Authors: Jeff Noon
Channel Sk1n (30 page)
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Nola Blue’s body was found on a piece of forgotten ground next to a rubbish-strewn railway line.
Nobody had watched over her during this time. Only the sun, the moon, the sun once more. Two days of waiting as she lay perfectly still. All those hours before she was discovered.
Headline:
Naked and Forsaken! Tragic Mysterious Death of a Music Star.
Grey and pale and naked she lay there, her clothes beside her. There was no evidence of violence, self-inflicted or otherwise.
She died alone.
The singer’s real name was Diana Knowles.
A police cameraman recorded her final position.
No explanation forthcoming for Vision Woman’s demise. Doctors mystified.
The police made their enquiries, the press moved in.
Various witnesses were brought forward and given their allotted screen time: a director of music videos, customers in a bar, a press photographer, a garage attendant, a hotel clerk, a teenage girl in a traveller’s camp, Nola’s personal assistant, her manager. All told their own tales of this beautiful or terrifying figure with the glowing form, with the moving, shimmering pictures on her flesh. Images were shown from Evelyn Moore’s glamacam site, footage of the skin in action, heated, awash with colours, shapes, sounds. Faces, guns, explosions, cars, victims, guitars, bodies, sex, noise, music. Other people came forward with their own captures, all showing in varied degrees the same phenomenon. Most astonishing of all: playback of Nola’s bodyscreen performance at the Tangent 5 camp, caught on a number of handheld cameras. Finally, that brief moment when Nola had appeared on screen nationwide at the very end of her life, those final moments when she had somehow taken over every broadcast, every signal. The body agleam, fragile, made from all the pictures and sounds sent in to her, everybody’s face on view for a second, for less than a second, subliminal, scattercast. And yet Nola’s corpse held no traces of such wonders. The skin was perfectly clear of all markings, all evidence of what she was or might have been.
And despite all the witnesses, all the recorded evidence, the real secrets of Nola Blue’s last day alive remained hidden from view.
Why her? Just what was it exactly that had taken her over? Would there be others?
Nola’s old songs were played for a week or so, complete or in fragments, covering news of the body’s discovery, of her life, her childhood, the transformation into a world-market vocalist, the few years of fame, her death. The latest tune rose up the status charts, reaching a position of number three. Her first single was re-promoted. It spent two weeks at number one. Nola’s old videos appeared on the music shows and portapops. People sang along with the melodies, bodies moved to the rhythm.
When I see you dance
I just wanna get down and
Dance with you
(Dance with you)
I feel my body sweat
You set my eyes (on fire)
I feel the feeling of
the feeling of the feeling
of the feeling of the
feeling
of the feeling
of desire.
I FEEEEEEEEL the feeling
of desire.
~~~
Joe Palmer watched the screen.
He sat in his bedsit, eating takeaway food. No lights on, no windows open, curtains closed. He hadn’t been outside for more than a week, staying off work. Something was happening to him. Stomach ache, occasional sharp pain at the base of the neck. A buzzing noise in his head. Funny taste in the mouth. He couldn’t sleep properly, couldn’t concentrate on anything other than the screen, the visionplex.
He was looking for signs, signifiers.
Resemblances.
He was scanning the channels, remote in hand, clicking with greasy fingers.
Nola was out there somewhere, he was certain of it. He had seen the news programmes talking of Melissa Gold’s spirit haunting the screen. Surely, Nola was also living in that same realm, the land of signals. If he could just locate her, or create a suitable channel or medium for her download. She was gathered in the waves, distributed, her body scattered adrift and waiting for retrieval.
Pure ghost, pure motion,
pure flow.
At his feet lay the photographs he had taken of her in the dingy hotel room, after they had made love. The pictures glowed with strange colours.
He could hear voices in his head,
the blur and hum of words at the edge of hearing.
Click, click.
His fingers pressing buttons,
Eyes jammed to the screen, held wide.
Waiting.
Click.
Finally, taking off the set’s control panel and working with a small screwdriver, Joe fixed the receiver to a dead channel, picking up static wash, grey smear. This was one of the few gaps left in the spectrum, free space, and he sat there staring at the monitor, hoping for a shape to appear, a figure of mist, of flecks, dots, grain, glips, glitches, spikes, speckles, hiss, crackles, crosstalk, overload, white noise. Palmer was the perfect spectator, an addict of pirate frequencies. He could not surrender, not now, and he felt heartbroken over what he had seen and let astray that night, and what he’d felt in those few hours: the gentle burn of flesh under his touch, the flicker of perspiration over melting pictures, representations of the world unfolding in crazy detail on a woman’s skin, on her body, the living body of image in his scarred and pitiful arms and he’d let her go free, he’d lost her.
Lost...melting away...
He could only hope that something more than love had passed between them.
This world was too crowded, that was the trouble. It was too earthy, too physical for such fragile souls. Nola had escaped from the bodily realm, entering the ether.
That had to be the way, the only way out for her.
Her body was clear, normal, when it was found, the flesh wiped clean of the countless downloads and broadcasts. But those images had to be somewhere, they couldn’t just fade away, he couldn't let himself think that.
It was too much of a loss, too painful.
No, the images floated on, and all he could do now was watch and wait, to be the viewer, become the audience,
become the most ravenous of all eyes
and by so doing give presence to the lost ones,
the silent travellers through air and wires,
like this one particular shape that moved now on his screen
amid the grey fuzz
a figure of static blur...
~~~
Joseph fell asleep.
He slept and drifted, the viewer,
drifted, dreaming,
his body set in tingle mode.
His skin shivering:
his face clouded by pictures,
blue light, murmurs,
the signal taking over.
And now the woman danced before him
Nola
a silhouette
of dust and numbers
held for a second, moonlit
touching
then scattered.
Joe’s flesh buzzed with heat
with flicker
as slowly the bruise
materialised on his skin.
The first pictures were forming.
And soon the ghosts of television
will walk freely through
the studios and back lots;
they will be seen moving
with their own secret purpose
through location shots.
Across our countless screens
they will wander unseen,
pale revenants with programmes
of their own to make,
still haunted by cameras,
tongueless now, bodiless,
but veined with fire and image.
For Vana, with love.
With thanks to Michelle, Alex and Andrew for all their help and encouragement. And to William Shaw who read a very early draft of this book and encouraged me to go on with it. To Curtis for his amazing artwork, and to Tim for his formatting skills.
Lyrics from the song ‘Television’ are reprinted with kind permission of the Savage Club.
Thanks to McKenzie Wark for the use of the ‘roots and aerials’ quote. It’s taken from Virtual Geography, published in 1994.
Jeff Noon was born in 1957 in Manchester, England. He was trained in the visual arts and drama, and was musically active in the post-punk scene, before starting to write plays for the theatre in the 1980s.
His first novel,
Vurt
, published in 1993, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best Science Fiction novel. He has also won the John W. Campbell Award. His stage and radio plays include
Woundings
,
The Modernists
and
Dead Code
. He is currently writing and developing screenplays, as well as planning other novels and stories.
General news and comments as well as hundreds of fiction spores can be found at his twitter page
@jeffnoon
The microspore site is a community page bringing together words, music and imagery:
microspores.tumblr.com/start
Jeff’s main site,
metamorphiction.com
, contains new stories, avant-pulp experiments, essays, remix manuals, and lots of information on all his past works.