The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  “Look Kimi, you’re nigh on six foot, with shoulders wider than mine and skin like suede. You look fucking amazing but you hide it all away and the more you try to suppress it the more it sticks out. And anyway, why are you trying to hide? I mean, you look fantastic.”

  I pushed aside her fringe, conscious as always that I had to reach up to do so. She had a great face, oval and smooth and unscathed, like a dark version of one of those ruminant Flemish portraits. I pulled out an NME. “Look at these fuckers trying to get noticed.” We flicked through the pages and looked at the bands. Student types dressed up as anything but themselves: bovver boys, punks, sailors. “You look a million times better than them without even trying, so imagine if you tried.”

  She nodded dubiously.

  “Here’s the rule. What are you most self-conscious about? Your height? Your skin? Your weight?”

  She almost howled. “What’s wrong with my skin?”

  “OK, so not that then. Your height then.”

  She gave the tiniest nod. “Well you know what guys are like.”

  “Fuck ’em. Which guys? At gigs?” The four of us had been out a few times together checking out the soon-to-be opposition, which was just as important as practising as far as I was concerned. The Camden music scene was as inbred and status-obsessed as a country-house shooting weekend and I’d noticed heads swivel at the bar as the self-styled arbiters of indie taste tried to fit her on their social scale. The scene was so white and middle class that a Glaswegian would stick out as unspeakably exotic. Kimi was something else entirely. “Fuck them all. They’re terrified of anyone who has an inch of originality. Next rehearsal, heels.”

  “You’re telling me how to dress?” She stuck out her bottom lip but her tone wasn’t aggressive.

  “Not telling you. Do what you want. But if you’re dressing for the plankton that prop up the bar at the Underworld then that’s got to be worse, no?”

  She gave a grunt.

  “Just think about it, OK? And what else? Your hair?”

  Her natural hair, which I’d only seen once, was a wild scribble of near-afro but she spent hours every day trying to discipline it into the dead Sixties fringe that was de rigeur among the Camden girls. “Set it free.” I said.

  I never again gave her any kind of direction but I ruled that band like a Roman emperor. If you make ’em scared enough of the thumbs down they’ll do the heavy lifting for you. It was just, “Cool shoes Kim,” or a raised eyebrow at anything too fucking Inspiral Carpets and they soon got the message.

  Of all of them it was Kimi who took the look and ran with it. I’ve got a picture of us at one of our last gigs (artfully cropped to disguise the fact that the audience would have fitted, and I use the comparison deliberately, in a small lifeboat). Kimi’s in side profile, her hair shaved roughly around the ears giving her a kind of artless, floppy Mohican, and her bottom lip juts out as she concentrates on the frets. She’s wearing a Vivienne Westwood blouse — vintage they’d call it now — shorts and stockings, and a pair of scuffed white heels, and she looks so perfectly, oddly, right that it gives me a pang of regret for days past (and then I stop myself because regret is the most worthless of emotions. I won’t have that shit in my house).

  As for the others: Saul had that infuriating model physique and he looked good in anything. He stayed at mine if he missed the night bus home and he’d often pick some old piece of clothing off the floor in the morning and ask to borrow it; invariably it looked great on him. Baxter was a lost cause. The rule was to shove him at the back and tell the lighting guy to pretend he was a mike stand. But Kimi? I looked at her then, on Letterman, the heels like tower blocks and her hair a slo-mo explosion and thought to myself, “I made that”.

  I was on the wrong side of the ring road around Tower Bridge when the phone rang. It was “someone from Kimi’s office”. Not her manager, not even the tour manager but “someone”. Could be an intern, could be some phone monkey. Yes, she understood Kimi had said that she was available to meet up for a drink. Where could she send tickets for the show? No, I didn’t need to come in and collect them, they’d send a bike, and before I could ask anything more she was gone.

  I’d not been to the O2 Arena before. The name alone should have given it away as a big deal, as should the passes, which looked like something you’d need to get into a merchant bank. I took the DLR. The front was all window so I let the stage set of the city churn past. I had a companion, a boy of about nine or ten, with a flatly elegant face, who was pretending to drive the train, anticipating every corner with a roll of his shoulders, and I could see Robin in his fierce concentration. He didn’t return my smile.

  After years of California what struck me about London was the sheer randomness of it all. Blank slabs of tower block sat atop untidy warehouses that bordered Seventies estates that gave way to Victorian terraces that leant up against industrial estates. Every second building bristled with scaffolding and lone churches stood amidst the scribble like lost children. Every clack of the tracks muddled the genre. To the left the streets were dressed for a Jack the Ripper documentary, to the right for a dystopian sci-fi epic. By the time we got to Crossharbour there were five or six people with Kimi t-shirts on, and as we were funnelled towards the gig the throng grew bigger.

  It took half an hour to find the VIP entrance. From there on every corner was festooned with signs: catering, production, security, stage. I felt a shiver of envy. Kimi was playing places big enough that you might get lost in them. It took four goes before I found someone who was expecting me — to see Kimi right? The guy from her old band? — and he walked me through the building’s innards and left me at a section marked ARTISTS ONLY. Fair enough. I pushed through set after set of double doors, like a nurse on the way to theatre, but at the end of the corridor even my AAA pass became useless. A security guard in a headset said wait here and it was fifteen minutes before another of Kimi’s goons came to get me.

  She looks good. Really good, not just photo good. I wondered if she’d had work done. I feel for this generation’s female stars: they have their own photoshopped selves to compete with rather than just a younger, sluttier generation. She looked older now, but not old; touched by the hand of time rather than beaten half to death by it, as I’d been. Her dressing room was as bland as you’d expect in a multi-purpose, credit-card-sponsored, almost-out-of-town arena. It could have been the changing room of a recently built leisure centre, or the council chambers of a middling Midlands town. The only exotic thing in there was her. Her hair was choppy and russet in a kind of expensive version of a cheap home cut (or a cheap home version of an expensive look, I couldn’t tell). And she had that stillness a lot of tall girls have. I could imagine she’d be invisible to cats and security cameras.

  “Hey.” Someone was pinning up her dress so I gingerly threw my arms around her. She felt gym-toned. “Looking good.”

  “You don’t look so bad yourself.” The voicebox flattened all cadence out of the phrase. It could have as easily been sarcasm as sincerity. “Are you back in London?”

  “Just for a bit. I have some business over here, and a couple of recordings to finish that needed the London touch.”

  “Wanted to add some grey, huh?” Her laugh was as perfunctory as a LOL.

  “Yeah, a bit of low cloud cover. Your album sounds amazing by the way.” I’d YouTubed a few tracks on my phone and got the gist. “Love the title track.” I didn’t, but it was so deliberately obtuse that it would be her favourite.

  “Oh thanks, yeah that was a bit of a struggle actually.”

  “Really? Well you must have worked pretty hard to get it sounding effortless.”

  A costume girl, mouth full of pins, orbited her, every now and then appraising her work. “Arms,” she said and Kimi took up a Jesus-on-the-cross pose.

  “So you’re still recording?” Even through the voicebox she sounded dubious.

  “Well this is going to be my swansong, after this it’s bye-bye music. I’m
going to concentrate on acting.” I willed the words to be true.

  “Really? I didn’t think anyone actually did that. I mean, the business might retire you, but who actually turns their back on it? No one.” The assistant, taking a couple of quick pictures on her phone, moved round to work on the other side. “Name me a performer, a singer, who has actually, while they still had a following, just said fuck it and walked away.”

  This was new, her pushing back, probing. Later on I thought of Captain Beefheart, but at the time I couldn’t think of a good example.

  “Peter Green?” I ventured.

  She snorted, a sound that bypassed the voicebox and took me back fifteen years. “Yeah, he’s a good object lesson. Go crazy, join a cult, lose all your money and then only come back to it thirty years later when no one is interested?”

  The assistant stood back and examined her.

  “How’s your mum?” she asked.

  They’d met once at one of the Brighton gigs. I had a sudden recall of my mother, hair wet with drizzle at the station taxi rank, telling me, “Be nice to that girl Brannie, such a bonny thing.”

  “She died a couple of years back I’m afraid, she always asked after you actually.”

  A makeup girl went to work on her lips and Kimi pantomimed wait a minute.

  “Actually, now you can’t talk, maybe I can run something by you?”

  People worked on her while I talked. She was repositioned: folded into a chair and her makeup done, pulled back up, arms raised so it was like talking to an animated crucifixion. I’d have found it distracting, but she’d developed that blindness to staff that people get when they’re a constant presence. My mind flicked to the only time we’d had sex. It was after the third or fourth Remote/Control rehearsal, where, after what I thought was a perfunctory, but perfectly serviceable performance by me, she’d propped herself up on an elbow, looked at me seriously and said, “Well, we won’t be doing that again.”

  What would it be like now? I imagined a team around us as we fucked, ministering to her like a Formula One pit crew.

  I talked to her about this and that, just babble really, to get the tiresome business of getting used to each other’s presence out of the way. There was a tour schedule blu-tacked to the back of the dressing room door. She was due in China in two days so if I was going to reel her in it’d have to be soon. She made her mouth small so the makeup girl could colour her lips with a delicate paintbrush and said, “I have to be quiet for a minute. Tell me something.”

  “I have this theory,” I heard myself say, “that fame has a singularity.” She tilted her head an inch.

  “Think of all the images of you. The video, the photos, the fan-fiction, the broadsheet puff-pieces, the tabloid gossip. Every fan-drawn felt-tip masterpiece, every South Bank show, every Pornhub tribute.”

  She made a face and the makeup girl scowled at me.

  “Add it all together: the time it takes up, that’s your figure. Once that time exceeds the time you’ve been alive then boom! Your singularity has been reached. This Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from fragments of your life, is now bigger than you. The image lumbers out into the world, dragging you along behind it. If you get Madonna-big then it’s like King Kong, holding the real you in its hand. What do you think, are you there yet?”

  She gave me a blank look as someone handed her a sheaf of papers to sign. And then she was patting down her lipstick and the band were wandering in and you could feel the nip of anticipation in the air. Someone turned on a TV screen with the sound way up, so we could see the crowd, and the girls with Kimi’s last-but-one haircut pressed up against the barrier, because of course we were too far from the stage to hear the noise but even over the miniscule TV speaker that hubbub of voices made my blood leap in excitement and I pretended not to see her little nod my way to the tour manager, before he was calling out “band only from now on chaps, let’s clear the room.” And plenty of people stayed: makeup and girlfriends and assorted hangers-on but it was clear my time here was up, so with a quick “Have fun out there” I was gone.

  I was yards down the corridor when the tour manager came puffing after me. “Hey, can you hang on a sec?” He disappeared back into one of the side rooms and came out with a pass. “Sorry, bit of a mix up, can we swap that laminate?” He handed me a new pass that read BACKSTAGE. “We’ve run out of AAAs, sorry — this one’ll get you into the party though. See you later.”

  Back in the arena, uncosseted by my backstage access, it was bright and chilly. From the side I could sense an invisible line about halfway back in the hall. Up until there the punters looked like punters. T-shirted, sweaty, drunk. But after that it got older and balder very quickly. I stood by the sound desk, seeing if there was anyone I knew on the crew, and all around me stood, well, ordinary people. Thomas Pink shirts with sleeves rolled up to the elbow. White wine in plastic cups. Some half-hearted clapping along. Lots of texting and selfies.

  I pushed forward to see what the real fans were doing. Twenty yards from the stage it was just row upon row of upraised cameraphones and tablets. You couldn’t see the stage. You couldn’t see the band. Instead you could watch a thousand little Kimis from a thousand infinitesimally different camera angles, moving in perfect harmony. She was caged — hidden even — by her own image. I made for the left-hand side of the hall and watched the show on the big screens.

  It was pretty slick. Kimi didn’t do much on stage so a lot of the excitement was outsourced to the band and the lights. The stage was backed by what looked like architectural models — blank white boxes in rudimentary building shapes, like one of my brother’s home-made cities. But they were lit in a whirl of overlays so that one minute they were lonely tower blocks, three lights out of a thousand on, the next they were temple walls. Then they were a kid’s building blocks and the band became giants. It was pretty effective. It had sweet FA to do with the music, but in a shed like this, what does? Most of it was your common-or-garden “look at the size of my budget” kind of thing but with an unmoving Kimi at its centre the effect was quite something. She was the point around which everything turned, the eye of the storm. The band danced and gurned — the guitarist was particularly unbearable, throwing out riffs with the kind of pained expression you’d make lifting a sofa — but it didn’t really matter because in a space where nothing was still you were drawn to the only constant thing. Kimi, voice deep in the mix, but far away from any of the noise. It made me ache to be this side of the stage barriers. I missed the power and freedom of being on stage; the way a word or a movement could wring tears or laughter from strangers. Nowhere else, nowhere since had joy been so easy.

  The end, when it came, was an anti-climax. “This is the last song we’re going to do”, some perfunctory nos from the audience, and then an encore of her biggest radio hit and the best track on the new record. It seemed like the final note was still echoing as the lights came on and the cleaners appeared with their brooms. By the time I reached the bar the metal grill was firmly down. It took nearly twenty minutes to find the after-show, which was populated by as motley a crew of hangers-on as I’d ever seen. Before I opened the door I was worried no one would recognise me, once inside I prayed they wouldn’t. There was a stunted, funereal atmosphere in the room as speakers set in the ceiling played The Best Of Kimi and I wondered where the band were. Kimi herself would be lazing in some inner sanctum but you’d expect the fucking bass player to be here, snaffling the free sandwiches and hitting on people’s daughters. Everyone was on their phone checking whether anyone they knew was having a better, better-connected time of it.

  I was on my way out when my phone buzzed.

  WHERE R U?

  WHO IS THIS?

  KIMI R U COMING 2 THE PARTY?

  THOUGHT I WAS AT THE PARTY. IN THE GREEN ROOM

  DID ALAN SEND U THERE? NO COME 2 DRESSING ROOM

  I grimaced.

  HE TOOK MY AAA

  HAHA HANG ON

  There was a five
-minute wait.

  MEET US @ STAGE DOOR COME IN THE VAN

  Here’s another sign of where Kimi’s at nowadays — the van was parked inside the venue. On the level below the stage roadies were dismantling the set. Doors the size of house-fronts were open to the night air. Outside in the cold, their heads wreathed in icy breath, huddled a group of fans with that sixth sense for where the action might be. The van was idling and I tapped on the driver’s window. He took off his headphones.

  “I’m going to be coming back to the party with the band.” As I said it I knew it sounded unlikely.

  He nodded. “Not a problem buddy, just have to wait until they get back here and give the OK, OK?” He closed the window without waiting for an answer and I saw a couple of the waiting fans laugh. They eyed me professionally, trying to work out if I had any more access that they had. A couple of the band came down, towelling hair and rifling through bags. The annoying guitarist went out to chat with the throng while the other two took the van’s back seat and jumped straight on their phones. When the guitarist returned he made a wide circle around me.

  The fans alerted me that she’d arrived. There was that slight increase in air pressure then a chorus of Kimis. She’d changed into some kind of elaborate African thing with four-inch cork sandals and she spent nearly ten minutes taking pictures and chatting with the fans, as I stood and smoked and fumed.

  Finally she swept back, giving me a look that I couldn’t read, and said, “Coming.”

  I jumped in behind her.

  The hotel where they were staying was a gas. In one of those Shoreditch backstreets where Georgian townhouses and tatty warehouses co-exist there was a wooden door tucked into a dark alcove. No one knocked but the door swung open anyway and we trooped up a staircase narrow enough to force us into single file. It was shadowy to the point of ridiculousness; if there were any other guests here I couldn’t tell. A neat man in a waistcoat popped out of a vestibule.