Mr Outside E-Book

Caleb Klaces

• Herausgeber: Prototype Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 210

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

During a time of restricted movement, the narrator of Mr Outside visits his reclusive father Thomas who is packing up to move into a care home. As father and son grapple with the task, long-buried conflicts resurface. Thomas, a poet and former radical priest, slips between affection and fear, while the narrator struggles to find the words he's been holding back. Yet amidst confusion and grief, moments of humour and connection emerge, as both men discover new ways to understand each other and let go. Told through a striking combination of text and image, Klaces' distilled novel explores the stories we tell about our lives, the limits of intimacy, and the fragile line between reality and delusion. Based on the life of his own father, Mr Outside is poignant, profound, and unexpectedly funny; a tender meditation on endings, the limits of understanding, and the act of letting go.

Leseprobe

(                   )

Caleb Klaces is the author of the novel Fatherhood, which won a Northern Writers Award and was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the poetry collections Away From Me and Bottled Air, which won an Eric Gregory Award and the Melita Hume Prize. He grew up in Birmingham.

Mr Outside

Caleb Klaces

Mr Outside

Saturday

Thick milky fog had settled on the motorway. The car appeared to float. An occasional bright smear of light hovered close and then disappeared.

My phone vibrated again. I sped up, then made a conscious effort to ease off. Letting go of the vehicle’s power was sensible but unpleasant.

A flatbed truck appeared just ahead in the lane to my left. The cabin was the mottled orange of a boiled lobster. The bed was made of weathered grey wood.

It carried four heaps of coal that were actually sheepdogs. The animals lay close together, holding their rippling bodies low to the moving surface.

My turnoff appeared in the distance. The truck wasn’t indicating left. Either I had to overtake or brake sharply.

Before I could make a decision the truck went over a bump. One dog was thrown into the air. It was leashed at the neck. It fell on its back, bounced, twisted. Its back legs slid over the end of the bed and dangled above the road.

I was almost level with the driver’s window. If I sped up I could attract their attention and somehow let them know that they had to pull over.

My phone vibrated. I thought of Thomas pacing the hallway behind his front door, holding the scrap of paper on which he’d written the date and time he could expect me to arrive.

If I missed the turnoff I’d be late. I felt his fear and outrage in my body as nausea and panic.

The dog managed to heave itself back onto the bed. A second dog left the safety of the others and crept towards the first. It was close enough to help.

The truck bounced again. One dog was thrown into the other, taking them both off the end. The leashes pulled tight. The dogs hung by their necks over the road. They flailed like bait on a hook.

I cut behind the truck and off the motorway. A hard cloud of flies hit my windscreen. I couldn’t see. I followed what I thought was the slip road. There were lights, a horn, a swerve. It was happening too quickly, and slowly I thought, one word at a time, I Am Dead.

*

The car came to a stop. I opened my eyes to find I was in a perfectly ordinary position, waiting at a red light.

I followed the roundabout and made it onto the new motorway. There was nothing except the road and the car and driving the car along the road.

I thought something else would happen. I was miles along the new road before I realised I was waiting. I didn’t know what for.

My arms were heavy and hot at the joints. I asked my hand to push down the indicator lever so I could change lane. It shook so much I gave up.

I heard a dog’s yelp and the rainfall of nails desperate to cling to wood. I swatted the sound away and turned on the radio.

A voice spoke about the date set for schools to reopen and restrictions on movement to be lifted so that people could see loved ones indoors.

It wasn’t a real date, she said. It would, given the outlook, be delayed again.

The fog thinned and revealed cars everywhere.

I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe how many people there were all around me.

I had been so stupid. For so many months, as Thomas fell apart, alone, I’d stayed away, believing that everyone else in the country was doing the same.

*

The dog slid along the wood. The second dog launched a rescue which made things much worse. The driver couldn’t hear me shout. The memory went round on a loop.

The road seemed different. The verge was stippled with saplings. They must have been planted in the year since I’d last made the journey.

The phone made me jump.

I checked the dashboard clock. There was a sharp tingling pain across the skin of my chest. An old scar had recently started itching so much that even my bitten-down nails drew blood. I could not be late.

I reassured myself that everything was in order. I had the letter in my jacket pocket. The letter told him what I didn’t have the nerve to say out loud. I felt cowardly at having to write it down – but we’d always communicated better that way.

At a long bend the air grew watery and transparent, revealing the landscape behind the verge. In a field stood a large red tree. It was covered in hanging moss that looked like a beard.

It was unmistakable. My two daughters liked it – when they saw it they were allowed a snack.

A car in front: suddenly solid, almost touching.

I slowed down to a creep.

A stranded church building came into view. Over the years I had been making this journey it had been Sex-Shop, ‘for gentlemen’, then Spice, an Indian restaurant. It was now boarded up.

I took the familiar exit onto the dual carriageway. My arms conducted operations without complaint.

There were thousands of silver dandelions in the battered median. The stalks swayed but held on to their seeds.

The weeds signalled the outskirts of the city.

*

There was a sign for the city. But I’d already taken the turnoff for the city. I was already on the road into the city.

Phone. I pushed every button at once, trying to make it stop vibrating.

The car rumbled on the rumble strip.

My hands took the wheel and locked into position, shivering a little.

I let the turnoff come and go. The fog drained into the landscape and everything was clear. Small, pleated fields appeared, faintly gluey, on both sides. I could see every blade of bitten-down grass.

I had never been here before. I had no idea where I was.

*

I indicated and stopped in a lay-by.

I checked my location. I was miles from the route I usually took. I was headed away from the city.

My phone could tell me nothing about how this had happened. It did propose, however, that I might just make it on time if I turned onto an A road and met the city ring road from the south.

The responsible action would be to call and warn him I might be late.

My head physically swerved to avoid this idea, knocking my glasses against the window and dropping them into my lap.

‘The cost of isolation.’ I turned off the radio.

I sat and watched the cars file slowly past, trying to work out where I’d gone wrong. A child in the rear seat of an SUV caught my eye and waved. Proudly she held up a small round pumpkin – at least a month too early.

I remembered how excited Thomas could get about making costumes for Halloween. Suddenly he would be running around the house to find an old shirt to slash with a kitchen knife, or sawing a cricket stump to make a stake to go through the head.

I put my glasses back on and studied the map. Briar had already terminated his wi-fi. To preserve phone data I memorised the route. I turned the phone on silent and pulled out to rejoin the traffic.

The traffic heaved forward then fell to a standstill. There was nothing to do. I wanted to do one thing: check my phone. I threw it out of reach.

After a few miles the cars dispersed. The road opened out. I relaxed my foot onto the accelerator.

For the first time I could see the sun. It was a pale damp disc like a stain.

The orange haze accepted me into it.

The scar on my chest no longer itched.

It was a reprieve: I had, all of a sudden, been understood.

*

I filtered onto the complicated, swooping lanes of the ring road. I followed the signs around the city centre.

He lived off the end of a long High Street. I recognised the pawnbrokers, the kebab shop, the pub. They were all shuttered.

I slowed down. I had never seen the High Street so empty. It was desolate, peaceful, and clean.

I found a space to park. I looked at the dashboard clock. Despite the detour I was ten minutes early.

I looked at the passenger seat. My phone must have fallen into the footwell. I reached over and felt around in the dark.

The gearstick jabbed at the scar on my chest. I sat up straight.

He had never owned a mobile phone. I could do without mine for a few more minutes.

I wondered what had happened to the dogs. They might have been saved – someone else could have told the driver, just in time. Or their necks might have broken, removing the pain. Perhaps the two other dogs also gave up their grip on the wood. Perhaps they couldn’t bear to watch. Perhaps it looked to them like a game.

I imagined the driver reaching their destination, having sung along to the radio for the whole journey, and only then discovering four lifeless sheepdogs hanging from the end of the truck.

I turned over this image. It was necessary, the mind’s paperwork, but it now had little to do with me.

What troubled me was the journey. I had no idea how everything had seemed so right and yet been so completely wrong.

I had passed the tree, the abandoned church, the dandelions, all exactly where I’d seen them so many times before, on the familiar route.

But I hadn’t taken the familiar route. I’d driven on a different road. There was no way I could have seen what I’d seen.

*

I reached into the back and grabbed the Welcome Pack. There was the list of what he was allowed to bring. There was only space in his new room for one small bookcase, a suitcase of clothes, and a selection of photographs.

There was also a form I hadn’t noticed. It was designed like a child’s worksheet, with ‘MY LIFE STORY’ printed at the top. There were ten black lines on which to write his life story.

I flushed at the chance to do something well, a little smug with our shared proficiency.

But what kind of story could we agree on?

He grew up in Wales. He came of age in Essex. He was married. Then he wasn’t. He was a priest. Then he wasn’t. He was married a second time. Then he wasn’t. He worked. He didn’t. He was a poet. He decided not to publish any more. He had four children. He remained in contact with two of his children.

I could barely state a fact I didn’t have to qualify or withdraw.

‘Tell them something more interesting than facts,’ he’d instructed me a few days before. The memory was vivid and uncanny, as though I was in two places at once. I’d had to cut the phone call short because a child had pulled my trousers down around my ankles.

‘Tell your children about their grandfather.’ He made me promise to carry out his will. ‘You’re a poet. Make it an exciting story.’

The memory made me smile. Had I made up a good, exciting story for the children?

I left the form where it was – there would be plenty of time over the weekend. I took off my glasses and placed them in their leatherette case inside the new rucksack I’d bought online, impulsively, the week before.

I rubbed my eyes. They were dry. I remembered my face mask. I put it on. An unpleasant smell was directed from my mouth up to my nose. I pulled the mask over my chin. I put it back in the glove compartment. I took it out again, shoved it into my pocket, and got out of the car.

*

The gate was gone. The garden wall was broken. He had tied the bricks together with blue string. A tree reached up through the overhead cables. I removed a faded crisp packet from a lower branch as I walked up the path to the front door.

I stepped under the porch. A weak light shone from above.

I looked up at the motion-activated lamp and camera Briar had screwed there a decade before. The camera was supposed to identify a mysterious person who for two years had knocked on his door in the middle of the night.

It was one of several defunct fortifications. In order to relieve delivery people of the need to disturb him, he had lined a wooden box with bin bags and placed it beside the front door. In order to help the neighbours not to disturb him, he had painted a sign with red lettering: ‘I AM INSIDE’.

I held the knocker in my hand. It was wrapped in a dark green handkerchief to dampen the sound. Dark green mould spilled across the dark green material. I disturbed the silence.

There was no answer.

I knocked a second time. No answer.

I tried to look through the front bay. On the inside of the windows he had tacked up sheets of netting, so I could only see pale outlines of furniture. Nothing moved. My shins were wet from the weeds.

I knocked on the window. No answer. He had taken to filling his ears with cotton wool soaked in olive oil.

I checked my pockets for my phone. I walked back to the car.

When I opened the passenger door my phone fell onto the tarmac.

There were several missed calls from him, but nothing recent.

Renata had sent me a photograph of our two daughters. Gina lay on the sofa looking miserable. She had a stomach bug. I’d been up with her in the night.

Her younger sister, Sol, clutched her own stomach, though I suspected she wasn’t ill. The previous week she’d told me in great detail about a troubling altercation at nur-sery. When I asked the teacher, she looked puzzled. It had happened to one of Sol’s friends, she said – but my daughter wasn’t lying, exactly. She just didn’t understand the difference yet.

I began writing a reply. I noticed the time in the top right-hand corner of the screen. I closed the message and checked the clock app. I was an hour late.

The clocks had gone back the previous week. I remembered because the change was the same day as the deadline for my MA students’ dissertations. One or two had written to me in a panic.

I must have forgotten to change the dashboard clock.

The spare key wasn’t in the glove compartment. I paused to think, telling myself to stay calm. I might have dropped the key into the box with the new pair of trainers.

I’d left in a hurry. Before I fell asleep the previous night Gina was sick in her bed. I showered her and carried her into the spare bed. She was sick again. I showered us both and stripped the sheets. She cried and couldn’t sleep. I told some improvised story in the dark for too long. We slept tangled up in a corner of the bare mattress.

Before dawn I crept back into bed with Renata, back to the secret pool of warmth under the duvet, the soft touch of her breath on the back of my neck. I overslept.

The boot was a mess. There was some camping gear, four pairs of muddy walking boots, and a large shopping bag full of mildewy swimming costumes and towels. They were from the brief window when restrictions on movement were lifted and we went out to do everything all at once.

I found the key in the box with the trainers.

*

Laughter from the opposite pavement: a toddler swung between a man’s legs. I felt their relief at being outside, taking up space, using the permitted hour.

He wrestled a hand up in greeting. He carried the child across the road.

I fished in my pocket for a face mask. He waved to say it didn’t matter.

‘You look like you’re having fun.’

He nodded.

He asked if I was visiting the person who lived in the overgrown house.

We stood for a moment. I made eye contact with the child, who buried his head coyly into his father’s neck.

Yes – I was helping him pack.

This seemed to please the man. He kissed the top of his son’s head. He laid his nose on his son’s hair and stared into space.

‘Nice to meet you both.’ I turned towards the house.

‘It will be nice when the place is tidied up.’

I stopped. I regretted my weakness for offering intimate information to strangers.

The man’s gaze slid over my shoulder.

‘He’s just going on holiday,’ I lied. ‘He’ll be back in a week or two.’

I turned again.

The man said he would come with me.

My body moved to block the way.

‘He’s not well,’ I said.

The man hesitated. He found his son’s eye, whispered something, and his son giggled.

He looked at me with an expression I assumed was intended to be frank.

‘I’ll speak to the council about the sycamore.’ He paused. ‘Again.’ A smile that wasn’t a smile.

I turned towards the house.

The pair crossed the road. They picked up fiery leaves from their front lawn, blown there from Thomas’s sycamore, restoring it to a pristine square of green. I pretended to look for the key.

*

When they were gone I opened the door.

I stepped into the hallway. The cold rose from the dark red floor tiles. There was the usual smell of book dust. Another smell too. Something was burning.

I hurried into the front room. I couldn’t get very far. The furniture seemed to have multiplied since my last visit. Computers and desks and sofas were crammed on top of one another as though competing for space. A stocky printer perched at the crest. Every surface was buried under its discharge, the spreading wave of materials carrying stationery, books, magazine cuttings, used packaging, blankets and old toys.

I glanced around at the shelves. Hundreds of faces looked back – postcards, sculptures, figurines. Nothing was on fire.

I reversed into the hallway. I ignored the middle room and squeezed past the bookcases towards the kitchen.

There was a pot on the hob. I turned off the heat. I ran my fingers under the cold tap.

I returned to the pot and looked inside. Water had boiled away and there was a black layer of charred rice.

There were scorch marks on the wall behind the hob. They were cold to the touch. They were probably years old.

On the radio, a man listed the many DIY improvements he’d finally had the time to make.

The radio was on the windowsill, behind a pile of used yoghurt pots. I tripped on something. It was a red road sign: ‘FLOOD’. I moved the sign and turned off the radio.

The broadcast continued. Another radio was tuned to the same station.

I tried the plastic drawers of medication and homeopathic supplements. I tried the bread bin. The radio was inside, alongside a note which said ‘BREAD’. The quiet was a relief.

I took the stairs two at a time. I nodded to the face painted on the top banister.

I called. No answer.

I went downstairs and checked the middle room. He wasn’t asleep in his armchair.

I checked the time again. I rehearsed my excuses: the roads had been busy and white with fog. I’d seen something terrible. I’d almost died.

I could feel his ear on the story. The part with the dogs suddenly sounded absurd. I considered what else I could say. I could mention Gina’s illness, maybe. Or I could make up something more exciting, if only I had the imagination.

*

I returned to the upstairs floor. I checked the small back bedroom first. He hadn’t used it as an office for at least a decade but the decorations hadn’t changed. There were portraits Briar and I had painted of him when we were children: ‘see you in a week’. A photograph of an ancient stone circle, where he’d had an experience he couldn’t explain. A postcard of Benjamin Péret, the surrealist, insulting a priest.

As a child I would stay away when I could hear the clack of his Amstrad keyboard. I lingered and savoured the infraction.

The bathroom was pink and orange and red. We had painted it together – Briar and I chose the colours.

The toilet was as old as the house, with a porcelain cistern at head height. The bath was grey and chipped. He’d tacked plastic sheeting to the wall.

Outside his bedroom I felt cautious. I stopped in the doorway and asked him if he was inside. There was no answer.

At the end of the landing was the room overlooking the street. It was the largest bedroom. I’d shared it with Briar, until she chose to sleep downstairs.

The room had never been cleared. It contained the traces of the successive ambitions: footballer, musician, writer. The individual pieces of clutter were humiliating, and yet together they made a strangely unplaceable impression, as though his hoarding had managed to confuse time itself.

I looked through the window at the houses opposite. All the front yards were orange with leaves, except one.

A violent image came into my mind: the neighbour chopping Thomas into pieces and feeding them to his woodburning stove. I wanted to hurt the neighbour.

I felt the creep of a yawn. I yawned again. I could taste the loud odour of vomit. My neck ached from odd sleep.

I was bored, I realised, and guilt immediately scattered across the skin of my chest. Renata was looking after the children so that I could be here.

I had to find him. Something held me back from continuing the search. I stared at the single strip of Beano wallpaper in the corner where my bed had been. The space was taken by a listing floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and a threadbare pea-green sofa.

The sofa was buried under piles of books with dark symbols on the covers. They were obscure books on English folklore. He’d wheeled the whole lot home from a charity shop in a shopping trolley.

The collection had taken hold of him. He wrote hundreds of beautiful poems in the voice of their former owner, who he’d assumed was dead, using her annotations as material.

As was often the way, the obsession came to an abrupt end. He took a bus to visit the address carefully written into each flyleaf. The woman was alive – and friendly and intrigued and wanted to know him better. The spell was broken.

*

In the centre of the room was a church lectern. Two square legs held up a flat-angled top, which had a lip to hold an open book. The dark wood was punctuated with wood-

worm.

I leaned against it and thought about what to do.

It had taken me a few miles to admit I was lost. When I stopped on the hard shoulder I was frantic. Everything bad that had ever happened was happening again, all at once, and for a moment I felt capable of pulling out into oncoming traffic.

Then later, having found the right road, the fog lifted and I saw thousands of familiar silver dandelions stretching out along the swooping concrete of the city ring road. The watery sun appeared. I felt weightless and understood. I was glad I’d gone wrong.

I’d slept in the corner of this bedroom every other week for a decade. For years: the early morning warmth on the sheet. The gradual withdrawal of heat. Covering the stain with the duvet.

Had I really believed that every day he’d pretended not to know and then, when I was at school, come in and changed the bedding?

I looked at the place where my bed had been. The sofa and the bookcase were the final stage in a long, unconscious, methodical process of concealment.

It wouldn’t work. When every trace of him and me had been cleaned from the house, a stubborn pale stain would mystify the future owners. They would try everything. Why wouldn’t it go away?

My phone vibrated: unknown number.

I picked up.

No reply.

I said hello again. I told myself, internally, not to shout.

Bustle on the other end. A yell.

The call cut off.

I called back. Straight to generic answerphone. I tried again.

I turned the phone on speaker. I kept trying.

I walked around the room. I walked along the hallway. I went into his bedroom.