The Raw Shark Texts (5 page)

“What?”

She put the guidebook on the table and pulled down her shades. “Wake up.”

“I know,” I smiled. “I think it must be the heat.”

Clio poked her glasses back up her nose and stared at me for a second.

“You might want to work on your stamina, Sanderson. You’re no use to me broken.”

I came over all mock hurt. “Is that all I am to you?”

“Yes,” she said.

Hours after what I’m clumsily thinking of as Clio’s
moment of crisis
the night before, we’d had sex again, at something o’clock in the morning. The second time was sleepy and slow, a drifting almost subconscious thing. Clio speaking so quietly as I moved inside her and me speaking too and the words were from a long way down, not thinking and then saying things, words, at all. Night words, sex words or dream words, I don’t know, not for conversation or the sun. Not the kind of words that can be pinned down with letters and ink. I don’t really know how to explain it, but that’s how it was.

“I love you,” Clio said out of nowhere as I reached across the table for the guidebook.

“I know,” I nodded, taking the book and leafing through it. “And I enjoy spending time with you too.”

“Wanker,” she laughed. “I hate that one.”

“You invented that one.”

“Give me the book back,” she said. “I want to show you the stone man thing.”

The videotape of the flashing light perched on top of the video recorder, under the TV, in the dark. The stabs and shards of the smashed light bulb all in their box, shaken back carefully down the crease of a newspaper, like glitter, to protect Ian the cat’s ambling late-night feet. The light bulb box sealed up and standing above the fireplace like an urn. Sixteen weeks of letters and post from the First Eric Sanderson sitting unopened in a little cube of black space behind a kitchen cupboard door. Raindrops tapping and streaking in the wind, each one its own bacterial blue planet, rolling down the outside of the windowpanes. Dust collecting itself in corners, my own Hiroshima shadow building up on the windowsills and the skirting boards. The spiders and the insects dividing out their territories on the vastness of the floors and ceilings. The downstairs of the house not quite still and not quite quiet in the night-time.

Upstairs, off the landing, the locked door, solid and familiar and unmovable. Next to it, my bedroom door, real and functional and not quite closed. A cat-wide gap existed between the door and the frame and this projected a floor-to-ceiling wedge of yellow bedside table light. Beyond the crack and into the bedroom, the impenetrable exercise book on the carpet, four columns of numbers and a crossed-out chart facing up at the ceiling. On the double bed Ian the cat curled in a nose-to-tail sleeping ball,
The Light Bulb Fragment
book, slid halfway down between pillow and duvet, and me, on my side, forearm covering my eyes from the forgotten-about electric bulb, dreaming:

I walked along a sun-dappled avenue lined with overgrown bushes and vines, half-collapsed Greek columns and classical white statues with
missing arms or tumbled heads or broken plinths which tilted their weathered masters at angles which would have been precarious and scramble-sliding for any real person. The air was sweet-sappy with the smell of eucalyptus or linseed or camphor oil and was so hot and alive it got into your mouth and vapoured away the moisture with gentle, intimate care. I passed an old marble statue of the celebrity chef who wrote my cookbook. His blank eyes stared out of his licheny face as he stood tall and aggressive, holding – wielding – his spatula as a hero would a sword. A little further on in a deep alcove, a shadowy, spider-webbed Humphrey Bogart leant against a rough carved piano, his grimy stone glass held in his grimy stone hand up against his grimy stone tuxedo.

At the end of the avenue, I strolled under a crumbled archway and out into the remains of a large open square with a Roman bath at its centre. The bath was half-empty and what water there was had been covered by a quiet mat of leaves from a wide willowy tree which had forced its way up through the ancient flooring. I made my way towards the tree, carefully overstepping a busy line of big black ants and weaving around the many tall brown grass tufts and low flat bushes which had also pushed up wherever they could between the stones. Nature’s reclamation committee.

As I got closer I noticed a white plastic sun lounger parked up in the tree’s shade. There was a girl lying on it, on her side, her back to me. As I got closer the girl sat up to dig for something in her bag and my insides leaped throatwards with a wet jerk of recognition.

“Clio.”

Clio Aames stopped what she was doing, turned and pushed her sunglasses up into her long dark hair like an Alice band.

“Fucking hell,” she said. “Look who it isn’t.”

I arrived under the tree and dipped as she half rose, scooping my arms around the solid summer heat warm reality of her. She squeezed me back hard and we sank down together onto the lounger. We stayed like that for a long time, holding tight, our faces buried in each other’s necks, breathing and being still.

“You alright?” I asked with just breath and hardly any sound, under the lobe of her ear.

“Yeah, I think. Yeah.” Air, words from inside her against my neck. “I missed you.”

“I’ve forgotten you, Clio. I’ve forgotten it all. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Hey. Come on, it’s okay.” Her hand on my neck and her fingers stroking circles in the back of my hair. “It’s alright. Everything’s okay.” She pushed us gently apart so she could look into my eyes. “It’s alright. We’re here now and everything’s okay.”

“Clio,” I said.

“It’s alright. I know.”

“You’re gone.”

“I’m right here.”

“No, you’re not. You’re dead.”

Clio let go of me and sat up straight.

“For your information,” she said, “I think I’m looking pretty good.” She ran her hands down from bikini top to bikini bottoms to emphasise the point. After a second she looked back at me. “This is the part where you’re supposed to agree.”

“You look fantastic.”

“Fantastic for a dead person?”

I let go of it, felt the smile open up on my face.

“Don’t start with me, Aames. How come you’re wearing your top anyway?”

I reached over to touch her in the same way she’d touched herself but she slapped my hand away hard with exaggerated amazement.

“Oh my God.
Clio, you’re dead. Hey Clio, can I see your tits?
One word for you: necro–” she broke it in half and pinned each part down with a finger point “–philia. This is what you degenerate into when I leave you on your own?”

I stared at my feet with as serious an expression as I could manage and answered in my gruff, B-movie samurai voice.

“I am filled with shame.”

“Good,” she said, pulling her knees up to her chin. “Now tell me what’s been happening in
EastEnders”.

And that’s what I did. I was about halfway through a complex and unlikely plot surrounding the return of one of the programme’s villains when Clio leaned in, slipped her hand around the back of my neck and kissed me, at first gently and then deeply and honestly.

“Hang on,” I said quietly as we moved apart. “I’ve not told you about the stupid one with droopy eyes getting pregnant again.”

Clio smiled an empty kind of smile and pushed her forehead back against mine.

“I’m sorry this had to happen,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not as good as it was. I think the ratings have suffered too.”

“Eric.”

“I know, I’m sorry. It’s just. How can we do this, you know? How can we even do the jokes?”

“Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition,” Clio said, her head nodding a little and making mine nod too. We stayed like that, forehead against forehead, for a few seconds.

“Could – was there something I could have done?”

She pulled back a little so we were eye to eye. Her hand still drooped over my shoulder. She shook her head.

“I don’t even know.”

I took hold of her other hand and held it on my lap with both of mine.

“Clee, tell me something to prove this isn’t a dream.”

“Something like what?”

“Like something I don’t know and I have to go and look it up and when I do it turns out to be true.”

“I don’t think it works like that.”

“Just tell me I’m not dreaming?”

“Maybe you are,” she said. “Probably you are.”

“I don’t want to be. Clio, I can’t do this on my own.”

There was a bang.

We both jumped, turned towards the Roman bath. A clump of leaves swirled on the surface of the water in a slow spiral.

“Is there something alive in there?”

Clio nodded. “Yes.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said, watching the waters. “Something from down where it gets black.”

There was another bang.

Little waves raced across the littery surface, lapping the bath’s mouldy tiled sides.

“Are you ready? This is it.” Clio held me by the tops of my arms and gave me a smile which was meant to be strong and almost was.

“What? Clee, what’s going on?”

Bang.

Bang.

I jumped awake, blinking in the electric light. I didn’t know if the noise had been part of some dream I’d been having or a real, external thing. The cat was upright and alert at the end of the bed, staring with huge eyes at the wall. I stayed as quiet as I could, counting off the seconds of silence in my head: One Mississippi…Two Mississippi…Three Mississippi…Four Mississippi…Fi –

Bang.

Ian disappeared in a ginger bounce of nervous energy and I knotted up in shock.

Another bang.

A slam.

A thud. A bang. Another slam.

Chemical instincts flooded through me, numbing fingertips, lips and ears. My stomach dropped slack and sick and every hair on my body pulled upright, an electrical conductor. My biology primed me to run, to escape. But I didn’t run. Some higher logic took control as I sat up carefully, a steady hand taking hold of my strings and turning my actions away from panic and towards – something else. I found myself taking four, five deep breaths then, quietly as I could, getting out of bed and creeping onto the landing.

The banging and slamming, clattering and rattling sounds were coming from behind the locked door, and they were building up, growing more and more aggressive. As I stood there, shaking, controlling my breathing, keeping quiet, I started to realise something about the noise
was wrong. It took a few seconds to work out what that something was, and then I got it: the banging and crashing from behind the door seemed to be coming
from a distance
. From the dimensions of the house, the locked room couldn’t be large, slightly smaller than my bedroom at the biggest, and perhaps only a box room. An impossibility then, but still: the sounds seemed to be bouncing off bare walls, as if travelling from the far end of a huge, empty warehouse.

The violence cranked up even further into an angry thrashing of violent bangs and metal crashes. I leant forward, listening for some clue. My ear brushed the surface of the locked door, gently, barely at all. The instant it happened, the split second my body made contact with the paintwork, the noise, the smashing, banging, slamming, everything, stopped dead.

Shock jerked me backwards like burned fingers. I tried not to move, tried not to breathe, my hand covering my mouth.

Deep thick silence thundered from behind the closed door. Pure. Heavy. Pregnant. The sound of being stared at.

I waited.

I waited for something to happen.

One minute.

Two minutes.

Nothing happened at all.

Ten minutes later I had the hammer out of the toolbox and was searching through the kitchen cupboard full of unopened letters from the First Eric Sanderson. I found the envelope with the card square inside, ripped it open at one end and shook it. The key fell into my hand.

“I’m coming in,” I said outside the door, surprised by the clarity and pitch of my voice in the silence. My guts felt like dangling elastic bands. Hot nervous fluid pressed in my bladder. “I’m coming in. I’m unlocking the door.”

The key clicked around in the keyhole. I pushed down the handle and swung the door slowly open. Silence. Holding the hammer up by my right ear, ready to bring it down on anyone or anything that lurched out of the darkness, I edged inside, fumble-reaching at the walls. Eventually I found a switch and clicked on the light.

There was a bright red filing cabinet standing in the middle of the room.

And nothing else.

There was no one there.

The room
was
smaller than the bedroom, much too tiny to make any sense of those ringing echoes. The single window was locked and undamaged. As far as I could see, there was no way anyone could have got in or out, but I kept the hammer ready.

Four of the five drawers in the filing cabinet were empty. In the fifth drawer, I found a single red cardboard suspension folder with a single sheet of printed paper inside.

I didn’t take out the folder or read the sheet of paper. I didn’t do anything for one, two, three, four seconds. Finally, I closed the drawer, pressed my back against the cabinet and tried a grip on the
wrongness
of it all. It wasn’t just the noises. From my second day in the world, I’d imagined this room containing all the facts and figures and pictures of my lost self, a paper trail life of the First Eric Sanderson, and photographs – of him, of Clio Aames, and of all the people close to them. Permanent records in colour print and text proving those lives had happened, those people and times and events had been real and once had their place in the working of things. I’d half expected to find this room filled with Clio’s belongings – it would have been a logical explanation for the room being sealed up in the first place. But there was nothing. I checked through the cabinet and the rest of the room again to make sure. Pulling the red folder off its runners and tucking it under my arm, I got myself out of there, clicked off the light and locked the door behind me.

I pulled the vodka bottle out of the freezer drawer – I’d got into the habit of having a shot or two with the Friday night video, and maybe the occasional shot with afternoon TV – and poured myself a big half-glass over ice. Ian reappeared in the kitchen, now all brave and never-been-scared-in-my-life, doing his fat cat slink around my legs. I opened a tin of tuna for him and took the vodka and the bottle through to the living room.

Television, the great normaliser. I switched it on and dropped onto the sofa, vodka at my feet, red folder at my side. I drank back a few deep, hot throatfuls to calm my nerves before opening the folder and taking out the piece of paper inside. This is what it said:

Imagine you’re in a rowing boat on a lake.

It’s summer, early morning. That time when the sun hasn’t quite broken free of the landscape and long, projected shadows tigerstripe the light. The rays are warm on your skin as you drift through them, but in the shadows the air is still cold, greyness holding onto undersides and edges wherever it can.

A low clinging breeze comes and goes, racing ripples across the water and gently rocking you and your boat as you float in yin-yang slices of morning. Birds are singing. It’s a sharp, clear sound, clean without the humming backing track of a day well underway. There’s the occasional sound of wind in leaves and the occasional slap-splash of a larger wavelet breaking on the side of your boat, but nothing else.

You reach over the side and feel the shock of the water, the steady bob of the lake’s movement playing up and down your knuckles in a rhythm of cold. You pull your arm back; you enjoy the after-ache in your fingers. Holding out your hand, you close your eyes and feel the tiny physics of gravity and resistance as the liquid finds routes across your skin, builds itself into droplets of the required weight, then falls, each drop ending with an audible tap.

Now, right on that tap – stop. Stop imagining. Here’s the real game. Here’s
what’s obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn’t matter if you never know me, or never know anything about me. I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were even born and still – think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside – the lake in my head has become the lake in your head.

Behind or inside or through the two hundred and eighteen words that made up my description, behind or inside or through those nine hundred and sixty-nine letters, there is some kind of flow. A purely conceptual stream with no mass or weight or matter and no ties to gravity or time, a stream that can only be seen if you choose to look at it from the precise angle we are looking from now, but there, nevertheless, a stream flowing directly from my imaginary lake into yours.

Next, try to visualise all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.

Now, go back to your lake, back to your gently bobbing boat. But this time, know the lake; know the place for what it is and when you’re ready, take a look over the boat’s side. The water is clear and deep. Broken sunlight cuts blue wedges down, down into the clean cold depths. Sit quietly, wait and watch. Don’t move. Be very, very still. They say life is tenacious. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places. Life will always find a way, they say. Be very quiet. Keep looking into the water. Keep looking and keep watching.

I read through the text couple of times. I put the page back in its folder.
I drained my vodka. I rubbed my eyes. I said
Jesus
. I poured another drink and slouched back into the sofa. The cat slid past, ignoring me completely. The fridge hummed. Everything else was rain on the windows and the night-time dramas of insects. Nothing made any kind of sense at all, or if it did, I was too tired and frazzled to see how. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the burn, swirl and chink of the vodka and on the simple sliding weights of breathing.

I woke up on the sofa in the middle of some vivid memory playback of my second meeting with Dr Randle.

“But it’s not – ” I said out loud, and then stopped, recognising the dream for what it was.

While I’d been asleep, something had changed.

My groggy half-awake attention turned inwards like a brilliant sweeping searchlight and the sudden clarity of it shocked me. I saw the whole of my sixteen-week-old mind and my sixteen-week-old self perfectly, completely, vivid and obvious in every detail. I could even see the memory dream still playing in the back of my head, tape winding down, losing cohesion and forward momentum.

I pushed myself upright on the sofa. The sensation of clarity expanded. Everything in the room, all things and their spatial relationships, all colours, light, shades, textures, all space, all air pressure and all bouncing wave sounds became cutting-edge sharp, everything tuned to a hot brilliant focus. My wide-open skipping-around eyes found the vodka glass on my lap. I became transfixed. I lifted it as carefully and gently as I could, working hard not to affect events inside. The three ice cubes had melted into round-edged lozenges, each with its own complex puzzle of faultlines, ghost planes and fractures. Around each cube, the run-off water and the slightly thicker vodka curled together in miniature weather systems and storm fronts. I thought about fragile colour spirals of oil in water, about the
sad rolling and dispersing of the galaxy, about cogwheel daisies on green grass driving the vast machinery of evolution, about a whirl of cream unwinding its spiral arms in a left-behind coffee cup and all this coming from somewhere all at once but not distracting; perfectly in line with the beautiful, almost traumatic actuality of substance, form, movement and light in the glass. It was breathtaking, too clear, too much. My eyes were hot and prickly, and I realised I was crying.

A movement unlocked my attention. I re-focused my eyes, looking past the vodka glass and into the static buzz of the TV. I stayed very still for a few seconds before lowering the glass to the floor, careful not to take my eyes off the screen. There was something distant and alive in the depths of the white noise – a living glide of thoughts swimming forward, a moving body of concepts and half felt images.

I moved slowly off the sofa and crawled across the floor towards the television, trying to see deeper into the vast depths of no-signal hiss behind the glass. I got nearer and the creature became aware of me. It picked up speed and powered out of sight, disappearing in a fast flick of movement below the bottom right corner of the screen.

I crawled closer, closer, closer, trying to pick out another glimpse
or recollective flash of the thing deep in the vast distances of static, and then –