by Mat Osman
And then an idea swept across me with the force of being shaken awake. That’s what Rae saw in him. When they first met. Not his swagger and poise and acid and edge, but the shadow-being at the borders of his personality. I was hidden deep in his bones and seeped out of the edges when I was needed. It was me. I ran like an undertow, a silent song beating in the blood. I was the subliminal message beneath the blare of bravado; the stutter in his songs, the ghost in his machine. It made me feel better about whatever it was I was building with Rae.
There was still Robin though. Every time Rae and I spoke I wanted to ask her about him but the whole subject felt so fragile. One of the oldest parts of Umbrage was the Glaswald: petrified twigs that I’d won on a school trip that I coated with Potassium Dichromate and watered until the twigs groaned with twisting arms of bright green crystals. I’d never quite got the balance right. Once they’d coated the wood enough to look suitably tree-like the crystals would coil and metastatize until they crumbled to the ground. They always seemed to collapse at night, and the sound they made — a gentle rain of glass — played in my mind every time I thought of Robin. I shook the feeling off. Rae first, then him.
She was gummy-eyed at the monitor, her head somewhere else while the coffee brewed. I tapped on the screen.
“Baxter is due in half an hour, I was wondering if you’d listen in?”
She yawned. “Sure, I can try.”
“If you hear me getting into difficulties you could buzz me on the phone so I could make an excuse to cut it short.”
“Like on a blind date?”
I must have looked confused because she laughed. “It’s obviously never happened to you. It’s a standard thing — you get a friend to call you ten minutes into a blind date. If the guy’s OK then you say it’s nothing, if he’s not then bingo! There’s an emergency at home.”
“You can tell after ten minutes?” I thought that if that were me I’d probably just about have got my first sentence out by then.
She yawned again. “The dates I’ve been on, Adam? I could tell before I sat down.”
Baxter texted. BE THERE IN 10.
“D’you think he’ll need the laptop?” Rae was sitting at her kitchen table.
“I’ve no idea, I don’t really know what the hell we’re doing.” I looked at the neat wraps on the table. “D’you think I should take some more cocaine?”
She smiled. “You sound like a kids’ drug warning video. Try this: shall I do a line?”
I tried it. “Shall I do a line?”
“Better.”
“But should I? I definitely feel more Brandon-ish on it.”
“Well that’s no surprise is it? Maybe you should. There’s a calmness about you, which speaking as a woman, is totally hot, but as a long-time student of Brandon Kussgarten it’s way off beam.”
“You’re not worried that I’ll turn into an arsehole? Become him?”
“It’s only a couple of lines. Anyway, you know when people say cocaine turned me into a monster, or fame made me crazy, nine times out of ten they were that way beforehand. They just needed an excuse to let it out. Your brother totally used coke to say the things he thought, deep down, but knew he couldn’t normally get away with saying.”
She slipped back into his accent. “For fuck’s sake Rae it was just the coke talking, you know how I get.”
Her cheeks coloured. “Coke won’t turn you into an asshole Ads, and you know why? Because you’re not an asshole.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “Nicest thing anyone’s said to me for ages.” I cut out two lines and snorted one up each nostril. There was that subtle metallic drip and nothing else. I threw my head back and the buzzer went, making me jump.
Any worries about Baxter seeing straight through me disappeared as soon as he came in. He was a ball of energy, talking thirteen to the dozen, sitting down and standing up, never at rest.
“Fuck man, where’ve you been? No don’t tell me I don’t want to know. I’d either be jealous or pissed off or both. I thought you’d gone for good though and left me holding the baby.”
He pulled his glasses on and examined me. I held my breath.
“Fuck’s sake. Week-long bender and you still look fresh as a daisy. Not fucking fair. I’ve spent the last five years going to bed at ten and eating my broccoli and I look like a sack of shit.”
He took his glasses off again. “This is where you say nah, you look good Bax. Fuck it.”
I kept quiet. It didn’t seem to be doing me any harm.
He sat down for the third or fourth time.
“Annnnnnyway. You got my message? Frank Isaacs. You remember him? Pompous old twat. It’s good news and bad news I think. Good news is he’s obviously the man when it comes to Wilsonology. If he OKs it then it’s one hundred per cent kosher, fit for purpose, golden goose time. Bad news is he really knows his stuff and if we’ve fucked up he’ll notice. I mean I think I could swing it, make it look like I was scammed too, but…”
He was up again, disappearing head-first into the fridge. “No champagne? You’re slipping Bran.”
I set my voice to its most acidic.
“It’s in the champagne fridge to the right there. I’m not a peasant Bax.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Sorry, sorry. So, the music’s all good I think.”
He eyed me beadily. “The music’s all good, right?”
I nodded as he popped the champagne cork.
“So that’s the main thing. Sleeve and label I have here.” He opened up a messenger bag and pulled out a square of cardboard and a sheet of stickers. “Sleeve’s from a Jan and Dean acetate I bought in Long Beach, totally contemporaneous, if that’s the word I want, and the stickers are from the Seventies but I don’t think that’ll matter. So…?”
I wasn’t sure what he wanted.
“The pressing plant? The vinyl. Is your guy sorted?”
There was a page in Bran’s notebook with a name and number and the word PRESSER underneath, I’d been meaning to ask Rae if she knew what it meant. I tamped down the worry in my voice.
“He’s been out of town for a couple of days, sorry. I’ll get on it.”
Baxter poured a couple of glasses of champagne and chopped up two lines. “Do it. Last piece of the puzzle, man.”
He was a curious looking little man. He was only five foot six-ish, but still all his clothes looked a little small. Hairy knobs of ankle and wrist showed white as he moved around the apartment and his checked shirt was tight enough to expose crescents of flesh between the buttons. His hair was an odd monk’s-tonsure kind of thing and his face was saggy and unshaven with a beard line that almost reached the bags under his eyes. The only neat parts of his appearance were the lime-green trainers he was wearing; they looked brand new.
I kept silent, one foot tucked on the other knee and watched him. It seemed to rev him up further. He was up and down, putting records on, enthusing wildly and then taking them off before they’d finished.
After the third line I began to feel shaky as hell. I spent ten minutes in the bathroom texting Rae.
Her message read “PRESSER in the notebook might be record pressing guy, figures below cld b vinyl weights? Ur doing great but don’t say sorry so much.”
When I came out he was on his phone too. He held up his chubby hands. “Gotta go. There’s a guy up in Hendon who says he’s got some John’s Children rarities. Wanna come see?”
I wanted him out of there. My face ached from the blank expression. “Thanks but no, I’ll get on the presser thing.”
He’d only been out of the door a second when the buzzer went. What had I done that had tipped him off? There were a million ways I could have fucked this up. I lit a cigarette and waited a beat before opening the door.
He was there, quizzical. He thrust a CD into my hand. “I checked it out. It’s fine, you can’t hear the sample anyway. You could even take it off if you wanted.”
I made as neutral a noise as I could manage and only p
roperly breathed once he’d disappeared down the hall. It took ten minutes to find a CD player among the racks of gear and another three to find the corresponding button on the amp to switch it on. This track seemed different from the first two. It was persistent and loud, and even turned low I couldn’t really work out what Brandon was singing. Rae was visibly concentrating on the laptop I’d brought through.
“It’s definitely him, though I can’t really make it out properly. It’s good though, no?”
I gave her a look.
“Can you upload it and send it to me?”
I slid it into the laptop but when I clicked on the folder icon two files popped up. One was an mp3 with the title “The Day After the End of the World” and the other was a text file entitled DON’T READ. I opened it and read a little. Then I forwarded both to Rae, telling her, “I think you’re going to want to see this.”
The Day After the End of the World
The below was on the document titled DON’T READ. It was properly formatted and had obviously been spell-checked.
Baxter. Fat, funny, froggy Baxter.
I proposed coming down to see him in Brighton. He countered: Claridge’s, Thursday, he had a meeting.
“Are you sure you want me along?” I asked. He was cagey about how he’d been making a living. It sounded like he was buying and selling old vinyl and I couldn’t imagine I’d be much use to him. Plus the idea of a born scruff like Baxter trying to fit in at Claridge’s didn’t sound like much of a day out.
“Yeah come,” he said, “I’m meeting some people and I could do with a wingman.”
For wingman read social secretary. He’d never been good with people and had a spooky ability to always say the wrong thing. There was nothing malicious about his behaviour but nowadays you’d happily describe him as on the spectrum.
I walked from Oxford Circus down into the world of money. Cars the size of boats idled outside Gucci and Chaumet, their shaven-headed drivers hurriedly putting out ciggies as the shops disgorged Russian wives and their minders. Deeper into Mayfair the shops became more oblique. What’s that one, with only the security guards marking it out from the houses? Gallery? Shoe shop? Brothel? Claridge’s looked the same though: trying too hard to look like it wasn’t trying too hard. The Arabs of my twenties had been replaced by Chinese kids in Moschino who didn’t look up from their phones as the cocktails arrived.
Baxter was in the corner on a laptop with a cup of tea. He had that haircut — the short-fringe-and-feathery-bits do that’s been handed down through three generations of British musicians like a family heirloom. I could have told you before I saw him that he’d be in a checked shirt, dark blue jeans and trainers, it’s his tribe’s uniform. His only accessory was a pair of gargantuan headphones encircling his neck like one of those South African tyre punishments.
He was lost in thought, looking at something on his computer and when I tapped his shoulder he took a while to refocus.
“Hi, Brandon, lovely.” He stood up and brushed crumbs off himself before we shook hands. “Sit, come on, how are you?”
“I’m good, just getting used to London again. Do I have time for a drink?” I gestured at his tea.
“After, after. Let’s just get this done and then we can go to the pub.” He looked nervy. “Shouldn’t take too long.”
“So who are we meeting?”
“New Money and this producer he’s got now. Glock something?”
“Well, we are mixing with the big boys aren’t we?”
Even I, with my total disinterest in the world of hip-hop, knew those two: Atlanta rappers who’d gone from gang members to CEOs in under three years.
I looked him over. His fringe was damp with sweat and his belly encroached over an M&S belt. “What are you doing for them?”
He swung the laptop round to show a screen full of waveforms. “Beats.”
“Beats?”
“Beats. You know I used buy and sell old records: charity shop and jumble sales stuff. Well, after Remote/Control, I started buying up stuff that I could sell elsewhere. Old soul and funk mainly, you remember I always liked that stuff?” I did. Driver’s choice in the Transit van and Baxter taking the last leg. Even now there are certain records — Northern soul things especially — that take me instantly back to the M25.
“Anyway a couple of black guys started buying stuff off me. Always rare stuff. And a couple of the things I’d sold turned up as breaks on UK rap things. Not big records really, but you’d hear them on the radio. So next time they came around I asked them about it. It had become like currency in certain sectors — everyone wanted the breaks that no one else had. So I boned up on the producers and started emailing them with ideas. It used to be a sideline but I make more money from it now than selling records.”
The idea of Baxter as a wheeler-dealer didn’t sit right with me. I wouldn’t buy a used beat from the man.
“It’s better if I show you. Just shut up and look cool, OK?”
The music industry is stacked against black artists. Behind the scenes the business is so white that it makes international banking look like a paragon of inclusivity. But… it did mean that when the likes of Glock and New Money broke the glass ceiling they could fly first class for a weekend at Claridge’s and still make it look like a high-art act of rebellion. Bare arms looped over Louis Quatorze sofa arms, a basketball video game playing on the TV. Joints in crystal ashtrays. Lucky fuckers.
They still looked more at home there than Baxter though. He was playing snippets of tracks on his laptop; nothing sounded like it belonged on a hit record to me. I zoned out and watched the video game characters waiting patiently on their digital basketball court.
“Hold up.” Glock raised a hand. His eyes had been glassy for the last two tracks.
“Go back a couple, the guitar thing.” The way he said “guitar” made it sound like some kind of exotic instrument.
Baxter played it again. A busy arpeggio on a guitar so electronically treated that I’d thought it was a synth the first time round.
“One more time.”
Baxter hit play again.
“I dunno man. Can you Airdrop it?”
Bax opened up his laptop and typed.
Now the riff played on vast speakers propped against the back wall. Glock looped it, let it run. He slowed it slightly. There was more menace to it at that speed. A threatening lethargy. He cut it at two places, making the beat a triplet, then dropped a four-four loop under it. The down beat shifted and new rhythms appeared. Money nodded. “Loop the first one round like three times, then the second.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
They could hear something even before Glock made the change; both were nodding furiously.
Now the first triplet repeated, insisted. And the second was just a moment’s respite before the nagging first part came back again. Glock stripped out the hi-hats, turning the drums super-dumb: an 808 kick, a handclap, tape echoes. Even Baxter was nodding now. He looked like one of those bulldog toys you saw in car windows.
New Money picked up a wireless mike and began to rap over the top. The words unearthed another rhythm hidden in the gaps between beats. His delivery shifted the downbeat again. He ignored the chord change, ramped up the tension. Both men were up on their feet and I had goosebumps. Then click, stop. The two guys laughed and high-fived before collapsing back onto the couch.
Money turned to Baxter. “Hells yeah we’ll take that one. Good job little man.”
For one horrible second I thought Bax might attempt a high-five but he just reached for his notebook.
“OK, OK. The southern soul was $1,500 each and that last one is $3,000.”
“Cool, call Matt at the office and I’ll let him know that’s right. You wanna stay? Hang a while?”
Even Baxter could hear lack of enthusiasm in the offer. We were being dismissed.
“That’s very kind but they’re selling an old BBC music library up in Acton and I need to go ch
eck it out.”
“Sure.” They looked bored. Glock reached for the game controller. “Till next time.”
In the lift down Baxter clutched his laptop to his chest.
“Good deal?” I asked. It seemed like it: the best part of five thousand dollars for finding two records.
“Not bad, not bad at all. I’ve had bigger. You remember that Jay-Z track about the LA Riots?”
It wasn’t really a question. You could have been comatose in intensive care for all of last summer and you still wouldn’t have avoided that track.
“The sample? That preacher and his whole ‘I say let this city burn and twist in the wind’ thing? I found that.”
“What’s to stop them finding those tracks themselves now and not paying you?”
“They’re not paying because I found them. They’re paying me not to let anyone else have them.”
It was only when we found a greasy spoon with fogged up windows and solitary old guys making cups of tea last an hour that I saw Baxter finally relax. He visibly deflated, a beer belly appearing from nowhere, his chins doubling. He ran both hands through his hair and it sprang into an untidy tangle. I realised how much he’d been holding himself in check back there.
He looked around, rubbed his hands together and ordered the works. Then he started to talk. I didn’t listen to everything he said. There was a dogged monotone to his voice that I’d heard before in people who’d spent too many hours in their own company, rehearsing arguments and playing them over and over in their minds. He gabbled like someone trying to get to the end of a failing Best Man’s speech and then finally gulped down his cold tea.
