Starfishing (Extract)

Published by Chatto and Windus/Vintage in the UK. You can buy the latest edition here. Due out in US, Scribner May 2010.

A Higher State of Consciousness
You walk through the door and into a wall of sound.

It’s so loud it sends you off balance, makes it difficult to put one foot in front of another.

The room is immense and lofty, the size of an aircraft hangar, and it boils with people pushing and shouting and clambering over each other. The air crackles. Static moves the tiny hairs on your arms and the back of your neck; you feel it sweep your body.

The clothes people are wearing make your eyes dart about, they send you dizzy with their blues and reds and stripes and stars. The hot pool of bodies oozes sweat, which fills the air and floods your senses. Everyone’s squashed against each other with their arms in the air and as you walk through, they suck you in. Your heart’s pounding, you’re pumped full of chemicals. You don’t run and you don’t fight and they build and build and it makes you light headed. High.

People shoot past you, on a mission. They fly at you and seem to go past sooner than they get there and it’s all you can do to keep yourself upright with the force of it all. The world glows radioactive; electric blue, shocking pink, the colours have a charge to them.

Then you’re in the middle of it, arms stretched out to some random god. You’re shouting and waving and making the room change. It’s like you earth something and it flows through you. Not solid or liquid or something you can get hold of, but real nonetheless. Hard to define and gone as soon as you’ve touched it.

There’s a lull. People move to the side of the room, they whisper to each other. The air is thick around you, the way it is on the kind of summer’s day that has to break, the kind when you wait and watch for the sky to moan and scream as lightning cuts it open.

You hold your breath.

Then it’s off again and it’s madder than before and you didn’t think that was possible but it is. It’s like the floor’s pulled out from underneath and you all fall through, out of control, and you’ve got no fucking clue where you’re going to land or how hard. People scream and scratch like pigs. All round the room the lights are going mad, flashing and changing and flashing and changing and mashing up your brain with the input. It’s too much to take in so it bypasses the front of your head and goes right to where it’s needed. The room smells of bodies and fear and instinct. It smells of animals hunting, and being hunted.

A bell rings and it all stops. The screens and the walls are splattered red with all the numbers that have gone down, down, down, down. Like it’s been sprayed with blood from a slaughter, from the hunt.

You feel blooded too, can almost smell the iron of it, feel it smeared across your face.

The floor is littered with debris. You walk, watching your feet as they crunch through abandoned trade cards. They remind you of autumn. They remind you of betting slips at the races.