The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  I thought about it. “Honestly, I’m enjoying it a little bit. It’s like Total Recall. You know, a holiday in someone else’s head. I’m Arnie on Mars.”

  “You’re a pretty unlikely Arnie.”

  “I know, I know, you make a good Sharon Stone though.”

  There was a silence where we both tried to remember exactly what Arnie and Sharon’s relationship had been.

  “OK, but if you want to bail any time, tell me.”

  “I will, but I won’t if you know what I mean. Anyway, yesterday with you and Robin was great.” My heart was jumping in my chest.

  “You’re good for him you know. I caught him on the phone telling a friend how amazing his dad’s models are.”

  The idea of my being discussed, even by a child, even under someone else’s name, was fantastical. “When are you going to tell him?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Whenever. I feel like we have enough on our plates at the moment. That’s terrible isn’t it? I can do it now if you’re uncomfortable.”

  I considered it. I wanted her to tell him but I didn’t want this feeling to end yet.

  “Maybe not. It’s no worse than Father Christmas. But won’t it make it harder to tell him later?”

  The transatlantic lag made her pause yawn in front of me.

  “For me, yes. But I think for him, no. It might even help.”

  Rae had work to do so she perched the laptop on the windowsill looking out over their garden. I found myself, hands unmoving on another piece of Umbragian hardware, watching the slow changes in the landscape there. A crow worked its way intently across a snowed-in playing field, occasionally cawing in triumph at some piece of insect booty, and giant 4x4s crunched on snow chains between the shops of the main street, but minutes went by without anything to indicate that the image wasn’t a screensaver. I swore I could smell ozone and pine. Work, company, beauty: who could ask for more? After an hour Rae gave a satisfied sigh.

  “Done, for now anyway.” She turned the laptop around and grinned. “OK, I have to let down Robin’s school trousers. Talk to me.”

  Something she’d mentioned before came back to me. “You said Brandon was an actor?” I could see it. There was something declamatory in the way he talked, even as a kid. He delighted in sitting up with the adults when my parents had parties at the house, mimicking the way they spoke, swearwords and all, like a miniature adult, and my parents’ friends, drunks to a man, would applaud this spectacle.

  “Well when I say an actor I actually mean an extra.” Rae said with relish. “In four years he had seven speaking parts, and one of those was cut. The trouble is he started too well. CSI Las Vegas had a part for an English rock star who is found OD’d inside a locked and drug-free hotel room. That was his first audition. He was OK too, it’s not like the role was too much of a reach and even I could see he had some talent. But after that, nothing. He ended up doing work as an extra but he couldn’t help himself — he’d always argue with someone or try to improvise a line — and he ended up even getting blacklisted from that. The weird thing is that he finally got a load of work in 2007, when the actors’ strike was on, so he’ll appear in the background of all kinds of things. It always freaks me out a bit. I’ll be watching something with one eye and out of nowhere he’ll be staring out at me.”

  She held the trousers up and examined them critically.

  “The funny thing is that I think he might have been good if he’d got himself some kind of lead role. He could switch personalities as easily as changing clothes, and he could really do accents. If you introduced him to someone then ten minutes later he could impersonate them, and not just the voice, he’d have found some tic or habit of theirs that would just capture them. But he hated being told what to do and that’s about ninety-five per cent of an actor’s life.”

  It sounded like she was speaking from experience. “And you?” I asked, “Did you act? Is that what you were doing in LA?”

  She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “The tiniest, tiniest bit. I actually came to LA as a model, but my agent got me a couple of parts. Nothing you’d have seen.”

  “You were a model?”

  She laughed. “You find that implausible, Prince Charming?”

  I blushed. “No, god, you totally look like you could have been a model. I mean, you look like you could be a model now, but you just don’t seem the type. You’re too normal.”

  She looked mollified. “Thanks. I guess. I wasn’t very good. It’s hard being told ten times a week that you’re not pretty enough. And I hated getting dressed up.” She gestured to her outfit — a robe and sweatpants.

  The noise swished through the flat again. It sounded mechanical rather than electronic and it had me checking out of the windows for helicopters, but it was something else, something closer. I made a note to ask Kaspar about it.

  We sat in silence for a while. I felt like Brandon was doing what he always did: dragging me along behind him. I wanted a way to get ahead of him. “Maybe we should set down what we actually know?”

  “Sure, go for it.”

  “So, that morning, Bran gets up, packs a bag and drives down to San Francisco.”

  “He was already packed actually,” said Rae. She’d moved back into the kitchen and was alternating between me and a saucepan of something steaming on the stove.

  “So you knew he was going somewhere?” I couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t told me this before.

  “No, he always had a bag packed. A go-bag. You know the idea?”

  I didn’t. She rolled her eyes. “There’s a whole community of people online who have a bag of essentials packed and ready by the front door ready for the inevitable collapse of society. When we get a black president or gays can get married or mental patients are barred from automatic weaponry. Y’know, obvious signs of the apocalypse. You have to be ready for your new life in the woods, whittling homesteads and hunting the weak, so everything you might need fits inside this one, quick-to-grab rucksack. It was usually medical supplies, weapons, water purification tablets, that sort of thing. Him and Robin both had one actually.”

  “It doesn’t sound very Brandon,” I said. It sounded rather creepy and genuinely appealing. Mentally I’d already started ticking off what I’d include.

  “It wasn’t. He gets antsy if he’s out of sight of a liquor store. But I think the idea tickled him. You know how he was about packing light.”

  “So you didn’t expect him to leave?”

  She looked straight at me. “Well, I’d learnt not always to expect him home, but no, I wasn’t expecting him to… to disappear.”

  “Do you think it was a spur of the moment thing?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Silly, isn’t it? I’ve thought about it a lot and I’m not sure what would be worse. That he’d been planning it for months and I was too blind to see the signs. Or that on a totally normal day he could just get up and leave us without so much as a backwards glance.”

  I thought about the diary stuff we’d read and imagined how it must feel to hear his elation.

  “And anyway. If I had known he’d left, then the last place I would have expected him to go was Britain, London even. Although…” she stirred the pot, “he had been talking about the band a bit in the month before.”

  “Was that unusual?”

  “Oh god yes. He never talked about his past. You would think he’d been hatched from an egg the day he came to the States. I’d never have known he was in a band if someone hadn’t recognised him in a record store once. It was one of the things that attracted me to him when we first met — he didn’t seem to have any baggage at all. It was always about tomorrow and the things we were going to do together. But in the last month or so… you know the story about Dillon’s remix?”

  I didn’t.

  “OK, once I did know about Remote/Control, then a couple of times a year, when he was very wasted, he’d start moaning about this fucking remix.” She gave me a concerned look. “You
know what a remix is, right?”

  I laughed. “I’m not a hundred, I’m aware of the concept of remixes, yes.”

  “OK. So they get to remix a track by this guy Dillon.”

  “A band called Dillon?”

  “A guy who was a band, or a band who only had one member or something. Kind of famous in the States but from the same scene as Bran. All that matters is that it was his track that they mixed.”

  Rae’s emotions lit up and darkened her face like clouds. It was hard to concentrate on what she was saying rather than just watching her.

  “This was when they’d had a couple of singles out and they we’re being talked about as the next big thing. As Bran told it everyone started sniffing around and a major label asked them to remix one of their artists. The original wasn’t very good, and that apparently wasn’t just Bran being superior, the thing was just trash. So him and the keyboard player — Saul I think — decided to give it a total overhaul. They stripped out the drums, dumped the bass and replaced them with something a bit more modern. But once they started tinkering they couldn’t stop. They got rid of the keyboards and the guitars until they were left with pretty much a whole new track and Dillon’s vocals. And then they thought, ‘Why stop there?’ So they gutted the vocals and kept one phrase, this aside from the beginning, one of those fake-studio bits where the singer said, ‘Let’s do this thing’”.

  Something about that phrase rang a bell, something from the radio. “I know that track,” I said. I googled it in another window as Rae talked on.

  “So they submit this mix to Dillon, hoping he won’t mind that they’ve basically erased his track and they get a big fat no. Dillon is not amused, but by now Bran doesn’t mind the rejection because he’s beginning to think that their track, the stuff that he recorded, is actually pretty good. So they call it their new single and start playing it to people. And everyone loves it. The band’s been at a low point and then suddenly they have this track that everyone wants. Bran re-records the ‘Let’s do this thing’ bit so they don’t get sued and they hawk it around a few places and then they get a call from the record company who say, ‘Hey, we played your mix to the guys at NBC and they love it. They want to use it for Sunday Night Football’. So everyone’s stoked. This is a massive break. They’re on this tiny little indie label in Britain but now they’re going to have the equivalent of ten thirty-second ads for Remote/Control every Sunday night on the most watched channel in America. It’s all gravy until the lawyers call. They’ve been sorting the paperwork and they ask Bran why his track is credited to Dillon Marksman.”

  Rae took a sip of water. There was a kind of triumphant horror to her tone. “It turns out that when they registered the track, or whatever it is you do, the writing credits had been Dillon’s because it was a remix of his song.”

  “But now it’s ninety-nine per cent Brandon’s work?” I asked.

  “Sure, but still a hundred per cent someone else’s property. So Bran contacts Dillon to try to get the rights and this sets off warning lights. Dillon asks around and instead he puts it on his new record, licenses it to NBC and sells a couple of million.” There was a kind of amused wonder to her voice now.

  “Didn’t Bran sue?” I could only begin to imagine his rage.

  “He tried, of course. But the record company didn’t care whose track it was as long as they were selling it. In the end he took a couple of grand which was basically to shut him up about it.”

  “So? What changed?”

  Rae tasted a spoonful of mashed potato and added some milk.

  “A court case. Another British band in the same situation but more recent, they sued that… who’s the gay singer? Keeps crashing his cars?”

  I didn’t know.

  “Him anyway. They did the whole ‘even though it’s in your name we wrote it’ thing and apparently settled out of court for a bunch of cash. The lawyer who won the case was in Billboard saying that this opened the floodgates for other bands and Bran was on the phone to him about ten minutes later. He even went to see him in New York.”

  “And did he have a case?”

  “Yes and no. The lawyer guy said that technically the track was theirs but Bran had settled, so it was too late for him. But this other guy, Saul. He never settled. Instead he played in Dillon’s band for a while and Bran always hated him for that. He could still sue, apparently but he’s totally gone off-grid. I know Bran had people over there looking for him, and it takes something pretty big for Bran to even talk to people back in the UK. But maybe he took things into his own hands?” She absent-mindedly fed herself a mouthful of mash.

  “OK, he comes here possibly to see this Saul guy and convince him to sue?”

  She turned the gas off. “Maybe. But there’s no way that the money is from that. These things take forever. And anyway, this record sounds like something he’d been planning for a while. And if he was serious, y’know, with Kimi, then he wasn’t going to need money anyway.”

  “Could it have been meant for you and Robin? For when he was dead?”

  She scrunched up her mouth. “I seriously doubt it, don’t you? That little speech you read me yesterday didn’t sound like someone worrying how we would cope, did it?”

  She didn’t look particularly heartbroken, but she was quiet for a while. I couldn’t square the scene there — the sleepy town, the loving family, her gentle nature — with the Brandon I remembered. I let the silence grow.

  “You know it’s not you, don’t you?” I asked her.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “He’s done this to everyone. He left home this way, left our folks this way. He’s left girlfriends this way too.” I didn’t want to say that this wasn’t the first call I’d had like this. The whole getting gunned down by men in Donald Duck masks was a new twist but she wasn’t the first ex to call me (though mainly they had, until we spoke, no idea that an ex is what they’d become).

  “I know, I guess,” she said, “it’s just very hard not to take personally.”

  “How long until dinner?” I asked her.

  “Ten minutes?” She called up, “Robin, wash your hands, dinner in ten.”

  “OK, let me tell you a story.”

  I told her the story of Laura Sheldrake. I was sixteen and Laura was, I calculated, the perfect girl for me. Out of my league but not by so much that it was laughable. Pretty but not beautiful. Smart but not superior. Friendly but not indiscriminating. I don’t think at the time that I gave any thought to the idea of chemistry between us; she just seemed nice, and possibly attainable, and that was enough. My campaign to win her over, seen from the twenty-first century, might look close to stalking: I learnt her likes and dislikes through sticking close to her and her friends throughout the school day. In those pre-Facebook days this was a long-winded process. It took three months of watching her favourite films and listening to her favourite records before I was confident enough to ask her out.

  The plan was simple. Drinks at The Ship, the pub in Brighton laxest with under-age drinking (which I’d already scoped over the previous two weekends, buying pints and making eye contact with every one of the bar staff in turn). Then to see Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Brighton Centre. I had no strong feelings about the band one way or the other (besides being slightly intimidated by the singer) but I was confident that their pre-eminent place on her school bag — above even the Cure — meant that she was a fan. Beyond that I had nothing. No expectation, no plans. I assumed that if she said yes I would be thrust into the brave new world of boyfriendhood, a world that I couldn’t imagine in even the broadest detail. So I asked.

  The hitch: she already had tickets. Of course she already had tickets. Had I not seen the bag? The twist: she’d still love to go for a drink first. Which is how I found myself sitting ostentatiously at the window table of The Ship, Laura clearly on display for any classmate who might walk past, as a girl stopped in the street outside at the sight of me, wordlessly entered the pub, took my as-yet-untouch
ed pint from the table, and threw it in my face.

  I’d never seen her before. She was pretty, older — at least eighteen — and quite clearly not finished. She turned to Laura and examined her with disinterest.

  “Is this the latest?”

  I was too busy wiping myself down to answer so she jabbed a finger at Laura.

  “You want to know how fucking far down his list you are?”

  Again, she didn’t wait for an answer. Whatever it was she wanted she wasn’t going to waste any time about it.

  “You’re behind his girlfriend, his other girlfriend, the girl from Kenyon’s who he got pregnant last year, his ex-girlfriend and, if I wasn’t just about to tell him to fuck off forever, you’d definitely be behind me.”

  She looked Laura up and down and turned to me. “Fucking hell, you’re losing your touch.”

  Then she leaned in so close that I could see the brush marks in her lip-gloss, and said, “Fuck off forever Adam.”

  It was beautifully done. If it wasn’t me having the drink thrown in my face I might have applauded. Certainly you could see people at other tables loving the show. I wiped my face, looked at Laura, and told her, “I have never seen that girl before in my life.”

  “Well she’s definitely seen you.”

  The penny dropped. “Brandon. My brother, Brandon. My twin brother Brandon?”

  She looked dubious. She must know of Brandon but I’d not talked about him.

  “My identical twin brother Brandon?”

  “She called you Adam though.”

  There was that. That was new. I’d been on the receiving end of scenes like this before. The aforementioned girl from Kenyon’s for example, or, more frighteningly, a gang of football fans who claimed I’d “led a charge” at them at the Goldstone, but each time a library card had proved I wasn’t the brother they were looking for. This one had called me Adam though.

  The date pretty much ended there, as you might imagine. She said she understood and suggested we leave early to catch the support band but once we were inside she disappeared and next week at school it was as if we’d never spoken.