The Raw Shark Texts. Steven Hall

stomach:

      I have a condition. A disorder.

      What was that going to mean?

      Randle said I didn’t need to worry about work and that I had a ‘quite sturdy’ bank account. I’d found what was probably my PIN written on a little piece of paper in my wallet behind a video rental card, so there was no immediate crisis there. She also said I’d broken all contact with my family and friends not long before coming to her for treatment. Whatever the First Eric Sanderson’s reasons for doing this, I made up my mind to undo it. I’d dig out his address book and make contact with my mum or my dad or whoever counted as important in my life.

      I have a condition.

      I peeled off a couple of rashers and slithered them over the chromy bars of the grill, saying it a couple more times to myself, trying to take it in. I have a condition. I have a psychological disorder. It was too big, too much for one person alone in an empty and unfamiliar house to deal with. I’d find an address book, contact numbers. I’d make contact with my old life by the end of the day. I leant back against the sink and watched the bacon start to cook.

      I noticed little lived-in things. The limescale on the kettle, the half-used bottle of washing-up liquid. The couple of pieces of dried pasta in the gap between the fridge and the kitchen units. All the marks of use. Recent habitation. Signs of life. I was searching the cupboards for a tin of baked beans when I came across a packet of Penguin biscuits. There were two missing. I knelt there for a few minutes just looking at the packet sitting on top of tins of spaghetti hoops and chopped tomatoes, looking at the torn flappy plastic end. The me who had eaten those biscuits had been real and alive and here, living in this house. He’d been in this kitchen only yesterday, probably cooking just like I was today. The food he made was still working its way through my body. It all happened here in this room so recently and now he was gone. It’s a stark thought that when we die most of us will leave behind uneaten biscuits, unused coffee, half toilet rolls, half cartons of milk in the fridge to go sour; that everyday functional things will outlive us and prove that we weren’t ready to go; that we weren’t smart or knowing or heroic; that we were just animals whose animal bodies stopped working without any sort of schedule or any consent from us.

      Except.

      Except nobody had died here yesterday.

      There was no him or me. These were my biscuits that I’d been eating. There was only one Eric Sanderson and I was still standing there, in my house, in my kitchen, with my breakfast sizzling under the grill. I knew this to be the unarguable logic of the situation and I tried to bring myself back to it again and again, but the idea felt hollow and fragile and thinly spun out over a deep black space. I knew nothing about Eric Sanderson. How the hell could I claim to be him?

      •

      I ate my breakfast in front of the still-chattering TV and made a mental list of the things I wanted to find in the house. The list went like this:

       Address book to contact family/friends and tell them what had happened.

       Photographs/photograph album. I needed to see my past life. I needed to see a picture of me with the girl who died in Greece.

       I remembered there had been a locked door upstairs, next to the bedroom I’d woken up in. I’d find the key to the door and see what was so important that it had to be locked away inside the house.

      I started off gently in the living room, picking things up, looking at them, trying to form some sort of connection; taking the time to read the title of every book in the bookcase, swapping a few around so the existing random order became my random order; going through the papers in the magazine rack; getting on my knees and looking at the wires coming out of the back of the TV and at the dust and chips on the skirting boards. Trying to get intimate, make the space familiar from every angle. Going through drawers and taking out the objects inside one by one.

      After maybe two hours of exploring I still hadn’t found any of the items on my list. No address book, no key, not a single photograph or photograph album. The more time passed and the more rooms I explored – the front room, the bedroom – the more I started to realise there were other things missing: I wasn’t finding any letters or bank statements or bills, not even junk mail. Not a single thing with my name on it lying around or tucked away or lost under the sofa or bed or down the back of the chest of drawers. Nothing. And nothing that could be connected with Clio Aames. The gathering shock of all this, the level of sanitisation and control it implied, hit me pretty hard. I was frightened and I was hurt. What started as a careful, inquisitive, getting-to-know-you search began to derail itself, barrelling out of control into something hot and aggressive – a violent hunt for my own reference material. Soon, I was tipping out drawers, dissecting storage boxes and magazine stacks, raking out cupboards, gutting the wardrobe. I cried, red with tear-wet frustration, scrambling, searching, scattering. And when each anger charge inside me was drained and empty, I’d find myself coming to a stop in the debris I’d created and gulping over the fatter tears of totally adrift despair, or, as more time passed, falling into one of those periods of blank stillness that come from overspending on emotion. Still I didn’t find anything. No photographs. No papers. No letters. Every accessible space in the house lay completely open and there was not a single solid trace of me or my past there at all.

      All this only brought me full circle, of course. Now I knew where these things were being kept. I’d realised earlier I think but instead of stopping me, the realisation only drove me into the search harder, wanting to prove the cruelty of it all by laying the rest of the house bare. And when there is absolutely nowhere else these things can be, I’d been telling myself, pulling out boxes and folders and tipping them empty, I will go upstairs and I will kick down that locked fucking door.

      But I didn’t. When it came to it, after hours of tipping, sifting and scattering, the rage I had left wasn’t fresh enough or hot enough. Now there was a smoky curl of caution where all that destructive fear and hurt had been. I stood on the landing with my hand palm-flat on the locked door and I let myself sink to my knees, all tired and used-up, my fingertips dragging down in squeals against the white gloss paint.

      Empty spaces, barriers, caution and willpower, this was the game I’d been born into. The trick, as Randle suggested, would be in knowing which barriers could be kicked open for progress and which were defensive, structural. Which ones were actually shoring everything else up.

      •

      It took the rest of the morning to tidy up the wreckage. By now, the post-crisis stillness had complete control of me and I moved through the house straightening, replacing and aligning at half-speed, eyes unfocused, sliding between the rooms like a ghost on pulleys.

      Just after twelve there was a sound in the hallway. I straightened up and stood very still and very quiet. I’d been putting clothes back in the wardrobe when it happened and when I went to investigate I carried two shirts downstairs with me, not really aware of having them in my hands. There was a big A4 envelope sitting on the doormat. My name and address were written across the front in black felt-tip.

      I’d ripped it open and got two lines into the letter inside before my brain finally came up to speed and I realised I shouldn’t be reading it, that I’d been asked not to read anything like this. But by then it was too late; my eyes were already being information-dragged, skip-reaching towards the end –

      Letter #1

      Eric,

      Whatever Dr Randle may have told you, I am not coming back. Nothing is coming back. It is all gone forever and I am sorry for that.

      This is the first of a series of letters I have created to help you survive your new life. You will get these letters at regular intervals. Sometimes every day and for several months. The process is automated. The key to the second bedroom will be posted to you soon. For your own wellbeing, please don’t try to get into the room before then.

      This is what’s next. You have a very important choice to make. Dr Randle has told you what she thinks is happening to you. She has probably asked you not to read