Free The Impostor by Damon Galgut Page B

expression doesn’t change. As if she’s answering his question, and perhaps she is, she murmurs, ‘I hate it here.’
    ‘You’re not serious, are you?’
    ‘Of course I am. All this space. All this…wildness. They can cover it in cement as far as I’m concerned.’
    ‘But it’s beautiful ,’ he says.
    She gives a snorting laugh. ‘You look at it once and then what? There’s nothing to do here. It’s boring. Give me the city–the city’s what I like. Clubs and parties and people, something happening.’
    ‘I moved here to get away from the city.’
    She is watching him now with a faint interest. ‘What do you do?’
    ‘Me? I’m a poet.’
    ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but what do you do ? What’s your job?’
    ‘That is my job,’ he says, all his self-doubt rising into his throat, making his voice go squeaky.
    The interest fades in her face; she glances away. ‘That must be why you like it here.’
    ‘This is an incredible place,’ he says quietly. Despite himself, he speaks with real feeling, and part of it is an obscure anger towards her. ‘It reminds me…this will sound stupid, but it reminds me of being a boy. The area I grew up in was like this. Green and intense, like life that can’t be squashed down.’
    She gives a little toss of her head, and it’s as if she’s shrugging him off. ‘I also grew up in the countryside,’ she says. ‘That didn’t make me love it.’
    He has started actively to dislike her. He doesn’t speak for a moment, then he asks, ‘Where did you live?’
    ‘Oh…in a lot of places. We moved around.’
    ‘But where? Which part of the country?’
    ‘Small towns. All over.’ She sounds half-asleep and thoroughly bored with the conversation. ‘I saw enough of nature when I was small. It’s just things trying to get bigger, things screwing and eating each other. Don’t talk to me about nature.’
    Canning suddenly emerges from the house in a loud, illogical flurry. ‘Where are you two? Ah, yes, over there. Have you been getting better acquainted? That’s good. You’re my two favourite people on the planet, I want you to like each other. But come over to the fire, it’ll be time to put the meat on soon. Great to have you here, Nappy.’
    The old black man has disappeared, and the fire is an enticing point of light and heat. As Adam steps down from the stoep behind Canning, he looks back to where Baby is sitting unmoving on the railing, but his eye is caught by a flare of light in the sky. Against the glow, the row of peacocks on the roof is stamped out in strange silhouette.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says. ‘What is that?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘That light, way up there.’
    It wells up again, a spooky yellow blaze, like a god searching through the clouds with a torch.
    ‘Cars going through the pass,’ Canning says flatly. To his wife he calls plaintively, ‘Why don’t you come and join us?’
    Her only answer is to slide off the railing and disappear indoors without a backward glance.
    ‘Just leave her,’ Canning says to Adam, as if he’s the one who had spoken.
    They sit in deck-chairs, watching the flames burn down. The conversation leaps around in a fractured, disjointed way, from Canning’s father to Adam’s poetry to the farm. At only one point does their talk settle down to a steady topic for a while. This is when, after the fifth or sixth cocktail, Canning undergoes an odd transformation. He glares at Adam, then starts to lecture him in a high, nasal voice. ‘This is your final warning…six cuts for you next time…no, don’t grin at me, boy, I don’t want to see your teeth, do I look like a dentist to you?’
    Adam is so astounded that it takes him a few seconds to realize that Canning is doing an imitation–a surprisingly good one–of a teacher from long ago.
    ‘Mr Groenewald,’ Canning says. ‘Do you remember how we used to climb out of the window, one by one, whenever his back was turned…?’
    ‘Yes,’ Adam says, the memory coming