The Raw Shark Texts Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 snookerafternoons 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 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