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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 how to breathe? Perhaps there was contact information inside the still unopened RYANMITCHELL 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