The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  He made a couple of notes and yawned unselfconciously. The first slivers of daylight were showing around the curtains.

  “Not bad. Four done. Three were easy ones mind, but a good start.” He yawned and rubbed his neck. “Same time tomorrow?”

  I could have gone on forever. “Sure,” I said, “You sort the brass and I’ll make a start on some of the stuff that we’re doing from scratch.”

  He kept nodding, like a tic, as he packed away. “One other thing. The Theremin on ‘Good Vibrations’, it’s not actually a Theremin.”

  I fixed him with a stare. Even the newbies on the Smile forums knew that. They could tell you all about the device that Paul Tanner had built for Brian, an odd cross between a pedal steel and a Theremin, that produced one of the most recognisable sounds of the twentieth century.

  Baxter stretched. “I know who has the original.”

  “The one they used on tour?” That was old news.

  “Nope, the ‘Vibrations’ one. The fucking grail, man. Tanner sold it to a hospital because he thought it had been superseded and the hospital wanted any gear that had an oscillator.” He shook his head in wonder. “They were going to use it on heart patients. But it never got used and ended up in an electronics shop in Pasadena. And guess who found it there? Hyde.”

  “Hyde from Jackyl & Hyde?” That made sense. He was a prodigious collector of all things analogue and musical. “Yeah, I can see that. So, go and borrow it off the old gargoyle. He lives down your way doesn’t he?” Bax had mentioned him at Claridge’s.

  “They both do. But they won’t see me.” I was beginning to recognise his gestures now. The hand covering his mouth like a Japanese schoolgirl — that was embarrassment.

  I did know that they wouldn’t see him, he’d mentioned it, but you should never pass up an opportunity to make an old friend feel uncomfortable. “Yeah, why was that again? They’re such sweethearts.”

  He stared at me like he was constipated. “Their fucking records man.” He looked reverent. “You should see their collection. Fuck. ‘Rabbit Foot Blues’ on 78. A Benny Cliff Trio single, mint in sleeve, even Kenny and the Cadets. I couldn’t help pushing. I’d go down there and listen to their endless anecdotes and drink that Camp Coffee and Jackie’d play these fucking records that are like, they’re like legends. No, not legends. They’re rarer than that, they’re like myths. They have fucking wax cylinders of Robert Johnson, Bran.”

  I recognised his look from NA meetings. Pure, feverish hunger. “So, what’s the problem?”

  “I just wanted to take some pictures, you know for authentication, and for my own… pleasure.”

  I had a momentary, ugly vision of him on his knees, hand down his jeans, grunting to iPhone images of 1950s rockabilly sleeves.

  “They went crazy. They would have thrown me out on my arse if they weren’t frail as sparrows. I’ve been back but they don’t even answer the door.”

  That’d be killing him. A world-class record collection on his doorstep. Forget what they were worth, the bragging rights alone would light up his particular slice of the internet.

  “Why d’you think it’d be any different for me? It’s been years.”

  “They like you Bran, she likes you. Always asks after you.” He approximated her faux-Texas snarl. “‘What ever happened to the purdy one?’ The thing is Bran I think it’s the key to the record. No one’s ever got close to capturing that sound, not properly. If someone came to me saying they’d found the Smile originals it’d be the first thing I checked.”

  He was right. The pierce and warble of the thing was as recognisable as a voice. If we got it right it would tug all of our inconsistencies into place behind it.

  “Fine, get me the address, I could do with some sea air. Now why don’t you fuck off and let me work?” I felt the undertow of inspiration and Bax was beginning to bore me.

  Once he’d gone the room hummed with electricity. Those old amps vibrated and spluttered and were prone to tantrums, but there was no denying they filled the air with possibility. The centre of the music room was a bare expanse of parquet the colour of pipe tobacco. I found a packet of chalk and tried to recreate the Sigillum Dei Aemeth. A drawing pin pushed between the parquet in the centre, a piece of string. I traced the outer ring and then drew a heptagon inside it, touching at seven points. The names of the Angels of Brightness should go here I knew, but I could only remember a couple. Horlwn and Galethog were the sun and moon, I dredged that up from somewhere, but the others refused to appear. Instead I wrote in names. BRANDON. KIMI. SAUL. BAXTER. DILLON. HYDE. I toyed with the last one. KASPAR had an excitingly Gothic set of letters but he had the feel of a Lesser Angel about him. Fuck it, I knew who’d be playing a part, even if it were an inadvertent one. I wrote in ADAM at the top tip.

  Then the angles of the seven-pointed star that you drew, satisfyingly, in one zig-zagging stroke. The Sons of Light it was called, and the pentagon formed its centre was named for the Daughters of the Daughters. And then that oldest of clichés, the pentagram, sitting smugly in the centre.

  It suited the overwrought nature of the room, with its candlesticks and bell jars, the portraiture and metalwork. I took a paperweight from the desk and used it as the shew-stone, tossing it mindlessly among the lines of power like I had on a hundred teenage afternoons crouched over diagrams and books. What fucking nonsense this was. Another of the puny ways we’ve tried to impose some order on the universe, another thin layer of ice over the abyss.

  I’ve flip-flopped on these things over the years. I loved them in my pretentious youth. I was forever reading bloodcurdling futures for timid girls at parties. As an adult I was as sceptical as a Dawkins, holding forth for hours on the constructs that stopped people from taking control of their lives. That phase was even more unbearable than the first. It took me years to work out the power of these fripperies: tarot, Rorschach, OKCupid. They didn’t unearth the hidden structure of the universe, they made one up. And, however flimsy the construct — autumn ice on black water, highwires between skyscrapers — it gave you a handhold to at least face the chasm that is everyday existence.

  I tossed the shew-stone three times. Baxter, 6, Sons of Light. I let it mean what I wanted it to mean. I sat at Bax’s Wurlitzer, the stool so low that I felt like Schroeder, and flicked the sixth preset. It was a husk of a sound. I willed myself into an approximation of Baxter, hunched and myopic, careless with the keys, careful with the pedals, and began to play.

  “Sons of Light forget their names…” I was off. I recorded quickly. Drums, bass, guitar, vocals, while still deep in Brian-space, my fingers moving with his ragged exactitude, every trace of black and blue gone from my voice. I let the stone decide the directions. It picked out percussion, nudged the lyrics, cut an outro that wasn’t quite working.

  I listened back over breakfast. Kaspar came up with kedgeree, something that I always order and then remember I don’t especially like, and he sat with me on the balcony as the track played.

  “It’s nice,” he said. “Calmer than I would have expected.”

  “You put into your songs what you’re missing in real life,” I said, and then, feeling like I was back giving interviews, added, “Thank you.”

  When he’d gone I lay out on the balcony under the weak London morning, watching the contrails. A flock of parakeets flashed past chattering, the green of their bellies seemingly still lit by some tropical sun. They glinted like jewels.

  At this point Bran stops talking. There’s twenty seconds of background noise and then a track plays.

  Chapter Six

  I usually dream of everyday life in Umbrage. I’ll be a lullaby-peddler kneeling at the bedside of a merchant’s teething son, singing the secret song passed down to me through generations (while discretely dabbing a corner of cloth in essence of laudanum, just in case). Or the river will materialise around me, ferrymen’s shouted conversations across the waves, the suck of river mud between bare toes and the feel of old rope on my palm. Or I�
�m drunk at the zinc bars, circling in eddies of beer and lies, a dream within a dream within a dream.

  But here at The Magpie for two days straight I’ve dreamt of Tahoe. Last night I was walking through the house at night, the scene lit with that gauzy glow of moonlight on snow, and I ran my hands over the walls and window-sills, the rails and worktops, always touching, like the conductor on a dodgem car. I saw it all: the clock on the cooker set an hour slow, the recycling bin full to overflowing, the hairbands knotted with blonde fuzz. A wonderland stranger than Umbrage could ever be. I dreamt of Robin in his room. Blankets twisted around his knobbled ankle, not flesh of my flesh but something deeper, chemical keys turning in chemical locks. He wore an American football jersey rucked up under his arms, everything else in the room grey in the moongleam. His fearful, brittle rib-cage, his constellations of moles. Something half-finished stood in the middle of a workbench. A tower of white squares, covered in flaps, the occasional one flipped open to reveal hooks and hydraulics and pulleys and motors. Something written in a language that only Robin and I knew. That moves there, and that slides open, and that section drops away. Out into a corridor lined with photos, lit by a window onto frost-rimed branches and far-away car lights.

  Rae’s door open. Starfished across her bed, like she’d been dropped from a great height, window open to the lake. Crushed up against the sheets giving her a lopsided pout. More laughter lines than worry lines, like my mum would say. Books on the bedside table, topped with a pair of reading glasses. Financial Planning for Dummies with what looked like every third page folded over at the corner.

  I sat on the edge of the bed but nothing moved. I was weightless. There was the faintest movement with each breath and a flutter of blood in a neck-vein to tell me she was alive.

  When I woke I could still feel the pull. This room with its art and books and voice-activated TV and six kinds of bottled water was less real than the dream. The window through to Tahoe was still open but it was night there, the screen just a wall of grey. I replayed Brandon’s recording to see if there was anything to be gleaned from it.

  The title “Sons of Light” seemed as good a place to start as any. I googled it and waded through pages of occult sites. They were badly designed and full of photocopied images from old books. Sad, empty comments sections. Each site was different, each was the same. I recognised the obsession and desperation. I could feel the screenburn from here. “Sons of Light” yielded nothing, but I hit gold with “Daughters of the Daughters”.

  It was a Baidu page. I had to search again just to discover what Baidu was, but it appeared to be the Chinese version of Facebook. The page itself was a squiggle of Chinese characters, cartoon pop-ups and friend suggestions, but the waveform at the centre looked like the SoundCloud links. Underneath, in the comments, someone called CC had provided the lyrics in both English and kanji “for my Chinese friends”.

  I was about to Skype Rae when the familiar tone bubbled up from the laptop.

  I clicked ACCEPT. “Hey, Rae, guess what I f…”

  “Fucking little mother fucking fuck.” Rae was inches from the laptop. She shot me a look and thrust something against the camera, turning my screen white.

  “That evil little fucker.” The page of white turned and squirmed. “I will kill him. I would kill him if he wasn’t already dead.”

  I tried to calm her. She pulled the page away and started pacing, only in shot for split seconds. She was running a constant monologue. “Fucking… Fuck… Stupid.” She slapped herself hard on the forehead, sat down and then instantly jumped up. “I can’t even…”

  I slowed my breathing, trying to enact some sympathetic calming effect.

  “He sold the house right out from under us.” She was in profile, vibrating with rage. “Sold it and didn’t say a word.” She read the page again in front of her.

  “How?”

  “How? Because I’m a fucking idiot that’s how. Because I put him on the mortgage two years back so we could write off the payments against his fucking nonexistent tax bill that’s how. Because I let my guard down for one, stupid, second.”

  “Can he do that?”

  She shook her head. “He’s done it.”

  “Can’t you do anything about it?”

  She gave me an evil look.

  “Can you at least get your share of the money?” Her shake was almost imperceptible now.

  “How long?”

  She smoothed out the letter. “Six weeks. Maybe. He sold it to the bank. To the bank. Jesus what an idiot. It might take them a while to find a buyer, but…”

  She looked around her. “Borrowed time. And renting here is ridiculous. Landlords make more from Bay Area skiers in a month than I can pay a year.” Her voice was rising. “And Robin just about likes this school and I can’t move him again.” The words began to trip over themselves. “And the fucking moving and the deposit and the nosy neighbours.”

  She looked up and her eyes and nose were pink, like a baby animal’s. “I can’t look at you at the moment. I know it’s not you, but…”

  The screen went black, the speaker quiet. I thought of the bills here: the food and drink I’d been ordering, Kaspar’s little treats.

  There was a pause and then a small voice. “I’m still here though.”

  I tried to cut in. “The Smile money.”

  Silence.

  “Baxter said it was a big deal right?”

  “So? How much could it be? 50K? My cut’s twenty-five. I suppose it would be a deposit and a couple of months’ rent.”

  “Take the lot. It’s not mine. Brandon doesn’t owe me anything.”

  “I couldn’t. I won’t. Anyway Baxter has to sell it first.” But there was an hopeful edge to her voice now.

  “Well let’s get it sold. I’ll call him now. And then there’s Saul’s thing. The contract.”

  I heard a sniffle. “You don’t think Bran fucked that up?”

  “I’m sure he did. But it can be unfucked. I’m not him, Rae. I may not have his charm but I don’t think I rub people up the wrong way as much as he did either.”

  The screen flickered back into life. She was low in the frame, raw and tousled.

  “You don’t. You’re easy to talk to. But it’s too much. All of this. You’re not him, you don’t have to make this right.”

  I could sense the distance between us. The dark ocean and the mountains and the leagues of rain.

  “I want to.” As I said the words I knew it was true. Let me be wanted. Let me be needed. Let me be seen.

  “Really?” She trailed a jumper-sleeve under her nose as if she weren’t on camera.

  “Really. Where’s Robin?”

  She glanced out of frame. “Upstairs, working on something for you.” She smiled the very smallest of smiles. I saw his tower of white squares, fresh from the dream.

  “Good, tell him I’ll call in an hour.”

  I had work to do.

  I called Rae back after an hour. She and Robin were at the kitchen table. He looked skittish; I guessed he’d heard Rae’s outburst this morning. As I talked to her he watched us both carefully.

  “I spoke to Baxter. Just one little thing to do. Nothing to worry about.”

  I shouldn’t have said that. I never understand how I can say one thing and people, rightly, assume the opposite, but her look was fretful.

  “Robin, your mum tells me you’ve made something for me?”

  “Yeah.” He was torn between showing me and leaving Rae, I could tell. He fiddled with his pens.

  “Go set it up. I need to talk to your mum.” There was a fierceness to his look that I’d not seen before. “It’s all good stuff, I promise. No fighting.”

  He nodded and took off. Rae pushed her chair so she was centre frame. “Nothing to worry about? That sounds worrying.”

  I kept my voice light. “It’s good really. Just some problems getting the record actually made. Baxter’s sorting his end but he says Brandon agreed to arrange the pressing. I chec
ked the number in his notebook, the PRESSER one, and it’s a studio apparently. I’m going to call them in a bit. But first, this morning, before, y’know, I was going to tell you I found another track.”

  “Damn. I was just going to search. Where was it?”

  I sent her the link. She didn’t have to tell me that we should listen together, just counted down three-two-one on her fingers. This was something different again: spindly, circling guitars over stocky drums, everything somehow in pieces, unsettled and unsettling. Brandon’s voice was distant and harsh, ending lines with yelps that reverberated for seconds. They sounded like animal cries. I didn’t like it at all.

  “Wow, that’s great.” Rae shook her head. “It’s like something from 1983. Not his taste at all though.” She clicked play again. Her head nodded along to the beat and she mouthed a couple of the lyrics.

  After singing along for a while she watched me from the screen. “What do you like? I never hear music on in the background there.”

  “Just the radio really. Growing up with Brandon made music impossible. Whatever I liked was wrong so I stopped trying. And now I feel like other people hear something in music that I don’t.”

  She nodded. “That’s a shame, but I get it. Putting a record on in front of Bran was a bit like being up in court.” She grinned. “I can’t tell you what it’s like to be able to play Yaz around the house without Bran having a meltdown.”

  Robin called from upstairs, “I’m readdddy.”

  “Sorry, he’s been talking about this for hours, you’re going to have to go see. Be nice, OK?”

  I didn’t admit that I was looking forward to it. I said, “Of course.”

  Robin had the laptop in his hand. “I don’t have an endoscope but mom got me something even cooler, hang on.”

  The picture on the screen wobbled and then went black. Robin muttered. Then an image lurched onto the screen. It was his room: the furniture had been pushed to one side, and a square table, shiny with glass or water, had been positioned in the centre. The view see-sawed and stabilised. I could see the table more clearly now. It was low and deep, with the sides partially covered. Its surface was divided up into a series of exact squares, like a mirrored chess board. The view shifted until I was looking at the table from almost directly overhead.