The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  She looked around herself. “But it can’t be coincidence either. Some of it seems right, doesn’t it?” She clicked away at her keyboard. “Gunned down… grainy CCTV… the suit, the costumes.”

  I nodded. “But even if it got a bit messed up, surely it’s the most important things that are missing? The record and his identity. Without them this is nothing.”

  She looked at me blank-eyed.

  “Let me go back.” I was thinking on my feet. “Let me go back and poke around some more. I didn’t know what I was looking for that first time. For a start if there is anyone there who was mixed up in his killing then I’m going to scare the living daylights out of them.” I felt a churn in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t stand the silence and the desolate look on Rae’s face. “And maybe the record is finished. Maybe it’s there.”

  She sighed. “I don’t care about that Ads.”

  But an idea was germinating: find the record, get it released, give the proceeds to Rae and Robin. I heard a far-off chime and Rae looked around.

  “Shit, that’s the delivery,” she said, embarrassed. “No time to cook what with, y’know, all this.” I could hear Robin thundering down the stairs, chanting pizza’s here pizza’s here pizza’s here.

  The three of us ended up eating together. I chipped a microwave pizza out of my fridge’s ice-box and we ate and chatted around our respective monitors. I’m not good with small talk but Robin filled every gap in the conversation with a hotchpotch of questions, jokes and stories from school. Rae was quiet though, and a couple of times Robin complained that she wasn’t listening. He watched her constantly, checking how his thoughts landed and whether he was making her laugh. And although she was lost in thoughts she reached for him often: to flatten unruly hair or brush crumbs from his shirt or, as we ate dessert, just to hook a little finger around his. She sent him to wash up, but not before he’d whispered something in her ear. She came so close to the monitor that her voice had a fuzzy warmth. “Can he see the model?”

  I remembered the few kids at school I’d let see the beginnings of Umbrage. It had never really worked; the city looks like a toy but its beauty is in the way it runs itself, and kids don’t like to sit and watch, they prefer to get their hands dirty.

  “What would I tell him? I bet Brandon’s never mentioned Umbrage.”

  “Say you built it as a kid? That it’s been waiting there all this time? God knows Bran had bigger secrets than that.”

  I felt sick but I wasn’t sure if was the deceit or the idea of Brandon claiming ownership of Umbrage. I could hear Robin on the stairs again and I nodded at Rae. She mouthed a silent thank you and left us to it.

  Back before Modelcon 2010 I bought a second-hand endoscope from a Ukrainian eBay store. The idea was that I could check out blockages in the water-pipes that kept Umbrage’s fountains and springs running, but the picture quality was better than I’d anticipated. You could run the ‘scope through the streets and output the footage — via a spaghetti of interconnecting cables — onto a laptop. Robin understood the idea straight away. It took him all of five minutes to get the feed up and running on their own TV back in Tahoe. He pointed Rae’s laptop at it, and there was Umbrage, reflected and reversed, digitised and trans-Atlantic.

  I unspooled the endoscope slowly and talked him through the alleyways and chambers, the plague pits and opera houses. We started with one of my favourite places. I crawled under the two decorators’ tables that support much of the south-western quarter and started filming inside the council chamber. I built it back in ’94 from the shell of a violin that I found in a Ladbroke Grove skip. The f-holes let in sinuous, solid bands of light, thick with dust motes, and I found that the stories of things that had happened there came easily to my lips. I told him about battles both bureaucratic and bloody, of sieges where councilmen were reduced to boiling the leather binders of the Great Books for morsels of protein and of week-long sessions on complex points of ancient procedure.

  I threaded the endoscope through the streets around the Chamber, streets that were perpetually in shadow and flanked by blank-faced buildings that housed homesick sailors and lost immigrants who went months without hearing their mother tongue. Robin listened avidly. In the silences between stories, as the endoscope trickled down cobbled alleyways I could hear his breath in my headphones, as comforting as the sea. In a way this was better than having him here. There was no childish running around or stray limbs. Robin, like me, might be best at one remove.

  The stories and the streets doubled back on themselves, knitting themselves into something dense and protective. How long would Robin have listened if Rae hadn’t interrupted after two hours with her soft, “Enough now”? I could have gone on forever, letting the stories build and intertwine to a soundtrack of the boy’s breath and the scratch of the endoscope. He fled the screen with an over-the-shoulder, “Thanks daddy that was awesome,” and left me there stranded, the room coming back into focus as Umbrage receded like the tide. My flat was small and stuffy after we’d toured tree-lined avenues and airy chambers; everything was too bright and too real.

  I did a couple of chores. The Great Tree bonsai that topped the vivaria looked listless and I found a blockage in its undersoil pipes. Two of the work-barges at Sorent were tangled and I unpicked their tethers with tweezers. All the time I let the Tahoe feed run on the big screen rather than the laptop. I heard Rae come back before I saw her. The soft pad of slippered feet, like a cat. She sat at the screen.

  “Thank you for that. Him and Brandon had been butting heads all month and that’s the happiest I’ve seen him for ages. I feel like that would be a better final night together than the one they actually had.”

  I wanted to ask when she would tell him what had happened, and where it would leave me, but she looked so raw that I resolved to save it for another time. She came closer to the screen and I felt her gaze slip past me.

  “Where do you go to?”

  “Who?”

  “You. Bran. Men. Where are these other worlds you disappear to? I used to watch Brandon when he was at the piano, writing, and I’d wonder ‘where are you now?’ You could call out his name. You could burn down the house. And he still wouldn’t notice a thing. I envy that. To be able to dismiss the real world.” She made a face. “It’s such a luxury.”

  She looked past me, out at the lights of Umbrage. The windows of the Shade Dorm were light-sensitive so as the artificial dusk took hold their shutters clicked closed one by one. Each sounded like a long-exposure camera shot.

  Cl-lick

  Cl-lick

  I didn’t know if Rae could hear it. She kept on talking.

  “And then it becomes more real than this world. That other place where records live, and stories and people you don’t really know.”

  More shutters fell into place. A sound like baseball cards in a bike’s spokes. Cl-lickcl-lickclclcl-lick

  “Bran gave it all up. Me. Robin. This place. His friends. His life. Dismissed it all like closing a tab on a browser. Because there was a more important place than this one.”

  The last shutter closed. A lonely sound. A row of blank windows looked back at me.

  “Were we there at all? Were we ghosts? Were we in the way? Where the fuck was he?”

  Her gaze was somewhere over my shoulder. She didn’t sound angry at all.

  “Where do you all go?”

  I had no answers for her. She kissed the screen absent-mindedly as she stood and then she was gone.

  Street lights flicked on across the city. The sound of Umbrage’s systems had a drowsy charm, but all at once I didn’t feel like sleeping here. The sleeping bag, the instant noodles, the taped-up windows: it felt so claustrophobic after the wide-open spaces of Rae and Robin and Tahoe. I wanted to have something for them next time we spoke.

  So instead, the next day, I woke in Brandon’s bed at The Magpie. His pyjamas. His toothbrush. I explored the bedroom, trying to feel my brother’s movements about the place. Books were folde
d open on the nightstand. A biography of a musician called Dennis Wilson, a field guide to British birds and a book about molecular chemistry that I couldn’t imagine him reading. The drawers didn’t yield much: headache pills and hair gel, plectrums and books of matches. I looked again at the long rail of clothes. Nothing in the pockets, nothing in the bottom drawers.

  I dressed pretty much at random. Soft wool trousers as wide as a sailor’s and an off-white shirt with a rounded collar. Did they go together? I’d have to ask Rae. The bathroom cabinets were stuffed with products but they were all branded with a magpie so I guessed they weren’t his. All except a battered white metal tub of hair wax. I examined the lid. Trufitt & Hill, St James’. Two grooves were dug into the wax; my fingers fitted perfectly. I experimented in the mirror until I had an approximation of the hairstyle that I’d seen on the slab. I looked again in the mirror. Me but not me. The clamp in my stomach that had been tightening since I woke loosened a notch. I have to second-guess myself in social situations anyway, examining my responses before I make them, trying to twist them into the kind of thing a normal person might say. It’s a form of impersonation I suppose, so the idea of taking on Brandon’s personality didn’t seem too much of a stretch. If you’re not going to be yourself then you might as well be someone you know. I smoothed back a stray lock and whispered to my reflection, “Hi, I’m Brandon.” I took it down a notch. “Hi… Brandon.”

  I walked through the apartment again trying to feel like it was mine. I sat in the music room and tried to make sense of the diagram on the floor. Triangles within circles, words in what looked like Hebrew. Astrological symbols. There were names written around the edge — BAXTER, DILLON, KIMI — but two or three had been rubbed to clouds of chalk-dust. I filled in some of the blurred lines, my hand feeling the weight my brother had used, his confidence. There was noise that tracked through the apartment occasionally. Something like traffic, as if there were an invisible highway running through the air. I’d mentally blocked it out and it took me a minute to realise the phone was ringing. It was Kaspar.

  “Mr Kussgarten, I hope I didn’t wake you, the motion sensors indicated you were up. Two quick things: I just wanted to check we’re still invoicing Miss Kimi for your bill.”

  Miss Kimi. From the band. I calculated: now I could send the money from the safe to Rae. “That’s still the deal Kaspar, yes.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “And Jay is on his way up, I said that was OK.”

  There was no mention of a Jay in Brandon’s notebook. “Oh of course, sure. Did he say what he wanted?”

  Kaspar laughed. “It’s what you want that matters.”

  Jay turned out to be a fresh-faced, tiny-eared man, without a hint of a line and busy, sharp features. He had one of those faces you only really see in cities: so thoroughly international that it was almost a race in itself. His eyes were relentless and quick, his hair curled tighter than carpet. If he’d said he was Somali, or Malay, or Israeli I would have believed him. His foot tapped so incessantly that I had to check he wasn’t wearing earphones.

  “Good to see you man.” He shook hands sombrely. “Get myself a Coke?”

  “Sure, help yourself.”

  He busied himself in the kitchen, obviously at home. He found ice, limes and a chilled glass (at which he shouted through to me, “Bruv! You remembered”). He sat down opposite me, took a sip with exaggerated relish, and then started pulling packages from his pockets.

  “The TLAs are the same as last time, you said you liked ’em right?” He went on talking before I could answer. “The coke is new, someone I’ve bought from before but not for a while so we’ll have a little taste just to make sure.” He winked. “And I’ll chuck the Adderall in for free. It’s my kid brother’s and I can’t stand him when he’s on it. Little smartarse.”

  “Oh, yes… that sounds fine,” I said. He was cutting something up into two granular hillocks, and then corralling it into long lines. I tried to dampen my nervousness and curl myself into Brandon’s actions. He rolled up a note and handed it to me. “See what you think.”

  I’d seen this done on TV, how hard could it be? I leant in, my new quiff almost brushing the table, and scooted the note along the line as I breathed in. I got most of it up. It felt pretty much like nothing. Slightly cold, slightly chemical. I nodded approvingly.

  “Yeah?” said Jay, taking his line.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s not too rough is it?”

  I felt an unpleasant, salty drip at the roof of my mouth. “It’s very nice.”

  He leant back. “So that’s £350, unless there’s anything you need more of?”

  The notes from last night were still on the table. I counted them out.

  “No, no extras, I’m trying to have a quiet week.”

  He smiled quickly at me. “I hear that fam. And the passport? That on or off, because it might take a day or two?”

  Could I ask what passport he meant? Probably not. Brandon’s had been found on him, and if he was serious about dying then he wouldn’t have been needing a spare. “Can we put that on the back burner for just now?”

  He gave a nod and started packing up. “There was that other thing, my CD?”

  I tried to look noncommittal.

  “What did you think?”

  I thought about possible answers. “I’m sorry Jay, I totally forgot.”

  Anger flooded his features for the shortest of moments: blink and you’d have missed it.

  “Again, fam?” Then he laughed. “It’s OK, I know you’ll get round to it. Really wanna hear what you think, whether you can hook me up.”

  I expected cocaine to be more spectacular. Once I’d closed the door behind Jay I monitored my internal state. Elevated heart rate? A little, but nothing concerning. Sweaty palms? Sure, but that was ordinary. It was closer to the feeling of a double espresso than anything else. I reopened the laptop window back to Rae’s but she wasn’t around. I checked my email. In the end I decided to do some woodworking. Last night Robin had asked me about two bare patches of earth that sat either side of the Coloffy Bay. They were waiting for a bridge that I’d never gotten around to building. I’d tried a couple of ways of spanning the water but they always seemed drab set against the curves and peaks and the little infoldings of land.

  But there were a pair of wooden horses on the mantelpiece that kept catching my eye. They must originally have been mannequins for equestrian artists because they could be posed in various ways. They were perhaps as high as a hand, and lacquered to a sheen so deep it was almost purple. Every time I passed them the unbroken curve from tail to back to mane pricked at me. They’d caught Brandon’s attention too. In his notebook there was a page of sketches of horses, each one a little more abstract until the bottom of the page was just a simple, fluid line. If you doubled that line — repeated it in reflection — the shape would be undeniably bridge-like.

  I whittled and chipped away and used the weights from a set of antique scales in the music room to work as counterbalances. Once I was done the two horses faced each other, nostrils and forelegs touching, with a path of steps running from tail to nose. I imitated Jay, scraping off a neat pile of the cocaine onto the glass table and then used a credit card to crush it into the finest powder. It went down more easily this time and the lukewarm drip at the back of my throat felt like the push I needed to get back to work. Now if you tugged gently on the weights then joints rotated and the horses reared back enough to let the tallest ships through. The next time I looked up it was 6pm. There was still no sign of Rae or Robin so I stretched out on the floor, letting my throbbing back subside, and then sent down for a burger and chips.

  After I’d eaten I tried the laptop again. It was a bright morning in Tahoe and Rae had taken the computer out onto the porch. The backdrop looked fake at first, with snow-dusted pine cones and far-off mountains. I half expected bluebirds to swoop down and rearrange Rae’s robe. A mug of coffee steamed in her cupped hands. She was flicking between
two windows silently but her face was never still; she was rehearsing whole conversations, her lips moving noiselessly through expressions of surprise, laughter, confusion, flitting across her face like weather. It was maybe five minutes before she noticed me.

  Her eyes widened. “Shit, how long have you been watching me?” Her hands did their independent thing, tucking hair behind ears, smoothing down her T-shirt.

  “Not long, you looked engrossed.”

  “I was.” Her attention drifted back to the surface and her face lit up. “You’re back at the hotel?”

  I talked her through the morning. Jay and Kaspar and how little I’d found in the rooms. I wished I’d asked Jay about the passport now because when I mentioned it I could see her mind working. I wasn’t sure what she was hopeful for. That he hadn’t arranged his own death, or that he had? At one point she said, “I’m trying very hard not to take his death wish personally but it’s kind of difficult.”

  I changed the subject. “Oh hey, I did coke.” I wasn’t going to tell her but there was something so easy about the setting that it felt safe.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Did you now? First time?”

  “Yes, I’m starting my misspent youth at forty-two.”

  “So, how was it?”

  “Um… less, extreme than I expected. I was going to say that it had no effect whatsoever but I realise I’ve done a week’s model-making in four hours so I might be wrong about that.”

  “Interesting. Using a coke-rush to do something creative rather than just talking bollocks.” The English phrase sounded quaint in her accent. “It’ll never catch on.”

  She pulled the laptop closer so she could look at me more clearly. “So, how are you really doing? Are you holding up?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Because I was thinking this morning that I’m not sure if I could do what you’re doing.”

  “What, stay at a five-star hotel and mooch around making models?”

  “Seriously though? You’re still fine doing this? Drug dealers and deception, I don’t think it’s what you’re used to.”