The Impostor Read Online Free PDF

the minute scrabbling of a beetle among grains of sand. Human events were elsewhere. In Johannesburg or Cape Town, there was a sense of turmoil and ferment; South Africa’s big change was evident and tangible. But not here. Here the way things were seemed inevitable and natural, as preordained as the weather. There was the old racial division, all the whites on one side of the river, in their spacious and expensive properties, and all the coloureds on the other side, in the township, in their crowded little houses between pot-holed, neglected streets. Two or three times a day there would be a knock on Adam’s front door and it would be somebody looking for work. There was deference and desperation in the way they appealed to him, the men holding their hats in their hands and the women avoiding his eyes. He felt a curious mixture of pity and anger towards them. Couldn’t they see that he had nothing to offer, that he had lost control of his own destiny too, that his future was up to fate?

    One night he went down to the hotel in town, the place where Gavin and Charmaine had stayed. He’d seen the bar in passing and remembered it, and now the thought had come to him that he might go down there, have a beer, maybe chat to a couple of people.
    It was almost empty. Five or six customers at most, not counting Fanie Prinsloo. The meaty ex-rugby player welcomed Adam loudly. But his heartiness was close to aggression, and the assortment of rugby jerseys hanging on the wall, amongst tarnished trophies and faded team photographs, were like the flags of a club that had refused membership to Adam.
    After he’d set down his beer, Fanie Prinsloo said, ‘So, Alan. What is it you do?’
    ‘Adam.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘My name is Adam. I write poetry.’
    A gaunt older woman with a leathery face leaned towards him. ‘I didn’t catch that. You do pottery?’
    ‘No, no. Poems. I write poems.’
    Silence descended on the room, while Fanie Prinsloo flipped through channels on the television in the corner.
    A thin man with glasses asked, ‘You make a good living out of that?’
    ‘Um, no, not really.’
    ‘Didn’t think so,’ the man said.
    The leathery woman leaned in again. ‘Where do you come from?’
    ‘Jo’burg. Well, more recently, Cape Town. I’m new here. I arrived a couple of weeks ago.’
    ‘You know where he’s staying?’ Fanie Prinsloo said. ‘He’s staying in that old vrot place up the hill, with all the dead weeds outside.’
    Somebody whistled and somebody else laughed.
    ‘That place?’ the thin man said. ‘You not scared, living in that place?’
    ‘No, why should I be?’
    ‘I’ve seen lights moving around in there. In the night-time.’
    ‘No, that’s me,’ Adam said. ‘I light a candle sometimes at night. To keep me company.’
    ‘You should clean that place up, man,’ Fanie Prinsloo told him. ‘Get those weeds out the back.’
    ‘Yes, I plan to.’
    ‘Get a boy to do it. Hire yourself a couple of boys.’
    The thin man asked him, ‘So how do you like it so far, living up here?’
    ‘It’s all right. A big change from the city.’
    The older woman shifted closer. Adam saw that she had a glass eye, which he hadn’t noticed till now. The half-dead stare unnerved him, as she told him, slurring just a little: ‘I’ve lived here my whole life. I was born here. This was always a quiet place. Now they’ve made this fancy tar road that goes past. They’ve made a pass that goes across the mountains. The traffic that goes through now! It’s ten times what it used to be.’
    ‘Twenty,’ the thin man said.
    There seemed to be general agreement on this, though Adam couldn’t work out whether they liked the traffic or not. Then a little dried-up man with ginger hair, who hadn’t spoken till now, suddenly declared shrilly, ‘There are prostitutes now. Girls from the township sell themselves up there, along the new road. To the truck drivers going through. There didn’t used to be trucks. There