The Inside Out Man

by Fred Strydom

  Time’s all messed up in my head.

  Past, present, and future swirl in a bog.

  The kid asks if I’m all right.

  I laugh, say I’m fine. Then I compose myself, lean forward, and cut to the chase.

  I tell him about a farewell weekend, to be held at my house in the country. I also mention money. That there’ll be a lot of it.

  But he doesn’t play for money, he says, money corrupts—and I laugh then, and tell him only cowards are afraid of money. Cowards and posers. And we’re more interesting men than that.

  I sell him a chance for the two of us to take a risk, swim out from the islands of our lives. Slowly, he comes around. He seems to get it. I tell him the dress code, the arrival time, the departure time. He says little, seeming to soak it all up. Finally, in the miasma of that dark bar, the young pianist in the cheap suit—who played like the devil up there on the stage and is playing with the devil down here—he smiles. It’s a smile like a gash from ear to ear, of agreement and anticipation and utter unknowingness. And I know, after all the searching, the visions of myself spending a year in absolute solitude, that I’ve finally found the one …

  No. No.

  It couldn’t be true.

  I hurled myself at the door. Gripping the handle with both hands I shook and twisted and threw my shoulder at it.

  “Open up! You hear me? Listen, please—there’s been a mistake! Open the door!”

  At the sound of footsteps, I banged again, yelling, then swiftly, hysterically, ran to the window, and pressed my face against the glass to spot an escape. I looked down. There was no point. Fine metal shavings indicated I’d already tried to file through the bars, though there was no hint of an implement. No balcony, either. No gutter, no piping—

  (… But here’s the kicker. No release. No shortcuts. No diversions. No channel-hopping my way out of it. There’ll be nowhere to go, except straight through the muck and the mist …)

  I ran at the door again, bashing it with my fists, ten, twenty, a hundred bruising times, until I closed my eyes and leant my forehead against it. Panting and out of breath, I slumped to the floor. There was no way out.

  There’d never been a way out.

  Precisely what I’d paid for, after all.

  My limbo. My Hamistagan in hell.

  Cut off from the world.

  Immune to time itself.

  (Cos what I really want to know is this: after everything is gone, after everything I’ve spent my life obsessing over has been taken away, what’s left of me? How deep’s my rabbit hole? What will I find in the company of nothing and no one but myself and my own thoughts? And if I go in that room and it’s madness, if there’s nothing in the basement of my stripped mind but eat-my-own-shit madness, well, hell, won’t that be a trip …)

  I opened my eyes again and saw the loose pages of the worn, years-old letter teeter on the edge of the bed before they fell to the floor and landed in a tatty fan. All those words. Bitter, forgotten memories. Incomplete answers. Mine to stitch to the content of my own mad mind. Christ. That’s why I’d gone in at all, wasn’t it? To understand the reason I’d been left that vast inheritance in the first place. To work my way through the shit in my head. A lonely, insecure mother and her quiet, fatherless son. A version of me who’d got everything I’d ever wanted from the world, from my career (before I’d caved his head in with a pot, the pompous prick). All of that, along with a judgmental voice from behind a closed door, a voice that reminded me I hadn’t earned any of what I had—and that I never would, or could.

  But then what?

  How many times had I told myself this same story already, run through this same charade? How many times had I realised that, all along, I’ve been here, wasting away in this room? And then, how long after knocking and banging and screaming and scratching my fingers raw would it take for me to finally give up, to accept that I wasn’t going anywhere, to begin the process of forgetting all of this—the letter, the posters, this room—before slipping back into my convoluted fantasy all over again?

  Come on. Spit it out, Jazz Man.

  While you still can.

  How goddamned long before you imagined yourself walking around in a painting of a park alongside a woman from a song and seeing yourself standing in the rain and down at the pool, before blacking out and waking up and blacking out and waking up on the same big bed of the same big bedroom of the same big inescapable house between the hills—

  again …

  and again …

  and again …

  and again?

  VII.

  Don’t bother tryin’,

  I’ll save you the trouble,

  Love her …

  But cut it off there.

  She ain’t up for it too,

  It’s not ’cos of you,

  She just don’t see

  … that you’re there.

  Hey man …

  Jolene just don’t see

  That you’re there.

  66.

  It was a beautiful day.

  No one could say otherwise.

  The view I had was of a part of the estate I couldn’t recall having ever explored—dense woods leading into an immense expanse of countryside, craggy mountains, and, in the distance, the haziest hint of what I knew to be the city. Seeing it from where I was standing made the city feel both farther and closer than it actually was.

  From my window, I pictured everyone going about their lives, confined to office cubicles, or having cappuccinos at sidewalk cafés, or listening to the Top 40 in their cars. I pictured a mother and son in a cinema, watching a movie on his eleventh birthday. A woman with face piercings smiling at an unsuspecting man across a bar counter. An over-privileged twenty-year-old playing Brahms in some lavish hall in Prague. A woman throwing dinner parties for strangers. A sensitive boy drawing pictures in a restaurant. A jazz pianist in a nightclub on the corner of Bree and Orphan—the one that sits between a restaurant and a musty old bookstore. And finally, I pictured a bored lunatic in the background, looking on. Clapping. Drinking his tea. Waiting his turn.

  I pictured them all and wondered what each one wanted from their ordinary little lives. I wondered whether any of them could declare that they were happy—really, genuinely happy—with the self-told stories of who they were and what they wanted and where they were going. Or whether, as a woman in a song had once said (a woman I loved, as if being in love without being loved in return can ever be enough): there was no such thing.

  I also wondered if they were unaware of their own madness, and oblivious to the simple truth that eludes the so-called sanest of us: the wars we have with ourselves become wars we have with others, and the wars we have with others become wars we have with ourselves.

  I perched on the edge of the bed, feeling painfully hungry, and tried to remember when last I’d been fed …

  Whether there’d be a next time.

  Sunlight filled the room, and I looked outside. Clouds. Three clouds of different sizes, sailing across a sky as blue as any I’d ever seen before. I watched them for as long as I could, as long as they’d allow me, but they soon scudded beyond the window frame, and were gone.

  Out of sight.

  But not out of mind.

  No, not out of mind just yet.

  Scratch, scratch

  1.

  First things first.

  My name is not Bentley Croud.

  It’s been so long since anyone’s called me by my full name that I imagine it belonging to some smiling stranger at some dull party. Someone tanned and healthy and successful. Whites of the eyes admitting to few or no vices. Straight rows of pristine teeth that have taken no punches. Someone who looks like me, has my face, shares my birthday, but who’s taken every road I haven’t, said a no to each of my yesses and a yes to each of my nos. That would be your Bentley Croud, and that would not be me.

  No. The I in the story I’m about to tell you is simply known as Bent.

  B
ent. The misshapen state.

  Now …

  Where was I?

  The Inside Out Man

  Acknowledgements

  Ideas, like most things, die in isolation.

  Brent Strydom, my brother, who finds the time to read my writing between plots for global takeover and pool-dips in Vietnam. Tom Southey, for being there at the start, and periodically reminding me not to fuck it all up. Carl Gough, my new good friend and off-the-record editor, who’s due to call in a major favour any day now. My actual editor, Lynda Gilfillan, who made me question every comma and somehow uncovered music allusions I had no idea I’d written in. Manager and muso Ryno Posthumus, who’s backed me from book one, but is no doubt thrilled I’ve traded in rafts and robots for jazz and madness. Aoife Lennon-Ritchie—my agent, mentor, and creative confidante—who grafts harder than anyone I know to get the world on my side. My family, both in my wife’s corner and my own, who have continued to offer a level of encouragement and enthusiasm I’ve never had any right to expect. Once again, my mother, Juliet, and Wytze Voerman, to whom this book has been dedicated. And, ultimately, my courageous and talented wife Bron, and hilarious, handsome-devil-of-a-son Charlie-Max, for ensuring I’ll never have to resort to fiction to experience the life I’ve always dreamed of living.

  My love and thanks to you all.

  Fred Strydom studied film and media at the University of Cape Town. He has taught English in South Korea and published a number of short stories. He currently works as a television writer and producer in Johannesburg, where he lives with his wife and son, two dogs, cat, and two horses. The Inside Out Man is his second novel; his first, The Raft, was published by Talos Press in 2015.