The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  “And we sat and waited, and listened to the sea. Saul went back to argue the fee, or so I thought,” he smiled, obviously in the throes of a story he’d told before, “but two weeks later we cycled out to see the reactor and there it was, with two carpenters already working on it. It’s forty feet by forty feet, as close to the plant as you’re allowed to live.”

  “Why did you buy so close?”

  “Whole point of this place. It’s a rebuttal. They’re big, we’re small. They’re ugly, we’re beautiful. They pollute, we grow. Everyone who visits there has to pass this place and at least gets a glimpse that there can be another way.”

  Weedy sunlight crept through the gaps between boards and made the dust dance. I guessed it would always be windy here. Even on a still day like today you could hear the sails flap outside.

  “So,” Saul’s hands were wrapped around a tiny teacup, like he was trying to nurse it back to life, “What is it that you’re here for?”

  It didn’t work, my spiel. I thought my deal was perfect. Back in the day I’d remixed Dillon Marksman, remixed him so well that a) it sounded fucking amazing and b) there was nothing left of Dillon and his fat fraud band on the track. But our manager at the time had neglected to put my name on the publishing so when the record became that rarest of beasts, a bona fide American hit, Dillon got to keep the cash (and, even more frustratingly, the credit). I’d huffed and puffed but the lawyers said his legal house was made of bricks so I ended up settling for five fucking grand. But now the winds were changing. A couple of test cases in the States made me think that I would have won if I’d tried now. It was too late for me but Saul had been there in the room as I’d worked. I’d thought his dance music background would help, but he was too slow and too wrecked so I’d done it all myself. But no one need know that. He could sue for his “half”. I’d agree he was there (for half of the half). Dillon caves, and we both sleep on pillowcases stuffed with fivers. Who could say no to that?

  Saul could. He wouldn’t sign anything and claimed he didn’t even want the money. He spouted such bullshit that it was all I could do to stop myself from slapping him.

  “You can’t own music Bran. That’s where we went wrong in the first place. We were always chasing a deal and when it didn’t happen then we gave it all up just because we hadn’t managed to turn ourselves into a commodity. We should have been proud of that. All the while the real treasure was sitting in front of us: the music. Nowadays Andre and I give our music away for free, and we only charge for live performances. It’s a small price to pay for a communal experience.”

  Andre beamed like a proud mother at her daughter’s recital.

  Saul had always had a spiritual side but we’d managed to keep it successfully under wraps in the Remote/Control days. But now he had that supercilious air that only living in an echo-chamber of two can provide. I wanted to tell him a few home truths. That it didn’t matter if he thought no one could own music because Dillon most clearly could and did. That if he thought that Remote/Control’s music was “treasure” then both his standards and his memory were slipping. And that if last night’s rave was a communal experience, then so was any other collection of window-licking mouth-breathers in one place — a dole queue perhaps, or a gangbang.

  I changed tack: they could donate the money, they could buy more land with it. No, no. I appealed to his vanity: the world thought Dillon created that particular piece of treasure when we both knew it was us that deserved the cosmic kudos. It didn’t work.

  Everyone has a key, an action or phrase or just a way of being that makes their tumblers line up and click into place. With Saul, back in the day, it used to be envy. But that key’s not working any more. Perhaps it’s being clean, maybe it’s love. There amongst the knick-knacks and the hanging things I tried everything. I appealed to his avarice, then hit on his high-mindedness. I flattered, I cajoled and at one point I rather think I might have flirted. Nothing.

  Much too late I realised that he was enjoying saying no. With ex-junkies you needed to discover where they’d transferred their addiction. Usually it was something harmless — yoga or body-building — but here, and I kicked myself for not seeing it earlier, it was denial. He was getting off on every “no”.

  The wheat-free bread and the black tea. No. No.

  The unbleached cotton. The bare feet.

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

  No to everything. I’m up to twenty NOs a day. I did so much NO last night I can’t see straight.

  Fuck it. I should have given him an offer he could only refuse.

  I’d have to regroup and try again another day. And even if I couldn’t get him into court I might still need him for the record. I tried to reconnect. There was a pattern of marks at his neck and wrists, in fact everywhere that any skin was showing.

  “What are those, those tattoos?” I asked him.

  He had his top off in an instant (fair enough — if I had 7% body fat and pecs like a suit of armour I don’t think I’d wear a shirt ever again). His left arm, most of his chest, and all of his back was covered in liquid black-blue dots, arranged in a regular, slanting pattern. I drew closer. Tears. Identical fat teardrops falling in a pattern like rain blown by wind.

  People telling you about their tattoos is only a short step up from talking about their dreams. But, needs must, and I had to get back on a better side of Saul.

  “Very beautiful. Tears, isn’t that a prison thing?” I was confident Saul had never done anything interesting enough to land him in jail.

  It was Andre who answered. “It was a Latino thing originally, one tear for every five years in prison. But they’ve come to symbolise any kind of incarceration at all.”

  Saul butted in, “In my case, drugs.” He added, “Drugs can be a prison too,” (in case I’d missed his thudding analogy, I suppose).

  “There’s one for every month I spent under the spell of intoxicants,” he went on, muddying even his own metaphor. “One month clean, one month atoned for, one new tear. I have around fifty to go.”

  That would be a hell of a lot of tears. They’d encroach on his face and hands before he was done, which was as good a reason for a relapse as I could imagine. He was expecting some kind of response. Beyond the obvious: in which fucking universe does the pain of a poor Chicano boy locked up for five years in one of the world’s most racist prison systems equate to a month of doing blow in Camden nightclubs? I couldn’t think of anything. Instead I made a sound of vague approval and asked them about the headdress he’d been wearing on stage. The question seemed to annoy him.

  “They’re called war bonnets actually,” he said, “Native American war bonnets. I’ve been adapting Muscogee designs using roadkill feathers from the roads in the neighbourhood. You know, as a nod to the local folklore about crows and magpies?”

  I could see that unless I was very careful I was about to learn something about the local folklore of crows and magpies, a circumstance I was keen to avoid. The headdresses did interest me though.

  “Could you make something like that, but with a beak?” I asked him.

  He looked dubious. “Maybe, how big?”

  I took out my notebook and sketched. Until that moment I’d been thinking that the killers would be wearing Jack the Ripper costumes but the headdresses had a sleek unlikeliness to them. They were elemental rather than cultural and I figured I owed that to myself.

  The drive back was unbearable. Traffic snarled up every fifteen miles or so with never any sign of what had caused it. I tried to will myself into being another person, one who didn’t mind delay and discomfort. This remaking of yourself was one of the few things I’d liked about being an actor.

  At the lowest point of my time as a family man, when I’d wake up hours before Rae and the kid, lying rigid among the fluffy pillows and soft toys thinking, “How the fuck am I going to make it through another day of this shit?”, I’d only survive by pretending I was preparing for a role. How convincing could I be as a regular gu
y? At the school gates, where I once prided myself on being the only one smoking, now I’d be the guy asking if the other dads were helping with the science project and whether they wanted to go for a coffee to discuss it. I shovelled snow for the neighbours, clipped supermarket coupons. It was a way of making those dead, white-bread days have even a sliver of meaning. I’d like to see fucking Sean Penn immerse himself a role like that. Let’s see him putting in an Oscar-winning performance while waiting by the playground fence, so brain-blown by hangover that the very sky seemed to throb, with his back aching from scratch-marks that he didn’t remember getting, talking to the drones-in-fleece about school projects and bake sales, without wanting to take a shotgun to the whole lot of them.

  Six hours of blank roads and blank skies. Kaspar was at the door as I came in, directing various serious Eastern Europeans to strip me of my bags and coat and…

  Chapter Four

  The nervousness of meeting Baxter the next day was a physical thing, more like hunger than anything mental, and the strangeness of my surroundings meant the smallest sound disturbed me. I gave up on sleep and instead went online to search for any filmed evidence of my brother.

  There was some live stuff which I fast-forwarded to get to his interactions with the audience (which were so short and echoey as to be practically useless) and a couple of interviews from Nineties music shows whose constant jump-cuts gave me warnings of a migraine. The motherlode though was a collection of video interviews from the early 2000s featuring Bran seated on an empty stage with an unseen interlocutor asking questions about his career, both musical and thespian. This was an older Bran, still belligerent and dismissive, but now with a tendency to opine upon the “big questions”. His views were canvassed (and vigorously given) on the meaning of art, the death of the music industry, China’s rise as a world power. I couldn’t tell who they had been made for but they looked slick and had an impressive number of views.

  I watched them over and over, practising phrases which he reused. He was fond of “You might think that but you couldn’t be more wrong” and “the role of the artist is…”. The interviews were a gold mine of physical tics too. He waved away questions that he didn’t feel were up to his standard with a curt, mimed brush-off. The foot dangled over the other knee. Steepled fingers when he particularly liked a question (or, more accurately, particularly liked his planned answer to it). He played with his hair like a girl would. I could use all of these; I tried some out in the mirror. Steeple fingers, look to one side. His best side; our best side.

  “The role of the artist in a connected society?”

  Push hair behind ears, little sigh to express the banality of the question.

  “Disruption. Running interference. Incoherence.”

  Switch legs. Let the mirror see the diamonds of the socks, the soles of the brogues.

  “The rest, traditional roles of narrative sense and possibility?”

  The hand brushing the air. Eyes to the ceiling. A glint of rings.

  “Hey.”

  Rae was working on another screen in her kitchen so I could only see half her face. She turned to face me. “Hey, you look tired. Bad night?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. Though that’s probably good for meeting Baxter. Wouldn’t do to be all fresh-faced.”

  “Good thinking. Nervous?”

  “Utterly. Can I run something by you?”

  “Of course.”

  I took a breath and pushed my hair back. I leaned back and dangled a foot.

  “The thing is Bax,” I stretched out the name and paused to look off-camera, “You might fucking think that, but you couldn’t be more wrong. We are here to destroy the music industry, not to make money from it. So, sweetheart, let’s get in, get out, fuck the consequences. The rest?” I made the brush-off gesture.

  “Fuck,” whispered Rae. “That is spooky. I mean it’s not how he was with me and Rob but if we were at a party or something? Yeah, that’s just how he’d behave.”

  The look she gave me wasn’t the most pleasant so I put back my broadest smile. “I spent most of the night watching videos of him. I think I picked up a bit.”

  “More than a bit, that was good. Which videos though?”

  “Some thing in an auditorium, just him on a chair. Pretty serious stuff.”

  Rae snorted. “Oh that thing is so sad. He had it done when work was short in LA. He figured that if casting guys saw him being taken seriously as an artist on some big British arts programme then they might cast him more. He faked the whole thing. His friend Champ did the credits and stuff, he wrote the questions himself and the interviewer was another actor-stroke-alcoholic who got paid with a couple of grams. If he’d spent half the time that it took up on going to auditions he might have worked more often.”

  “I’m glad he did. It’s like a crash course in his public persona.” I steepled my fingers and looked skywards. “You call it a persona, darling, like it’s a bad thing, but you couldn’t be more wrong. That word, as anyone who thinks of himself as an actor should know, means…”

  Rae giggled, such an unaffected sound after hours of Brandon’s bombast. “What an asshole.” She made a shush sign, and I saw Robin cross the background with bowl of soup in his hand. He poked his head around until his face filled the screen. “Hello Daddy, you look tired.”

  “Well thank you Robin.”

  “Daddy,” he said, “Will I go all white like you?”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. It was getting long. “Maybe. My parents didn’t but I have an uncle who went totally white too. Would you like to look like this?”

  He looked dubious, darted off, slid back.

  “Did you have it forever?” he asked.

  “No, when I was your age my hair was like yours, very like yours actually, then one day it changed.”

  He waggled his head from one side to the other and then shot off into the other room.

  Rae laughed. “Not much of an attention span on that one.” She looked into the screen. “God I wish I was back in bed, that looks comfy.”

  I spun the laptop around. “Super king-size, four-hundred-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, according to Kaspar. Wasted on me, I can sleep pretty much anywhere.”

  “What I’d give…” she started. “Anyway, you can tell me the story of how your hair went white, I don’t think Bran ever did.”

  I got myself comfortable.

  “We were eleven or so. I woke up one morning, went to brush my teeth and there it was in the mirror, a patch of pure white.”

  I remember rubbing at it experimentally with the ball of my hand.

  “Not the whole head?”

  “No, you could cover the whole thing with your palm. Brandon came in, laughed like a drain for ten seconds and then realised he had the same thing. Same patch, different place.”

  “Serves him right. The same day?”

  “Indeed. He was inconsolable at first. I’ve never known a kid as vain as that since, not at ten. That first day he covered it up with our dad’s Just For Men but the next day there was more.”

  “More?”

  “Yes, the patch had grown, and then there was another one. That first week I looked ridiculous, like a Fresian. Mind you, Bran was worse. The dye didn’t stick and new patches were appeared all the time. He ended up piebald. By week’s end I was totally white, except my eyebrows, and Bran was a skinhead.”

  “No!” Rae had her hands clasped over her mouth.

  “He never told you? He got a friend to shave it all off. My parents were furious, this is back in the days that being a skinhead was more a political thing than a style one. I remember my mum shaking him by the shoulders, telling him ‘You. Grow. That. Back. Right. Now’.” I mimed the actions, the laptop wobbling in front of me.

  Robin was back, perched on the tabletop.

  “What’s so funny?” he wanted to know.

  “When your daddy’s hair first went all white he shaved it off like a skinhead.”

  “Really? D
o you have pictures?”

  “Sorry Rob,” I told him. “No pictures.”

  He did his frog impression and then disappeared again.

  “But you don’t mind it now?” Rae asked.

  “God no. I see old school friends now and they’ve gone bald or grey or whatever and they just look ancient. I look pretty much the same. Brandon didn’t mind it?”

  “No, I think he was quite proud of it. He dyed it for a while, in LA when he was working as an actor, but I couldn’t take him seriously like that.”

  “Yeah, Billy Idol coming along was the turning point for him back then. He just spiked it up and pretended he’d gone platinum blonde.” I yawned.

  “Don’t yawn,” she said. “It’s infectious. God I’m so tired.”

  I did some last-minute cramming. Watching Brandon again I started to spot chinks in his armour. There was the ghost of a stutter; you’d miss it unless you knew what to look for. I’d suffered terribly as a child with a stammer, enough so that I’d seen speech therapists, and it was the one thing Brandon had never teased me about. Now I saw why. It was very slight, his stammer. I recognised it more from his avoidance techniques than from anything he said. Often his theatrical leg crossings and hand gestures came just after he’d started to say something and then stopped. It gave the impression he was considering everything he said, but I recognised it as a holding exercise while he found another path to the summit of the word that was blocking him. “The thing about the B… the English.” “It’s like trying to put out fire with p…p… with gasoline.” I could feel those avoided words turn to ashes in my mouth: “British… Petrol…” I had to hand it to him, he found a replacement word far faster than I could.

  But with this in my locker I started looking again. His clumsiness on stage, which he presented as a kind of stoned slackerdom, was revealed in this new light to be just that: clumsiness. And a thought started to spread. That’s me up there. There in the seconds of stutter and the rhythm of relentless foot-tapping, that’s me. There, coming in at the wrong point of a song and the quiet looks between the rest of the band. His nervous laugh at the harder questions and the silences and tics. Me, me, me. I’d been there all the time, a sleeper cell in his DNA. The path not taken. There have been times in my life when a proper rage has come upon me and each time I’ve berated myself that it’s how Brandon would have behaved. The idea that he might exist somewhere within me terrified me, but it had never occurred to me that a similar emotion might be at work in my brother.