something like this happened already?”
“No.” It was a knee-jerk, things are complicated enough thing to say, nothing to do with what would be the best or not the best thing to do. Was it even really a lie? I smoothed over the bumps deciding I’d think about it later: “Well,” I said. “There was a note by the front door telling me to phone you and how to get here, just that kind of thing.”
Half true. Less than half true: Good luck and sorry. The First Eric Sanderson.
“Of course,” she said. “You should leave that in place in case you ever need it again. But please – if you should come across anything else, bring it straight to me. Don’t read it. I know what I’m asking you to do is difficult, but if I’m going to be able to help you, this is very, very important. Okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
Kitchen Archaeology and Second Post
In the deep dark, in the thousand-fathom black waters of ancestral memory and instinctive unconscious, where old gods and primitive responses float invisible and gigantic, something moves. The dust debris on the ocean floor, sediment a million years still, lifts and swirls in its wake
I woke in a jump of panic, flailing around inside my head, but I could still remember. The bedroom carpet, Randle, her wicker chairs, the yellow Jeep, the house. Just one evening of memories, but it was enough to know it hadn’t happened again, I was still the same person I’d been the night before. I was lying on the sofa. I’d fallen asleep almost as soon as I’d got back from Dr Randle’s and the TV was still on, all colourful, cheerful and breezy and not at all worse for wear after such a long shift. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Breakfast television presenters with sculptured hair were talking to an American sitcom actor who’d just done the voice of an animated lion in a new film. I wondered how long a TV would carry on with this sort of thing if left on its own in an empty room and it bothered me that the answer was probably forever.
This wasn’t my house. Being there, having made myself at home, it felt dangerously wrong. I was the tired burglar who’d stopped burgling for a quick forty winks and opened his eyes to see it was morning. I half expected the sound of the front door opening, for someone to walk in with bags of shopping or an overnight case, to stop in the doorway, look at me and scream. Only – it was my house. Eric’s house. Remember it or not, I was home and even if I spent the next hundred years tensed up on the sofa listening for a key in the lock, nobody at all was going to come. I decided the only way to shake these feelings would be to explore, to get to know all the rooms and spaces and things on my own terms. I’d have to break the ice. Breakfast would be a good start. In spite of everything, I was starving.
The fridge was well stocked with all the makings of a full English. I clicked on the grill, found some plates, found the cutlery drawer on the third try. Then it hit me like a little void in the 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.
