There is a second envelope inside this envelope labelled RYAN MITCHELL. Please read the information enclosed carefully and save in your memory as much of the text as you can. I ask that you do this even if you do decide to disregard all of my further communications. The information will be important in case of emergency.
You do not have long to make your decision. Please think carefully.
With regret and also hope,
The First Eric Sanderson
I pushed my hand into the envelope and found a second, chubby package marked just as I, he, the First Eric Sanderson said it would be. RYAN MITCHELL.
I wandered through the living room, into the kitchen and back into the living room again re-reading the letter. She can neither help nor protect you. I know this from experience.
The afternoon sunlight drew a bright stretched rectangle on the carpet and a small bird sang on the TV aerial of the house opposite mine. I heard the sound of a car a couple of streets away, growing quieter and quieter with distance. The fractures in this broken world spread out under my feet.
At 3.30 p.m. on the second day of my second life, a big ginger tomcat arrived in the kitchen. He hauled his heavy self in through the open window, stepped across the worktops and planted himself down solid in the middle of the floor. Then he just sat there, staring up at me with round cynical eyes. I stared back, surprised. I thought he might run if I tried to get too close but he didn’t budge at all, he just kept on looking at me as I knelt down to read his collar tag: There was a name–Hello! I’m Ian–and a full address, although the first line told me everything I needed to know.
I had a housemate.
“So, slugger,” I smiled. “Where have you been hiding?”
The cat just looked at me.
I tried again: “Are you hungry?”
The cat just looked at me.
“Hmmm,” I said, stepping back. “What kind of a name is Ian for a cat anyway?”
And the cat just looked at me, his big ginger face managing to do bored, irritated and smug all at the same time. He looked at me as though I was being very stupid indeed.
3
My Heart was Deep Space and My Head was Maths
Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there’s not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago.
Everything is changing.
In the early days of my second life I noticed how the shadow of a telegraph pole would inch between the gardens of two houses across the street–from 152 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 happ
ening 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 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.
&n
bsp; 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 shock. I opened the door a little way and a wet bluster of rainy evening air rumbled and tumbled in through the gap. There was an old man standing outside. He was wiry, big-nosed and big-chinned. He had a thinning comb-over and it collected and ran rainwater crystal earrings off the bottoms of his long-lobed ears. He hugged his raincoat around himself and blinked because of the raindrops.