New Animal Ella Baxter (best books to read non fiction txt) 📖

I give up because I can sense that pushing the point will ruin the small amount of goodwill between us. Reluctantly, I allow myself to be pulled through to the main room like a balloon on a string.

The club is the size of an aircraft hangar, and throughout the space are platforms and podiums where people are either dancing or performing various sex acts. It is packed, and the scent of sweaty bodies thickens the air around me, making the atmosphere feel incredibly charged.

‘Why don’t you wear the collar and I hold the lead?’ I ask, unable to let it go.

‘Because I am the dominant one,’ he says, stretching to his full height.

‘I thought it was more free range,’ I say.

‘It is,’ he says. ‘We are free to do what we like now.’ He jangles the chain playfully, making it rattle, and I feel it snag through a few hairs on the back of my neck.

He nods at me. ‘Get it?’

People are frolicking around us, showing off costumes and dancing enthusiastically to the music. Their sense of freedom is contagious, and I start to feel that we are all collectively agreeing to be something different for now. I imagine people all over the island tucked into their beds. Do they know about this place? Are the passengers in planes flying overhead aware of all this rubber? The satellites and the stars I’m standing under—are they aware of this earthly situation? There is something completely liberating about being in a club with a stranger, in a town I don’t recognise anymore. I can be anyone. Anyone can be anyone. We are all beautifully interchangeable. A throaty German track begins to play, and all I can think is that I was made for this industrial lot, this club, this moment.

Leo continues to lead me through the crowd while I observe everyone in the close vicinity. I run a few fingers through the back of my hair, trying to untangle the cluster of knots that keep dragging across the metal clasp of the collar, as someone bumps into my side. A group of people are engaging in what looks like sexual parkour.

‘Sorry!’ a bald, naked woman yells before somersaulting back into the group.

‘No worries,’ I say, wiping her sweat from my arm.

I feel something smack into me and turn to see a woman walking blindly in a leather hood with the eyes and mouth zipped closed. Another woman gives her a sharp spank, before roughly unzipping both her eye patches. The parkour group approach the couple from behind and swallow them into their fold, while nearby a man in a gas mask gets an energetic blowjob from another in a mesh wrestling suit.

‘Whoa,’ I say.

Leo pulls me over to a gathering of people who circle around two women. One is wearing a rubber rabbit mask, and the ears are so long that they bounce forward and back as she bounds ahead of another woman who swings a lasso. Every few seconds the woman with the lasso booms, ‘Run, rabbit, run!’

The rabbit-woman picks up her pace until she is running frantically around the inside of the circle. If she gets too close to escaping, the spectators push her back. At one point she stops mid sprint and stands up on her tiptoes, sniffing the air. The crowd begins to chant.

Run, rabbit, run!

Run, rabbit, run!

My heart pounds as I watch the woman with the lasso inch closer to the rabbit-woman then throw the rope around her and cinch it tight. The rabbit-woman takes two frightened hops forward. The woman with the lasso pulls her swiftly so that she falls to the floor with a loud thump. As the rabbit-woman thrashes about, trying to get free, the woman holding the lasso hauls her from the circle. I crane my head, trying to see where they’re going, as Leo grins at me and pumps his fists.

‘Run, rabbit, run!’ he yells.

He stares into my eyes. ‘Most people consider this an imbalance of power, yeah? But it’s not. The chick in the rabbit mask is just as powerful. Both are giving the other what she needs, see?’

‘Where will they go now?’ I ask. ‘What’s the woman going to do to her?’

‘Nah,’ he says, ‘you’re not getting it—that was the whole thing. That was the erotic part.’

‘Which bit?’

‘The woman getting the rabbit, the fear leading up to it. It’s all about how it feels up here.’ Leo taps my head above my ear, and I push his hand away because he can’t just go around knocking on people’s heads.

Vincent’s meditation book suggests mirroring people if you want to communicate well with them, and so I stand directly in his eye line and mimic the position of his arms and legs. I want this night to be a good experience.

‘Leo,’ I say, ‘I really need to have a great time.’

He waves to someone over my shoulder. ‘Yeah—that’s, like, the whole point.’

I give up trying to mirror him and instead walk slowly behind him as he starts to move through the crowd, which has hit fever pitch after the rabbit scene.

While looking at a woman being penetrated by two men on a nearby stage, I wonder what the evacuation procedure is if there were a fire. It’s basically a concrete bunker. I scuff my boot across the floor, which feels slippery. They probably just hose it down at the end of the night.

‘How do you think they clean this place?’ I ask, as Leo’s eyes dart between the two men and the woman.

‘Are you worried about it?’ he asks, laughing.

I watch as the two men manoeuvre the woman so that she is like a bridge between them.

‘I mean, I guess they would just sweep it out or something?’ he says.

I look at some scattered ice that has been spilled across the floor, as well as a disintegrating feather boa, and then turn back to the woman, who is glowing with sweat. Her hair sticks to her neck and back in lines