The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  “This is what you get instead of love.” The last word stretched out, stepping down, like a bride down church steps, hem in hand, tap tap tap to the final note. And again, once more.

  We did it twice. Me speaking the verses with Kimi playing me like an instrument, the three of us on the chorus, and by the end the throb of blades in my head made the track sound like white noise. I was following more by Kimi’s breaths than by the words and I didn’t trust myself to do another take.

  “That’s it, I’m done.”

  I pushed the headphones back around my neck and Kimi unhitched the cable from her throat without meeting my eye.

  Dillon nodded. “Intense. Do you want to cut it now?”

  I glanced over at the machine. I couldn’t look at Kimi, it felt so intimate. “No time like the present, I guess?”

  Dillon pressed a button. “Deano, can you come to the cutting room?”

  He pulled his stool next to mine, an inch too close. He wore a heavy, fruity scent.

  “This is the way to do it, huh? So pure. Inspiration to physical product in…” he checked his watch, “Two hours. Like they did it in the early days.” He fiddled with his rings.

  “I’ve got some Robert Johnson acetates upstairs that he cut in one of those down-south recording booths. Just him and a guitar. Cost me a pretty penny.” A pause. “Ask me how much.”

  I shrugged, “How much?”

  “Half a mill. Worth it though. They’re the greatest artworks of the twentieth century.”

  He flicked through his phone. It was a habit every time there was the briefest lull in the conversation.

  “Look, Mark Zuckerberg. He gave a TED talk where he said that saving those recordings was as big a deal as saving the whale. Or something.”

  I felt a deep tiredness. I wanted to be done with these people and their complications.

  I fingered the memory stick in my pocket. “Could you cut a whole album?”

  He blinked and took off his glasses. “Sure, if you’ve got the masters.”

  I held up the memory stick. “Right now?”

  “Of course right now, come on.”

  He walked me through to the cutting room. I caught the smell of that night with Baxter: hot metal and PVC. Kimi waited outside, talking on her phone.

  “Deano, can you cue up a blank disc?”

  “Sure can boss-man.” I caught a hint of Dillon’s voice in Dean’s. Unconscious imitation or a subtle dig? Dillon tossed him the memory stick.

  “Are the tracks in sequence?” Dean was asking Dillon rather than me. He looked over.

  “Yeah, all set up and ready to go. Just add that last one on the end.”

  We sat together on a nubbly brown sofa, again slightly too close, but there was something comfortingly technical about the room — the heat and hum of machinery. Dillon alternated between listening, talking to me, and checking his phone.

  “I like this one. It’s kind of Beatles-y.” He sang along, his voice floating over the track.

  “I worked with McCartney a while back on a mobile phone launch. We did a show in Red Square.” He started flicking through his texts. “I’ve got his number here, see?”

  He blinked like it was too bright and cocked his head to the tune playing. “You think about doing this one a bit faster? Just a couple of bpm. I think it’d tighten it up some.”

  He tapped out a beat on the sofa’s wooden arm and then turned to face me. “Maybe it needs a remix.”

  I wished he’d stop talking. Just holding my face the way that Brandon did was giving me a headache.

  “Are you still doing remixes?”

  There was nothing casual in that question. His shoulders hunched in the silence. I wanted a line.

  “Nah, I told you, this is me retiring.”

  The tracks played on. Each one was time-stamped with the moment that Rae and I first heard them together. They came with built-in visuals: the subtle electricity of her face, the bloom of wrinkles around her eyes as she laughed, the guilty hand across the mouth, those heart-breaking nails — painted and bitten, bitten and painted — and the anarchy of her hair.

  I realised that “our tune” would probably have to be “The First Footprint in Fresh Snow” which made me laugh to myself; Dillon took that as his cue.

  “So, you know anything about this Smile acetate?”

  I looked away from the cutting machine. “Acetate?”

  “You’re not on the forums anymore? I know your pal Baxter is. Word is he’s found the motherlode. From the original tapes, whole shebang.”

  I was tied up in knots calculating what Brandon knew and how he’d play it with this man. “Sounds exciting.”

  Dillon pressed his face close to mine. His weirdly pocked and lineless face, like the surface of a basketball.

  “Exciting? Exciting? It’s the fucking Holy Grail. Make him come to me first if it’s true.”

  “I will. But he hasn’t mentioned it.”

  I don’t think he realised how tightly he was gripping my wrist. “But he would come to you, I’m sure.”

  Kimi was out in the corridor, still on the phone. I waved to her, hoping she’d catch my distress.

  Dillon kept looking directly at me as if the answers would show on my face. I forced myself to look back. He nodded at me, as if we’d decided something.

  “Good man, good man. Hey, you want to see a picture of me and Mick?”

  Kimi stood in the doorway. The light behind her made her look almost sculptural.

  “Are you boys done catching up?”

  “Just about. I’m getting Dillon’s guy to cut the whole album for us.”

  She walked me into the corridor and shook her head.

  “I know it’s fun to fuck around with him but he always lands on his feet. He’ll find a way to make this about him, I just know it.”

  I nodded. I didn’t care. All that was important was movement; it didn’t matter in which direction. I found an empty bathroom and did a line to quell the blood-throb in my head.

  When I came out Kimi was back on her phone. Dillon drummed his fingers on the glass and mouthed, “all finished”.

  The acetate was still warm in its plain white sleeve. Someone had written “unnamed Kimi/Kuss project. marksman productions” in Magic Marker across the top and Kimi rolled her eyes at me.

  “Let’s talk as we walk.” Dillon had me by the wrist again and was ignoring Kimi. His voice was low.

  “What about your other little pal, Saul?” He steered me along the corridor back the way we’d come. “I hear rumblings that he might be getting lawyered up. Is that anything to do with you?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why do I? That’s why I’m asking. You come back with your tail between your legs and suddenly all your little indie pals have got schemes on the go. Someone’s rattled their cages. When you see him, tell him even my lawyers have better lawyers than he does.”

  My blood pulsed in time with each step. It was easier to channel Brandon while we were moving. Downhill downhill. Poison in the bones. Acid in the cells.

  I reversed Dillon’s grip, grabbing his fat wrist.

  “Even the best lawyers in the world aren’t going to stop him if he wants to sue. It’s his fucking tune. He knows it, I know it…” I tightened my grip and forced my face closer to his. There was a smell of violets. “And you know it. He just didn’t have the law on his side before.”

  His face was fifty-fifty triumph and despair. He’d been right about something he’d wanted to be wrong about.

  The next day. The last day. A few hours of sleep in the ruins of the Notting Hill flat. An eviction notice was plastered on the wall outside and white tape criss-crossed the doorway. Sunlight struggled through thin curtains. The clock on the microwave flashed 00:00. And an unknown number set my mobile rattling across the floorboards.

  I answered, my lips and eyes gummed closed.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s Dillon. How much does he want, Saul?” />
  The light made my eyes ache and I pulled the sleeping bag over my head.

  “I thought he didn’t stand a chance?”

  “He doesn’t. But I still don’t want my dirty laundry aired in court. Some of us still have a reputation you know. So how much?”

  Brandon had told Saul a quarter of a million. But that was probably pumped up to get him interested. So £125,000? An idea stole over me. “He wants £66,000.”

  Dillon didn’t bother keep the relief out of his voice. “OK, I can manage that. Weird amount.”

  “He’s into numerology,” I improvised. “It’s a figure with magical qualities.”

  “Great, great. What a fucking muppet. How do I know he won’t still sue?”

  “I’ll get him to sign something. I have to be out on Eel Pie Island at 5 o’clock. Can you meet me there?”

  “Today? Sure. Wait, where’s fucking Eel Pie Island, can’t we meet at Soho House?”

  “Look it up for fuck’s sake. That’s where I have to be. Let’s get this over with.”

  The blood throbbed through my head in a way that set my vision trembling every ten seconds or so. I went to take a shower but the water was off.

  Packages started arriving around 10am. They were from high-street clothes shops and theatrical costumiers, all already paid for after Rae and Kimi had bonded over the costumes last night. The crow headdresses were to be the centrepiece but they’d styled the rest.

  I laid the deliveries out on the floorboards. FRANKIE SAYS CHOOSE LIFE T-shirts. Adidas three-stripe bottoms. Cherry-red Doc Martins. One eye each of fake eyelashes that Kimi sent over. Long black coats. It was a bonfire of symbols, meaningful on the surface, empty at its core. Perfect for Brandon.

  Ronnie and Reggie turned up at noon. If they saw anything strange about trying on costumes amid the wasteland of a wrecked twentieth floor flat, under the direction of the man they were about to shoot and his dead brother’s girlfriend, they gave no sign. The flat echoed to their yelps as they fought about whose headdress was nicer, and cooed over the eyelashes. Once they had the DMs laced up tight the pair of them chicken-danced around the flat, arms on each other’s shoulders, throwing themselves this way and that. Then they crammed into the little bathroom preparing for the big reveal and I could hear them bickering as they made final adjustments. Their clothes laid in piles on the floor. I took Ron’s phone from his jacket and retreated to the far corner of the kitchen to call Dillon.

  I set up the meeting again and gave him clearer directions. He already knew where he was going but I wanted a call of a decent length to have come from Ron’s number if anyone were to check his phone records later. After I hung up I sent him a text too, a text that I whittled away at until it could be read as though it had come from Ron rather than me. “£66,000 and he’s dead in the water. And you’re protected.”

  They came out hand in hand, once I’d tuned the clock radio to Kiss FM for their catwalk soundtrack. Ragged crow-men. Death in casualwear. They paraded up and down with lips set to permanent pouts and hands on hips. I cradled the laptop in my arms so Rae could see her creation, and her round of applause brought deep bows from both of them.

  From the speaker her voice was full of joy. “If that’s not every cool kid’s Hallowe’en costume this year then I’m losing my touch.”

  Once they’d left I lay on the floor and watched her at work in Tahoe.

  “Ready?” She turned her face sideways to look at me more clearly.

  “Ready.” I was. Everything was in place. “An hour until I leave, I don’t know what to do with myself suddenly.”

  “Well, I found one more thing of Brandon’s online. It just came up in a google search last night. It’s comments on a video for sale on a Japanese site, I’ll send it to you.”

  I switched over to the laptop and clicked on the link she’d sent. A hand-held video started up. People milling around a small venue, a few side-eyeing the cameraman. That low hubbub of something about to happen. On the screen Rae moved around the kitchen, singing something to herself. I clicked off Brandon’s video: I could watch that any time.

  OU Kids

  The following is a transcription of a comment under a bootleg live video for sale on a Japanese website. The whole site is in Japanese, bar the prices and the following text.

  Well, here’s a surprise. I had no idea there was footage from this, the final and most ill-fated of Remote/Control gigs. I’ve never seen as much as a still photo of the night; by this stage a band that’d been around as long as us — two whole years of striving — was irredeemably passé. Newer and shinier bands came along leaving us on the highest of shelves and not getting any cooler. Unsigned bands, like porn stars, have to break big in the first eighteen months or accept that they’re going to have to do the degrading stuff to get noticed. Hence this night, a showcase. (For those of you fortunate enough to not know what that is, a showcase is a kind of artificial gig, paid for by the band, with enough cash behind the bar to attract down that particular mix of jaded alcoholics which makes up the London A&R community, a community that will spend the entire gig up at the bar bitching about their colleagues. Thus you get the deadest of atmospheres at the precise moment the band need it to be at its wildest, making the whole point of the exercise — to get a deal — even unlikelier than before.) So why do it? Because we were fucked, broke, unhappy, hungover, bored, jealous and worst of all, profoundly in debt to the label who had given us £2,000 for a “development deal” that we — read I — had spent on clothes, booze and this godforsaken gig. This was a shameless flirt for some major label to buy out our contract.

  The video’s two-figure view-count is an indication of how little interest there is in a Remote/Control gig today, but for those of you thinking what the hell is this shit I thought I’d provide a spot of director’s commentary: Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the death of Remote/Control.

  0:10 Shonky title page in Japanese. The text looks more comprehensive than the English but I’m buggered if I’m going to run it through Google Translate. It’s the Borderline, just off Charing Cross Road, and it’s late in 1994, that much I’m sure of.

  0:20 The cameraman takes a swing through the crowd. Scant is the word I would use. Thin would fit just as well. Sparse. Patchy. Disappointing. Underwhelming. It’s a mix of the less savvy A&R men who didn’t realise that everyone important had already passed on us, hopeless out-of-towners, confused foreigners and Remote/Control regulars (a cohort so tiny that they could comfortably fit in a phone box). Oh, and Dillon Marksman. Look, at 0:25, that’s him, with his entourage of hangers-on, doing what he does best: checking out those more talented than him and working out a way to boil down their bones into snake oil.

  0:30 More crowd shots. A wild track of the camera past backs of heads onto a blur of empty stage. Get it focused dude, that’s my career ending up there. The ratio of punters waiting by the stage to those queuing at the bar is around 1:12. And there’s the semi-circle of doom: that patch of bare dance floor neighbouring the stage which no one dares to visit for fear of being infected by the air of decline coming from the very idea of Remote/Control.

  0:45 Our intro music: Vaughn Williams’ “A Lark Ascending”. We’d stolen that idea (like so many others) from The Smiths, who played ‘Romeo and Juliet’ before they came on, lending the stage an air of drama and grandeur. Here it just sounds like someone’s left Classic FM on.

  0:55 The sound of a crowd erupting: cheers, whistles, a vast surge of almost sexual excitement that breaks like a wave across the audience, whipping them on to even greater fury….

  1:00 …which is all on tape, of course. It came from one of Saul’s recordings of the Blackburn raves. We added the crowd noise to the classical music, hoping to get a Pavlovian response from this dog of an audience.

  1:05 The lights finally lower, even if the conversations don’t. There’s a pitiful hiss of dry ice which makes the stage look even more barren than before.

  1:12 Enter Saul, stage right.
Looking, it pains me to say, fucking great. Being murderously pissed off suits him. The more street-wise among you will recognise the movements of a man who’s just done a couple of pencil-thick lines backstage. (While the more emotionally intuitive of you might also guess from his rigidity that this is man vibrating with anger, possibly brought on by his old friend and band leader’s admission that the last of their advance had gone on staging this fiasco, and if it didn’t turn out to be a glorious success then his plan was to get on a plane, any plane, to anywhere, and never have to set eyes on the other three losers again.) He stands stage left with his back to the audience, just waiting for a knife. There’s no second guitar on the first track so he takes up position behind the keyboards and plays an elegant little piano figure, waiting for….

  1:30 Kimi. Kim Balloch then. Now known by a single name, like Prince or Bjork or Hitler. Look at that grown-out Mohican, the stubble on the side of her head as downy as a rabbit’s ear. Her mum’s pearls and Essex-girl white stilettos. She’s a mess, but a hot mess, right? She straps on that white Gibson Firebird and plays root notes, up, down, up, down. Her tongue sticks out in concentration but she’s in that zone where she looks so good that everything gets forgiven. Stamping in her high heels like a tantrum. Can you see what she would become even back then? She’s got something, that’s for sure. Something in the awkwardness of her movements, like she’s being worked remotely. The thick smudge of her eyeliner could be affectation, could be the row we’d had backstage; she cried easily did our Kim, like it was no thing at all. If the seed of her future fame is hidden there then it was me, and the whole sorry failure of Remote/Control, that caused it to bloom. Her steel and rigour came from me. I taught her how to run a band and to bend it to your will. And if you keep watching you’ll see me show her how to burn it all down too. I was a shining example and a cautionary tale. You’re welcome.