Free The Impostor by Damon Galgut

recognizes this fact when his tone changes suddenly, from pride to panic:
    ‘I love my wife, Nappy. I love her very badly! I don’t want to give her up.’
    Afterwards, when Adam remembers this conversation, it is that one word, ‘badly’, which stands out for him. How can you love somebody badly ? But he says, in a soothing voice, ‘You don’t have to give her up, do you?’
    Canning is sunk in gloom now, as if the twilight has affected him. But then his mood switches again. ‘Come with me,’ he says. ‘There’s something special I want to show you.’
    The light is fading as they go back out onto the lawn. Adam looks, but Baby has disappeared. Canning leads him away from the complex, in the direction of the river. They pass in silence through concentric rings of cultivation that radiate outwards, each one a little wilder and more unkempt than the last. There is an orchard, and below that an open field, churned-up and broken, in which nothing has been planted. Then a wall of trees goes up, complex and knotted, lush with the proximity to water. Along the way, Adam sees the greeny-blue, outrageous shapes of peacocks everywhere.
    ‘What is it with the birds?’
    ‘My father had a thing for them. He started out with two, but they kept multiplying.’
    ‘Your father built this place, then?’
    Canning doesn’t answer. It’s almost dark, and Adam doesn’t want to go into the forest. But Canning takes him along the edge of the trees, to the top of a high bank, which looks down on a large, sunken pit, enclosed by a wall. An arena of some kind. They stand, looking down into gloomy vegetable growth. A smell rises to them, rank and unfathomable.
    ‘This was going to be the swimming pool,’ Canning says. ‘But it’s been put to another use in the meantime. How about that?’
    ‘What?’
    But then he sees it. Or rather: he sees the eyes. They are luminous and yellow, apparently disembodied, as if the undergrowth is gazing at him. He takes a step back.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says. ‘Is that…?’
    Yes, it is. He can see the body now, behind the glowing stare. He has an involuntary urge to run, but he holds himself in place.
    Canning says smugly, ‘It’s a lion. My father’s little pet.’
    ‘But why is it here?’
    ‘He wasn’t going to keep it here. Not permanently. There was a whole family, a what do you call it, a pride of them that were going to be let loose out there.’ He gestures at the surrounding dimness. ‘This is the last one.’
    ‘What happened to the others?’
    ‘I sold them,’ Canning says. ‘To hunters and circuses. I’ll get rid of this one too, eventually. But it’s kind of fun to keep him in the meantime.’
    At this moment two workers appear, wearing the same khaki uniforms as the guard at the gate. They are carrying between them a dripping sack, which they drag to the edge of the enclosure. Below them, in the crepuscular blue, the lion has started to pace: back and forth, up and down, a restless power with nowhere to go. The workers look across at Canning. He makes a lazy gesture of assent, like a Roman emperor at a circus. The workers lift their sack and tip it, and into the pit there tumbles a slurry of red meat and bones–the carcass, whatever it is, that Adam saw in the back of the bakkie this morning.
    The lion doesn’t approach immediately. It continues its pacing, stopping every now and then to look balefully up at the two spectators. The workers fold up their sack and leave. It is all inexplicable: Adam is surrounded by a mystery, which seems to centre on the odd man standing next to him, sipping loudly on his blue cocktail. He feels as if he’s fallen through a hole into another world.
    ‘I don’t understand,’ he says.
    ‘What?’
    ‘This. This whole place.’ He gestures at what’s around them.
    ‘Ah.’ Canning takes him literally. ‘It’s a bit of a geographical freak. Something to do with the mountains, a sort of micro-climate in the kloof , volcanic