The Raw Shark Texts (10 page)

At the far end of the bar, Aunty Ruth moved all surviving sandwiches onto a single platter then set about clearing the empties. Rush watched her manoeuvre her wheelchair out of the bar then turned back to me.

“Lots of smashed-up people because of those hills,” he said.

Blink. Blink.

It was down to me to bridge the meaning gap and it took a second.

“You know them then? Ruth and –”

“John. Yeah,” he nodded. “Car crash three years ago. They didn’t think she’d survive the night.”

A few days before I set out on this
quest
I bought a mobile phone. I rigged up a system which would feed incoming calls through a post-buried diverter in the locked room for safety, then I made myself a small stack of
business cards. They had
I need to speak to you
written on them and my phone number. I’d pushed the cards under
AUTHORISED PERSONNEL
doorways in the back alleys of crumbling docklands in Hull and grease-smeared transport depots in Sheffield. I’d left them in all the grey breezeblock
STAFF ONLY
and
MAINTENANCE
corridors which riddle the backstages of big shopping complexes and superstores across the north of England. Any place I came across that could possibly be described as un-space, I left a card. The Un-Space Exploration Committee, whoever they were, had helped the First Eric Sanderson on his journey. Maybe someone there would be able to help me track down Trey Fidorous. That was my plan, my hope. Only, the mobile phone never rang.

After so many weeks of leaving the cards and hearing nothing, I’d found myself starting to worry that the whole idea of un-space and its committee was just a jumbled delusion created by the first Eric’s collapsing mind. The line between chasing ghosts and tilting at windmills was faint and thin and blurred to the point of almost not being a line at all. Maybe this was a condition. Perhaps I
was
suffering from Randle’s fugue and I should turn around, go home and confess everything to her or to a proper medical doctor in a hospital who could finally make sense of all this. But. But the Ludovician was real, I’d seen it. I had seen it. And I kept coming back to the First Eric Sanderson’s words.
Please don’t lose faith in me, Eric.
I told myself that I wouldn’t and I couldn’t, for my sake as much as for his.

Bleak Dean Rush got up from my table, drained his beer, nodded to me, blinked and was gone. I sat there on my own for a while, spinning my bottle of beer on its mat and looking at the left-behind plate of sandwich crust Vs and discarded strings of fat.

“Are you and the cat running a mobile library, love?” Three-quarters of Aunty Ruth’s head smiled over the check-in desk. I stopped at the foot of the stairs.

“Well, the mobile part might be a problem.”

She laughed. “I could always try calling someone else if you like, or I could get John to have a look at it. Mind you, he doesn’t know half what he thinks he does and what he does know usually makes things worse.”

“Don’t worry, it’s fine. It’ll be nice to be off the road for a few days, to be honest. Ian says thank you for the ham.”

“He’s welcome. You’re right to give yourself a rest after what you went through getting here.”

I’d been unloading boxes of books from the back of the yellow Jeep and thinking about potential and momentum. The yellow Jeep was dead. The storm found its way into the engine and turned something important and dry into something broken and wet during the night. Aunty Ruth called a local garage but flooding had left the whole town full of tipped, beached and silted cars.

“They said it’ll be at least twenty-four hours, love. Maybe a couple of days before they can send someone out.”

I could have tried a less local garage. Phoned back across the moors to Sheffield maybe, but I didn’t. I told myself a few days’ wait here at the Willows Hotel could be productive. One big push might finally decode the rest of The Light Bulb Fragment. I also needed to collect a new set of letters to
replace those ruined in the downpour the previous night. There was no reason not to do both here and now before heading out into Manchester; it would be hard to imagine how Fidorous’s trail could get any colder.

I convinced myself to stay on at the Willows Hotel with these clean practical facts, but there were other murkier reasons hiding in there too. I’d come three-quarters of the way along the path the first Eric had followed and I’d uncovered so very little – at best, unexplainable splinters and chips from a long lost yellow brick road; at worst, nothing at all. Soon the Light Bulb text would be decoded and not too long after that I’d reach Blackpool and the end of Fidorous’s old cold trail. The thought disturbed me. While there was still distance to travel, there was still the slim chance of finding answers. While there was still a journey to be made, my crumbly little self could exist in the potential of making it. But what when the road came to an end? What would I be then?

Ian ignored all the coming and going with boxes, staring out of the window at the trees or at the birds in them. I found myself wondering what happened to the other cat, Gavin. In The Light Bulb Fragment Eric and Clio said they’d bought two kittens before they went away to Greece, but perhaps all of that was just another routine, a joke they liked to play on strangers in campsite bars. I wondered what sequences of events had made Ian a real cat and left Gavin existing only in words, in the text of a memory. Maybe it’s natural for questions to outlive their answers. Or maybe answers don’t die but are just lost more easily, being so small and specific, like a coin dropped from the deck of a ship and into the big deep sea.

I finally closed the book of codes and charts around four o’clock the following morning. I’d been decoding and deciphering the Light Bulb text for almost thirteen hours straight, carefully chiselling out each letter from the sediment; verifying, classifying, contextualising, bringing old buried things back up into the world.

I hadn’t planned to attack The Light Bulb Fragment like this. After unloading the boxes I had a lunchtime sandwich and beer in the bar then I’d gone for a walk up the lane outside the hotel, following its winding way up the hillside. I found a bench by a lay-by and decided to sit down.

Blocky sandstone houses and mills made a town down in the valley. I saw the road I’d accidentally taken the night before and the battered park where the living brown river escaped its banks. The flashing lights of JCBs and council vehicles search-swiped through the black trees there now. Other strobing yellows blinked across the town too – recovery trucks collecting the dead cars, road cleaners, emergency street repairs. It looked as if the whole place was being dismantled to be taken somewhere else.

Beyond the town, the grey spread-planes of Manchester.

It started to drizzle. My coat was still wet from the downpour the previous night but I’d worn it anyway. I huddled down, pushed my head deep into the hood and slid my hands up the sleeves.
Nothing is ever still
, said the wind’s spittley breath over me,
there’s no hiding from that
.

I think there’s still a small block of original quiet that exists in the world. 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. – a last natural wilderness, time’s shrinking little Antarctica. In the heart of this remote and silent time-place, I finally closed my book of notes and decoding tables. I’d finished. I flipped through the completed text of The Light Bulb Fragment one more time and closed the notebook. I paced around the room for a few minutes without really seeing or looking, all heavy and sleep-staring. There were things in the text I hadn’t been expecting. Uncomfortable, complicating passages.

I checked my watch. I could afford half an hour’s sleep before the next task on my agenda if I wanted to take it, but I didn’t. The night’s decoding had left me feeling cold and hollow. I wanted to focus on other things, to do things, not lie still and quiet in a room without distractions. I packed away The Light Bulb Fragment and my translating book and dug out a smaller
reporter’s notepad and pair of binoculars from the backpack’s left pocket.

My coat was finally dry and warm from half a day over the radiator (the radiators were on constantly at the Willows Hotel, a preference shared by Aunty Ruth and Ian). My room key came with a front door key because reception went unmanned after ten o’clock and this meant I could come and go whenever I chose, which was useful for the kind of early morning surveillance necessary to collect a new supply of post. I already knew where I could get a good view of the town.

I dropped the notebook, binoculars and my mobile phone into my big empty coat pockets and took my supper tray – ‘I guessed you’d lost track of time, love, so I brought you something up’ – down to reception. I let myself out of the building as quietly as I could.

Pulling my coat tight against the surprise of the wind I set off up the dark lane towards the bench. To take my mind away from The Light Bulb Fragment, I started to work through the First Eric Sanderson’s various systems for
acquiring
other people’s post.

I never got to put any of those systems into action.

It all became academic as soon as I reached the lay-by that morning. Something was waiting for me on the bench, something that changed everything. A thick padded envelope with the words
THIS IS FOR YOU
written across the front.

The walk back to the hotel was ten minutes of wind, trees, the sound of my heels on the tarmac road and then, suddenly, a sharp electronic note. I tripped a step, juddering the tip of my shoe against the tarmac lane and thinking for a shocked beat that the parcel under my arm was making the noise, but then knowing – almost instantly and with voltage surprise rising up into my skull – what was really happening. I pulled the mobile phone out of my coat pocket and squinted at the bright green display:

<<< Call >>

Answer?

Clio slid her finger and thumb around the stem of her Amstel glass.

“The question,” she said, “is why would you
not
want a hammock?”

“Well – ”

“Oh – my – God,” she cut in with her best
Sex and the City
. “You are so last-century, Eric. Have you ever actually been in a hammock?”

“No.”

“You see?” she said. “You see?” Her face almost straight, Clio managed to give me a
what the hell do you think is so funny
stare. “Never been in a hammock. My God, Eric. I’m sorry to say this, I really am, but that is so you. You’re –” a tiny pause “– unseasoned.”

“Unseasoned?”

“Yes, darling. Unseasoned by the life-affirming spice of experience.”

I laughed out loud. “Fuck off.”

“Oh,” she said, as though my swearing were some big moment of intimate realisation. She looked me in the eyes. “Are you angry, Eric? Are you afraid?”

“Am I afraid of hammocks?”

She patted my hand. “It’s okay to cry.”

Something Clio likes to do is want things and then work out complicated ways of getting them. This is in spite of the fact that most of the things Clio wants she could actually afford fairly easily because she makes nearly half again as much money as I do. Or, that’s how it was until recently. We’ve
been living together for about eighteen months now and we’ve moved into the final stages of money commitment. My cash and Clio’s cash has collectively become ‘our cash’. This is a lovely and nice thing for all kinds of reasons, and it also means Clio can come up with new complex strategies to persuade me to let her use ‘our cash’ to buy things. Even though I would, of course, never try to stop her buying anything.

I took a swig from my bottle. “I’m trying to work out why you want me to have a hammock.”

“Because I love you and don’t want you to miss out.”

“And?”

“We can string it between the trees outside the tent and you can lie in it and read books.”

“And?”

Clio shrugged. “And I can lie in it and read
Fight Club?”

I smiled. “Okay, then. Let’s get a hammock.”

“Cool.”

“But how about we get it for both of us? Like a joint treat. To share.”

“Oh.”

“Unless,” I said, patting her hand the same way she’d patted mine, “unless you want me to buy a hammock as a treat just for myself because maybe you secretly want to buy a treat just for yourself and once I’ve got the hammock you can say ‘but I’d really like this and you
did
buy yourself that lovely hammock yesterday mer mer mer’.”

“Spoilsport,” Clio said, switching gears to wounded five-year-old. “Why don’t you love me anymore?”

“Because you’re an evil genius.”

She grinned. “I am, aren’t I?”

She is. Clio did want a treat for herself – an underwater camera. A second-hand one which was on sale at the bookshop in Naxos Town where we swapped our novels and where backpackers would sometimes sell stuff when money got short.

Clio loves snorkelling. She says it’s a bit like flying and I’d like to say
I know what she means, but I don’t. I’ve got a snorkel and mask too, but touching the bottom with my toes is as far out as I go. And on Naxos where the drop off is pretty steep, that’s only one step removed from paddling. What freaks me out, the few times I’ve tried snorkelling, is the huge bank of blue you see when you look out towards the open ocean. Turning my back on it, the scale of it – I don’t know. Mainly, I’m expecting something massive to come rushing out the second I look away and bite my legs off, but partly, maybe, it’s also the scale of the blue itself. Knowing how swimming towards that wall of blue can only make it bigger and bigger and bigger until its face is impossibly massive and all around and behind you too, with the sea floor sloped away to black. But the scale of the deep doesn’t bother Clio at all. She’s done parachute jumps too, and extreme skiing, although I don’t want to give you the impression she’s a health freak or whatever. We’re both fairly outdoorsy (don’t you hate that word?), but the idea of anything we do being healthy usually spoils it. I don’t think either of us have ever understood the whole
no pain, no gain
thing. Here’s something I especially love about Clio Aames; she likes to laugh at joggers. There are joggers on Naxos. The temperature is touching forty on the mainland and it isn’t much cooler out here but still, joggers on the beach. Clio has taken to saying “wrong” and sometimes pointing at them as they go past.

One of Clio’s all-time favourite facts is how the guy who invented jogging died of a heart attack. Someone at a barbecue last summer spent ages explaining to her how the jogging guy was actually born with a heart defect and how the heart attack was coming all along.
So it wasn’t actually caused by the jogging per se
, he kept saying, but that didn’t spoil it for Clio at all.

“You see what they’re like?” she said, as we staggered home that night. “Only a jogger with a heart defect could invent something as fucking ridiculous as jogging.” I laughed and said, “That doesn’t make any kind of sense at all,” and she pushed me into a hedge.

“That’s it.”

“Hmmm. How do you know it works?”

“If it doesn’t work I’ll bring it back and get a refund.”

I looked at the sand-blasted collection of window junk and creasecovered backpacker books. The underwater camera looked grubby, scratched and duff.

“A refund from here?”

“Don’t be doubting my abilities, Sanderson.”

We’re not going to go into any of the Clio Aames complaints and refunds stories. “Can you actually get thrown off an island do you think?”

“Do you really not want me to have it?”

I looked at the camera.

“Course I want you to have it if you want it.”

“I do want it.” She grabbed my wrist. “Hey, I know – it can be my present for looking after you the other day when you went mental.”

“Does that mean I don’t have to have a hammock?” I said, then, “I didn’t go mental.”

“Yes you did –
Clio, Clio, help me I’m a total nut job,”
she said, doing a voice.

“Look, I can’t help it if I’m sensitive and creative, can I?”

“Whatever,” she smiled. “So can I have the camera now?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay.”

So Clio now has an underwater camera. She hasn’t used a full roll of film yet, so we still don’t know if it works.

I did go mental a couple of days before we bought the camera, for an hour or so anyway. It happens sometimes. The
otherness
just rolls in on me like angry clouds and there’s nothing I can do. That evening, I had a rising fear – terror – of being trapped on the island and not being able to get off. I was
tiptoes on the edge of a panic attack, everything around me suddenly waiting to become groundless and horrific.

We were sitting outside our tent reading books when it happened. Clio was going through the guidebook putting more stars on all the things on Naxos we still hadn’t done.

“I don’t feel right,” I said. My voice sounded thick and odd, like sound bursting out of bubbles made in some deep and strange place.

“I know,” Clio said, sucking on her biro and not looking up. “He does that to me too.” She meant Paul Auster – I’d been reading
The Invention of Solitude
.

“Clio,” I said, and I meant it to start a sentence but there were no more words to follow on.

She put down the book and looked at me, distracted. I saw the concern focusing her eyes. “Honey, what’s up?”

I tried my best to explain, handling and gently passing the words over to her like they were small spiky mines, careful, careful, careful.

“What are you like?” she said. “Maybe you should go for a walk or something. Stretch your legs.”

“Maybe.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, I think I should be on my own.”

“Okay. Well, the sunset fish’ll be in the surf now. You could take what’s left of the sandwiches and feed them if you want.” She smiled again. “And maybe bring back some ice cream too?”

This is how Clio punctures my panics, by bringing them down into the same familiar world as vacuuming and Saturday afternoon TV. By being kind and by calling out to my child-self –
it’s okay, here’s something fun
– making warm redirections to safe and happy things. Clio’s deep honest kindness – you could call it a mothering streak even – is something most of our friends probably wouldn’t even guess at. But it’s there, bright and straightforward and obvious, if you know what you’re looking at. A sort of on-show secret.

“I think that might help,” I said. “The sunset fish are cool.” We sometimes save pizza crusts from dinner to feed the little fish that gather in the evening surf.

“It will help, honey,” Clio said. “I am always right, remember?”

“I do remember.”

“Good,” she said. “Well, there’s a start.”

And I laughed in spite of everything.

“Hi. How are you feeling?”

“I forgot the ice cream.”

“I was really worried about you.” Clio was still sitting outside writing in the guidebook when I came back to the campsite half an hour later.

“I know you were,” I said, sitting down next to her on the reed mat.

“I feel so terrible. I never know how to help.”

“You always get it right, anyway,” I said, then, “I’m sorry it happens.”

She put her arm around me, hand still holding the book, and hugged my head onto her chest with the hook of her elbow.

“What a dick,” she said gently, rocking me from side to side.

The underwater camera is a chunky yellow and black thing living inside its own close-moulded Perspex bubble. There’s a tough yellow plastic porthole around the lens held in place by a ring of six silver screws. Instead of a viewfinder, it has a foldaway plastic crosshair on top and the
take a picture
button is basically a plunger. Now we’d bought it and it was sitting on the café table with our new books and our
frappés
, I realised I liked it. It was scuffed and battered and probably didn’t work, but I liked it. I found myself thinking how it looked
brave
. To boldly go where cameras have never gone before. It reminded me of Buzz Lightyear.

“You can have a go with it too if you want,” Clio said. After buying the camera we’d gone for drinks on Naxos harbour. There was time to kill before the bus back to the campsite. “You could kneel at the edge of the surf and stick your head in.”

“For a girl who
I know
has seen
Jaws
at least twice,” I said, “you’re pretty fast and easy about the sea, do you know that?”

“I’m not the one who always watches it through my fingers.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s what I’m saying. It’s terrifying.”

Clio looked at me.

“That bit when the head pops out of the hull? With the eyes all hanging out?”

Clio looked at me.

“And the end – Chief Brodie, Richard Dreyfuss and that mad fishing guy all on that rickety boat? I can’t sit still and watch that. I have to get up and walk around.”

“I know,” Clio sighed, shaking her head at me.

“In all other respects though,” I shuffled, pretended I’d been caught out, dropped my voice, “in all other respects, I’m incredibly manly and brave.”

Clio laughed.

“Okay, prove it. Come snorkelling with me. There are some amazing fish out by the rocks, I wish you’d come out and see them.”

“Well, I’ll be able to see them now, won’t I?” I patted the top of the underwater camera.

“But it’s not the same,” Clio dragged the words out in a little girl whine. She smiled. “If you loved me you’d come.”

“Don’t you think it looks like Buzz Lightyear?”

“I
said
, if you loved me you’d come.”

“To infinity and beyond,” I told the chunky yellow and Perspex bubble, ignoring her.

Clio sucked hard on her straw, staring at me.

“Make it so, Number One,” I told it. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

“It is mine you know,” Clio said, pulling the camera towards her protectively.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I know. I know. Totally.” I sucked up a mouthful of iced coffee and winked at the camera in a knowing way.

“Stop it,” she said, covering the lens.

Out past the harbour shops, cafés and bars, along a narrow sea-sprayed causeway, you can see what’s left of the temple of Portara; mainly, a huge stone doorway looking out over the bay. This is known as Ariadne’s Arch, where, according to legend, the daughter of King Minos of Crete had the pleasure of watching heroic love rat Theseus sod off back to Athens without her. Heartbroken Ariadne eventually married Bacchus, god of wine and song, and they lived happily ever after. Which, Clio reckons, is a way of saying she became a crazy drunk and stopped giving much of a fuck about anything.

“And the moral of the story is?” Clio had asked as we’d sat eating ice cream on an ancient world masonry block behind the arch one afternoon.

“Don’t go offering your ball of wool to strange soldiers in underground tunnels?”

Clio laughed. “No, do,” she said. “But don’t bother going home to meet the folks afterwards.”

She was still playing with her camera, so I had a flick through the new books we’d picked up. I’d got a copy of
Crooked Cucumber
, Shunryu Suzuki’s autobiography. I’d already read his
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
and
Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
. Backpackers seem to leave a lot of Zen literature behind them, and, because it was everywhere, I’d started to read it. I’d bought a copy of
Shogun
too, although it looked like a feudal Japan rewrite of
War and Peace
; almost as thick as it was wide and I knew I wouldn’t be carrying it off the island with me. We also picked up another book on Greek mythology (we had three). I’d already forgotten why we had to have this one as well.

“Do you feel like doing one of the guidebook things tonight?” Clio asked, putting the camera down.

“Dunno,” I said. Apart from Ariadne’s Arch, we’d failed to do any of the archaeology adventures we’d planned. We hadn’t even gone to see the giant stone man in the quarry. Instead, we’d kept up our uncultured routine of breakfast, beach,
taverna
and bar for almost three weeks –
If I see another ancient clay pot I’m going to kill somebody
– and in six days’ time we’d be sailing back to the mainland for the plane home.