The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  Lost Boys and Hollow Men, Camgirls and the Bored, Wandsworth and Wormwood and Holloway and Ford

  Clothes-hidden bruises, H, E and X, Botox and Rolex and passing bad cheques

  Lear jets and treadmills, trackmarks and tears, safe words for caged birds, Chopard and De Beers

  Crystal and Cristalle and crisis and crime, Bath salts, hesitation marks, me my mine

  Then, after three long verses, there was a key change that swelled heavenwards until it reached a moment of balance like the second when a plane’s wheels leave the ground, and then we were back into the verse. This happened five more times. Five more lists, five more swells. I got goosebumps.

  I played it again. It was something, she was right. It went where you want music to go: inexplicable but familiar, a feeling that you knew deep in your blood but which had no name. It was impossible and inevitable. The verses twisted the feeling tight within you, waiting for one line in that tundra of the chorus to make it all come together. One little line there would finish this thing.

  I called her back and told her I loved it. She had news too: she’d coaxed the whole band into coming here to record, even Saul, though I hate to imagine what she had to offer him to make him dismount his high horse. I doubt Baxter needed much convincing: he’s the kind of sap who’d willingly go to a school reunion. We’d have two days here to finish the record and then, well, everything would be over. I asked her what she’d told them.

  “Just what they needed to get them here. They don’t know anything about your plans, after. Baxter’s doing it because he has that soppy side to him and he thinks it might be ‘cathartic’. I think he’s hoping you’re going to cry. Saul’s just doing it because you’ll be in his debt. And I said that you complete him.” The voicebox turned her laughter into a series of staccato barks.

  “Christ Kimi, you’re making me sound like Elton fucking John here. This isn’t going to be one of those Circle of Life things.”

  Still, it felt right to have all four of us there. You want your last ever performance to be something complete, however damaged. Think the Beatles on the Apple roof — I hope we passed the audition — rather than the Stone Roses at Reading.

  “Hey,” she said, “I did what had to be done. Your winning personality wasn’t going to get us all in the same room together, was it?”

  I had the news on in the background. There were only two stories — the volcanoes and the financial crisis — and they melded irresistibly. Grounded planes and Mordor skies and security guards locking up century-old banks for the final time. Lehman’s, Merrill Lynch. Gone, gone. Names you knew but didn’t understand, like constellations. A pall of ash, a cloud like a frozen explosion and deep below in the shadow, veins of pulsing amber. Impossibilities before breakfast. Rocks flowed like water, banks owed more money than had existed throughout recorded history and a cloud the weight of a mountain hung in the sky. Each song I recorded took a year from my life. It was a slow-motion disaster, like a car crash at one frame a minute and I loved every second of it.

  Kimi asked, “So are we rerecording everything?”

  I’d played her some tracks. She was a good sounding-board in that she was tough, had good ears and didn’t care if she hurt my feelings. Musically she was full of suggestions but lyrically she left well alone. I wasn’t sure whether that was because she thought they were unimprovable or she didn’t know where to start. I chose to believe the former.

  “Nah. A couple of things sound right already so I’m only going to mess with the ones that need some chemistry.”

  On screen a helicopter circled the ash cloud, close enough to whip the smoke into a liquid landscape. Like the ground beneath it was slowly tearing itself apart. Across the bottom of the screen stock market prices trundled past: all preceded by minus signs, all falling.

  Kimi was telling the driver a short cut. The silence was a relief. When she returned she was louder.

  “Do you have a title?”

  I hadn’t. No last song, no title. “Not yet. The trouble is that once Blood on the Tracks was taken, everything else became a bit of an also-ran.”

  She paused. “That is a good one. I was thinking Suicide Notes but it’s a bit on-the-nose.”

  “A bit on the nose, and terrible.”

  She snorted. “What about Notes from Nowhere?”

  I rolled it around. “I quite like it. Double meaning but not a pun. Sounds timeless.”

  I wrote it out on the pad by my bed.

  “It sounds like I’ve heard it before. Is it something?” A book, I thought, old and leather bound.

  “Of course it’s something…” I could hear her frustration with everyone’s slowness: the taxi driver’s, mine, the world’s. “Of course it’s something, it’s good. We’re just picking over the rubble by this point.”

  A reporter stood on the fresh land under the ash cloud, silhouetted by cooling lava. Sparks rose drunkenly around him. The news crawler read GREEK FINANCE MINISTER SAYS THESE ARE THE LAST DAYS.

  The next morning I played Kimi’s tune over and over as I prepared the room. I’d rewritten the verses so that there was one each for the four of us, but the chorus still eluded me. Maybe the pressure was too much. It would be the last line on the final track of a record at the end of the world. I’d leave it until the tape was rolling.

  I could see the paths the four of us would take written in the air. I could see the interference patterns between Saul and Bax and the distance at which I needed to hold them: close enough for friction, not close enough for ignition. I felt the dark pull of Kimi too. The gravity of her fame and the way it bent logic around her. Left to her own devices she would suck the whole project into her orbit, suck it down and crush it into something weighty and dark.

  *(Oh please! If I have to be an astronomical object in your tortured analogy, let it at least be a supernova, pumping heat and light into the vacuum of this project.)

  I sat on the balcony and looked out at where the stars should be. Somewhere out there was Voyager 1, that fragile thing with its tinfoil skin and breadstick legs, travelling at 39,000 mph, speeding stubbornly through the dead unknown beyond our solar system. Hardly any of that speed was due to its rockets, though, they were just there to throw off earth’s gravity. No, since then it has slingshot its way through the solar system, catching acceleration from hair-raising orbits around planet after planet, each one lending it another velocitous kick until it was the fastest moving thing for a billion miles. *(U OK hun?)

  That was the strategy I needed to take. To orbit Kimi’s dark star and Saul’s angry quasar and Baxter’s dead system and use them to propel me onwards. I could see the path; I could taste it.

  I drew diagrams on the floor. For Saul the bird, for Bax a crescent moon. Kimi I gave a five-pointed star. Its meaning depended on its orientation but that meant nothing when there was no up or down. I lit candles and drew blinds. I tuned the guitars and switched on amps, revelling in the way the valves added weight to the air.

  I smoked a cigarette out on the balcony. Little deaths, big lives. The fox was back — ballerina-footed on the filthy glass of the warehouse roof, sooty at his toes, bible-black at the tips of his ears. I moved the ashtray, just an inch, and his head swivelled to bring that long snout round to face me. A quiver, a calculation of danger, black eyes. I saluted and he walked on.

  White cotton shirt, black wool trousers. Sleeves rolled up like I’m Mission Control. A spritz of Aqua di Parma at the pulse points. Jugular, Ulnar. Femoral. A voice from another life, Rae studious at her makeup table — girls wear perfume where they want to be kissed, Bran — jugular, ulnar, femoral: the suicide veins.

  For three people who’d at least been in some kind of contact over the last twenty years they seemed a lot like strangers. From Baxter and Saul’s hug-turned-handshake-turned-what-the-fuck-was-that, to Bax’s obvious confusion about whether Kimi had finished speaking (the lack of inflexion meant that you had to watch her eyes carefully for punctuation, and Bax would sooner w
restle a tiger than look you straight in the eye). Saul and Kimi, who I thought might bond over some kind of new-age nonsense, seemed boringly deferential towards each other. The whole room was a study in inert chemistry.

  But how could it be that we four were so uncomfortable talking to each other but so comfortable playing? We were twenty years deep in other bands and new musicians, and we had nothing more to go on than my chord sheet and Baxter’s one two three four but we clicked into place like a key in a lock. The tumblers tumbled and everyone fell into their old roles.

  We tried “Clear Your History” first. We tried it slow, then faster. I didn’t care about the tempo, I was waiting for something to slot into place. It took until halfway through the fourth take before it did. Something clicked between Kimi and Baxter — a dislocated shoulder gratefully coming home to its socket — and suddenly the song was a blank page again. I tried to play as plainly as possible: barre chords, no colour, but between the notes some ghost of the chemistry we’d had back in the day began to grow. Saul noodled something baroque over the top. It was pushy and stately at the same time, but you could hear him feel it work too. I pressed record for the first time, said, “from the top?” and away we went.

  “Daughters of the Daughters” we did in a single take. There was something clunky about it. Everyone was reluctant to abandon the groove of the first track, trying to overlay its particular grid onto the raw data of a different tune, but it worked in an odd way. The song never properly settled but when it finished Kimi said, “that sounded like it had a stone in its shoe,” and it seemed to fit. We switched tracks and when we reached some kind of equilibrium I had them go back and rerecord a couple of things.

  It was so knackering being back in charge. One by one they complained that I was “telling them what to do”. It was ever thus. It’s not like I have any actual power over them — unfortunately — so any level of control I have is down to my powers of persuasion and the fact I’m usually right. But fuck it, if I didn’t do it nothing would get done. They’d jam and chat and bitch and talk about records and jam some more and whine and go for lunch and record and delete and at the end of the day we’d be no further forward. I forced them to make choices, or if they couldn’t, then to follow mine. I had to play Saul off against Kimi and then listen to her bitching before reassuring Baxter and then going off down one of Kimi’s theoretical rabbit-holes which you know will lead nowhere but you had to indulge her otherwise when you solved the song’s problems she’d still want to try it her way.

  *You give yourself way too much credit, as ever Bran. Anything that works is because of your powers of persuasion, anything that’s wrong is down to us. Do we have to play “count the platinum records” again to give you an idea of exactly who was driving this session?

  I saved “Mythical Beasts” for the last track of the night because it was the one most in need of band chemistry. Everyone was tired and everyone was quiet, which was good; it meant less thinking and from the first downbeat it just worked.

  And I was thinking… Oh Lord, don’t make me miss this now. The old slow dance. The push of Baxter’s drums, the pull of Kimi’s bass, forever out of time but consistently, beautifully so, an unspoken conversation taking place in scraps of seconds between their heartbeats, chiding each other, come with me come with me, and Saul finding the spaces in between.

  And I was thinking… Don’t make me miss Saul’s playing. As ever, lovelier than anything else about him, gentle and strong and rolling over the beat like smoke, like clouds. The beautiful mathematics of the three of them, and the geometries of vibration. Three sets of waves converging on me, collapsing down to a waveform that made fingerprints look simplistic.

  And I was thinking… It’s all too easy. To weave a guitar note in between the waves and then close your eyes and dance your voice across the surface, the music a slope and the tune the line that a skier takes. Oh Lord, don’t make me miss this now, not now when I’m so near the end and the mythical beasts are just stories and I can’t even remember how many times we’ve gone round this coda but we slow as one, every heartbeat a fourfold kick-drum, every kick-drum a group heartbeat, and we slow and it’s ragged, ragged but together and we stop like it never was and that sound, the sound after the sound, the seconds of silence after you bring something new into the world and no one was cruel or lost or wrong or hurt and you breathe out together, as your wheels touch down, and you breathe out as one until somebody, me I guess, says, “OK, OK then.”

  And I was thinking… Why shouldn’t I miss this now, haven’t I earned it? Why shouldn’t these moments be the best things I’ve ever done? Nine songs, nine snowflakes, made by our path through the storm — can’t they mean as much as lovers and children and fortunes? The electrical charge as they hit the ground might be something so small that it wouldn’t shift a needle, but these songs are special in a way that real life never turned out to be for me.

  And I was thinking… don’t think.

  And I was thinking… disappear.

  The next day, as the others set up, I asked Kimi about her track again. “So your song. It needs a chorus, right?”

  “Sure. It needs something in that gap. Something to tie the lists together.”

  I waited.

  “Something that transforms. At the moment it’s just a feeling but the right line after could turn it to something alchemical. Your area, really.”

  “You say that like there’s a right answer.”

  She smiled. “There is. I just don’t know what it is.”

  The second session was all business. We started at 9pm; yesterday proved that none of us was much use before then and it’s the kind of time when I start to see the machinery in action. Baxter and Kimi moved on their pre-arranged orbits like figures in a Swiss clock. Circles and ellipses interlocked and if you listened carefully you could hear the points click in and out of place. All our complex, maddening, beautiful, human behaviours rose from these simple paths. I took ten minutes off to “clear my head” and lay on the balcony looking up into the sky. There, beyond the atmosphere, above even the lonesome satellites and space junk, turned the oldest, slowest machinery. Power’s machinery: cogs worn smooth with age, a closed system that nothing ever trickles down from. I lay there for a while listening to the three of them teeter through a tune, feeling like I’d turned a key and set them playing. They ran through “No Beauty” a few times and I listened to it come into hazy focus. Someone was misreading the chords and there was a slurred passage each time. I took a last look at the sky, feeling the weight of whatever was behind it, and came back downstairs.

  The light in that room gave everything the air of a Renaissance artwork. I kept quiet in the doorway, imagining a painting: The Recording of Notes from Nowhere by the Musical Group Remote/Control. Shadows concentrated the action on a central tableau of Saul with his back to me, hunched over a keyboard, only his face lit in the cold blue of a monitor. Kimi stood in the darkness behind him, the dim glow from the skylight making her headphones glint like a halo. Baxter was sitting, his clothes dark against the cherry-red Strat stained purple in the shadows. They were still, each lost in their headphones, but I could hear feet tapping.

  That feeling again, the moment of absolute rightness, of beauty alive and alongside it, its stunted friend, the knowledge that it would soon be gone. I strained to hear the ghost of the song through the thin sounds of plectrum on strings, Kimi’s mumbling and the soft beat of feet. I watched this thing that I’d put together working on its own. Like my brother with his model city.

  I stood in silence until Saul looked up and saw me. “Hey, Bran, what’s this third chord in the middle eight supposed to be?”

  I stepped into the picture, feeling self-conscious, and said, “It’s a G minor,” and he wheeled round on Kimi, “Told you, told you.”

  *(I’ve listened back to the mp3 of “Slowing of Light”, attached here. There’s no G in the chord, it’s an A#maj with a passing G in the bass. Just because you made it, do
esn’t mean you know what it is.)

  We tried Kimi’s song, the last song, without any rehearsal. Kimi called out the chords so that no one could attempt anything clever and I tried to catch myself by surprise as the chorus came in, willing the words to come, willing an ending that would illuminate everything that had come before — an epitaph, a headstone — but nothing came. The music was beautiful and the verses worked, but where was I? A blank space. I tucked my disappointment away. I’d try it again on my own afterwards.

  Later, when it was just me and Kimi listening back on the gentlest hit of some new TLA of Jay’s, I realised it was pretty good. It was rough as fuck. There were stumbles, slurs, over-complications and unexplained accidents, and on at least a couple of tracks differences in key that strayed from “jazz” into “mistake”. But the songs, though I say so myself, were great, and the playing had its own dysfunctional charm.

  “If you do this right you could spin your whole career. Every one of your failures can be recast as a small step towards this glorious destination.”

  Kimi was winding me up while she multi-tasked. She was nursing some Russian teen through an online DMT trip while putting some bass down on “The Day After the End of the World”.

  I’d brought a tie-line through so we could stop and start the track from over by the TV because Kimi wanted to catch the news. Bankers with five-hundred-dollar haircuts sat on New York sidewalks muttering into borrowed cellphones, their possessions in cardboard boxes at their feet. Overnight, on the streets outside each glass tower of London’s financial district some newly emboldened group had painted targets and sprayed JUMP U FUCKERS across them. Champagne bars sat empty. Sushi meant to be eaten from the naked body of some girl working her way through college was thrown out by the plateful and pawn shops had stopped taking all but the most jewel-encrusted of Rolexes. And over it all the silent, waiting cloud.

  She closed down the laptop and we lay on our backs, watching the smoke funnel up into the spiral staircase. I played the tracks from the beginning again.