The Raw Shark Texts. Steven Hall

would be relevant? Useful?”

      “Of course I did, but my hands were tied.”

      “By me?”

      “Yes. Who else?”

      Apparently the First Eric Sanderson made a decision to completely isolate himself from his old life before the onset of his illness. He had been unwilling to discuss the possibility of contact even after his condition began to worsen, remaining convinced that he needed a completely clean slate if he was ever going to deal with things from Greece. I got the impression this had been intriguing to Randle. She talked more about rare conditions and dissociative fugue, and called Eric’s decision to sever all ties to his old life a very interesting precursor. I asked if she hadn’t thought the family should be contacted when things started to get worse with Eric’s condition. (I was careful to say ‘my condition’ out loud.)

      “Perhaps I haven’t been clear enough about the nature of our relationship,” Dr Randle said in answer to this. “You are here on your terms, not on mine. I only do what you give me permission to do.”

      “But I was sick. I mean, no offence, but why didn’t I have a proper doctor?”

      “I am a proper doctor, Eric.”

      “Come on,” I said. “You know what I mean.”

      “I’m afraid I’m not quite sure what you’re suggesting. What we’re doing, everything that’s happening here, it’s what you’ve chosen. This is how you wanted it. I do believe I can help you, but if you don’t want to do things this way anymore, that’s fine. Of course that’s fine. You’re completely free to take yourself to a GP or to the hospital. You always have been.” She said all this in a pleasant this-is-impartial-advice tone but it was easy to feel the radioactivity spike in the room. The collar of my T-shirt itched dry against my neck.

      I had a horrible gut worry about Randle humouring the First Eric Sanderson, bending too easily to his wants for complete isolation in order to keep exclusive discovery rights on the unusual things happening inside his head. Eric didn’t want any contact with his family, but in the end, was he of sufficiently sound mind to make that decision? I’m not sure what I thought Randle should have done, but her attitude seemed distant and wrong. The whole thing felt, no, not sinister, but at least coldly academic. Or maybe I just wished things were different and I had someone looking after me as I tried to come to terms with it all. For now at least, I was on my own.

      Or was I? As Randle rattled on in defence of her pricked ethics, I ran through my options. Maybe there was an address book full of contact numbers in the locked room back at the house and all I had to do was force my way inside and get it. But then maybe it wasn’t safe for me to open that door. Maybe whatever had been triggering the condition was locked away in there too. What would happen if, next time I woke up on the floor, I couldn’t remember how to speak, or how to walk? Or how to breathe? Perhaps there was contact information inside the still unopened ryan mitchell envelope the First Eric Sanderson had sent through the post. ‘It will be useful in case of emergency.’ Could I risk opening that? How can you get your bearings when all you can see are flat horizons? I guess you can’t; I guess all you can do is stay still and wait until something presents itself.

      •

      Quiet, empty days passed. The quiet days became quiet weeks and Ian and I settled our new world into a tiny orbit.

      On Monday and Thursday mornings I’d go shopping. I bought a cookbook by a celebrity chef and, starting at the beginning and working towards the end, I made one meal from it every day. I’d have lunch with a book and Ian would eat with me, usually sliced ham or tuna, and we would watch the snooker together in the afternoon. Ian, I discovered, was a fan of the snooker. At the weekend I would stay in bed late and read the newspapers. On Friday nights a video, or the cinema. There was enough money in the bank account to pay for this kind of life for two and a half years, maybe three. I didn’t have to do a thing with bills either – everything had its date, its direct debit. Nothing at all needed to be done. I was free. Sundays, I would go for a drive in the yellow Jeep, not usually to anywhere in particular, although one week I made it as far as the seaside.

      Through these activities I began to develop some parameters, put together a minute but perfectly formed existence, a neat, square little head garden – flowers, grass with daisies and a white picket fence – a postage stamp of control in miles and miles of empty moorland. I began to make myself an inside and an outside, an Eric and a not-Eric, a little block of self in the world. I wondered sometimes whether I was happy or unhappy, but it was as if the question wasn’t relevant anymore, as if I was no longer the kind of creature to whom these states applied. I was a little robot, a machine for existing, just following all the looping programmes I’d set for myself, and nothing more or less than that.

      Sitting in the armchair with the cat on my knee and snooker on the TV, watching the shadow of the telegraph pole make its journey between the gardens, I thought a lot about the point of my being alive. Not in an unhappy way. Just in a quiet and straightforward way, a blank, empty wondering. My routines, my Prozac routines – after a while I didn’t care about getting better or about the First Eric Sanderson or about whether Randle was looking out for my best interests or not. I just didn’t think about any of it anymore. My heart was deep space and my head was maths.

      My life as a shopping list.

      One morning, I pulled a cup from the draining board too quickly and knocked a plate into the sink. The plate didn’t break but there was a loud crash and the noise made me burst into tears for no reason at all.

      Something would happen or nothing would. I’d known I would have to make a decision, this was it. I didn’t have the reach to stretch forward and find whatever was going to happen to me, so I just sat back in my little clockwork world as it tick-tocked around the sun and away into the future.

      New letters from the First Eric Sanderson arrived almost every day. Almost every lunchtime I would take each one and put it in a cupboard in the kitchen, unopened. Some letters were thick and fat, some fully-fledged parcels, others so small and so thin they could have only contained a single folded sheet. When a letter arrived with a thick square of card inside, I knew my last self had decided I was ready for the key to the locked door but the space no longer held any urgency for me. The world behind that door wasn’t part of the me I’d been putting together. If anything, the locked room was a threat to its stability and I had no desire to challenge the boundaries I’d built. The envelope went into the cupboard with all the others.

      I did open the ‘emergency’ envelope that came with the first letter, the one marked RYAN MITCHELL. It was the evening after my second meeting with Randle and I couldn’t get away from the idea that this Ryan Mitchell might be one of the friends Eric had left behind, that perhaps it contained a way to get back in touch with his old life. But that’s not what it was at all. Inside, I found sixteen pages of typed, personal and uselessly specific information about Ryan Mitchell – names of his aunts and uncles (first names only), his allergies, the results of thirty-two spelling tests he’d taken when he was ten, a list of sexual partners, the colour history of three rooms in his house – but no address, no phone number. Nothing at all to connect Eric and this whoever-he-was, nothing I might have actually needed to know. The First Eric Sanderson had titled these pages RYAN MITCHELL MANTRA. I pinned them to the notice board in the kitchen and would try to work out what use any of this information could possibly be as I cooked my celebrity chef meals each evening.

      I saw Dr Randle twice a week and, as I said, I soon stopped having any opinion about these sessions at all. She would answer my questions, I would answer hers and we would drink tea. This was the extent of our relationship and more and more it was all I wanted. I never went to a GP or to the hospital. I never spoke to her about the locked room and she never gave any indication that she might have known about it. I didn’t tell her about the letters. I didn’t tell her about the Ryan Mitchell Mantra. I didn’t really tell her anything. What did I have to tell? My life was perfect and pointless, and if that didn’t mean anything good, it didn’t mean anything bad either.

      As more time