The Inside Out Man

by Fred Strydom

  “What you may or may not know, Mr. Croud, is that your father was a wealthy man. His business affairs have been dealt with by relevant parties, as per his will. That side of things, you don’t have to worry about. There is, however, the matter of a house.”

  I say nothing. Not yet.

  The attorney pages through a folder on his desk.

  “Well, house is a bit of an understatement,” he says with a half-smile. “It’s a mansion, really, on a very large estate in the countryside, and it’s known as … I have it here”—flip, flip, flip—“Krymeer. An hour or so away, off the N1, I believe.” He looks up at me. “The point is, it’s yours. That, and a kick-start sum of two million rand, to be paid in two instalments. Non-taxable.”

  My brain doesn’t fully register his words. “I’m sorry. I’m getting a house?”

  “A mansion. Yes. Along with one hundred and twenty-four hectares of land. The mansion itself has quite a significant history; you can read all about it in this.” He pushes a file towards me and I open it. The attorney adds something about a long-standing servant and a groundsman, but it’s entirely up to me whether or not they stay.

  I slowly turn the pages, sheets of white paper secured with paperclips. There’re some photographs, too, in the folder, all showing the mansion from different angles. The last one is different. A Polaroid of a man on a couch, with a boy on his lap. My older self turns it over, and in black ink is written: 7th June 1983. Happy burp-day daddyo!

  “That’s you and him,” the attorney says. “I believe he was fond of that one.”

  I shake my head, tell him this is all some mistake.

  “No mistake,” the attorney says. “I assure you. It’s yours. All of it. Like I said, do with it what you will. It’s in your hands, now.”

  He pauses, reaches inside a drawer, and continues, “One final thing.” He pulls out a long rectangular envelope, and hands it to me. “There’s this.”

  It’s got nothing but my name on it, written in cursive.

  “It’s a letter,” he adds. “From your father. I have not read it, and I have no idea what it relates to. But perhaps it has a few answers to questions you may have. What I do know is this. Included in your father’s final wishes was a request for a weekend wake, to be held at the mansion, for his friends, relatives, and yourself, from Friday to Sunday, two weeks from now. In addition to that, you should know that your ownership will only come into effect after completion of the weekend proceedings.”

  When the time comes, I turn up at Krymeer in a white Cressida I’ve just bought. The sheer size of the estate overwhelms me. And angers me, some. The mansion looks like a stony cross between a parliament building and a cathedral.

  There are a number of cars in the parking lot. I lean over for my suit on the back seat, then go up the steps, bracketed with classic columns, and knock on the door. It opens, and an old man is standing there. Tendrils of grey hair are combed over to hide a balding head. He greets me with open arms, smiles, and tells me I look just like my father. The resemblance is unmistakable, he says. He talks about the numbers, oh, the numbers, how they miss the numbers. I figure he’s talking about piano songs. I follow him into the house. He turns out to be an uncle I’ve never met (a former university professor, he says he was, specialising in graph theory). We pass by half-open doors, and I glimpse the occupants, who are dressed in black. The clink of glasses can be heard.

  They’re all sobbing. Consoling one other. Discussing my father, from what I can tell. I realise there isn’t anything I could say to any of them about the man. Everyone else in the world seems to know him better than I ever did. I sigh at the thought of his wake lasting the entire weekend, but a final wish is a final wish, after all. As for me, I want to stay as far away from everyone else as I can. Upstairs, I find a small room with a tiny television and decide I’ll be staying there. The only time I leave is to play a piano I find at the other end of the corridor. I hear people move around, freely making use of the house (my house, I have to start accepting), though I have no idea what they’re up to. Eating. Drinking. Crying. Or just gossiping about the aloof son upstairs. I hear them scuttling, way below the floorboards, like rats.

  As Sunday comes to a lazy close, I figure people are leaving, so I exit the room. I go to the window and watch the procession of black cars pull out of the parking area, returning each of my father’s relatives, friends, and acquaintances to the pantomimes of their regular lives …

  I took another look at Leonard’s pic on the LP cover before putting it down on the bedside table.

  This was my house.

  This entire time, the house was mine.

  The estate. The money. All of it. But what about the rest of the story? The naked woman at the door that first day I’d arrived? What about Leonard’s mad plot for me to lock him up for a year, feed him, ignore him? I stepped backwards, sat down on the bed. As I did so, an image beamed against the wall of my mind, bright and clear as the moon on a cloudless night.

  The envelope.

  I reached for the letter from my father—as forgotten as the man himself. My stomach cramped at the thought of reading whatever was on those pages.

  I turned the envelope over, looked at it front and back. Inside, there were three pages, all handwritten. The paper looked old and tatty, as if it had been pulled out a hundred times by a hundred different persons. I flattened the sheets against the striped duvet, took a breath, and began:

  Dear Bentley,

  I don’t know how to start this & maybe that’s always been my problem. Or maybe it’s that I don’t know how to finish things. I’m not sure. Maybe neither is true. Maybe it’s the middle where I really bugger things up. Whatever the case, all I can say is that this letter is probably far too little, far too late. Maybe you’ve been told a particular story of me & this is the story you’ve come to believe. Before I proceed, I must say that I have no intention of confusing you or upsetting you or turning anyone against you. All I want is to share my side of the story.

  It’s true that I wasn’t as present as I perhaps should have been. I missed your birth, for one. That was the start of it. I’m also not sure what I’d have contributed by being there, though if I had been there you might not have been named Bentley. I always hoped you’d be named something stronger & more classic, like Howard, or even Edgar, but your mother was adamant you’d be Bentley & of course she was there to have her say, so Bentley it was.

  I spent a great deal of time away on business, often for weeks on end. I’m not sure, if I could travel back in time, that I’d do any of it differently, but for all my ambition, for all my accomplishments, I have in these final days found myself overcome by a peculiar sense of regret.

  I know people dream of having the things I’ve got. Doing the things I’ve done. At one stage of my life, I myself dreamt about wanting all this & so that’s why I find myself here. In this big house. Surrounded by my things. There’s very little I haven’t done, very few places I haven’t been. Yes, of course, I could simply have gone on—there are always new toys out there—but after a while I seemed to lose my appetite. I realised that all I’ve done is pile everything up, endlessly, year after year, without ever stopping to strip away the layers—to discover what kind of man I am beneath it all.

  Take away the things we own. The houses. The clothes. The cars. Etcetera. Take away the people. All the jabbering & the dinner dates and the handshakes. The schmoozing. Take away the weekend retreats and the jet-setting & the events and occasions and all the traditions on top of traditions. Take away the things we convince ourselves are important. Our little responsibilities to each other. Our mundane habits. Our rituals. What to wear. What to eat. Where to go next, do next, on & on & on. Take away this entire swirling cyclone of existence & then take away our ability to control any of it—and then ask yourself: what remains of us? Who are we without any of that?

  Well, Bentley, here’s the thing: I really don’t know. I never allowed myself to ever find out, & so in
this way I feel I’ve missed out on the opportunity to be the father I could & should have been to you. Beyond this, I hope you have at least a few good memories of me.

  I have one, in particular. It was the day I took you to meet the musician who lived across the street. Leonard Fry. Remember him? Way back, before he was famous. I can still see the look on your face the moment he started playing. You were hooked. His biggest fan, though at the time he didn’t have many. You even had your favourite song of his. Remember it? “Sweet Jolene.” You’d play it over & over & drive your mother mad. You sang it all the time. I think even at that young age you were kind of in love with the woman in that song.

  Anyway, I’m wandering off the point—if there’s in fact a point to be made. What’s most important for you to know is this: I did not just leave you, abandon you. I did not escape in the night, in spite of what you may have thought or been told. The truth is, I was asked to leave—by your mother. I did try to see you, but she wouldn’t let me. I wanted you to live with me. It’d also be fair to add that your mother went through a period of alcoholic indulgence that concerned me greatly. I tried everything to have you come home with me, but she used my earlier absence against me. In the end she won & I was sent away from you.

  But I never forgot you. So, little as it may mean to you, I’m leaving you this house, this estate, a payout of R2 million—& on top of that a hefty living allowance which will be deposited into your account every month.

  All of this & a key to a room. It’s a room I’ve been wanting to show you for a very long time. A room I’ve kept prepared for you for many years now. A room I always hoped you’d one day occupy & call your own. Even though it became unlikely you’d ever actually stay in it, I kept it all those years to show you, to prove to you that I never gave up hoping.

  I have to admit, though, that I was never sure I could be the parent you needed. And I was never the most open of fathers, as you’re aware. But who knows how you might have turned out? Knowing me, I’d probably have encouraged you to play classical rather than jazz, if only to ensure you didn’t spend your time in the company of pot-smokers & drunks. I’m joking, of course.

  I also can’t be sure it’s a good idea telling you all this—changing the story you’ve been carrying around with you all these years. Maybe I should have gone to my grave with my mouth shut. One thing’s for certain, though, the cancer in my lung will soon take me. That’s what you get when you take in more cigarette smoke than fresh air. The chemotherapy’s been useless. I’ve lost my hair. I’m a frail man who struggles to get out of bed in the morning & I don’t imagine I’ll last longer than a few more weeks.

  So that’s that. I’m not sure what else to say. It’s a start but also an end.

  You probably have questions & I apologise for not being there to answer them for you. I suppose over time you’ll have to figure out a few things for yourself. You’ve got this far on your own & thankfully you’ve turned out to be the best thing you can be in a world where fairness is a fairy tale & all that matters is who’s got the sharpest claws: a survivor.

  Regards,

  Your father

  I dropped the letter on the bed, then wandered to the window. My mind was running over my father’s words in the letter.

  That letter.

  That letter—

  This wasn’t the first time I’d read it. Of course not. I’d read it many, many times before. Without recalling having ever pulled those pages from the envelope, still, I knew this with certainty. Those words. I’d heard them all. The complaint about the burdens of wealth, of endless choice.

  I sucked air between my teeth, exhaled. I needed to leave. I felt the first few swells of panic rise in my chest. I needed to get out of that room, out of that house—

  The door was shut.

  I couldn’t recall closing the damned thing.

  What was going on?

  I clutched the handle with both hands, turned it.

  I tried again, and again, and then shook the handle.

  “Hey,” I called, pulling at it. “Hey!”

  No answer. Not a murmur.

  “Who’s out there?”

  I paused, my chest heaving, and stepped back.

  I ran at the door, thumping it.

  “You hear me out there? Whoever you are, open this door!”

  I stopped, my fist suspended in the air as I looked down—

  I froze in my spot.

  Scratch marks.

  Hundreds of them, criss-crossing the lower half of the door, creating a crude carving of wood and flaked paint. I turned my hands over and studied my fingertips: chipped nails with purplish blood underneath, seeping as far as the cuticles. All that blood I’d never been able to get rid of, never managed to scrub away …

  (Scratch, scratch, scratch)

  I retreated a step, took a second step back, my eyes flicking from my nails to the door, and back, and then they caught a full-length mirror on the wall—

  Me, staring back.

  But not me.

  A withered, shabby version of myself. Pale, bearded, with blue-black pouches under my eyes. Everything else could have been a stunt, a sham of some kind, but not what I was seeing now. This was me. Barefoot, with cheap clothing sagging on my bony frame.

  I staggered backwards. As I did, the walls of the room warped and bulged. With a mental flash of flesh and faces, a distant, haunting echo of expired laughter in a heaving house, I remembered everything …

  … the house has been heaving for months now. It’s full of people I don’t know, there for the booze and the drugs, for the sex, for the chance to escape their pedestrian little lives. It’s no secret. And yet, for a reason I can’t place, I want them here, these strangers, all over each other, screwing, partying, using all my stuff. Because I don’t give a shit. Because this house is so big.

  So stupidly big.

  I’m slouched in my couch beneath a chandelier sailing back and forth, watching these people in front of me, these men and women laughing and drinking and doing lines off any smooth surface in sight. The music blares as if it’s coming from an immense machine beneath the house—a coal-powered monstrosity, churning, thundering at the core—somehow keeping the whole world going. I know the song. Television’s “Marquee Moon.” Tom Verlaine singing about listening to the rain but hearing something else …

  I grab a bottle of whiskey and step over sprawled strangers. No one notices. I pass by the fireplace, and the tables of fruit, and baskets overflowing with all kinds of furry and leathery and plastic props. Someone swigs a bottle of champagne, and with an ape-like laugh spits it out in a spray. I pass by, leaving behind all that bedlam.

  I’m in the empty corridor. I feel relief now that I have some space, but the relief doesn’t last longer than a few seconds. I’m drunk or high or both, but that corridor, it just goes on and on. I keep walking, keep swigging. I stop, close my eyes, slam my back against the green wall.

  I open my eyes.

  I’m facing a door.

  Not just any door. It’s the door to the room.

  I tip the bottle back. The booze runs, burns my throat.

  To hell with my father, I think.

  And to hell with that letter he left for me—

  To hell with it all.

  Except for that room. This one little room.

  Sealed off from everything.

  Waiting for me.

  I look to my left, at the entrance to the bar area with all those strangers. Clambering, wallowing, swallowing each other whole. I can still hear them in there. Trashing my place. A woman I don’t recognise enters the corridor and heads towards me. She’s wearing a man’s shirt unbuttoned to her belly. Her legs stretch out from underneath. Her eyelids can barely stay open, but she’s dozily eyeing me. I wish she’d leave me alone.

  “So you’re him, huh?” she says. “Hey, man, you’re missing out on all the good stuff.”

  She blows a kiss, moves on, and I look back at the door. The door, it ju
st sits there. Shut. Fixed in its frame, unperturbed by the chaos of the world.

  What did my father have in mind, I wonder, when he set it up for me all those years ago? The bed. The posters on the walls. The record player, Leonard Fry’s album (as if that’s the only music I’d listened to since the age of seven or so).

  That neat, well-ordered room, prepared for a person who doesn’t exist—for a possible me, if I’d only gone to live with him. And now that he’s given me the house, I’m not sure what he imagined I’d do with that room—apart from possibly sitting in it for a while, pondering some grand, unlived version of my life.

  The room doesn’t even feel like a real place, at least not in the way anything else is. It feels separate from everything else that exists. There is the world as it is, with whatever’s in it—and then there’s this room. All that remains of some alternate reality. My own personal limbo on earth, my Hamistagan in the midst of hell, cut off from the mess of my life, and immune to time itself …

  … Groggily, I look up.

  The Bijou, my old haunt, with its sign buzzing in blue cursive.

  I wipe my mouth with my sleeve, go inside.

  … Borrowing the waiter’s pen, I grab an old receipt, write TURN AROUND on the back. I instruct the waiter to leave it on the pianist’s saucer. Ten minutes later, after a few tequilas, the young pianist gets his tea, along with the note. His eyes sweep the room, find me in my corner, and then he slowly, cautiously, makes his way over.

  He thanks me for the tea, tells me he’s not much of a tea-drinker. I introduce myself, ask him to take a seat.

  I clear my throat and smile.

  He’s a good pianist, I say, adding that he knows that, and it’s good to know one’s worth. He seems pleased, mumbles something about growing up in a family of pianists, and how his mother wished he’d stuck to playing for the church. That was a long time ago, he says. I ask him then if he has family, and he says no. A wife? No. Girlfriend? Shake of the head. I nod, take a sip of my tea and turn my eyes to the people at the bar. A man chatting up a woman, or the other way around. A barman punching an order into a touchscreen terminal. A guy running a cigarette under his nose for a whiff before putting it back in the box. It reminds me of how my father died—that painful, six-month suffocation—what was it, almost two, three years ago now? Have I really been living at the house that long?