The Impostor (5 page)

So he stopped trying. He didn’t go near the table or the pen any more. The stone sat on top of the paper, and it didn’t speak a word.

4

The world shrank very quickly to the size of the house. He hardly ever went out, unless it was down to the supermarket or the bottle store. He started drinking in the afternoons, to make the evenings come faster. There was no cell-phone reception in the valley and he waited weeks for the land-line to be connected. When that finally happened, he sat and stared at the telephone for a long time, wondering who to call. There was only his brother, but he already knew the conversation they would have.

One night, when he was drunk, he did make a disastrous call to a woman he’d been engaged to briefly a long time ago. The engagement had been a big mistake, and they’d both been happy to escape so cleanly, no kids or property, no major damage done. They hadn’t spoken in years, and he had to ring a few other people to get hold of her number. It turned out she was living in Durban now, married to somebody else, with two children. He had learned this in advance, but it didn’t stop him from calling. For the first couple of minutes she was chatty and effusive; she sounded happy to hear from him. But then a silence opened up and his own mood turned. He realized now that she’d been talkative because she was nervous.

‘Adam,’ she said eventually. ‘What is it you want?’

‘I don’t know. Just to catch up, I guess. Find out how you are.’

‘Well, I’m fine, Adam, I’m fine. My life is good. And how are you?’

But she’d already asked him this; he didn’t feel like lying again. ‘Pretty shitty, actually. I’ve kind of lost my way. Midway on life’s journey, as Dante has it.’

‘Adam. That’s awful. I’m sorry to hear it.’

‘I’m living in my brother’s house out in the country. I’ve got no money. I’ve got no job.’

‘If it’s money you want…’

‘No, I don’t want money.’ He was furious for a moment, then ashamed; and then full of absurd, unbearable sadness: at himself, at her, at the road not taken. ‘We should’ve stuck it out,’ he told her, ‘we should’ve made a go of it.’

‘I can’t have this conversation, Adam. I’ve got a husband, I’ve got a life.’

‘It should’ve been me.’ He was almost snivelling.

‘I think you’re drunk. I’m going to put the phone down in a minute.’

‘I’m sorry about everything, I’m sorry it didn’t work out.’

She put the phone down. He cursed at her, and then broke down sobbing, at what exactly he didn’t know. The best, high point of his life was already behind him somewhere, though he didn’t know when it had passed. He had started to dislike people younger than himself, wrapped in clothes and styles and values that he didn’t understand. He was turning into the kind of person he’d always dreaded becoming: small-minded, focused relentlessly on himself. He foresaw an old age of tiny obsessions as his body gave in, bit by bit, and his sense of tragedy shrank to the scale of his own life. His compassion would also contract, but his intolerance would grow. Already he sensed his opinions crimping inward, on a hard core of endemic disapproval.

In the morning he remembered the conversation and was appalled. How could he have done that? And why had he been so full of grief over something he didn’t really regret–didn’t really ever think about? For a while, he thought about calling again to apologize, but decided that would only make it worse. He resolved instead to keep control of himself: no more drunken calls to people from long ago, no more chasing after the past. You couldn’t bring back what was gone; you could only move forward, however imperfectly, into the future.

In the beginning he had swept and cleaned the house every week, to recharge the sense of satisfaction that first cleaning had given him. But now he started to let it go. He told himself:
tomorrow. Tomorrow I will do it
. The dust crept back, crunching delicately under his feet. It lay in a fine film over his paper, the pen, on the desk.

In just a few weeks he had lapsed into inertia. It was very hot; a massive weight of sun pressed down on everything. The light at noon cut human faces to the bone. The effort required, even for simple daily tasks, could seem too much.

He spent hours and hours entirely on his own. In his old life, in the city, everything had been arranged around particular points in the day. Now those points had gone. Not long after he’d arrived he had taken off his wrist-watch and left it somewhere, intending to pick it up later. But there had never been a reason to pick it up.

Time changed shape. Now he could sit and ponder something for what seemed like a moment, but when he came back to himself, several hours had gone by. It happened more and more that whole days disappeared behind him without trace, measured in the atomic drift of dust, the creeping progress of branches as they stretched towards the sun. And the sun itself, in its vast stellar motion, became a blotch of light that moved imperceptibly across the wall. He watched the light move. Or he saw a fig fall from a tree, and it fell and fell without ever hitting the ground.

On that first day, when he’d arrived, he’d felt time flowing in through the front door behind him. He’d brought time back into the house. But now he could feel a different time–old time, dead time–trapped inside, unable to pass back out, into the current. It had become shaped to the rooms, looping back on itself, piling up in compacted layers so dense and heavy that they were almost substantial. It didn’t seem implausible that people or actions from long ago might be here, very close to him.

Sometimes the past was almost apparent. He would catch a movement out the corner of his eye, or he heard the sound of breathing from the room next door. One night he went to bed early, but struggled to sleep. When he did eventually fall into a hot, shallow doze, somebody sat down on the bottom of the bed. He was between waking and sleeping, just under the skin of time, and even after he’d jolted into full consciousness again he wasn’t sure whether it had happened or not. He lay there rigidly in the dark, hearing his heart. Then he lunged sideways, fumbling for the lamp. He knew, before the light came on, that nobody would be there. But it felt as if someone was watching.

So he was alone, but he didn’t feel alone. He remembered what Charmaine had said about the house; about presences. It wasn’t quite like that for him. It was more the accumulation of tiny signs into a single presence: the presence of the house itself, made of time and neglect and leftover intentions.

It wasn’t real, of course. It was only a shadow with no particular shape of its own. He thought of it as part of himself, a stray section of his mind that had ranged itself against him. It moved around the house as he did, behind him or off to one side, watching him. Listening. He could sense its attention, like a small, cold vacuum drawing substance towards itself, possibly out of him.

He began speaking to it. Not in a serious way–he didn’t seriously believe in it. He just chatted, his manner off-hand, to amuse himself. There was nobody else to talk to, after all. ‘Hey, are you there?’ he might say. ‘Hello, hello? Calling outer space–can you hear me?’

Then he imagined how it might answer.
Yes, I’m here. Always here. Reading you loud and clear
.

He thought of its voice as soft and dry, almost inaudible. A burr of static, made of all the lost sounds drifting around out there.

‘Don’t you get bored, watching me the whole time?’

No, no. On the contrary. I was bored before you came. You’ve given me fresh life
.

‘Come on. I’m not that interesting.’

Oh, don’t be so sure of that
.

And he laughed–at himself, because it was himself he was listening to. There was no spirit, no presence, no
thing
there in the house. Of course he knew that.

‘I’m the only one here,’ he announced. Very loudly, so that the words rang back at him. He listened after the echo. Nobody answered.

Except me
.

Occasionally it occurred to him to doubt his mind. He had allowed a slow slippage in, a change to the way he thought about things. Perhaps he ought to be worried about himself. In the end, he did ring Gavin, looking for reassurance, though he assumed a nonchalant tone. ‘Just thought I’d call and say hello. There’s nothing much to report.’

His brother was in a cheerful, bullying mood. ‘Finally we hear from you. I was starting to think I had to drive up to check on you. How’s it been going? Writing lots of poems?’

‘Uh, not really, not yet. But I will. I’m just getting ready.’

‘Getting ready? How long does that take you?’

‘A while.’ He shouldn’t have called; it was a mistake. ‘You can’t just switch it on and off like an engine.’

‘It’s been five weeks, Ad.’

‘Has it?’

‘Of course. What do you mean, you don’t know what day it is?’

‘Uh, I’ve kind of lost track a bit.’

‘Should I be concerned about you? I mean, what are you actually
doing
there? How are you spending the days?’

‘Thinking, mostly.’

‘Thinking? You shouldn’t think too much, Ad. It isn’t good for you. You need to stay active. Have you done any work on the garden yet?’

‘Not much.’

‘How much?’

‘I haven’t done anything, to be honest.’

Gavin sighed. ‘Get out into the yard, Ad. Go and dig up the weeds. You’ll feel a lot better afterwards.’

The conversation left him irritated. But when he’d put the phone down he went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. Unshaven, a bit dirty, a feverish glint in the eye. Maybe his brother had a point. He was spending too much time idle and alone. Believing in ghosts was the symptom of a deeper malaise. His mind was a little loose, a little displaced on its foundations. It wasn’t a bad feeling, to be sure–and that was the danger. You went a bit further and it felt okay, so you went a bit further still. This was how people lost track, the mental rivets popping out one by one. It crept up on you, the slow dereliction of the senses, till one day you were holed up in a ruin, beard all the way to your knees, defending your territory with a shotgun.

He must do something to push back. Any effort would be good. He filled the tub and got in and cleaned himself up. After a wash and a shave, a change of clothing, he already looked better. The way you looked was half the battle. Then he went onto the back
stoep
and glared at the weeds. He’d been avoiding it and putting it off, but the moment had come. Clearing out the back yard would be like ordering his mind. And he would start right now. No more of this
tomorrow, tomorrow
.

He got into the car and drove down to the farming co-op. He needed tools, though he wasn’t exactly sure of what. He walked up and down the aisles, studying the bags of seed and fertilizer, the cisterns and pipes and fittings, and all the other peculiar items whose purpose he couldn’t guess. He felt like an obvious fraud: anyone could see he didn’t belong here, amongst the paraphernalia of a vigorous outdoor life. He was something else, a pale indoor creature, made for books and indirect light.

He chose a fork and a spade. He thought about the thick, thorny stems of the weeds and picked out a pair of heavy gloves. Once he’d loaded his purchases up in the car, he stood there for a long moment, feeling anew the oddness of his fate. His job, his home, his familiar life–all the old stars by which he’d steered his way–where had everything gone? What was he doing here? How had this happened to him?

Somebody nearby said, ‘Nappy.’

GONDWANA

5

Adam jumps. ‘Nappy’ is a name he hasn’t heard for twenty-five years, but it re-attaches itself to him instantly, with a jolt of shame. It’s like being hit by a fist.

The man who has spoken to him is plump, about the same age as Adam, wearing short pants and a T-shirt and tennis shoes. He has a very odd expression on his face–somewhere between happiness and weeping.

He says, ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment. I knew it would come, sooner or later.’

Adam peers at him. But the face means nothing at all. Bland and sandy skin, almost colourless. The only distinctive feature is a pillowy upper lip, which seems to button down over the lower one, like the flap of a purse. The short, wheatish hair has receded badly, giving an oval, egg-like quality to the head–one of those Easter eggs on which a child has painted a simple expression.

‘You don’t remember me,’ the man says. ‘I don’t blame you. I’ve changed. But you, Nappy. You look the same. You haven’t aged at all.’

‘Oh, no,’ Adam says, ‘that’s not true.’ He gestures at his own face to indicate what the years have done, but he’s just stalling for time. He realizes that he is wearing an idiotic half-grin and wipes it off.

The man comes up close to Adam, jangling his carkeys in his hand. He has a strong personal smell, sweat over-laid with aftershave. ‘I’ll give you a clue,’ he says. ‘
Cloakroom
.’

‘Cloakroom?’

‘Think about it.’

Adam has started to wonder if the man isn’t mentally deficient, an impression exacerbated by the beatific expression on his face. But at this moment the expression disappears, to be replaced by something more petulant. He seems disappointed not to be recognized.

‘All right,’ he says. ‘I’ll tell you. It’s Canning.’

‘Canning,’ Adam says. ‘My God.’

They shake hands. Canning has a moist, warm, insistent grip. When he finally lets go, he slaps Adam hard on the shoulder, unbalancing him. ‘Nappy,’ he says. ‘Old Nappy.’

They blink at each other, unsure of what should come next.

‘Do you live here?’ Adam says at last.

‘I live outside town. With my wife. I have an amazing wife, Nappy. How about you? Are you married?’

‘No,’ Adam says. ‘I’m not married.’

‘But you live here?’

‘Yes, I…moved here recently. To write poems.’

Canning’s face becomes solemn, and he nods. ‘I read your poems, Nappy,’ he says.

This is very unexpected.

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. Oh, yes. Of course.’ He nods again and then an admiring smile spreads slowly across his face. ‘Wonderful poems. Wonderful, wonderful poems!’

‘Really? Did you like them?’

‘More than that. I
loved
them.’

Adam cannot help himself: he is absurdly pleased to hear this. It feels as if his poetry has drawn down nothing but embarrassment on him before this moment, until now, at last, there is someone who understands. ‘Thank you, Canning,’ he says. ‘That’s good to know.’

Canning: he hears himself slip into the schoolboy appellation. Although half a lifetime has gone past, they are relating to each other like two teenagers.

‘Why don’t you come for dinner?’ Canning says.

‘You mean…tonight?’

‘Yes, come tonight.’

‘Okay. Sure. You’d better tell me where to find you.’

‘No, you’ll never get there on your own. Let me come and fetch you. Why don’t you spend the night with us, Nappy? We’re riding back to Port Elizabeth tomorrow, I’ll drop you on the way. It’ll give us a chance to catch up. What’s your address?’

Adam has a moment of shame: he doesn’t want Canning to see the run-down house, the back yard full of weeds. On impulse, he gives the address of the house next door, where the blue man lives.

‘All right,’ Canning says. ‘I’ll pick you up at seven o’clock. I want you to see our place before the light goes.’ He starts walking towards a
bakkie
parked nearby, the back of which is loaded up with some kind of animal carcass–a sheep or a goat. The bloodied tangle of meat wobbles at the feet of an old black man wearing a yellow hat. The old man smiles at Adam, showing two brown stumps of teeth.

Canning has turned back. ‘Is it just chance?’ he says. ‘You know–accident or design? Meeting up like this after so many years, in a parking lot…What do you think?’

‘Uh, I don’t believe in any big plan, really.’

‘Well, you believe what you like, Nappy. But I knew this day would come.’ Canning thumps his chest with one fist, smiling broadly. ‘Fate,’ he says.

When the
bakkie
has disappeared from sight, Adam’s high mood frays out into uneasiness. He is going to have dinner that night with somebody he was at school with a long time ago. But the truth is that Canning’s name, his face, still mean nothing to Adam. He has no memory of Canning. He doesn’t know who he is.

He doesn’t go home and tackle the weeds after all. Somehow that mission has got sidetracked. Instead he finds himself wandering around the house, staring unseeingly out of the windows. He is thinking about his schooldays.

Adam’s childhood is split into two in his mind. There is home, in what was then the Eastern Transvaal. That part of his life is suffused with nostalgia and sentiment. Then there is school, which is something quite separate. School was in Johannesburg: a byzantine complex of sandstone buildings, where he and Gavin had been boarders. That memory is full of rules and punishment and torment. School was not a happy time for him.

The nickname, Nappy, had become attached to him early on. When he’d first arrived at the school, Adam was a frightened, sensitive boy who’d been terrified of this new place he found himself in. For the first few months his body had expressed his anxiety in an involuntary way: he’d wet the bed while he was sleeping. Of course, it was like the end of the world. The other boys had been merciless. Every morning they had gathered around, lifting the sheets, pointing at his sodden pyjamas, hooting and jeering. One of them had said something about him needing a nappy, and the name was close enough to his surname, Napier, to seem witty. So it had stuck, a badge of shame, long after the bed-wetting had stopped.

It is quite possible that most of the other boys have forgotten the original incident. But Adam has never forgotten. It is branded into him with all the heat of humiliation. He has left those days far behind; he is a middle-aged man now. But the moment he heard that name, all the vulnerability and embarrassment returned in an instant. It is astounding how much history can be stored up in two syllables.

He isn’t sure any more about going out tonight, about having dinner with Canning. He wishes that he hadn’t accepted the invitation so readily. The only reason he’d been such a soft touch was the fact that Canning had read his poems. Not only read them, but loved them. That counts for something with Adam.

He has got himself into a position, though, with the house. It was foolish to have given the wrong address, but now that he has, he must follow through. He’s afraid that Canning will arrive early and knock on his neighbour’s door. That would be very embarrassing. So he is outside, waiting, wearing his best casual clothes, carrying a bottle of cheap wine, from about a quarter to seven. He stands a little way down, on the street that fronts the blue man’s property, close to where he parks his car in the only available piece of shade. Loitering casually there, the neat little house with its immaculate garden behind him, he gives the distinct impression that this is where he lives.

The problem will come, of course, if Canning wants to step inside and have a look. If that happens, he will have to confess. But when Canning arrives, precisely at seven o’clock, he hardly glances at the house; his attention is elsewhere. He is also wearing casual clothes, but with a designer label on them, and they look stiff and unnatural on his body. He is driving a gleaming silver Jeep Grand Cherokee, and he jumps out and opens the passenger door for Adam, then waits to close it behind him. Adam has the unsettling feeling of being courted. The inside of the car smells new, and when Canning gets in behind the wheel all the shiny technology around him gives the same impression as his clothes: of being ill-fitting, expensive and unnatural.

‘It’s my newest baby,’ Canning says, running a plump hand over the upholstery. ‘What do you think?’

‘Very nice. You bought it recently?’

‘Last week, as a matter of fact.’

The sound of the engine is almost inaudible. Through the tinted glass of the windscreen the town looks distant and unreal as they slide silently down the street and up to the main road. They turn right, towards the mountains. As they pass the turn-off to the old road on the right, a garish, painted figure leans into their path. It takes Adam a moment to realize that this is one of the prostitutes he’d heard about, a local woman selling herself at the roadside. She disappears behind them, but the rude colours of her makeup linger somehow in the car.

The town has dropped away now; the ruined-looking countryside spreads around them. Adam thinks:
two hundred million years ago this was a swamp
. He has a shivery sense of the whole landscape looking utterly different, full of sex and death in forms he can hardly imagine. Prehistoric creatures moving through a soupy twilight. Now those animals are a scattering of fossilized bones, and the landscape itself is like a fossil of that time. In all the miles of desolation, the car is a tiny shape, going from nowhere to nowhere.

‘Have I changed, Nappy?’ Canning says suddenly.

Adam has been planning to ask Canning not to call him Nappy; the name stabs him every time with its sharp point of malice. But the moment passes, and he doesn’t speak. Instead he says vaguely, ‘Well, we’ve all got older, Canning.’

‘Yes, of course. But do I look the way you’d expect?’

‘I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting anything. I mean, it’s a surprise to see you at all.’

Why doesn’t he just tell the truth, which is that the man next to him is a stranger? It would make things awkward for a while, but surely they’ll get past it? Is it so rude or unusual to forget somebody from long ago? But something in the way Canning relates to him makes Adam hold back; he senses that his admission might matter more than he thinks.

Canning says, ‘It’s strange, isn’t it, Nappy? How years can go by and then you see somebody and it’s as if no time has passed? I feel as if we’re continuing an old conversation.’

‘Yes,’ Adam says.

‘Now tell me everything. I want to know all about your life.’

‘There isn’t a lot to tell.’ And as he speaks it aloud, he can hear for himself how little there is: two years in the army. Four years of university. Then the same job for twenty years, until the recent upheaval. All of it had felt so rich and elaborate and heavy while he was living through it, but when he looks back, half a lifetime seems very insubstantial.

‘And what about you?’ he asks when he’s finished. ‘What’ve you done since school?’

‘Well, I struggled, Nappy. I had a very hard time. I was also in the army, but I was G3K3–unfit for combat, you know. I was much fatter then, as you remember. Also, I had asthma. So I had an office job up in Pretoria. While I was there I met somebody I went into partnership with. We started up a business, importing and supplying chemicals. My partner left after a while, but I stuck with it. A real battle. I got married along the way, to a girl who worked in the office. Had a child with her. But that’s all over now.’

Adam ponders all this. The new car and clothes, Canning’s bravura air: it doesn’t seem to fit with the image of a chemical salesman. He asks cautiously, ‘So are you still in the chemical business…?’

‘Oh, no, no!’ Canning laughs loudly. ‘Everything’s changed for me, Nappy. My whole life has turned upside down. You’ll see what I mean, in just a little while.’

They have driven much further than Adam expected; the town is far behind them by now. The mountains are very big and close, blocking out the sky. It’s like rushing in insulated comfort towards a solid wall. The new pass is visible, high up. As they approach the toll booth at the bottom, Canning slows down. He points to the peculiar little village next to the road that Adam had seen the other day, with its mixture of poverty and pretension, and says, ‘I built that.’

‘
You
did?’

‘Well, not me personally, of course. But I donated the land, I put up the money.’

‘Really? But why?’

‘To head off a land claim. The people who’re living here say they were chased off one of my father’s farms. They agreed to drop the claim in exchange for the
Nuwe Hoop
settlement. I gave them the land, I built the houses for nothing.’ Canning relates all this off-handedly, as if he’s used to carrying out big schemes in a casual way. But then he goes on in a different voice, more confiding and calculating: ‘Of course I got the better deal. No more land claim to hassle with. Cheap labour on tap to build the pass. And I’ll be using them in my future plans too.’

‘Is it your company that built the pass? Liberty Vision?’

‘It belongs to a friend of mine, actually.’ Canning shoots him a sideways look. ‘Do you know Mr Genov? No? A marvellous man. An entrepreneur and a visionary. Don’t believe what you’ve heard about him–he’s had a bad press.’ He has turned off the main road and is driving on a dirt track past the odd, anomalous shapes of the
Nuwe Hoop
settlement. ‘Because of him…and me too, of course…these people have done very well. Partnership between big business and the previously disadvantaged–it’s a new South African solution.’