The Impostor (21 page)

He forces himself eventually to take control. He starts the car at last and turns out of the dark knot of trees. Back on the road, he sees the direction ahead and begins to gather speed. This is what he must do, he tells himself: drive like this, all the way down to the city, not stopping anywhere. He’ll be okay among buildings and lights; no harm can come to him there. He has almost begun to believe it. But as he comes to the turn-off that leads into the town, his mind returns to him in the form of a memory–a rootless, irrelevant fragment, which insists on being considered. Till it hardens into realization.

It’s a blinding moment. He takes his foot off the accelerator and lets his momentum drop away until the car judders and stalls. In the stark wash of the headlights he sees the fork in the road floating just ahead of him, like the embodiment of a choice. He sits and stares, but he doesn’t know which way to go.

A truck roars past, horn blaring, rocking the car turbulently in its wake.

‘What now?’ he says aloud.

Don’t be a fool
.
Keep on going, don’t look back.

‘But I can’t. I have to…I don’t know, warn him, stop them, do something.’

What for? It’s got nothing to do with you.

‘But he’s an innocent man.’

Hardly. Remember what he told you. Doesn’t any of that matter?

‘Innocent of my crimes, then.’

What crimes have you committed
?
You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s all. It was fate
.

‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’

Do nothing
.

A hand extended on the cliff-face: a choice, entirely his.

AFTER

21

One day, out of the blue, Gavin told Adam that he thought he’d had some kind of a nervous breakdown while he was out in the country. ‘I was quite worried about you,’ he said. ‘You weren’t yourself for a while. You looked really scary, Ad. Thin and dirty, with a crazy stare. I got a shock when I saw you, that first time you came down here.’

‘
Gavin
,’ Charmaine said reproachfully, but she was playing with his hair as she spoke. They had recently got engaged, and there were a lot of lovey-dovey caresses going on between them.

‘What?’ Gavin said. ‘It’s true. Can’t I be worried about my brother?’

This was a few months after Adam had got back to Cape Town, when things had settled. At first there’d been quite a bit of tension between him and his brother, especially after he’d turned down Gavin’s offer of work again. But later, once he’d found another job and started earning a salary of his own and had moved out of Gavin’s place into a flat by himself, the tension had eased.

‘Something did happen to me up there,’ he said. He was trying out the idea of a breakdown in his mind, and it fitted quite comfortably. Maybe that was what had happened to him; maybe that explained the odd way he’d behaved. ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘I never mentioned this before, but I think Charmaine was right. There was another presence in the house with me.’

‘Oh, jeez, not you as well,’ Gavin said. ‘What kind of a presence?’

‘I can’t tell you. But I wasn’t alone there.’

They were sitting in a booth at an expensive Waterfront restaurant, yachts bobbing idly outside the windows. They were all a bit drunk, and Adam enjoyed the effect that his admission was having. Charmaine slid closer to him along the seat, her headlamp eyes fixed on his. ‘I could sense it,’ she whispered. ‘I told you, remember? An old woman, very sad.’

‘Oh, for the love of God.’

‘I don’t know about an old woman,’ Adam said. ‘But something listened. Something watched.’

‘Something talked a lot of bullshit too.’

‘No, it’s true,’ Charmaine said. ‘If your mind was open to it, you’d understand. There are other planes intersecting with this one. There are all kinds of entities you just don’t see. I really believe that.’

By now Adam was sorry that he’d started this line of discussion. He didn’t believe in other planes and invisible entities, even though he hadn’t felt alone in that house. But he thought of the other presence as a split-off part of his own mind, something real and imaginary at the same time, a sort of by-product of the depression he was going through.

He had certainly been depressed; Gavin was right about that, even though Adam hadn’t known it at the time. He looked back now on his time in the country as a deviation from the main route of his life. He had been playing at poverty, while knowing all along, at the back of his mind, that he could go back to middle-class comforts whenever he wanted to. And now that he had picked up the thread, the whole episode caused him profound embarrassment. Sitting around doing nothing for day after day–what had he been thinking? His false friendship with Canning, and the affair with Baby too: when he looked back on his own behaviour, he didn’t recognize himself. No, the entire thing was an aberration.

Thankfully, however, it was all very much in the past. Gavin didn’t even own the house any more. He’d put it on the market not long after Adam had returned to Cape Town. There was no point in keeping it, Gavin said, considering he never went up there, and a pall had been cast over the idea of a rural idyll after what had happened to the next-door neighbour. It was no use Adam reminding him that the man was in hiding from a dark and dangerous past; in Gavin’s mind the incident was confirmation that crime was rampant everywhere now, even in a sleepy backwater like that. The country was going to the dogs.

In the end, the only trace left of Blom was in the form of that awful metal sculpture. Adam had forgotten it existed, until Gavin and Charmaine had gone up there to clean the place out before the new owners moved in. They’d brought Adam’s possessions, which he’d abandoned so hastily, back down to Cape Town with them, and the sculpture was in one of the boxes. It didn’t look as powerful or repellent to him now as it had used to, but in any case he didn’t want it. He was about to throw it into the bin when Charmaine stopped him. ‘If you don’t want that,’ she said, ‘I’ll take it.’

‘You’re welcome. Go ahead.’

‘Such a beautiful peacock feather. The whole thing has a very positive energy to it.’ She carried it off and now it sat on her bedside table, amongst a collection of crystals and pendulums and Buddhist mandalas.

And that was it; there was no other tangible evidence of anything he’d been through up there. What he’d actually hoped to bring back with him had gone up, quite literally, in smoke. He never admitted that to his brother, of course, though Gavin kept returning to the subject.

He brought it up again now, after they’d left the restaurant and were walking, a little woozily, to the car. ‘By the way,’ he said to Adam, sidling casually closer, ‘what happened to all the poems you wrote?’

‘Oh, I’m still polishing them.’

His car disappeared one day while he was at work. He assumed at first that it had been stolen, but on further enquiry, it turned out that he’d parked in a loading zone and the car had been removed by the traffic department. When he went to pay that fine, they still wouldn’t release the car. The computer had thrown up the traffic fines from a year and a half before, as well as the summons to appear in court. There was a warrant out for his arrest.

‘But I didn’t do anything,’ he said.

He would have to explain in court, they told him. There was no way around it now; the warrant couldn’t be undone.

He had a last flare-up of moral indignation. He would put his case, he decided, the way he’d planned to at the start. But on the day that he did appear in court, he had to sit first through a dispiriting array of sad and sorry characters, all with their own unlikely excuses. Each one had a story about why they had not paid their fine, or had failed to turn up in court before: one had been sick, another had been led astray by a series of absurd coincidences…By the time his own name was called, Adam’s fount of self-righteousness had dried up. The magistrate, a weary-looking black woman, looked sceptical before he even started. And the sequence of events that he’d planned to relate–all of them true–sounded in his own head like obfuscation and lies, no different to those he’d been listening to all morning.

In the end, he didn’t explain at all, beyond saying that he’d been living in the country and had forgotten about the fines. The magistrate looked relieved at the straightforwardness of his account. He should have paid in the first place, she told him, and no summons would’ve been necessary. Adam opened his mouth to argue, but heard himself apologizing instead.

It was all too high-up and out of reach. That was how it felt. There were principles, rules by which one should live, and these hovered in the air, shining and inviolate. Then there was the way one
did
live, which was a ramshackle construction of compromise and half-truth. Perhaps it was age, but he was learning to accept reality.

He stood in a line in front of a grimy window to pay what he owed. The woman behind the glass counted his money and stamped various forms and slid them back to him. On top of all the other fines there was now an extra one, an admission of guilt. Then he stepped aside and the next person in line took his place.

He had taken the whole day off work for his court appearance and now he found himself with a spare afternoon. He wandered through town and, out of habit, went into the Company’s Garden. It was where he spent most of his lunch-breaks, sitting on a bench. The first white settlement had grown its fruit and vegetable supplies here and he liked the tatty remnants of history which occasionally showed through.

His usual bench was occupied, so he moved on to a different seat, under some overhanging vines. He watched the squirrels and pigeons for about half an hour, then he got bored and decided to go and retrieve his impounded car from the traffic department. He strolled back down the path and was about to walk through the gate of the gardens when he saw Canning directly in front of him. He was coming up the avenue past the parliament building, hands in his pockets and head down. It would have been easy for Adam to avoid him: he could have turned around and walked away. But he hesitated, and the hesitation became a choice.

Canning looked up and saw him and stopped. The two of them stared at each other for a moment, both very still in the flux and flow around them. Then Canning did something peculiar. His face clenched slightly, and he stepped sideways around Adam and hurried on. In a few seconds he was almost lost in the crowd.

Adam looked after him in amazement. What did it mean? The sensible thing would be to ignore it and walk on, but very suddenly, on impulse, he started to follow.

It was a weird chase. Canning never quite ran, but he was scurrying quickly along, ducking and diving, continually looking over his shoulder. When he saw Adam behind him, his body went tense with shock. For a few seconds he increased his pace, but then he seemed to give up. His shoulders slumped, he went a little slower, and when he passed a vacant bench he abruptly sat down.

Adam caught up and sat next to him. Canning was pale and breathing hard. He didn’t look directly at Adam, but kept glancing sidelong, with little frightened turns of his head.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Adam said.

Then Canning gave a big exhalation. ‘It
is
you,’ he said. ‘You’re real.’

‘What are you talking about? Who else would I be?’

‘I thought that you’d gone back to the house after all. You know, after we spoke that last time…’

Then Adam finally did understand. ‘You thought that was me? You thought I was dead?’

Canning nodded, blinking furiously. ‘But you aren’t, are you?’ he asked, absurdly.

‘No, of course not.’

‘That’s good.’ Thus reassured, Canning visibly relaxed. ‘I’m very glad to see you, Adam.’

Strangely, he didn’t ask any further how Adam had escaped: his return from the dead had almost instantly become a fact. Instead it was general matters that they spoke about–Adam’s move back to the city, the new job. It turned out that the office where Adam worked was ten minutes away from where Canning now lived. They had been here, so close to each other, for the past eight or nine months, and yet this was the first time they’d met.

‘Well, we must get together,’ Canning said. ‘We need to catch up.’

‘Yes,’ Adam said, but in the pause that followed both of them knew that they wouldn’t. There was no mutual future between them.

Canning had aged terribly. It was just over a year since they’d last seen one another, but a tiredness, a greyness, had come into his face. There were loose bags under his eyes, his hair had thinned even further, his mouth had started to sag. But at the same time something light and boyish had switched on in his eyes. It was that old happy spark–a throwback to long ago–that Adam had always set off in him.

‘You heard about the golf course, I assume.’

‘No,’ he said, though of course he’d heard some things. Gavin had called him whenever a fresh item appeared in the newspapers–when the commission of inquiry had cleared Sipho Moloi, for example, or when the mayor had been forced to resign, still protesting his innocence. Or even when, in the next municipal elections, Fanie Prinsloo had become the new mayor. But it had been a while since any of this had appeared in the media.

‘It opened last week,’ Canning told him. ‘Big song and dance, very fancy. They’ve kicked off with a new international tournament, the Liberty Vision cup. I’m surprised you didn’t know about it–it was all over the television. I don’t mind telling you, it looks magnificent. That is, if you care about golf courses.’

‘I don’t care about golf courses.’

‘Nor do I, actually,’ Canning said. ‘Not any more.’ He gave a barking, bitter laugh. ‘No, I’ve given all that up.’

‘Still,’ Adam said, ‘you got what you wanted. You managed to wipe out the past.’