The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  “So that’s me. How have you been? Married? Kids?”

  Don’t look back, never look back.

  “No. I came close a couple of times but I’m not sure I could inflict myself on anyone for that length of time. When I say it’s not you, it’s me I actually mean it.”

  “So you’re back for a while?”

  I shrugged.

  “I might have something for you, then.” There was smugness in his tone, but something else too. Excitement?

  He said, “You know the Velvet Underground acetate they found in a garage sale in New York?”

  “The Sceptre Sessions?” I knew the story well. A garage sale find that had cost cents and sold for six figures. It was a post facto justification for the hours I spent thumbing through used record bins.

  “What d’you think about that?” I could see he was actually interested in my reply.

  “I think it’s great. It’s one of the great artworks of the twentieth century. It’s like finding the preliminary sketches for Guernica in a skip.”

  His eyes shone. “Exactly.” I’d stumbled on the right answer. “And if they did find the whatdyacallit, the Guernica things in a skip, what would they do with them?”

  “Same thing they did with the Velvets, auction the living hell out of the fuckers.”

  “Sure, but first?”

  “First?”

  “First they’d authenticate them right?” He gestured for another cup of tea.

  “Yeah of course.”

  “And the VU acetate?”

  “I guess.” I tried to remember what I’d read in the press.

  “You guess wrong. Everyone wanted it to be real so we decided it was. Not even a hint of a check on it.” He sat back, pleased with himself.

  “Well yeah, who would fake something like that?”

  He waited a beat. Satisfaction radiated off him.

  “You?” I asked.

  “No, not me. Though I wish I had. To be fair I don’t have any proof that it was fake, but it’s pretty convenient. There was nothing else interesting in that sale, no other acetates. The guy who’s supposed to have recorded it is dead. The sessions were notoriously druggy.”

  He was talking to himself now, working himself up.

  “There’s simply no other artwork that you could sell, unchecked, for that kind of money. A painting would have Sotheby’s in like a shot, there are people who make a living authenticating these things, but because it’s just a record…” He shook his head and refocused.

  “All you’d really need to fake something like that is a guy who knows how old records look” — he pointed at himself — “and a talented mimic with no morals and bills to pay.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or insulted.

  “Sooooo… What exactly are we talking?”

  “Well.” He was properly smiling now, a Cheshire Cat thing. “In terms of money it would be the Quarrymen show, the one in Bootle?”

  The day the Beatles met. John and Paul together for the first time. There were pictures — John hard as nails, Paul babyish and pink — but no audio.

  “I thought it wasn’t recorded?” I was already running through the idea in my head. How you’d get that skiffle sound, who had those vintage guitars.

  “Someone could have taped it. I’d have to do some Liverpool house clearances, find a contemporary, fake a whole backstory. But.” He tilted his head. “It has some difficulties. McCartney is smart, with a great memory and he’s litigious.”

  “So not the Quarrymen?”

  “Not the Quarrymen. Really it needs to be something from the studio, something fabled, but best of all something whose makers are all dead, or…” his grin widened, “Better than dead, nuts.”

  The tumblers clicked into place. The key turned. “Smile?”

  He clinked his mug on mine. “Smile.”

  Chapter Five

  “Smile?”

  Brandon’s writing just stopped there, on that last line. My voice was hoarse from reading.

  Rae was nodding. “Yeah, Smile… you don’t know what that is?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The corners of her mouth turned down. “It’s this record, or rather, it was going to be this record by Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys guy? It was rumoured to be this masterpiece that he beamed back from God after taking a bunch of LSD. But just as he finished it he had a message from on high and he destroyed all the tapes. He thought the power of the music was starting fires all over Los Angeles.”

  Her look said nothing. “It’s like this total Holy Grail of record collectors and musicians, they try and recreate it from the scraps that were left.” She turned wistful. “God the number of fucking car journeys I’ve spent listening to that thing. There was an official version of it released a while back but that just seemed to make the internet guys even madder.”

  “Why?”

  “Well the guy, Brian,” she said his name like he was someone she knew, “is kind of messed up nowadays. Too much acid in the Sixties. So according to the likes of Bran he just fudged his way through it. Like a moustache on the Mona Lisa apparently. Bran listened to it just the one time and then went back to the outtakes, it was like it didn’t really exist.”

  She zoned out again and I let her think. “I suppose it would be worth a fortune if they could fake it.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “I don’t know. Brandon knew those tracks inside out, and he does a pretty good Brian impression. And he has reams of out-takes from the original sessions.” I watched her fingers worrying a thread on the frayed cuff of her jumper. “The thing is I’m not sure it would matter whether it was possible or not, he’d do it anyway. Just the idea of it would be enough. It would fuck off the Beach Boys fanatics. Check. He might make a fortune from it. Check. It was supposed to be super difficult to play. Check check check. And… even if it ever got out later that it was a fake, well that might be better.”

  That noise flitted through the apartment again: a whirr more insect than mechanical, spinning from room to room.

  “Better? How so?”

  “It’d prove he was talented enough to sound just like Brian and it’d make a fool of any journalist who’d raved about it. Win/win.”

  I looked through at the instruments and recording gear in the other room. They glowed with the warmth of objects handled over decades. How old was that stuff? Beach Boys-era? It would explain why nothing looked new.

  “Do you think he recorded it?”

  She shrugged. “Baxter seems to think he did. You’ve not seen anything?”

  “I wouldn’t know what I was looking for. A record? Tapes? A memory stick?”

  “Tapes.” Rae was definite. “The record’s not cut, if that’s what Bax was asking about. It wouldn’t be digital because that would sound too modern. So it’s tapes. Big ones.” She spread her hands about a foot-and-a-half apart.

  I carried the laptop through into the recording room. It felt church-like in the dusk, the guitars the colours of religious paintings: dried-blood reds, tobaccoey browns and tarnished golds. On the far wall I could make out a gloomy face: two eyes of spoked tape spools in a machine and a tight line of tape for a mouth. I pointed the laptop at it.

  “That’s it, there’s a tape in it too.”

  I found the switch. The machine gave a sigh and feeble green lights struggled to life. I waited for the valves to thrum with heat and then pressed play. The room was filled, instantly, with a thick soup of voices, swooping and soaring and tied tight to each other. Even I could tell it was beautiful. I sat back in a chair and let it tiptoe through neat variations, adding to the room’s religious air.

  “‘Our Prayer’, this one’s called,” said Rae with grim satisfaction. “Track one, side one, leave it playing.”

  We sat there for an hour with the music playing and the light fading. She chatted about nothing: school clothes for Robin, the paths cut in shoulder-deep winter snow that made her town a maze of gleaming
white walls, whether or not she should cut her hair. I felt privileged, a new immigrant to her world. At one point the music stopped and the tape flapped on its reel.

  “Look underneath for side two. I hope he finished it.” There was another tape and I worked out how to spool it between the two wheels. Again the burning smell of valves, old, gold light and songs that veered from the sacred to silly. I didn’t want it to end.

  “It’s pretty nuts that Bran put all that writing on a memory stick that he knew Baxter would have. If he’d opened it then surely there’d be enough there to keep Baxter from working with him.”

  Rae looked dreamy on the screen. “Oh, he’d have loved that. He was addicted to risk.”

  She paused for a couple of seconds. “Last month I took him to a NA meeting in Reno. Things had gotten pretty rocky between us and I thought it was a good sign that he suggested it. He’s always been so dismissive of those places: ‘If you don’t quit alone then you’re not quitting’, that sort of thing. So, I didn’t quiz him, just drove him there and back because of his DUIs and sat in the car for an hour listening to old tapes. When he came out he looked so battered by it that I thought it might have helped. He looked humbled, y’know? And that’s not a word I get to use much about him.”

  A track ended in a tumult of noise and Rae stared out, flat-eyed.

  “So when he disappeared I drove out there to see if I couldn’t talk to his sponsor. I know it’s all confidential but if I could just get a sense of whether the guy was surprised that Bran had gone. There was no one in Tahoe he really spoke with. So, up I go to the third floor and it’s like no meeting I’ve ever been to: the door is metal and bolted and no one wants to let me in. And when I finally collar someone coming out and see his pupils and his trackmarks I realise what the place is: a shooting gallery.”

  She checked the screen to make sure I understood.

  “A place to shoot up, y’know? I’m there for an hour and I watch them go in shivering and come out wrecked.” She shook her head slowly, more in wonder than in disgust.

  “And when he did stuff like that, and he did it a lot, it infects everything around you. If a woman came to the house — any woman: Robin’s teachers, a neighbour, one of the moms — I worried that it was because Bran had fucked her and he was getting a kick from her meeting me. If he ever bought me clothes I wouldn’t dare wear them out in case I mistakenly went wherever he’d stolen them from. It’s so tiring.”

  I didn’t know what to say. We sat in respective silences for a minute as the track played on. And then the whole thing came to an underwhelming end. A wobbly synth line tailed off over huge acoustic drums, there was a silence and then, in offstage voices. “Brian?” “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  Rae threw off the magic of the last thirty minutes. “Well. It sounded pretty real to me, but what would I know?”

  I laughed, “About twenty times more than me. So what do you want to do with it?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  There’s a special kind of silence after music has finished. We sat and watched each other on the screen.

  “We wouldn’t really be doing anything wrong, would we? If we sold it. We’d just be passing it on.” There was hope in her voice but she was facing side-on to the screen so her eyes didn’t meet mine.

  “It’s still fraud, we know it’s not the real thing.” I felt instantly, irredeemably square, like someone from another era. “I mean…”

  She nodded. “I know. I wish I didn’t know but I know.” She breathed out hard. Then an odd smile crossed her face.

  “You realise that if they were planning to sell it then what we’ve just read could have put Baxter in prison?”

  It was true. There was enough detail there to make a legal case and Brandon had saved it onto a memory stick that he’d given Baxter.

  Rae sat in profile like a portrait on a coin. There was something I wanted to ask her but I worried it was inappropriate.

  “Do you miss him?”

  She didn’t pause. “Yeah, a bit. Sometimes. There’s an internal Bran who’s still here, telling me not to listen to Bon Jovi and complaining that the drinks cabinet is looking a bit thin; that one I could do without. But the actual Bran, I miss that other point of contact, y’know?” She stared into the screen. “When I was a kid I’d do anything to spend more time with my dad — he worked away a lot so when he was home I’d tag along everywhere he went. He used to love to rock-climb and I even went along with that a couple of times. You’re literally tied together, if one falls you pull the other one down with you. I’d be up there flat against some terrifying Kansas rock-face, more worried about my nails than anything, and he’d call up to me, “Two points of contact at all times Ray-ray.’ It was his rule: you always had to have two holds on the rock. Didn’t matter if it was fingertips or toes, two points of contact. One was too slim a hold on the world.”

  I tried to keep very quiet.

  “That’s what I was thinking about, at his funeral. My fingers uncurling from around a spur of rock. One point of contact gone.”

  My phone vibrated on the table and I switched it off.

  “Men don’t feel that way, do they? Like they’re fading away. A week after his funeral I moved to LA. Started going to castings. Found a place up in Koreatown over a dry-cleaners. All by my sweet self on the third floor and the neighbours never seemed to leave their apartments and I’d go days without even speaking to a soul. And I began to disappear. Every day I felt a little less solid. I’d go days without talking to anyone. I even did my shopping item by item just so I’d get to speak to someone. Once…” she shivered, “I lay down on the sidewalk, on Melrose. Just lay down with everyone walking around me, waiting for someone to ask if I was OK. So I’d know they could see me.”

  Without saying anything she walked to the fridge and came back with a Coke.

  “When Bran came along it was like…” she mimed an explosion. “Everything turned 3D. When you see the day through two pairs of eyes everything becomes real again. But after a while he retreated into some other world and the world flattened out again. And then Robin. God, Robin.” Her hands made an indistinct shape. “That was the moment. For the first time since I was a kid I was seen twenty-four hours a day. If I’m not directly in his sight then I’m in his mind. And all of a sudden I was solid again. Broken but solid. Two points of contact at all times. So I miss Bran but, I dunno, not enough.”

  The calm was broken by the noise of a door opening. It was only when I saw Rae rub her eyes with the pulled-down cuffs of her jumper that I realised she’d been crying.

  Robin charged into the room and then vibrated to a halt when he saw the screen. “Hi Daddy.” He leant in to kiss Rae and then squatted down.

  “Why are you sitting in the dark?”

  I looked around me. “I hadn’t even realised. We were just talking.”

  “Can I see Umbrage?”

  I gave him a look. “Don’t you have homework?”

  He turned to Rae. “Mommmm?”

  Could he tell she’d been crying? She swiped her sleeve under her nose.

  “An hour. Exactly one hour.” She pulled out her phone. “I’m setting a timer.”

  “Daddy? C’mon.”

  I set up the endoscope as he chattered about school and let it run as he talked, watching the grassy uplands unspool on screen. With a child’s unerring recognition for what you least wanted them to see, he waited until the Necropolis came into view before he said anything.

  “What’s that? Go back, go back.” He was up on his elbows with his face close to the screen. The Necropolis was a spiral of glass bowls, each with just the narrowest of mouths gaping up into the air, uncoiled around a lone hill. In each bowl grew a single plant: some spindly, wooded things, some tiny jewel-like flowers. At the summit of the spiral the glass of the bowls had darkened and cracked, and pale roots trickled through the splinters. Lower down the bowls were newer and gleamed with the fresh green of shoots, while the containe
rs on the lowest level, now beginning to colonise the flatlands, were pristine and contained nothing more than a thin layer of earth.

  “What is it?” Robin’s voice was rapt. What did he know of death? What did I know at that age? The brutal mathematics of pet ownership was my only experience.

  “When people from Umbrage die, some of them are buried, the way we are,” I said.

  “Or burned up,” said Robin with glee.

  “Right, or cremated. But here people do something different. I’ll read from the book, OK?”

  I checked the screen to watch him nod.

  On a ridge overlooking the inland sea, in an area called Koleman Putara, stands a knotted, stunted tree. It’s black from root to branch-tip and covered in an ebony fruit with the sheen of beetle carcasses. The fruit are deadly poisonous and a white pyre of bird bones engulfs the first few feet of trunk. A songsmith from the Darks was the first to popularise this as a place to die. He rolled an oil-glass all the way up the hill and, after swallowing a handful of the shiny berries, climbed through the open neck and lay down. It’s that oil-glass that sits atop Koleman Putara, blackened and mosaiced with cracks, but still home to the spiny black plant that grew out of his remains. As with most things, Umbragians are faddy about death, and it soon became fashionable to end your life here. Those who wish to die no longer have to push the glass bowls up the hill, or climb the tree for berries. Instead they take the funicular to the summit, pay a garden-hand to pack a glass with the richest of mulches and then choose from one of thousands of seed-cocktails on sale from stalls. Seeds of any growing thing from the four corners of Umbrage are on sale here: lilies that flower once a decade, voracious climbers, pungent lavender, trembling sky-thistle. But each packet also contains one sleek black bullet seed. Down they go together, death and beauty. And as the black seed releases its toxins, slowing vital processes and drawing life back, the other seeds start to swell and burgeon in the stomach; the moment when you are no longer a man, when you’ve become a garden, is hard to measure. Some of Umbrage’s great and good are interred here. Dreamsmith Gororo, whose work sent the whole parliament into a week of unmoving sleep, is a tangle of thick vines. Westie, Umbrage ferryman for sixty years, is a simple carpet of daisies…