The Impostor (14 page)

‘I asked my one question,’ he says. ‘You didn’t answer.’

‘Any
other
question.’

‘No. That’s the one.’

Without looking at him, her voice blank, she says, ‘Because I fell in love with him.’

‘That isn’t true.’

She laughs at him–a gutsy sound with the rattle of cruelty in it. She’s halfway through putting on her lipstick and there’s a bright red smear across her teeth. ‘Are you jealous?’ she says. ‘You poor baby. He’s my husband.’

‘Come on, you don’t even notice him. You hardly touch him.’

‘Not in public. But we have our moments.’

‘That’s not what he says. He told me you never fuck any more.’ The word splats rudely onto the floor between them; he has spoken on impulse, from a sudden upwelling of envy. He is almost instantly sorry, but she only laughs again.

‘Do you believe that?’ she says.

‘Why would he lie about it?’

‘Kenneth is very dramatic. He exaggerates everything, in a good or a bad way. Haven’t you noticed that?’

‘There’s no sexy spark between the two of you,’ he says. ‘You can’t fool me, it’s obvious. You’re more like brother and sister.’

She considers this seriously, before telling him: ‘There’s a lot of love possible between a brother and a sister. I owe Kenneth a lot. I won’t forget what he’s done for me.’

‘What has he done for you?’

‘I’ve got a good life now, Adam. It didn’t used to be like this.’

‘How did it used to be?’

He has asked too urgently; her face seals against him. They have come full circle by now. ‘Always questioning,’ she says coldly. ‘Always digging. Can’t you just be happy with what you’ve got right now?’

‘No. I want a future as well.’

‘What kind of future can you offer me?’

The question silences him, with its thin edge of sarcasm and its underlying truth. He can offer her nothing. His bank account has dwindled to four figures now; his back yard is still full of weeds. Yet he burns with an adolescent rage to be driving with her on an open road somewhere, the rejected past behind them, an unknown destiny ahead.

‘Is it so important?’ he says at last. ‘To have money? To have…
things
?’

‘It’s everything,’ she answers simply.

‘Not for me,’ he says. ‘To hell with that.’

He is angry, and he means it. To hell with the pair of them, and their brother-sister love; to hell with their money and their golf course!

‘You talk about the future,’ he tells her, ‘as if I mean something to you. But all along, you and he have been planning to sell this place, after you’ve finished wrecking it. I’m just a diversion for you, a pastime. I don’t matter to you.’

‘You do matter,’ she says. ‘But of course this won’t last. What did you think? It’s childish to believe the world stands still, when all the time it’s turning and turning.’

‘Leave him,’ he says suddenly, surprised by his own intensity. ‘Leave him and come live with me.’

She freezes in the act of putting on a shoe and looks at him with interest for a moment. ‘Don’t be crazy,’ she says quietly. ‘I’ll never do that. Don’t start dreaming things that can’t happen.’

‘They
can
happen,’ he says. ‘If you want them to. We have a pretty explosive time in here. It could be like this every day, for the rest of our lives.’

As he says the words, he hears how raw and callow they are. What is he going on about? He doesn’t
want
to be with her for the rest of their lives; he doesn’t even want to be with her for a few hours. What happens between them is powerful precisely because it is hurried and secret. Living in drab semi-poverty together, one day following on another, he suspects they would start to loathe each other very quickly. They can only conduct this business in little sequestered interludes, where they seem to strike each other at angles, generating fire.

She has both shoes on now. She bends to kiss him on the forehead, a chaste, ironic contact. ‘See you in the real world,’ she says. He watches her peer through the crack of the door, one way, then the other way, before slipping out. After which he lies naked on the bed for a long time, while the room goes cool.

He remembers this as one seamless event. But in fact it’s made of little pieces from various afternoons.

The next time he’ll see her is when he’s back at the lodge, in his clothes and in his other role, as Canning’s friend and confidant. Then he and Baby are formal and distant with each other again; there is no frivolity and flirting. He has tried to push the limits, tried to catch her eye, or in other ways endorse their private intimacy. But she doesn’t respond and in time he has learned to play his part completely. His life, it sometimes seems, has become arranged in a series of compartments. None of his various incarnations feels like the real, the true Adam; yet each of them is true in its own way.

He is surprised at how easily all this comes to him. He has a gift for duplicity. The mystery isn’t in how hard betrayal is, but how simple. It requires no special skills. Betrayal is natural, like an extension of his character–which, disturbingly, perhaps it is.

And it only gets easier. Everything becomes a habit. Habit is what you do without thinking, and nothing is exempt from deadening repetition. Even murder, he realizes, could become a habit. The first time might be difficult, but after that you were just repeating something you’d already done. Each subsequent occasion would be easier, until you could stand among piles of corpses and dream up lines of poetry.

Yet he does feel guilt. It still comes over him in a nauseating rush sometimes when he’s alone in town. Then he looks back on his other selves with a mixture of horror and amazement.
That was me
, he thinks.
I spoke that word, I made that gesture
. He is tormented by what he remembers and frequently resolves to break it off–never go back there, never see the pair of them again. And the resolution is very clear, very final, until the weekend comes. Then the self-disgust turns inside out, and becomes that heady mix of dread and desire again, bolstered by all sorts of petty rationalizations; and before he knows it, he is driving down that familiar road.

He longs to tell somebody about it. There is no point in telling, yet the yearning is strong. But there is nobody he can talk to. His brother would only scoff or judge, and he has tried the blue man next door, without success. He has no other friends left. Except for one.

It is a symptom of the impasse his life has reached that Canning is perhaps the only person he could really turn to. And there have been a couple of extreme moments when confession has been just there, like an inedible shape in his mouth, wanting to come out. It would be so easy to speak the words. A simple sentence would do it–truth, then all the ugliness to follow. But even the ugliness would be freedom and release; from them, and more especially from himself. All of it over and done, no going back.

It occurs to him that Canning might know already. Adam studies him carefully, but his innocence seems unfeigned. Though there are some unnerving moments. Once Canning asks him, with aggressive cheerfulness, whether he has anybody in his life.

‘You mean a romantic involvement? No, nothing like that.’

‘Why not? Don’t you get lonely?’

‘Sure. But I’m not really cut out for that sort of thing.’

‘I used to feel like that, even when I was married. The first time, I mean. But when Baby came along, everything changed. It was like finding the missing half of me.’

Adam only nods; he can’t bring himself to speak. And his discomfort verges on torture when Canning shifts closer and adds confidingly:

‘I want you to be happy like I am. I want you to have somebody like Baby to keep you company too.’

He looks sharply at Canning, but his moon-face is full of tender solicitude.

13

The earth is tilting into winter; the days are shorter, lopped off at each end, and a hard, cold quality has come into the light. At night he sleeps with the windows closed and sometimes he wakes to a pale furring of frost on the ground.

The poems have frozen in him too. At first it had seemed like a natural caesura, on the far side of which the words would simply resume. His attention, in any case, is elsewhere, so that months go by before the obvious truth becomes apparent: he has not written a single line since his affair with Baby began.

The moment he’s aware of it, the knowledge starts to hurt him, like the tip of a blade broken off in his flesh. It makes perfect sense, of course, that longing would give rise to poetry; as soon as longing is satisfied, the poems will die. How to go back to where he was? Especially when every instinct, every animal appetite in him, is wanting to press forward, towards some unattainable ideal. In his clearer moments he knows he should drop this thing, he should leave this place and her; yet he also knows that such retreat is beyond him.

It’ll end anyway. Better to do it yourself now
.

‘Why will it end? Why can’t it go on like this?’

Don’t be such a schoolboy. She’s already bored with you, can’t you see it?

‘What do you know? You’re not even real.’

Oh, you’re so cruel
.

To quell the inner voice, to lay the poems to rest, he takes up his battle with the weeds again. It’s been months since he’s gone out there, and the green strip at the top of the yard is now as high as his waist. But the plants are soft and pulpy, and when he wets the ground it gives up its grip without a fight. After only a day he has cleared the new weeds out and then he is back with the brown battalions behind.

It becomes–during the week–his single, obsessive preoccupation. Each day he goes a little further, pushing back the frontier another few steps. He uncovers all sorts of objects, lost or abandoned in the weeds. A plastic doll, a tattered parasol. Bits and pieces of an engine. He piles them up near the house, like old artefacts recovered from the sea-bed. He keeps at it–this lonely, self-appointed labour–even though there is nobody to judge or praise him, and there will be no reward when he’s done.

He asks Baby one day, ‘What would Canning do if he found out?’

‘About us?’ She thinks for a moment. ‘I don’t know. Collapse and cry, probably.’

‘He wouldn’t shoot us or something?’

‘I don’t think so. He’s too weak for that. He might shoot himself, I suppose.’

They are lying on the bed in the cottage with a blanket over them. Although it is the middle of the day, a blue-green twilight presses on the window; that morning the first rain of winter has fallen. He has become so used to the aridity and dryness that this change of season is like a change of locale: he feels alone with her in some remote northern fastness, with arctic bleakness encircling the house. It’s from this sense of false solitude, and the shared warmth between them, that he slides in behind her, taking hold of one of her breasts in an idle, possessive way, while he murmurs into her ear, ‘If he shot himself, we’d be able to do this every day. For the rest of our lives.’ He feels her tense against him and adds quickly, in a different voice, ‘I don’t want him to do it, of course.’

‘Sometimes I do.’

He raises himself on one elbow to look at her. There is a long silence between them, and a sudden contraction, a clarity. ‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Yes, I do. He’s a nobody.’ When he starts to shake his head, she goes on: ‘It’s the truth. What would he be if his daddy hadn’t left him the farm?’

‘He’s not a bad person.’

‘No. He’s just a nothing. Which is worse.’

His protest is really a form of agreement; he’s excited by the dark scenario he’s drawing out of her. ‘That’s his luck,’ he says.

‘Luck? Or chance?’

‘I don’t see the difference.’

‘Oh, they’re different. Of course they are.’ She pulls away from him a little in the encircling hold of his arms and he pulls her back. ‘It’s just chance, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘That he’s in his place, you’re in yours. It could just as easily be different.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Yes, you do. It could’ve been you in Kenneth’s place. Just think.’

‘Right now,’ he says smugly, ‘I
am
in Kenneth’s place.’

And it’s true. But then he considers what she actually means. She means the farm, the golf course, the money, the potential that all these open up. To truly be in Canning’s place, he has to own Canning’s future.

‘You know what I think sometimes?’ she whispers, her lips grazing his ear. ‘It’s like a fantasy I have. I imagine if something had to happen to Kenneth. Like an accident. Chance, accident, it’s the same thing, really. Accidents happen all the time.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Well, you know. A rock fall. A car crash. Somebody goes missing in the mountains. It could easily happen. The farm is a wild place. I think how it would be if Kenneth had to die suddenly. By chance. How different everything would be afterwards.’ She giggles suddenly, pressing her face into his neck. ‘I’m terrible, aren’t I?’

He can’t answer. It’s as if something has been offered to him, something glistening and beautiful and dangerous, which he has only to reach out and accept. This is his moment; she has told him, without quite saying the words, that she wants to spend her life with him, if he will just do one little thing to make it possible. But he shifts away from her on the bed, and a gust of cold air comes under the blanket.

‘Of course,’ she says, her tone becoming brusque, ‘I don’t wish anything bad on my husband.’

He keeps coming back to this conversation afterwards, alone at home. Did she mean what he thought she did? But of course she meant it; of course she wished something bad on her husband. Even to consider it raises the temperature in his brain. He’s not weighing it up–not seriously. He’s not capable of murder. But what he might be capable of is inaction; of standing by and letting fate takes its course.

To cool his head he goes out into the yard and hacks viciously at the weeds. But sweat and blisters and a pounding pulse don’t calm him down today. The memory that keeps coming to him is of Canning on the rock face that afternoon above the river–the moment when he’d slipped and he, Adam, had put out a hand to save him. But what if he
hadn’t
put out his hand? What then? Even at the time, Adam had had a vivid sense of a dreamlike other future branching off. If Canning had fallen and died, he would have left behind a blank place, an absence, into which Adam could have stepped.

When Baby had spoken about that possibility, she’d tried to entice him with the notion of wealth. He would have the land, the development, the great prosperity ahead. But none of that matters to him. What he wants is Baby herself–to have her and keep her. He wants her with a painful, restless longing that churns in him. And why not? It isn’t fair, it isn’t just: that she should be married to a man like Canning–a small, sad sketch of a man, who is in his position not through hard work or brilliance, but through an arbitrary turn of fate. Baby’s right; everything is chance. Accident, luck, random collisions. One thing makes another, forming ultimately into a design that seems inevitable. But if a single event in the chain happens differently, or doesn’t happen at all, what follows on will be different too.

And yet–his mind does touch on the idea now, but tentatively, fearfully–the future can be changed. Fate can be moulded by the will. A slip, an accident, a misstep on the rock face, and Canning will be gone. And then the immutable design will alter.

Such a small thing. So tiny. One little death in a dusty corner of the world. People are slaughtered in their thousands, all over the planet, every day; the history of the human race is a history of carnage. Murder, not progress, is the great enduring truth, and we shrink from it not in virtue, but in weakness. If we were stronger, if we were
honest
, we would look that truth in the eye. So much blood, a river of it, endlessly flowing: what are a few drops more? What does another death matter?

He recoils from his own mind in alarm. The voice that has been playing in his head is not his own; it belongs to the serpent in the garden. But it continues to whisper, a soft echo at the edge of his brain, even after he throws down the pick and goes back indoors to clean up.

Kind of tempting, isn’t it?

‘Not at all. What do you take me for?’

A lover. Don’t poets kill for love?

‘No, you stupid bastard, they
die
for love. Not the same thing at all.’

Still, it’s on your mind. I’m surprised at you, I must admit. And impressed. I didn’t think you had it in you
.

‘It’s not like that,’ he says hotly. ‘I’m reflecting on things. Philosophically.’

Ah. Philosophically.

‘I could never actually…’

And is that weakness or strength?

‘Leave me alone! Go away.’

Laughter, a low, hissing sound, maybe only the wind coming under the door.

But on his next visit to Gondwana, fate presents him with a chance. He’s with Canning down at the lion enclosure for the evening feeding session. The carcass has been tipped over the wall; the khaki-coloured workers have withdrawn; the yellow eyes are pacing back and forth in the gloom. But something isn’t right–a chunk of bloody meat has got stuck on the way down, hooked to a bush on the bank. Canning makes an exclamation of irritation and hands his blue cocktail to Adam. ‘Hold onto this a moment, won’t you,’ he says.

Then Adam is watching the soles of Canning’s shoes as he leans over the top of the enclosure, struggling with a branch to get the piece of meat loose. He makes little grunting sounds of effort and frustration. He is like a precarious weight tilting back and forth on a fulcrum; just one slight misjudgement and he will slide the wrong way, down to the hungry mouth below. And Adam behind him, a glass in each hand like the scales of justice, weighs up a balance of his own.

Go on. It’s so easy. Been handed to you on a plate.

‘No.’

Just a little push. That’s all you have to do. One little push and the rest of your life will be different.

‘I can’t.’

What’re you afraid of? Nobody will ever know. A tragic accident, not your fault at all.

‘No, I said! Go away!’

‘I can’t reach it,’ Canning says, sliding back this way, his face suffused with blood. ‘What were you saying to me? I couldn’t hear properly.’

‘Nothing. I’m just talking to myself.’

‘Are you all right? Your voice sounds funny.’

‘Yes, I’m okay. Just feeling a bit light-headed.’

‘Let’s go up to the house, shall we? It’s getting too dark to see.’

On the way back, a violent trembling thrums through Adam; he drops the glass on the lawn. It doesn’t break, but it’s as if something inside him has shattered, leaking out its contents, all bright and blue and toxic, onto the grass.

The next day, when he’s alone with her at the cottage, he tells her, ‘I can’t do it. What we talked about last time. I’ve thought about it, but it’s just not possible for me.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she says coldly.

‘I can’t do anything to Canning. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.’

‘I didn’t ask you to do anything. It was just talk, nothing serious. A little game.’

‘Yes,’ he says miserably, ‘a little game.’ But the mood that has opened between them has nothing playful in it; they are both grim and sober and intent. Not long afterwards she makes an excuse and leaves, though they have–for the first time–gone nowhere near the bed.