The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  Baxter poked his head around the doorway, his hair damp. “Is that ‘Nothing but a Heartache’? Great choice dude.”

  I had time to play two more tracks before Baxter re-emerged in a check shirt and jeans. I remembered Brandon’s description of him and looked for where he might have mis-dressed himself and sure enough, there it was. One leg of his jeans was tucked into the back of a chequered sock.

  “Here, come and see this.” He led me through the maze of jukeboxes into another of the converted garages. The ceiling had been lowered and there were cubby-holes built into all four walls and each one contained a pair of trainers, spotlit from above like some priceless vase. It had the air of a high-end jewellery shop.

  “So?” He waited, head on one side.

  I couldn’t imagine what Brandon’s take on this might be. Impressed at the attempt at street culture? Horrified at the sheer neediness of it?

  “I didn’t know you were so sporty Bax,” I said, finally.

  He laughed. “Yeah, I know. Never really worn a pair in anger.”

  He was caressing a particularly garish pair, smoothing down the day-glo laces. “So what brings you here Bran?”

  “Money,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows and doubled his chins. “Money? Now? I told you we have to be really careful how we go about this Bran. We have a couple of people to pay first. And I’m thinking we leave it a month just in case Isaacs has it properly checked out. Insurance, right?”

  I was glad that I’d snuck a quick line in while he was changing. I tried out a 180-degree turn in my mind — don’t fear conflict, stoke it. “No Baxter, I need it now. I have outgoings.”

  He looked carefully at me and stopped towelling his hair. “Outgoings? Go stay somewhere cheaper for a bit, you could survive without the butler or whatever that guy is.” He sounded direct but looked nervous.

  “Other outgoings, Baxter. I have responsibilities.”

  He laughed at that too. “No Bran, you’ve got habits, those are very different things.”

  I felt a heat rise in me. “Don’t tell me what I have or don’t have. You didn’t say anything about all this shit when we agreed to this.”

  His voice turned whiny in an instant. “I did. We sat in that fucking caff and I told you that it would take a while but it’d be worth it. This isn’t some drug deal Brandon, this is serious, it will happen when it happens.”

  “It happens now. Right now.”

  For the first time he seemed to take in the scar on my forehead and the scratches on my neck. I probably still smelled of smoke too. He draped the towel around his neck like a boxer. “What have you done?”

  “None of your business. But I made a record for you, I’m making money for you, and any minute now I’m even going to make you famous again, and what do I get? Nothing.”

  I was beginning to shake. Reign it in Bran, I told myself.

  “OK, OK, I can get you an advance.” He took out his wallet. “How much?”

  The magic number in my head. Fifty for Rae’s mortgage, thirty-five for Ron and Reg. Maybe a thousand to get me to Tahoe. “£86,000.”

  He put the wallet down carefully. “Bran,” he said, like he was talking to a kid, “I just don’t have that. I could do you five K.”

  I concentrated on my hands not shaking. “£86,000. Now. Or I end this.”

  He looked like he might cry. “Is that it? Is that what this whole thing was about?”

  He sat down and his shoulders slumped. “I’ve been talking with Kimi most nights, you know? On the way back from whatever you guys have been cooking up. He’s changed Bax, she keeps saying, he’s like a different person. He listens, sometimes he even cares. But you haven’t changed have you? You just needed to be someone else for a couple of weeks until you had your claws into some serious money. If that’s all we were to you Bran, why didn’t you just say?”

  He started counting out twenties from his wallet.

  “You could have just said, I could do with the cash. I’ve got myself in a spot of bother. It’s what we expected. But you had to make it personal again.”

  He looked at the cash. “£1040. Take it and fuck off. You can have the rest when we’re in the clear, every last penny.”

  I took the passport from my pocket. I had a sudden physical desire to hold a gun, a cold, heavy gun, just for the heft of it.

  “Bax, I didn’t want to do this.”

  That was a lie. I could feel it now, the fury. I wanted him to say no to the deal, to throw it in my face. He had to lose for me to win. He picked up the passport, turned it over and opened it.

  “Sarah Chappell. Oh, is it Sistine? God, funny picture.” He flicked though the virgin pages. “She’s hardly been anywhere.”

  I waited a beat. Baxter was a born straight man. “Not had much chance has she? Seeing as she’s fifteen.”

  He gave me a stuffed frog look.

  “Go on, check.”

  He reopened the passport at the back page and read it. “Bran.” His voice was low. “Shit, Bran. Did you know?”

  “Of course not. I don’t mind paying for it, but just with money. Not with my liberty.”

  “But she never said.”

  “Oh fine, then you’re in the clear. She never said, officer.”

  “But she seemed so…” I could see the clockwork working in his head. He blushed at some memory.

  “She wouldn’t say anything, would she?”

  I took the passport and waggled it under his nose. “She probably wouldn’t…” I pulled out the iPad. It had taken three different connections to download the footage of him with Sistine, taking care to cut out the less incriminating stuff. The discussion of safe words and the kiss goodbye were on the digital cutting-room floor. This was just the good stuff. I couldn’t say, what with modern morals, whether it looked like consensual, but rough sex, or whether it read as straightforward abuse, but coupled with the passport it looked bad. I let the video start. I was sure we wouldn’t need to get to the end.

  Baxter watched as if it were someone else. He made no attempt to stop it.

  “You know what this is. It’s been edited it so you must have seen the whole thing. You know.” His expression was more wonder than anger. “This is not what it looks like.”

  I put my arm around his damp shoulders and felt him recoil. I let Brandon run my mouth for a while.

  “Bax, Bax, Bax, everything is what it looks like. I understand, believe you me. No one is just one person. Or at least no one interesting is. I get it. Sometimes you’re Baxter Moores, doting father, loving husband, provider. Sometimes you’re Bax the Beats guy, friend of the stars. And sometimes you’re this guy.”

  I pressed pause. “Big bad Baxter. Huffing and puffing and blowing down. I get it. We’re all a million different people, some good and some bad and you haven’t lived unless you’ve tried some stuff. You know that I’ve been there Bax. But this guy…”

  I gestured to the screen. “This guy, he has to pay. Not the good guy or the family man or even the band member. Those guys get a free pass and kind words at their funeral. But this guy… he pays. Because although I understand the subtleties at play here, and I think even Sistine knows the roles we all have to play, but the general public, they’re not going to be so understanding.”

  “Brandon.” He stopped. “This crosses a line.”

  I smiled.

  “Seriously Bran. Most of what you do falls into the category of being an arsehole. But this is evil. You understand the difference, right? What you have here, on tape, is a mistake. A bad mistake, sure, but it’s not malicious. What you’re doing is malicious. I was always going to get you your money. But if you take it now, like this? You’re gone. Gone to the other side.”

  I didn’t bother to reply. I was on the other side. Rae’s side. Our side. Good versus evil, left versus right? I didn’t have time for them.

  He shielded the combination to the safe with his back, as if it mattered now. As if I couldn’t take anything I wante
d.

  “I mean it Bran. This is where you leave us. Y’know, the world.” He pulled rubber bands off a piles of notes.

  “This would have been yours next month anyway. The only reason I have the cash is so that we could get paid at the same time for Smile.”

  He shook his head at the mention of the word and counted out the notes. His face was wet with tears but his voice was steadier than it had been since I arrived.

  “Once you’re there you can’t come back. You think you’re a bad guy but you’re not, not yet.”

  He placed each note carefully, like it was worth something.

  I rewound the video back to the start again and found my favourite bit. I turned the volume higher; the microphones on those little cameras were shit. “And you? You came back from this Bax?”

  I watched his face go blank.

  It took me nearly thirty minutes to find the car that matched the keys I’d swiped from his side table. I walked a spiral around the streets near his studio, ever widening, pressing the UNLOCK button every few steps. His car turned out to be a muscular American thing in red and yellow, easily the most conspicuous vehicle on the street.

  For a split second after I started the car I genuinely thought a bomb had gone off. There was a jolt and a sound like a jet engine. It took me all of five seconds, my head jammed protectively between my legs, to realise it was the stereo. The entire rear of the car had been ripped out and replaced with a set of giant speakers which were vibrating wildly to whatever Baxter had played last.

  I flapped at every button on the dashboard until it quietened. It took a while: there was more hardware than air traffic control, and I had to work my way around them one by one, getting a grip on their functions. At least half were for the stereo. Another set dealt with the hydraulics. For some reason each corner of the car could be lifted and dropped at will and after some fiddling it took me another five minutes to get it back to level.

  After all this, actually driving the thing was a relief. It had been a decade since I last drove and I crunched the gears four or five times before I got the hang of it. I’d planned to head straight to Saul’s but if Baxter reported this car missing then it would be spotted in seconds. I phoned Jay.

  “Hey, are you interested in buying a car?” I put the phone on video chat so he could see the inside. “I’ll swap this one for anything, something discrete.”

  “Show me the stereo again,” he asked, so I panned around, showing him brand names and electronics.

  He cut right to the chase. “Very nice. Is it yours?”

  “Not entirely.” I thought about it. “Actually, not in any way.”

  He shook his head. “No can do fam, which is a shame because that is quite a whip.”

  But ten miles down the M23 I got a WhatsApp message from a number I didn’t know. I clicked it open.

  “21 Marbury Road, N22. VW Camper alright?”

  Marbury Street turned out to be a multi-storey car park in a quiet Wood Green street. I parked on the top floor so I could look out over the entrance below.

  My mobile pinged twice in quick succession: Jay — there in 15, top floor. And an email from Rae.

  “You seem to have lit a fire under Robin. He’s holed up in his room with 12 sheets of modelling tin and a soldering iron. Are you sure it’s safe for him to have? He swears you told him how to do it. Anyway, the field recordings magazine has a website and on it Bran’s track is a YouTube clip, not audio. And guess what’s underneath? Miss u nutgarden R x”

  I lay on my back on the bonnet, letting the warm metal soothe my aching back, and clicked the link she’d attached.

  Are We Going to be Alright?

  The YouTube clip is four minutes’ footage of snow falling while the track that we’d already heard played over the top. Underneath are a series of comments, all under the username Kissing Garden: YouTube’s text limit meant he’d had to reply to himself, over and over, to fit in everything he’d written.

  Kissing Garden — 15 days ago

  It took at least a minute between my ringing the doorbell — turquoise Bakelite with a spritely La Cucaracha — and Mr Hyde answering the door. The flat behind him was dark and he was a spindly silhouette against the gloom. Back when Remote/Control toured with them he towered over me, but now, even with the rickety coxcomb of an eight-inch quiff, he was perhaps an inch shorter than me. He leaned heavily on a stick.

  “Can I help you, son?”

  That voice. Southern honey. On record he was as sonorous as a preacher, with the same promise of soon-to-come damnation, but in person he sounded homely. He had the unruffled drawl that pilots adopt to explain that an engine’s gone down.

  I thrust out a hand. “I’m Brandon, Brandon Kussgarten. My band toured with you back in the Nineties. Remote/Control?”

  That ruined landscape of a face loomed out of the dark, examined my hand, and then me. His quiff toppled forwards.

  “Your little record-collecting pal not with you, son?” He said “record-collecting” the way someone else might say paedophile.

  “He is not, sir.” The “sir” just slipped out.

  He looked left and right along the walkway of the tower block.

  “Well, you’d better bring your skinny white ass on inside then.”

  Outside might be pure Seventies tower block — the kind of hastily knocked up job-for-the-boys that sits mouldering in every big city — but inside the flat it was pure 1950s Americana. Red velvet curtains, tassled like a stripper, were drawn tight, and dim lamps threw cones of light in every corner. There were thick rugs in golds and scarlets and a drinks cabinet with an etched front holding those glasses meant for cocktails that don’t exist anymore: highballs, Rob Roys, egg flips.

  As my eyes adjusted I took in more. The fireplace was too big for the room and clad in faux stone — it looked like the kind of thing you’d see Dean Martin leaning against with a martini. Over Hyde’s shoulder I could see the gleam of the kitchenette. The kettle was avocado, the mixer the colour of salmon mousse. The fridge was a turquoise both light and dull and the cabinets were edged in a kind of faded tartan. It didn’t feel kitsch though, I’m not sure why. Partly it was just great fucking taste. There was a painting in an alcove that looked like an original de Kooning and the chairs were definitely Herman Miller. But also it was the sheer rigour of it. There was simply not a thing in the flat that dated from the past sixty years. Nothing to make the hostess trolleys and zebra-skin bar stools look out of time.

  Kissing Garden — 15 days ago

  “Boy from a band’s here,” Hyde declared, seemingly into the dark of the room. “Friend of the other one. The collectin’ lad.”

  A portion of the couch, which appeared nothing more than a lumpy shape under a mountain of throws and blankets, peeled itself away and squealed, “Is that Brandon? Oh my sweet lord.”

  Jackie wasn’t quite as desiccated as Hyde. One of the advantages of wearing makeup as thick as house paint since you were fourteen is that the mask remains the same whatever the damage underneath, but those miraculous legs were now just a rumour of flesh, sharp angles in a pair of leopard-skin pyjama bottoms. Her arms too were mottled and pitted like blue cheese. I remembered her on stage in Camden once, stabbing at effects pedals with ten-inch heels, her huge Gretsch White Falcon making her look elfin as she howled up into the mike. Now she looked like a breath of wind would blow her right back to bed.

  Kissing Garden — 15 days ago

  Jackie “Jackylline” O, is like me, a returnee. Born just down the road from here, in Horsham of all places, she made her own transatlantic escape back in 1972. According to her bio she spent her time “stripping and fruit-picking” in the Bay Area, before Hyde (real name Maurice Muscovitch) came across her modelling in a nude life-drawing class, and, without even asking her name, split up his band, the Swamp Gators, and dragged her on stage the very next night without so much as a rehearsal. As Jackyl & Hyde they made raw, ramshackle rockabilly records for an audience that would have
needed to quadruple to even be considered “cult”. Until, swept up in the first breathless wave of LA punk, they became something like mascots for the Black Flags and GoGos and Xs, a perennial support act howling trebly swamp blues into a tsunami of punk spittle from Orange County to Orgreave.

  They had the last laugh though. With a bloody-minded resolution to never change, to never improve even, they’d outlived the headliners who were now blown to irrelevance, addiction or the morgue. They clambered their way up from outsiders to elder statesmen to national treasures by simply never stopping. We’d supported them in 1992 on a jaunt around mid-size British venues, a pairing so arbitrary that it spoke volumes for their utter disinterest in the current music scene.

  Despite the mismatch, or possibly because of it, we’d had fun. Every moment of a Jackyl & Hyde set was unchanging. On every date at the midway point of the sixth song (same song, same set, every night) Hyde dropped to his skinny knees, mike cord around his neck, and spluttered the same bible verses and dime-store pornography at an uncaring Jackie. Every night there were two encores, every night Jackie was bundled off stage at the end of the second by roadies dressed as psychiatric nurses. Even Hyde’s Presleyesque thankyuhvermuchs were spaced out evenly over the night. This level of routine left them plenty of time to hang out. Their tour bus (a metallic Airstream of course) doubled as kind of portable Southern plantation house. There was a samovar of ice tea laced with bourbon. Bathtub speed. Twinkies and Sno-Balls.

  I spent a lot of time with Jackie. She was doubly, trebly lost, but I envied her total reinvention. She’d destroyed any trace of the Home Counties girl she’d once been. If anything her accent was heavier than his, and nothing of her, from her hair to her nails to her voice to her name was original. She wore corsets that literally rearranged her organs and a kabuki mask of pancake makeup. It was glorious to watch the pair of them out in public. Him emaciated in black leather, frazzled like a burnt match, arm in arm with this bulimic Betty Page. There would have been fewer looks if you’d freed a couple of polar bears.