The Ruins

by Mat Osman

  “It’s good.” Her voice was aimed ceilingwards.

  It was a satisfying moment and I let it hang there for a second, up among the strata of smoke, like the aftermath of a battle.

  “You know good’s not enough, right?”

  “I know.”

  There’s that moment on any trip, drug or otherwise, when you start your descent. When the warm fug of the moment begins to disperse. It’s the first crack of dawn, the first niggle of doubt. Kimi aimed her voice upwards into the smoke.

  “What I mean is, it’s good enough to be good.” She laughed to herself. “It’s good enough to be favourably reviewed in The Wire and to cause some micro-storm in some online teacup and to be hailed as a massive return to form by any journalist old enough to still remember you. And you might get it on a commercial or two, my involvement should at least get you that.”

  I still wasn’t used to Kimi’s knowing her worth. “But that’s all it’s good enough for, right?” I asked.

  She looked over at me now. My eyesight was twitchy and the room was as vague as a sauna but I could make out the tautness in her expression.

  She said, “It’s not nothing you know Brandon, being good. It’s better than being nothing, it’s better than being bad. It’s better than ninety-nine per cent of people will ever be.”

  Her face was dreamy. “It’s better than you used to be, definitely.”

  “But good’s not enough,” I repeated.

  *(Bran, I can’t over-stress how much we need to lose every line after this. Seriously. You must see that the whole thing falls apart if it’s clear we know what’s about to happen. And that’s even ignoring the position it puts me in. Delete this. Double delete this.)

  She just looked at me.

  “If I want great, if I want a sensation, then I need the story.”

  “At least that,” she said. “Who knows if that’s even enough.”

  I shrugged. It was only my life we were talking about. She let the silence hang. Smoke eddies formed and recombined around the rafters.

  I heard her get up.

  “I’m going to go, Bran. Let you do what you have to do.”

  Even through the voicebox she sounded sad. I went to get up.

  “Don’t,” she said. She came over and kissed the top of my head. “Kaspar can see me out.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The Liberty Building was a blank-faced skyscraper on the very edge of the City, close enough to Shoreditch to look out over the warren of streets but far enough away to have some peace. The silent lobby gave no clue as to whether it was offices or homes. The epauletted doorman made me think it was residential but the receptionist, with her headset and wipe-clean smile, turned that idea on its head. I told her the unit I was visiting.

  She touched her earpiece. “Number 516. Miss Balloch, is she expecting you?”

  So I was here to see Kimi. Was she expecting me? “I believe she is, yes.”

  There was that brief moment of blankness — the I’m-on-Bluetooth face that’s unique to this century — and the smile reassembled. “Go straight up.”

  Kimi’s place took up one whole side of the fiftieth floor. From the west window you could see the playset of the City, St Paul’s and the BT Tower, and between those straight lines the silver thread of the Thames. To the east, new London. Cranes at all angles, half-built towers and everywhere the glint of sunlight on glass.

  I stared out, trying to find the Magpie’s rooftop and ignoring the tension in the room.

  Jay was already there, setting something up on the table — a laptop, a camera, rolling papers — while Kimi talked on the phone, wandering throughout the flat. I caught fragments of her conversation. But we’re insured for the volcano stuff, and I saw her in Ibiza, she’s too fucking thin.

  Her hair was down and shaggy and her clothes were nothing like the ones I’d seen her in on TV. She wore a shapeless T-shirt that read THIS IS WHAT A COOL DAD LOOKS LIKE and jeans smeared with dried paint. She paced back and forth, paying me no attention. Jay walked in, placed a lit cigarette in her mouth, waited, and took it back. They looked comfortable together. I heard the unmistakeable sound of a conversation being wound down and there she was in front of me. Tall, taller than me, with one hip hoiked higher than the other. The voicebox stripped any nuance from her words.

  “Jay said you were around.” A statement. I wondered how many of my movements he had reported back to her.

  “And since a couple of his chemists have come up with a new TLA I thought, ‘Well who better than Mr Caner himself to try it out on?’”

  Jay took one of those cases you keep film in from his pocket and shook out three white pills. Something about their purity — the dead white of fridges — against Jay’s dark palm tweaked at my nerves. The voicebox was unnerving me too.

  “Fuck, I dunno Kimi, I’m a bit battered from the weekend to be honest. I was thinking more along the lines of a nice single malt and a bit of a lie down.” The voice came naturally now, with its veins of condescension and boredom.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. You’re ordering Kevlar vests and fake passports. It sounds like the weekend is just getting started, so I think you can make some time for me. Besides, it’s a pretty short high apparently. Jay?” Even as she spoke to him her eyes stayed trained on me.

  Jay did that Michael Jackson moonwalk thing across the floor to us. “Couple of hours tops. Something for our cash-rich, time-poor customers, you get me?”

  “Anyway,” Kimi took the pill and examined it, “where’s the fun in knowing what’s going to happen next anyway?”

  Before switching on the camera she tied a black silk scarf around her neck, just about shielding the voicebox from view. Her hair covered her eyes and thick-rimmed glasses. The laptop showed a site: a series of webcams, men mostly, and scrolling text. I guessed this was the place she’d shown Brandon all that time ago. She typed in the details of the drug and its dose, our names — we were to be Don and Miki apparently — and that she welcomed passengers on the trip.

  Jay skulked outside the sightlines of the camera, working his way through the pile of records in the living room and rolling joint after joint. “For after, innit.”

  I toyed with the idea of hiding the pill under my tongue but when the moment came both of them watched me so closely that I had no choice but to swallow. I felt an immediate shiver and it took me a second to realise it was just the phone buzzing in my pocket.

  I peeked: a message from Rae — WHERE U @ KUSSGARTEN? — and Kimi shot me a look over the glasses.

  “Phones off for a bit I think. Need you present, know what I mean?”

  I nodded and switched the ringer off without answering. Instead I let Rae’s morning routine run at the back of my mind as a kind of mantra. Now she’s at the mirror, now she’s slicing Robin’s sandwiches at an angle please mom, now she’s flapping as the oatmeal boils over. I let her day unspool as I edged across the couch until I was off camera.

  Jay pushed a button and slatted blinds descended noisily across all three windows. Thin shafts of light bisected the room, making Kimi’s face a camouflage of stripes.

  It’s an odd feeling, waiting for something to happen to your mind. I kept a watch over my thoughts like a general who was nervous of mutinous troops, and my heart hammered at several false alarms. A flutter of wings on the balcony, movements in the shadows, was it beginning? Thank god I’d been doing coke. I’d recognise the change now, the way you thought nothing was happening until it had already happened.

  Kimi chatted away on the site via text. She had an earpiece in so I only saw her side of the conversations.

  “No, never tried it, I’m nervous of hallucinogens.”

  “Like trying to drive a car, in reverse, with a shattered rear-view mirror.”

  “Everyone says that. I’m hotter than her though, dontcha think? She’s kind of chubby.” She gave me a happy wink.

  The wings started up again. A rattle like a fly against a window an
d then a chattering inrush of air. Kimi adjusted her scarf. I turned to face her, keeping my voice low. “They must know it’s you, surely?

  “Some of them, probably. They know, and I know they know, and they know I know they know. But these are people who understand you might need a holiday from yourself every now and then. You understand that, don’t you, Brandon? Being an actor and all.”

  The voicebox flattened her intonation. Was she being sarcastic about the acting? Did she know? Something drummed against the window. Why didn’t Jay go and investigate? Instead he took the needle carefully from a record and put another on.

  Kimi talked to me as she typed. “You know what it’s like to stand on the other side of yourself.” It was a statement, not a question.

  The tapping of her nails on the keyboard sounded huge. She turned back to the camera and watched some of the people on the site. I caught a glimpse of the small window in the corner that showed the scene here and moved out of shot again. She gave me a long, unfathomable look and then cocked an ear to the record playing. Something familiar, old.

  “Jay! You old sap. You like this? You even know this?”

  He grinned, dancing one half of a waltz. His feet traced a triangle with an elegant, sliding backstep and he beckoned Kimi with a nod. She pulled herself up, grumbling, and joined him in a slow shuffle, his head laid incongruously on her shoulder.

  I felt more watched now than when she had been beside me. The green light of the laptop camera glowed, beaming the image of an empty room back to the world as they circled around together, not talking.

  There was a shutting down, like being inside a concertina, as everything flattened and darkened. The edges of my vision blurred. I moved my head this way and that, keeping Jay and Kimi in the centre of the frame, making an old-fashioned painting of them. The record sounded like it was coming from another planet: Your clothes are all made by Balmain and there`s diamonds and pearls in your hair

  I heard scurrying. Tiny nails tripping beneath the floorboards and around the skirting. I followed their path: kitchen, lounge, hallway. Kim and Jay slow-wheeled, every third step bringing them back to first positions. There was something mechanical about it. Step, step, step and back. Identical each time. A film loop.

  “What?” Kimi had hold of my arm, twisting me towards her. “What?”

  I hadn’t realised I was talking. I hadn’t realised she was back beside me. The laptop camera’s light glowed green. I see you.

  “I can see the machinery.” A voice. My voice? My voice.

  There, behind her right eye. Delicate cog-work, thinner even than a watch’s movement, ticking to and fro. I saw her cheek twitch and wondered which subtle cylinder was misfiring beneath the skin. I stood up and reached out to touch it but she reared back.

  “Woah. Hands off B-boy.”

  I nodded but kept an eye on the spot that had moved. It might need to be debugged.

  Jay danced on alone — step, step, step — and I focussed on her neck. The scarf had slipped and the voicebox glowed dully in stray bands of light. I’d deliberately ignored it before but as her eyes fluttered closed I took a closer look. It was a curved golden grill that protruded slightly from the skin of her neck, joined by puckered and pale scar tissue. It was beautifully made, I could see that now, with the fluid lines of a Bentley grill. I had to stop myself from reaching out to touch it.

  We were standing face to face as Kimi tipped her head back and the voicebox glinted.

  “Hey, my eyes are up here,” she said, and then laughed. She pulled the scarf back up over her neck and then sang along with the record in a colourless voice.

  “Where do you go to my lovely?”

  I shook my head, unsure of what she meant. She was talking at the screen now but I thought the words were meant for me. A circuit of scratches ran behind the walls. The room darkened and lightened, like a giant had stepped past the window outside. She’d kicked her heels off and was my height suddenly.

  “You come back here all cock of the walk, which I don’t suppose is any surprise, and I think to myself, oh we can have some fun with him now, now his fangs are drawn.”

  She looked at me and snapped her jaw shut which made me flinch. Little noises flashed right to left behind me. I forced myself not to back away.

  “Now his fangs are drawn,” she repeated. “But, bless you, you realise that you don’t have a lot to bring to the table any more so you have a plan and a story and an idea and I listen because, y’know, desperation can do interesting things to a man.”

  The screen flickered beside us and I wondered how much of this was being picked up. Jay sat in the other room with his elbows on his knees, watching. Lights brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed. The wingbeats slowed until they made the whole room pulse.

  “And I have to say you did put the hours in, you always were a hard worker, and it’s like we’re building something and I’m thinking that it isn’t half bad, y’know the boy’s got something, now that his mind is focussed.” Her voice lowered and in a whisper she said, “Death’ll do that huh? Focus the mind?”

  I couldn’t answer. My vision throbbed like a vein. She went on, “So I pay the bills and put you right and smooth things over with the rest of the band.” She examined me. “I had to pay them to spend time with you. Like you were a punter. Not something to be proud of really.” She cocked her head. “And then you disappear again and I think fair enough, man probably has some things to put in order. Last wishes and all that. But three days becomes four and seven days becomes eight and I start to think you’ve done a runner. Which, though it’s what we all expected, would be disappointing because without this thing that we have, there’s really nothing to you Bran.”

  She tapped me gently on the forehead with a manicured nail. “Hollow man, see? Just another old white guy who doesn’t know why no one is listening any more. And then you come back. Yay!” She mimed girlish surprise. “But since you’ve been back… I don’t know. I’m sensing a lack of drive to you Bran, a lack of focus.”

  I couldn’t work out whether the drugs were affecting her the way they were me. Her forehead and neck were damp with sweat, and between sentences her mouth seemed to move of its own accord, but her eyes were steady.

  She put on a gravelly voice. “He never writes, he never calls. So I’m thinking that this little project has gone off the rails a bit.” She took a step closer and placed her hands on my shoulders. “Has it Bran? Gone off the rails?”

  I tried to force certain facts to the front of my mind but it was like moving heavy furniture. “No Kimi… I have not gone off the rails.” I stopped and then realised I had to say more. “There are things that need to be done before the things that need to get done, get done, y’know?”

  She didn’t look like she did.

  “This is a… a project where things have to fall like dominoes.” I toppled a hand from vertical to horizontal. “There has to be an order, and rigour and y’know.” The room seemed to empty of air, as if we were in the updraft of some vast wing, leaving me breathless.

  She considered this. “Bran, it looks to me like there’s only one domino that still needs to fall. It’s such a little thing. I mean, I’ve paid, and lent, and talked and helped and there’s only one thing that you have to do. And let’s face it, it’s the simplest thing.”

  She came a half-step closer — her eyes level with mine, our mouths inches apart — and placed both hands on my chest.

  A stammer of light. Claws and feathers. Something trapped behind the walls.

  “So simple, we all do it one day.”

  Her voice like machinery. Knife-lights and feather-blows.

  She pushed and I rocked back on my heels, beginning to fall.

  Moths’ wings on a lightbulb. Bones in a mouse’s nest. The floor rising up to catch me.

  “The easiest thing in the world.”

  And then it was over. Not the sensations: the blinds still periodically darkened as if huge birds were swooping past, and m
y heart rate raced and slowed but I was over the hump. The world was normal with flashes of the surreal rather than the other way round and Kimi obviously felt it too. No more questions, no more traps. She leaned against the couch, blowing smoke rings my way.

  Rain beat gentle drums on the windows. Jay played a game with himself, placing a felt-bottomed chess piece on the record as it spun and snatching it up again before it hit the arm. A soft tap every second under the music. The first time thump ever I saw thump your face. It felt like a childhood Sunday: lazy but with a shadow hanging over it.

  Kimi’s voice was steady. “Is it that last track that’s holding you back? Still no ideas?”

  I shook my head mutely. The record finished and clicked off. Jay held up two album covers. “What next Kimi?”

  She fired a smaller smoke ring to chase the larger. “Bran can choose. I’ve got music fatigue.”

  Jay waggled the two covers in my direction. For once I recognised one. David Bowie, done up like a boxer. Something we’d had at home.

  “The Bowie, I think.” Safely back into Bran’s drawl. On top of things.

  But something pricked Kimi’s attention as Jay moonwalked back to the record player. She held up a hand to Jay. “One sec hun.” She twisted to watch me.

  “Say that again Bran.”

  Fuck. It was David Bowie wasn’t it? I could see the logo in my mind — the cassette version we’d listened to in the car. I was sure it was him. “The Bowie, darling.” I tried again.

  He dropped the needle. It was a track that even I knew. And definitely a Bowie song. I relaxed. It was poppy — a welcome relief after some of Jay’s picks — and it sounded like car drives and workmen’s radios. Kimi hummed along.

  “Great guitar there. Ronson or Alomar d’you think?”

  I felt nauseous. I tried to brush the question off. “The guitar? Who cares about the fucking guitar. Listen to that voice.”

  Kimi sat up, now plainly watching me. “Yeah, the man has some pipes all right. We should skip to ‘Under Pressure’, now that’s some singing. Which track is it?”

  I rubbed my temples. “Jesus, Kimi. I can’t even remember my own name at the moment. That stuff was lethal.” Don’t whine, I told myself.