Authors: Jeff Noon
‘There now. We’ll get you better. We’ll make this work.’
Nola could hardly bear it.
Close. Too close.
Sweat. Heat. The smell of another person.
‘Here now. Come on. Nola, have some water.’
Nola drank.
Sudden cold rush of liquid down her throat, grateful, like she hadn’t drunk in weeks.
‘I can’t do it, Chris. Not today.’
The two women stared at each other.
‘Okay. But what should I say to them? Any ideas?’
‘I’m sorry. Not today.’
Christina’s face filled with trouble. ‘Sweet Jesus, but we really do need to get you sorted out.’
‘What?’
‘Get you some release, a good fuck, a week in a private spa, or a shot of juice to the veins, what do you say?’
Nola’s anger burned at this. Sudden, loud: ‘Get the fuck away from me.’
Silence. Christina clenched a fist. She breathed in steady, breathed out, tried to keep control.
Nola said, ‘Ring George.’
‘George?’
‘He looks out for me.’
Christina laughed. ‘Really? You believe that? Nola, he made you. He created you from dust, from a single spark.’
‘It’s not like that. We’re equal.’
‘Equal?’
Nola’s eyes going wild. ‘I’m the talent.’
‘Of course you are.’
Suddenly fired up: ‘He’s not my creator.’
‘Fine. Is this the pill going wrong?’
Nola shook her head. Her body trembled with desire.
‘You’re sure now? Nothing on top of that? No prescription drugs we don’t know about.’
‘No.’
Desire? Why desire?
And desire for what exactly? Nola was liquid inside, skin glowing in painful pleasure.
She swayed from side to side.
Christina just stared at her. Seeing only another fuck-job, another mess to clean up. She spoke slowly, keeping eye contact. ‘I’ve looked after worse than you, Nola. Really. The absolute dregs. Tuneless bitches, male tarts, sensitive deary-me artistes, abject cowards singing anti-war anthems, gleeful desperate little upstarts with eyeballs full of dreams and lips still damp from Mama’s tit. All that wailing in the wings, the shits, the jitters. Stage fright, spotlight rash, limo sickness, red-carpet panic attacks. I’ve covered up zits, drunkenness, pregnancies, abortions, punch-ups, shoplifting, the whole rigmarole. I have secret knowledge of the stars. And you know what? I’ll outlast them all.’ Christina grinned. ‘And here’s me thinking, finally, thank God, somebody different, somebody with a bit of fire in them.’
Nola looked at her and nodded.
Christina reached out. ‘So now: you play the game. Please do that.’ Her voice was close, warm. ‘That’s all. That’s all we ask of you, little star. Play to win. Because you know what the very lovely and very rich and ever so talented Miss Yoni Yoni cried out, don’t you, her last words before leaping to the tarmac, seven full storeys below?’
Nola shook her head.
‘Fuck the Noise.’
Christina’s words shivered in light.
‘You want to end up like her?’
Mist. Sparkle.
And all that Nola could hear now was the voice inside, this time a child’s voice in her head, crying out for a cake or a toy,
Gimme, gimme, gimme!
and then laughing with sudden burbles of joy.
Couldn’t Christina hear this? She
must
hear it.
Was Nola the only one?
Her face in the mirror.
Eyes: fearful, black, they would not look back at her.
She turned away. Again, her stomach heaved, she was going to be sick.
Christina a figure of blur, miles away, miles.
White porcelain glimmer, overbright.
Strip-light fizzle and spark.
Burn of wiring.
One man’s voice.
Facts and figures. Skintalk. Chatter.
The average turnover will fall, as...
Jabbering. He would not stop.
Of course, as predicted...
A woman’s voice, interrupting.
Babble.
Voices. Louder now. Voices that sang and blustered and yelled out and sighed, nonstop.
Noise. A kiss. Two pairs of lips meeting, the sound caught and magnified.
Wet suck.
Pain in Nola’s skull.
Sharp.
Throb.
Needle sharp.
Then darkness.
She caught a taxi outside the studio.
Alone now, having left Christina to sort out the mess. Thankfully, the strange voices had died down to a whisper, sometimes even fading to silence, but she could still feel her abdomen burning. A sudden feeling of nausea would every so often possess her.
Reaching her apartment she immediately headed for the bathroom, where she pulled off her shirt to examine her body in the full length mirror.
Eyes wide open now, needing to know...
The bruise.
The damaged area had grown still further, covering almost half of her belly. The surface was wet. Seepage. Pus. Moving images played there, flickering into existence and then changing, transmuting into other shapes and scenes in a constant flow.
Nola saw:
The crescent moon.
Clouds.
Pictures of far-off lands.
Soldiers marching.
A lingering shot of a half-naked man.
Blood on a wall.
Graffiti:
Free the Dream!
A cat prowling.
A building in flames.
Each image was accompanied by a sound or a series of noises:
Cheers, shouts, inane chatter.
Car brakes screaming, fists slamming into soft flesh.
A gunshot, a baby’s first tears.
Political commentary.
A raging argument.
Groans of simulated pleasure, cries of despair.
Static interference, each wave bringing Nola a jolt of pain.
Szzzxtzztztxt!
Jingles, riddles, tangles of words.
Popular songs of decades past, war whoops, poems of love and loneliness.
Footsteps
footsteps
footsteps
on a dark and rainy boulevard.
All of these things were brought to extraordinary life on Nola’s skin, and she could not drag her eyes away from them.
Oh God, what’s happening to me?
What’s happening?
Alas, alas the looking glass
had no voice, no lips, no tongue
with which to speak.
Nola wet her hands at the sink and started to wash herself, her stomach, the bruise itself, rubbing, rubbing at the strange contusion, wiping, trying to clean herself of this mark, this damage.
The bruise remained.
She hurried into the main room, crying out to the walls, the visionplex, the furniture, the window, crying out for help, for anything, just some grain of hope or comfort.
There was none.
She rang Christina.
‘What is it, Nola? What the fuck is going on? You have to tell me.’
‘Just come over.’
‘Now?’
‘If you can. Please.’
That was all she could manage. She clicked off the bug, poured herself a drink, and waited.
The blank wall screen held her in its vision, reflected, a pale dream of a woman clinging to the last shreds by her teeth and nails.
She drank. Her eyes closed.
Pictures came to her, dreamlike.
Stop. Please stop.
Pictures. Stories told in mist, in fragments:
A tall tower struck by lightning.
Night falling across moorland, where a strange animal drags itself through the grass. The beast has a wounded side, and seeps blood. The blood is succour to crawling bugs.
She knew these images were currently flashing across her stomach. She felt them there, but she would not look at them, no, let them flow away, let them die, let all images die.
The last man alive on the planet walks down a deserted high street. The air is humid, muggy with heat. The man’s scrawny greyblack shadow follows at a distance, separated from his body.
A crashed spaceship in the centre of London. The people run in fear.
Images stolen from cable vision, from fantasy and horror films, science fiction.
From the all-day-long reality channels.
A middle-aged woman stares at her own face in a mirror. She speaks, the signal broken by noise, by fever and dust. ‘I feel dirty, filthy... all these cameras...all day...all night...so many eyes...touching me...touching...
Christina got there within half an hour. She could hardly believe what she was seeing.
Nola: slumped down against the wall, face hidden, hair wet and out of shape. Her shirt was torn, hanging loosely open. There was an empty whiskey glass on the carpet at her side.
Christina bent down, pulling Nola to a sitting position. ‘Come on, baby. Easy now.’
Nola tried to hold her shirt closed, but Christina had already seen that something was wrong down there, within the folds, on the skin.
Was that an injury, a wound of some kind?
Quietly spoken: ‘Let me have a look.’
And gently she pulled Nola’s shirt open fully, viewing the bruise that lay beneath, a sickening bright stain of colour stretching across Nola’s stomach.
‘Oh my God, Nola. Who did this to you?’
Silence.
‘How did this happen? Did somebody hit you?’
Nola shook her head.
‘Well. You didn’t do this yourself?’
Again, no answer. But then Nola struggled to her feet, saying, ‘Look at me, Chris. Look closely.’ She breathed deep, steadying herself. ‘Tell me what you see.’
Christina looked at the bruise.
The colours and the extent of it were painful to the eye. At first all she could was the wound itself. But soon enough the contusion altered itself, the shapes and patterns taking on new form. Sounds could be heard, all quiet as yet, but gathering. And then a voice coming from the skin itself, and an answering voice, faraway, muffled.
Christina closed her eyes.
She remembered her own time on television, the primitive version, her one great chance at success. She felt again the camera’s heat, the fizzle and burn of skin. Sweat beads. Nerves jumping. She recalled the thought of her own image being transmitted, examined, sent around the nation, found wanting. The long minutes stretching out, her face melting, it seemed like, under the harsh lights, every pore and blemish magnified, her sins on show, revealed, the body opened out for public viewing. All the people she had slept with over the years, the grabbing of pleasure wherever it might lie, moment to moment. No George Gold in her life, back then. Alone. So much booze, so many drugs. Add it all up, weigh the balance. The lights catching her, x-raying her soul. So bad, so very bad. The camera moving in, closer. Breath caught in her throat. Panic. One hand tapping at her tiny crucifix necklace, the other shaking at the script. Dig in, keep reading. Glue this mother down. Say your lines. Keep...