The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  I looked up at Reggie silhouetted against the grey of the sky. Mane of feathers, curve of beak, the barrel of the shotgun. He waited. Why? Then I remembered. I dropped the record as gently as possible, watching blood smear across the paper sleeve.

  My eyes raised with the shotgun, its own two pupils on mine. The beak levelled and the shotgun jerked. It made a softer sound than I expected; another invisible shove, low and deep. A sucker punch. The air rushed from my body and I pressed the button and felt the blood burst from the pouch. I wrapped my arms around myself just as Rae had taught me. Getting back up had moved me too far forward and the edge of the bridge was four or five feet behind me. If I fell back now then I’d miss the handrail. I took a step back and raised my hand, late, much too late.

  At the end of things we’re just bodies moving through space. Engineering problems, and not even complex ones at that. The handrail rushed to meet the back of my thigh and my weight turned the rail into a pivot. I toppled backwards, my arms reaching towards the sun, horizontal now, no noise, just the bland London sky again, before I was backwards, upside down and the noise all around me. As I fell the wire snagged on my heel. I spun right over and was tugged down, gravity and the weight combining to make me fall feet first. The wire on my heel tightening. A flash of sky but no one moving. The dark lip of the bridge. I brought my feet together but still the water slapped at my stomach and face. The trick is to make as little splash as possible. I should be able to do that.

  The last thing. In Kimi’s tower block in the clouds surrounded by people who were like comic-book characters, and Rae onscreen so real it hurt to look at her, and Jay saying very softly, “we’re going to need some blood.” Three syringes’ full into a clear pouch. My blood. Brandon’s blood.

  The cold punched the air out of me as I reached along the wire. Robin had given me the idea. That dandelion clock at the centre of New Umbrage worked on the simplest of pulley systems. You tripped the wire, weights fell and the structure rose. Things spread apart in tandem. This morning I dropped a bag containing the lightweight breathing gear onto the river bed. A pulley wire connected it to a loop on the bridge. My foot went in the loop.

  The first jolt freed the bag from the silt and pulled the wire from the bridge. I let the water envelop me until my feet touched — barely — the riverbed but the water was too filthy to see anything. I grabbed the wire from my boot and followed it, hand over hand, to the familiar shape of the mouthpiece. I’d practised this at Trellick Tower, blindfolded until I knew the shape of the mask by touch alone, holding my breath against the cold. In the sink I’d managed forty-five seconds without breathing but already, maybe ten seconds in, my lungs were heaving. I pulled the mask on, forced myself not to rush and turned the valve. Nothing. I let it run, squeezing water out of the mask until there it was: thin, rubbery air. I took a breath, another, and then fitted the goggles. Even with them on I couldn’t see my hand in front of me.

  I must have kicked up silt from the floor, a cloud around me like Pig-Pen. Should I wait for it to clear so I didn’t leave a trail of silt? Or get moving before someone dived in to help? The sheer naked embarrassment of the latter set me walking. Short steps, holding the weight and its airtight package a little off the floor. I couldn’t help kicking up mud but it dissipated around me. I toddled, inelegantly, upstream. I tried to keep the light above me even. Even light meant the same depth, meant invisibility, meant escape. Eight hundred steps I’d calculated yesterday, eight hundred steps until it was safe.

  I stripped out of the wet clothes and lay for a second on the shore of the island I’d scoped out yesterday. It was two hundred metres upstream of the bridge but hidden around a kink in the river, out of sight of Eel Pie. For a moment I stared up at the sky; a dead man, a no one. I watched Heathrow planes write contrails across the sky until the sound of far-off sirens snapped me back. My hair was thick with silt and when I ran a hand through it came away filthy. I took a T-shirt and jeans from the waterproof bag and replaced them with my sodden shirt and trousers. I changed, shivering in the cool beneath the trees, and pulled a woolly hat down over my hair. I put on glasses, trainers. Nothing clothes: the sort of stuff I would have worn before this whole thing started. Then everything went into a sports bag before I pulled the rowing boat out from under the vegetation. Earwigs scuttled from underneath as I dragged it to the water. One set of sirens stopped and then another started up.

  I pushed off for the south bank, the slap of oars on the water sounding loud as handclaps. Halfway across I stopped. The south bank was lined with trees — a stand of London Planes — but I could see the flash of blue lights through the trunks. A police car and an ambulance. I’d mapped the whole area and I couldn’t imagine why they would stop there. It was a featureless stretch of roadside: that why I’d chosen it as the landing spot.

  I let the boat drift for a minute to see if they’d move on, but there was just the blink of lights and an occasional horn. As quietly as possible I manoeuvred the boat around and struck out for the far end of Eel Pie Island instead. The houseboats here were older, and so thickly overhung with trees that they blended into the landscape. I manoeuvred quietly, gently batting at the water, until I found what I was looking for: a boarded-up houseboat with its own jetty. Through the trees I could hear voices in a shouted conversation and the same bunch of kids playing. I dragged the boat into the long grass around the untended garden and tipped it onto its side. The shouts were making their way across the island like smoke signals. Doors opened and shut and a fresh siren sounded from the south bank. I walked onto one of the main paths. It had the feeling of a well-tended campsite. Already residents were making for the bridge but slowly, chatting along the way, like the crowd before a football match. I walked with my head down, trying not to hurry.

  The bridge was in turmoil. A police car and two ambulances howled impotently on the main road and I could see debris scattered across the tarmac. The island’s residents collected around the entrance to the bridge but a couple were leaning over the side and taking selfies. A dinghy circled around the legs of the bridge, throwing up a wake of froth while a pair of yellow-clad policemen encircled a gesticulating Dillon. It would take some digging for anyone to connect the £66,000 he had in cash on him to the cost of Ronnie and Reggie, but some digging is what I expected.

  On the main road a police car crawled up onto the grass to avoid the debris. Any second now there would be crime-scene tape and large-scale interviewing and lies to be told. I strode across the bridge, keeping my eyes on the water upstream as if I expected someone to appear. A policeman made a half-hearted attempt to keep me back but there were people joining the bridge from both sides now.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” I walked across to the other side, turning my back to pass Dillon and the policemen. A phalanx of paramedics yomped up carrying a stretcher and oxygen tanks.

  The taxi driver was chatty. I had to put earphones in just to shut him up. We headed west to Heathrow through back-garden suburbia with glimpses of the Thames through the trees.

  I checked the passport again. Mine was out of date and Jay had said he’d need a day for a new one so I was travelling on Brandon’s Fitzroy one. It looked brand new. The covers were stiff and the pages empty and his photo wore a wry half-smile. I practised the same look via my reflection in the window. I flicked through the pages to check for any stamps that I should know about and found, jammed deep in the fold of the middle pages, a SIM card. Heathrow 12 miles. Blood under my nails. Silt in my hair.

  Esophobia

  There was just one piece of data on the SIM card: a long piece of writing, spread across a series of texts. They were the most difficult things to transcribe as they’re full of run-on sentences which lack capitals or punctuation. I’ve tidied them up as best I can and removed anything that I don’t think is pertinent. All texts were still in the drafts folder.

  5:45am. I opened a window. Partly to clear some of the gloom from the air but also to hear Kimi leaving; her brief co
nversation with Kaspar, car doors opening and closing, tyres on concrete and finally just the birds. Other goodbyes crowded my head. Other doors closing, other cars pulling away into the dawn. Another whole life was disappearing in the back of a long, black car. I shook the feeling off and pressed RECORD. Coming down is a great time to make a record: the gaps between things thin and you can lie back and let the universe work your strings. I rerecorded “Dead Beats” and “End of the World”. We’d played them well enough but the band made them too solid and these were songs that needed the threat of collapse. I didn’t listen back.

  It was daybreak. A hint of reality at the edges of things and all the hazy joys of night congealing. I remembered something I’d heard on the TV and scribbled it down in my book as a possible title: Eosophobia, the fear of the dawn. I burnt four CDs. My only doubt was that last song and the long lacunae scattered throughout it. An inner voice told me it was fine: the gaps were pure and elegant, but deep down I knew it wasn’t so. Here, at the death, I had nothing.

  I wanted to be walking. I would burn through the fumes of last night and extinguish myself. I had a vision of walking to the coast, fading with every step, clouds of energy trailing behind me like a cloak, until I stepped, featherlight, off the cliff. Suede shirt, black trousers, brothel creepers.

  Kaspar was on the phone in the lobby. He gestured to me to wait but I mouthed “Just going for some air,” and stepped out into the dawn. Grey and gold. Smog and halogen. Stone and rain.

  6:25am. It was cold enough to keep you moving fast. I took turns at random, avoiding streets I knew and letting London’s backstage slide by. Left, right, right. No pattern to it. A beggar sat under the bluish light of an ATM, holding a lead but no dog. I fished in my pockets: some dollars and a baggie of Jay’s TLAs. If anyone needed some beauty in his life it was this guy so I tossed a couple into his hat and dry-swallowed the others. The last hurrah of the coke leant a forward tilt to my stance, propelling me through the crowds, and a flock of suits in Old Street parted automatically for me. Into the City. It was already thick with traffic. Busses with windows wet from the sleepy breath of the dreaming shift workers: Somali cleaners and Serbian security guards and Bengali caterers and Romanian hookers and Persian croupiers and Polish repairmen. Upstream against the Mercs and the Lexuses with Radio 4 playing and backseat iPhones bringing news of which bank had gone belly-up today.

  I cut north towards Barbican, past the last sad bit of London’s Roman walls, shoddy and ill-lit in the lee of some Brutalist loading bay. Something in the TLAs was flyposting stray images across my mind and unspooling snippets of lyrics. An infuriating shop name — Spit’n’Panache — the cartoon splotches of vitiligo on the skin of a piebald Rasta begging from a doorway, a pigeon’s tail poking out from a rustling and discarded bag of bagels, they all dropped hooks in me. And over it all a loop of melding songs like a kid fiddling with the car radio.

  Round round get around, I get around the world around the world won’t listen I listen to the band on the run young hearts run free

  North again. Through one of those nameless who-lives-here bits of London. Gone dawn but the street lights still on. Dead estates patiently awaiting gentrification behind their screens. The blankest of graffiti: no pictures, no beauty, just names written over names over names. Into the Angel. Rae had loved London’s names. The Angel, Seven Sisters, Crystal Palace: like something from a fantasy novel.

  After a third time miscalculating the trajectory of a car as I crossed the road — a smeared blare of horn, a shouted insult lost in the wind — I ducked into a greasy spoon at the back of Kings Cross. It gave me instant flashbacks to my first London life, with its laminated menus and the plastic ketchup containers shaped like tumorous tomatoes, crusted with dried product the same brown-red as old blood. I wasn’t hungry but I ordered a number three — two eggs, chips, beans, sausage, bacon and fried bread — as a sop to the time I planned to spend there, and it arrived disturbingly quickly.

  8:10am. I was coming to some kind of equilibrium. My heart stopped beating like butterfly wings high in my chest, and the scraps of music and conversation that were cross-fading through my mind had calmed down to something ignorable, like the hubbub of a pre-curtain theatre audience.

  There were traffic lights outside the window and I watched the drivers. A business-suited woman with feline eye makeup checked her breath on the back of her hand, a van driver lit a ciggie from the end of another. The morning felt heavy and slow and I had an urge to lay my head on the Formica and sleep. The caff played oldies radio: “If Paradise Was Half as Nice” and “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”; ten-second news bulletins and adverts for opticians and car insurance; “Needles and Pins”, “You Can’t Hurry Love”. Records like clouds or rain, you couldn’t imagine them being written, couldn’t imagine the lyrics scribbled into a notebook, couldn’t imagine the band leader saying let’s try it in three-four time.

  A Lycra-clad cyclist, exotic in lime-green and top-heavy under an insectoid helmet, balanced at the lights, micro-adjustments keeping him upright. I willed him to topple with all my heart. Hailstones the size of garden peas sprang instantaneously against the window. Two old boys sat in opposite corners of the caff, both working their way through steaming platefuls of whatever the day’s special was: something brown and viscous with the aroma of cat food. I got another cup of tea and waited for the hail to subside. Two kids on bikes crossed in front of the window and one palmed something to the other without even slowing. Neatly done.

  The news finished and Etta James came on. An old favourite. I would rather, I would rather go blind… than to see you walk away. I held my breath under its skinny spell. Like a solar eclipse it was better not to face it head on otherwise it would burn you, you had to come at it in bits. That rubbery one-string guitar part buried deep down in the mix. The girls oohing and yeahing in the background, girls who you knew were serious and beehived and lovely, who lived two bus rides away from the studio and brought their homework with them to do while they waited, with their swells and their triumphs and their fingerclicks. The horns just out of bed and late to the party, and then Etta herself, always a head-nod ahead of the beat, sounding cool and ready except on the special lines which caught in her throat like death. (When she sang most of all I just don’t wanna be free it punched the air out of me). I revelled in the sheer unlikeliness of it all. Two minutes and thirty-five seconds of warm Alabama air, moved this way and that by vocal cords and vibrating strings and felt beaters, trapped in a series of magnetic charges on tape and later digitised onto silver discs and sent across the ocean to be played on air, plucked algorithmically from the annals, converted again into radio waves and beamed through the haze of London skies and put back together by that radio there, sat behind the counter, the sound back in its element again, set free to strike at my eardrums. And despite all this transformation and reconfiguration it still hit me like an uppercut. My eyes wet with tears just like Etta’s but six thousand miles and thirty-five years away. Remote Control.

  What was my life compared with that? What was I going to do with my days that might compete? I watched the girls huddled under an awning opposite, smoking furiously, and the kids with their school jackets pulled up over their heads, and the old boys trying to make the last bit of their lunch last, and the waitress wiping down the same table again because, really what else is there to do, and the cook with his tattooed arms crossed on the counter, and the people rubbing view-holes in the condensation of the bus windows, and the endless fucking gaggle of mums with their endless fucking pramfuls of babies, and the Porsche drivers talking into headsets and the van drivers with week-old Daily Stars yellowing on the dashboard and I thought what the hell will I ever do to compare with this, this divine procession of tiny hopes and monumental pain, and the taste of unexpected tears on your tongue and flickering light in past-midnight bedrooms and bruises in hard-to-reach places and a loneliness like thin ice over black, black water, loneliness like animal’s teeth, like
a living death.

  10:01am. I left a tenner on the table and left before the song could finish, striding into pinpricks of hail and the hint of sunshine at the corners of the sky. I felt righteous and feather-light. What had I been thinking? That I was important, that I mattered? My footsteps were a drumbeat and songs started up in my mind more insistent than before.

  May the road rise with you, may the road to nowhere come on inside, step inside love let me find you a place there’s a place for us somewhere a place we’ll find a new way of living on the ceiling someday somewhere

  The road rose for me. Down the hill to Kings Cross proper. Into St Pancras. For a generation just an unloved, minor-key appendix to the bustle of Kings Cross, now seemingly awake from its cocoon and thriving. Somewhere the rain got turned up a notch and I sat in the station pub there, a cookie-cutter gastro-bore called the Betjeman. I half-remembered an interview Betjeman had given, propped up and freezing in a bath chair on some bleak Sussex cliff, a million years old and posher than the queen, and his being asked “Is there anything you regret about your life?” and, fingerclick-quickly, his reply, “I wish I’d had more sex.” I raised a double MacCallan to the old invert as the storm of songs swept over me.

  To the centre of the city where all roads meet waiting for you, so tired, tired of waiting for my man hey whiteboy what you doing uptown top ranking say me give you heart attack waiting I’m not waiting on a lady I’m just waiting on a friend