He stays the night again. In the morning, they are going through all the pleasantries of goodbye when Canning suddenly hits his forehead with his palm. ‘I almost forgot,’ he says. ‘I wanted to ask you a little favour. Would you be able to deliver a parcel for me in town? It’s just some papers, I’d do it myself, but I’m in a bit of a rush.’
‘No problem.’
‘Thanks, Nappy. You’re saving me a detour. Could you hang on just one moment?’
Adam is standing at the car and he watches a peacock make its stately way across the lawn while he waits. Every few steps it stops and flares its tail magnificently. The display seems to serve no purpose, except as a show of beauty. Adam approves: loveliness for its own sake is a worthy creed, he thinks. Yet he has not written a single poem since he got here.
Canning comes back out with a package. ‘The address is written on the front,’ he says. ‘Would you be able to deliver it tonight? I’ll make sure somebody’s waiting at, say, eight o’clock.’
‘Sure,’ Adam says, weighing the parcel in his hands. It’s compact but hefty, and it gives off a satisfying crinkling sound. ‘I don’t recognise this address.’
‘It’s in the township. Just go over the river and ask anybody for the street. And Adam – it’s important. Please look after it.’
‘Of course,’ Adam says, speaking in a casual tone to cover his anxiety. Making deliveries to the township, even out here in the countryside, isn’t in his normal ambit of activity, but he doesn’t want to say that to Canning.
‘We’ll be seeing you next weekend, I hope? Don’t wait for Saturday. Come on Friday – stay the weekend. You’re part of the family now.’
He thinks about that on the drive home. The family: Canning’s little circle. He’s beginning to have an inkling of what that might involve. With his black wife and his multi-racial business associates, Canning’s repeated claims to be a new South African man are starting to look less hollow than before. It’s Adam, by contrast, who feels a little outside events, a little superfluous.
He wonders what the parcel might contain. Papers, Canning had said; but papers dealing with what? There is some kind of money-making scheme afoot, that much is clear. He supposes that it has to do with the game farm, with getting it started again, now that Canning’s father is dead. That can’t be a simple process, Adam imagines, though what it entails he wouldn’t know. The world of business, of money and power: it has always been a mystery to him. It’s a part of life he’s never felt equipped to understand. No, he was made for simpler, leaner things, though he can’t quite decide what they are.
At eight that night he drives across the bridge to the other side of the river. Though he sees the township off in the distance every day, this is the first time he’s actually been there. Nevertheless, the tiny houses, the burnt-out, scrappy gardens, the pot-holed roads and sputtering streetlamps: it’s all known, all familiar. He has thought of it as far milder than the townships in the city; a place without danger. But as he noses slowly along, trying to find a street name, he notices a few groups of carousing drunk men. His car is a minor event; people stare at him as he passes and somebody yells out wordlessly at him. Sunday night in the country, after a weekend of hard revels: this is a task perhaps better left till daylight.
He is on the verge of turning around and heading home, when he passes a woman walking on her own. He stops and asks her the way. Yes, that is Smit street, that one over there, she tells him; and he’s no sooner in the street than he finds the house he’s looking for. It’s a neater, bigger place than the houses nearby, with the start of a good garden around it. He parks outside and hurries in. The door is opened almost immediately to his knock by a youngish man who looks vaguely familiar. They shake hands, and the man says, ‘How are you,’ in a nervous, friendly way.
‘I was asked to bring this to you. Mr Canning, from the game farm...’
‘Come inside for a minute.’
He steps into a murky front room. He can see another room beyond, where a woman and a child are watching television. The young man closes the interleading door, then returns expectantly.
‘Thank you,’ he says, as Adam gives him the parcel. He holds it away from him, with the tips of his fingers, as if it might dirty him. Then they stand in uncomfortable proximity, as though waiting for something meaningful to happen. The atmosphere is not quite hostile, but it isn’t relaxed either; there’s a tension with no clear cause.
‘Well,’ Adam says. ‘I’d better be off.’
A voice from the television carries metallically through the door. The young man says to him, ‘The trees are still there.’
‘I beg your pardon...?’
‘The three aliens. In your front garden. I noticed the other day, as I went past. They’re still there.’
Adam stares at him in astonishment. And suddenly understands. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he says. ‘I didn’t realize.’
The young man nods, although he also looks surprised. ‘Who did you think it was?’ he says. ‘How is the poetry coming along?’
The short drive back to the other side of town feels inordinately long. Something about the encounter he’s just had stays with Adam, perturbing him. It’s as if an object at the edge of a room, which he’s noticed unconsciously out the corner of his eye, has been removed when his head was turned. A tiny displacement, almost indiscernible, but enough to nag at his mind. The phone is ringing as he comes through the front door and when he picks it up, Canning’s voice says immediately, ‘Is it done?’
‘Yes, I’ve just come in.’
‘Ah, good man, yes, good.’ It’s only now, when his voice softens, that Adam recognises how peremptory that initial tone had been. ‘You’re a real friend, Nappy. One in a million.’
‘That was the mayor,’ he says.
‘Um, yes,’ Canning says, sounding guarded again. ‘So what?’
‘Nothing. Just... you hadn’t mentioned it was the mayor.’
‘Didn’t I tell you that? I should’ve mentioned it. Well, thanks a lot, Nappy, it means a lot to me that you did that. Will we see you on Friday?’
‘See you on Friday,’ he says.
*
Before Friday comes, he sits down at his desk. What impulse takes him there he doesn’t know; he hasn’t attempted poetry in weeks. But he has no sooner placed himself than the words begin to fall out of him – words pressured by some nameless internal sensation rising volcanically at his core. In a couple of hours he is looking down at his first complete poem in half a lifetime.
Other poems follow on. Over the next few days the same feeling carries him back to the page. It’s as if he is giving voice to unspoken words that have piled up dangerously inside. Sometimes he can experience them almost physically: word stacked on word, like bricks laid in rows, walling off his mouth.
Now that they’ve been released, these words take on a life of their own. He hears them as a rustling, a seamless susurration at the very edge of things. At first, particular sentences, specific meanings, don’t stand out. He thinks of them as the leftover scurf of human talk, everything that has ever been said, moving in endless waves through the universe, unable to die.
In time the words become grafted onto the presence in the house, which still drifts in and out erratically. He senses it most acutely at night, when the world shrinks to the size of a few connected rooms. It has never felt menacing or malicious, this presence, and its occasional nearness is company for him. He still talks to it in a half-real, half-fanciful way. But now its replies take on a tone and volition of their own.
My, my, it says, reading over his shoulder. Looks like the real thing.
‘Well, I am a poet.’
I was beginning to have my doubts about that.
‘Oh, I was collecting myself. You can’t just snap into it after such a long break.’
Yes, I see. But I’m surprised. I would never have thought of you as such a hot type.
‘Hot?’
Mmm. Such a would-be lover boy.
‘I really don’t know what you mean.’
But when he reads the poems again, he does understand. He’s been so caught up with rediscovering his gift that what the words are saying is almost secondary. But of course they have a subject; of course they have a theme. It wasn’t immediately apparent, not even to him, but now that it’s been pointed out, he sees it right away.
He’s been writing about her – about Baby. More specifically, he’s been writing about his longing for her. Not as a would-be lover, that part is nonsense, but with a sort of metaphysical yearning. Until now, he’s been trying to write poems about the wilderness, a world empty of people, while all the time he’s needed a human being to focus on. And here at last she is, intervening between him and the landscape – not an identifiable person, but an emblematic female figure, seen against the backdrop of a primal, primitive garden. All of it is very biblical.
The poems have also broken the mould of his first collection in other ways. Part of what’s been hindering him is an obsession with the metre and rhyme – the mechanics of the exercise. Instead, now that he has a real subject, what’s poured forth is in free verse, a spontaneous explosion of language in which the technicalities of form are subservient to his passion. This is right and proper and obvious: the way it should be. Yet there is also something wanton and uncontained about it, something abandoned, which makes him slightly ashamed. It would be all right for an adolescent, but he’s middle-aged, supposedly past all that looseness of feeling.
After a bit of hesitation, he tells Baby about the poems the next weekend. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting or wanting from her, but she only stares coolly back at him.
‘Poems? About me?’
‘Well, not you exactly. But somebody like you. Or no – what am I saying? It is you, but a heightened aspect of you. A dream-you, if you know what I mean.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
They are sitting outside in the shade on a pair of fold-out chairs. It’s the Saturday afternoon, and Canning has withdrawn into the lodge to make a conference call. Once again he has asked Adam to occupy himself with Baby, and Adam is happy to oblige.
‘You’re like a kind of muse,’ he tells her now.
‘A what?’
He starts backing off, feeling oddly hurt by her bemusement. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ he mumbles. ‘They’re just scribblings.’
‘I don’t really know about poetry,’ she says, looking away.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says again.
‘Kenneth showed me your other poems. Your book. He read some of them to me. That was some time ago, before I met you. But I didn’t understand them.’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I don’t understand them myself.’
He changes the subject and their talk moves on to other, less dangerous things. But the exchange stays with him, giving him both pleasure and pang when he thinks back on it. He feels a little further away from her, a little colder, but also a little closer and warmer towards her husband. Had Canning really done that – read his words aloud to her when Adam wasn’t around?
Nevertheless, he doesn’t mention the poems to Canning.