The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  “But practically? Practically there’s no change.”

  “Could argue practically we’re in the clear.”

  As they whispered the quality of the light in the room changed infinitesimally and with a jolt I recognised what it meant: someone had walked in front of the camera back in Tahoe and the flat-screen TV here had lit up. I willed whoever it was to keep moving. The screen-light stayed on. I kept my eyes on Ronnie and Reggie. If it were Rae was there a way I could get a message to her? I was just formulating something to ask them that might explain the situation when I heard Robin’s voice.

  “Daddy?”

  Ronnie jumped and wheeled round.

  “Daddy? Whatchu doing?” Robin, over life-size on the vast screen, tilted his head from side to side.

  Ronnie and Reggie looked at each other and Reggie whispered, “You take this.”

  Ronnie dropped into a crouch again, eyes level with Robin’s on the screen.

  “Hey buddy, we just popped in to see your daddy here, y’know, a cup of tea, a bit of a chinwag.”

  “Robin, go back to bed, OK?” I tried to inject some meaning into my look.

  “OK,” he nodded, but he seemed reluctant to move.

  Reggie held up a hand. “Of course, back to bed in just a sec.”

  Ronnie mouthed something to him and he nodded. “Is your mum around?”

  Robin looked sly. “Yeah but she’s asleep. I shouldn’t really be up.”

  “Gotcha, our secret. But she’s there with you, right?”

  “Yeah.” He locked his eyes on me.

  “That’s good, just wanted to check you were OK. Your daddy is right, you should be in bed.”

  He gave the tiniest nod of the head to Reggie and before I could react he clasped a hand over my mouth. He lifted me off my heels and dragged me to the doorway. I was facing the bedroom but I could still hear the conversation.

  “It’s the middle of the night there. You guys on holiday?”

  Robin would be bursting to talk, even to a stranger. “No I’m at home.”

  “Course you are, your daddy said. Looks nice.”

  I could hear the boredom in Robin’s voice. “I guess.”

  “You’d rather be in London?”

  “Yeah. Most of London was burned down in 1666 by a great fire.” He slowed over the last two words and I could tell he was wondering why it was great.

  “That’s right. You really know your stuff. How far away d’you think it is?”

  “I can check on Google maps.” Even before I tried to call out I felt the hand tighten further and I was pulled deeper into the lounge.

  “That’s right you can. Door to door even if you know the address there.”

  Carefully Robin spelled out the address as he typed it in, his tongue hanging out with the effort.

  “Fit… teen… Bear’s Nest Road… Tahoe…. City… Mom! What’s our zip again?”

  A pause. Faint sound of footsteps. Rae’s voice, too far away to be clear.

  Robin turned his head. “Our zip.”

  And then Rae’s voice, clearly now. “What’s it for honey? Why are you up?”

  There was a pause then she replaced Robin at the screen. Her eyes darted around, taking it all in.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  Ronnie’s voice was light. “Just a friend of your boyfriend’s. Nice kid. Bye there.”

  “Where is he?”

  Ronnie squatted down. “Well that’s a couple of questions really. Who exactly are we talking about?”

  The briefest pause. But enough. “My boyfriend.”

  “And would this errant beau have a name, darling?”

  The same pause. “Brandon, Brandon Kussgarten.”

  Reggie swung the laptop around to face Ronnie and I. “Would this be the fellah?” He swung it back into place.

  “Yes.”

  “Interesting, interesting. And would you have any idea where Brandon keeps his money? You’d be saving him some major inconvenience if you did.”

  Another, longer, silence. I thought the screen might have frozen. And then, without warning, Rae stepped out of eyeline.

  I heard faint beeps of a phone keyboard and then her voice down the speaker. Confident, official. “Hello police, I’d like to report a kidnapping.”

  Her phone screen glowed in the darkness. “It’s in England actually.”

  “Stupid bitch.” Ronnie turned back to Reggie and me. He was clenching and unclenching his fists. “Stupid bitch.”

  “113 Elleworth Road E1, room 6. Yes, it’s a hotel.”

  Reggie tightened his grip. “You think she’s serious?”

  Ronnie nodded, “It sounded like an international number. We have their address though now, we can come back to this.”

  He looked back at the screen. “Cunt,” he added, thoughtfully.

  He came very close to me then, close enough for me to catch the twitch in his eyes and see the spots he’d missed shaving. He looked me in one eye and then the other.

  “Now I’m not certain if you’re Brandon or not, and to be honest I’m past fucking caring. But you’re in his house, spending his money, with his girl and kid calling you up in the night.”

  He spread his arms wide to encompass Brandon’s stuff. “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…”

  Reggie nodded, as if his brother had said something unutterably wise.

  “So whoever the fuck you are, you owe. The forty-five K we agreed and, let’s call it fifteen for our not inconsiderable troubles. Our card.”

  He threw a business card on the floor and took my chin in his hand. “Friday, sweetie, the whole kit and caboodle — no ifs or buts, or…” He raised an eyebrow.

  “We’ll kill you all over again,” said Reg.

  I couldn’t get the taste of Ron’s aftershave off my face. I pulled the laptop through to the bathroom to clean up as Rae babbled.

  “I just called any number I was so sure that they were going to hear the recorded voice on the other end but it worked, it really worked. Shit I have to check on Robin,” and with that she was gone.

  I sat on the toilet and my heart raced.

  The address. Rae and Robin’s address. They had that now. And I had given it to them. Even Brandon hadn’t managed to inflict so much peril on them in such a short time. And it had taken Rae to actually get rid of them.

  I looked around the bathroom. Its opulence was absurd. What had I been doing all this time? I’d learnt nothing of real use from staying here. I’d not got back a penny of their money. Instead I’d been playing with toys and drinking and making believe that Rae and Robin were mine. Before my intervention all that Kussgartens had done to those two was to disappoint them. In ten days I’d managed to put them in mortal danger.

  Umbrage’s lights twinkled and the surfaces around it were encrusted with the dust of extinguished lines and crushed Adderall. This is what I’d been doing while they sat in limbo, five thousand miles away.

  There was a calm in the flat after they’d gone, like the silence of a platform after the last train. So, I was a dead man — what was new? I looked back on my life in Trellick Tower as if through the wrong end of a telescope. Scurrying back and forth around that shell of a flat, doing errands out of habit, answering emails, making deep ruts in my life. Twenty years and there was hardly any of it I could remember clearly. But since Rae’s call each day had been as rich and strange as a novel. Moments that I’d have with me forever. There were hours even that would stay unchanging within me until I died: that first time in Umbrage with Robin, Rae’s laughter through laptop speakers, our pizza dinner together.

  My head rang from being held upside down. That was me right there: suspended, in other people’s hands. I felt an ache in my thighs like after a long day’s walking, but it was the opposite. It was an ache to run, to move, to kick out. To use and not be used.

  I sat silently until Rae came back. She stared from the screen with her lower lip clamped between thumb and forefinger. The
n she let out a low moan.

  “Adamadamadamadamadamadam. Shit, I’m so sorry. What the hell have I done?” She tugged at her lip. “I should never have asked you. Even pretending to be him brings down a ton of shit.”

  I felt calm, like the room itself. I wanted to tell her that she had done nothing wrong, that she and Robin were the best things that had ever happened to me, that everything was my fault, but the words were stillborn in my mouth. No more talking.

  She said, as much to herself as to me, “You could just get on a flight. They might be able to find us here but if we moved, moved state even. They don’t know anything about us, our real names even…”

  My heart rang at her assumption that we could be together — at any other moment this would have been the biggest news I could possibly imagine. But I didn’t want to run. I tried to piece together a way of making this right.

  I thought of it as an engineering problem. Timelines and deadlines and forces that needed to be brought to bear. Where were the weak points and cracks that could be widened, where were the fears that could be preyed on? Baxter would be easiest because he now had the most to lose. Saul would need some finesse, and Kimi? She was a black box to me. But there was a combination that would unlock them all. That one goes here and that one goes there until, there it was: a path through the ruins.

  My stutter was returning but Rae waited patiently as I talked. I explained Brandon’s real plan, as I understood it, and where it left us. I told her she should take Robin away from the house for a while if she could. I told her everything would be all right. And all the while I was sick to the stomach with my weakness and procrastination. I told her my plan.

  “He has to die again.”

  I started to sketch it out. “He has to die again. It’s perfect. We’ll scrape together his record and it’ll come out as planned with the backstory that he worked on. The money from Smile, and Saul’s lawsuit if it happens, come to me, which means they come to you. And I’m the grieving brother again, managing his estate for his grieving widow.”

  Her voice was small. “And where would you be, afterwards?”

  “There of course, if you’ll have me.”

  As soon as she was gone I started. I had to take Brandon’s anger and sharpen it to a point. I had a line, then a second, and an Adderall. I went around the flat throwing open windows to let in the dawn and I shut down the line to Tahoe; no distractions today.

  A shirt torn into strips and soaked in mineral water was enough to block the fire alarms. I covered the sprinklers too, though hopefully the alarms being out would mean they wouldn’t be set off.

  I couldn’t bear to look at Umbrage. The weight of years I’d devoted to it tugged like a riptide in the room. I called Jay for the supplies: lighter fluid, blasting caps, and a drone. I’d settled on a volcano to destroy the city. I had enough cameras to capture the destruction: a wide static, two focussed on major buildings, a hand-held and a drone cam but I couldn’t do it all on my own. Kaspar’s discretion made him the obvious choice as cameraman, but with the fire hazard it might be a mistake. Jay was busy. George, the architecture student, would understand where and when to film but he might try to dissuade me from such full-scale destruction. The band would be worse than useless. I was resigned to an uncomfortable discussion with Kaspar when I had a thought.

  An hour later the intercom buzzed.

  “Mr Kussgarten, Sistine is here.”

  Discrete though he was, I could hear intrigue in Kaspar’s voice. Even in Bran’s world 9am would be an unusual time to be entertaining hookers.

  “Lovely, send her up.”

  She got it straight away and she worked her way around the cameras, checking their output while I mixed together the baking soda, petroleum jelly and lighter fluid. I set half aside for the volcano and distributed the rest around Umbrage, concentrating on basements and attics. Then I embedded electric motors, strapping them to every supporting strut and seabed before wiring them to a single switch, while Sistine stuffed the bigger buildings with M80s and smeared petroleum gel across the fields and grasslands. If the contrast between this meeting and our last discomforted her at all she didn’t show it. In fact she threw herself into the task with enthusiasm. It was her that sculpted the main crater, rising darkly from the lowlands, barren and smooth and alien against Umbrage’s busy cityscape. I packed the centre: blasting cap, gel mixture and iron filings.

  I checked the feeds from each camera and went over possible high-points and spectacles. Sistine had a real eye for it; when I told her so she laughed: “In my line of work you have to know where your best side is.”

  We sat back on the couch to look over the city. Umbrage was as busy as it ever got. The funiculars and wind turbines and dream-sails and chain bridges were all working.

  We pressed the button together.

  At first, nothing. Motors vibrated at different frequencies and for a second it looked as if all we were going to get was an Umbrage that shook in a variety of interesting ways. But then the frequencies began to combine and multiply. You saw it first in the waters: patterns of waves criss-crossed and overlapped, cycling through order and chaos.

  The Darks of Mols was first piece of land to collapse. The moorland rippled like liquid and then began to tear into thick stripes of light and dark. Simultaneously the row of pylons that crossed the Darks shook their feet free from the ground and toppled gratefully onto the dark earth. A line of sparks became a band of fire that burned brightest where chasms were forming in the underlay. I brought the drone closer to catch the liquid shadows of the fallen pylons dancing across the cliffs.

  There was a gentle thump like someone moving furniture in another room and then a crack as the volcano’s lid broke. A vibration set all the church bells in the city trembling as one, before the volcano erupted. Shards of clay, instantly baked hard, rained down on the inland sea. A shower of sparks, fizzing like fireworks, followed and caught on the breeze, setting small fires where they landed. And then all in a rush the burning gel gushed from the crater. Firstly as a glowing orange fountain that came close to the ceiling, then as a thick delta of fire careering down the volcano’s slopes.

  “Bran, over here.” Sistine was focusing a camera on the Necropolis where the vivaria, glued hard into the hillside, were cracking as the mountain began to shake itself apart. Trees with thick globs of earth still attached to their roots tumbled down the incline and began to clog the River Ansti.

  Then everything happened at once. The towers at Treblon collapsed as one with a satisfying shudder just as a wave of flame raced across the reed-fields which were so dry as to have not needed any accelerant. I flew the drone up and down, left and right, and everywhere was mayhem. The smoke detectors remained silent, and when the inland sea broke its banks it put out most of the major fires as well as any sprinkler system would have. From then on it was a war of attrition between the deluge of new rivers coursing their way to the sea, the vibrations of the remaining motors, and the firetraps Sistine had built. Whole districts convulsed like dying animals, settling into crumpled ruins. A layer of smoke haloed the city, making the drone’s images all the more dramatic and everything over a storey high was levelled. I flew in silence over the wreckage and the drone’s rotors drove the smoke through the blackened skeleton of the city. The thin whirr of the drone and the steady drip of water onto the parquet were the only sounds. It took nearly an hour and by the end Umbrage was a smouldering, acrid wasteland. Its smelt of smoke and petrol, and in places the frame of the city — its long-forgotten trestles and supports — showed through the blackened ground.

  Kaspar had phoned once — is everything OK, I smelled smoke — but I promised I was just disposing of some paperwork, which won a chuckle.

  Sistine sat in a armchair, her fingers and face smeared with soot, and drank champagne from the bottle.

  “Jesus, that was fun. The most fun I’ve had here,” she said with glee. She caught herself. “I mean Baxter is great too…”

  I
waved it away. That was someone else, another time.

  “So,” Sistine said, eyeing the line of smoke snaking towards the skylight, “You’re off, I guess?”

  I hadn’t explained what we were doing — one of my favourite things about being Brandon these last days has been the fact that I don’t ever need to explain myself.

  “Why do you say that?”

  She looked at the wreckage of Umbrage, listened to the creak of cooling metal.

  “I don’t know, this seems kind of final. Remember what you told me that first time?”

  I waited.

  “About burning down your old life? Never looking back?”

  I nodded. When had Brandon told her that?

  “Well this looks a lot like that.” She wiped soot from her brow. “Fun, anyway. Is that all?”

  “I think so. Let me get your money.”

  The safe was empty but I still had a couple of packets of Brandon’s US cash. I called through. “Are dollars OK?”

  She opened the calculator on her phone. “Sure. Three hours, call it a grand. That’s what? Fifteen hundred bucks?”

  I counted it out. She looked young, sitting with her legs tucked under her, and I remembered an idea I’d had. “Actually there is one thing you might do for me. A picture.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Not that kind of thing, honest. A passport picture.” I gave her the rest of the dollars. “There’s a machine down on the corner.”

  She counted out the money. There was another five hundred or so, and she gave me a quizzical look. She said, “I’m not sure but I think it’s probably only a pound.”

  “Call it a tip. And I do need to style you a bit.”

  I combed out her fringe and patted down some stray curls. I had a memory, a physical memory of the feel of my mother’s hands on my face, doing the same things with my unruly hair. I looked at her.

  “Could you take your makeup off, all of it?”

  “You’re the boss.”

  I texted Jay while she was in the bathroom. “Hey, a while back you said something about a passport?”

  The girl who came back into the room was another person entirely. She had retreated into herself, you wouldn’t have given her a second look on the street. Flat hair, plain, neat features, a country girl. She looked better in a way too, more herself.