The Inside Out Man Read online

  I began to feel nervous. I needed to say something, or ask something, but all I could manage was, Are you sure about this?

  Leonard smiled, bent down, took off his shoes, and handed them to me.

  There is nothing more offensive or repulsive in this world than a sure thing, he said, and shook my hand. Then he thanked me, wished me luck, opened the door and went inside. I strained to see something through the gap, but I could see nothing; it was too dark.

  The door closed behind him. Slam.

  Then silence.

  I stood alone in the corridor, staring at a closed door. I could barely register the gravity of what had just occurred. I glanced over my shoulders, looked at the door. Finally, it clicked: it was all over. Or beginning? I didn’t know. I couldn’t profess to know much of anything in that empty moment. But there was one thing left to do, a final signing on the dotted line. And it was up to me.

  I stuck the key in the door, then locked it.

  27.

  Exploring the contents of a man’s house is like exploring the contents of his mind. There are images and objects, patterns and textures, things organised in a clear system—forming part of some design—and then there are other things that are in a mess. You know each of the things is connected to a past, if only in some vague and tenuous way. Some of the things you see are impressive, some heart-breaking, but most are bits of junk that seem unworthy of consideration at all, so there they stay. You can go through drawers, stare at the man’s paintings, admire his collections, turn your nose up at his lack of taste—but the one thing you won’t find is meaning. There’s no meaning behind any of it, just endless loose ends. Nothing more than hoarding, this is a disguise, one that projects a complex interpretation of himself and his place in the world.

  And if Leonard Fry’s house was in any way a measure of his mind, then there was plenty of stuff furnishing it—lots of fascinating, shiny, dusty, arbitrary and vulgar things. Ancient artefacts and new mechanical toys. Tribal sculptures. Four-hundred-year-old maps in golden frames. A Japanese deep-sea diving suit from World War Two (which looked to weigh about three hundred kilograms). A genuine nineteenth-century zoetrope, with flickering images of a man galloping on a horse. There was a collection of what seemed to be centuries-old vases, all decorated with chrysanthemums. Hundreds of books stacked in piles reached upwards, like the forest of trees they’d once been. Curious hand-crafted musical instruments I’d never seen before, and rooms and rooms and rooms filled to the ceiling with more and more of Leonard’s shit.

  I went down to the kitchen, where gleaming pots and pans hung from a beam above a marble counter. Carl was nowhere to be seen—retired for the night, I guessed. After exiting through a door at the opposite end of the kitchen, I climbed yet another unfamiliar flight of stairs.

  I found my way back to the main bedroom. There was nothing exceptional about the room—not when compared to the rest of the house. A king-size bed faced a large window overlooking nothing. A plain wardrobe stood alongside a dressing table with a mirror. There were no pictures on the walls, nothing but a large white calendar that began with that day’s date, 17 April, and ended on the same date the following year. My travel bag was on the bed (probably brought up by Carl). Opening it, I realised I had clothes for only a few days, though I’d be in the house for a whole bloody year. I’d packed in complete denial of the reason I was packing at all. That was suddenly obvious. I undressed and climbed under the blanket. I’d never felt such a comfortable mattress. I stared at the ceiling, thought about Leonard in his locked room, and for the first time, it all felt as if it were actually happening. He was there. I was here. The game had begun. The weight of our agreement plummeted down on me, like a piano falling from a five-storey building.

  On night one, I hardly slept a wink.

  28.

  Next morning, I thought I’d go downstairs, where I’d find Leonard at the kitchen table, drinking an espresso and reading a newspaper. He’d drop the paper, revealing a smirk, and I’d realise the whole thing had been a gag.

  But Leonard wasn’t in the kitchen. Carl was there, poaching eggs and frying bacon. Without so much as a smile, he pointed to a table on the patio outside. The morning was a country stunner, everything crisp and glistening under a mild sun. A goose skimmed across the lake and flapped off, skywards. Carl exited the house and laid the food out in front me. My juice was poured, slices of toast were fanned out across a silver platter, and then I was left to eat my breakfast. Afterwards, I got up and walked back into the kitchen. Carl was gone, but on the counter I saw a tray with a covered dish and a bottle of juice.

  Had Carl prepared this for Leonard? I lifted the cover and saw scrambled eggs and three strips of crispy bacon. I took the tray and went upstairs to Leonard’s locked room. There, I stood and stared at the door, wondering if there was anything I may have missed, some ritual I’d forgotten to enact. I got down on my haunches, carefully pushed the plate through the slot, then slipped the bottle through. I quickly stood up, and, remembering that I wasn’t to say a word—no matter what—I took two steps away, turned, and went back to the bedroom.

  29.

  From the get-go, I had this idea of just enjoying a rich man’s life, doing whatever I wanted in that outrageously large space, with all kinds of props and gadgets at hand—but I soon found there was little that kept me occupied for long. There were certainly novel features that piqued my interest. For one, there was a waterproof touchscreen jukebox in the shower. Also, an impressive entertainment theatre with three rows of leather armchairs facing an enormous curved television on the wall. The walls held shelves filled with movies, all untitled in uniform black boxes. I picked out two, and sat through three thirty-minute enigmas, dreamlike black-and-white films in foreign languages, devoid of plot or coherence. I watched naked women running around in a desert landscape, an old man flailing around in an enormous industrial vat filled with raw chicken breasts, a suited man wandering aimlessly with a giant button attached to his forehead, which was pushed by passersby. Rather than conventional movies, they were grisly pieces of performance art, like random clips from nightmares—shock-fodder that straddles the line between genuine profundity and pretentious crap. The whole time I sat there, I imagined Leonard watching by himself, all dressed up, sipping whiskey, no expression on his face, absorbing it all. Waiting to feel some-thing. Even if the feeling was merely disgust.

  I found a snooker table, had two tots of whiskey, and sank a few balls. I played a round of one-man darts. I joylessly played the piano. An hour or so on, I sat outside and paged through some reading material I’d found—mostly yellowing Reader’s Digest magazines. I skimmed through some outdated scientific stuff, and then got stuck into supposedly true stories about extraordinary individuals (such as the Austrian explorer trapped in a cavern for nine days before beginning to eat expendable parts of his own body—if such a thing is at all possible).

  On the third floor, at the far end of the building, I found a gymnasium. It was a bright room complete with a punching bag, an assortment of weights, and a couple of complex cardio machines. I changed into shorts and a t-shirt and did forty minutes on a treadmill. Not being an exercise type, I thought I’d at least try it out. Being cooped up for a year provided a good opportunity to adopt some kind of fitness regimen.

  As I ran to nowhere, I watched the news on a flat-screen in the top corner of the room. I don’t often watch the news. The same tired old tunes. A missing schoolteacher. An overturned bus with seven dead and four in critical condition. A new Chinese entrant into the energy market. A railway strike. A rapper in rehab. Something about Syria. Macedonia. Making biodegradable electronics out of corn.

  With a click, I switched the world off.

  30.

  Next day, only two noteworthy things took place. First, I watched from a top window as Carl hobbled out the front door to grab a taxi to take him home. He was wearing a grey hat and coat and carrying a briefcase in each hand. He didn’t once turn to lo
ok at the house. He slid his briefcases in the boot and climbed into the back of the black car. His eyes didn’t so much as glance my way as the taxi glided out of sight, leaving me alone in the house.

  Well, almost alone.

  Soon afterwards, I had my first glimpse of the groundsman. He entered the property—a big, pear-shaped man wearing blue overalls—and got started right away. For a long while, I stood and watched as he mowed the lawns, trimmed the hedges, and turned the soil in the beds. I didn’t have much else planned, so I stared out from the upstairs window, somehow expecting that the more I watched, the more interested I’d become in what I was looking at. Leonard had been right: the groundsman brought his own lunch and made use of an outhouse, so he didn’t need to knock on the door. I didn’t even bother to go down and introduce myself to him. By the end of the day, he had packed up and left.

  Apart from this, I occupied myself for a while by looking for clues to Leonard’s life, to work out how he’d earned his wealth. But lacking the audacity to rummage through his drawers or sift through his documents, I didn’t come up with much. I wandered the house, peering at pictures on the walls, hoping to find something of interest. No picture gave me any clearer idea of anything: unrecognisable faces at a fancy party, a black-and-white photograph of a docked yacht called Britomartis, and a man riding a majestic black Friesian horse.

  That night I slept okay, though I did wake once or twice thinking I was at the Crack Radisson. And like the previous nights, this one was dense and dreamless.

  As the days rolled by, I did occasionally wonder what Leonard was doing in his room. Was he sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, eyes closed, facing a corner in deep meditation? Was he lying on his back, hands behind his head, counting imperfections in the ceiling? I couldn’t rest on an image. Sometimes I’d put my ear close to his door, hoping to catch a hint, but nothing came my way, not the sound of a tap or the flushing of a toilet.

  One morning, I took a walk outside to find his window—but no luck: from the outside, it was hard to tell where his room was. Perhaps he didn’t have a window at all. Maybe a view would provide too much sensory stimulus. As I circled the manor, however, I became aware of the sound of my shoes on the cobbled stone, and then I felt eyes on me, as if he was watching from somewhere, from a small window I’d possibly missed. I picked up a stone, rubbed it between my fingers, dropped it, stuck my hands in my pockets, looked around once more, and then I went back inside.

  31.

  Things go well until they don’t go well. At all.

  You wake up and the day looks like any other. There’s no reason to suspect you’re about to have it tough. You’re precisely where you laid your head the night before, but you’ve somehow awoken somewhere else, in a world that doesn’t quite play by the rules you thought you knew. This day has surprises in store for you. Plans to shake things up a bit.

  The day was a Tuesday—that much I knew—though it’d become hard to keep track without checking the calendar (little point in doing this, anyway). With nowhere else to be, I found the actual day didn’t matter much. I’d had a few calls from the city, a manager here and there asking if I’d be up for a gig, if I’d be back any time soon, but I said no. I stuck with the family-emergency story, though I had no reason to lie. Each time they called, I was reminded that there wasn’t much to miss about the city. No matter how many pangs of dumb longing I felt (for one particular greasy food on some grotty street, for one particular tatty bar stool in the corner of one particular bar), a single call would do the trick, turn me off going back, as if I could somehow smell the city over the line.

  But I digress. On the Tuesday in question, I went about my chores. I emptied my laundry into the washing machine. While it spun, I had a ramble around the house, feeling satisfied that, however mundane, I’d done something constructive with my day. I went downstairs, and landed up in the large garage where Leonard kept his cars.

  At the flick of a switch, a row of fluorescent beams came alive, revealing a series of pristine machines. I sauntered between the cars, ran my fingers along their sides, peeking through the windows as I did so. Without thinking, I opened the door of a green Aston Martin and sat in the driver’s seat. Voices warned that I should leave before something bad happened, but I tuned them out, as if I were switching to a different radio station.

  The scent of the car was the first thing to hit me: brand-new leather and fragrant wood. I rolled my hands over the dimpled steering wheel. The key with remote was dangling from the rear-view mirror and I grabbed it. For a second I stared at it in my hand, then I stuck it in the ignition and turned it. The engine woke with a roar. The sound went through my bones, stirring some long-dormant thing inside me—the primeval thing that had enabled man’s discovery of fire, sent a rocket to the moon, and levelled cities with a single bomb. The thing that scares and defines us in equal measure. I pressed the remote, and the garage door lifted with a whirr. Sunlight poured inside and I narrowed my eyes. Outside, the world sat quietly minding its business. I adjusted the mirror and revved the engine.

  A low growl, the gears smoothly engaged, and I was off.

  Brown veld rolled out before me endlessly. It felt like I was on an uninhabited planet, with shadows lurking on hillsides, and clouds materialising and vanishing like unsure thoughts. That was it—as much commotion as you might expect in the countryside. Time isn’t its normal ravenous self out in the middle of nowhere. Not like in the city, where it’s gluttonous and insatiable. No, in the countryside, time savours, sipping slowly.

  And nothing ever changes.

  Not really.

  A fairy of light danced along the gleaming bonnet as I switched to third and sped up the pass. I shaved each corner, swung to the left, then the right, shot out from under an arch of trees, and burst into the sunlight. The engine screamed, and I floored the pedal. Soaring down the south side of the mountain, I turned onto an open stretch of highway, and the needle climbed from one-twenty to one-forty, one-sixty, one-seventy, one-seventy-five, quivered around one-eighty, and then, because things go oh-so-well until they bloody well don’t—

  Fromp!

  A dull and sickly fromp.

  I wrenched the wheel, but the car skidded, ripping up grass and dirt and growling to a halt. The rear-view mirror revealed nothing. A cloud of dust swirled up. You’ve hit something. I fought to catch my breath and shuddered with the delayed realisation: You’ve hit something, you idiot. But what?

  Slowly, I opened the door and stepped out. No other cars, though all around the long, thick grass waved silently. The sun had baked the land. There was the din of a thousand heat-stirred cicadas, and beyond that the sound of panting, faint whining.

  A dog.

  A coal-grey, not-quite-fully-grown cross between a Labrador and some stockier breed. A township mongrel probably bred for fighting, it lay on its side, head against the hot tar. Its chest was heaving unnaturally, and its fur was caked with blood. I got down on my haunches, and lowered my hand to touch the dog, but it snapped, its mouth a spring-loaded trap with teeth.

  I stood and looked around. No hint of help from anyone at all. The highway stretched out in both directions, to the tips of its hot grey daggers. I grabbed my phone from my pocket and saw the signal was low, but managed to locate a clinic some thirty minutes away. I unbuckled my belt, slid it out, and edged the loop towards the head of the animal. The dog snarled, gave a yelp. In a single swift movement, I pinned its head to the ground and tightened the belt around its jaws. I carried the animal to the car, warm blood dripping from my elbows. I placed it on the seat, then slammed the door shut and ran to the driver’s side. The car thundered back to life, shooting up dust and dirt as I got back on the road.

  Tearing along the highway, I turned to the heaving animal, urging it to stay alive, to hang in there, to not give up on me now, for Christ’s sake. Blood dripped from the seat, pooling on the carpet. The dog’s eyes were opening and closing like broken shutters. Back and forth, with every
blink, alive … dead … alive … dead … dead … dead … alive … alive … still alive …

  And the blood. All that blood.

  I couldn’t just see the dog, I could smell it too: not only the rich, sweet smell of blood, but also the pungent stench of piss. The combination made me want to puke—adding my bile and half-digested breakfast to the waves of nauseating smells. I suppressed the retching. By now we were only ten minutes away. I glanced at the dog. Its eyes were closed.

  Hey! I yelled. Hey, you! I hooted and leant over, screaming into its ear, Wake up! Wake up! And then, in desperation, I started barking, barking and growling like a big dog, loudly and viciously.

  Buildings appeared in the distance, cream-coloured prefabs surrounded by high barbed-wire fences. Ahead, three scrawny kids were sitting on the edge of the road. They turned as I raced towards them, hopped up and scampered away. I looked at the dog; with each breath, it made a gurgling sound as more blood dribbled from its maw. My eyes darted back to the buildings, to the entrance gate.

  To the dog again.

  We were so close. So bloody close.

  Just another minute and we’d be there.

  The day bled away. Not a bird in sight. No murmur of a breeze. Nothing but a heavy mugginess in the air, left over from another season.

  The sun was going down, burning out, and in the last of the light, I dug a hole next to the lake at the back of the house. As I did so, I hardly thought of anything. I didn’t even think about the dog, which was now lying in a sack beside the hole. I didn’t think about how I must have looked right then, a crazed killer, shirt and pants spattered with dark stains. I simply dug that hole; it was all that mattered.