The Inside Out Man Read online

  Then the man finally got to his point. He was calling, he said, to tell me my father had died.

  4.

  I don’t know much about my father. He left me and my mother when I was too young even to remember my age at the time. In the instant I was told of his death, what little I recalled loomed as a big figure with big hands and the scent of aftershave. This was all I had of him, though even these pathetic memories may have been of some other man, or a movie I’d watched, or a dream I’d had.

  When I was young, my mother did occasionally speak of this nebulous man, whose existence could be proven only by the fact that I myself existed. Sometimes she’d say just a few words to keep my curiosity at bay: Your father cared more about himself than other people. That’s all. Some people just do.

  She made it sound as if she was talking about the difference between people who prefer rain over sunshine, Bovril over Marmite. What she meant was that after my father’s ship-building career really took off, in the early years of their marriage, he’d decided settling down and being responsible for a wife and child wasn’t quite what he’d wanted after all. He was an explorer, my mother said, a neophiliac—preferring a new experience over a tried and tired one. She’d always known this, she’d go on to say. Even before they were married. It was part of the reason she fell in love with him, of course. But for her, marrying such an insatiably curious man would always mean a cold side of the bed to make use of on hot summer nights.

  My mother was a piano tutor, and we were forced to get by on what little she made. She’s the one who taught me to play, and were it not for my admiration of the great American jazzmen, her tutoring would have put me off for good. She’d sit beside me and poke a pen into my leg when I needed to play a sharp, and tap a book on my head to play a flat. She’d sigh, then grab my hands and move my fingers, insisting that every movement was either clumsy or wrong—some kind of musical abomination. Fortunately, my Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson records were there to modify my contempt, a reminder that I needed to know the rules before I could break them—and boy, would breaking them be good.

  At the time, we were living on a smallholding on the slope of the mountain. There’s not much I remember about that tiny house. I do remember it smelling of stale cigarettes and wet wood. I also remember that there was very little natural light and almost no ventilation, as if we were in a nuclear bunker during some untelevised war. But that was it. I may have just blotted the rest from my mind, without being aware.

  Of the many years we stayed in that house, however, there was one night that often comes to mind. I’ve told myself it is yet another memory of my father—but I can’t, and probably won’t, ever be sure.

  I was in my room doing something or other. My mother was in the lounge, smoking her umpteenth cigarette, building a mountain of yellow butts, as usual, in the perlemoen-shell ashtray that balanced on the armrest of the couch. There was a knock at the door and she got up to answer it. We almost never had visitors, so I went to my bedroom door to see who it was. I couldn’t see much, but I heard a man’s voice. It was deep but calm. He spoke with my mother for a while, and her voice rose as his began to sink. Soon, she was screaming at him. He said something like, Take it, just take it—and she was yelling that she wouldn’t, and said, Go to hell, we don’t want it. Go right on off to hell!

  Then the fight was over, the door was shut, and I closed my own door. There was never a follow-up to that night. As the years went on, that’s all I had to work with—that one night—like a detective trying to solve something that may or may not have been a crime at all. All I can add is that the following day my mother took me shopping for new clothes, something she hadn’t done in months. Money can’t buy you happiness, she told me, even as she bitterly (or not so bitterly) picked through rows of shoes, racks of coats, and shelves of perfume for herself. If you remember that one thing, you’ll be smarter than most of the grown men of the world.

  What she failed to add was that, while money couldn’t buy you happiness, no money couldn’t buy you anything at all.

  Things did not improve. We left the house and moved into an even smaller place, a flat in the industrial part of town. Our furniture was always layered in a thin film of black ash, as smoke drifted through crevices from the crematorium next door. Not that our furniture stuck around for long. Eventually, even the piano was sold.

  It was around this time that my mother started drinking. So often, I’d find her slouched on the living-room couch, her cheeks shining with tears, a bottle of brandy in her dangling hand.

  By then I was playing well enough to give lessons myself, mostly to others kids from my school. I’d walk to their houses, give a lesson, and walk back after dark. The parents paid me modestly, but I’d have to hide my earnings in a sock at the top of my cupboard; more than once I’d caught my mother clawing at every nook and cranny for cigarette and booze money.

  She accused me of lying to her, of plotting to leave her, of being exactly like my father. This didn’t so much alarm as intrigue me. I was so desperate for direction that I looked to myself to better know my father. How was I like him? Was it the way I spoke, or walked, or something else? But there was nothing to be deduced: most of the time, she just blurted out her curses in a drunken stupor. She’d have pointed to a hat rack and compared it to my father—that is, if we hadn’t already sold the hat rack.

  And I was beginning to resent him. He’d been gone for longer than I could remember, but the teenage me wouldn’t stand for what the pre-adolescent me had had to endure. My mother hadn’t always been the sweaty, stinking woman in the living room, refusing to eat or shower. She’d once been a woman of dignity and grace. Stern, but giving. He was off somewhere, screwing around, cavorting, and spending his way to hell. Surrounding himself with the finest of everything. Paying for smiles. Not giving half a shit to be split two ways. And we were here.

  Until it wasn’t we. It was I.

  A songwriter would probably have said my mother died of broken-heart, but to hell with all that. She died because she had more booze in her veins than blood. She died because she hadn’t eaten a proper meal in days, and whatever she did have in her stomach had come back up her throat as thick, throttling bile. The morning I walked into her bedroom to find her sprawled on her sheets, naked and twisted and bloated, her face caked in vomit and her eyes rolled up like a broken slot machine, there wasn’t a single blues song that came to mind. Not one romantic chord or lyric that could help make sense of the filth and the shame. And that was the one thing I’d always been able to count on.

  Sometimes, I guess, there’s nothing but the horror.

  5.

  There’s a girl named Coby who bartends at one of the venues where I used to gig every so often. It was my favourite place in town to have a drink, and the only bar I’d frequent even when I wasn’t about to gig. Could it have been because of the hipster décor, the selection of microbrewery beers, or perhaps the fact that nobody ever seemed to recognise me? Unlikely. It was probably because of Coby, my saddest version of a soulmate in a city where real friends are about as hard to catch as a suntan on a rainy day.

  Coby must have been in her late twenties, I reckon, though I’d never had the courage to ask. She was a pretty girl, no one could say otherwise, but made a helluva effort trying to mask all that with dark eyeshadow and a factory’s worth of metal piercings. Her hair was short and pixie-like, and there was always a new tint, green one week, purple the next. Sometimes, watching as she worked, I imagined what she must have looked like as a schoolgirl: I invariably pictured one of those posed school portraits that usually ends up in some dumb frame on a mantelpiece. I imagined Coby virginal and freckled and smiley and a little awkward. No eyeshadow hiding her tiny eyes, no gel spiking her frizzy ginger-blonde hair, yet all the while suppressing a small inner voice—her parents had picked her hair, her maroon uniform, and the photographer her smile—that one day, one goddamned day, she’d show them who she truly was … chains, rings, tints,
grotty bar job, and all.

  After getting the call from the mysterious uncle about the death of a father I had never known, I couldn’t get to sleep, so I snatched my coat and left to see if Coby was on shift. I entered the bar and took a seat, grudgingly allowing my order to be taken by a barman. Coby was at the far end of the counter, leaning and grinning at some tall, long-haired biker guy. He had a smirk stitched shut across his face, like the scar on Frankenstein’s monster’s forehead—the one that stopped its brains from falling out. He kept his calculating, dozy eyes on her, mumbling something witless, I imagined, and she seemed to be lapping it up. My drink arrived and I downed most of it. Eventually, she made her way to my side of the bar. She smiled and I smiled back, raising my glass. Was I just another one of these idiots, thinking her smiles meant anything more than a call to help pay her rent?

  Hello stranger, she said. I haven’t seen you here in a while.

  I smiled and lifted my glass. She wiped the counter as she filled me in on her week: the leave her boss wouldn’t allow her to take for her sister’s graduation. Her cat’s skin issue. The homeless woman who’d stumbled in the previous week and gone picking through the pots. The desperation of a starving woman hadn’t even crossed Coby’s mind: It must be great being like that, she said, not giving two shits about anyone and just waltzing in to take whatever you want. Pretty free way of being, huh?

  I didn’t say what I was thinking—freedom of that sort always ended up as no freedom at all. Instead, I nodded and sipped at my drink.

  I asked about her sister’s graduation; I figured it was the topic she’d be most willing to discuss. Also, the question made me seem sensitive and selfless. It worked. Coby’s eyes widened and she dropped her flirty demeanour. She told me her sister had just finished her final year and would soon be an honest-to-god doctor, though in her eyes her sibling was still that twelve-year-old using a plastic stethoscope on a teddy bear.

  Seriously, can you believe it? she asked, as if I too might only be able to imagine this medical student as a child.

  I smiled and shook my head.

  I know, right? Anyway, Bent, when you playing for us again?

  I told her I didn’t know. Her boss hadn’t got in touch with me and I knew better than to ask. When he had the money, I’d have the gig.

  Coby paused, smiled and nodded. She asked me about my week.

  I shrugged and told her the apartment was getting colder, that’s for sure. A ridiculous thing to say, but it was the truth: the apartment was getting chillier by the day—and with regard to lifestyle, winter is transformative in every way. It changes the way you sleep, the length and frequency of your showers, the colour of your skin, the amount of food you eat, and your levels of activity. This kind of issue bothers me, exhilarates me, alters my physical form, and gets me thinking in utterly new ways. My music changes. My interests change. My concepts of comfort and discomfort evolve. What could be bigger than that? To Coby, however, I was just talking about the weather.

  You know what I like about you, Bent? she said.

  What’s that?

  You’re simple, she said. Complicated as all hell, but simple.

  And then she turned to serve some other guy.

  6.

  I’d already found my grey suit jacket, the one I’d worn only twice some years ago. All I needed was a tie. The first time I’d worn the suit had been at an interview for a call-centre job (which lasted a week before my tiny cubicle and stack of weak leads plunged me into an existential quandary). The second occasion was a Halloween party I attended as a demonic lawyer. Good look, mind you—suit, briefcase, and flaming red face with horns. That had been the last time. Since then, the jacket had wrinkled at the collar and the shoulders had lost their shape. Also, it wouldn’t button up without giving me the Heimlich manoeuvre.

  Finally, I found a tie, one I’d probably borrowed from someone a very long time ago (I don’t think I’ve ever actually bought a tie). I put it on, then grabbed my black shoes from the bottom of my bedroom wardrobe, and sat on the armchair near the window to polish them. I slipped them on, and did up the laces. Opening the wardrobe, I combed my hair in the full-length mirror on the inside of the door. I parted my hair to the right, created a neat path of white scalp, and combed the sides flat. I tightened the noose of my tie, and patted the front of my jacket.

  For at least a minute, I stared at my own reflection, waiting for it to say something, explain itself, burst out laughing.

  But the man in the mirror didn’t move.

  A man in a shabby suit with a hard and expressionless face in a shitty apartment, with nothing to say for himself. My eyes turned to the wall clock. I closed the wardrobe door. The funeral was in half an hour, and it’d take a good twenty minutes by car.

  The taxi arrived. It hooted twice, waited a minute, and then hooted again. I didn’t move. I stood in my apartment like a stranger in a foreign place. My suit was tight as a straitjacket and my hard shoes were cramping my feet. I leant against the wall, unable to breathe.

  The walls began to warp, bulge and close in, as if to suffocate me. The mirror went mercurial in its frame, twisting the room. Twisting me. The car hooted again, and the walls and mirror flattened. Back to normal. My breath found its rhythm. I sat in the frayed corner armchair, stared at nothing for the longest while, dressed like the dead man himself. And then, finally, the hooting stopped.

  7.

  The attorney was a fat man with a head that looked as if it could be popped with a pin. His big office smelt like some kind of fast food, and an ashtray on his desk was filled with the yellow corpses of Dunhill cigarettes. The curved walls were lined with shelves of law books, endless volumes I could barely imagine being read in their entirety. Ornately framed certificates and photographs lined the walls: fat attorney in sunglasses on a catamaran. Fat attorney standing beside a prominent politician. Fat attorney on a ski slope—geared up and grinning like a snowman who’d magically come to life.

  Just the day before, I’d received the call from his secretary regarding my father’s last will and testament, and so here I was, sitting before him in a red leather chair, watching him as he fumbled and sweated and spoke between wheezing breaths.

  Your father was a secretive man, he said. I know. I was his attorney for almost twenty years, and rarely met with him face-to-face. I know you’ve never met him. But your father was your father. He slapped a brown folder on his desk. Neither God Almighty, nor the law of Man can deny that.

  I don’t want anything from my father, I said.

  My words didn’t surprise him. He didn’t even look up. I could only deduce that he’d heard it all before—that he’d heard a hundred stubborn sons make a hundred stubborn statements about the final hand-out of their dead and disowned fathers. The fact I meant it was immaterial to him.

  That may be so, he continued, licking his thumb to open the folder. But your father’s dead, so what I have here for you isn’t his to give any more. At this very moment you’re the owner, so do with your inheritance what you will after leaving this office, but it’ll be leaving this office in your hands. Sorry, son.

  He cleared his throat and wiped his forehead. It was cold outside, but the central heating had been turned up to a level of which only Dante and the devil would approve. The fat man paged through documents in his folder, pulled out one and placed it neatly on the desk, then closed the folder and moved it aside. He leant forward, fixed his eyes on me, put his elbows on his desk, and wove his fingers together.

  Now, he said, fingers flapping as if he were playing a trumpet. What I’m about to give you on his behalf may or may not make sense to you. I suppose that’s what your father intended. Like I said. A secretive man.

  I didn’t want to listen to him go on about my absconded father. A lifetime of absence had more than convinced me.

  Until that moment in that office, I’d entertained the possibility that the will was a hoax. But there was my name on a document, specifying a hitherto unknow
n inheritance—some mysterious item or amount I was entitled to, now that my father was dead.

  Before I go ahead, do you have any other questions? he asked. It was a professional reflex; I could tell he was hoping there’d be none.

  Was my father a good man?

  A good man? I’m not sure what you mean.

  You knew my father.

  We probably met with each other only two or three times over the years.

  And in your opinion, was he a good man?

  The attorney rubbed his hands together and diverted his eyes, looking over my shoulder.

  He was rarely in trouble with anyone, he said, his eyes returning to me. I can tell you that much. I didn’t expect a Christmas card every year, if that’s what you’re asking.

  His patience was the only thing about him growing thin. I said nothing in response, though he’d waited just long enough to give me the opportunity. Then he moved on with the proceedings.

  As I’ve already said, if you’re expecting this to come with any kind of clarification, I’ll have to disappoint you. I know nothing about what I’m about to give you. I have no idea where it belongs or what it opens. For all I know, it has sentimental or metaphorical value—who knows?

  The attorney leant sideways and opened a drawer. He pulled out a small antique box adorned with minute, detailed engravings. The attorney slid the box across the table, gestured with his palm for me to open it. He coughed loudly, took a handkerchief from his top pocket, and dabbed at the phlegm on his lips.

  I stared at the wooden box for a moment, then laid my hands on the lid. I ran my fingertips over the narrow band of carvings, deciphering its peculiar narrative: an eagle swooping down on a rabbit, which was chasing a carrot, which was being dragged by a bicycle ridden by a boy, chasing a winged girl who was ascending into the sky, in pursuit of an eagle.