The Impostor (2 page)

Then, for the first time, he noticed the house next door. It entered his consciousness by degrees, like a photograph developing. It was a small house, in layout and shape almost exactly the same as Gavin’s–except that it was different in every other way. It was brightly painted and neat and immaculate. The garden at the back was green and clipped, ordered into regular lines. A huge amount of toil and effort had gone into maintaining the place; and at this moment Adam saw a small human figure, turning over the soil with a spade.

His next-door neighbour was an older white man, dressed in blue overalls. More than that couldn’t be seen at this distance, except for a general air of frenzy that the man gave off. He was hurling himself at the earth with dedication or fury, talking to himself, while a cigarette glowed redly in his mouth, like the light of an engine, but suddenly he became aware of Adam and he stopped work instantly, as if he’d been switched off. His stillness was almost unnatural.

Now the two of them looked at each other across the wire fence between them, while pretending they were not. There was no reason for them not to greet each other, or wave a hand, or nod, but neither did. It was as if they were waiting for something to happen. Then the man in blue dropped his spade and ran to his back door and went inside.

Adam was in a frightened, irritable mood when he walked down to the hotel a little later. This was a big, blockish building opposite the church, with an imposing, balustraded façade. In its proportions and design it resembled an old saloon in a western.

Gavin and Charmaine were at a table on the front balcony overlooking the street. A big man in an apron was serving them breakfast and Adam heard him say, as he came up, ‘It was the voice of God, speaking like I’m speaking to you now.’

‘Amazing,’ Charmaine said, shaking her head.

‘This is my brother,’ Gavin said. ‘Adam, this is Fanie Prinsloo.’

Everything about the big man was meaty. Even his face, with its dull, minimal expression, was like a slab of steak. But the movement with which he dried his fingertips on the apron was surprisingly delicate. He repeated his name significantly, as if it should mean something, as he shook hands with Adam.

‘I believe you are coming to live here,’ he said. ‘Welcome!’

‘Thanks.’

‘I was just telling your brother how I came here three years ago. My wife and me, we were attacked in our house in George. In the middle of the night. Tied up, hit over the head. I lost a tooth–look here.’ He bared a black gap in his smile. ‘And while I was lying there, with the rope around me, thinking I was going to die, I heard a voice. Just like I’m talking to you now. ‘Fanie, go live in the country.’ That’s what it said. ‘Go live in the country.’ So I came.’

‘It’s incredible,’ Charmaine said. ‘Those moments when the barriers break down.’

‘I used to come here for holidays,’ Fanie Prinsloo said. ‘Me and the wife, in my caravan. But I never thought of moving up here. Not till that night. But I packed my bags, I sold my house. My friend, I never looked back.’

‘You own this place?’ Gavin said. His eyes had narrowed, becoming cold and thoughtful. ‘You do all right up here?’

‘
Ja
, these days. Now with the new road and the pass over the mountains, there’s a lot of traffic going through. It didn’t used to be like that. This used to be the end of the road. But things have changed.’

‘When God speaks,’ Charmaine said, ‘you should always take His advice.’

The big man laughed heartily. ‘
Ja
, it’s a beautiful place,’ he said. ‘The mountains, the sky, just like our Heavenly Father made them. You won’t be sorry, Adrian.’

‘Adam.’

‘And what can I get you for breakfast?’

When he’d gone lumbering off to the kitchen, Gavin said, ‘Do you know who that is? Only one of the greatest forwards in the history of rugby. And he’s living up here.’

The conversation had thrown Adam. He was full of insecurity about what he was doing, the whole move up here, the big change in his life. When he answered his brother, he spoke too vehemently. ‘I don’t care about rugby,’ he said. There was a silence, and the mood around the table dropped.

‘You’ve got red bumps all over your head,’ Charmaine said, trying to be cheerful.

‘Mosquito bites.’

‘Well, you wanted to stay there,’ Gavin said. ‘In that dirty house.’

‘It’s
your
dirty house.’

‘Nobody’s forcing you to stay there.’

They stared off in different directions while Fanie Prinsloo brought the coffee and toast. Afterwards they ate without speaking. Both brothers were thinking about things that had happened in the past, which had nothing to do with their conversation. There was a lot of friction, a lot of
stuff
, between them, which had played itself out in recent weeks. The sound of chewing and swallowing was very loud, but the antagonism slowly drained away, till only its brittle shell remained. Gavin wiped his moustache carefully and, without looking at Adam, said, ‘We shouldn’t fight. It’s all ancient history.’

‘I agree.’

Gavin got up. ‘Come on, babe. We’d better hit the road.’

Adam walked out to the car with them. But his brother had a last little speech to make. He had obviously prepared these thoughts, though the heart had gone out of them now. Looking down, his expression sulky, Gavin said that if Adam wanted to change his mind, if he wanted to come back to the city with them, now was the time to speak. There was still the offer of the job, if Adam wanted to reconsider…

‘No,’ Adam said. ‘I want to be here.’

Since arriving the day before, he’d been unsure. He’d been wavering. But now, as he spoke, he was startled to discover that he meant it.

Gavin sucked on his moustache and glared at Adam in sad resignation. ‘So you’re set on being a martyr.’

‘It’s not like that.’

Gavin threw out his hands, palms upward, to show how helpless he was. But when he said goodbye to Adam he put his arms out and embraced him. It was out of character, a peculiar gesture for him, and despite himself Adam felt like crying. For weeks now, he’d wanted to get away from his brother. But when the red sports car had gone, he had an unsettling pang. Now he really was alone.

2

A set of unfortunate circumstances had led Adam to this point. In the normal course of things he wouldn’t have been here at all, but his life hadn’t been normal for a while. Everything had unravelled for him a few months before when two things happened at the same time to undo him. First he’d lost his job and then he’d lost his house.

He shouldn’t have been surprised about the job. All the signs were there but Adam was oblivious, and it was a deep, cold shock to discover that the young black intern he’d been training for the past six months was, in fact, being groomed to replace him. His boss had been apologetic, talking about racial quotas and telling him it was nothing personal. But how could it not be personal? It was he, Adam Napier, nobody else, who had to pack up his desk and take his pictures off the wall and walk through the door for the last time. Afterwards, remembering this scene, what he felt most keenly was humiliation that he hadn’t seen it coming.

The house was a different story. It had been clear for a long time how things were going. The area of Johannesburg in which he’d bought–trendy and vibrant and multi-cultural when he’d first moved in–had been sliding badly for a few years. All his friends who lived nearby had been selling up and getting out, and they’d urged Adam to do the same. But for some reason, some passivity in his character, he hadn’t done anything about it. He’d just sat there, watching it all go to pieces: the gangsters taking over, the squatters moving in, the crime and drugs getting worse and worse, until it was too late. He couldn’t find anybody reliable to rent the house and nobody wanted to buy it. In the end he couldn’t even give the place away. The bank didn’t want to repossess it and they only took it when they saw that Adam was in no position to keep up any repayments at all.

It was a real mess, a real stroke of bad luck. In just a few months he’d found himself stranded–alone and futureless in the middle of his life. Eventually he’d had to turn to his brother for help. Gavin was three years younger than Adam and had always done things in a very different way. He was down in Cape Town, at the other end of the country, and they had stayed only tangentially in touch over the years. But since Adam had got into trouble, Gavin had been calling a lot, affecting serious concern.

‘Why don’t you move down here?’ he said now. ‘You could take your time, stay with us till you find your feet.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Adam said. But he didn’t have to think for too long. He’d been hoping, in fact, that Gavin would make the offer. He was tired of Johannesburg, tired of his life up there. The idea of a big move, a completely fresh start, was appealing.

It was amazing, when he packed up his life, how little there was. The bank had taken all the furniture along with the house. He was left with his clothes, a few household implements, some boxes of books. All of it fitted into his car.

As a young man, Gavin had been muscular and powerful, but he was running to fat these days. He had an affluent, satisfied look to him. He wore expensive clothes and jewellery and he had cultivated a smug little moustache. He’d recently moved into a huge penthouse apartment on the top floor of a fancy block of flats that he owned.

From Adam’s bedroom window there was a spectacular view of Table Mountain and Lion’s Head. A certain unreality attached to this vista, which reflected the unreality of Adam’s position. Here he was, without prospects or cash, living like a king.

Gavin rubbed it in. ‘Relax, no hurry,’ he told Adam. ‘I can afford to look after you, until you get things worked out.’

There was irony in this. Until just a few years ago, Adam had been the staid, dependable, predictable one, while Gavin was financially straitened and directionless. Now they seemed to have changed places. But the history went back further and deeper than that and it didn’t take long for Adam to sense that Gavin was using his weakened state to try to settle some obscure moral score. He was constantly on his case, wearing him down. ‘You’ve got to pull yourself together,’ he told Adam just a day or two after he arrived. ‘Look at you, you’re a wreck. There are food stains on your shirt.’

‘Who cares? Oh, all right, I’ll change the shirt.’

‘The shirt’s not the point here, Ad. It’s you. You’re letting yourself go, you’re collapsing. Why don’t you fight back? You can’t just give up. So you lost your job, big deal. Get another one.’

He made it sound so easy. That was the way Gavin thought: you side-stepped bad luck, you rolled with the punches. And maybe he was right–maybe Adam was indulging himself, giving in to self-pity. In his place, Gavin wouldn’t be folding up like this; he had proved it before. He had changed jobs a few times already, without suffering the slightest self-doubt. He had been through two marriages, both ending in ugly divorces, but the experience hadn’t stopped him from getting involved with a series of unlikely women, the newest of whom was hanging on his arm now, chewing gum and staring at Adam. Her name was Charmaine.

‘I’ve got a friend who’s lonely too,’ she put in. ‘I could introduce you.’

‘I’m not lonely.’

‘That’s your problem right there,’ Gavin said. ‘Denial. You’ve got to confront this thing. Get up, get out. Don’t lie around, staring at the ceiling.’

‘I’m different to you, Gavin. I reflect on things. I’m Hamlet to your Laertes.’

‘What? What are you talking about? All I’m saying, get out and socialize a bit. Why don’t you come out with us tonight? We’re meeting some of my buddies for drinks.’

‘No, thanks.’

He’d met some of Gavin’s friends already. A bunch of them had come over for a
braai
in the garden downstairs a few nights before–big, boozy men with simpering wives, who talked about business deals and cars and insurance, and made jokes about blondes and blowjobs. One of them had asked Adam what line of work he was in, and when he’d answered that he was unemployed, a hot, scratchy silence had fallen.

As they got up to go, Charmaine said to Adam, ‘I can read auras. Your aura is very dark.’

‘Jeez, babe,’ Gavin said. ‘Leave my brother alone.’

‘I’m just observing. You need to clear yourself,’ she told Adam. ‘You need to change your life.’

He thought about that the whole evening. He didn’t know about the aura, but she was right about the rest of it. He did need to clear himself, he did need to change his life.

This idea was still on his mind a few days later when Gavin took him to visit a building site. It was a scene of frenzied activity. Hundreds of men were toiling with machines to raise a massive concrete structure from the ground. It was while they were up on the top floor, both wearing hard-hats, Adam beset by vertigo, that Gavin offered him a job.

‘Nothing too big or high-powered, obviously,’ he said. ‘You’re not qualified. But you could come and work at the office. I need an assistant. I could train you, show you the ropes. No, don’t answer now, just think about it for a few days, all right?’

Gavin had made a fortune in just a few years out of property development. He’d started out up the west coast, getting involved in a marina and surf resort that had destroyed a wetlands conservation site. These days his energies were mostly focused on Cape Town. He was teamed up with people who were buying old buildings and gutting them or ripping them down and putting up shiny modern apartment blocks in their place. Some of these deals were unscrupulous and Gavin had pointed out proudly to Adam that one of their company directors was a black man who was paid a healthy retainer just to stay at home in Gugulethu while his name on the letterhead brought in legitimacy and investment. The sums of money involved were staggering.

More than anything, it was the idea of the money that swayed Adam. He’d never been seriously poor before and it wasn’t nice. In recent years there had appeared a new phenomenon in Johannesburg: white people at the traffic lights, wearing old clothes and a hopeless air, begging. He wasn’t anywhere near that state himself, but the possibility of it pulled at him with a powerful gravity. Losing everything, having nothing–the notion stirred contradictory feelings of panic and excitement.

So he did think about Gavin’s offer. It was tempting. Later he would realize that Gavin had chosen his moment carefully: the view from the top of the construction site was heady, full of the promise of industry and power. It was only when they were back down at ground level that the real world returned. While they were walking to the car he heard his brother having a vehement conversation on his mobile phone. ‘Rip it all out,’ Gavin was saying. ‘All the old fittings…
ja, ja
, I’ve got a buyer for the stuff…no, we’ll put in copper…the cheapest, I told you, it’s got to look good, that’s the point…I know a guy, he’ll handle it…take out the silver, put copper in…’

A blue melancholy rolled down over Adam. Cheap fittings. Copper instead of silver. No, he couldn’t do it.

Although he’d agreed to think about it for a few days, he spoke to Gavin that night. It was better to talk while the urgency was there. He felt full of moral clarity, a sense of freedom and release. ‘I want to make a contribution,’ he said, ‘not a fast buck.’

Gavin was instantly set bristling. ‘What, I’m not contributing?’

‘Well, how?’

‘I employ hundreds of people. Construction work–that’s a lot of jobs. It’s good for bosses and workers, it’s good for everybody. And it’s all part of opening up the country. Where’s the problem?’

It was a difficult argument to answer. But Adam remembered that, in the years leading up to South Africa’s big change, Gavin had been gloomy and frightened. He’d even spoken about emigrating. Adam had been the positive one, full of hope for the future. It didn’t seem right that it should have worked out like this: with Adam unemployed and homeless, and his brother talking loudly about opening up the country.

‘The way I see it,’ Gavin finished angrily, ‘you’re not in any position to refuse.’

‘I’m grateful for the offer. Really. But it’s a matter of principle.’

‘Oh, right. It’s like that. Great to keep your principles while other people are looking after you.’

‘You offered,’ Adam said. ‘I didn’t force you.’

‘Out of interest, what will your principles allow you to do?’

He hesitated, but then he answered. ‘I want to write poetry,’ he said.

As a very young man, Adam had published a book of poems. The collection had been called THE FLAMING SWORD, a title he had taken from Genesis. It had been a small local publication and had sold only a few hundred copies, but it had attracted some attention, mostly because of his age. The poems were about the natural world, ardent and intense and romantic, and he felt quite embarrassed by them now. He had never written or published anything since, but he had always–secretly, inside himself–thought of himself as a poet. It had felt more like a condition than a vocation, especially while he was holding down another, ordinary job, trying to make his way in the world.

Now that the other job and life had fallen away, the poet in him felt renewed. It seemed to him that he’d returned to his true calling. Accordingly, he’d started to conceive of this crisis he was going through as something he’d willed upon himself. He hadn’t lost his job; he had given it up. He hadn’t lost his house; he was shedding his possessions. He was paring his life to the core.

Till now, he hadn’t voiced these thoughts to anybody. He had barely acknowledged them to himself. But Gavin’s offer of a job, and his reaction to it, had brought the whole issue into focus. He had reached a moment of truth.

‘
Poetry
,’ Gavin said. He made it sound like a perversion.

Adam blushed. ‘Yes,’ he said, feeling more certain than ever. He resolved that from this moment he would declare it to anybody who asked: that was what he was–a poet.

Charmaine was nodding at him. ‘I think that’s so amazing,’ she breathed.

‘Maybe it’s amazing,’ Gavin said, ‘but it doesn’t pay the rent.’

‘The rent isn’t important.’

‘It is, if you don’t have it.’ Gavin glared at his brother. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘things are good at the moment. The country’s rolling along. There’s a lot of money flowing, if you just know where to look. You’ve had a bit of bad luck, that’s all. But there’s no excuse for a white man to go starving here, whatever anybody says.’