Channel Sk1n (2 page)

Time now, time to break away?

I really want to get to know the REAL you.

All of you.

Damn. Sometimes she wanted to just stretch out and kiss music on the lips and and and and GRAB music by the neck and SQUEEZE! Until, until...

Nola reached for her bug and called his number.

No answer.

She rang her assistant, saying, ‘Christina. Hi. I need you to find George for me.’

‘Nola? Where are you?’

‘What?’

‘Where are you?’

‘In a bar.’

‘In public?’ That edge of concern in the voice.

‘I’m safe.’

‘You’re drinking?’

‘Of course.’

‘Amongst your own kind?’

Nola looked around, eyeing the clientele. ‘It will do.’

A pause then, before Christina said, ‘I was worried, back in the flat. You sounded so bad.’

‘That’s fine. I’m over that. Are you still at my place?’

‘No.’

‘Where?’

‘I’m at home.’

‘Is George with you?’

‘No.’

‘Where is he? He’s not answering.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I need to speak to him.’

‘Really, Nola. Everything’s good.’

‘What did he say, after I’d left?’

‘Not a lot.’

She was holding back. Nola could sense it.

‘Christina, you’re meant to be helping me.’

‘I am. You know I would always--’

‘I’m not feeling it. Tell me the truth.’

Silence on the line, moments of static haze.

Then Christina’s voice, quiet, purposeful: ‘Why don’t you come round here, Nola? We can have a good long chat, like the old days. Get stoned. I can get a couple of guys round, what do you say.’

‘I’m good.’

‘Are you sure? We can charge it to the company, call it therapy.’

‘Chris. I need to talk to George. It’s personal.’

Christina paused and breathed on line. ‘We’ve been through this before, you do know that? In other years, with other girls and boys.’

‘Really?’

‘It’s a setback, that’s all.’

‘A set-back? Right. And just how low are we?’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘What number are we?’

A pause. And then quietly: ‘Thirty-six.’

Nola sighed, hearing that. She broke the connection.

Thirty-six...

Damn it.

That was a projected status ranking based on legit sales across all media, alongside image counts, name recognition indices, estimated illegal downloads, press mentions, gossip graphs, drip-feed from rumour hounds, grapevine checkers, the whole mad panoply merged into one handy little packet of information.

A number.

That’s what it all came down to.

Nola felt dazed.

Thirty-six. Too low.

She would talk to George tomorrow, telling him that she needed to get out there, do some appearances, but properly this time, live, singing live, no miming, and a real band, no tapes. The fuzz and burrrrr of jacks placed in sockets, fingers on strings, the wrong notes, slippage. Contact. Maybe we can do something good before the figures go public.

It’s the only way, George. The only way.

This is what she would say.

Yeah. This was good. Keep it grounded.

Be strong. Fight back.

Nola finished the drink in hand and left the club.

Street air. Cold then warm against the face as the neon leered closer. She saw a man approaching, glamacam in hand, and she flinched away from him. But he shuffled on past her, his prey elsewhere, lens set on other delights.

Nola walked along, keeping to the shadows, the small areas of blindness amid the colour and flash of the city. A giant animated image rose above the streets. Her own face projected large up there, moving, fashioned from light, from money and desire. Nola’s face. Nola’s eyes sparkling. Blur. Then silver. Gemstone eyes. Imitation eyes.

Nola stared at the face of shiver and stardust.

Sometimes all of this still feels like a dream, a dream of stardust and red-carpet magic, and one cold grey morning I’ll wake up back where I started from, alone, back in the old town.

From across the road a group of drunken teenagers called out her name. Girls, all of them.

Nola! Hey. Nola Blue!

She waved back, suddenly thankful for the recognition.

But what was it they were saying? Their voices had a mocking tone. It was like they knew already, even before the weekly status charts were made public. They were calling her a music death fallout zone, a slidedown, a loser, a no-use nobody, out of luck, out of time.

Everybody knew everything these days, way ahead of the sponsored channels.

Everybody was tuned in.

Nola! Nola!

What number you at?

Nola baby!

What’s your standing? How’s your grade?

36, baby!

36!

Nola stared at the girls. They stared back. Blank looks now. Voices silent.

Had they even spoken to her?

Nola trembled.

The girls laughed together, passing remarks back and forth, making glad of the world in general, of boys and music and shop-bought glamour and such forth. Their telebugs glowed in luminous blues and yellows and sang with flexitext melodies that danced in dots of light above the screens.

Come here honey, honey, bang my drum.

There go the girls, walking on, singing a song, another song, a new song. Somebody else’s song. Probably, most of them were vocalists or dancers in the making, their names and dreams jotted down on numerous talent-show waiting lists.

If you ain’t got the fever, you ain’t gonna come.

Nola felt faint. Crushed.

Zxxxtttttt...

There was a strange buzzing noise in her head. Painful. Insistent. Sharp. It felt like some kind of call sign was trapped in the skull, something beamed in from another planet.

What could she do?

These kids were only a few years younger than her, and yet their fashions, their slang, even their choice of hairstyle, they were all alien artefacts. Once, a few weeks ago even, she would have called them fans. But not now. Nothing can be held in trust for ever. Music was accelerating, burning itself to sparks and powder and ash on the road of spikes, and Nola had always loved that aspect, that crazy headlong rush of brilliance never quite catching itself. But now, was she really too slow to keep up, too slow to set her wings aflame? The public looked elsewhere and here she was, coming in low with only her third release.

The numbers were messed up, they had to be. Some glitch in the system.

36.

36.

36.

Most acts out of the George Gold stable had at least half a dozen hits before they started the sonic drift-away, the slow ride into darkness, silence. Nola could hear the DJs talking already, making scorn:
And just about scraping in this week we have Nola Blue with ‘I Just Wanna Feel (The Real You)’. Dearie me, Baby Blue’s hit the speed bumps.

She couldn’t help feeling worried.

George was sure to let her go now. That was it. That was the look she had seen in his eyes, back at the flat. Dismissal.

36. 36. 36.

But Nola had always had more in mind.

She was in this for life. A fact. She was the next Jio, the next Beneeca, the next Yoni Yoni, the next girl star, the next and the next, all rolled into one. Not some throwaway toy, pull the string and hear her sing! Not that. Nola was the dream of herself coming real, the years of hard work scoping out the future piece by piece and never giving way, never giving in. She had songs, songs of her own to sing one day, songs that would shock the world into silence.

Fact.

No. No backing down. She would do this.

Here now

alone, adrift

in charge of herself.

Nola Blue. One and only!

One and goddamn fucking only!

Make way!

All she’d desired when younger, from just being a kid with a cheap plastic keyboard struggling to get the words and the melody down, all those crazy patterns and changes that floated through her mind.

Nine years old, lighting a flicker.

Nola! What number you at? Nola baby!

A group of revellers approached along the street, all laughing and gleeful.

Nola turned away.

Voices.

What number?

Thirty-six, baby. Thirty-six!

Thirty-six and falling fast.

Her tongue moved within her mouth, wetting the gums. There was a strange metallic taste. Now her hands started to itch. Her skull rang with noise.

And there she stood, alone, waiting for the moment to pass.

Nola blinked.

Her fingernails scratched at her palms.

Body signals.

It was painful to begin with, but now as the noise in her head rose in pitch, she started to feel it differently. The sound rang clean and true. It was exactly in tune with her blood, her bones. Her flesh glowed with sudden desire. It made her want to dance, to fall into somebody’s arms, a stranger’s arms.

The body is right. The body knows.

The body sings!

Nola pranced and tingled, step by step.

Needing privacy, she ducked into an alleyway.

Narrow. Dim, dirty. Scuttle of something moving away. The smell of burnt food, leftovers. Wisps of grey smoke from a vent. And now Nola’s voice rose up from her throat, unbidden, filling her head and shining forth in love,

out loud,

halfway melodic:

No blues like gemstone blues.

The line just coming to her like that, made up as she stood there. But what did it mean? Oh, right: seeing her own face on the animated display earlier, projected eyes glimmering that supernatural blue.

Again, try:

No blues like the gemstone blues, shining,

Night sparkles.

(Good tune, better that time.)

No blues like a white moon shining

Down the sky, unfolding.

(And repeat. Possible chord change here.)

Down the sky unfolding

Night sparkles

Dreams unfolding.

No cares for now. Only singing. Like she used to do, bedroom bound, just singing to herself, writing lyrics down as they came to her. Nonsense poetry most of the time, with the occasional two-line phrase sounding more than okay, making her wonder where it all came from. And just grabbing hold of it then and scrawling the words down, thinking:
I can do this, I can really do this!
And where before there was nothing at all, now a song, or half a song, or a quarter of a song existed.