The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  She propped her chin on her hands. “Doesn’t matter, it’ll wait.” She watched me.

  “I might have a little doze,” I told her, desperately.

  “In a minute.” The voice box shot the words out staccato, with equal stress. Jay watched from the lounge, aware that something was going on. She asked, “What’s the only good Radiohead album, Bran?”

  Silence. I actually did feel sick. My stomach churned.

  “Where did we steal REM’s rider again, you remember that show?”

  Something twisted deep in my gut, down where there are no nerve endings. A heat rose in my throat.

  “Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong Bran?”

  I held up a hand to fend her off and then stood up and headed for the bathroom. It was lined with mirrors. I knelt in front of the bowl and began to retch. A thin liquid the colour of straw.

  The door opened behind me. Kimi knelt beside me and stroked my hair. “There, let it out.”

  My back arched but nothing came.

  “The thing is,” her hand was cool on the back of my neck. “I don’t think you’re so wrecked that you forgot how to pronounce Bowie.” She said it bo-ee and I retched again. “You were kind of a stickler about that back in the day.”

  My head throbbed.

  “Or that Mick Ronson had been dead a decade before Let’s Dance. Or that ‘Under Pressure’ isn’t on that album.”

  I spat, trying to clear the strands of acid drool.

  “I mean you’d literally forget your own name before something like that.”

  Her touch was like someone stroking a dog: friendly, thoughtless. She took a clump of my hair and pulled me to face her, but gently. I couldn’t hold her gaze.

  “So what’s going on?”

  I wiped my hand across my mouth. I went to speak but I had no idea what to say. She looked closer. And then it happened.

  “Fuuuuuuuuuuck.” The hand stopped. The voicebox quieter than ever. I heard my name, my secret name, across two small syllables. “Ad-am?”

  We’d met before. I didn’t remember it but Kimi did. As I sat in the kitchen, wrapped in a blanket like an invalid, Kimi and Jay examined me.

  “The Venue, New Cross. It was supposed to be full of A&R because Fabulous were headlining so it was a three-line whip for getting people along. Bran introduced you as his ‘stunt double’. You were nice, nervy. You liked my shoes.”

  It was possible. Going backstage always gave me panic attacks, I would have spent the whole time counting the seconds before I could safely leave. And she did have nice shoes.

  In fits and starts I told them everything that had happened but it sounded ridiculous as I put it all together. Brandon’s plan: how he was to have taken my place, the incompetence of Ron and Reg, my spur-of-the-moment decision to become him. They didn’t look convinced. Finally I found the CCTV of Brandon’s shooting on my phone and showed them. That was easier than trying to convince them that this wasn’t some hallucinated story.

  At the end of it, with Brandon just a dark smear on the ground, they went off together and talked in low voices in the kitchen. When they came back they switched everything off. The music and the cameras: dead. The blinds were turned so tight that it was like a black box in the lounge.

  Kimi asked, “Why? Why are you doing this?”

  I told them about Rae and Robin. I’d not said a word to anyone about them so it came out in a deluge, an outpouring like a mirror image of the ten minutes in the bathroom. I ranted about the stolen mortgage and how Brandon had betrayed them, their humiliation and poverty and my determination to use Brandon’s selfishness to build them a new life.

  Kimi’s first reaction was, “Bran has a kid? Poor, poor fucker.” But her features softened. “So why are you still here? You’ve told them what happened?”

  “Of course.”

  She had a way of looking at you very directly. When I looked away she placed a hand on my chin and forced me to look back at her. She pushed my quiff away from my eyes.

  “But there’s more.” Her eyes darted around my face. “You want them. You want to be with them. Is that it?”

  Yes yes yes yes yes yes. Like steam escaping. Yes yes yes yes yes. Saying it out loud made it real. The idea was a building you could step inside and walk around. Yes yes yes yes yes. Yes, I want to be with them. Yes, I want to be there.

  “I do, but I had things to take care of. Things of his that needed finishing so that they’d be sorted whether I were there or not.”

  Her smile widened. “Oh, Baxter’s Beach Boys thing.”

  Bran’s protective cloak was in tatters now. I’d vomited him away back there. I just wanted to lie there and talk it all out. “And a legal thing, with Saul.”

  Kimi’s gaze was relentless. Her eyes searched my face for some sign that only she could interpret. “The Smile record is done, Baxter told me that. And Jay tells me that you’ve already been to see Saul. Why are you still here?”

  My mouth was dry however much water I drank. “I’m not done yet. I need to finish him.” I tried to hold her gaze.

  “Finish him? The way it was supposed to end?”

  I nodded. “There’s a way. But there’s another thing.” Something had been nagging at me for the last few days and now, with Kimi in front of me, I could put into words.

  “I want that last track done. I’m going to finish it. I’m going to reclaim it for them.” The idea had come to me reading Brandon’s notes. I would complete the track that had eluded him and the record would belong to me.

  Kimi let out a deep sigh, as if she’d been holding her breath all this time. “And that kept you here. You risked everything for a piece of music. You’re not that unlike him.”

  The rest of the night was a blur of movement. Jay was in and out every hour, constantly on the phone. After a flurry of texts we connected the Tahoe feed up to the TV so Rae could be involved. She and Kimi circled each other like cats: wary but intrigued. A call roused Ron and Reg from a warehouse party in Bethnal Green and they sat perched on the couch, clearly in awe of Kimi.

  It was out of my hands. Six of us on the fiftieth floor: three unlikely couples with one thing to plan. The meat of the idea was mine, the creative touches came from Rae, but it was Kimi and Jay who made things happen. This had become a show and they knew how to put on a show.

  When everything was as organised as it was ever going to be Kimi’s driver took me back to Notting Hill. The post was piled high, topped with three letters from the Residents’ Association: a complaint about excessive noise and out-of-hours construction work, an urgent query over the status of the registered owner, headed simply Deceased? and finally, inevitably, an eviction notice.

  The flat was huge without Umbrage but it was empty and warm and there was a sleeping bag. I slept, unmoving, for ten straight hours. When I woke my phone showed twenty missed calls: Kimi, Jay, the residents’ association. A text from Robin read simply, “We are here”.

  There were stale Pop Tarts in the fridge and I ate two of them raw while sitting on the toilet. My energy was returning. Not Brandon’s catherine-wheel energy, spinning and spitting but never actually getting anywhere, but a builder’s energy. The feeling that each brick you placed told you where the next one would go.

  I had phone conversations with model-makers about stress tests and leverage ratios while I walked the Thames’ eastern bridges and measured handrails. I visited sports shops and chandlers, and picked up the Kevlar vest that Jay had found me. I left Kimi to arrange the recording session, which might have been a mistake. She booked Hot Action, not knowing my history with the place. The symmetry of the thing was very Brandonesque, but whoever it was who’d left that window open hadn’t sounded like he wanted to see me again. Momentum would have to carry me through.

  I racked out lines in a McDonald’s bathroom and took one of the TLAs that Jay had recommended. When I closed my eyes there was a noise like a river and the tick of metal feet. They pushed me onwards. I booked tickets on
three different flights, allowing for the alternate ways this might play out. I sent Robin ideas for New Umbrage and as I walked I could see his streets overlaid onto London’s tired old stone.

  Hot Action felt very different by daylight. I followed a blinking neon sign reading XXX ACTION INSIDE down a dingy alley. At its end people crowded a lobby, concentrated around a table of drinks. Music was muffled by the glass frontage. I almost lost my nerve, but a combination of Brandon, the coke and those robot rhythms pulled me inside. There were too many faces, too many unknown faces, but by the back wall I recognised Kimi’s blade of hair. She was a head taller than most of the men and gratefully I shouldered my way through to her. She gave me air kisses and placed a hand on my forearm with a look of concern. I faded the crowd from my mind and anchored myself onto her.

  “Play nice, I didn’t know that he’d be here,” she whispered, and then a pair of hands spun me round.

  “You talentless cocksucker.”

  The face was too close. Hat, glasses that were shaped like sunglasses but with clear lenses, bad skin like orangepeel and a beard that looked drawn on. But smiling, beaming even.

  I looked back at Kimi and he kept talking. “You know you should have booked the place yourself, there’s a special rate for unknowns.”

  He waited, obviously expecting a reply. A girl at his side giggled nervously. Kimi mouthed “Dillon” at me as the silence lengthened.

  Finally I said, “Well I figured I owed you some back rent.”

  He blinked, then grabbed my arm, delighted. “Water under the bridge Brannie, forget about it. Come on, let’s go and make some magic.”

  He steered me through the crowd, taking Kimi by the other arm. She towered above him and even I was a head taller; it felt like we were taking a kid for a walk.

  We made our way through the studio with Dillon providing a running commentary. “These are the writing cubicles. We’ve got nearly twenty guys working here at one time, all semi-freelance. Kind of like a twenty-first century Brill Building. We do stuff for Rhianna, Katy Perry, Sugababes — all those people. I keep trying to get this cutie here to do some writing, eh Kimi?”

  Her face was a mask. “That he does.”

  Double doors led to the old section of the studio and I recognised the layout now. Dillon had a nod and a word for anyone who walked past, as much for our benefit as theirs, I thought. He walked us along the curved corridor into the circular studio room. It looked far less sinister today. Even lit by the signs that ringed the walls — GIRL-ON-GIRL, NEW MODEL, HOT COCK ACTION — it was recognisably a workplace. A barefoot teenager was tuning up a guitar on one of the stools.

  “Hey Deano, I’ll take it from here.” Dillon picked up the guitar and the boy scurried away.

  “Good kid,” he said as the boy left the room. “He’s a rapper, and a damn good ’un, but I like to make sure they have a grounding in all aspects here.” Again he waited. I was beginning to enjoy the awkward silences but Kimi looked pained.

  “So, Kimi played me the track, it’s sounding good. Didn’t think you had it in you Bran.”

  He strummed a chord sequence on the guitar, something from the verse.

  “Uh, thanks. Yeah I think we’ve really got something. But it’s going to be the last track, and this idea just came to me.” Brandon’s archness was eluding me today. There was another silence.

  “Here, look at this.” Dillon’s face lit up as he handed me the biggest mobile phone I’d ever seen. “Here, scroll down. Look.”

  He wore rings on every finger — ornate, gothic things — and I couldn’t help looking at them rather than the screen. Skull, bird’s head, eyeball.

  “What do you think of that?” He was pointing to a text. Under “sender” it read NELSON MANDELA. He didn’t show me the body of the message.

  “Cool, I guess.” I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say.

  “Talking about this charity thing we did in South Africa. We put pianos in five hundred school classrooms. And, get this, all the keys were black.”

  He flicked through his phone. “Got one from Aretha here somewhere.”

  Kimi touched my arm again. “Brandon, Dillon has kindly offered to produce the session today.” There was a flash of warning in her eyes.

  “Oh great. That’s very kind. But y’know, anyone would be fine.”

  Kimi was falling over herself to agree. “An engineer would do. Or a tape op even. We know exactly what we want.”

  Dillon waved her away. “We’ll have an engineer for the grunt work. But a project like yours needs a creative to sprinkle a little fairy dust.” He pointed two thumbs at himself.

  “I said we’d be happy to do it ourselves.” The voicebox flattened any nuance there might have been in the sentence but her eyes were fixed on me.

  But there was a note of finality in Dillon’s voice. “Nonsense, wouldn’t hear of it.”

  We set up in silence. The kid came back to man the mixing desk, moving faders and patching cables. He gestured to the headphones and I put mine on. His voice was unpleasantly intimate in my ears. “Something like this?”

  The track started playing. Three pairs of eyes on me. Dillon, Dean, Kimi.

  Everything fluttered and strobed in my headphones, like helicopter blades. I looked at Dillon and Kimi. They seemed unconcerned.

  “Yeah it sounds fine.”

  “No changes to the mix?”

  “No, let’s go with that.”

  Kimi leaned in so the microphone was at her neck level. “You’re going to lose the organ, yeah? It’s a guide.”

  I felt a stutter building and dark liquid rising. “Um, yeah.” Trying to keep the question out of my voice.

  “If I could?” Dillon’s voice, not waiting for a response. “Could we roll some top off the SG? It’s eating up the vocal space. Just a gnat’s. And Bran? The delay on the piano? Is it printed? Because it sounds out to me.”

  Three pairs of eyes. Far-off helicopters. Air bubbles in thick oil.

  “It’s supposed to be that way.” I tried not to sound petulant. Remembering something Brandon had quoted in his videos I said, “It’s just wrong enough.”

  Dillon held his hands up. “You’re the boss-man, boss-man.”

  There was an electronic four-count and the track started up. In the headphones I could hear beauty in it for the first time. Every line suggested the next. The melody and the chords pulled it far from home but then, every verse, back it came like a key in a lock. It pushed back at the pressure behind my eyes, balancing me on tiptoes. Up, up, on, and back. I closed my eyes and let my head hang down.

  The track stopped. “Your line Bran.” Dillon looked amused. Kimi, less so.

  “Sorry, yes.” I brought myself back. “I was, um, enjoying that.”

  “From the top?” The engineer’s voice.

  “From the top.”

  I’d gone back to Kimi’s original lyrics. Brandon had rewritten them with a verse each for Kimi, Saul, Baxter and him, but I wanted the cornerstone of his record to be something he’d had no hand in. Kimi’s chords and verse, my voice and, at its centre, in the space that he’d died still unable to fill, a line of Rae’s that had haunted me since she’d first said it.

  I smoothed out my lyric sheet in front of me. I should have been more nervous than I was I suppose; I hadn’t sung since I was a kid. But the tide rose in me like seasickness and the inevitable cycle of chords was a gentle push in my back.

  Eastern religions, signs from the deep, skin dripping oceans, too little sleep

  I croaked it out. My voice sounded thin in the headphones and I felt the room’s attention round on me.

  Imaginary cities, cells in the sky, Astanga, the Buddha, high-life in lo-fi

  I couldn’t find the note. It was virtually a spoken-word piece yet still I was off-key. Kimi made a signal to the engineer and the song halted. She looked worried, Dillon intrigued.

  “You OK there Bran? Big night?”

  “Fine, just…” my voice tailed o
ff. The rotor noise in my head thickened and slowed.

  “Shall we try the voicebox? Like I suggested?”

  I had no idea what she meant. “Sure, like we suggested.”

  She unplugged the lead from the mike and brought it up to her throat. On the underside of the voicebox there was the thinnest of sockets. She connected an adaptor to the cable. “Closer,” she said.

  I stood facing her and she placed the mike in front of me. “Speak.”

  I started to talk. An Umbrage story. In the third year of the Raven, after forty days of rain.

  As I spoke she began to move her mouth silently. She pursed her lips and opened wide, her tongue tapped her teeth and all the while her eyes were on my lips. The words I spoke began to alter with the timing of her movements. They glided into a key, thickened and split, doubled and trebled and then tumbled down into something from a horror movie. It was beautiful and it was terrifying.

  “Sing,” she ordered, and I went back to the lyric sheet.

  One part obsession, one pinch of denial

  Ambition and envy and a crocodile’s smile

  Speaking in tongues when the machines have the mike

  A loop from snuff-film with one million likes

  All I provided was the rhythm, the rest was all her. The plaintive melody with its descending downwards run at the end. The repetitions and echoes, the ghostly spin-offs that thinned and multiplied and soared and plummeted. She mixed in gravel and helium, sandpaper and silk.

  “OK.” She closed her eyes for a second. “From the top.”

  We were so close that I could see every movement of her throat. She caressed and repositioned my voice and it was like being carried as a child, taken, barely awake, in your father’s arms up to sleep.

  Women are bullets and men are the guns

  Dark aspects, dead planets round collapsing suns

  Mouths are still moving long after they’re dead

  Women are nooses, men shots to the head

  I’d emailed her the new chorus but I had no idea if she had learned it, so when we reached that point I pulled the mike close again. She was ready though and as our voices meshed she raised an eyebrow. Then, on the second time round, we were joined by Dillon. There we were, the three of us. Me gruff — a flatlining vocal that was there for padding as much as anything. Kimi, on some voice box setting that made her glide from one note to another like a violin, and Dillon with a surprisingly sweet, soulful tone. Three voices splitting and recombining, passing each other then coming together for the last word.