear indoors without a backward glance.

‘Just leave her,’ Canning says to Adam, as if he’s the one who had spoken.

They sit in deck-chairs, watching the flames burn down. The conversation leaps around in a fractured, disjointed way, from Canning’s father to Adam’s poetry to the farm. At only one point does their talk settle down to a steady topic for a while. This is when, after the fifth or sixth cocktail, Canning undergoes an odd transformation. He glares at Adam, then starts to lecture him in a high, nasal voice. ‘This is your final warning…six cuts for you next time…no, don’t grin at me, boy, I don’t want to see your teeth, do I look like a dentist to you?’

Adam is so astounded that it takes him a few seconds to realize that Canning is doing an imitation–a surprisingly good one–of a teacher from long ago.

‘Mr Groenewald,’ Canning says. ‘Do you remember how we used to climb out of the window, one by one, whenever his back was turned…?’

‘Yes,’ Adam says, the memory coming back with unexpected fullness–it must’ve been buried in him somewhere.

‘And old Mr Joubert, who wanted to ravish Miss Weir, the science teacher with the big boobs. Remember the day her one breast fell out of her dress onto the table, in the middle of an experiment? And Mr Kleynhans, the PT teacher, who used to watch us when we showered? And Bennie Broome, with the red bike that we called the menstrual cycle?’

‘Yes,’ Adam says. ‘I do remember!’

He has always felt disdain for those people who talk endlessly about their schooldays as if they were the fount of innocence and happiness. He mistrusts that kind of sentiment, because he knows too well how wretched he’d felt back then. Yet tonight, for some reason–perhaps the blue cocktails–this loose, nostalgic rambling is comfortable.

He decides to offer a memory of his own. ‘What about that special assembly,’ he says, ‘when the first black student came to the school?’

Canning blinks and frowns. ‘What?’ he says. ‘No, I don’t remember that.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Adam says eagerly. It’s one of his strongest impressions from that period. ‘We were all called to the hall for a message from the headmaster. He told us it was a momentous day–that the son of a diplomat from Swaziland was coming to the school, that we all had to make him welcome.’

‘Are you sure, Nappy?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’ Even at the time, Adam had been aware of history impinging on his existence. ‘Afterwards, when we went back to class, the Afrikaans teacher looked very glum and said something about how this used to be a school he wanted to send his son to, but not any more.’

‘Really? It doesn’t ring a bell with me at all.’ Canning shakes his head and frowns. ‘Well, I can tell you, I drove through the school a couple of years ago when I was up there, and it’s mostly black kids now.’

‘Yes,’ Adam says. ‘But he was the first one.’

‘And did you?’ a voice suddenly asks from behind them.

They both turn, startled. Baby has come out quietly and settled herself close by in the shadows; she must have been listening for a while.

‘Did we what?’

‘Did you make him welcome,’ she says, ‘the little black boy?’ She has an odd, twisted smile on her face and Adam suddenly realizes that it’s him she’s looking at.

‘Uh, yes,’ he says, too forcefully. ‘Of course I made him welcome!’

But it isn’t true. He’d gone past him in the corridor a few times and had noticed the lonely, bemused expression on his face. The black boy had been something exotic and new, something to get used to. But Adam had never spoken a word to him.

At the end of the evening, Canning rises on loose legs amongst the rinds and bones, the coals almost burned out, and says, ‘Time for bed. We’re in this
rondawel
, Nappy, why don’t you sleep next door?’

‘I’ll get the keys,’ Baby says. She has been sitting curled up in a chair to one side, her coat wrapped around her, gazing dreamily at the fire. She has hardly spoken a word the whole night. Now she stirs and unfolds her legs and goes off inside.

It’s very late by now; there is darkness all around. The stars are smeared thickly overhead. Canning reels closer to Adam. ‘This has been an important night for me,’ he says. In the red glow of the coals, with his face loosened by drink, his sulky top lip appears a little puffy, almost sensual.

‘For me too, Canning.’ And he feels this to be true, although he couldn’t say why.

Canning throws out his arms to embrace Adam and, as he does so, plants a wet kiss on his mouth. It’s a startling moment, and the shock half-clears Adam’s head. But by then Canning has gone again, a lopsided figure tacking into the dark.

When Baby emerges from the lodge, keys in hand, Adam follows her to one of the nearby
rondawels
. It’s clean and comfortable inside, with the same design as the lodge, the same pretence at ethnic simplicity: smooth mud floors, and the thatch showing between the wooden struts of the roof. But a mosquito net is draped over the double bed, and there is a television discreetly hidden in a cabinet; through the open door of the bathroom he can see the gleam of Italian tiles. This is five-star luxury, with an artful veneer of modesty on top.

She holds the keys out to him; as he takes them, she is already moving away, towards the door.

‘Baby,’ he says.

It’s the first time he’s used her name and both of them are a little rigid as she turns around to face him. They hold a cool, steady look between them for a moment.

‘Yes?’ she says.

‘Earlier on, you said he’s talked about me many times. What has he told you about me?’

The unbalanced green eyes are full of sympathy or amusement–it’s hard to tell which. ‘That you were at school with him. That you were his hero.’

‘That’s all? Nothing else?’

‘There was one particular night, he says. When he was about to crack. But you talked to him, and everything changed. His whole future was different, because of you.’

‘How? What did I say to him?’

The gesture most natural to her is the shrug. ‘You were there,’ she says. ‘You know better than me.’

The look between them lasts for a moment longer. It’s as if they’re having another conversation–a conversation completely different to their words–and then she turns and heads for the door again.

He stands there, not moving, for a few minutes after she’s gone. He can hear the tiny noises–voices, footsteps, windows opening and closing–of the pair of them getting ready to sleep next door. Then he is suddenly exhausted. He undresses exactly where he’s standing and rolls into bed.

6

He wakes into pre-dawn dimness, with no idea of where he is. The mosquito net enshrouds him, like the last skeins of a dream. Then he remembers, and sits up quickly. The movement dislodges a bolt of pain, which shoots from the back of his head and down his neck. He has slept off the buoyancy and crossed the front lines of a hangover: a toxic uneasiness is rising.

He gets out of bed and goes to the window. Something has woken him: a sound, still vibrating under his skin. Then it comes again, a dragging, guttural noise, like a piece of heavy furniture being moved nearby. It’s the lion roaring, half a kilometre away, in its enclosure.

He shivers, in primitive, atavistic dread. Through the window he can see the lawn, frosted in moonlight, and the high mountain walls on either side; and the oddness of this little green island comes to him again. What kind of place is this, full of peacock screams in the daytime and these terrible roars in the night?

Now he finds his mind going back to Canning. He thinks he has him sussed out. Canning is a
nouveau riche
type, who had a very bad relationship with his father, but who managed, through sheer luck, to inherit his fortune. Without this place, what is that silly name again–Gondwana–what would Canning be? A chemical salesman from Port Elizabeth, for God’s sake–a nothing, a nobody. He would still be married to his first, no doubt dowdy wife, and they would be living in a little house somewhere off the map in well-deserved obscurity. Instead he has fallen into this dreamy prosperity, with a gorgeous black woman hanging on. There is a certain mystery to Baby, a certain haziness to her origins, but it’s clear that she is the power in the relationship. The devotion and love between them is a one-way affair. That is obvious. She had barely glanced at her husband the whole evening; hardly spoken a word. It’s a marriage that must finally end in shipwreck.

He sees who Canning is. But what he still doesn’t know is who Canning
was
. The question has suddenly become important. There must be some image, surely, some spotty schoolboy face he can dredge up? But when he tries to get a fix on it, there is nothing. He has a vague sense of familiarity with Canning, but otherwise there is a blankness, an erasure.

What makes it worse is that, for Canning, Adam is obviously a significant figure. He seems to remember him intensely. A certain feeling radiates from Canning, a kind of infatuation, a juvenile crush; it makes Adam uncomfortable, like sitting too close to a fire. For an unpleasant moment he wonders whether there wasn’t some kind of homosexual encounter, which he’s pushed aside in his mind. But no–he isn’t likely to have forgotten that.

The effort of trying to remember is setting things loose in him. He has the sensation of pushing against a psychic wall, an invisible, elastic barrier, on the other side of which the past is stored up. Unbidden, a picture comes to him of the uniform they’d had to wear at school: grey pants, white shirt, a blue and red blazer. And he has a quick flash of a desk-top with a set of initials, DG, that somebody had carved into it with a pen-knife. Who was DG and why are his initials haunting him now? Why that memory, but not others? Why the top of the desk, but not Canning?

The questions are tiring; he shakes them off. Outside, the moonlight has faded and the sun is coming up. He knows he won’t go back to sleep, so he dresses quickly and goes out. The air is cool. The grass is silvered with dew, in which peacock feet have left cryptic hieroglyphic signs. There is nobody else around as he walks away from the lodge, towards the trees. He has it in mind to go back to the lion enclosure, but when he has passed the orchard he finds himself on the wrong path and he keeps going, wherever it will take him.

In five minutes he’s in the woods, with the sound of water nearby. The undergrowth is striped through with early light. A blue and yellow butterfly flits around him, signalling its beauty. The path is following the
kloof
, heading towards its narrowest point. The further he goes, the more tentative the track becomes, till the undergrowth is dragging at his feet. Trees crowd in on both sides, speaking in the voices of insects and birds.

Just when he is considering turning back, the vegetation thins away and he comes out on the bank of the river, at the point where it emerges from the mountains. Dark walls rise on either side like portals; the water jets between boulders, then spreads immediately below into a wide, calm pool. In the first light the surface is almost statuesque and solid, flawlessly reflecting the far bank, the sky.

Only now does it occur to him that this must be the same river that flows through the town. It’s unlikely that there are two of them, this size, in this part of the world. The realization jolts him. There is a connection, suddenly, in the form of a living blue vein, between the place where he lives and this inexplicable green paradise.

He goes over to the edge. The transparency of the water shows him a mysterious nether terrain of boulders and logs and splotches of light. He sees a fish suspended, like a hovering bird.

He looks around carefully, to make sure that he’s alone, and then sheds his clothes on the bank. He turns his chest to the sun, trying to take its heat into his paleness. Let him open up to the world! The poet in him will sing about moments like these.

He hesitates for a moment before slipping in. The coldness envelops him. He swims out into the middle of the pool, where it’s deepest. The current is barely perceptible, a faint tugging on the skin, but he imagines it washing him clean, carrying the past away. It is like baptism, but for that you need to be fully immersed: he ducks his head beneath the surface. The mirror breaks soundlessly, then composes itself around him again–sky, trees, the river-bank leaning in.

His feet find a rock and he perches there, half of his body in suspension, the other half projecting into the world. He is like the still point at the centre of everything. The first man, alone on the very first morning.

And then not.

Because somebody else is there.

First he can feel the eyes. A feeling, that’s all–an animal alarm, some vestigial instinct in his cells. He remembers the unearthly roaring in the night as he peers into the trees, making out only light and shadow and the liquid movement of birds. He turns sharply the other way. The far bank is even more inscrutable. He stares and stares–until, quite suddenly, he sees.

It’s a horrible moment. His body becomes colder than the water. Centuries of history drop away: the forest itself is staring at him–
into
him–with a dark face, lined and worn and old, marinated in ancient contempt. The face belongs here. Adam is the intruder, alien and unwanted; the single element in the scene that doesn’t fit. All his pagan hymns to the landscape depart, unwritten. He is about to vanish without a trace, and the shock jolts him off the rock, into deep water again.

So they look at one another, the black face in the forest and the naked white man, treading water.

Then he sees the hat. A dirty yellow hat, slanted skewly on top of the face. He knows this hat; he saw it yesterday, on the head of that old black guy, who must be as startled as Adam at this encounter. The world becomes ordinary as he enters time again.

‘You gave me a fright,’ he calls crossly, trying to smile.

But the man has gone again, the leaves vibrating behind him like a slammed door.

Adam splashes around for a while, trying to look nonchalant. But his little pristine moment is over: he feels exposed and vulnerable, out in the open like this. Soon he flounders his way, huffing and puffing, to the bank. He’s not primeval and magnificent any more, the original man: he is middle-aged and unemployed, with skinny legs and the start of a paunch, pink flesh gleaming like a target. He can’t get dressed fast enough.

Then he is going at a half-jog through the forest, looking back over his shoulder, his clothes sticking to him like a clammy second skin. Only when he comes out into the open again, in the bare field, does he slow down. There are coloured workers in the orchard, all dressed in that ubiquitous khaki uniform, spraying the trees; he catches the sweet, chemical whiff of poison. They greet him with smiles and doffed caps: old-fashioned rural courtesy, full of submission.

Canning is on the lawn, knocking golf balls aimlessly about with a putter. He looks haunted and pale, but he manages a ghastly smile. ‘What’s your handicap?’ he says.

‘What?’

‘How many over par? Your
handicap
?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘You
must
play golf, Nappy. Sport of the gods.’

‘No,’ Adam says crossly. ‘I don’t. Sorry.’ He doesn’t want to be having this conversation, in the hot sun, with a headache; he wants to be going home. On the grass at his feet he finds a stray peacock feather, which he picks up and studies, pretending to be absorbed.

‘We’ll be leaving in a minute, Nappy,’ Canning tells him. ‘Baby’s just getting packed.’

On the way into town, there is hardly any talk; all of them, for different reasons, are quiet today. But they do exchange telephone numbers and Canning makes it clear that they will be back the following weekend. ‘You can come around any time,’ he says. ‘No need to call.’

‘All right,’ Adam says. But he isn’t sure, at this moment, whether he will ever see the two of them again.

Baby speaks for the first time today as he is getting out of the car. She is wearing an enormous pair of dark glasses, which stand out against the rich colours of her makeup like a double bruise stamped into her face. But now she takes them off and stares back through the rear window. Canning has pulled up exactly where Adam had waited last night, in front of the blue man’s house, with its ordered garden full of luxuriant flower-beds. But she hardly glances at what, to all appearances, is his home; instead it’s at his actual home that she’s staring. In horror.

‘Who lives
there
?’ she says.

‘Oh, there,’ Adam says quickly. ‘I think it’s empty.’

‘What a terrible old place. It looks haunted.’

‘It’s an eyesore,’ Canning agrees. ‘Maybe you should set fire to it by accident.’

‘Ha ha,’ Adam says.