Authors: Jeff Noon
A living room flickered around the girl, suspended like a painted mist between the trees, webbed from branches.
Nola recognised the room, the girl.
It was her seventh birthday party.
Her mother and father were moving round about, along with some other relatives and a few children her own age. Amongst them, herself, this little girl whose body and face shimmered with barely present life, a ghost caught on video, years ago, years, the image degraded and fuzzy, conjured into being by Nola, peeled from her skin, given life, tremulous life.
The girl spoke in a voice so quiet and crackly, recorded on tape: ‘I can’t do it alone. You know I can’t.’
Without movement, in silence, fearful of disturbing the picture, Nola watched the scene unfold.
‘I have to sing along.’
The mother’s voice then, unheard, but Nola knew every word.
Jerry, get the CD player working.
My first ever music centre player, Nola realised, seeing the cheap black plastic machine on the shelf, hearing the song unfold from tinny speakers, her favourite tune from childhood: ‘Tomorrow Came a Day Too Late’ by Sumi James. Not the main tune, but one of the remixes. Yes, now she remembered.
Her party trick.
Papa spinning the tune, instrumental dub, herself singing along to the wordless music. Words of her own devising.
Nola as she was, stepping forward into the centre of the room, all eyes upon her, how she loved that.
And then she recalled her real name, her given name.
Diana.
The young girl standing there in repose, calming herself, waiting for the music to reach its perfect moment. And then beginning...
Sally falls,
The moon catches her.
Susie loses her cat,
The sun he finds the cat
For Susie.
Nola found herself singing along quietly, murmured under breath, but each word in perfect accord.
Ginny takes the wrong path
Clouds bring her home...
The song continued to its end, before the living room and the family faded from view, returning to air and wave and pixels. Leaving only the girl, who turned now and seemed to look directly at Nola across the years. She contemplated this grown woman before her, noting the marks on the face and brow where twigs had scratched. Hair awry and stuck with leaves. Nola could not tell if the girl was really looking at her, it hardly seemed possible, but nevertheless she set her skin alive with dancing images, with colours and sounds drawn from family film, uploaded memories, photos and vidiflex.
Cartoon cats chasing each other.
Birds fluttering above telegraph wires.
A street. Grey, urban, littered. A dog nosing along the gutter.
A house. Despite everything, a family home.
Tinkle of a bell hanging from a car’s rear-view mirror. Laughter.
A child alone in a forest.
Nola blinked.
The young girl reached out with her hand, towards Nola’s face. Her fingers were coloured by the images as they flickered and died, as new ones came into view. And yet the girl, Diana, she could not touch the skin itself; her hand blurred into dust and vapour. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she murmured, or seemed to murmur. ‘Very beautiful.’
Nola smiled.
Eyes linked in that moment.
And the two walked past each other, woman and girl, real and projection, each along the same pathway, one to the North, one South.
Nola glanced back and saw the girl for a final time as she vanished, flickered away into air.
Afterglow. Sizzle of image fade.
A memory in dim light,
taken by darkness.
Nola carried on for a couple of miles more until the forest petered out. She hit a train track and continued along it, taking on instinct a left-handed route. Each footstep created its own small glowcircle to move within. Her body had settled down, images moving across her skin in slow random patterns, splashes of blue and gold and scarlet, drifts of black and white, abstract shapes.
There were lights ahead.
Nola left the track, taking a narrow country lane. The first few houses of a small village appeared, most in darkness, one of two with lighted windows. More buildings melted into view, lit by streetlamps. The place, seen through Nola’s eyes, took on a strange, dreamlike quality.
The air shimmered.
She moved onto a patch of open land and kept on walking until the houses were out of sight.
A patch of waste ground.
Litter. Discarded household goods, shopping trolleys, tattered plastic sheeting. The railway line could be seen on the other side of the disused field, travelling onwards. Droplets of rain still glimmered on the telephone lines, where the bleached-out moon was caught, low in the sky.
This would do. Here.
Here where human voices travelled along the wires, asking questions, demanding answers, sharing secrets. Nola could hear them on her skin, all these voices calling to each other along the networks. The vision of a vast land of dreams came to her, a Ghost England that stretched from the Pleasure Dome outwards, never-ending, but corresponding in some subtle, magical way to the real country.
Figures moved in mist, made of vapour themselves and barely seen. Echoes. Images broadcast and multiplied, drifting free, conjured from traces.
Parasite signals.
And so it was that on this patch of dirty ground beside a rusting railway line Nola Blue, former music star, stripped off her clothing. She stood naked. There was no one to see her, no one to disturb this moment, this feeling of heat, this pure uncomplicated love that moved through her.
The airwaves touched her body.
Tang of metal on the tongue
blue smoke
skullshiver.
Now...
Nola reached out for every last broadcast she could taste, smell and touch. From airwaves, from cable and wireless. Pictures swirled on her skin, caught aflame in their own psychedelic floodburn.
Crsizk, craxkl, flkkx, xstkksssssstt
Sparks haloed her.
Time to go out LIVE.
Countdown:
5...4...3...2...1
Rolling...
NOLA was a split-screen maniac, flowing down the skin of herself in the darklight;
She was a feeding body of image desire;
She was desire itself, imagining itself, spewing the hot blood images of itself to the world;
She was the symbiomorphic skin-demon of the new media plague, the viral code awash with sweat and voices and liquid colours, flesh set to flicker, fleeting,
without roots
without conclusions
without targets;
She was every newscaster currently on air, worldwide;
She was every rent-a-brain pundit, every footballer, every do-it-yourself businessman, every vapid personality;
She was all the game-show hosts combined, ripped apart, jumbled back together again;
All the couch-bound commentators, home-video terrorists, moonlagged astronauts, cowboy builders, soapstar cocaine sniffers, flagging actors, high-flying superheroes, all the back-pedalling politicians and the femme fatales, every last amateur chef, make-over expert, petrolhead, cultural reviewer, shock-tactic micro-entity, every trailer-trash confessor of barely comprehended perversions, all the pretend-at-life kings and queens of daytime dreams; Nola was all of them brought together, in pieces, in motion,
in dreams.
She was the Glamour,
no longer the victim of a spell,
but the spell itself, as it cast its scattered charms upon the airwaves like the dust of stars.
Nola Blue, hungry for content.
She was the collector of spirits, the ghost messages from afar. Windows and subscreens opened and closed on her body as the signals came flooding in from all the Channel SK1N fans out there, all the buttonclickers with their homemade kits of self expression and self broadcast: telebug messages, portapop vids of cats playing pianos, flamespikes, flexitexts and mailblasts, thousands of glamacam downloads, facepics, vinepages, countless shimmers from Shimmertown, hexaplays, somablips, vibeflaunts, meShows, parapips, iJingles, all the whirl and whirr and cascade of noise, the people aglow with themselves, with life, with need, small-time junkie alchemists one and all, big on life, sending Nola their messages from the ether, the vapourplay of sparks from the wondermind.
Nola gathered and glimmered with them all.
She was the rigorous old-school back-and-forth motion grid-work of the cathode ray tube, the 01001110101011 of binary expression, the surge of electrons, the spark at the end of the night, the face reflected in the black-sky monitor screen when the power is shut down;
Nola was the interface, the borderline inside, lost in the colours, blurred by sonic brightness, a spray of pixels escaping her edges, fractal style;
She was the slow walker on the melting glass face of the visionplex machine, emerging from the mist of replication like a mirror phantom;
She was the hot-zone ranger, edge floater, a woman moving tangential to the nightmare, cast adrift on the cusp of transmission;
She was the spindle-legged dancer caught on the wire tangle of aerials, and yet free, set free at last to sing the clouds alive with pictures, to caress the datastream as it shrouded the earth in knowledge, in rapid-fire desires;
She was the body exploded in full view, the pornographic moment expanded, radiant, with her flesh of phosphorus glowing where electrons struck and dissolved into metaphors.
Nola was blood-host to paradise.
One of the new telemorphic dreamers,
afloat in the Abstract-Futurist expression of lust and love, inventing techniques on the fly as she plucked and sampled from all that surrounded her, carried by the wind;
Analogue Goddess of the Daily Ephemerama, conjured into being from the secret heart of
TELEVISION!
Nola was the avatar, the vision fix, a poem herself, electric verb,
plugged direct to the wetware terminal
clothed in static,
the fragile exterminating moongolden electrostatic angel of the chaos transmission,
working the Fever Skindub Special:
mismatches, jump-cuts, montage episodes,
slow fades, fast edits,
dissolves,
speaking from chatrooms, feedback,
and microphone bleed.
Her body whispered all the various iterations of doubt and love: on demand, interactive, the signal encrypted at the skin source, decoded on contact with air.
She was made from soundtracks
from interference
from songs of flesh and wire:
I was asleep but my skin came alive.
For my head is filled with dreams, and my hair with the rain of the night,
And my hands they drip with pictures, and my flesh sings with dreams and memories
That drift upon me like a mist of jewels.
Nola made herself a body of light from all that she found, constructing herself every second, destroying herself every second, coming alive in the moment,
this moment
now
again
once more