by Mat Osman
I dangled the key in front of the camera. “Same kind of look. Is it the sort of place Brandon might stay?”
There was an edge to her voice. “It looks like the kind of place he’d love to stay, if he could afford it. I couldn’t find prices anywhere online and you know what they say about ‘if you have to ask’. It’s more likely that he’s charmed some girl who was staying there and squirreled himself away with her.”
She gave me the address, some place out in east London that I couldn’t picture. I waited. I felt like there was something she wanted to ask me but I couldn’t imagine what. I laid out his things in front of me. “There was a journal too, among his stuff. I can send all of it on to you.”
She ignored that. “Did you read it? Does it say what he was doing there?”
I fidgeted. “I read a little, just to get a sense of what he was up to. Lots of it is lyrics and stuff, things I don’t really understand, but the back is more… structured. I didn’t read much. It seemed private.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Private? He’s dead. I give you permission to read it, if that’s what you want.”
I didn’t know what to say. I just stared at his things in front of me. Notebook, passport, cash.
“So tell me about the part you did read at least.”
I tried to formulate a reply. Her eyes flicked across my image on the screen and then her shoulders rounded. “I see. You have read it. How bad is it?”
I struggled to find the words to describe the coldness of his tone or his elation at leaving her and their son behind. She nodded, more to herself than to me.
“Listen Adam, I’m under no illusions what your brother could be like, none at all. On Robin’s third birthday I was called away from a party where I was looking after twenty screaming toddlers, on my own — to bail him out of an Oakland jail. And Oakland was five hours away. I had an afternoon of dropping moaning children all over Vegas while he sent me a ton of WHY AREN’T YOU HERE YET messages. So, just read it, if you can. I’d rather know than to sit here wondering.”
“OK, I need a coffee first. It’s long. Meet back here in ten?”
She gave me the shortest of smiles. “It’s a date.”
It took nearly an hour to read it all out. Brandon’s handwriting was tiny and haphazard and often there would be an inked arrow leading to some other piece of text. Some of those pieces were connected, some were tangential thoughts that he’d thought absolutely, positively had to be laid down for posterity at that very moment, and some of it bore no obvious connection to anything else in the text. It was like walking in a maze; side paths turned out to be main streets and thoroughfares were dead ends. I didn’t know what to say to Rae after we’d read everything. All the time we were reading, asking each other to decipher words, trying to figure out where the body of text led next, it felt like a game. I knew that the names had lives attached but it was only when we reached the last line, and I found myself back in the darkened living room, the automatic lights of Umbrage casting skyline shadows on the bare walls, that I reconnected the face on the screen — open, wild-haired and blank — with the Rae from the text. I was conscious that my voice and Brandon’s were the same. It must have made it sound doubly real to her.
“Look… sorry.” I said, immediately unsure of why I’d said it. “He’s just… a dick.”
She looked at me. “Yes. Yes he is.” She looked as untethered as I was feeling.
I wanted to change the subject. “Those three names at the end.” I flicked back. “Kimi, Saul and Baxter. Do you know them?”
“I know of them. They’re the rest of the last band he was in: Remote/Control? I don’t think he’s had any contact with them for the last fifteen years either, though. Kimi ended up being pretty famous, she’s the chick with the voicebox? The other two I don’t know much about.”
The chick with the voicebox. I knew who she meant. A singer I’d seen on TV a couple of times, a stately, high-fashion woman with a robotic voicebox doing exactly the kind of modern music that I don’t like. I couldn’t remember whether the voicebox was something she needed or an affectation.
“Shit, it’s nearly three. I have to go pick Robin up.” She looked into the screen. “No fucking car you see. It’s back to the bus for me.” She looked disconsolate for a second and then started laughing. “Sorry, not your problem. None of this is your problem.”
I could feel the loneliness coming off her like heat. “Well genetically I suppose it is my fault,” I said. “It’s my exact genes that have done all this to you. Just in a slightly different vehicle.”
She gave a wan smile.
“Let me help.” I said. “I can go visit this At The Magpie place and see if there’s anything I can find out. Someone there might know what he was doing here or who might have it in for him.”
“Are you sure?” Something in her voice said please, please, please.
“Of course, I had nothing planned anyway.” That wasn’t strictly true. The earthquake was pencilled in, and something had been blocking the aqueduct that snaked between the water city of Sorent and the Darks of Mol, but I wrenched myself back to the present. “It’ll be fun,” I said uncertainly.
“Thank you. Will I see you when I get back?”
I checked the time; it was nearly midnight. “I don’t think so. I’ll Skype you tomorrow?”
This time the smile was broader, “Of course — night night.” Then she stopped. “Can I ask what is that in the background?”
I’d angled the laptop away from Umbrage, towards the one unencumbered wall of the flat, but in laying out Bran’s possessions I must have brought more of it into view.
I flattened my voice in expectation of scorn. “It’s a model. Of a city.”
“Oh, model trains?” she said with a note of forced interest.
“No, not really, just a model.” I wondered how much of the city she could see.
She beamed, showing her teeth. “Oh wait, I know about this. Bran told me ages ago. This is the thing that you’ve been building since childhood, right? Can I see?”
“It’s not that interesting, really.”
“Oh go on. I’ll show you my place if you’ll show me yours. Go on, walk me through it. Please.”
No one new had seen Umbrage since an estate agent back in ’98. “OK, just quickly though.” I took the laptop in my arms and angled it downwards. I tried to imagine what she was seeing and how it might look to a newcomer. The two halves of the city were at about chest height, cleft in two by the serpentine Dropwall ravine. The left-hand side housed the newer city of ’Rage which sloped away steeply and by the time it reached the back wall, nearly thirty feet away, grazed the cornicing around the ceiling. The camber meant that ’Rage’s highest roads had to snake back and forth like San Francisco’s, with vicious hairpins at each end and houses and churches clinging to the hillside in serried ranks. A funicular puffed its way effortfully through the steepest section. The right-hand, older city of Umb was more classical and its gentler slope allowed for a tidier structure. Shadowy plazas emanated languor and thin lanes radiated off them like arteries. In the centre was the oldest part, where some of the buildings dated back to my childhood. They were rudimentary compared with the intricacy of the later buildings. Architectural styles criss-crossed and cross-pollinated on both sides. Onion-domed churches abutted cave-like cubby-holes carved from a roseate sandstone, and slender, timber-fronted shops threw long shadows over a shady park ringed with painted caravans. I walked through the ravine showing Rae each side, then turned the laptop back to face me. She was wide-eyed.
“It’s just… wow. If I didn’t have to go I could spend all day looking at it.”
I turned the laptop back to face me again.
“So. Many. Questions,” she said with a lop-sided smile.
“Fire away.”
“Is that all of it? Some of it seemed to be spilling into other rooms.”
“Nope, there’s a water-city called Sorent in the bathroom, and a coup
le of suburbs in the bedroom.” Actually the bedroom was totally taken over bar a single futon, and even that had two-thirds of its length hidden under the platform that held the Darks of Mols, but revealing that might make me seem obsessive.
“How long did it take?”
“Well, Brandon was right, I started back when we still lived with our parents, but most of that is gone now. It’s been thirty years on and off.”
“Is there anywhere left for you to actually live?”
“The bedroom’s half clear. And the shower. There’s a bit of kitchen too.” I pointed the laptop back towards the collection of units that passed for a kitchen.
She chuckled. “It’s amazing. That’s not a good enough word for it. There are no people, though?”
“No, they’re too hard to make. That’s where your imagination has to come in.”
She considered this. I hadn’t expected her to take it so seriously. Model-making is one of those things that seems to split the sexes entirely, like cricket or being able to browse in Boots the Chemist.
“People are too hard to make,” she said finally. “Would they spoil it?”
As I’d done a hundred times, I imagined the tracks and paths and motors I’d need to make Umbrage a proper, populated city. “No, not at all, but the machinery to keep the transport and electricity and steam-powered stuff running needs a lot of work. If it was working thousands of figures too I’d be snowed under. It takes up most of the day as it is.”
She smiled at that. “Could Robin see it? He just loves to make stuff and I always wondered where the urge came from. It certainly wasn’t from Bran — he’d get a guy in to change a fuse — and I can’t draw or make things at all.” She placed her hands face up on the table and examined them critically.
Robin. My nephew. Something new in the world. “Sure,” I said, “I don’t see why not.”
She gave me a searching look. “He’d appreciate it, I promise, I can just tell.”
“OK, next time we talk.”
She gave me a grin that seemed to come out of nowhere. “See you later, investigator.”
The First Footprint in Fresh Snow
My brother’s notebook, pages 1–11. These are all of the pieces that Rae and I read that night. I’ve relegated the parts that I felt were extraneous to footnotes.
Treachery, like all adult pleasures, is best taken slowly.
I step out of that front door for the very last time, out into the held breath of pre-dawn, and gulp down lungfuls of crystalline mountain air. It’s too early for traffic, too early for the birds even, and the only sounds are the crunch of my footsteps and the catch of my breath: kick drum and snare in a lopsided beat. I head downhill, my footsteps in the snow writing a sentence with no full stop. First steps out into a morning’s unsullied whiteness, woman and kid and home and possessions sleeping safely behind me, and I know that there will be no corresponding set of footprints ever returning. Each step an arrow pointing straight into a new life. The last time I’ll ever be here and here and here.
I parked Rae’s car a couple of streets over last night where there was no danger that the engine might wake the household; even betrayal has its logistics. I brush snow from the windscreen, unglue the wipers and scrape away the ice with a credit card. One of Rae’s cards actually, one of the three that I drained of funds last night, not that there was much credit left anyway.
Here, close to what they laughingly call a town, there are just hints of sound: the bomb and glide of sparrows, snowmelt’s fingers stretching towards the lake, coffee pots bubbling behind triple glazing. I open the Jetta with the actual, physical key, like someone from the twentieth century, and wind the windows down. Needle-sharp air on my skin as I let off the handbrake. The movement is almost silent, just the creak of rubber on snow and I push off down the hill with one foot in the car and one on the ground, like Robin on his scooter. It accelerates, dumping snow from its roof, and the key waits in the ignition. I let the speed build, pull the door closed, and wait for the junction at the bottom where it should be too early for any traffic, unless the snowploughs are out but I would have heard them surely, and anyway it wouldn’t be the worst way to go, crushed under the wheels of one of those municipal behemoths, so when we hit the corner, snowblind and moving fast, I finally turn the key and the engine coughs and catches and the back wheels skid — taking my stomach with them — and then straighten and the radio springs into joyous life and the timing is perfect — an omen if I believed in such nonsense — and I am away and free and gone.
Treachery, like all adult pleasures, is something you have to learn the taste for. It’s like blue cheese, or Tom Waits, or a single malt. These are things that are terrifying when you’re young because at their hearts they’re poison. But you grow a little and you twist and harden and you learn a taste for a little poison; it’s an inoculation against the hard stuff. Treachery, nicotine, asphyxiation: little deaths. That’s what leaving my home and never looking back feels like. It’s delicious and venomous and it rings with the sting of a neat gin.
I flick through the radio waiting for something dumb and fast — unlikely in the pre-breakfast show hours — but then I strike gold with the soul station over in Truckee. I wind the windows down and howl to the last sliver of moon as it slinks away. It’s ten miles to the interstate where the snow is already gritted to water and the tyres hiss with pleasure.
The trick is to keep moving. Stillness is where doubt settles, so you keep the car rattling just over the speed limit and the music just a fraction too loud. Don’t think about later today, and Robin sitting on the curb outside school, his head turning hopefully at the sound of each new car. Don’t think of Rae noticing my bag gone, and then doing anything but checking the wardrobe for empty hangers because then she’ll know, rather than suspect, that I’m not coming back. Just switch lanes, switch stations, smoke and sing. Break the treachery down into easy-to-swallow portions.
Mountains give way to flatlands. Snow to scrub. The soul station submerges in static so I switch to Oldies Radio out of Sacramento and sing along to “The Wanderer” and “Why Do Fools Fall in Love”. Backwoods diners are replaced by motorway services with their near-indistinguishable list of dining options. It’s like computer game scenery — procedural, they call it — where the combinations of a few finite units are varied each time to give the illusion of richness. Robin, my son, who still at this moment is unaware that the conversation we had as I picked him up yesterday is the last we’ll ever have, could read some underlying logic to these constellations of outlets. On an unfamiliar highway he’d press his forehead against the window and study each grouping of McDonald’s and Coffee Beans and Red Lobsters until the pattern became clear to him. Then, minutes before the next forest of signs, he’d make his prediction, whispering under his breath, “Burger King, Dairy Queen, Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks” and he’d be right nine times out of ten. Strange kid.
When I’m far enough from the orbit of my soon-to-be-ex family I pull over and do a couple of lines in the restroom of a coffee shop about as close to San Francisco as it is to home. Here’s the last point at which I could turn back. Half-life. Wave or particle. For the moment I’m Heisenberg’s cat. Until someone peeks in my box I’m both doting partner and abscondee (and I’ll leave it you to guess which is life and which is death).
The air here still twinkles with Alpine clarity but there’s a rumour of the tropics in the wind riffling the garbage bins. A place that fits snow chains sits amidst a perfumed orange grove and in the mini-mall you can buy bikinis and showshoes, parkas and flip-flops. Cars towing snowmobiles park up next to VWs bedecked with surfboards. I sing everybody knows this is nowhere to myself. Nowhere: the American speciality. Thoughtless non-places where the outlets spore and everywhere looks like the back side of somewhere better.
I drink a final cup of the tepid brown water that Americans call coffee and dump my cellphone in a bin. If this were a film then this would be the moment you saw a light go out
on an electronic map, as agents crowd around the screen, yelling we’ve lost him.
Back on the road the Jetta feels too small to contain me. I want to go spinning off in all directions. I open the windows as wide as they go and turn the radio up higher. Will I be missed, back in Tahoe City? Robin and Rae will miss and hate me in equal proportions, but I have to scour them from my mind, they’re gone, they’re the Old World. There will be a few other people who’ll mourn my non-appearance. I brought a spoonful of glamour to the school gates. The appearance of a dad always added a frisson of excitement. And when he was an exotic, British dad, with, it’s whispered, a past, and enough of a personal sense of style that he didn’t just rock up in a fleece and jeans, well that was all the better.
After Sacramento the road widens and something lifts from me, not a weight exactly, but a fog from my mind, and the day looks bright and newly washed. I take sleepy NorCal suburban roads so as not to fall into the pull of San Francisco. I skirt the meat of the place and drive instead through empty streets of lumber companies and taxi repair places and strip malls and storage units until I’m on the coast road to SFO with a whole life dwindling to a point in the rear view mirror and Belinda Carlisle on the radio.
A million years ago, when I made this journey the other way — London to California like a million crappy screenwriters and wannabe actresses — I sat next to a mumsy Texan in elasticated slacks and bug-eyed glasses. She watched as I methodically destroyed every remnant of my London life. I worked studiously on photos, letters, bills, address books, alternating between scissors and my bare hands, until the tray table in front of me was a snow scene of personal confetti. When I finally called the stewardess over to take this rubbish away and burn it please could you love? Mumsy peered over the glasses and said, in that honeyed Southern accent that disguises a multitude of unpleasantnesses, “Oh sweetheart. You can’t run away from your troubles you know?”