The Raw Shark Texts Read Online Free PDF

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 uselesslyspecific information about Ryan Mitchell – names of his aunts and uncles (first names only), his