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 passed though, I found myself thinking a lot about Clio Aames. I wondered about her and Eric, the way they had been with each other, how they had sex, the cruel things they said and didn’t mean when they argued. I imagined her. Randle said Clio had been training as a solicitor. I imagined her sometimes blonde, sometimes dark, hair long, hair short. Some days I made her sensitive and caring, others tough and no bullshit. It was a game, a kind of barrier testing.
The idea of a real Clio Aames – her actual skin, voice, ideas, eyes, past, hates, loves, hopes, priorities, blood, fingernails and shoes and periods and tears and nightmares, teeth and spit and laugh, her actual fingerprints on glass – the thought of her with this kind of solid factual history, this had-once-been, was too too much for me (another reason I didn’t open the locked door). No, the ghosts I called up in those late nights and long drives and snooker afternoons were all painted on the walls of my empty head with my own two hands. And that was as close as I wanted to be to anyone or anything.
Almost sixteen weeks after I’d woken up on the bedroom floor, the light bulb box arrived.
The dark shape glides up into the flow of conversations and stories, swims through the word-hum of packed Saturday night bars, circles the loops and edges of exchanged mobile numbers.
A telephone call is misdialled and, miles away, my unconscious self shifts in sleep, disturbed by a ringing bell.
From four degrees of separation, the shadow under the water catches the scent. A curved, rising signifier, a black idea fin of momentum and intent cuts through the distance between us in a spray of memes.
I opened my eyes. I was in the living room, lying on the sofa. The phone was ringing. Except for the one time Dr Randle had called to move an appointment, the phone never rang.
I shuffled out into the hallway all dream-fuddled and struggling through sleep sand but as I reached the hallstand table the ringing stopped. An empty sound-break of after-echoes bounced off the walls around me. I dialled 1471. A noise came down the line like the hiss of a seashell; that close-to-the-ear sound of almost-waves breaking far far away. I pressed down the little black bails on the phone cradle a couple of times and tried again. This time I got the clunky voice of the computerised telephone woman: “You were called at … Twenty … Twenty-six … Hours … The caller withheld their number.”
I’d hung up and was on my way back into the living room when – bang bang bang bang bang – a flat palm on the front door made me jump and prickle with
