Channel Sk1n (23 page)

Authors: Jeff Noon

The fence posts buckled, the wiring stretched against flesh. Any minute now it would surely splinter and snap. A klaxon sounded. A woman slipped, almost fell. Too close. Hot, sweaty. Push.
Make room, make room!
A guard came in sight on the other side of the barrier, urging the crowd to step back, to give people space. His dog barked. Nola felt herself being pulled away, aside, channelled, dragged along.

Free now. Free of the crush.

She stood at the crowd’s straggly limit, and felt a shiver on her flesh. The skin tight suddenly at the back of her neck. Ice fingers.

Something...someone...

Someone looking at me...

She turned around and saw George Gold standing alone near the forest’s edge.

Nola walked over to him, and he scanned her the whole way. Seeing a woman in a dark overcoat, all bound up, with dark glasses on, hair tumbled across her face.

‘Fuck me.’

It was all he could say to begin with. Words atremble. His hand wrapped round a silver hipflask. He was already drunk.

Nola kept her voice steady: ‘What’s happening? Where’s Melissa?’

He breathed deeply. ‘I don't know. Nobody knows.’

Glowlights moved over the Dome’s exterior, searching, seeking out. George followed Nola’s gaze.

He said, ‘She’s gone, Nola. Just vanished.’

And she saw now that his eyes were flickering, wet.

‘There’s an answer.’

George shook his head without thinking. He looked far away from himself, detached.

‘George?’

He could barely look at her.

Nola tried to calm him. ‘Have you told them who you are?’

He frowned. Spat. And set off drawling: ‘They won’t let me in. I’ve tried. I’ve pleaded with them. I offered the guards money, drugs, women, boys, a position in the music biz. Fuck. Nothing works with them. How can that be?’ He was growing manic. ‘How can it be?’

Nola stared at him, not knowing how to answer.

Her body was hit by a sudden wave of images.

Static spasm.

Skull shiver.

George came near, responding to her distress. ‘Do you think she’s alive? Do you?’

Nola felt the images crawling over her flesh, under her clothes. She heard voices, sound effects: the slamming of a door, a cry of jubilation, fierce political argument, a street riot, somebody running, their footsteps on a pavement. If she could just keep her face clear.

‘Do you?’

George was just one more voice in the skinmix.

‘Talk to me. Is Melissa still--’

Focus.

‘Of course.’

George looked at her.

‘Of course she’s alive.’

His voice trembled at this answer.

‘Alive?’

‘Yes. She’s escaped.’

George pushed a hand through greasy hair. He looked around in a daze: at the trees, the Dome, anywhere but Nola’s face. Now his hands made nervous movements, making shapes.

‘Escaped.’ This said quietly, in awe.

‘George...’

His voice gathered strength. ‘Melissa’s out there somewhere. She’s drifting. She needs help. My help. I have to find her, bring her home.’ His eyes locked onto Nola. ‘You. You can help us. You, Nola. With your...with your body.’ He smiled. Grimaced. His mouth stuck in the one twisted position. ‘With your pictures and all that.’ Hands jabbing, gesturing. ‘Let me see her.’

He came forward, close up, touching. Nola tried to back away.

‘Show her to me!’ He grabbed her.

Nola stayed in his grasp, feeling the pressure of his hands build. She let it happen, holding his eyes with hers. Seeing the old George in there still, the one who had given her this chance of a new life, whatever kind of life it was. Her maker.

He stared back.

And now his fingers loosened, fell away from her clothing. His teeth started to bite at his own lips.

‘George. Let me--’

Auiehghhhhh...

He started to howl. He could not control himself.

Nearby viewers were turning towards this new attraction. A pressman came over, a crumpled guy in a raincoat the same ash-grey complexion as his face. A camera was slung low around his neck, his fingers itching for a picture, a story, scandal, anything.

‘You. Peckman!’ George was on him in a second; he knew his name, his face. ‘Piss off.’

‘Just doing my job.’

‘There’s nothing here for you. Zilch! Do you hear me?’

Peckman held his hands aloft. ‘Sure. Whatever, Mr Gold. I’m gone.’

George watched the reporter move away. ‘Fucking bedbugs, all of them.’

He turned back to Nola. She had wrapped her arms around herself, hugging the coat to her skin. Colours shimmered at the frayed edges of the garment, around her neck, her wrists, along the filament of her hair where it tumbled from her slouch hat.

George looked at her. Her examined her.

Nola whispered, all she could manage. ‘I don’t feel...I can’t feel...’

‘What is it?’

Nola’s hands came forward.

‘I haven't got long.’

Her fingers skipped with tiny dancers, images leaping from one hand to the other as she rubbed her palms together.

George clocked this display, his eyes now clinical. He said: ‘Come here, come closer.’ Traces of the old style coming back. ‘You’ll live forever, I can feel it.’

‘No, George. I don’t think so.’

Silence then.

Muggy air. Hot, clinging.

Nola took off her glasses, and her hat and scarf. She let the pictures roam, giving them access, freedom. Her face shone with moving colours, with iridescent shapes.

George’s gaze wandered over her, incapable of settling.

Not on her eyes. Too deep, too painful.

Not on her cheeks and brow, nor on her lips. Too many shifting planes, too many colours, images, figures.

And not on her hands. Too much was held there.

Vision blur.

He sensed her as a whole, as a being of many programmes, fully alive in the one thousand channels. And he felt proud then, that he had in some strange way created this body, sent it on its way into the world. Now it had come back for him. Now the body stalked him, it burned him, it fired up his eyes and he could hardly see for the dazzle.

Nola spoke quietly. ‘Inside the lens lies a world beyond ours. We have created it, set it free. Now it grows, expands. People live there. The spectral ones, the lost and the damaged for whom this world sets too painful a task, there they live.’

George looked deep. ‘So you know where she is, where my daughter lives on.’ He pressed finger and thumb against his eyes, dug in. Words: mumbled. ‘Show. Please.’

Nola waited, watched.

Flesh wet, sweaty. Drizzle mist.

The two of them, locked together. George holding it cold until he lost his nerve, and then:

‘Oh shit. I’ve fucked up. What have I done?’

His face suddenly looking old. Tears on stretched flesh.

Nola took a step or two, into the canopy of trees. Away from crowd eyes. George followed her. Shadows fell over them both, joining them together in this place. Past branches half bare, half still in leaf. Semi-gloom. Slow flowing map of moonlight, dark and bright shades of green, tans and yellows in between, orange tints.

Trickle of rainwater,

drop by drop,

tiny bell music.

Faint animal cries.

Nola was half hidden, semi-dark, semi-lit by screen glow.

George’s hands reached out.

‘What can I do, Nola? I’ve given up everything for this. This career. Fame. Money. You, the other stars. All the songs, the sorry songs. Now I’m being punished. The demon of broadcast has taken my child, swallowed her whole.’

Nola stared at him, unmoving.

Then she said: ‘Do you want to see?’

He nodded. He stared.

‘Yes.’

‘Her face?’

‘Please. Show me her face. Melissa’s face. Give me her image, her picture. Bring her to me.’

Nola let her overcoat fall open and drop from her. She rolled up the sleeves of her shirt and opened the buttons down the front, allowing the two halves to hang open. And then she moved forward slowly.

George waited. His eyes never left hers.

Out of the damp mottled shadows she came, stepping into moonlight. And all of her body that was currently visible, her face and neck and hands and arms and chest and stomach, her golden-dyed hair even, all were fully alive with imagery, with gorgeous icons and starlets. Nola was the Special FX Human and her art and style dazzled the muted woodspace with its electrical motion, with sound and vision and colour.

Luminance, chrominance.

Of fog and fragments and jewels she was made.

Her palms outstretched sizzled with sparks where the pictures flashed and breathed. Images caressed her.

Nola came close.

She took charge, covering her visible skin with chosen metaphors, all drawn down from the airwaves. Brought down, set in place.

Now...

Killers’ faces. Scowls.

A knife in the hand of a woman. Blur movement. Flesh pierced.

A scream. A pink mouth, stretched.

Blood flow:

drops

drops of red

hitting a white tile floor.

A little boy crying.

Burning flags and carriages and sea storms and sailing ships and blue-winged birds and books filled with numbers and spinning tops whirling around nonstop and rockets landing on distant planets and automobiles racing along a tarmac strip and people lying on a beach.

All of these things and many others all contained within her body, at play upon her contours.

And then pictures of George himself, gathered and collected from the news channels, talent show panels, vidiflex interviews, music docs, game shows, all arranged and spun out by Nola, collaged, mixed and remixed with captured shards of pain and violence.

Guns firing. Flame. Then smoke.

Hands coming round to strangle at a man’s neck.

Pictures. Images.

Magnified sound capture: slice of blade through muscle, hitting bone.

I just wanna, I really wanna!

Sprays of blood from torn wounds.

A bullet hitting flesh, digging deep.

Vein slice.

Disease spreading in speeded motion.

The knife dripping.

I wanna get to...

Get to know you!