by Mat Osman
We stepped into a space so like my childhood bedroom that it made me ache. Posters and diagrams were blu-tacked a third of the way down every wall, the furniture was pushed to the edges and even the bed cowered in the corner. Everything was a mere adjunct to the model that filled the centre of the room.
New Umbrage had grown huge and sleek: a square white plain divided into hundreds of geometric tiles like a solar panel array. Whatever he’d been working on was hidden somewhere underneath. Rae and I sat on kids’ chairs up against the wall as Robin wound up the robot that I’d bought him at Heathrow. Had he asked me for it? I couldn’t remember. The room filled with his babble and the warmth between the two of them. Everything he said, even when it was meant for me, was channelled through Rae. When he sat between us Rae felt closer, not further away, like a force field had engulfed us all.
He tugged at Rae’s sleeve. “Mom, the lights.”
For a second all was night. I heard Robin place the robot somewhere in the middle of the room and then scurry back into place between us. His breathing was ragged and it blended with the whirr of the toy’s clockwork. I placed a hand on his head and saw a square light up.
The robot was just a black block on a shadowed landscape and its progress was painfully slow. It walked one square and then another, the ground lighting behind it, leaving a tiny trail in the room’s blackness. Now, on square three, the land began to rise beneath him on hidden hydraulics. Simultaneously faint lights sprang into life along the edge of the table. They rotated as the toy strode on, each step setting off mechanisms beneath the ground. Walls, some dark as the room, some prettily mirrored, hoisted themselves out of the table and threw shadows across the walls. The room shuddered with slow transits: skyscrapers loomed and fell, bare trees reached skywards and then shrunk back into the earth, lights like snowfall drifted down into oblivion. And through it all the lone figure marched inexorably. There was something primal about this little machine dwarfed by the walls around it: like a horror film it didn’t matter that you knew it wasn’t real.
The ground beneath him rose hydraulically, tugging neighbouring tiles into new configurations. Whole districts unfolded: ivy-strewn walls, fountains that sounded like bells, painted shop-fronts. The robot was raised, rotated, shunted and dropped, and with every inch the world reconfigured with him at the centre. How had he done this?
I reached down to touch Robin’s shoulder; he was asleep, just a dead weight in my arms. So heavy, so light, so real, with that crust of dry skin around his lips and an insect bite blooming behind a rosebud ear and our respective hands on his head, touching but not touching, just in the same place at the same time and after all who can ask for more than that? Night bird sounds and the faint whirr of the robot, Robin’s featherlight breathing — heartbreaking teaspoons of breath — and the city of New Umbrage unfurling like a flower.
Still it walked on. Canyons blossomed, whole districts crystallised and crumbled. The lamps brightened until the room was wet with flowing light. Some spring hidden beneath a square caused whole villages to bloom and wither on the other side of the city: villages like fireworks, like mayflies. The robot was near the centre now, each step saw the land beneath him rise. Now it was a gleaming ziggurat, clean as a new car, with one lone smudge of movement at its centre. The clockwork was winding down and progress was painstaking. I felt Rae’s hand squeeze mine as it took its final steps.
At the centre it stopped, seemingly hesitant before taking a last step. And here was Rae at last with nothing in between us — no screen, no intermediary, no remote control — and we breathed together, her hand tightening in mine as the robot teetered and the square beneath it rose and twisted to deposit him on a staircase with walls leaping alongside it, up, onwards to the summit where it waited for a beat, an eternity, before the ground before it opened up, and then same mechanism that had dumped me in the Thames and risen me up, spilt and dropped. As the robot descended it was covered over by a crystal spire, faceted and filigreed, trembling as it slid into place and the lights turned in unison to focus on its sides, and as they did it scattered the light and the walls shivered with falling motes, slowly tumbling particles, like snow.
Rae’s face was rapt, lit from without and within. Her face tiger-striped with fierceness and shadow, and her lips were like nothing, like a puff of air, whispering, “Shall we?”
I hoisted Robin over my shoulder. Oven warm and awkward in my grasp, I carried him down the corridor to his room. Every window showed a snow scene like a line of Christmas cards.
I laid him out on his bed in the corner and brushed his hair out of his eyes. He let out a long sigh and turned away from me. I sat there for a while and listened to his breathing, watched the fluttering of his eyelids and the pulse at his throat.
When I got back to the bedroom Rae had brought the crystal spire in to sit in the centre of the room. The walls swam in shards of light: now diamonds, now crescent moons, now tracers. She was cross-legged on the bed and looked submerged, tattooed with light. I sat, carefully, next to her, the ancient bedsprings rolling her into my orbit.
“Is he sleeping?”
“He didn’t even stir.”
He. Him. Robin now. Mine. Ours.
I rise with the sun these days, I can’t help it. Even with the blinds pulled tight the sun squeezes itself through the gaps and calls to me. I’m up, I’m up, I’m tight and buzzing like a guitar string as my foot taps to some unheard beat.
120 bpm. 808 kick, claps on the 3 and 4
I make a coffee and sit on the porch. It almost always snows at night here, like it’s some municipal service, and every morning I wake to a brand new world. In a couple of hours the three of us will have scribbled life’s sentences across this blank page. A set of tyre tracks and a line of tiny footprints shadowing mine. Chainsaws will call to each other across the valley against the music of falling icicles. But for now it’s just me and the birds.
Prophet V, arpeggiator, filter opening all the way
I feel electric, incendiary, overflowing, but a slow tide pulls me back together. My brother. The dark moon and his retrograde orbit: Charon to my Pluto. Finally, unknowingly, he gave me everything that I needed to walk a straight line in this crooked world.
Filters off, sub-bass pulse.
I lean backwards out over the porch, just far enough that the tardiest flakes of snow alight on my hair, my face, my tongue, until I’m wet like I’ve been weeping. Leaning out until I’m balanced halfway between home and the abyss. I swim in it all — cold air and dark water and the graveside stillness — before I pull myself upright, brush off the snow, and go inside to wake my family.
Acknowledgements
Anissa, first and last and always.
Thank you to Tariq Goddard for being both guiding light and cautionary tale, and to Will Francis for his immediate and unwavering passion for The Ruins.
Thanks too to Johnny Daukes, Julie Clark and Catriona Ward for reading early drafts without laughing and to Josh and Rhian at Repeater for editing the later ones.
Graeme Webb created the beautiful cover image and Georgina at Watkins kindly wrangled my design into shape. Rick Hornby put flesh on the bones of the book’s music — if he’d been in Remote/Control then they would have been huge.
Thank you to the boys in the band — Brett, Simon, Richard and Neil — for the everyday magic of a life making music (and for the luxury of a bass player’s schedule).
And to my brother, Richard for his advice and encouragement along the way.
Finally, thank you to Mica and Lorien for their tireless research into the perils of twinhood.
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