The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  I stopped it there.

  “So they’re not really dead?” he asked.

  This was the question I’d asked myself when I’d come up with the idea. A plant wasn’t dead, was it, and the transformation was no more dramatic than that from a caterpillar to a butterfly. It was just a different kind of life: a concept that was comforting to me, but I had no idea how it would seem to a child.

  “No, I don’t think they are. A different kind of alive maybe.”

  “Freddie’s buried in the back garden.”

  “Freddie?”

  He pouted. “Our cat, don’t you remember?”

  “Of course, sorry.”

  He was fidgety but quiet and Rae was nowhere to be seen. I let a couple of moments pass.

  “Hey, Robin, does mummy seem happier or sadder since I went away.”

  “I dunno.” He tugged at his lower lip.

  “It’s OK. There’s no right answer, I just wondered what you thought.”

  “Sadder. I dunno. Both. Sadder then happier.” He looked at me beseechingly — don’t ask me this stuff.

  “Happier recently?” I asked.

  “Yes, kinda. In the last week.”

  A twitch of pleasure. Did I do that?

  I checked my watch. “That’s an hour, homework time.”

  He jumped up, spindly legs filling the screen.

  “K, thanks Dad love you,” and he was gone.

  There were things that needed doing in Umbrage but I couldn’t keep my eyes from the screen. A blank white oblong of window that could be snow or sunlight. A crumpled juicebox. The tap dripping. Footsteps up and down stairs. Faint notes of birdsong. Umbrage sat dozing in a deep twilight behind me but it felt like a corpse on a slab. I wanted to plunge my hands through the screen into the mess of Tahoe to pick through the pile of washing on the counter and ball the socks. A blur traversed the screen: Rae, bare-legged. I coughed and her face slid into view.

  “Whoops. Thought you’d gone.” She sat down, one arm crossed over her bare chest. Earlier she’d told me something about her life, unasked, and now our relationship felt lop-sided. Umbrage ran through my head — the stories I had told Robin — but they were thin things compared to hearing her talk. For a long time she just looked at me with that strange disconnect you get on a screen. Then she said, “one sec,” and returned in a T-shirt, holding a bottle of nail polish.

  “So Baxter needed Brandon alive?” She was painting her nails and they loomed in the monitor in front of me.

  “What’s that?”

  “Baxter. He needed Brandon to finish this Smile record.”

  “Right, yes. Though I’m still not sure why Brandon was doing all these money jobs. You’d think he’d concentrate on his own record if it’s his legacy.”

  She examined her nails. “Who knows why he does the things he does? Maybe he just wanted to tie them all together again. Certainly if the record did come out it might put an unwelcome spotlight on them. We could try Saul?”

  I’d spent an hour earlier looking for a way of contacting him but had come up with very little. “I got the number for the promoter that Brandon mentioned. I left a message but he may have burnt his bridges there. Kimi?”

  “Can you face her?”

  “I’m not sure…”

  A noise started up from the music room. Vague sounds of someone moving around a room and then a voice. My voice. Brandon’s voice.

  “You left the tape running?” asked Rae.

  “Yeah, I thought you said it was the end.”

  “It’s the end of Smile, yes. I guess he used the half-inch tape for something else.”

  I walked the laptop through. Brandon’s voice sounded actorly on the huge speakers. He was saying something about steam and windows.

  “Should I rewind it?”

  “Yeah, go back. It only just started up.”

  It took a couple of minutes to find the beginning but when we did the reading started with no preamble.

  Daughters of the Daughters

  (I’ve transcribed this as clearly as I can. It was surprisingly easy — I have a feeling that Brandon was reading from something written down. He hardly pauses and you can hear pages being turned at some points. It’s clear from the environmental sounds that the recording was made here, in At The Sign Of The Magpie, but there’s no clue as to when.)

  Bax and I went for a couple of pints before I walked home. I took vaguely remembered streets, taking pleasure in London’s illegibility. This city is so fucking unwelcoming to newcomers — young or old, black or white, rich or poor — that it’s oddly democratic. You have to put the time in. On Mount Street a trio of mirror-sunglassed Arab kids drove their supercars at a walking pace. I’d seen them parked outside Claridge’s earlier: three slabs of polished fibreglass that barely reached my waist, each in an eyeball-popping lipstick shade. The kids were bored, revving constantly to keep the engines from seizing up in London’s snarl, staring out into space as cameraphones were whipped out at every traffic light. I fantasised idly: a bottle of vodka with my handkerchief stuffed in the top, a flick of lighter, and then of a wrist.

  The whole block where the Colony Club used to be, where I’d had my first paid-for handjob, was broken to rubble, picked over by cranes and surrounded by hoardings. They promised “gracious city living” and were emblazoned with pictures of those Jurassic Sohoites — Bacon and O’Toole and Melly and Bernard — which just seemed like rubbing salt in the wound. It was their haunts that had been bulldozed. Every couple of streets it was repeated: some memory torn down and the wreckage locked away behind hoardings. The city is made up of screens now. It was like Kimi’s gig where everything vital and alive was caged in a screen. Life at one remove.

  I had a vision. The city torn to pieces and roamed over by diggers, scavengers in the ashes. Birds bursting from bare trees as pneumatic drills juddered. All happening behind a maze of billboards showing what had once been there. Ornate painted screens of royal scenes around the wreckage of Buckingham Palace. Cartoon judges laughing over cappuccinos hiding the ruins of the Inns of the Court. Dickensian urchins in Shoreditch. And at the bottom of each one: SOON TO BE LUXURY FLATS — PRICES FROM £500,000.

  Through Denmark Street, and the music shops that I’d haunted from the age of thirteen. Prices had gone from the exorbitant to the speculative — eighteen grand for a ’53 Strat — so that what had once been toolshops for the musicians’ trade were now a very specific antiques market. At Seven Dials I walked in lockstep with a girl talking tightly into a hidden mouthpiece. I reached over and touched her arm.

  “Rachel? Rachel! It is, oh my God.”

  I’d never seen her before, obviously. Her eyes widened and she clutched her bag tighter, but she didn’t say anything. I matched her stride.

  “It’s how long? Ten years? No, eleven.”

  She shook her head but didn’t say anything.

  “You’ve been alive all this time. He said you were dead, he said you couldn’t live with it, but I should have known you were stronger than that.”

  “I don’t know you.” Her voice was tiny but certain.

  “Of course, of course — I understand. You have to say that. I know you though. I know you.”

  I gave her a wink and walked on.

  I knew I was back in east London once the kids started to look like refugees. They were dressed in leftovers and bin ends, big kids who’d been at the dressing-up basket. The attempts at beards were particularly heartrending. They reminded me of photographs of kids playing in the bombsites, post-World War II — kings of nothing, rulers of a wasteland. They’d picked over the rubble of our culture, cloaked themselves in rags, stripped of all meaning. I saw Thundercats T-shirts, leather blousons in teal and burgundy, turn-ups, branded sportswear, plastic sunglasses, sweatshirts yellow and crusty at the armpits, ski boots, braces, dinner jackets.

  I sat in a coffeeshop and pulled up the Brian Wilson messageboards just to see who was saying what about what. No rumblings of a mir
aculous find. The whole thing would put Bax in my debt, which is exactly where I like people to be. With him under the thumb, and Kimi’s love of a musical game, I had pretty much a full band. I could go ahead without Saul but there would be a symmetry to the whole thing if he were involved. Technically I didn’t need them but there’s a reason why the best records are made by bands.

  Music, if you do it right, is making the impossible come to life. For all your everyday emotions there are words: jealousy, anger, enchantment, whatever. But for those impossible tangles of feeling, “brutal femininity”, “desperate ennui”, well you need an older, stranger language. And it’s easier for two people, or four even, to hold all these competing emotions in orbit around themselves. A quartet could to want to build and destroy and cry and laugh and give up and persevere all at the same time; a band could believe six impossible things before breakfast. I needed irritants and accelerants. I needed firewood.

  Kaspar was standing in the doorway when I got back to The Magpie, staring up at the sky like it had done him some harm. I pulled out my ciggies. He was wearing a badge that read, I LOST 10 POUNDS ASK ME HOW.

  “How d’you lose ten pounds Kas?” I asked.

  He produced a lighter from somewhere and lit my cigarette. “I grew dreadlocks before the weigh-in, then shaved them off.”

  Baxter’s more dynamic now than he ever was on stage; the recording gear arrived the next morning. Two sweating guys in vests swore their way up and down the spiral stairs with as-near-as-damnit the exact contents of Brian Wilson’s Sunset Sounds studio, as it was back in the summer of sixty-five. Bax and I had pored over the few pictures that still existed from those sessions. Brian already a vacant, glandular toddler, ringed by unlikely instruments. There he was grinning under a fireman’s hat, picking at a battered ukulele. There’s Van Dyke Parks, trim as a plantation owner, struggling with a tuba. Comprehensively moustachioed session men blew, bowed, struck and strummed a wealth of instruments that would have made a good-sized orchestra jealous.

  The gear was from a guy called Tony Harrison who I’d hired from back in the Nineties, when he was the go-to guy if you wanted the kind of amp that Bolan used on The Slider, or a 335 that had passed through Johnny Marr’s hands. He’d been expensive then, but nowadays he was astronomical.

  The third time I queried a cost his voice hardened.

  “These are the fucking prices OK? I hardly ever lend out at all nowadays, I just find stuff to sell to bankers.”

  “Bankers?”

  “Bankers. Hedge fund men. Property people. The art market’s got too rich for them, wine’s going the same way. So the next big thing is vintage instruments. Remember that black Gold Top? The one Jimmy Page used in The Song Remains the Same?”

  I did. I’d hired it for our very last session, at a ruinous cost. It didn’t make me sound like Jimmy Page.

  “Guess how much I sold it for?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “A hundred and fifty grand. Some French guy in Westbourne Grove. Can’t play a note as far as I can tell. Not sure he even knew who Jimmy Page was. So, think on. That Strat that you’re trying to beat the price down on is probably worth two Ferraris. And you wouldn’t get them for five hundred a day.”

  I did actually get the price down. For all his faults, the man loves his guitars, and a few minutes of cooing over his war stories of Mick n’ Keef and Van and Eric got me a discount and free delivery.

  I couldn’t play all of the instruments in the Sunset Sound pictures. Baxter was nervous, obviously, about bringing in outsiders, but we had samples of pretty much everything, and, according to Baxter, the record would probably never be comprehensively examined.

  He kept pushing his glasses back up his nose, a sign that he was excited. “The great thing is that every play diminishes its value. So whoever buys it is going to play it once, if at all. If he digitises it, that first time he plays it, we can blame any artefacts on the process.”

  “What d’you mean, ‘if at all’?”

  “I wouldn’t play it. I’d put it in a climate-controlled vault, make sure everyone knew I had it and just wait.”

  It’s a strange feeling, taking apart something you love. I’ve lived with Smile for thirty years — it’s probably my longest meaningful relationship. It’s an odd record, only knowable through its absences. You can see its shape hidden in Brian’s other records, a ghost haunting the Gothic halls of later Beach Boys. Bits of it turn up elsewhere. Some songs are finished and well documented. Some are nothing more than titles and studio time-sheets: Danny McCrae, Wurlitzer, 90 mins @ $30 an hour.

  We started with alternate takes of the existing sections. Some of the major songs like “Heroes and Villains” or “Cabin Essence” exist in a snowstorm of fragments. There are home demoes, which mutate into slicker sounding takes from United Western Recorders, then hugely altered versions whose provenance is unconfirmable. The popular theory among the shut-ins who make up the Smile online cognoscenti is that the version of “Good Vibrations” that Brian re-recorded for his next record was a cut ’n’ shut of two older takes, with the first half being vastly superior, so we set out to recreate the whole thing in the spirit of those first golden minutes. The playing wasn’t that hard. Brian was a genius but that didn’t mean he was a virtuoso. It was actually harder to get the room sounding right — that peculiar reverb signature of Brian’s swimming pool (used for the guitars) and the slapdash mike placement. We worked steadily through rack upon rack of virtual units until we found something that replicated its odd mix of slapbacks and long notes. I played guitar (a glorious semi-acoustic, so worn that you had to turn it over to discover what colour it had originally been), ukulele, bass and some organ. Baxter took the piano parts and did some tuba trills.

  He pottered around the instruments like an old man on his allotment. He always made a mess of dressing himself: labels hanging out, trouser legs tucked into socks. Today he’d buttoned his shirt up wrong and one checked collar flapped uselessly out of his sweater. Still, he knew Smile like no one else. He perched on the piano stool, lit by candles, looking like a chubby Phantom of the Opera and poured out track after track of keyboard parts. At one point, damp with sweat and glassy eyed, he played me back a song on the big speakers. It was one of those rococo harpsichord parts that unfold like a butterfly from a cocoon and halfway through, where he flubbed a descending run — a stubbed toe of a note — he looked at me in triumph. “You hear it, you hear it?”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “The mistake. It’s the exact same one he makes in ‘Little Pad’ a couple of years later. Nice huh? By thy mistakes shall we know thee.”

  We played for hours, safe inside the world of Smile, a world at once as infinite as a solar system and as strictly confined as a prison. When, finally, we were done for the night, an unmistakably post-coital air suffused the room. We slumped on couches, smoked and avoided eye contact.

  “It’s like dressing up, isn’t it?” Baxter was lying on the couch with his shadowed head lolling down. “At first you feel silly then you get something from it.”

  I didn’t want to hear what kind of dressing up Baxter Moores might do, but I knew what he meant. I was an OK actor back in my day. I liked being someone else and feeling my face move in unaccustomed ways. I liked crying and I liked fighting without getting hurt. But I never lost myself in it the way I did recording Smile. Once we were two or three tracks in and Brian’s syrupy rhythms started calling from the deep then you just let go. Your hands were like water. Your voice tracked his like that game where you run a hoop over an electrified metal wire, a centimetre either way setting the buzzer rattling. But you stayed calm and true and you ran that wire dead through the centre until you were home sweet home.

  “You’re not wrong.”

  I rolled a joint. The street outside was a cul-de-sac and once in a while a pair of headlights threw a white frame around the window. Once in, once out.

  “Bran. Why are you here?” His feet had stopped jiggling.


  “I’m going to make a record.”

  His silence was more accusatory than anything he might have said.

  “I’m going to make a record and then I’m going to go away for a while.” I thought about it. “Well more than a while. And I wanted to make amends with Kim and Saul and you. And I don’t really know of any way of doing that apart from this.” I threw a hand towards the music room. I couldn’t see his face, which made it easier.

  “I’m aware my word isn’t worth much.” This was something I’d said before, but here, with a man whose girlfriend I’d fucked on the night I split up his band, I knew how true it was. “And I don’t think there’s any way of changing that. Leopard, spots, y’know.”

  The grunt from the couch could have meant anything.

  “What little good there is in me is in my songs. If I can’t put my life right out in the real world” — I threw my arms wide — “then I can at least do it in here. I know it’s not a lot. But hopefully it’s something.”

  People think we write songs to express feelings, and who knows, perhaps there are some mentally stable folk out there for whom it’s true. But I think most writers, the interesting ones anyway, write songs to create feelings. It’s alchemy; the spark of life in the automaton. In a song you can find that perfect feeling that real life is so reluctant to provide. I don’t want to be like Kate Bush writing “Running Up That Hill”, I want to be “Running Up That Hill”.

  He was quiet for the first time in the whole day. Just another of his grunts and a fat finger on the PLAY button again.

  “Those are going to have to be finessed at home,” he said, listening back for the hundredth time, swapping between his iPod and our tape. “We’ll fake some mike spill and get a few of the ambient sounds in there. You can hear a train go by in one of the Gold Star sessions.” He was talking mainly to himself. “I’ll have to find out what make it was.”