The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  His face loomed in the top left-hand corner of the feed. He was switching off the camera above the bedroom mirror. There was a flicker of a cufflinked hand and the screen went black. He moved to the lounge. Again his face swam into view, again the square turned black. Through the music room, into the spare room, my brother’s face — all business — then darkness. The last camera was by the door. I watched a screen of eight black oblongs, all bar the bottom left-hand corner. He pulled a stool into place, climbed on it and then looked straight into the camera. I felt that familiar itchy discomfort of someone looking me right in the eye and I forced myself to look back. He breathed out — something decided, something finished — winked and the screen went black.

  There was nothing after that. The timecode clicked through to another day but the screen stayed empty. Even when it reached the day that I arrived it stayed resolutely dark. I went back to the final image. 7.11am. His face, filling the bottom left corner, was washed out and swollen by the lens but… But it didn’t look like a man who thought he’d be dead in eight hours. There had been a spring to his step as he moved from room to room and that last, awful wink felt playful rather than rueful.

  There was something else. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the wink was meant for me. He’d led me here and fed me clues to keep coming back. I was in his world, following his tracks. His flat, his family and his games. How well did he know me? How much could he control? (A line from the interviews I’d studied came back to me: “Brandon, what made you choose the name Remote/Control?” Half smile, cross of the legs. “Well I’m remote. And controlling.”)

  I’ve never felt freer than I have this past week. No longer swept along by the river’s flow, I’m swimming against it, and that’s the only way you feel the water on your skin. But that wink said that I was right where Brandon wanted me, and right on schedule. As he paused, in that second before the wink and the dead screen, as his tractor beams locked in, I knew that look was for me, as clearly as if he’d said my name. I was still in his orbit.

  What should I say to Rae about this Brandon, this monkish, bookish hermit? I didn’t want to tell her. It was worse that he’d done all this while he was sober. The Brandon of the liner notes was at least adrift in a storm of addiction and magic; she could blame her abandonment on outside forces. But this was a man in perfect control.

  I was overcome with a wave of revulsion for his cruelty. I wouldn’t tell her. But I wouldn’t lie. I went back to the start of the recordings to look for something I could give her from the tapes. Nothing. His routine was as puritan as mine had been back in Trellick Tower: everything was subsumed to the work.

  I tried another tack. I rewound to the recording session. About halfway through there was a discussion. The four of them were huddled around a piece of paper. It ended with Brandon scribbling chords out on the floor in chalk. From the camera angle it was unreadable so I went back to the music room to see if any trace remained. To the right of the Dee diagram, under a side table, the work remained, smeared but legible. A block of chords: Am Gmaj7, D, Dmin, and written alongside them the words CLEAR YOUR HISTORY. Googling that phrase brought nothing but sites on how to cover your tracks online but when I put the phrase in quotes and added MUSIC it brought up a Bandcamp page for an artist called The Ashes. The track was three minutes long so I looked around for an accompanying text. Nothing. No links, no comments, just the music.

  I sat at a desk looking over grimy Shoreditch chimneys, eating pickled ginger with chopsticks. There were four indentations in the desk’s leather top: this was where the typewriter had sat that I’d seen him working with on the footage. I opened the drawers and found that the antique cherrywood hid a filing cabinet. Pens and pencils were up top and in the cavernous bottom drawer sat the typewriter, fed with a scroll of paper as thick as my arm. I lifted it out, paper and all. It was heavy and smelt of oil and rubber. The roll was one continuous sheet, and metres of it were covered in neat blocks of typing. I rolled it out across the music room floor and found the beginning. In capitals it read VOODOO RAE.

  Clear Your History

  Voodoo Rae — Act I

  Champ had a precise formula for the perfect time to hook up in a bar. Some happy conflagration of desperation, pheromones and rising cab fares. It formed part of his whole playa persona: a ragtag bag of tricks for seducing women in bars, a pursuit which he carried out with a joyless professionalism. He had schedules and strategies, and flowcharts dedicated to combinations of pick-up lines and topics of conversation.

  I didn’t understand his commitment. He was a good-looking, personable guy with no sense of shame, which is normally a winning combination, but he had to make a competition out of it. It was as if his only real goal was to win the respect of the gurus of the Pick-Up Artist message boards which he read vociferously. The boards were, like any online space where men congregate, forests of stats, abbreviations and petty arguments, and regulars discussed their metrics like they were sports pundits.

  We were in The Dresden Room, an LA institution where a desiccated old duo in matching wigs played jazz standards, badly, to an audience of hipsters, pre-clubbers and locals. It was one of those places that had swung so many times between so-bad-it’s-hip and simply bad that the city had given up keeping score, and now it was just a muscle memory — somewhere that drunken feet took you at a certain witching hour. It was dark and noisy and quirky enough that you could drop in without looking like you were desperate.

  Champ was at the bar dividing his attention between two groups of girls and I was trying my hardest not to be his wingman. I alternated between listening to the band and listening to him, the juxtaposition of the syrupy standards and his spiky chat-up lines jarring my happy descent into drunkenness.

  A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces

  “It’s pretty brave of you to wear an outfit like that”

  An airline ticket to romantic places

  “Although you do have a great little body. Are you bulimic?”

  And still my heart has wings

  “Doesn’t it piss you off the way she does the talking for all of you?”

  These foolish things remind me of you

  “Yeah, you should definitely get a tattoo, you need something to make you interesting”

  A shiver of cold air ran through the bar as two girls walked in, jackets pulled over their heads against the rain outside. A blonde and a brunette, like negatives of each other in a way too neat to be accidental. On the left: blonde with a lazy slash of a mouth, puppy-fattish enough to be a recent Angeleno. Thick eyebrows that you could see were itching to be arched. Her friend was a Central Casting Cali Goth, the exact same height with long hair in a short fringe, dressed all in black. She was wearing a Clan of Xymox T-shirt that would have been obscure even in London.

  I caught a glint of recognition from the blonde. Not the animal chemistry of the quick pick-up, more that she’d recognised me from some internal database — she knew something about me that I didn’t know about her.

  They took seats further down the bar and turned ostentatiously inwards to deflect attention. Champ’s head snapped towards them as if on a string.

  He gestured at me and set off to stand between them. I waited. The longer I could stay out of his orbit on nights like this, the less shrapnel I’d take later. He sat by the blonde and asked her name; this was Rae.

  His voice was brash. “Ray, like a dude? Bold choice.”

  This was his “negging”: negative comments wrapped up in compliments. He’d explained the psychology of it to me many times. The bringing down to your level, the sense of unease, the need for approval. I’d seen it work too, but only on profoundly dumb or profoundly damaged girls, and there was a note of humorous contempt in Rae’s face that I thought boded ill for Champ.

  He waved me over again and reluctantly I introduced myself to her friend, hitting the British accent hard. Soon we were chatting — music, tattoos, films — as I tried to eavesdrop into Champ’s conversa
tion.

  I could hear the rhythms of what they were saying if not the words. A pointed question from Champ got an amused response from Rae. He tried again, she brushed him back off. Thrust and parry. Dating as a contact sport. Meanwhile Clan of Xymox was going full Anglophile, championing long-lost bands that even the Brit-Goths had given up on: Stockholm Monsters, Dead Can Dance, March Violets. Champ was doubling down and sounding harsher, Rae sounded less amused.

  Clan of Xymox was asking me whether I’d ever been to the Batcave when it all kicked off. Rae had finally had enough. I’m not sure which of Champ’s insults-dressed-as-compliments had tipped the balance but the smile evaporated from her face. She leant in so she was looking up at him and took his hand in hers.

  Then, loudly enough for everyone up at the bar to hear, she said, “I will go home with you right now and let you perform any sordid little act that you want, if you can say one simple thing to me, soul to soul, person to person, that’s truly from the heart.”

  She laid her palm on his chest and fluttered her eyelashes.

  Champ gawped as she started counting down on her fingers. “Three, two…”

  “I… I love you?”

  Even Xymox laughed at that.

  Champ didn’t look back as he left, which I took as a sign he didn’t expect me to follow. Anyway, I was probably irredeemably tainted by his failure now; I’d be harmless to these two. As I chatted with Xymox, Rae watched me.

  “We’ve met before.” She had a way of examining you as if she were looking over a pair of glasses.

  “I thought you looked familiar.” She didn’t. She was striking enough for me to know that if we had met then I would have filed her away somewhere.

  “Before, at a party up in Silver Lake.”

  This happened a lot. That last party, the one that put paid to Dillon’s house in the hills, the one with the fire trucks and the blood-red swimming pool and the out-of-town TV crews — well, half of LA seems to have been there. It’s like the Pistols at the Free Trade Hall: if everyone who said they were there really was then it could have been held in the Hollywood Bowl.

  “Oh, the party.” I still didn’t remember her. “Do I need to apologise?”

  “No, you were sweet. A bit distracted. You seemed kinda dedicated to trashing the place. I’m guessing you’re not there now?”

  “Well, you know, the upkeep and all that.” I checked her expression to make that she knew I was joking; sarcasm’s a risky move early on in an American bar conversation.

  “Yeah, who needs the hassle, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  Rae had a car, an ancient Jetta that smelled of pot smoke and hairspray, with a back seat full of takeout litter. I squatted in the rear with my hair brushing the roof, and watched the two of them in the mirror, marvelling, as ever, at the lovely easiness of women together. It gave me a chance to look at her properly, sporadically sidelit in neon, her busy hands with bitten nails. There was something wholesome about her. In a year LA would have had its way with her. She’d be a few pounds lighter, her hair a shade brighter and that laugh wouldn’t tumble out quite so unguardedly. But for now she was radiant.

  Her friend kept a constant, low-level conversation going — a kind of stream-of-unconsciousness thing — and twice Rae turned to look at me as if to say sorry about her.

  It’s twenty years later and I couldn’t tell you Xymox’s real name or the gist of the conversations we had or which landmarks we passed, but I do remember the music. Rae was playing a mix-CD and whenever I hear any of those tracks again I’m sent crashing back to the rear seat of the Jetta. There was “Been Caught Stealing” and Rae’s pretty throat bared to the glow of traffic lights as she and her friend did the barking bit. There was “Imitating Angels” by some now-forgotten LA scene band, which at the time sounded like the most vital thing that anyone had ever recorded (I’ve heard it since and it’s not — young love is worse than drugs for impairing your judgement).

  And then, on the elevated section of the 110, with tidy pockets of residential life laid out below us and a holding pattern of airplane lights stacking over LAX, with the busted air conditioning soaking us in dust and fumes and my head brushing the vinyl roof with every pothole, there was “Voodoo Ray”. It set Rae and Xymox high-fiving in the front and calling out “theme tune”, their shoulders hunching and releasing to some car-seat dance that only the two of them knew. I hear that track perhaps three or four times a year now and every time instantly the scene replays. The liquid lights of the LA suburbs through murky car windows, as gaudy as Vegas and as dull as Burnage. Xymox approximating the muezzin chant with her fringe bobbing, Rae waiting for the “Voodoo Ray” bit to turn and chant it through a bashful grin, the push of the hi-hats and the pull of the road.

  We pulled up outside the place Xymox was house-sitting and idled there at the curb for a couple of minutes to let the track end.

  The house was spacious and blankly empty. A pool steamed sleepily under outdoor lights and the furniture looked showroom new. It was oddly familiar: a particular bland Californian style that I couldn’t place but that I’d seen a hundred times. Like a chain hotel with ideas above its station. Faux antique lamps and plenty of smoked glass. Art books.

  “It’s a porn house,” whispered Rae while Xymox was in the bathroom. “Half the houses in this sub-division are. They use them for shoots. Then the owners take the profits and spend the winter surfing in Maui or whatever, so she looks after them for weeks at a time, a different house every night. It’s freaking hilarious if you turn up when they’re shooting, you have to pick your way through naked bodies to get to her room.”

  She lowered her voice further as Xymox returned. “And that couch you’re sitting on? It’s wipe-clean.”

  The night coiled itself tight around us. I shifted my focus onto Rae (mainly because I was interested in her, but also because the other girl was doing my head in. At one point she said in all seriousness. “Y’know, African-American actors get all up in arms when they cast a white guy in a black part, but every fucking vampire role on TV goes to someone who’s not from the scene. I say if you haven’t drunk blood for real then you shouldn’t be allowed to play a vamp. Fuck, I’d be so good in Buffy.”)

  She started spending more time in the bathroom and each time she returned more unsteady and distant. Normally I’d bridle at this breach of etiquette — if she was holding then we should be sharing — but it was working my way. Rae and I were nesting on the wipe-clean, nose to nose in that yeah-this-is-going-to-happen stage.

  She had a face that was forever on the edge of smiling, begging you to give a little push. I told stories just to see how they made her face alter. I was about to suggest a change of scene when there was a dull thud from the bathroom, a solitary, very clear ow, and then silence.

  “You better go look,” I said. “She might be indecent.”

  “She is indecent,” Rae laughed, but she went to check anyway, “Don’t go anywhere.”

  She was gone maybe twenty seconds and then called through from the bathroom, “Um, Brandon, can you give me a hand?”

  The girl was sitting on the toilet, fully clothed but tilted sideways, and there was a smear of red where her temple rested on a bath tap. It looked uncomfortable. Her eyes were closed.

  “Fuuuuuuuck,” I whispered, as if louder might wake her. “What did she take?”

  “I don’t know, she only had a tiny bit of blow.” She went through the girl’s pockets. “Sweetheart, sweetheart?”

  She shook her experimentally. The blood was a vivid red against the white of her makeup.

  It was the work of a moment to haul her over my shoulder as Rae dialled numbers on her phone, trying to find someone who knew the area.

  “Fuck, I can’t drive in this state,” she said. “Are you OK with American cars?”

  I hadn’t driven since I got to LA but the local streets were spookily quiet. “I’d better be, I guess.”

  I tried to unload the girl into the b
ack but the booster seats and general crap made it impossible. “She’s going to have to ride up front with me,” I said.

  Rae was giggling, despite herself, “This is so fucked up.” She strapped the girl into the front seat, tucked her arms under the seatbelt and clambered into the back. She was alternating between crying and laughing. “If we get stopped now this is just…”

  I took it as slowly as I dared, Rae reading directions from the back. If we cornered too fast the girl flopped against me so Rae had to lean forward and press her against the window. The lights spooled in reverse, the neon colder now. I switched the music off so the only sounds were the rush of air and Rae’s urgent instructions. Left at the end here, no next one, sorry, fuck.

  You could see the hospital from a mile away. White-light glare lit up a whole city block and ambulances idled in the car park. I was considering whether we had to park up or could just dump her on the doorstep when the girl made a noise. She let out a bovine moan, then a deep out-breath and pushed herself away from the window. There was a smear of dark blood across the glass. She looked at me, and then Rae and then out of the car.

  “The fuck are we?”

  I pulled to a stop.

  “At the hospital, you OD’d.”

  She looked askance. She was, improbably, wide awake and lucid.

  “Excuse me. I do not OD. Who said I OD’d?” Her hair was sticking up and she yawned lopsidedly. She wiped a hand under her nose and it came away red.

  Rae’s voice came from the back. “You were passed out in the bathroom and we just assumed…”

  “I’m fucking narcoleptic, I’ve told you that about a million times. Fuck, if I went to the hospital every time I passed out I’d never be at home.”

  She shook her head. “OD’d. I had like three lines back there. You had more than me. You girl, you watch too many films.”