The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  “Like this?” Even her voice was flatter.

  “It’s perfect.”

  Kaspar was hanging around outside the door as she left. I opened the door a little — the rooms must have smelt like a war zone — and he did his best to not look worried.

  “This came by courier earlier but I thought you might be otherwise engaged.”

  He handed me an amateurish looking magazine, shrink-wrapped in plastic. I closed the door on him and tore it open. The Journal of Found Sound and Field Recordings Vol. XIV. I recognised the kind of thing — the model-making world was full of magazines like this, photocopied at work, aping scholarly journals but really just an outlet for obsessions that were outgrowing their owner’s living room. I flicked through articles on “Underwater Recording and Deep-Sea Sounds” and “Nuclear Bunkers: Putting the ‘Radio’ back into Radioactivity” and a slip of paper fell from the pages. It was hand-written, the signature illegible. I held it up to the light to read it: “Thanks for the piece — it’s on page 111. Hope you get some downloads!”

  Tiny Lightning

  From The Journal of Found Sound and Field Recordings Vol XIV

  “Recording Single Snowflakes: A Beginner’s Guide” by Brandon Noyes.

  Field recording: individual snowflakes, 5.45am, 3/4/99, Tahoe City, CA. 12 mins and 34 secs. Equipment: CAD Equitek E100, Sony TC-D5, Logic Audio

  This recording was made on a frozen lake behind a house in which I used to live, in Tahoe City, California. In summer the lake was fetid and littered with dead leaves. In the autumn it froze from edge to edge, and by November it was as hard as iron. It became a disc of white among the firs, patterned only by bird tracks until the locals awoke. By March it started to thaw. Most people took the long way around but still, on some mornings when I woke early I’d risk the walk to go and get a coffee from the diner on Tahoe’s main street.

  Each step brought a response from the ice: sub-aural groans or splintery crackling, and you had to listen to these for clues to guide your feet. Crossing might take twenty minutes, far longer than walking the perimeter, but it felt auspicious to start the morning with Danny at the diner saying, “not your day to die today then?” each time I arrived. There was a particular sound I liked too: a shudder deep in the ice with a hollow echo that you only heard on these spring mornings. I resolved to capture a recording of it; my old Sony TC-D5 was kept charged and ready, hanging in the garage.

  One Monday in April I returned from San Francisco after a sleepless forty-eight hours, with competing chemicals fighting for control of my nervous system. Coke vs temazepam. Coffee vs cognac. Ecstasy vs agony. Amid the comedown my house looked like a prison. The curtained windows were a reprimand, a foretaste of a week of recriminations. I needed a coffee.

  I picked up the recording gear and made for the ice. I walked through tussocks of snow-covered grass, under branches pregnant with icicles, down to the lakeside.

  There’s something hallucinatory about Tahoe; it’s alive with the extremes of perception that you sometimes get on acid. Clear air lets you see for miles and the snow isolates sounds into single sources. The clean edges of things shine.

  I stepped onto the ice as delicately as a fawn, which wasn’t the easiest feat after the weekend I’d had. In April the ice melts during the day and then freezes over again at night, so the surface was freckled like a bird’s egg, grey on white. It was pock-marked and riven with slushy cracks. I took a step and felt the ice stretch and wake. I slid to the left where the footing was surer. Each step was a minefield. When my weight sent hairline cracks sprinting deep into the surrounding ice, I had to retrace my path to try another tack.

  Halfway across I looked over at the diner. The lights were still out. My chest and back were soaked with sweat even in the sub-zero air so I lay face down for a second, the ice on my face as calming in my state as a bathroom floor, and lit a ciggie. In the silence the fingersnap of the lighter gave way to the crackle of burning tobacco. I sucked in air and it rushed like a waterfall as the drugs did their victory laps around my body. Cold radiated up into the points where I touched the ice: my shoulders, knees and skull.

  When I rolled onto my back the ice creaked beneath me. It was the sound of a dying thing. I set up the recorder and scraped ice from the headphones. I turned down the sensitivity and listened. It was beautiful. No wind; just silence and then, like whale song, a howl as underwater plates shifted against each other. If I moved my weight around I could make the ice move.

  There, star-shaped on the ice, I drummed my heels against the cold and it felt like it was my body that creaked and groaned. Every movement was transmitted outwards like I was a fly in a web. I brought a heel down hard and there was crack like a gunshot and then silvery ripples. A fissure opened up from where my foot now rested, metres long. Enough. In my state the water would be cold enough to kill me in seconds.

  I lay still and let the lake settle. A noise whispered in the headphones: patter of static like distant rain. Snow had begun to fall. It fell in straight lines, individual snowflakes as clear as diamonds. A flake landed on the tip of my cigarette and hissed to its death. I thought about the singular shapes of snowflakes and the way their path through the air was written in their form; each change in temperature and every buffet of wind altered the way their crystalline arms grew — an entire history written in icy limbs.

  I turned the microphone sensitivity higher. A far-off tapping and the noise of my heart beating. I needed more isolation. I slid the mike as far from my body as possible and lay still, willing my breath shallower.

  A sound like a match striking. Burst and sizzle. Another. Sounds bloomed like snowdrops. Tsscck. Tsssssscck. T-Tsscck. I closed my eyes and let the cold freeze the sickness out of me. There was a crackle like bubble wrap. Later I found out that this was the noise of the snowflakes’ electrical charge sparking into the ground, a million miniature lightning strikes, each one as unique as the snowflakes themselves. Once in a while, despite the cover, you’d hear the sound of a flake hitting the mike itself. A soft explosion that wiped out all the other sounds, clearing a path for the silence to rush back in.

  The snow fell harder. On my eyelids, on my stubble. The sounds were tiny and vast like a supernova seen from earth. I tasted snowmelt on my lips and, from the corner of my eye, saw a light in the diner go on. I pressed STOP and looked to the shore. The snow had laid evenly over the ice and I was the only black mark on a field of white. Once I was upright I found it was easier to close my eyes. I slid each foot forward until my weight began to shift, letting the ice flex but not break. If I had even an inkling of that vertiginous fall, like missing a stair in the dark, then I eased back and breathed. Wait, slide left, slide right, try again. Until, lost in it, snow-blind and shivering, I touched grass.

  I threw myself down and looked back over the ice. Behind me the snow had already swallowed my tracks.

  The recording was made by taking the original sound source and slowly increasing the rate of quantisement and pitch correction until every snowfall had been assigned a note and a place on a rhythm grid. There was a section between 8:45 and 9:30 that I particularly liked — after that it’s simply looped and the tempo increased until it made a rudimentary drum track. Feel free to use either in your own recordings — the whole piece is under a Creative Commons license.

  Chapter Nine

  I called Robin before I set off to see Baxter. He’d been asleep — he pawed at puffy eyes and yawned so wide I could see every one of his perfect teeth — but I knew that once I became Brandon I’d lose my connection with him. Ideally he’d have had more time with the clues from The Folly; still, if he had my DNA then he might have unravelled them. He spread his notebooks on his bed, full of diagrams, crossings-out and long lines of text. His pyjamas were too small and his thin wrists shone white on the screen.

  “I think it’s like a map.” He pushed a scribbled piece of paper against the camera.

  “This, here.” He pointed at a complex symbol. “I thi
nk this is the whole of Umbrage. The circle is the lake, and this lightning shape is the ravine, and the squares at the back are the Darks.”

  He took the paper down and looked at me beseechingly.

  I kept my face impassive. “Interesting. Go on.”

  “Then there’s this symbol, like an eight on its side. I think it’s a bee-dance thing.”

  How had I known that he’d recognise that? Bees and beehives were a childhood obsession of mine. I knew the bear-traps he’d willingly tumble into.

  “What’s a bee dance?”

  “Like when a bee finds honey? Or is it pollen? It does this special dance that shows the others where to go.” He opened his mouth wide again, less a yawn, more of an unclicking of the jaw.

  “OK, so how does it work?”

  “They have to go in a line from the waist of the eight.” He looked through his notebook until he found the page he wanted and then traced a line that ran across the page.

  “Right around the walls, through the columns, to here. But on the way there are all these animal pictures.” He showed me jittery line drawings of bees and bears and birds. “And I don’t know what they mean.”

  I let the silence win out for a second and gave him a sympathetic smile to let him know it was all there to be uncovered. With a start he said, “They could be the years.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “They could be the names of the years. How would I find out?”

  I pulled out the Book. “Does it go Badger, Magpie, Ant, Badger?”

  He traced the patterns. “Yes, so it’s years.” He stood up and sat down immediately.

  “So you have a direction, and you have time, how many years?”

  He counted out loud. “Twenty-six, twenty-seven. Twenty-seven. And then you come to this symbol.”

  Again he pressed the paper against the screen. There was another, smaller symbol like a wheel atop a lozenge.

  “And what’s that?”

  “I dunno. There was stuff like that in the Valley House but you never told me what it meant.”

  He placed it in front of him and stared down at it. “It has some of the same writing as the first one. Can you read it?”

  I hadn’t explained any of the Umbragian picture words. Everything had moved so fast.

  “Well those two signs under the first symbol read ‘Umb’ and ‘Rage’, so I guess you were right about it being a sign for Umbrage. Those symbols are there in the second one two, but with one more added.”

  “Something Umbrage? Umbrage something?”

  “It’s the symbol for a child, does that help?”

  He muttered. “Umbrage child. Son of Umbrage. Young Umbrage.” His eyes never left my image on the screen, waiting for a flicker of recognition.

  He stopped dead.

  “New Umbrage?”

  “Could be. They were going hundreds of miles on a journey that would take twenty-seven years to start another city. Could be New Umbrage.”

  “Where?” Robin’s eyes were sparkling with anticipation.

  “Who knows? Hopefully we’ll find out some day. Hopefully you’ll find out some day, I have my hands full with the original Umbrage.” The machinery started to move inside him. “I do know that the angle of the bee dance is thirty-nine degrees.”

  I’d leave him to work out later that was the bearing from London to Tahoe. I stepped closer to the camera so he could see my eyes.

  “I’m going to be busy for a little bit Robin, OK?”

  He nodded warily.

  “But I promise I’ll be back. I promise.” I tried to beam the fierceness with which I felt this across to him. “I have to go do something for your mum now, OK? And you’re going to look after her until I get back.”

  His nod was slight but definite.

  I texted Rae with the link to Brandon’s field recording and wrote, “I’m going off-radar for a while but I’m always thinking of you two.”

  I dressed for trouble. A powder blue Gucci suit with thin gold chains at the cuffs, and an ivory shirt so soft that it felt more liquid than material. The tie was a meaty purple (“Oxblood” Kaspar called it, approvingly), as were the shoes. Not Lobbs this time but some German make that gleamed like a limousine’s bonnet.

  As I dressed I felt a kind of strength. Clothes like these said something about the wearer. Something about care and arrogance and power and a sheer head-spinning disregard for thrift — they put a barrier up around you that felt like armour.

  And beneath the armour there was a black wire twisting up through me, pulling everything taut about it. A black wire the shape of a burned-out match, snaking through vertebrae and stiffening my neck. I had a line, another, and let everything tighten inside me.

  As I walked down Brick Lane towards the tube I could feel the pull of eyes on me. Being Brandon brought a weight of attention that I couldn’t get used to. You were always being measured up as something. On a whim I stopped in at a barbers on one of the sidestreets. It was reassuringly old-fashioned and smelt of leather and lemon. The mirrors were fogged with steam and it was soundtracked by the ticking of heavy scissors. Only the barber himself, with his sleeve of sea-monster tattoos and hair in a messy bun, seemed to belong to the twenty-first century. I flicked through my phone to find the picture I wanted — Brandon’s first LA headshot, where his quiff was a complicated, sculptural thing, like a just-breaking wave.

  The barber examined the phone dubiously. “But this is you, right?”

  “Yeah, of course.” I crossed my legs and did the Brandon dust brush-off.

  “Huh. Mostly people bring in pictures of celebs, y’know. Actors or what-have-you.” He looked at the picture again. “This is a first.”

  “What can I say, I have a type,” I said. “And I don’t have all day.”

  Afterwards, back on Brick Lane, where the press of Londoners was strongest, a guy on his phone bumped shoulders with me. Not hard. It was just enough to send me spinning on my axis; I didn’t even fall. But in a second I was face to face with him, saying fuck you calmly but with a weight of intent that came out of nowhere.

  His response was instantaneous. He brought his face as close to mine as it could be without actually touching. Pedestrians parted neatly for us and looked away.

  He was shorter than me, but not by much, and he looked up at me with genuine fury. Fuck. You. Too. Each word was accompanied with a warm spray of spittle, and then we were toe to toe. Something in me was screaming run but the wire tightened, pitching me forward a little.

  My forehead touched his, his hairline tickling at my brow and his breath warming the space between us. I felt a power — something like ignorance, something like fatalism — and I said, very clearly, walk away little man, in a voice that wasn’t mine but was familiar, like hearing yourself on tape. And for another moment our eyes locked, and I could see a web of pink veins through the white, and a shutter-slide of pupils widening and then he was gone, just another bob of curly hair among the crowd.

  I darted into a coffee shop, my hands shaking. If it had come to blows everything would have crumbled, I knew that. I would have been in a ball on the floor, hands cradling my skull as I waited for it to be over. Still. It hadn’t come to that and now I felt like a knife, a point of light. Back on the streets people flowed around me like water. I was a racehorse in blinkers, a hawk mid-dive. I took the tube to Victoria, the train to Brighton.

  On the train I played the tracks over and over until their rhythms were my rhythms. I must have been talking to myself too, because I found I was alone in bank of four seats on an otherwise full train. I drank gins from the trolley that came round, three at a time, and when the attendant gave me a mournful look I repeated something I’d heard Brandon say years ago: “Don’t think of it as neat gin, think of it as a very, very dry martini.” I gave him a wink and a tenner tip.

  Hove felt better than London, purer. There were horizons and seagulls and empty streets. I liked the push of sea air against my skin and I snapped my teeth lik
e a dog against the sea spray. The route to Baxter’s place took me down roads that were solid and pale and quiet, places of family dinners and back-garden barbecues, but once I turned off the main streets it turned drabber.

  Tucked behind the Regency terraces was an unlovely industrial estate, ringed by sixties tower blocks that must have looked bright and modernist for about a week before the salt in the air stripped the paint right off the concrete and the seagull-shit turned the roofing to Pollocks. Baxter’s place was in a row of garages, all padlocked bar the last, where a tiny door like something out of Alice in Wonderland had been cut into the corrugated steel. Above it, someone had sprayed Broken Records. I rang the bell and heard a dog barking over distant music, and footsteps.

  Baxter peered out like a turtle from its shell. “Jesus Bran, you’re on time? I’m not even dressed, I figured you’d be another couple of hours.”

  He ushered me inside and down a corridor, talking all the way.

  “Remember the tour we did when we had that tour manager who used to make call-time an hour earlier than we needed to leave, just because he knew how late you’d be?”

  He didn’t seem to need me to answer. We turned a corner into a surprisingly comfortable looking room, three times longer than it was wide, dotted with jukeboxes.

  “So you started being two hours late to compensate, so he starts making call-time even earlier and by the end of the tour if we needed to leave at midday, lobby call would be 9am and you’d get up at two.”

  I smiled. I think that was what he was after. The coke was wearing off and I didn’t have the The Magpie’s protective shell to bolster my Brandon impersonation.

  “I’m going to get changed, there’s coffee and tea in the kitchen there” — he pointed out a small side door — “and all the jukeboxes are working; have a blast.”

  I supposed I should play something. The nearest jukebox was finned and turquoise with a grill like the front of a car. I flicked through the tracks and picked one at random, figuring that any song that I recognised would be wrong. Something pounding and shrill burst from the speakers.