The Raw Shark Texts

Steven Hall was born in 1975. His ‘Stories for a Phone Book’ featured in New Writing 13. The Raw Shark Texts is his first novel and won the Borders Original Voices Award and the Somerset Maugham
Award. It has been translated into twenty-nine languages and film rights have been optioned by Film Four. Steven was chosen by Granta Magazine in 2013 as one of the decade’s Best Young British Novelists. He lives in Hull, England.

I was unconscious. I’d stopped breathing.

I don’t know how long it lasted, but the engines and drivers that keep
the human machine functioning at a mechanical level must have
trip-switched, responding to the stillness with a general systems panic.
Autopilot failure – switch to emergency manual override.

This is how my life started, my second life.

My eyes slammed themselves capital O open and my neck and shoulders
arched back in a huge inward heave, a single world-swallowing lung gulp of
air. Litres of dry oxygen and floor dust whistled in and snagged up my
throat with knifey coughing spasms. I choked and spat through heaves and
gasps and coughing coughing coughing heaves. Snot ropes unwound from my
nose. My eyesight melted into hot blurs over my cheeks.

The shudder-hacking violence of no air then too much knocked me dizzy,
sent the floor tilting away under my fingers. Static behind my eyes
bacteria-swarming dangerously towards another black-out and, snow-blind and
shaking, I pushed my wet mouth down tight into the palms of my hands,
trying to pull controlled, steady breaths through my fingers –

Slowly, slowly-slowly, the world began to reappear in sickly greens
and thumping purples and after maybe a minute, it steadied itself into a
shaky-solid kind of balance.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and gave in to a last scratchy cough before
rubbing out the last of the tears.

Okay. Just breathe, we’re okay.

I had no idea who or where I was.

This was no sudden revelation, no big shock. The thought had congealed
itself under the gasping and the choking and even now, with my body coming
back under control and the realisation fully formed, it didn’t bring with
it any big horror or fear. Against all that physical panic it was still a
small secondary concern, a minor oddity at the corner of things. What
mattered most to me – a million times more than anything – was air, breath,
the easy lungfuls coming and going now. The beautiful, heavenly,
angel-singing fact – I could breathe and that meant I would live. Pressing
my forehead down into the wet carpet, I imagined breathing mile after mile
of smooth blue savannah sky as the last of the shudders worked their way
out of my body.

I counted to ten then I looked up from the floor. I propped up onto my
elbows and when that seemed okay, all the way up onto my knees. I was
kneeling at the foot of a double bed in a bedroom. A bedroom stocked with
all the ordinary, usual things. There was wardrobe in the corner. A bedside
table with a collection of water glasses of varying ages and an alarm clock
with red digital numbers – 4.34 pm, a chest of drawers cluttered with
deodorant cans and lids, a tub of multivitamins and the remains of a blue
toilet roll, used right down to where the paper goes wrinkly, like bath
fingers. All just normal bedroom things – but I didn’t recognise any of
them. None of it felt strange, but none of it was familiar either. It was
all just there; unremarkable but alien stuff. The thought came that maybe
I’d fallen and concussed myself, except nothing hurt. I felt around my
skull to make sure, but no, nothing.

I climbed carefully up onto my feet but the new angle didn’t do
anything for my memory either. And that’s when then first real stabs of
worry started to land.

It isn’t all coming back to me. I don’t know any of this at all.

I felt that prickling horror, the one that comes when you realise the
extent of something bad – if you’re dangerously lost or you’ve made some
terrible mistake – the reality of the situation creeping in through the
back of your head like some pantomime Dracula.

I did not know who I was. I did not know where I was.

That simple.

That frightening.