The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  The call woke me from a deep sleep. I had a momentary lurch of something like falling before I remembered where I was. I checked the clock — just gone 2am. Umbrage slumbered all around me. I fumbled open the laptop. “Rae?” I tried to focus on her face on the screen.

  “Yeah, listen…” She sounded excited, then saw my befuddlement. “Shit, it’s the middle of the night there.”

  “It’s OK.” I turned on a side light. “What’s up?”

  “Sorry, I needed to clear my head a bit. That money on top of everything else was just a bit… A bit much. But I’ve been out, and dropped off Robin and I think I’m a bit less crazy now. So, I got to thinking about the music Bran said he wrote, on the plane over. That First Footprint in Fresh Snow thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well it wasn’t on his laptop, right?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve never seen an emptier desktop.”

  “Well he sounded pretty pleased with it so I thought I’d google it.”

  “And?” I took a sip of water.

  “One hit. A SoundCloud page. An artist called The Band of Rain. And one track.”

  “The First Footprint in Fresh Snow? Is it his?”

  “It is, and there’s a whole essay with it too. He says that it’s liner notes for the track but it reads more like a brain dump. I started to read it but then I thought we could look at it together. I didn’t think about the time, sorry.”

  “God no, this is intriguing.”

  She visibly relaxed. “It is, isn’t it?”

  I took the laptop through to the kitchen and made myself a coffee. There was something restful about Umbrage at night: the sound of tiny waves and the click-click-click of the last running tramcars. I settled down on the one free chair and typed in BAND OF RAIN FIRST FOOTPRINT. Rae was right, it was easy to find it once you knew what you were looking for. There was a thumbnail picture of a magpie where I supposed a portrait of the artist would normally be, and a link to the track, shown as the undulating peaks and troughs of a waveform. I pressed play.

  “You’re listening first?” asked Rae.

  “I thought I would.” I had to fiddle to get the volume turned up and once I did the track didn’t sound as beautiful as Brandon had described it. It was sparse and tinkly and utterly formless.

  “Do I have to listen to the end?” I asked her, “Does it do anything else?”

  “Not really. I think that’s the point. It’s quite pretty, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose. I don’t really get his music though, never did. Shall we read?”

  “OK, it’s the link below.” I could see her excitement. “On three, two, one…”

  It felt oddly intimate sitting five thousand miles apart but sharing a moment, our eyes running over the same phrases. At one point we both reached for our coffee mugs at the same time, eyes on respective screens, and the movement jolted me back to the present for a second. She looked back, raised both eyebrows and we went back to it. I finished first and watched her read. Her face was endlessly mobile and I could tell when she’d reached certain sentences by the set of her features. At one point she put both hands flat on the desk and whispered, “Oh for fuck’s sake.” But mostly she just frowned. She had the corrugated forehead of a child, more overloaded than angry.

  When she finished she looked up and saw me watching her. “God, did I look like a loon? Bran always said that my lips move when I’m reading.”

  I risked a compliment. “You looked fabulous.”

  She gave me a sideways look. “Sure. So… what do you think?”

  That wasn’t hard to answer. “Honestly? I think he’s insane.”

  In the Ruins

  The track has been taken down from SoundCloud but I kept a copy of the text beneath, which I’ve replicated here.

  There was a page torn from Dan Mellor’s biography of John Dee folded in my back pocket. I kept it for a passage that I’d always liked, which read, “John Dee could see the workings of the universe. While his contemporaries, charlatans to a man, cast runes and conferred over piles of chicken innards, Dee had only to glance heavenwards to read the future writ large across the heavens. Nature lifted her veil for Dee as for no other man.” I knew the feeling. Sometimes in the depths of a comedown, or late into a night’s driving with the oncoming lights smearing to contrails, the sky would shudder and, for an instant, I could see the machinery. I was close to that feeling now: London and the blur of jet lag was bringing it on. I walked and walked until the city’s rhythms caught in my throat: the impatience and fury, its willing blindness. I stopped for miniatures of Gordon’s gin from corner shops and smoked ciggies in doorways that were more graffiti than wall, until the jet lag washed over me in waves and the air began to throb. Propped up in a pissy alleyway I waited for the familiar arc-weld flash. For an instant the sky writhed with information. I stood as still as possible and watched the tangled skein of new constellations appear. The pulse of wi-fi networks and the spiralling tracer shells of mobile data. Dark blimps of state surveillance and the ghostlights of encrypted traffic. Interference. Phase shifts. Everything was transcribed into the air. The smog of censorship and the lightning strikes of Russian malware. Then it was gone, nothing more than a bruised purple on the backs of my eyelids and the sense that every pavement was a rut.

  I retreated to a nothing hotel near Paddington. Magic FM too loud in an empty restaurant, plastic cups in plastic wrappers and a view straight into a telesales office. I dozed and surfed, surfed and dozed.

  Thank god for the internet and its deep oceans of data. Back in the day finding contact details for three people you hadn’t seen in fifteen years would have been some private-investigator-level sorcery, but now by lunchtime I had personal numbers for all of the band, and a work one for Kimi. The question now was which of the three was least likely to slam the phone down on me? Saul was the one with whom I’d left on the best of terms, but that was relative, and he had a vindictive streak that could happily burn bright over fifteen years. Kimi would be trickiest, what with her shields of management and her complicating level of fame. That left Baxter. I’d probably done him the most damage, and technically I still owed him a great deal of money, but he had a sentimental side to him and he might be the likeliest to swallow some kind of redemptive bullshit narrative. I gave him a call.

  It rang for so long that I was expecting the answering machine so when he answered, sounding muddled and distant, it threw me.

  “Hello, who’s this?”

  I cleared my throat, I’m not sure why. “Baxter? It’s Brandon. Brandon Kussgarten.”

  He let out a long whistle. “Is it now, is it indeed?”

  “In the flesh,” I said, and then reconsidered, “Well on the phone anyway.” I hadn’t planned what I was going to say. I’d been expecting to be on the receiving end of the conversation but he seemed content to sit in silence. “I’m in London, Paddington actually, and I wondered if you wanted to go for a beer.”

  His laugh came a second too late. “A beer eh? Sure, sure. But I’m afraid I’m not in town at the moment, sorry, I’m in Mali for a couple of days.” He was trying to keep the pride out of his voice as he said this. God knows why.

  “Christ. Mali? Why would you go to Mali for a couple of days? Why would you go to fucking Mali at all? You haven’t gone all Damon Albarn on me have you?”

  “It’s a business thing, I’ll tell you about it some time. Meanwhile, I’ll be back on Thursday and we could catch up then if you like. Is this your number?” He read out a string of digits.

  “I don’t know, it’s a new phone.”

  “Well I’ll call you then. God knows what time it is here, I feel like I only just got to bed.”

  I needed to get something from this call that would keep the wheels spinning. Downhill, downhill. “Wait, before you go, do you have a number for Kim?”

  Could I sense his interest prick up at that? He certainly sounded less sleepy now.

  “Try Universal and ask f
or Roxy, or call Dark Talent, the number is online.”

  This might be a fob-off. Him and Kimi were always pretty tight. “Yeah, I have those but I was hoping for a personal number.”

  “I bet you were,” he snapped, but then some humour returned to his voice. “I can’t help you with that unfortunately but Roxy’s usually pretty good. I’ve got to go but let’s speak on Thursday.” He yawned, making me feel sleepy.

  “Wait,” I said. The moment of truth. If I was back for a while I had to know where I stood. “How’s Mel? And Gabe?”

  Jump-cut flashbacks: Mel’s tattoo stretched taut as she arched her back in front of me. Black-painted nails down my arm. Dressing room beer bottles spinning across the floor. My hands in her hair. I’d had to trawl through his Facebook to find their son’s name, I knew he’d appreciate me remembering.

  He yawned again. “They’re good. Mel went back to school, took her PhD. She’s Doctor Moores now if you can believe that. Gabe’s fifteen now, got his own band.”

  I waited. No hint of recrimination. Mel must’ve kept quiet. I was almost disappointed.

  Hotel TV. Worse than that, British hotel TV. Comedians who weren’t funny, drama that wasn’t dramatic, porn that wasn’t sexy. When I switched off the programmes the welcome message remained. GREETINGS MR/MRS ? I propped myself up on the pillows to check something on my phone and the next thing I knew the maid was banging on the door and it was dark outside. I came to with that brief moment of existential angst unique to strange hotel rooms, where you can’t remember where, when, or on a particularly bad day, who the hell you are. It made me yearn for touring and the day’s schedule slipped under the door: a statement that it was someone else’s job to make sure you woke up and got on the bus. What I’d give for that level of pampering today.

  I checked my phone. One voicemail: Baxter again. He’d had time to process my being in London. His voice was that estuarial drawl that Home Counties kids adopt when they get to London to avoid getting beaten up on night buses, an affectation that had turned into reality for him. “Fucking hell Brandon but I assumed you were dead or something. That was like getting a call from the afterlife. Anyway listen, I’ve texted you Kimi’s number. Sorry, but I had to check that she was OK hearing from you but she is, God knows why. She’s playing tomorrow night at the O2 so don’t forget to mention that if you talk. And please remember about the voicebox, it’s a bit of a shocker the first time, but you get used to it pretty quick. See you later on.”

  Everything felt gluey and gummed up and there was a slow ache working its way through my limbs. The TV was showing the same shows as earlier. The rain had eased and the streets outside had an inviting sheen to them. London looks best after a storm — don’t we all?

  Here’s a phrase I haven’t used in twenty years: and have one for yourself. A lovely thing, as rusty in my mouth as “pavement” and “lift” but London pub etiquette obviously hasn’t changed because the Pole behind the bar accepted it with a serious nod. In the States it was a dollar a drink but that just felt like a loosely applied tax. Here it was more like largesse and I liked that. The pub was populated by a series of lone men in cheap suits who were working hard on missing their trains. I had a couple of pints, a couple of chasers and then phoned Kim from the bench outside. Baxter had been right. I’d heard her voicebox on talk shows but it still came as a shock in real time. I had to remind myself this wasn’t a machine I was talking to.

  “Hi, is that Kim?”

  A moment. A pause like you’d get on an international call.

  “Brandon, Bax said you might call.”

  I had to bite my tongue to stop my go-to pleasantry, you’re sounding well, from slipping out.

  “Yeah, we’ve been catching up,” I lied, “Old times and all that. He mentioned you were playing in town tomorrow.”

  Another moment.

  “What do you want Brandon?” Something in the box’s software was overstressing the two syllables of my name, making it come out Brand Don.

  “Nothing.” I sounded guilty, even to my own ears. “To say hi? To see how you were?”

  “So,” she said. “Hi.”

  She unfroze a little after that. We talked a while: places we’d been, the few friends we had in common. I told her I’d seen her show in LA at the El Rey Theatre but she never asked why I’d not come backstage. I asked after her dad, hoping he was still alive the last time we talked. We parted on OK terms: her to rehearsal, me to another drink.

  It had been a good six months between my hearing about this British singer called Kimi on the radio in LA and realising she was the same person as plain old Kim Balloch, erstwhile Remote/Control bassist. The first time I came across her new incarnation was at a casting call up in San Fernando somewhere. The ultra-specific brief — “at least six foot, grey hair, no facial hair/tattoos, between thirty and forty” — made the audition room a truly terrifying sight: twenty versions of myself, like a malfunctioning hall of mirrors. I tuned in to my neighbours’ conversation about this freaky singer with a voicebox and some kind of obscene Japanese outfit who’d been on Conan the night before. They talked for a while but it came down, in the end, to LA’s two eternal questions: Would it sell? And would you fuck it? They both thought yes, so I filed it away into the mental box of “things I should check out” and then forgot about her. But half a year later, 10pm in a K-Town bar with five TVs on but no sound, there she was on Letterman. The famous performance with the dancers wrapping ribbons around her like a maypole, and something about the tilt of her head plunged me back into a Dalston rehearsal room on the night of auditions for Remote/Control’s bass player, and watching this girl, tall, but an inch under it being ridiculous, ducking her head through the door with a gig bag on her back. And immediately thinking please be good please be good please be good because she had some little kernel of cool, and when she played it was with a kind of rigid funkiness, concentrating hard on the fretboard as a goofy grin spread across her face.

  I told the barman to turn up the TV and we caught the last five seconds, her ironic bow and Letterman beaming, “Kimi, ladies and gentlemen, isn’t she just something?” After that she was everywhere. Partly it was me catching up, and partly it was just her time, her imperial phase. Little trace of the girl I knew remained. The Kimi whose album was number three in the UK, and who was modelling for Dolce & Gabbana, was aloof and spiky. Of course the voicebox put her at one remove anyway.

  I pieced together her story from breathless broadsheet articles and bemused tabloids. In an interview with Time magazine she talked about “five years in bands where you didn’t breathe fresh air for a minute a day”. It was true. The venues, the studios, the vans, the rehearsal rooms, the house parties, the pub meetings: all came with a nicotine smog so ubiquitous that it hardly registered. She’d gone to the doctor with a persistent cough (instantly, automatically I felt a sympathetic scratch in my throat) and was being operated on the next day, with no time even to go home and change. A week later she returned minus a large chunk of her vocal chords. The options then for the de-voiced were grimly sparse. There was sign language, which was elegant but about as commonly spoken as Esperanto, or you could go for one of those Steven Hawking-style speech synthesizers which rendered you inexpressive and slow. Kimi had other ideas. She swerved the doctors and the medical suppliers and instead started talking with digital instrument manufacturers. She piqued their interest, this stately, earnest girl with her almost-mohawk and dirty laugh, and together they started to build something brand new. It had something of the vocoder to it, but with a subtlety that they’d tweaked over iteration after iteration. It was hard to work out exactly what it was doing when I heard her interviewed. Her speaking voice could be clanky and flat but then the software would turn a cough or a laugh into a pretty, electronic crescendo. On record it was extraordinary. Her voice would often start out nondescript but then, halfway through a track, split and curdle and bifurcate and loop around on itself and rise like a line on a graph from a whis
per to a scream, then back down from hard roar of aero engines to the chatter of sparrows.

  My emotions, watching her success, ran like this: jealousy, anger, fear, rising jealousy, scorn. The jealousy was simple: she was on Letterman, being called the one of the most interesting artists of the new millennium. I wanted to be on Letterman, being called the one of the most interesting artists of the new millennium (and if it wasn’t to be me I certainly didn’t want it to be someone I knew). The fear was simple too. I’d also seen intimations that Saul’s new band, an Ibiza-ish dark trance duo were, actually, whisper it, quite good. I’d ignored those rumours but now an obsession gripped me. The other three members of Remote/Control would go on to have wildly successful careers, leading to journalists making the connection and writing about the band where (nearly) every member had gone on to be a star. I’d be a frontman version of Pete Best, famous for not being famous, a pub trivia question. One night I dreamt an entire Vanity Fair article on Remote/Control, complete with family trees, sidebars and unearthed early pictures. The final line was, “Ironically the guiding light behind the band, and the man who broke them up, is the only one not to go on to success in the following twenty years”.

  Luckily Saul’s duo turned out to be one of those permanently lower-league bands whose promises of a bright new dawn always turned out to be false. Kimi too, after her spectacular rise, now seemed to be on a gentle, but consistent downwards slope, destined to be downgraded from First Class to the Business Class irrelevance of being merely “interesting”, and Baxter was as invisible as he’d been on stage.

  The thing is, I saw my hand in her rebirth. Back in the early days of Remote/Control Kimi was a tangle of worries. She was even insecure about her insecurities. She stooped and lingered in corners as if that would hide her away and she dressed in the most identikit of indie camouflage: hooped fisherman’s tops with ragged 501s and DMs. With hair curtaining her face and sleeves pulled over her hands even her mixed heritage was hidden. On our third rehearsal, as I was planning how the band was going to look on stage, I sent Baxter and Saul to the pub and sat her down. She sat on a flight case, kicking her heels like a kid.