The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  Back then, when I thought that extreme old age (she must have been at least forty) brought wisdom, rather than, as I now know, fear, I took this warning seriously. But if anyone on this flight is foolhardy enough to try that shit now I’d tell them, “Sure you can, you’re just not trying hard enough”. I’ve successfully run away from my problems a few times now. The running isn’t difficult, it’s the never looking back. Never. You can’t take anything with you; a scorched-earth policy. Robin, Rae, Tahoe, car payments, friends, lovers, bars, neighbours, record collections, email addresses, mementos, clothes, memories even. Not just gone but never existed.

  I’m first on the plane, which is in itself a first. I upgrade on a whim — what’s one more debt among the hordes — and this time my seat-mate is a Belgian, in chemicals or something. I celebrate another no-turning-back point over Newfoundland, once Britain is closer than the US, raising a glass of champagne to the silent mountains and tiny lights. Again I feel something slip away. Downhill, downhill, downhill. I pull the laptop out somewhere over Greenland, relishing being a lone pool of light among the sleepmasked bundles around me. I didn’t bring a piano keyboard but nowadays it’s not too hard to make a decent-sounding track with nothing more than a laptop and some imagination. I sketch something out in Pro Tools. Rizla-thin drums drawn across a grid like some Bletchley Park codebreaker, a synth line created by drawing a parabola over a lined screen. I scatter notes at random: snowdrops peaking their caps through frost. Then I run the whole thing through a couple of effects, pulling everything together, pointing things in the same direction. One note is a stray, wandering away from the scale, and I’m about to delete it when I remember an old jazz dictum that Kim used to quote. “Do it once and it’s a mistake, do it twice and it’s a motif”. I copy-and-paste the note to every verse and soon that’s the phrase you’re waiting to hear. I finish up as the microwaved breakfast cools towards edibility and listen back as the window screens go up, with morning just a powdering of sugar on the horizon. It sounds pretty good. I title the file The First Footprint in Fresh Snow and save it in a blank folder. The new world starts here.

  (There’s a sketch on the next page. Thin black trees and a path of footsteps across a blank wasteland. When the writing starts up again it’s in black ink and in a smaller, less certain hand.)

  At Heathrow I channelled Kim Philby. He was a particular hero of mine as the patron saint of life-burners. Here was the Picasso of betrayal: its Einstein, its Elvis.

  23 January 1963. “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” on the radio, “Walk Right In” and “Go Away Little Girl”. Philby steps out of an interrogation carried out by an old friend and colleague, and knows, deep in his heart, that he’s done. The jig is up and his life’s work — a traitorous double agency at the heart of the British establishment — is about to be revealed. He doesn’t pack. He doesn’t say a single goodbye. He moves fast, and is smuggled by cargo boat to Odessa then flown as a hero to Moscow.

  My parents knew Philby a little, he’d been to the house. There was a picture of them all in the back garden at Goring with the lawn chairs arranged just so, everyone facing the guest of honour. Even in a straw hat and with that long frame folded into a deckchair, there was a sooty glamour to him — that submarine smile and the air of somewhere to be. What fucking chutzpah, what fucking control, what fucking balls the man had. Thirty years a living lie. Thirty years sending a simulacrum of himself out through the corridors of power. Just a piece of the man but still one with more than enough charm to come within an inch of running the whole damn Secret Service. (Even the Ruskies couldn’t believe that Philby was real; no one could split himself so completely and let nothing bleed across surely? Like all betrayers their problem was that they saw betrayal in everyone.)

  23 January 1963 he steps off the plane at Chkalovsky military airport to the salutes of fifty serious Soviets, the rest of the world still sleeping, and he pushes that leonine head out into the deathly Moscovite cold, breath like smoke, trumpets sounding through a far-off PA, the clack of heels and snap of salutes, behold the man. For these hours, until the West finds out how long and well and thoroughly it has been fucked, there are just these few witnesses to his transfiguration — the butterfly becoming the caterpillar — as flamboyant, boozy, bed-hopping Philby is revealed in dowdy glory to be an older kind of man: secret, serious, free.

  (There’s sketch here of Philby — I had to look him up online. It’s a pretty good likeness, and there’s an asterisk beneath it. Later on in the book there’s the below text, I’m assuming it’s what is supposed to be linked.)

  (I wrote to the man actually. Jan 1988 — the slightest thaw in the Cold War and a friend of Dad’s, who’d met him at a Government reception in Moscow where he’d been wheeled out to talk cricket and salt wounds, gave me his address, knowing I was a fan. I sent him a care package: Fortnum & Mason tea, a half of Glenmorangie, shortbreads and a Wisden. I tried a letter but it gushed so instead I added a note asking the only question I really wanted answered. What would you have done if they’d never found out?)

  They should blindfold visitors to London until they’re through the suburbs — it’s just embarrassing. The route through west London is fifteen minutes of scruffy back gardens, parking spaces and dumping grounds.

  Treachery, like all adult pleasures, is a long game. I counted off names on my fingers. Robin and Rae, Tahoe and America. All those nameless bodies. Gone, like a dandelion clock. Pffff. And then I counted again. Kimi, Saul, Baxter and Dillon: those four owed me and the one who thought they owed the least would pay the most. I was going to take all the dross of the last twenty years: the drabness, the boredom, the successful friends and the successful enemies, the shopping lists and the PTA conferences and the bad TV — I would take all of it and spin it into gold.

  How? Just watch me.

  Chapter Two

  There are moments in life about which everything turns. Moments when your points get shifted across and a hundred tons of life’s train go thundering down an unexpected path. In engineering we call this sensitive dependence on initial conditions, and I’ve spent my adult life making sure that my initial conditions were as unchanging as possible. My parents died steadily and expectedly. My romantic relationships were slow-blooming and long-dying: a series of dissolves between interchangeable scenes. Sometimes I find myself remembering a holiday or romantic meal with perfect clarity except for one detail: I can’t recall who my companion was. That meal of vine leaves and fresh figs on a Grecian rooftop — Rachel or Lisa? A sleigh ride through trees festooned with icicles has an friendly blur at my side in the memory. My health is good, my work is dull, my bank balance is stable. If you’d asked me at sixteen how I might turn out I wouldn’t have known the specifics — Umbrage, my bonsai business, aunt June’s flat — but the shape of my life is quite as I expected it. Quiet and uncomplicated. Lonely sometimes, but not unfulfilling. Like a human suburb, I’ve situated myself far from the places where life-changing events might happen. So I’m not sure what led me, there amidst the beeswax and panelling of a hotel lobby, to pretend to be my recently deceased twin brother.

  I’d slept badly. Normally the rhythms of Umbrage’s machinery act like a lullaby on me, but the thought of coming back into contact with my brother’s world was unsettling. There would be mess, and drama, and people with obscure motives. The day after Rae’s call I worked on the city, carefully not thinking about the task ahead.

  Once I’m within Umbrage a change comes over me. My hands move of their own accord. Problems arise and are solved and the outside world fades to shadow. Two days previously I’d been at a car boot sale where, on a stall of foxed paperbacks and mismatched crockery, something glittered like a smashed disco ball. An old case bulged with nearly a hundred unused camera viewfinders. They were clever little mirrors that were adjustable via screws set in their sides and something in their angles suggested a structure to me. Back at home I screwed them onto a circular wooden base in a concentric spiral like
the chambers of a shell, positioned so that each mirror fed the next until any light that shone on the outer mirrors appeared dimly on the opposite side. Then I connected a motor from an old music box and extended the handle so the whole wheel of mirrors could be wound and set in motion from outside. I spent the morning mounting it in a cobbled central square that until now had been populated only by carved wooden benches, each in the shade of its own bonsai’ed Chinese elm. Inside the new structure’s outer ring I rigged intricate trellis-work from dental floss and glove-leather, and linked it back to the central spindle. A figure placed in one of the outside chambers faced a glass, mirrored box, his reflection nowhere to be seen, and I set the mechanism running. The forks of the music box were bent and blackened with grime but they lent the tune a haunted air. There, sixteen chambers later on the far side of the wheel, the figure was reflected in an empty chamber, life-size and clear. I let the mechanism run down and the space between the notes lengthen as the story of the building began to revolve in my mind. I wrote in The Book of Umbrage in the same way I’d been working: undeliberately, the hand leading the mind.

  Umbrage is a city without mirrors. To catch a glimpse of your reflection is thought to be unlucky, unseemly even — it straitjackets the soul as surely as a prison cell. No pool of water, from the humblest bird-bath to the eel-ponds of the Autumn Palace, is ever allowed to settle. Instead fountains ruffle surfaces and wind machines drive ripples across millponds. Metals are prized for their patina: Umbragians relish rust and verdigris the way other cultures might prize the sheen of precious metals. There is just one place in the city where mirrors are allowed: The Carousel. It sits in Dromedare Square, draped for the majority of the time in velvet, but Umbragians do their best not to look at it even in its shroud, as if the hidden mirrors still exerted some photonic pull. It runs for an hour in the morning for any citizen to ride for free. Some days queues snake back to the city walls and mornie-cake sellers do a rapid trade along the waiting line. Other times there are only two or three riders in a week. Like much in Umbrage there seems to be reason to these surges and lacunae; they are a faddy, capricious people.

  The Carousel’s process is simple. You step inside while it’s still moving, as the chime of the Fork Organ sets the morning air ringing. Your wrists go through the leather cuffs that dangle from the ceiling and you the grab the thin twine. It tightens automatically and your arms are hoisted aloft, hands apart. You position yourself in front of a mirror. Nothing. You are reflectionless, vampiric. Instead angles throw your reflection around the whorl of mirrors. The Carousel spins, darkens and then your reflection appears — or rather a reflection appears — because someone has entered the chamber directly opposite and their image has made the inverse journey to yours. Your twin reflections pinball through the maze, reversed, upended, magnified, diminished and righted again. This time it’s a woman, older, dressed in the grey swaddling of a wet nurse. Her pose echoes yours: arms wide, palms facing. The Carousel spins and the metal tines chime a note like a deadened bell. Pulleys do their work somewhere deep in the mechanism and your wrist is guided upwards and forwards. The woman’s image follows exactly. It’s you but not you, moving in unison, a slow dance. The floor turns ninety degrees and your double does the same. You turn to see your profile; she does too. The left-hand cuff loosens and you watch her wrist fall to her side as you feel the weight of your own. You are a stranger.

  For people who have never seen themselves in a mirror The Carousel can be a kind of miracle. I’m the most beautiful girl say grizzled dockmen, thick-knuckled hands stroking a face more beard than skin. I’m so old say teenagers, so tiny say giants, so lucky say the lame. And it adds a spoonful of spice to one’s day. Umbrage isn’t huge and its citizens cross paths regularly so it’s not uncommon to bump into your reflection. There I am, trained songbirds trilling from my outstretched arms in the Sea Market. See me in the crowd over there, looking over my shoulder before disappearing into Brothel Alley — naughty me, I never knew. There I am passing sentence, there I am washing dishes, there I am coughing up blood in the gutter. Retirees in the zinc bars under Dromedare Square say that people who visit the Carousel often are the best kind of citizens: friendly, generous, forgiving.”

  Once I was done with The Carousel the day ahead had lost some of its terror. So I was to go to a strange place and question people I didn’t know about my brother’s death. What of it? I steeled myself for Brandon’s kind of people. When we were young he was always friends with the most troubled kids: boys whose fathers were euphemistically “away”, girls with scars. Mixing with them, even in passing, was fraught with danger, but I tried to tuck these fears away. I was just a messenger, a tool for Rae to find out some information that she deserved.

  I walked right past the place the first time. I don’t know the East End well and even with the map printed out it wasn’t what I’d been expecting at all. There was no sweep of drive or dressy doormen. It was only on my second trawl along a litter-blown side street that I noticed that a sign that swung in the morning breeze depicted a magpie. It hung above a set of grimy red doors set back from the street like sunken eyes. There was no name but the knocker was a brass bird. I rapped it and after a moment’s silence a voice emanated from somewhere overhead.

  “Ah, Mr Kussgarten. I was beginning to think we’d lost you to the charms of Blackburn again.”

  Wherever the camera was, it wasn’t obvious. The doors swung open onto a passageway that looked cool and dark after the fug of the streets. And there, on the stairs, I decided that I wouldn’t say that I wasn’t Brandon, at least not yet. The decision ambushed me but thrilled me too. And it brought a deeper thrill: the idea of telling Rae later.

  I took the stairs as slowly as I could, trying to adopt Brandon’s swagger, as much to mask my own nervousness as anything. I took a breath as I turned the final twist of stairs. They opened into a dark, wood-panelled room with high ceilings and a whiff of beeswax. The light had the liquid tremor of candles though I couldn’t see where the glow came from.

  A figure peeled himself from the gloom in the corner. A trim, waistcoated man with geometric facial hair and an air of glee. He came striding towards me wearing an expression of obvious pleasure but then at the last moment paused. He gave me a quick, but obvious, once-over — hair, clothes, shoes — the way women do to each other on the street. His lips parted and then stopped.

  “Mr Kussgarten, what a pleasure. We were just starting to get concerned. No bags?”

  I looked stupidly at my empty hands.

  “No, no, nothing.”

  His eyes flickered across my face and I forced myself to hold his gaze.

  “Excellent, well, the room’s just as you left it.” He reached over to take my coat and I snuck a look at the name embroidered into his waistcoat: Kaspar.

  I tried nonchalance. “Sorry Kaspar, just a bit of a lost weekend, if you know what I mean?” I’d practised that line on the way up the stairs.

  He laughed. “Well we all deserve one of those every now and then. The room’s not been touched as you requested, but the bar and kitchen have been restocked. Is there anything you’d like sent up?”

  I was about to say no when I realised that I had no idea where I was going. The lobby had at least three exits. I pushed my hand into my pocket and said, “Well here’s the thing Kaspar, I left my key at a friend’s.”

  He laughed again. “No problem, follow me up and I’ll see about a new one for you later.”

  We took a doorway between two bookcases and then walked up a spiral staircase steep enough that I was staring into the backs of Kaspar’s knees as we climbed. Then along a picture-lined corridor that sloped first downwards and then up again. I was just feeling like my claustrophobia might kick in when he stopped outside a small door and fished out a key.

  “Home again, home again, clippety-clop.” His voice had a tuneful sing-song air. He did an odd, almost military clicking together of his heels and headed back the way he’d come, promising to
return with a new key.

  The first room was huge. You could have held a proper masked ball in there. Murals in dusty pastels busied the walls and a mazy parquet floor ran the entire length. It looked like a Victorian reading room: the kind of place where you could imagine Marx and Darwin nodding to each other as they passed beneath the book stacks. Everything was worn. The floorboards were a rich chocolate at the room’s edges but straw-pale in the centre. The furniture was solid and old and frayed and every surface was encrusted with things. Books were folded open over every chair arm, guitars leant against any vertical surface. Piles of stuff — sketchbooks, T-shirts, newspapers — collected at the edges, and it was hard to tell what was part of the idiosyncratic interior design and what was Brandon’s. There was an orrery — a very good one — that Brandon would have neither appreciated or recognised, and a technical looking turntable with exposed valves that I suspected might be the most expensive thing here.

  The room opened out into two more spaces on the same floor: a kitchen-cum-diner where wood panelling hid some high-end German appliances and cupboards full of Fortnum & Mason groceries; the other room was stone-floored and spacious like a chapel, with a walkway running around the second storey and an ornate skylight. There were instruments here too but arranged to more of a plan. Guitars sat patiently in stands and keyboards were arranged into an open-sided square. I fingered a tune on the piano as I passed — something from childhood lessons — and the notes were clean and rich. The floor was covered in chalk markings. There were chord charts, much crossed out and altered, caricatures in Brandon’s hand, and a wheel of symbols that took over the central few feet. I skirted around them, careful not to smudge anything.

  In the corner rose another spiral staircase, with turns tight enough to make me vertiginous, which led to a bedroom with a windowed, pyramidical roof. The bed was made but that was the only note of order. Clothes covered the floor in a way that made it impossible to tell whether it was carpeted or not. Candles had spilled continents of wax across the end tables and everywhere cabinets and drawers sat open.