to the garden of 150 – over the course of several hours, from lunchtime into evening. After watching this a few times I did the maths: the shadow movement from one garden to the next meant that both houses, the telegraph pole, the street, all of us, had travelled one thousand, one hundred and sixty miles around the earth with the turning of the planet. We’d also travelled about seventy-six thousand miles through space around the sun in the same period and much much further as part of the wider spiralling of the galaxy. And nobody noticed a thing. There is no stillness, only change. Yesterday’s here is not today’s here. Yesterday’s here is somewhere in Russia, in a wilderness in Canada, a deep blue nowhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s behind the sun, it’s in deep space, hundreds of thousands, millions of miles left behind. We can never wake up in the same place we went to sleep in. Our place in the universe, the universe itself, it all changes faster and faster by the second. Every one of us standing on this planet, we’re all moving forwards and we’re never ever coming back. The truth is, stillness is an idea, a dream. It’s the thought of friendly, welcoming lights still shining in all the places we’ve been forced to abandon.
•
“What?”
“No.” Dr Randle wore a green jumper with red stags or reindeers on it and brown tweedy cross-check trousers. “It’s just – you never mentioned having a cat before.”
“Well, I’ve got one now. When I left he was sitting on the sofa watching Richard and Judy.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Is it?”
“You said he had your name and address on his collar?”
“No, his name and my address. Do you think it’s someone’s idea of a joke?”
“Hmmm … it wouldn’t be much of a joke, would it?”
“No, suppose not. Maybe someone’s taken to palming animals off on me because they know I won’t realise they’re not mine.” I was trying to be funny. It wasn’t working.
“I can’t see that, Eric. And, anyway, you said he’s fond of you?”
“No. God, no, not fond. He’s not frightened of me though.”
“Well, maybe he’s just new. It’s possible that you got him before your last recurrence and never had the chance to mention him to me.”
“He doesn’t look very new. He’s quite old and miserable looking.”
Randle laughed. I’d not heard her do this before. The sound came in somewhere between a horse and a Catherine-wheel.
“Well,” she said, “I’m happy he’s keeping your spirits up, wherever he came from. What’s his name?”
“Ian.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Yeah, I know.”
I’d decided not to take the letter from the First Eric Sanderson along to my second meeting with Dr Randle. I’d begun a lie by denying what I’d found on the hallstand table on the first day of my life and – partially – it was easier to carry on than to backtrack to the truth. The other part? You could call it a wait-and-see attitude. I’d decided not to open any more of the letters if more came, but I’d also decided not to tell Randle about them for the time being. This seemed to be dead centre of the situation to me, completely middle of the road. I would be following the important part of the Doctor’s instructions without actually turning the letters over. I knew the letters might help Randle cure my illness, but. But but but. Can I explain this? It was just too soon – I’d not been in the world long enough to be comfortable with so much blind trust in her diagnosis. The letter from the hallstand table, the second letter that arrived a few hours ago, and any future unopened ones, they would all go into a cupboard in the kitchen and be left there until such a time as I felt ready to hand them over. I thought, after a couple more sessions, when I’m comfortable, when I’ve found my feet, then I’ll come clean.
As soon as I could get off the topic of Ian the cat, I asked Randle about my family and friends. She said she knew nothing about them.
“Nothing?” I said. “How can you know nothing?”
“I don’t know anything, Eric,” she said, “because you’d never tell me anything.”
“But didn’t you think that 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
