Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

  Jasper’s distracted by an eye that appears in a clear swirl in the design on the frosted window. It’s an inch from the pane. It’s green. It meets Jasper’s gaze, blinks, and its owner moves on.

  “Sorry,” says Dean. “Are we boring yer?”

  I’ve been here before. “Wait…” Dream-lit snow, or swirling blossom, or filigree moths…a street sign, on a wall…Jasper closes his eyes. Words emerge from memory-hiss. “Utopia Avenue.”

  Dean makes a face. “Utopia Avenue?”

  “ ‘Utopia’ means ‘no place.’ An avenue is a place. So is music. When we’re playing well, I’m here, but elsewhere, too. That’s the paradox. Utopia is unattainable. Avenues are everywhere.”

  Dean, Griff, and Elf look at each other.

  Mecca clinks her vodka glass against Jasper’s Guinness.

  Nobody says yes. Nobody says no.

  “My darkroom is calling,” announces Mecca. “I have a busy night.” She tells Jasper, “You can be my assistant. If you want.”

  Dean and Griff clear their throats and exchange a look.

  It means something but I don’t know what.

  Elf rolls her eyes. “Subtle as a brick, boys.”

  * * *

  —

  JASPER AND MECCA wait on the platform at Piccadilly Circus tube station. Groans, gusts, and echoes from the mouth of the Underworld resolve into half-melted voices. Ignore them. He lights a Marlboro each for Mecca and himself. The Piccadilly line is the deepest in central London, according to Dean, so its stations were used as bomb shelters during the Blitz. He imagines people huddled here, listening to explosions on the surface as powder trickled from the ceiling. Further up the platform, a cultured drunk is half singing Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” but he keeps forgetting the words and starts again.

  “Can I ask a question that is not my business?” asks Mecca.

  “Sure.”

  “Is Dean taking advantage of you?”

  “He’s not paying rent, it’s true. But I’m not, either. I’m flat-sitting for my father. Dean’s truly broke. Elf’s flat only has one bedroom. Same story with Levon. Griff’s living in a glorified garden shed of his uncle’s. So Dean either stays in my spare room or he leaves London, and then we’d need a new bassist. I don’t want a new bassist. Dean’s good. So are his songs.” The rails quiver. A train’s approaching. “He spends most of his dole on groceries. He cooks. He cleans. If he takes advantage of me, and I take advantage of him, is it still taking advantage?”

  “I guess not.”

  A sheet of newspaper spins along the track.

  “He stops me staying too deep inside my head for too long.”

  Mecca drags on her cigarette. “He’s very different from you.”

  “So’s Elf. She keeps a little notebook to record her purchases in. So’s Griff. The King of Chaos. We’re all pretty different. If Levon hadn’t assembled us, we wouldn’t exist.”

  “Is this a strength or a weakness?”

  “I’ll let you know when I do.”

  The oncoming train blasts into the grimy light.

  * * *

  —

  THE DARKROOM AT Mike Anglesey’s studio is crimson black, save for a small rectangle of brightness under the projector. Fumes from chemicals stiffen the air. It’s as quiet as a locked church.

  Mecca murmurs, “One hundred seconds.”

  Jasper sets the timer and flips the switch.

  Using a pair of tongs, Mecca dunks the print in the tray of developer fluid and tilts it to and fro to keep the liquid moving over the paper. “If I do this a million times, even, still it is magic.”

  As they watch, a ghost of Elf emerges on the paper, in a state of rapt concentration at Pavel’s Steinway. Mecca has the same expression now. Jasper remarks, “It’s like a lake giving up its dead.”

  “The past, giving up a moment.” The timer buzzes. She lifts the print, lets it drip, and transfers it to the stop bath. “Thirty seconds.”

  Jasper sets the timer. Mecca has him tilt the tray of fixing fluid while she records timings and filter types. When the timer buzzes she flicks on the overhead bulb. Jasper’s eyes hum in the yellow light. Mecca rinses the fluid from the print. “Photography needs lots of water, like all living things.” She pegs the photo of Elf over the sink to drip dry, next to an Elf in full-throated song and an Elf tuning her guitar. Further along are a Griff in freak-out mode, a Griff with a cigarette dangling from his lips, and a Griff doing a drumstick spin. There’s a shot of Dean’s hands on the fretboard with an out-of-focus face above, one of him playing harmonica, and one of him smoking.

  Is the past tense a trick of the mind?

  Is sanity a matrix of these tricks?

  Mecca turns to Jasper. “Your turn.”

  * * *

  —

  THEIR PULSES SLOW from demented to aquatic. Her coccyx presses into his appendix scar. He inhales her. She swirls into his lungs. His heart pumps her around his body. He covers their fused form with her blanket. Sweat puddles in a groove on her fuzzy neck. He laps it up. Ticklishly, she mumbles, “Du bist ein Hund.”

  He tells her, “Fox.”

  An angle-poise lamp slouches in the corner.

  Later, she wriggles free of him, rolls over, slips on her nightgown, rolls back, and sinks into sleep.

  01:11 A.M., says her clock. A classical LP is on her Dansette. Jasper clicks the PLAY toggle. An oboe has lost its way. Upon hearing a violin in the thorns, the oboe picks a path toward it, metamorphosing into what it seeks. It’s beautiful and perilous. Sleep pulls Jasper down, hypnagogic fathoms down. Nothing of her that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. Far above, the hull of the steamer darkens the lilac sea. Look. A coffin sinks, trailing bubbles. Inside is Jasper’s mother, Milly Wallace. From inside the coffin, Jasper hears a knock…knock…knock…Soft, yes, drowned, yes, persistent, yes, real? Yes.

  Jasper wakes. 04:59 A.M. He listens to the knocks until they’ve gone. The whorls of Mecca’s ear form a question mark.

  * * *

  —

  UNDER THE STRIPLIGHT in the staff kitchen, Jasper studies the sleeve of The Cloud Atlas Sextet. Apart from the lines Composed by Robert Frobisher and Overlapping solos for piano, clarinet, cello, flute, oboe and violin, there are no words on the front. The back is even sparser: Recorded in Leipzig by R. Heil, J. Klimek & T. Tykwer 1952, and the label, Augustusplatz Recordings. Regarding the soloists, engineers, arrangers, and studio, there is nothing. Jasper wants to hear it again, but the record player is in Mecca’s room and she’s fast asleep. Using a biro and a notepad he finds in a drawer, Jasper draws a stave and hums his memory of the “Cloud Atlas” melody. It’s in 4/4, simple enough, and starts on an F. No, an E. No. An F. The further along the melody he goes, the more it differs from Robert Frobisher’s…but I like it. By the sixteenth bar, he realizes he’s writing his first song since he arrived in London. He remembers seeing a guitar in the studio downstairs. It was on a hay bale, used as a prop. Jasper goes and finds it. It’s so cheap it hasn’t even got a maker’s name, but it’ll just about do.

  After devising a chorus, Jasper starts looking for lyrics. Phrases of Mecca’s from last night return. She was explaining the dangers of overexposure. “Without the dark there is no vision.” What rhymes with vision? Collision. Titian. Manumission. It’s a bold near-rhyme. But how to contrive an uncontrived-looking link between slavery and photography? Writing is a forest of faint paths, of dead ends, hidden pits, unresolved chords, words that won’t rhyme. You can be lost in there for hours. Days, even.

  Jasper plunges in.

  * * *

  —

  “YOU’RE WEARING A tablecloth.” Mecca yawns in the doorway. “You look like Grandmother in Rotkäppchen.”

  The clock insi
sts it’s 08:07. “What? Who?”

  “The wolf who ate Grandmother.” Mecca’s hair’s a dark gold mess and she’s wearing a blanket like a cloak. “The lost girl in the woods.” The kitchen window is still dark, but Blacklands Terrace is waking up. A van with a phlegmy carburetor passes.

  On the table is a pot of tea Jasper doesn’t recall making, the core of an apple he doesn’t recall eating, and a page of staves, notes, and lyrics he knows he wrote. “You’re wearing a blanket.”

  Mecca pads over and looks at Jasper’s notes. “A song?”

  “A song.”

  “Is it good?”

  Jasper looks at it again. “Could be.”

  Mecca notices the Cloud Atlas sleeve. “You like this LP?”

  “Very much. I’ve never heard of Robert Frobisher.”

  “He is…obskur. ‘Obscure.’ The same word, yes?” Jasper nods. Mecca curls her legs up on the chair. “Robert Frobisher is not in Enzyklopädie so I asked a collector in Cecil Court. He was English. He studied with Vyvyan Ayrs in the 1930s. He died young, by suicide in…Edinburgh or Bruges? I forget. This record is his only work. A fire burned the warehouse, so it is very rare. The collector offered ten pounds for a good copy. True value is more, I think. Ten was his first offer.”

  “How much did you pay for it?”

  “Zero.” Mecca lights a cigarette. “At Christmas, Mike my boss had a party here, and the next morning, the record was left. By magic. To sell it does not feel right. So, if you like it, you keep it.”

  Say thank you. “Thank you.”

  “Now,” says Mecca, “my final English bath.”

  “Do you need any help shampooing?”

  An illegible look. “Finish your song.”

  “It’s finished,” says Jasper.

  “Put me into a line, so when the radio plays it, I can boast to everyone, ‘That part is me.’ ”

  “You’re already in it.”

  “May I hear the song?”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “Okay.”

  Jasper plays the song from beginning to end.

  Mecca nods, seriously. “Yes. You may shampoo me.”

  * * *

  —

  ON THE FIRST landing up the stairs from Denmark Street is a black-on-gold sign for THE DUKE-STOKER AGENCY. Jasper holds open the door and says, “Take a quick peek.” Inside is reception, the receptionist’s desk, a palm tree in a pot, framed photographs of Howie Stoker and Freddy Duke with Harry Belafonte, Bing Crosby, Vera Lynn, and others. Through a screen is a bustling office, two telephones ringing at different pitches, a typewriter’s hammers slapping paper, and Freddy Duke, heard but not seen, barking into a telephone: “Sheffield is the twenty-seventh and Leeds on the twenty-eighth—not Leeds on the twenty-seventh and Sheffield on the twenty-eighth. Say it back!”

  They climb the second flight of stairs to a logo of a whale silhouetted against the moon, stenciled onto a door: MOONWHALE MUSIC. The office is much quieter, much smaller and less populated than the busy agency below. Dust sheets cover the floors and Bethany Drew, hired by Levon to do everything at Moonwhale he doesn’t, is on a pair of stepladders dabbing the coving with a paintbrush. Bethany is thirty, sometimes mistaken for Audrey Hepburn, unmarried, unflappable, and elegant even in the splashed dungarees she is wearing. “Jasper—and Miss Rohmer, I believe. Welcome to Moonwhale. I’m Bethany—office manager, dogsbody, and decorator.”

  “Jasper said you are very capable, Miss Drew.”

  “You can’t believe that old flatterer. I’d shake your hand, but we can’t have you flying to America with paint marks on you. I understand you’re going straight to the airport from here?”

  “Yes. My flight to Chicago is at six.”

  “And what’s taking you to Chicago?”

  “A patron is giving me a small show. Then I’ll look for adventures and photograph what I find.”

  Jasper wonders why Bethany’s looking at him. “It looks really professional,” he says. “The paint job.”

  “So far, so good. Levon’s expecting you…” Bethany nods toward Levon’s office, partitioned by a pair of sliding doors. The doors are half open, revealing Levon pacing to and fro midcall, carrying a phone and trailing the cord. He mouths, “Two minutes.”

  Jasper and Mecca go to the bench along the front window. Mecca takes out her Pentax to compose a shot. Jasper sits down and shuts his eyes. He doesn’t wish to eavesdrop on Levon’s call, but ears don’t have earlids. “Section two, clause three,” says their manager. “It’s there in black and white. Peter Griffin is engaged as a session player, not as an artist signed to Balls Entertainment for the rest of eternity. No ‘release fee’ is payable because there’s nothing to release him from.” Jasper guesses Levon’s talking to his ex-bandleader Archie Kinnock’s ex-manager. “I’m not off the boat yesterday, Ronnie. I’d say, ‘Nice try,’ but it’s a moronic try.”

  Click, goes Mecca’s camera. Scrit-scrit.

  Tinny anger bleeds out of Levon’s receiver.

  Levon interrupts with a dry laugh. “You’ll dangle me out of the window? Seriously?” Levon does not sound menaced. “Ronnie, has no old friend taken you aside and said, ‘Ronnie, old son, you’ve gone the way of the dinosaur—get out of management, while you’ve still got a few quid in the bank’? Or is it too late? Are these rumors about your imminent bankruptcy true? Wouldn’t it be awful if word got out that you’re effectively trading while insolvent?”

  A blast of abuse is ended by Levon hanging up. “What a freak show. Hi, Jasper, and welcome, Mecca, to my tiny empire.”

  “A beautifully decorated tiny empire,” says Mecca.

  “My, she’s good,” Bethany tells Jasper, to his confusion.

  “Is that all you’re taking to America?” Levon stares at Mecca’s modest suitcase and middle-sized rucksack.

  “It’s all I own.”

  “Enviable,” replies Levon.

  Jasper asks, “Was that Ronnie Balls on the telephone?”

  “It was,” says Levon. “Archie Kinnock’s ex-manager.”

  “Archie used to call him ‘my ex-damager.’ ”

  “He’s claiming Griff’s still under contract to Balls Management—but will let him go for a mere two thousand pounds.”

  “How much?”

  “It’s bullcrap and Ronnie Balls knows it.”

  “The glamorous world of showbiz, Mecca,” says Bethany.

  “It’s very like the glamour of fashion photography.”

  “Speaking of photography,” says Levon, “do I spy with my little eye something beginning with ‘P’ for ‘portfolio’?”

  Mecca holds it up. “They are ready for you to see.”

  “Come into my lair.”

  * * *

  —

  “HOLY CRAP.” LEVON examines the photographs spread out on the pool table: four each of Jasper, Elf, Dean, and Griff; plus a few posed shots of the band, first in Club Zed, then a few outside shots during a lucky moment of sunshine in Ham Yard. “This one,” he points to the picture of Elf at the piano, “it’s more like Elf than Elf.”

  “I am glad the ten pounds is spent well,” says Mecca.

  Levon might be smiling. “Who said Germans aren’t subtle?”

  “A man who never went to Germany.”

  Levon takes out his cashbox and counts out ten pound notes, then adds an eleventh. “Your first dinner in Chicago.”

  “I’ll toast you.” Mecca slips the notes into a money belt. “Contact sheets and negatives are here, so you can print more.”

  “Perfect,” says Levon. “We’ll use them for press and for posters to flag up the band’s first gigs. Next month.”

  Jasper realizes this is news. “You think we’re ready to play?”

  “We’re going to book
you a few student unions next month. It’s only the foothills of Mount Stardom, but it’s good to find your feet. My one concern is the lack of original songs.”

  “In fact,” says Mecca, “he wrote one this morning.”

  Levon’s head tilts back and his eyebrows go up.

  “Just an idea I’m mucking around with,” says Jasper.

  “It’s called ‘Darkroom,’ ” says Mecca. “It will be a hit.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. Very glad indeed. Moving on to other news.” Levon taps ash into the ashtray. “Elf called. Apparently you renamed the band in the Duke of Argyll yesterday.”

  “I made a suggestion,” says Jasper. “Then we left.”

  “Elf told me that she, Dean, and Griff are all sold on Utopia Avenue. It’s looking very like a fait accompli.”

  “I prefer Utopia Avenue to the Way Out.” Bethany Drew glides in. “By a country mile.” She surveys the photographs. “Goodness gracious. What fabulous images.”

  “These ones,” says Mecca, “I am pleased by.”

  Levon’s still on the band name. “ ‘Utopia Avenue’…I like it, but I’m worried. It sounds vaguely familiar. Where’s it from?”

  “It’s a gift from a dream,” says Jasper.

  * * *

  —

  HALFWAY DOWN THE stairs to Denmark Street, Jasper and Mecca stand aside for a figure striding up, his trench coat flapping like a superhero’s cape. He pauses his ascent. “Are you that guitarist?”

  “I’m a guitarist,” admits Jasper. “I don’t know if I’m that one.”

  “Good line.” The figure pushes back his fringe to reveal a thin white face, with one blue eye and one jet-black. “Jasper de Zoet. A damn good name. A ‘J’ and a ‘Z.’ Nice high Scrabble score. I saw you at 2i’s in January. You magicked up a hell of a set.”

  Jasper mimes a shrug. “Who are you?”

  “David Bowie, artiste-at-large.” He shakes Jasper’s hand and turns to Mecca. “Enchanted to meet you. You are?”