Yes! Of course!
Do you think that you know me as well as I know myself?
What?
TO FIND OUT HOW MANY RE-TWEETS WE GOT, GO F#&K YOURSELF
IN MEMORY OF THE WOODS
I went to one forest rave, in my first year of uni, and didn’t enjoy it at all. I didn’t really know the people I went with, and got the feeling that they’d only really invited me because I was standing with the person they actually had wanted to invite (who dropped out at the last minute, natch) and that it would have been awkward not to. I was used to tacky clubs and random house parties and booze and fags and the clinical, functional rush of amphetamines. I knew nothing about forest raves, luminous paint, knee-length dreads, psy trance or tripping balls, and the ensemble I picked out ended up looking more gangster-chav-does-Grimm’s-fairytales than frolicking woodland techno nymph. But even after I got a last-minute text from whoever her name was saying she wasn’t coming, I went anyway. ‘Cos I wanted to show myself that I could do something different. And hell, maybe it would be amazing? Maybe it would change my life, as the tedious wannabe hippies (I’m generally in favour of hippies, but the weekend types from well-to-do middle class families gurning off about the totality of ultimate oneness in Home Counties accents while their older brothers do terrifying quantities of cocaine with venture capitalists can fuck off) said it had once changed theirs. Whatever. So I got into a rattly little car, driven by a glaze-eyed tree person who spent most of the journey chewing the bottom half of his face and saying ‘wait, wait, yeah this bit’ about every identical psy trance tune he put on, and we went to the middle of nowhere. I was 18. And the party was . . . not great. I’d built up an image of a shimmering psychedelic wonderland full of pulsating, mind-expanding music, with beautiful mirage people passing through rainbow-coloured clouds, and fountains of blissfully clean, time-stretching acid potions that turned everything into Super Mario Sunshine. What I got was a grotty little clearing with a sound system that was far too loud for the space playing horrific thudding techno, full of tracksuited pillheads and lots of the aforementioned weekend hippie types, all falling over themselves to give you their own unique, personal take on the last time they’d been really, really fucked. I was too scared of the music and the looming ghost faces to take anything remotely psychedelic, and ended up just drinking all the vodka I’d brought and falling asleep at the foot of a tree that had probably definitely been pissed against. And when I woke up in the morning, head splitting, the techno was still playing (possibly the same tune that had been playing when I first arrived, who the hell knew) and I was being spooned by a grubby, twitching acid casualty who looked (and, when I told him in no uncertain terms to get to fuck, sounded) like Salad Fingers. I ended up hitching back to London, which was hard, yo.
So yeah, not a fan.
Laika had been going to these kinds of events since she was fourteen, and described them as ‘variable’. ‘Mostly they’re okay,’ she said. ‘Some were the fucking pits – although not as bad as your one, honey, that sounds like a full hellish breakfast. A couple were actually the kind of mind-expanding nirvana-fest that the others all claim to be.’
I wanted to hear about those ones. I wanted to know what I’d missed.
Lee had been to loads as well, first as a young, wide-eyed space cadet and later as a DJ, and apparently every single one he’d ever been to was amazing. I actually believed him. Maybe they hadn’t all been amazing, in fact they probably hadn’t, but I believed that he believed that they had. And that was the important thing.
So we sat, and we joined hands, and as the Stuff rose inside us, both Laika and Lee thought back to the very best of their forest parties, the truly magical ones, the transcendent ones. They rebuilt them from memories, from the clear passages and the impressionistic ones, all the little fragments, and made a composite, a single hyper-memory that was equally hers and his, an idealised, perfected holodeck party.
And they took me with them.
It started behind Lee’s eyes. I’d been here before, of course, at this point, but this was different, because at first the Stuff retreated, and I was behind Lee’s eyes and experiencing what he had experienced at the time, a thrilling, bubbling lysergic rush. He was DJ-ing behind a huge mound of equipment; turntables, CDJs, mixers, laptops, so many plugs, and it all wriggled and buzzed and throbbed, glowing with those garish ultraviolet deep-space colours, like a TARDIS had thrown up in the middle of the forest, and it was as though he were weaving the music from the equipment, not just EQ-ing or beatmatching or whatever, he was building it from the beats up, from the steady 4/4 thump through the thick gloopy bass frequencies and twisting snakes of synthesizer, and I could feel how much he loved it, and the energy he was getting from the crowd, see it painted in colours, and then the Stuff came back in, like the tide, and it painted information above the heads of the hundreds, thousands, millions of hypersexual forms glimmering like candle flames in the dark of the woods, telling me who they were, what they were on, what they wanted, how much HP and mana they had, what conversational options were open (answer: all of them), and they each had one thing in common, that they were here, and maybe there was more, but then we focused, Lee focused, I focused, we focused, on one person, one particular beautiful shape in the chaos . . . Laika . . . and zoooooooom I was behind her eyes, dancing, her hands in the air, hips wiggling, warm from the chemical pulses erupting in her blood, the world contracting and expanding around her, the living trees curving in and bending away, dangling with fairylights and ribbons of UV paint, the wings of glow-in-the-dark butterflies flapping softly in the breeze and causing hurricanes in the collected shareware brain of all these writhing ravers, holy fucking shit it was like dancing was everything, everything. Like it was the absolute truth. And just as it seemed as though we might go too deep, like we might panic, Lee switched it up, not abruptly but smoothly, upping the tempo and sending a spatter of tin-can jungle beats (they’re called amens, OK Lee thanks) outward, and then thwob, here come da bass, burst da bass b-bomb, and it cut through the crowd like a seismic shear and everyone changed, their shapes changed, their moves changed, they morphed, and then Lee cut the beats and in came a warm, luscious reggae breakdown, and we cheered and we chanted, and God I could have set up a tent in that cheering and lived there forever. Come on, come on, break. Break. Break! And it broke. And wheyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!
They let me play in their memories, and it was spectacular.
‘Pretty good, eh?’ asked Laika, later, in the bath.
‘Pretty,’ Lee nodded.
I just smiled, and blew bubbles, and shivered to myself.
FOR POSSIBLE FUTURE 1, GO THERE
FOR POSSIBLE FUTURE 2, GO THERE
FOR POSSIBLE FUTURE 3, GO THERE
ALL SIGNPOSTS ARE CLEARLY MARKED
YOU GET TO CHOOSE WHERE YOU GO. YOU HAVE THAT PRIVILEGE. I DIDN’T HAVE A CHOICE. DO IT FOR ME, GO ON
LEGAL ISSUES
So the papers did talk about Stuff, a bit, although they called it other things. The Mail said that people on the street called it Steve, which was bollocks, as far as I knew, and that it was one of the signs of the final drugpocalypse, or something. The Sun said that some knew it as Stuff, but it was more commonly known as Steel, or Shake, both of which were also bollocks, I think. Their reports, about people having spectacular freakouts in clubs, or weird conceptual overdoses, were also suspiciously sketchy. A Vice article about it read like a smart-arse libertarian reading between the lines of the Mail and Sun pieces and attempting to come to a kind of hipper-than-thou non-conclusion, which, well, imagine that.
And the thing was, apart from Lee, Laika and I, I knew of nobody else who had ever tried it, or claimed to be able to get any. We opted not to tell people we were on it the few times we took it out with us, because it affected the buzz, and Lee remained cagey about the guy who sold it to him – as far as I knew, Lee w
as his only customer.
So yeah, I had literally no idea what it was or where it came from, or anything about it. And that probably should have bothered me.
Didn’t, though.
LATER
I was never much of a smoker, really. More of a dramatic one. The type to say oh God I need a cigarette when something bad happened. And a social one. Ooh, is everyone smoking? Yeah I left my baccy at home, can I have one? Oh, can you roll it for me please? Thaaanks.
But then, in that molasses-thick mass of non-specific time after I turned 24, I decided to take it up.
Because dramatic.
‘Christ,’ said whoever her name was at work, as we stood outside for our fifteen minutes. ‘Three fags in one break?’
I mumbled something non-committal. Mostly because I hadn’t been involved in the conversation we’d been having. With every intake of smoke, with every closed-eye shiver of pseudo-satisfaction, I was cycling through photographs, through Lee and Laika’s Facebook and Twitter and Flickr accounts, finding the pictures of them together, the most recent ones, holding them in my mind’s eye. Punishing myself. Feeding off the twisted gut-thorn lurch I got every time a new happy, smiling, arms-round-the-shoulders snapshot popped up, scanning the comments, reading between the lines, with no idea of what I was leaving behind in my wake. I had no clue which of them I was in love with at that point. It was probably both of them, to be fair, or maybe some third composite person made of my favourite bits of both of them. Either way, I was drunk on it, bad drunk, remote accessing their photographs even though I’d had no Stuff in my system for weeks now. It had just stayed there. And I could control it now. Which was bad. I wasn’t even wearing Speccs.
Also, to be honest, I didn’t even notice that I smoked a second cigarette, and then a third.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Feeling the need today.’
BIOGRAPHY
Home from work that day, drinking wine. Some weird footwork grooves on the hi-fi. I’d got much better with genres since romping around in Lee’s brain.
Thinking about my life.
I was born on a house boat to a sixteen-year-old mother and a much older man who was not my real father. I could swim before I could walk. I always had the potential for magic inside me. But my half-brother was the one with the real power. And that drove me insane.
I was the last of five children to be born to two broken people who had given up on love years ago. By the time I was six, I’d been in and out of more foster homes than I could count. They never traced my mother’s broken neck back to me. Sometimes people just fall down the stairs.
I was the favourite of the three. My two sisters (one younger, one older) were loved, of course, but they were plain. They were dull. And they resented it. I never wanted for anything. At age twelve, my two sisters tied me down and sheared off my waist-length golden hair, my hair that everyone said was so beautiful.
I’m the only daughter of a soldier and a psychopath.
I’m the only daughter of two librarians; my childhood was full of books and wonder.
The wine dulled the little twitches. Twitches telling me that Laika had sent me a message. Sorry, wanted to see me, let’s get some food, it’s okay, just been a messy patch, or whatever. Twitches telling me that Lee had sent me a message. Missed me, sorry, let’s do something, it’s all fine. Thing was, I could also see through his eyes, and her eyes. And what I saw through his eyes was her. And through her eyes? Have a guess. I opened another bottle of wine.
I was left on someone’s doorstep, and grew up to change the world.
I crashed to Earth in a futuristic space pod, and grew up to change the world.
My parents killed each other as I lay in my cot, obliviously playing with my toes, and I grew up to change the world.
Lee wants Laika to go round to his, probably to do Stuff. Laika, at least, is reluctant. That’s something, I suppose. Surely they must know I’m watching? Surely they know I can feel all their crap from here? Or maybe they don’t know? Maybe they don’t have the leftover elements that I do. The residue. Maybe.
Or maybe they just don’t care.
TRACK 13) MOJO PIN – JEFF BUCKLEY
I wanted to include something from Grace, but not an obvious one, so Hallelujah and Lilac Wine were out. I didn’t even listen to this one that much, just remembered liking it. And then later, long after I’d given the CD to Laika, well not long, but a bit of time after it, I was sitting on my sofa and I’d just put down the phone because Laika had phoned and asked me what I was doing, what the hell was I playing at, this wasn’t me, which was a laugh because even I didn’t know who that was, really, and I put this song on so loudly that my neighbours complained, which was one of the things that led to me being evicted after a while, and I smashed a whole load of stuff that I couldn’t afford to replace, some of which wasn’t mine, which was another of the things that would lead to me being evicted. There’s a particular bit where the guitar just goes UP UP UP and Buckley screams, and it was utterly perfect for me to suddenly stop, frozen, and realise what I’d done. Such cinematic. So maybe I put the song on the CD because I knew it would become significant in the future. Who knows how this shit works.
IF I KEEP ON SPIRALLIN’ DOWN, SKIP TO THAT BIT, I’M SURE THAT’LL BE FUN FOR YOU
IF I DON’T, TURN TO PAGE
INTERVIEW
So, what attracted you to this job?
Well, it’s reached the point with my current shitty go-nowhere job where being there actually makes me feel genuinely suicidal, so I figured it was time to jump ship to another shitty go-nowhere job where there’ll be at least the bare minimum of novelty, i.e. enough to reset the scale so I’ll be able to bear it for a good few months before feeling suicidal again, at which point I’ll obviously have to go elsewhere. I’m sure you’ll find someone to replace me.
Excellent. And what do you think qualifies you for this role?
Well, what was briefly an extremely vibrant social life full of exciting and mind-expanding activities and hobbies has now crumbled into isolation and depression, so as there’s nothing waiting for me when I go home, I’ll be happy to do extra shifts for little money, and although I do often experience quite staggeringly intense fits of rage, these are mostly internal, and generally I exist in a state of perpetual numbness, which will facilitate me carrying out my assigned tasks in a cold, clinical, robotic fashion – although, interestingly, I think that my lack of any kind of social life will enable me to at least feign friendliness to the customers, and pretend that I don’t want them to die from leukaemia of the appendix, or whatever. Also I have a good head for numbers and I look quite cute in a smock.
And why are you leaving your current job?
See above, re: suicide.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
See above, re: fucking nothing, depression, isolation, rage. Imagine Brian from Spaced doing his little montage of art things, except less productive.
We don’t watch television.
Nor do I actually, I can’t afford the licence and I’m too scared to watch it without one. To be fair, I could probably tune my brain in to the TV, actually. Might try that when I get home.
Are you a heavy drinker, or do you use drugs?
I have used all the drugs. But now just lots of alcohol and the odd valium. Also I am dealing with the lingering effects of a super-duper-illegal substance that nobody knows where it came from, which has possibly irrevocably altered my brain chemistry, so when I said I would conduct my duties in a robotic way, sometimes that might well mean literally – my basic motor functions and lower-level mental subroutines will enable me to carry out my assigned tasks, but my consciousness will actually be elsewhere, possibly remotely uploading hardcore pornography to someone else’s Twitter feed to spite them, or possibly just trawling through their Facebook photos, comments etc and wishing terrible things upon th
em.
Great. Finally, is there anything you’d like to ask us?
Yeah, do you operate any kind of pension scheme? (Beat) Haha, me joke.
CONVERSATION
‘You don’t have to worry about yesterday,’ said Laika, wrapping her hands all the way around the mug of herbal tea I’d made her, the way she did, trying to contain all the warmth in a bubble of china and flesh. ‘Honestly.’
‘I kind of think I do,’ I said. ‘A lot.’
‘It’s just the Stuff. It’s . . . some kind of fucked-upness.’
‘I’m starting to get that.’
‘Yeah. Seems like we should have got it earlier.’
‘Hmm.’
We sat and drank tea, sucking up the warmth to combat the indifference of my cold
little flat, with the compilation CD she’d made me tinkling away in the background. It was all foreign music; French, African, little ditties in weird languages, louche techno, and then some sort of insane psychedelic carnival rock freak-out right at the end. Laika said her brother had made it. ‘I never knew how to finish compilation CDs,’ she’d said, during a different conversation. ‘And I never make them any more, so I’m even less good at finishing them.’
‘Remember tapes?’ I’d said. ‘I miss tapes.’
‘So I think Lee has some pretty messed-up feelings for me, or whatever,’ said
Laika. ‘Felt it loud and clear.’
Stuff Page 5