Authors: Jeff Noon
Again. Keep going:
No blues like the blue-day news
Of falling, stalling.
(No. Crap. Again! Sing now.)
No blues like the king and queen
Calling, falling
Down the sky of burnt-out stars.
(Sing!)
Night sparkles
Calling out for love...
(No. Cliché.)
Calling out for lovers.
(Yes!)
Night-sparkle gemstone bluuuues
Calling out for lovers everywhere
Calling...
Uh...
Nola stopped.
Shadows moving.
A noise from further down the alley.
Focus:
A man was gazing at her from where he sat, slumped down against the filthy wall. Eyes fuzzy, wet. Misty with drink. But dressed in a dinner jacket, crisp white shirt, black bow tie.
‘What do you want?’ Nola asked.
No answer at first. Then, a well-to-do accent: ‘That’s a nice song, my love.’
Nola hesitated. ‘I’m just...Well, you know, making it up as I go along.’
‘You should...’
‘What? I can't hear you.’
‘You should do it for a living.’
Nola laughed. ‘I guess so. I’ll try that.’
The man tipped his bottle of red wine at her. Smiled. ‘Your very good health.’
Nola walked out, hailed a taxi and headed back across the river. The night-blossomed city of drugs and crystals and spice and perfume and neon dancers and electric passion glowed in the water, inverted.
She felt better now, on track for something as yet unseen.
Just keep singing, that’s all that matters. Yes.
Mouth, lips, tongue, music, words, meanings.
Reaching people.
Touching them
.
Her face in the cab window...half reflected...the roadside seen through the image.
The ringing in her head still there,
but quiet now,
ambient.
Blinking her eyes to the pulse of the street-lights, as they passed by one by one.
Yellow sodium haze.
blink
flicker
blink
flicker
A slight pain in the stomach.
Sudden cold.
The flat was empty, dusted and polished, perfectly at ease with itself, comforting, expertly maintained. Shiny where it had to be shiny, matt where it had to be matt.
Silence.
Nola stood there in the centre of the room, looking from left to right and back again.
How strange...
All the usual items were to be seen, the usual furniture. A smooth plastic seat-covering warm against her fingers, the red and gold circles of the carpet design, the well-chosen pictures, the scattered magazines. The visionplex unit waiting on its shelf, beneath the viewing screen. All was in place. The walls were decorated in exactly the same patterns and shades as she was used to, so why then...
Why this sudden feeling, that she’d entered the wrong apartment by mistake?
Nola held her breath.
Waited.
Hoping that when she breathed again, everything would click back into place.
Waiting...
Breathe.
No, the feeling remained.
Through the living room window the river gleamed in blue darkness lit by passing boats.
Nola’s apartment took up half a floor of a newly built tower. She could look out over the city. Nearby stood other apartment blocks and complexes, where other wealthy people, deserving or otherwise, lived in splendour. Windows were alight or not, ones and zeros. A code of living, of sleeping, at home, away. Nola’s eyes moved across vistas. Curtains drawn, curtains open. People alone or in pairs. No families, as such. This was not a place for children. In several observed rooms colours danced across screens, or figures moved from room to room and back. A young couple sat on a couch, laughing together.
Nola watched them.
They moved closer to each other,
playing a game, teasing...
closer
into a kiss.
Ah...that moment...
Nola studied the passion.
The song came back to her, the one from the alleyway. Three notes rising, and then one falling away, into minor. She picked up her guitar and tried to remember how it went.
A few words here and there.
Sparkles. Night.
Here the chord change. Another.
But no melody, not really. Whereas before...
What was it?
Sparkles in the night. Stars? Jewels?
Billboard face, fake gemstone eyes all aglow. The sudden click of inspiration.
Some kind of blues. The sky unfolding...
No. Too late, too far. Too much distance between herself and whatever it was that might have been.
Night-sparkle gemstone something
Calling out for...
Nola lay down the instrument.
She grabbed a bottle of beer from the kitchen and came back into the living room to slump down on the couch. She picked up the remote control and switched on the visionplex.
Click.
Buzz. Burning sound. Brightness. Colour.
Image.
The viewing screen stretched halfway along the wall, and more than halfway to the ceiling, a vast expanse of dark shining mirror now brought to life, allowing pictures and voices to fill the room.
Relaxing, Nola sank back into the cushions. She sipped at the beer, idly watching and listening as she flicked through the channels.
Click.
Onwards.
Click, click, click.
Football, comedy, cookery, explosions, sex, the current war, old wars, cradle snatching, speeding cars, dancing, do-it-yourself, even more wars of years past, a close-up of a fist hitting a man’s cheek, crunch of bone, spray of blood, a teddy bear, plague fever, adverts, madness.
Finally...
She found a music show where her main rival was sitting on a pink bench next to a young kid scarcely out of school. He was interviewing her. They talked wittily to each other in sweet words of praise and mutual delight. Two mouths dripping with wonderful inanities, as scripted.
Boy and girl. They were both wearing sailor suits.
Come here honey, honey, bang my drum.
If you ain’t got the fever, you ain’t gonna come.
Now the rival’s latest release was playing.
Click, click,
Click.
Nola’s finger jabbed repeatedly at the buttons, causing the images on screen to flood and melt together as the programmes flowed by, merging into each other. Sub windows opened up and vanished as she moved through the web channels, the ethercasts, ephemeral programmes of vapour and dust, fragments and whispers. She passed through Shimmertown where the shimmers gathered, the countless endless messages that lasted for only 44 seconds before they faded from the screen. Nola tried to read a couple, failed to catch them in time, moved on:
from station to station, haze to spark
signal to signal.
Then she stopped.
What was that sound, that noise?
Music.
Her own music.
Click, click.
Nola flicked back through the last few selections until she found it, a web-cable fuzzcast, fragile, lodged in the low-rent frequencies.
Click.
The new video, the new song being promoted.
She got up from the couch, moving closer to the screen.
There she was.
Nola Blue.
The images jumped and pulsed.
Zoom!
Zoom shot hit the singer’s face like a bomb shock.
But she just laughed. Nola laughed in the eyes of the camera and then turned, spinning on her heels, dropping down to a dead
STOP!
Bang. On the dot. Halfway to her knees and then up again and away, singing now.
(I just wanna, I wanna get to know you.)
Dancing now, moving in time to the music, playing to the tracking shot as it kept pace with her, along the studio floor and then out, outside.
(You know I wanna
I just wanna
I really wanna...)
Out.
Bright glare of sunlight jarring the lens.
Jump cut.
Along the urban riverbank where the young man was waiting with his gang of toughs.
(I wanna get to know the real you.)
The young man was waiting just for her and then he too was dancing his own steps, moving away from the gang, moving with Nola but always keeping one or two or three or four twists and turns ahead of her.
(I wanna touch you. I just wanna...)
And no matter how she tried to stay in pursuit, no matter how loudly or how passionately she sang, he was always ahead, this young man, always on the edge of being lost...
Nola watched herself on the screen.
She could hardly recognise the face as her own, so often had she been transformed by the star-making process. Made-over, made-up, powdered. Jigged and rejigged. Extended, and then digitalised to within an inch of her flesh or so it felt, post-production, until there was hardly anything of herself left up there.
Hardly anything at all.
Even her voice, her lovely voice made by nature, by the good genes of the poor mother and bad father, even her born-to-sing singing voice was all chopped-up and rearranged, auto-tuned, remixed beyond any measure of her own tongue.
It was like another person existed.
That was it.
Another version of her own face and body. Some weird little abstract entity who lived on the other side of the screen. A young person who looked like Nola looked, talked and walked as she did, sang and danced like she did, spelt her name the same way, using the same letters in the same order; this second woman, this double, with the same silhouette, wearing the same clothes, clouded and veiled by the same fully moussed-up and layered cascade of hair.
The same goddamn teeth even.
Gleaming like a showgirl. Plastic white scrape and bleach job, all paid for by George himself, against future royalties, of course.
Name, face, teeth, skin, clothes, lips, eyes.