Ruins Read online

  Billing returned to his temporary job, encouraged, searching again for a magic tune.

  Notes sounded in his head. He scribbled them down. But they were imitations, spurious noises, mere jangle. The words he wrote, too, were nothing but fake emotion. He could bring to them neither sincerity nor style.

  Although he rejected both the music and the words, they still came to him at that time, pressing themselves on his attention, until he jotted them down merely to be rid of them. Protest as he might at this burden, he could not escape from it.

  ‘Who was I when I had talent?’ he cried aloud. ‘Who was I? Was I happier then? Why do I have to write down this rubbish now? Who is transmitting this nonsense to me?’

  Through the mazes of silence in his head, an answer came back. ‘Wilfred Wills.’

  Wilfred Wills was a hard rock group enjoying current success. The name was enigmatic and terrifying to Billing in his nervous state. It came bounding in on a strong beat at all times of day. He left a pile of three hundred and twenty unusable songs with his agent and flew back to the USA. Wilfred Wills followed, steel guitar, steel eyes, stealing his brain.

  Everyone he knew in his old American haunts had gone – had taken refuge in new habits, new partners, or New Orleans. Billing decided he was in a bad way, but at least the terrible Wilfred Wills voice ceased operations during the daytime. It returned in the small hours, rumbling through his brain like an old Mack truck.

  Impelled by Wilfred Wills, he began to travel.

  In a Boston bar he encountered a woman quietly weeping into a daiquiri. Her name was Mary Sarkissian. She wept, she told him, not for her own problems but for those of others. She was a psychoanalyst who constantly became involved with the sorrows of her clients. Billing, signing on as a client of Mary Sarkissian, was soon involved with her.

  Mary Sarkissian was a dark young woman of slight build, with delicate, braceletted wrists and a pensive expression well suited to her trade. He loved her, as he had loved almost every woman he had met since the age of six. Mary loved him and spoke eloquently of his English innocence which rendered him so vulnerable, and which she set about correcting, vigorously.

  He doted on Mary, on her pensive lips, on her sad Armenian wit. He had never been more happy. The noises had gone from his head. The music was in his body and hers. He found courage enough to tell her of Wilfred Wills. She had her own little noise, she told him, a phrase from a Jefferson Airplane number she sang over and over, ‘When the truth is found to be lies …’

  ‘Is that aimed at me?’ he asked once.

  ‘The very question the last passenger pigeon asked.’

  More bars, more daiquiris. Obliquity he could take. Besides, she smiled so mysteriously and the United States was blossoming round them. Until one day when he found Mary weeping not for their problems but for those of others. Another man with another puzzle had arrived in her outer office and her inner life.

  ‘She liked to swank a bit.’ Alice’s laconic verdict on his mother, his late mother, Florence Juliet Billing, née Jones. As he collected what possessions he had and made his way back, to England and across London to the family lawyers, his mother’s memory hung over him like a cloud. Over the streets and squares, cloud hung like memory.

  The lawyers lived in the City. The old wartime bombsites were being built on. Everywhere was concrete, brick, glass, in stupendous amounts. This was not America. The scale was too pokey. Equally, it could not be London, not the London he knew. He was floating, drifting, out of touch. The red double-decker he caught was a period-piece, bearing Billing away into regions unknown to man.

  ‘She liked to swank a bit.’ He repeated the words on the bus until they went to a kind of tune … Alice had the germ of insanity in her. Perhaps the tune her words conveyed had the power to transmit that germ to others. He shivered, wondering if she had infected him. The dome of St Paul’s, grey as an old oyster shell, slid between two tall glass slices of building like an immense diseased breast. He turned away in his seat, so as not to catch further glimpses of the disquieting sight.

  The lawyers would disclose – or impose – his mother’s will. Billing saw this as his last encounter with her unpredictable changes of mood which had so alarmed him as a boy.

  ‘She liked to swank …’ Mad Alice’s reference to his mother’s hypocrisy, to that character trait which could transform her from an otherwise loving person into a harpy. His father’s early death had encouraged the trait. After coming into a little money, Florence Juliet Billing had been able to indulge her streak of pretension more freely. He recalled how sugar-sweet she would be to friends, only to fly into a rage as soon as their backs were turned, accusing them of falseness, envy, malice – all the defects from which she herself suffered. On these occasions, something in Hugh cried with terror, to fancy that she must in reality hate him too. Nothing could be trusted, no friendship could be permanent, in the face of such treachery.

  He stepped from the bus and walked down London Wall, cool in the morning breeze. He saw again that vision of his father falling off the ladder. It happened for ever. The suburban garden in sunlight. He in short trousers. Running in fear. But … at that crucial point, at the moment when his father struck the concrete path, had little Hugh Billing been running towards the disaster, or had he been running away? Memory always failed at that point. It was a source of torture. However many times he tried to recall what had happened, down came blankness, as if it were he who had died.

  Dismissing his malaise, Billing continued to hum to himself. ‘She liked to swank a bit – to be frank, a bit too much … And so this coarse Hèlène was porcelain to touch …’

  Then the possession of a son with successful records to his name had increased his mother’s … instability.

  Of course, Billing’s sister June, now also part of that great blank, had been odd. Perhaps her wish to set the world, including her brother, severely, pedantically to rights, had derived from a fear of her mother’s pretensions. There was the early case of the biology exam question, ‘Describe the function of the leg in relation to the rest of the human body.’ To which young June had replied, ‘The question is incorrect, since a normal human body sustains two legs.’ Sustains. A nasty word. June had long sustained herself on such arid distinctions.

  The lawyers, Messrs Grimsdale & Grimsdale, were friendly in their professional way, despite the fact that Billing entered their offices bearing an orange back-pack to which a miniature stars-and-stripes was sewn. They sat him at a table which had been polished every morning for eighty-five years, almost smiled and read his mother’s Will to him.

  He uttered a cry similar to that of a hurdler who has jumped too close to the ultimate hurdle. All his mother’s money had gone to one Arthur Plumbley.

  ‘I don’t even know an Arthur Plumbley,’ Billing mumbled, bowing his head towards the shining surface of mahogany. So she did hate me after all. Now it’s proved beyond doubt. Mother – I! Your son, Hugh! Maybe she believed, or came to believe, that I jogged the ladder.

  ‘Arthur Plumbley was a friend of your mother’s,’ offered Mr Grimsdale Junior, in a tone of irreproachable seriousness. He had trained himself to have no gestures. The voice and the suit did it all for him. ‘He is blind.’ The pale hands rested.

  Billing looked up. ‘Arthur Plumbley? Say, was he – is he a bald guy? Furry white tongue?’

  ‘He could be described as “a bald guy”, yes.’ Distasteful tone clearly implying he couldn’t. ‘He amused your mother in her last years.’ It was a sentence Billing tried in his dismay to commit to memory. There might be a song in it.

  ‘Shit,’ said Billing. ‘I met the old bastard at the funeral.’ He began to laugh. Like his mother, he had his areas of insincerity. Grimsdale Junior’s hands continued to rest, not unsympathetically.

  Billing made his way towards Holborn Viaduct, dodging St Paul’s. The pavements were broken. Old men in fur hats gathered to complain and spit in the street. He bought a pair of Scholls insoles
size ten from an Indian-run chemist’s shop. They had a tartan pattern. He went to a hotel to fit them into his worn shoes, then decided to have lunch there to cheer himself up.

  ‘One must stay personally happy if possible,’ he told Grimsdale Junior before leaving the lawyers’ offices. ‘My mother was not herself. It’s dreadful for me to look back now and realise that both my mother and my father – before he died, of course – were victims of a kind of undiagnosed compulsive madness.’

  Grimsdale Junior did not understand that sort of talk. He replied in a firm voice, ‘The passing on of money is a serious matter, Mr Billing.’

  ‘I was talking of the passing on of genetic material,’ said Billing equally firmly, and became frightened by his own answer.

  The waiters in the hotel restaurant were slack. Over curried parsnip soup, Billing watched the youngest and palest waiter loading red wine into a refrigerated display counter.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ he asked.

  The palest waiter slightly altered his expression, perhaps to its fullest capacity, to indicate that he knew a daft question when he heard one.

  ‘We just put it in here.’

  ‘That doesn’t really answer my question, does it?’

  ‘Well, I was ordered to, like.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘The Filipinos, of course.’

  Although the soup was quite good, Billing decided that neither London nor chilled red wine were for him; within twenty-four hours he was back in New York, flying standby. A violent shooting, with a man and a woman killed – one of them black, one white, for equality’s sake – had just taken place and Manhattan was in a tense mood. Billing went to the fourteenth floor of the building off Times Square where his music agency was sited. While he was collecting the latest royalties due to him on ‘Side Show’, he saw an old friend of his, Neil Epoxa (born Neil Caractacus in Beirut), in the outer office. Neil had been a successful singer. Now he was an unsuccessful singer, working in a night club up on the East Side. Once Epoxa and Billing had shared confidences – about sex partners, even about earnings. Never since had Billing been so rash with his secrets.

  Still, he was glad to see Epoxa. The money Epoxa was collecting from the agency made him friendly towards Billing. He was high, too, as Billing discovered.

  They took a cab to a large apartment building on Riverside Drive where Epoxa was living with an older woman whom he introduced as Laxmi. Laxmi was tawny and flat-chested and wore a tawny cord suit, supported by much jewellery. She kissed Epoxa, then Billing, thrusting a neat little tongue into his mouth. It was three in the afternoon. Tongue-time already? Billing wondered; he never understood how others lived. A party appeared to be in progress. People moved about the rooms galvanising themselves into youthful postures to loud music. The furniture, a sort of cream colour, had been bought on the previous day, it seemed. It even smelt new.

  ‘You’re British, how charming,’ said Laxmi, taking Billing’s arm and sinking claws into it. In her other hand she clutched a toy dog, the coat of which had been dyed a flourescent purple. Laxmi appeared to have forgotten she was carrying it. ‘The Britishers are so aware. My husband Norm is a Britisher. Well, in fact, he’s Danish. He’s around some place. Always making money. Do you do that, Heck? How was the flight? We’re forever travelling around Europe. I just love the place. Ever seen the dervish house in Bukhara? I said to Norm, “Buy that” when I saw it.’ She gave a laugh like the smothered bark of a toy dog.

  He remembered the American habit of quoting something the speaker had previously said, as if holding it up for the listener to determine whether the remark was witty or downright stupid. He said nothing.

  She showed him round the reception rooms, pointing out art objects, stepping over bodies when necessary, still clutching him tight. ‘Aren’t you glad to be back in the Land of the Free, Herb?’

  ‘Hugh.’

  ‘This picture I bet you’ll recognise. The bridge at Mostar. The famous bridge. You’re an aware person. I’m sure you recognise it. Hand-painted. But this next one is from Russia. It’s actually painted on wood. A kind of wood. Marquetry, I believe. You can see. I did not like Russian food. I threw up. That’s from India – the tablecloth. Norm was sick most of the time in Delhi. Then you ought to see this. It’s from Armenia.’

  Laxmi stood him in front of a picture with a chartreuse background, while saying in an aside to a young woman leaning against the wall, ‘Betty-Ann, why don’t you take a shower and freshen up, and stop screwing around with that shit cap.’ Her tone had the lightness of a mother addressing a son in a dog food commercial. To Billing she said, ‘It’s Turkish, as I was saying. It’s a straw picture and it actually depicts the estuary Turks harvesting the straw in their boats. Isn’t that cute?’

  ‘Which estuary is that?’

  ‘I think that’s what they were called. Norm is so restless. He’s often planning next year’s vacation before we’re through this one.’ She laughed, a hard dry sound like dog biscuits falling into a plastic bowl.

  Billing muttered something which avoided reference to Norm’s possible mental state. Neil Epoxa was nowhere in sight.

  ‘We have some really fine Brazilian butterflies – fab, as you Britishers say – in the bedroom.’ She glanced around the crowded room, but apparently saw no one to whom she wanted to speak. ‘Wouldn’t you like to look them over, Hen?’

  He was interested to examine the flat-chestedness at first hand, so he went along. The nipples were a cheerful pink. Laxmi made passing reference to this subject just before she commenced a thorough licking operation involving all Billing’s willing body, saying, ‘Sometimes I wish my boobs were just slightly bigger – but Norm would probably never make it at all if they were.’

  The toy dog lay on the quilted bed with them. After he had made love with Laxmi, Billing studied her husband’s little bookcase by the side of the bed. Supermarket Philosophy, Silt, Norwegian Painting: The Golden Age, Straw Pictures: An Estuarine Art, Old Slovenian Ceremonies, Nebraska in the Bronze Age. Considering that he now had a fair picture of the absent Norm, Billing turned back to Laxmi, to find her lighting a joint. As she passed it over to him, he began to contemplate what he should do next.

  The idea crossed his mind of joining the American army and fighting in Vietnam, rather as an earlier generation of men had signed up with the French Foreign Legion. A simpler way of putting distance between himself and his present life would be to hire a car and drive across the States from East to West, old-fashioned though that proposal also was.

  ‘Shall we call some of the other guys and chicks in here?’ Laxmi said, pinching out the joint.

  The hired car broke down – or developed a malfunction, as the garage-hand put it – in the pleasant town of Waterloo, Iowa. The friendly young couple who ran the garage repair shop gave Billing a bed in their attic for the night. He stayed in Waterloo, Iowa, until the next spring, when the snows were gone and the wheatlands turning green from horizon to horizon. The couple with whom he became close were Ludmilla and Josef Jajack. They were of Czech origin. Their two identical old mothers were alive and dressed in gingham aprons. They ran a small market garden nearby. Ludmilla Jajack had beautiful grey eyes. She had never heard of ‘Side Show’.

  All the furniture in the house had been manufactured from a creamy plastic only a year previously.

  ‘When I’m sixty, I’m going to sell everything and Ludmilla and me are going to visit Brno,’ Josef told Billing, more than once. ‘We’ve never been outside the States. When I’m sixty, we’re going to ride horseback in the High Tatras. Sound good to you, Hugh?’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  He saw the beautiful grey eyes light up. He was sorry to leave them.

  California had its compensations. It was easy to find a music job. He played trad piano in Santa Ana for a while, isolating himself from the crowd but listening to American dreams and aspirations, with which the air was thick.

  ‘Since he left me, I’ve d
one great. I really go for business. I market yoga equipment and bean curds and health foods, do all my own packaging. It’s creative, you know what I mean?’

  ‘The only money that means a thing to me is the money I make myself, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So I’m resilient. I have to be. I’ve always been the resilient kind. I never saw my mother since the age of three, except weekends in summer.’

  Billings liked the look of the woman who had used the word ‘resilient’. She brought to mind his Jewish wife in the marriage that had lasted such a short while. An English woman would have said ‘tough’. In the word ‘resilient’ was stored all that rather squidgy optimism, not to mention euphemism, on which Middle America lived. He preferred it to the pessimism and the dysphemism of his own country.

  When she came over to the piano for a request, he got to talk to her. She had a deep resonant voice. Her name was Robin Vandermeyer. She bought him a drink. She appeared formidable, commanding, and strode about in an outfit of suede. Even her complexion was leathery. When Billing visited her ranch-type house, he found Robin was soft and romantic inside. She showed him her doll collection. She believed that everything was going to be marvellous at short notice, despite all that experience had taught her to the contrary. It was idiotic but captivating. She decided Billing was artistic and offered him a job as a designer for a complete range of labels and promotional material.

  Robin had another place up in the hills. They went riding there while Billing made up his mind whether to accept the job. In her bar that evening, drinking something pale blue, he found she had a number of Wilfred Wills records. Old fears returned. He jumped up and announced that he must go. Robin wept and threatened and snarled – all in a way that suggested she had been through this routine rather more times than she cared to tell – before driving him back into the centre of Los Angeles.

  Billing soon caught the same obsession with acquiring an outdoor look as the rest of the male population. He lay about in the sun a lot. He became as brown and freckled as if he had been born that way. His moustache grew. He drank only local white wine, chewed gum and lived mainly off tuna salads. He studied the spaces of Los Angeles which, to his eye, were more astonishing than the buildings. The town was not, he decided, built for the automobile: it was built for the asocial. Its roads and freeways formed a cryptogram of isolation. He embraced the perception with pleasurable fear.