The Raw Shark Texts (11 page)

“I was thinking of going out to the animal bay, what do you reckon?”

“Ahhh,” I said. The guidebook says there is a small secluded bay about twenty minutes’ walk from our campsite filled with large flat stones, some of which look like animals. The book reckons this bay at sunset is one of the most romantic places in all the Cyclades, and also mentions, in a surprisingly frank way, that it’s a great place to have sex outdoors.

“Okay,” Clio said. “So here’s what I’m thinking – we’ll take one of the small rucksacks with tops in for if it gets cold, towels to sit on and I thought at least three bottles of Amstel, so you’ll need to find the bottle opener. We should wear trainers for getting over the rocks and I’m going to wear my blue summer dress without knickers. You can wear whatever you want. If we decide we need any other stuff we can pick it up from the shop on the way. I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything. Are you with me, Sanderson?”

I nodded, once, seriously.

“I’m with you Aames.”

“Excellent,” she said.

We sat on a large flat rock with our trainered feet dangling over the edge, both of us looking out to sea. The animal bay wasn’t
romantic
in the way the guidebook had said, but it was beautiful and secluded. Clio sat staring out at the horizon, her hands tucked under her knees so the hem of her little blue summer dress stretched tight across her legs. Her feet kicked gently in mid-air. I tried to match her time, swinging my feet with hers, but my legs are longer and so slowed out of synch after a couple of beats – I had to keep
stopping and restarting to get back into time. There was a slight breeze coming from the sea and the sky hazed around the edges. Clio had been quiet for most of the walk and stayed quiet when we arrived, climbing up onto the rock and looking out at the waves. I know my role when this happens just like Clio knows what to do when I have one of my strange turns. My job is to stay nearby and say nothing, just to be there and to wait for it to pass. Sometimes, after a length of silence, Clio will explode about some little thing I did or didn’t do or something that went wrong earlier in the day. Then, it’s my job to listen without arguing and to be ready if there are tears. I fished a bottle of Amstel out of our bag and popped off the top. I had a swig and offered it to Clio. She had a mouthful and passed it back.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“I don’t think I want to have sex.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

A group of gulls dive-bombed something I couldn’t see out in the swell.

“I’m not doing it on purpose.”

I put my arm around her and pulled her shoulders up against mine.

“Why would I think you were doing it on purpose? Doing what on purpose, anyway?”

She let me hug her like that for a while before gently pulling herself away. After a few minutes, she started running her thumbs up along the line of her jaw, up behind her ears and then slowly down her neck in attentive little circles. It had been a while since I’d seen this.

“Don’t,” I said, taking hold of her wrists and gently bringing them back down to her lap. “You’re fine. There’s nothing there.”

“I didn’t even know I was doing it,” she said, facing out to sea.

“Sorry.”

“Do you think I’m crazy?”

“Clio, you’re not crazy at all. I’m crazy, remember. You’re – well, special maybe, but not crazy.”

This made her smile. “Shut up,” she said.

“Do you want me to check your neck?”

“No.”

“It’s all over, you know. You’ll never have to go back.”

“I can’t go back.”

“You won’t have to.”

She thought for a while, gently kicking her legs, before speaking again.

“There’s, like, a cheerful united outlook, you know, in the staff. They’ll do anything for you. You can have a TV by your bed, videos whatever. Everyone’s so upbeat. Eric, it’s fucking awful.”

“Hon, you’ll never have to go back. I promise.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“I just know you’ll be fine.”

The
tavernas
around the campsite all have multi-coloured lanterns hanging from their porches, like oversized Christmas tree lights. They reflect in the sea all along the shoreline at night, projecting blue and red and green and yellow out onto the waves. Out at the stone animal bay, the sea is left quietly to its own colourings.

“It’s like they say about soldiers coming back from a war. People all around you are dying. Really dying, Eric. You go in for a week’s chemotherapy and you’re in a ward with people who are really, actually dying, there and then and doing their best to come to terms with it. When the week’s up, you go home and you see your family and your friends and everything’s normal and familiar. It’s too much. You think – one world can’t possibly hold both these lives and you feel like you’re going to go crazy when you realise the world
is
that big and it
can
fill with the most terrible things whenever it wants to.”

We sat quietly for a few minutes.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there with you.”

“This isn’t about you. Or whether you’re sorry or not.”

“That’s not how I meant it, you know I didn’t.”

“You didn’t even know me.”

“I’m still sorry. I feel like I let you down by not knowing you sooner.”

“Well, that’s stupid.”

“Some things are stupid. It doesn’t stop them being true. I’m stupid and I’m here.”

Clio took the Amstel bottle and smiled. “That’s true.”

“Listen – I love you and whatever happens I’ll always be here, if you want me to be. But you do need to start letting go of this. You don’t want to end up freaking out like me all the time, do you?”

Clio looked out at the water. I knew she was deciding whether to be angry with me or not. Minutes passed. The gulls ate or lost whatever they were interested in and went shouting up into the sky. A plane left a straight white vapour trail.

“The hospital had its own library, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“A whole library and nothing to read. If I never see an Arthur Conan Doyle book again it’ll be too soon.”

I laughed.

“I’ve read them all and do you know what I learned?”

“What?”

“Sherlock Holmes isn’t clever at all – it’s just that Dr Watson is a fucking idiot.”

I laughed and Clio laughed too, both of us swinging our legs higher over the edge of the rock.

“You haven’t read
Hound of the Baskervilles,
have you?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t bother. A lot of pissing around just so Holmes can shoot a dog that’s been painted green. Actually, that’s how to get yourself a name as a genius; find yourself a stupid sidekick who’ll be impressed every time you fart and who can get your
exploits
into a national newspaper.”

I smiled, took the beer back and started picking at the label. “Are you okay?”

“It’s just a big thing, you know? Waking up every day for months and months and knowing you’ve got cancer.”

I nodded.

“The idea, it’s like a big rock you can’t ever put down. The weight’s there from the second you open your eyes, heavy on you all the time.”

“But you don’t have cancer anymore, hon.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

“Well, we don’t know I don’t have cancer for sure either. We don’t know anything for sure.”

“Is that supposed to be reassuring?”

I lifted my legs until they were pointing straight out in front of me and tried to hold them there against the pull of gravity.

“Hmmm. I thought so when I was saying it.”

We drank the rest of the beer in silence, the sky dusting towards night, the gulls flapping and bombing the sea, the waves counting our holiday away against the big brown rocks. All days, I thought, every day that starts always comes to an end. It was nearly half an hour later when Clio spoke again: “Hey.”

“What?”

“While we’ve been sitting here, have you been thinking
my girlfriend has no knickers on
?”

“No, course not,” I said, then, after a second: “Well, it depends. What’s the right answer?”

Clio tucked her hands deeper under her knees and looked away so I couldn’t read her expression.

“No clues,” she said.

«Call»

Answer?

“Hello?”

The line was terrible, breaking and crackling with interference. I thought maybe I could hear a girl’s voice, distant and bleached away behind the noise.

“Hello?” I said again.

“Wh[   ]ou?”

The connection was miles of rusty water pipes, leaking, dripping and losing pressure. Little rivers, flows twisting and winding in the dark. Or – it was a sinking submarine with the ocean forcing itself in, the sprays of deep black water from popped rivets and faultlines in the nose-diving, being-crushed hull. I tried to hold my nerve. I tried not to think about the Ludovician at all.

“I can’t –” I tried again, louder. “I can’t hear you.”

“–ou[  ]M[   ]est[ ]r?”

“Manchester? No. I –”

“D[ ]n’t [         ].”

“I can’t hear you properly,” I said, but I wasn’t really sure if I was hearing anyone at all.

“Th[   ]lo[  ]ing fo[   ]. D[  ] do[        ].”

“Hello?” I said, “Is somebody there? Who is this?” And as I listened
hard into the hiss, a word came up from my lungs and spoke itself out of my mouth, taking me completely by surprise:

“Clio?” I said.

The line went dead.

The cat lifted an eye from his chest of drawers, blinked once and went back to sleep.

Cross-legged on my bed in the Willows Hotel, I dug around in the rucksack and pulled out my half-bottle of vodka, unscrewed the cap and took a swig. The still unopened package sat waiting next to me.

Caller Unknown
said the green screen. I put the mobile phone carefully onto the bedside table. Caller Unknown could have been a member of the Un-Space Exploration Committee, or a stranger who’d found one of the business cards and dialled the number out of curiosity. Considering the state of the line maybe there hadn’t been a caller at all, just a systems malfunction, a fault in the network. Whoever it was it certainly
wasn’t
Clio Aames. A sleepless night staring at The Light Bulb Fragment had cross-wired my brain.

I picked up the package.
Maybe this and the call might be two parts of the same thing. That would be likely, wouldn’t it?
After sixteen weeks of nothing, everything was suddenly happening at once and it was difficult to find any sort of perspective.

After carefully setting up the Dictaphones around the edges of the room, I ripped open the envelope. Inside was a hardback book. The white dust jacket had a detailed Victorian etching of a prehistoric stiff-finned fish. The title read:
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
, and underneath, smaller;
with Evolution Engine by Trey Fidorous
.

“Fuck,” I said, flipping through the pages:

A note fell out of the book and onto my lap. A single folded sheet of A4. This is what the note said:

Dear Mr Sanderson,

I hope this book is of some interest and helps persuade you I am making contact as a friend.

I understand your situation and the dangers you face every day. You are not alone. Please meet me at the old Manor Infirmary at 12.30 p.m. this afternoon. The building is disused and the front doors will be open.

Yours faithfully,

Mr Nobody

As soon as I read it, I knew I would go. After all this time, someone. The idea of walking into an abandoned hospital to meet a person calling themselves ‘Nobody’ would ring alarm bells in anyone’s head, but what choice did I have? I’d been trying to make a contact in un-space for so long; when it finally happened could I really run away on the grounds of it being strange and unsettling? But this didn’t mean acting foolishly. I’d go a few hours early and take a good look at the place, see what I could see.
Preparation Preparation Preparation
.

But right now,
preparation
meant getting some rest.

With the new day’s sun pinking at the curtains I set the alarm on the mobile phone, put the book and the note to one side and stretched out on the bed. In spite of everything I was asleep in minutes.

But.

But in my exhaustion I’d made a terrible mistake.

When I’d set up the Dictaphone loop at the edges of the room, the strange package was
already inside the parameter
. And so, when the thick sinewy idea of a thing unlaced its long, slimy thought-body from the words and letters on that folded note and swam, slithered, up the bed towards me, there were no barriers to stop it.

I dreamt I sat on a long wooden bench in the Museum of Naxos. I was surrounded by glass cabinets filled with objects, ancient bowls and urns, golden coins, jewellery and tools. In the taller cases were half-made, half-collapsed marble statues, each with its own list of injuries; missing faces, missing arms or legs replaced by polished steel struts. Some of the figures were so broken they’d become unidentifiable. Several had only one smooth surface, maybe the round of a shoulder or the curve of a stomach, carved and polished and ambiguous alongside rough jagged rock.

From my seat, I stared into a large and well-lit case more or less in the centre of the gallery. Inside were two backpacks, a heap of novels and history books, a collapsed tent with its black foldaway poles carefully stacked on top of the canvas, two sleeping bags, two snorkels, two scuba masks, a hammock and a yellow underwater camera.

I got up off the bench and walked over so I could read the little white information card fixed to the inside of the glass. The card said:

Something bad’s happening. I’ve gone outside.

I might be a while.

Cxx