The Inside Out Man

by Fred Strydom

  So, would I play the rich man for a year, stay in a mansion with the owner locked in a room, hoping to go mad—all just for kicks? This bored and wealthy man, desperate for the one thing his money couldn’t buy—a bit of perspective?

  I wasn’t sure. My initial urge was to scrap the offer entirely, tell Fry to go to hell, and slink back into my life. I’d write the weekend off one bottle and gig and blanket-tossing night at a time. He was just another man with too much money. That was it. He couldn’t be serious. Playing a game. Testing me. With no intention of doing anything remotely so ludicrous. But the longer I drove, the more I felt there was something else. Sensed it in the dark part of my mind. A curious little hum. Not even a whisper yet. Just the idea of a whisper, the thought of a thought of a thought, and it went like this:

  What. If.

  I drove on through the dark countryside, thinking about my dream—and that big black thing behind the old man. That abomination, struggling to fit inside that hallway, growing larger and slimier with each passing moment, sliding up the walls, suffering in the prison of its own existence.

  Leonard was right about that mansion.

  There was something wrong there. I could feel it. I couldn’t say what it was, exactly, but somehow it had got inside my head. Added that dead woman to the painting in the hallway. Turned Leonard into a raving, unhinged madman. I turned off, onto the highway, and before me lay the glowing orange embers of the city. I drove on—chug, chug, chug, splutter—as if crawling my way out of a deep sleep.

  24.

  After those rooms with their high ceilings and all the paintings and fancy things, my apartment seemed small and dark, filled with broken toys. I threw my laundry in the hamper and packed my toiletries into the bathroom cabinet. It was a little after ten when I climbed into bed, but I struggled to get to sleep. I wasn’t tired. I’d felt exhausted earlier in the day, but the tiredness had evaporated. My senses were charged. My eyes were wide as moons. I could smell the steaming shit of the street. I could hear every skitter through the walls—kitta-kitta-kitta-kit-kit. The fridge, mumbling to itself. The wall clock, ticking incessantly, counting down to its eventual end.

  That, and the end of everything else.

  I retraced recent events all the way to the moment I’d met Leonard in the bar. I sifted through our opening chat for anything I may have missed. The winks. The nudges. The way that smile moved around his face. And how could I forget the condescension? I say anyone who loses himself to money never really had much of a self to begin with. Over dinner, he’d claimed the opposite, that his money had led him from one dead end to another, and after all that spending he was barely able to recognise himself in the mirror.

  I turned my pillow around and dropped my head on the puffed-out cold side. It felt like a new pillow for about a minute and then the feeling was gone. The same old pillow and the same old bed and the same old me. Pushing the blanket down to my waist, I turned on my side. There was nothing outside the window. Just darkness. No moon, no stars, just the endless black of night, as if I were in some rusty lunar module drifting through space.

  I needed to get out of that apartment. After all, there was no reason for me to stay. I had money now—more money than I’d ever dreamt of having in my bank account—and in the morning there’d be more, the remainder of my payment. So, what would I do with it? I could put down a deposit on a small house in the suburbs. Furnish it with the perfect sofa and the perfect curtains. The perfect closet full of big-brand clothing. Adorn the walls with stretched-canvas prints of mountains, buy a matching set of seashell towels and a TV the size of a highway billboard. That was one way to go about it. Then again, I could forget the future and blow it all, splurge on a few months in a five-star suite and grow accustomed to being pampered just in time to run out of money and return to this shitty life, none the wiser.

  How about travel? I could travel. People travel—they’re always going on about its pleasures, its benefits. Leonard had become disillusioned with travelling, but only because he’d done so much of it. I was a long way off from that—I’d barely been out of the city for longer than a few days at a time.

  Then again, I could go nowhere at all, stay right where I was, keep tossing and turning with the tick-tick-tick and mumble-mumble-mumble and thump-moan-thump against my walls.

  Or …

  I turned over, lay on my other side.

  I could take Leonard up on his offer. I could put off spending my two mill and try on his life—like a kid in his dad’s oversized shoes trying to see if he can cross the room without tripping. A trial run at a way of life most people will never get to experience. One year, and then he’d walk out the room, and we’d go our separate ways, right? That’s what he’d said. A chance to do things differently, to see things differently.

  A chance, he’d said, to flip our lives and be new again.

  Like the cold side of my pillow.

  25.

  The following day was peppered with several baffling moments.

  The first bout began with my weekend fee paid out in full. There they were, all those noughts on the screen, and yet I couldn’t think of a damn thing to do. It was an amount that gets noticed in bank accounts, so it was only a matter of time before the tax people turned up, forks and knives in the air, ready to feast. For now, though, the money was there, and I didn’t even take myself out for a fancy lunch somewhere to celebrate. I left every digit in its place, and went about my regular mundane business.

  The second baffling thing: I ended up having lunch in the last place a newly minted millionaire might find himself—a modest nook at the bottom of a run-down block of flats. A local dive where the old man who made savoury pancakes stood every day behind his counter. Even “modest” seems a generous description of his joint, with its two small tables, mismatched cutlery, and at the entrance, its shabby stack of magazines sticking out tattered tongues of gossip. Inevitably, the old Sicilian would approach with a smile and ask what you wanted as he wiped his hands down on his apron. Then he’d nod thoughtfully, and say, You know what, I’m waiting for delivery, so I can’t get you that, but—darting behind the counter, rummaging in his fridge, whipping out old Tupperware containers—I’ve got some avocaaaado here, some peppadews, the feta cheese … no, the goat’s cheese … and what’s this back here—rummage, rummage, rummage—olives! I’ve got olives. I make you this kind of pancake, yes? I promise, you eat this pancake I make, and you forget that one you think you want! And you’d say, Yes, sure, sounds good, because that’s how the guy rolled in his pancake nook—and all the locals knew it. That’s why anyone went there at all. It was like a restaurant run by a man who’d never been to a restaurant in his life.

  The only difference that particular afternoon was that the old man didn’t seem to recognise me. We’d never been on first-name terms, but I visited often enough to be singled out with: Long time, my old friend. How you been, where you been hiding? Keeping well? What you want today?

  For some reason, that afternoon there was no hint of recognition in his eyes, none of the usual welcoming comments, You just sit here, you tell me what you want—I make!

  I ate the pancake he prepared for me, waiting for a familiar quip, but it never came. Instead, he gave me my bill and said, You enjoy? Yes, of course you enjoy! You tell your friends, your family! You tell them this place you find! I put a big table out for all you! You come back! Now you know my home and you come back, yes? My new friend!

  The third baffling moment: that afternoon, I got a call from the manager at Van Hunks, asking if I was up for a gig. The pay wasn’t great, he added, and he knew it was last-minute, but he’d make it up. I told him not to worry about the pay, and agreed for no other reason than the chance to feel normal, if only for an hour or two.

  I turned up around six-thirty, downed a drink, and by seven, I was seated at the piano. The place was packed, but something was wrong. I never expect anyone to stop what they’re doing, to turn off their conversations and devote
themselves to my playing (I’ve had my fair share of gigs where nobody’s bothered to look my way, and good for them, really), but there was something grotesque about the scene before me. It was like the scrambling, tormented mass of winged demons in Signorelli’s depiction of Dante’s hell, revised for the happy-hour generation. A twisted orgy of rib-munching gluttons and drunken kids.

  At one table, a twenty-something in a t-shirt emblazoned with a severed hand giving the finger stood up before his friends and began a showy story. The friends threw their heads back and laughed as he seemed to give a crude and exaggerated impersonation of some poor sod. Spit flew from his mouth as he yelled his punchlines. His eyes bulged in his head. The friends guffawed. One fell backwards on his chair. The entertainer climbed onto his own chair, arms flailing as he pretended to jerk off. I looked around. The manager was nowhere to be seen. Carrying plates, the waiters rushed in and out of the kitchen doors as if refilling buckets to put out a fire. I turned my eyes to the kid in the t-shirt, my fingers on the keys. His eye caught mine. Ice-water ran through my veins. His eyes tapered into two slits, his smile curling into a vicious hook. His friends kept laughing, beating the table with their fists, chugging their drinks. Everyone else in the restaurant kept ladling food into their mouths—deaf, blind, or without two shits to give, who could say for sure?

  Yet, all the while, standing on a table in the middle of a dim room, the kid directed his eyes my way, his t-shirt giving me the bloody middle finger. Despite the raucous restaurant, I could somehow hear his thoughts: You’re going to die here. No one can hear you, piano man. So pound it. Pound the shit out of it. You’re going to die here. Alone.

  That’s when I stopped playing, right in the middle of my piece. I walked off the stage. I’d never before stopped midway through a gig—and never with the intention of abandoning my post—but it didn’t make a difference. Nobody seemed to see me dash for the door, apart from that arsehole who turned to watch me as I headed for the exit. He was applauding, too—clap, clap, clap, clap, whistle!

  I burst out into the street like a drowning man coming to the surface of a dark, impossibly deep lake.

  26.

  I arrived at the mansion late on Wednesday afternoon, half-expecting Leonard to turn me away, to laugh at me for having taken his bizarre joke seriously. Maybe he’d tell me the idea was due to all the drugs he’d taken, and that he was sorry for leading me on. (Pay you to lock me in a room for a year? Did I really say that? I must have been off my rocker. But wait … no … you believed me? Jesus, man.)

  I’d prepared myself for the embarrassing possibility. I thought about how I’d laugh with him, shrug and smile, and so keep my dignity from flying off. But I wasn’t at all prepared for what greeted me: a giddy kid about to take a ride on a rollercoaster. He could barely contain his excitement.

  Dinner had been prepared for us. We took our seats at the dining table, and shortly afterwards Carl entered with a large tray. He laid out a mosaic of small dishes between us, in the middle of the table. Leonard had ordered his favourite foods, though only a small portion of each. Twenty different dishes on twenty tiny plates, so that he could taste them all without rolling off the chair in a coma afterwards. I watched as he tucked a white napkin into the top of his shirt, grabbed a fork and danced it over one dish, then another, and another, making up his mind about which he’d enjoy first. He speared a chilli sardine, then scooped a mussel from a shell. He took a forkful of biryani. There was a small caprese, just two slices of tomato and mozzarella, and a small block of lasagne in a balsamic reduction, two simple lamb chops, two tempura prawns, and two slices of grilled aubergine. Leonard systematically savoured them all. As an accompaniment, he sipped twenty different wines. I sat at the other end of the table, nibbling a bit, but mostly watching as Leonard worked his way around his elaborate last supper.

  I didn’t entirely understand the fuss. It wouldn’t be his final meal, not like a prisoner’s supper the night before the electric chair. When I asked Leonard, he said it wasn’t about the food; it was about the choice. The power to select, he said, to say he wants to taste paella now, a spoonful of miso now, a bit of crispy duck now—and have the power to order it just like that, in the sequence he desired. Once he went into the room, he said, there’d be no choices at all.

  But tonight—he held up his glass, winking—tonight is not tomorrow. It’s not next week. And it’s not eight months from now. It’s tonight—so we indulge in choice. We make love to this bitch of a life we’ve been living, and then kick her out of bed. So eat up, Bent.

  Throughout the twenty courses of Leonard’s dinner, I hardly said a word. Lost in his own delight, Leonard Fry didn’t seem to care. There were a couple of details he felt it necessary to mention—mostly about where to find certain things, and what to do if such and such happened. In a few days, Carl would be travelling home to be with his family. As far as Carl was concerned, Leonard would be flying off to another country and leaving me to house-sit. A groundsman would come by every two weeks to tend the gardens, but he need not enter the house. He, too, had been paid in advance. As far as housekeeping went, I needn’t worry about basic supplies or groceries: there was a walk-in freezer at the back of the kitchen with enough shanks, turkeys, steaks, lamb chops, and pork sausages to feed us both for the year. The pantry was packed with pasta, rice, and canned foods. There was a vegetable garden the size of a small parking lot out behind the kitchen. Since Carl wouldn’t be around, whatever I decided to cook should be enough for Leonard too.

  There would be no written contract, if I didn’t mind—it would have to be a gentleman’s agreement. Could I accept that? I nodded, and he made it clear that no one but me would know of his presence in that room. While his lawyer was in possession of a sealed document explaining the deal, it wasn’t to be opened unless I instructed the lawyer to do so. My copy was on the desk in the upstairs study. It had been drafted in the event he popped a blood vessel while in that room, only to have someone later accuse me of having kidnapped him—a scenario I hadn’t considered at all. The notion sent an icy ripple up the back of my neck. It did, however, raise an interesting question: what was I supposed to do if he suffered some kind of physical problem—a seizure or a stroke?

  Leonard smiled and shook his head.

  Simple. You leave me, Bent. You do not open that door. Basically, I suck it up or I bite the big one. I can’t have any reason to trick you into opening that door early. Soon enough, I’ll be trying everything to convince you to open it. I expect to reach an extremely low point in that room. The mind doesn’t give up its poisons easily. But I need that to happen. I need to charge on through, whatever that might mean for my mental state. You understand what I’m saying?

  I nodded, darkly thrilled by it all.

  I wanted to ask why he thought he could trust me in the first place, but I didn’t. His answer wouldn’t mean much—and he had already placed his bet on the table, with the wheel now well in motion. What really fascinated me was the fact that everything had already been organised. Carl. The groundsman. The explanatory document. The food. He knew I’d come back. Either that, or he had some alternative plan, regardless of whether or not I turned up at his door.

  But no.

  He knew I’d be coming back.

  Leonard took his napkin from his lap and dabbed at his mouth. Then he pushed his hand into his pocket and the lights of the room flashed twice. A moment later, Carl entered and cleared the plates in a single go, with effortless panache. He returned to fill our wine glasses, and Leonard grabbed the notepad hanging from his neck, took his pen and jotted something down, then gave them both back to him. Carl gave a quick bow, and left.

  Leonard quickly stood up, untucking his shirt from his trousers as he led me out of the dining room and up the stairs. The date is April the seventeenth, he said, looking at his watch. The time is ten after ten. Which means that, precisely one year from now, April the seventeenth, at ten-fifteen p.m., you will let me out. It’s all in the
document. There’s a calendar on your bedroom wall to help you. I suggest you tick off the days.

  He’d timed this all to eerie perfection. Somehow, my return had been factored in. The length of our dinner. Every last detail, each moment. We passed along corridors until we stopped at a wooden door. Leonard pointed to a slot cut into the bottom, the size of a dog flap.

  I asked if I could take a look inside the room, but he refused. Think of the room as having been disinfected, he said.

  Disinfected?

  Disinfected of thought. Nobody has been inside but me. Any ideas about the room—what it is, what’s in it, what it signifies—these are mine, and mine alone. I can’t have any of your projections floating around in there, chief. Do you get that?

  Strangely, I did understand, but had the same thing been said by anyone else, at any other time in my life, I wouldn’t have understood at all. I knew what Leonard meant, but only because I was beginning to understand Leonard himself. I was being pulled into his orbit, and in a manner so sly, so measured, that I barely knew it was happening—the way we spin around the sun with no sense of motion.

  So this is it, he said with a smile. Are you ready?

  Now?

  I didn’t expect it all to be so sudden. I still had questions. Right then, I couldn’t think what they were, but there are always questions. Questions go on long after the answers run out, and maybe that’s why he wouldn’t give me an opportunity. He dipped into his pocket, pulled out a key, and handed it to me. I don’t know what else I expected, but it all seemed so unceremonious. No farewell speech. No valedictory gesture. Just a man about to enter a room.