The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  She hauled herself to her feet. Still skinny, still beehived, still painted like a doll; she tiptoed across the room to hug me. Her arms felt insubstantial, hollow.

  “Well, let’s have a look at you.”

  I forced myself to hold her gaze. Her eyes were bloodshot against the white paint of her makeup, and the mask was crazy paving around her eyes and mouth. But there was shrewdness there. Careful, Bran, careful.

  “Well ain’t you just a picture. Come into the light.”

  She squeezed my hand with brittle fingers and led me into the kitchen, but Hyde didn’t follow. He folded himself back into the couch. The TV was bulky and small-screened and was showing a black-and-white film.

  “So.” She filled a kettle and lit the gas. Even the matches were vintage, I noticed, some American brand with a picture of a tiger on the cover. She shuffled slowly between kettle and tap and, from behind you could see the old woman she’d become.

  “What brings you to see us honey?”

  Again I sensed steel under the sugar. My intention had been to chat about old times and then drop the idea of borrowing the electro-Theremin, Colombo-style, as I left. But Jackie’s gaze was unwavering.

  “Brian Wilson’s Theremin.”

  She blew on her tea. Her mug advertised the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, mine The Brooklyn Dodgers.

  “Of course honey, whatever you need. Plenty of Theremins around though, and plenty more up-to-date than ours.”

  “I want that old-time feel though.”

  She knew there was more. “That’s nice. We certainly got that going on.”

  “And if anyone were to ask about it I’d really appreciate you not mentioning that I was ever here.”

  “There it is.” She held my gaze. “Your record-collecting friend wrapped up in this?”

  Calculations running through my mind. Trust your instincts.

  “He is, yeah, but you won’t have to have any contact with him.”

  “Good, he riles Hyde up all kinds of ways. OK, OK. How much?”

  Back-of-a-fag-packet calculations in my mind. “A thousand. That’s not what I think it’s worth, it’s what I have.”

  “Then that’ll have to do. Come on, let’s visit.”

  Kissing Garden — 15 days ago

  She took my hand again, and I realised it might be more about support than flirting. She positioned me on the couch between her and Hyde. The TV programme switched to a news report. A snowy black-and-white screen with a bullfrog of a newsreader in suit and tie. The sound was low but clear enough in the still of the room.

  “Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced an agreement with the governments of France and the state of Vietnam today to provide ten million dollars of military assistance…”

  I raised an eyebrow at Jackie, who winked back at me. I sipped my coffee as the news stories rolled by. Dongshan Island captured by the red Chinese. UFO pictures cause a storm in Time magazine. Nino Farina wins the Silverstone GP. I looked over my shoulder at the tear-off calendar on the kitchen door that I’d written off as just another wilful anachronism. It read 13 May 1950.

  The news came to an end. Jackie thumbed through a worn TV Guide, George Burns twinkling behind an unlit cigar on the cover. I could see programmes circled in red ink.

  “Jus’ the Texaco Star Theatre on now hun, shall we have a little drink?”

  Hyde didn’t answer. He just bent his bony body upright and switched the TV off. He gestured to the radiogram in the corner.

  “Put a record on would you son? Cocktail music.”

  The bottom of the radiogram held a rainbow of LPs in their sleeves. I barely recognised one in ten of them, though I mentally catalogued them for annoying Bax later. In the end I chose one because of the cover: a polo-necked, prodigiously moustachioed Italian staring balefully at a framed photograph of a peasant girl.

  A clock chimed and two wooden figures pushed aside a flimsy door in its face. No taller than thumbs, they were still, recognisably Jackie and Hyde. Hyde in shiny black with a quiff as sharp as a stiletto, Jackie in red with cartoonish thigh-boots.

  “Fan made it,” said Hyde, defiantly. “Anyway, that’s cocktail time.”

  Jackie was ahead of him. She flipped open the drinks cabinet and started pulling out bottles, singing to herself. She poured out thick glugs of Cees cough syrup from what looked like an original 1950s bottle, crusted almost black around the neck and covered in waxy purple drips. She added a cupful of Lift lemonade — I could see the slogan on the can, “it’s f-f-f-f-f-frozen” — and handfuls of ice cubes.

  There was a bowl filled with hundreds of Jolly Ranchers on the mirrored cabinet. “Which flavour, darling?”

  Hyde didn’t take his eyes from the shaker. “Let our guest choose, I guess,” and Jackie turned to me.

  I couldn’t imagine it would make any difference, what with the other ingredients, so I chose at random. “Red?”

  “Red it is.” She used the ice tongs to extract eight or nine red sweets and dropped them in the shaker.

  “Maybe you could do the honours?” she asked me.

  The mixture was glutinous and the shaker made sucking noises as I worked it. Hyde watched the shaker as intently as a cat at a window. He started to talk.

  “Many folks think of sizzurp as a recent thing, y’know, something that the rappers drink.” He licked his lips. “But it has a rich history down there in Houston. They used to call it lean, because you’d y’know…”

  He flopped to one side, his quiff preceding him.

  I slowed down my shaking but I could hear that the sweets still hadn’t fully dissolved.

  “Horn players mainly, at first. The promethazine in the cough syrup meant you could blow all night, the Codeine gets you lost in the music.”

  “And the Jolly Ranchers?” I asked.

  He licked his lips again. “Show me the man who doesn’t like Jolly Ranchers.”

  Jackie took the shaker from me, reverently, and poured the resulting goo into martini glasses. It actually wasn’t bad on first taste. Sweet as only an American drink could be but with a herby warmth that tasted like days off school. It left a thick residue all around your mouth though.

  Hyde polished his off noisily and poured another while Jackie and I sipped politely. His mouth continued moving even when he wasn’t drinking. He looked around the room as if it was all new to him and then settled his gaze onto me.

  “I have a question for you son. Are you the director of your own life?”

  His hand went behind his ear and under the thicket of his hair I saw the liverish colour of a hearing aid. He needed a fresh dye-job — there was a line of pure white along his hairline.

  “Or are you a bit-part player?”

  I thought the question was rhetorical, preacher style, but he watched me for an answer. His eyes were milky pools amid the crepe-paper of his skin.

  “I try, sir, to be the director but the world has a way of wearing you down.”

  He nodded, seriously.

  “You have to be constantly on guard. You must always be the director. We decided…” he flung the arm holding his stick wide, “to live in a different era ten years back. Everyone said it couldn’t be done, everyone’s scared of it. But it can.”

  His stare dared me to disagree.

  “The TV?” I asked.

  “Original tapes, digitised and run from an external server. Exactly sixty years to the day. Papers too.”

  He gestured to a thick sheaf of Gainesville Daily Registers in the magazine rack. The crosswords were filled in in ink.

  “Food?”

  “Mainly fresh but you’d be amazed what you can find online. Tinned stuff lasts forever anyway.” His eyes shone. “Twinkie?”

  I felt the weight of it then. The outside pressure, like being in a diving bell. “Why?”

  “It’s where we belong. I’ve always known that. I was born out of time.” His mouth drooped, pulling down deep trenches that transected his face. “Why do people travel an
ywhere? Ever arrived in a city and thought ‘this is where I belong’?”

  I had. Manhattan. Melbourne. Manchester. Something in the light or the accent.

  “No one mocks those people, do they? No one says ‘son, you don’t belong here’. Not anymore. Instead it’s as if they’ve found something, like they’ve fallen in love. Well, we fell in love with a time, not a place. And then we bent reality to our will.”

  I recognised the cadences of a long-rehearsed argument. I could have countered that to live this way was a retreat, that it diminished life, but what was the point? There was no more chance of shifting these two from their circuit than the figures in the cuckoo clock.

  “I think it’s an incredible thing you’re doing.”

  Jackie caught the doubt in my voice, I was sure. How far did she go along with this, I wondered. Coupledom is always a dance of compromises but how do you compromise with this kind of absolutism? Still, Jackie had turned her life into a cartoon long before this.

  Kissing Garden — 15 days ago

  “So, why should we let you use our instrument then, son?”

  I didn’t realise that he had heard Jackie and I talking. His quiff toppled forward and he brushed it aside.

  I risked a look at Jackie. The faintest of head-shakes. Blink once if you’re being held against your will.

  “I’m making a 1960s record. Not a record that sounds like the 1960s but a record that lives in that time. Your machine is the missing link.”

  He nodded. “You could hire a 1960s Theremin though. That’d be contemporaneous. There a reason why it has to be Brian’s?”

  I looked again at Jackie. Nothing. I could say it was an attempt to make the record live the way they did. Completely authentically, entirely fake. But…

  “To fuck someone over. To make money. To live forever.”

  He threw a bony arm around my shoulder. It was light as a bird’s wing.

  “Well hell boy, why didn’t you say before?”

  Jackie shuffled back and forth between the two rooms like a clockwork scarecrow. Did she know what a tragedy her life was, this girl who’d played live in forty-eight countries, who’d been the first crush of so many teenage boys (and girls), now locked into an orbit so tightly circumscribed that there was a path worn in the carpet between the couch and the fridge? Probably not. We don’t, do we? We couldn’t and still go on. Instead we pull down the blinds, delete our profiles and let the phone ring out until the world is small enough for us to feel important again.

  Hyde pulled out the Theremin, in a black leather case. He examined me stolidly.

  “You want to jam it out a little before you go?”

  I was about to say no, I’d trespassed enough on their time, but an idea niggled at me. There was a song I’d written back in Vegas which I’d carried with me for years. It was a countryish thing with a hokey Hank Williams refrain that went, “Are we gonna be all right?”

  It was a question that stabbed a black needle in me whenever I sang it, because it was part of the oldest, saddest conversation I knew. It was a question that I had asked and been asked many times before, usually in bed, or in a midnight kitchen amid a wreckage of bottles, or once on a plane, seconds before we took off, asked so seriously that it might have been a question about the flight, but of course it wasn’t. Every time I’d asked or been asked it signalled the end of something, because in asking you got your answer.

  As a song it was perfect in my head — small and desperate — but every attempt to record it had flattened me and the song both. But something of the mood in the flat, and the vultures circling above Jackie and Hyde that they were oblivious to, made me feel it might work here.

  “Does that Tascam work?” I asked. I’d seen the old tape machine as I’d walked in, a piece of machinery the size of a cinema projector.

  “Everything here works boy,” said Hyde, tapping his cane on the floor with each word. “You got something for us?”

  Kissing Garden — 15 days ago

  We only did two takes. Hyde took the verses in a gravel-pit baritone, mixing up words and adding phrases, but he got the essence of it immediately. Jackie sang the refrain. On the first take I harmonised with her but the unity wiped the bleakness from the song. I asked her to sing take two alone. There was everything of her in that vocal: the pure tones of a playground singer, the frailty of a bird-boned old lady. Sussex, California, nowhere. She picked at an antique Gretsch bigger than her and the noise was so faint on the tape that it sounded like a cat scratching to get out. They didn’t want to hear it back so I listened on headphones and shivered at the rightness of it all. Nothing was straight, nothing was whole. It was a broken, flightless thing.

  Baxter was waiting around the corner in a beachfront cafe. Brighton was as bleak as a black-and-white film: grey skies, grey water, grey stones.

  “How did it go?” You could feel the questions queueing up behind this first one. I placed the cased Theremin on the table.

  “Good. A thousand for it.”

  “A thousand? You were supposed to be charming them, what did you do, hit on her?”

  I waved him away. “We need them to be invested in this anyway. Otherwise they might talk. And they really don’t like you.”

  Kissing Garden — 15 days ago

  I was still cloaked in the miasma of their flat. Sweet coffee and candle wax, sizzurp and fifty-year-old cigarettes. It brought a slothfulness with it that was not just to do with the drink. I slid down the plastic chair to watch a seagull high against the blank sheet of the sky, balanced gyroscopically against the tumult. His head was steady, unmoving as the wind bent his wings and ruffled his feathers. I wished we could swap places, that I could be there skyblown, stripped clean by high winter air. Instead I was here, among the mess and baggage of other people. I plugged my headphones back in and just watched the gull.

  Chapter Ten

  My plan had been to park a little way outside Saul’s and wait until I was certain that he was out, but that was before I saw the place. It was, as Brandon had said, easy to find. As you crested a grassless ridge on the A666 it was laid out below you, a blot on the road up to the power station, but its isolation meant there was nowhere nearby that you could park without being seen.

  I stopped in a picnic area a couple of miles back from the house and watched through binoculars. I couldn’t sit still. Somewhere behind me a wave was gathering, a black wave in a wine-dark sea. It pressed against the backs of my eyes as it gathered force. A wall of water, thick with trash and clammy creatures, ready to break when it made landfall. If I sat still I felt it swell and surge towards me.

  “Not yet,” I said, “Just let me do this and then you can have me.”

  I took one of Jay’s TLAs and maybe it was the anticipation — the rush before the rush — but I felt its effects instantly. It was like tuning a staticky radio into the clearest 50,000-watt transmitter. I could feel the scratch of the bullrushes against the boat’s sides as I watched them through the binoculars. I could sense the heat of the petrol cooling in the engine behind me. A radar-blip of excitement presaged a ring of starlings wheeling past. I forced myself to slow down my breathing.

  Something tugged my attention off to the right. There, on the moor, great and alive in the dusk, two hares reared onto their hind legs and batted furiously at each other. It was so quiet that you could hear the pad of paw on paw. Robin’s voice: mad not crazy.

  I jumped back into the camper van, started the engine and pointed it downhill until we were doing seventy on the long slope that curved down to the boat, scaring the hares into a low-slung, scrambled escape. Then I killed the engine and let the van glide to a stop on the gravel outside. Nature had held its breath against the mechanical racket but now it returned: the mumble of bees, columns of birdsong.

  They weren’t home. At the far side of the boat was a porthole with screws so rusty and weather-worn that I could remove them by hand.

  Inside it was musty and crowded with objects, like a teen
ager’s room, and as I moved around I kept bumping things off walls and scraping limbs on the exposed beams. It was the perfect spot for setting off fires; there was barely an inch of space that didn’t contain some firetrap. Feathers, fabrics, books, and all of them locked tight in this wooden box. I rigged up the smaller devices in suitable spots and then took up a couple of floorboards under a tatty looking rug. The big device went in here, sending up a soft cloud of sawdust as I dropped it into place. Then I tidied up, trying to make sure everything was how I’d found it, and left via the front to screw the porthole back into place.

  I’d saved a smaller kit to check the wiring. There was an old-fashioned, American-style mailbox by the road and I placed it in there. Robin had shown me how to rig up a Wi-Fi game controller to flick switches. I toggled the joystick and pressed X. There was a low thump and a noise like tearing fabric as the mailbox bulged and burst into flames. Napalm dripped in fiery globules from the base, scorching the grass on the ground, and a smudged line of smoke reached for the sky.

  They found me there, Saul and Andre, asleep on the wooden steps of the boat, under the shadow of the skeletal remains of the mailbox. Their voices woke me. How long had I slept?

  “What’s happened here? Look at the mailbox.”

  “It’s fucking Bran. D’you think that’s his van?”

  Silence. “Is he dead?”

  “This isn’t good. Should we just go? Leave him here?”

  I yawned, giving it some Brandonian theatrics.

  “Evening ladies.”

  The swell in my head receded. They stayed at the end of the drive, like it was my house and they were the interlopers.

  “Brandon. Are you OK?” Saul’s eyes flicked between me and the mailbox.

  “Fine and dandy,” I told him. “Thought I’d pop by.”

  I sat up and placed my hands on my knees. A noise like the retreat of a wave on shingle tore across my mind and then quietened.

  “And you two? Good ride?” They were dressed in day-glo Lycra. “Let’s go inside.”