by Mat Osman
“I know. It’s real vegetation, most of it, not the fake stuff.”
“That’s so cool. It’s like you expect to see birds and stuff. How comes it’s not kept clean like everywhere else?”
“No one knows.” I had a hunch Robin would like this story. As a kid I was fascinated by stories of abandoned cities, or mysteries like the Marie Celeste, and it felt like something genetic.
“It was built by a group of Umbragians who liked open spaces. They sequestered themselves up here and were pretty much self-sufficient. You know what self-sufficient means?”
Robin nodded furiously on the screen.
“They kept themselves to themselves so when a party of hikers from Dracksal, down in the valley, stopped by here there was no real way of knowing how long they’d been gone.”
“No clues?” Robin’s face was close to the screen.
“Well…”
Much of this morning had been given over to rewriting the clues hidden in The Folly’s fabric, to make them look right for a ten-year-old. I took a length of dowling and parted some of the vegetation that hung down over the chamber. The walls, pale as maggot-skin, were covered in scratchy patterns and writing. They were something between symbols and drawings, and they covered the entire back wall.
“What does it mean?”
“Who knows? I have an idea, but maybe you could take a look.”
I clicked the endoscope button to take stills and dropped the pictures into the chat box. He opened them and instantly his face slackened. I knew that look: absorption.
“Hey, that’s for later. Don’t forget what we came here for, the throne animal.”
His hand leapt to his mouth. “I forgot.”
“It’s always a child who looks so I’m going to step aside. Let me know if you see anything.”
I went out to the kitchen and did a line on the kitchen counter with the water running so Robin wouldn’t hear me. When I got back he was staring into the screen with his face scrunched up.
“Anything?”
“I think so. It wasn’t too clear.”
I let him think.
“I mean I saw it but I’m not certain.”
“That’s OK. Tell me what you saw.”
“Like a rabbit? But bigger.”
“A hare?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Google ‘hare — H A R E’ and take a look.”
He typed with one finger. “That’s it, that’s totally it.”
“Interesting. They call them jack-rabbits in the States I think.” I checked the book. “There’s never been a Year of the Hare before. What do we know about them?”
Robin stared as I consulted Wikipedia.
“In English mythology the hare was a trickster, influenced by the moon, wild and unpredictable. They changed sex from month to month. They’re that rarest of things, a cunning animal that’s not a carnivore. So, he’s peaceful but tricky. He’s fast, and he zig-zags and rears up on his haunches, and boxes and runs wild in the moonlight.”
Robin looked unconvinced. “How do they follow that? Do they have to run around in moonlight?”
“No, but they can take the spirit of the hare. Be wild but not vicious, swift but not rigid, mad but not crazy.”
Robin bounced on the bed. “Mad not crazy, mad not crazy,” he chanted, boxing the air in front of him. It was infectious. I slapped my hands on the desk and chanted along with him until we were both facing our respective screens, shadow-boxing.
“Mad not crazy, mad not crazy.”
At full volume he collapsed in a pile on the bed, shaking with laughter. He was still laughing when Rae appeared, laden with shopping.
She took one look: the ruined tower on the screen, the Wikipedia page and Robin’s tears of laughter. “Boys,” she said as she led Robin away.
The day spread out in front of me. I ate, I read, I repaired Umbrage’s western seawall. It was evening before Rae returned. She sat in the kitchen with a mug of coffee.
“I have no idea what you said to him earlier but he has been working away in his room for hours. He even told me not to disturb him.” She shook her head happily. “He’s come in here twice all day, once to ask me a question about jack-rabbits, which in no way could I answer by the way, so thanks for that, and once for a sandwich.”
“It was just a little puzzle. But I think it will appeal to him.”
“Because it appeals to you?”
“Yes. Well it definitely would have appealed to me as a kid.”
“But not now?” There was a trace of smile in her voice.
“Maybe a little.”
I sat for a long while after that. The sound of rain on the balcony and wet tyres on the street below mixed in with Umbrage’s symphony of clicks and burbles. There was a smear across the view back into Robin’s bedroom. I tried to wipe it clean but it must have been on his end — he’d kissed the exact spot of the laptop camera.
I didn’t feel like doing anything. I wasn’t tired, or high or worried. I poured a drink from one of Brandon’s half-opened bottles, a tawny whiskey that I didn’t want to know the price of, and waited, content.
Hours later the screen wobbled. Rae had come in to collect the laptop.
“Can’t sleep,” she whispered, her face in profile on the screen as she walked down the hallway. She lay down on her bed, her pose identical to Robin’s earlier.
“It’s silly. I’m really tired but knowing the laptop was in Robin’s room felt like I’d left a door open.” She lay on her side and pushed her hair back. “Why aren’t you asleep, it’s late there?”
“You look tired,” I said, “close your eyes.”
She looked beautiful right then. Late night puffiness gave her a cherubic look and her eyes flickered open, startled, every time she began to fall asleep.
I tried to drink in the details of their life over her shoulder. Action figures left in a frozen battle on the bedside table, family photos and Rae’s shoes where she’d kicked them off. Over the bed there was an old-fashioned map on the wall with a couple of jerky lines running across it.
“What’s that, the map?” I asked.
Rae looked over her shoulder. “Oh.”
The lines ran from England to California, and from somewhere deep in the American interior. With a start, too late, I realised what it might be.
“Brandon made it. Not long after we met. The red twine is his path across the world. The blue is me. Kansas to California. Not much of an adventure.”
She turned the laptop around so I could see the map, but not her face. Where the two lines met, at a pin in Los Angeles, they were intertwined and their conjoined paths spiralled outwards around the city and then north to Vegas and on to Tahoe. Now I was closer I could see a third piece of twine, yellow this time, joining them from Vegas to Tahoe.
It was a pretty thing. I felt sick.
Rae sighed. “I’ll say something for your brother, he could make you feel special. Chosen even. He always made me think I could make something of myself. Everyone else was an idiot, a chancer, but me? I was going to do great things. We were.”
She hooked her little finger under the path from Vegas to Tahoe. “I mean it was probably fifty per cent ego: anyone who he had picked had to be special, didn’t they? But with him at first I never worried about the future. We were going to win.”
I cursed myself for asking. She watched the screen and I couldn’t read her eyes. I didn’t want Brandon to be the last thing in her mind as she fell asleep.
“Match your breathing to mine, slow down,” I told her, keeping the laptop mike close to my mouth.
I breathed long and slow, and she began to relax, her eyes half-closing, then three-quarter closing and then gone.
I kept as quiet as I could. In the blue light of the screen she looked almost abstract, a snowscape with eyelashes for winter trees and a river of hair. She said something indistinct before rolling over. I wanted to reach into the scene to push her hair away from her eyes. I took the laptop into the
bedroom and placed it at the end of the bed, letting her light wash over me.
The noises were indistinct. Movements and low voices. Not street sounds, something closer. Maybe it was Rae or Robin through the laptop. I felt a pang for the comfort of their home. Here at the Magpie, the trompe l’oeil ceiling was nearly thirty feet above me. The walk to the bathroom was longer than most of the flats I’d ever lived in.
I headed to the kitchen for a glass of water and found two men standing in the hallway, reading something by the light of a mobile. White guys, bulky, shaven-headed. For a second they looked as surprised as I did but before I could do any of the things that I’d expect to do in such a situation — scream, run, hide — they were upon me. A hand closed hard across my mouth and then something yanked at my ankles. I toppled and was hauled upside down, my hair just touching the parquet. I reached down to steady myself and my hands were kicked away. I tried again. The same thing happened. I rocked from side to side, trying to get a better view.
Someone squatted in front on me while a hand still clamped my mouth. “Hold him higher for fuck’s sake. My knees are killing me.”
I was hoisted higher until my face was level with his. Upside down it was hard to tell exactly what he looked like. A clean, pinkish face with skin that looked pulled tight. Stubble on his jaw and head, longer at the jaw. A blue roadmap of veins.
He took his hand away from my mouth and wagged a finger at me. “Shhh.”
Experimentally he reached out and pushed me gently in the chest. I swung back and forth and he watched me.
“You know, I was hoping that Saul was wrong when he said you were back here. I didn’t believe him. I said to Ron, ‘He’ll be long gone that one. He’s got a brain in his head.’”
The other guy nodded. He gave me another shove, keeping me swinging.
“Because when we met you I thought to myself, ‘Now this isn’t our usual client, he’s discerning’. It’s rare that someone who hires us takes any kind of pride in what they do. It’s just ‘go here, do him,’ like they’re ordering a pizza. Like we don’t have any opinions. Like we don’t want to be creative with it. But you, you had a vision for the whole thing. I like that. And then, when you disappeared, I said to Ron that something must have happened to you because, let’s face it, running away when you still have a payment to make is the action of an ignorant, ignorant man. And you Brandon, don’t strike me as an ignorant man.”
I tried to say something but he placed a finger on my lips.
“I mean you have obvious flaws, like the pills and the big mouth and I have to say, what I consider a low-level homophobia, possibly through some unresolved same-sex attractions. And also there’s a fine line between creative and over-elaborate and I’m not sure it’s a line you’re aware of. But despite that you’re not ignorant. You understand the penalties and reparations and the compoundment of interest that are involved in hiring professional people to do a job, and then reneging on that deal.”
He placed his hand either side of my face.
“But now here we are and I find you’re back in this… whatever this place is. By all accounts living it very large indeed, and I find myself disappointed in you.”
He actually did look disappointed.
“As to what form that disappointment will take…” Here he spread his hands wide, as if he were about to catch a ball. “Well, we’ll find out later, won’t we? But for now. Where’s. Our. Money.”
Each word was punctuated with a shove to the chest.
“I don’t know,” I said, my words gummy with the weight of my upside-down tongue.
I didn’t see his hand move at all. I just felt a single blow land, hard, above my right ear and then my whole skull started throbbing.
He said something under his breath and nodded at whoever was holding my ankles and I was lowered to the ground. My jaw felt tight and there was a low rumbling that hadn’t been there before.
“All right, the safe first. I don’t really want to be fiddling around in your pockets.”
They walked me through to the guest bedroom, a hand on each elbow like they were helping an old lady across the road. By the time I had the picture off the wall my teeth were chattering. I shook as I entered the combination. I snuck a glance at the other guy, while the first emptied the files and envelopes from the safe. He was taller still, with the same shaved head and stubble combination, and a similar sheen to his skin, but they didn’t look like brothers. More like two people trying to look like brothers.
“This is two-and-a-half thousand.” He said it like it was tragic news — a fire in an orphanage — and ran the heel of his hand along the ridge of his eyebrows as if trying to shift a headache.
“Which is nothing. Actually it’s worse than nothing because this looks like remnants.” He sounded tired but there was a twitchiness to him that was making me wary.
He placed a hand on each side of my face and squeezed my cheeks. “So, my duck. Where. Is. Our. Money?”
I willed my voice calm. “I don’t know who you are. I am assuming, because it has happened many, many times before, that you are in some way involved with my twin brother, my identical twin brother, Brandon.”
A smile passed between them. “And you’re not Brandon?”
I shook my head.
“You’re the brother, Adam.”
How did they know my name? “Exactly,” I said but with a sense of foreboding.
“That’s pretty poor. You’ve had a week to come up with something more convincing than that.”
“But you knew he had a twin. You knew my name.”
“Yeah, obviously, we know about Adam.” His face was weighty with sorrow. “We know because we killed him.”
Ten minutes later we were sat on the sofa, going around it again. Over herbal tea (them) and a Scotch (me) I laid out everything that had happened. The phone call, the police, my deceptions, how I’d ended up here. They listened and then talked amongst themselves and I couldn’t tell how much they believed me. The quiet one seemed to be called Reggie but I didn’t want to ask them about that. What I wanted to do was to ask them about something that was coalescing in my mind. Once they were satisfied that I wasn’t a flight risk I tried a couple of questions.
“So did Adam’s killing go as planned?”
A look passed between the two of them. “Not exactly. But the end result was the main thing.”
Dominos toppled. “Not exactly? Was there something you were supposed to wear? Something you were supposed to leave?”
Ronnie rubbed at the back of his neck. “Yeah. It was all a bit complex, a bit elaborate. And you can be a bit grandiose after a couple of lines. You, him, whoever.”
Reggie nodded. “There were fucking costumes and a record we were supposed to leave.”
Ronnie took back over. “And a passport and a wallet, remember?”
Reggie said, “A whole fucking production.”
Their voices were more similar than their faces, I realised.
“Like I said, pretty fucking elaborate. But the day before we were due to, y’know, we were out checking out the area, looking for a spot, when we see him walking home alone. And we just improvised. No fucking headdresses or whatever. But the same result. You got what you wanted.”
I let it all sink in. I wanted them to see it rather than me having to explain.
“And how did you know it was Adam, not Brandon?”
There was a moment of silence.
“Stands to reason doesn’t it? Over in Notting Hill by his flat. Wearing a ratty anorak, no way that was Brandon. Man was a snappy dresser for all his faults. Right where you said he’d be, too.”
But he sounded dubious now. “I mean you never leave this place do you? Saul said you were like a hermit.”
I tried to recreate the chain of events. Brandon tells Kimi his plan. But then he hires these two to kill me. To kill me and leave his ID on my body. To kill me and plant his record on me. The media starts up. Kimi says her bit. He’s in the new
s. But where’s Brandon?
I felt everything in my body stiffen. He’s me. He goes back to my flat and waits for the police. He does what I did. He identifies the body. He waits and watches. He’s Adam Kussgarten, mourning brother. Perhaps he even comforts Rae. And he gets to watch his final creation unfold. Better still he gets to see it unfold while all the proceeds go to Brandon’s next of kin. Me. Him.
I was torn between a sorrow that my life meant so little to him and an admiration for the neatness of it all. And then Ronnie and Reggie messed it all up.
Gently I floated this new theory, but they were unconvinced. If Brandon’s plan was elaborate, this was a step too far. They were more interested, yet seemingly unworried, by the news that the killing had been captured on camera.
“How did it look? With the duck masks and stuff? Did it look bad-ass?” The taller one, Reggie, mimed the killing again, stepping across the room quickly and placing two fingers at my temple. “Bang bang.”
He regarded me thoughtfully. “Fuck I wish we had a copy. Needs considering, does this. Shall we, y’know, meditate on it?”
Reggie lit three cones of incense in a triangle around us. They sat cross-legged and held hands with their eyes closed. I didn’t really know what to do with myself.
As if reading my mind, Ronnie whispered, “Just sit there and look pretty OK?”
In unison they took small bottles from jeans pockets and dropped a brown liquid under their tongues. Reggie licked his lips like a cat with a furball. I sat quietly, trying to get a handle on how my fate was progressing, and what kind of people these were. Ron and Reg. Reg and Ron. I couldn’t quite place them. They had gym bunny physiques: great triangular plates of flesh up top, encroaching on thick necks, but spindlier legs. They wore identical white Ts that were so tight that I could see individual veins pulsing beneath them.
Ronnie rolled his head in a circle. I couldn’t tell which of them it was who started talking first
“We were, it’s true, a bit previous. You could argue without carrying out due diligence.”
“Yeah, but this is Marcus all over again. Too trusting of the wrong people.”
“Karmically it’s a fucking mess. There aren’t enough good deeds on the planet.”