Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

  “Mecca Rohmer.”

  “Mecca? As in the place all roads lead to?”

  “As in, the English cannot pronounce ‘Mechthild.’ ”

  “So you’re a model, Mecca? Or an actress? Or goddess?”

  “I take photographs.”

  “Photographs?” Bowie’s fingers go to the gold buttons on his trench coat. They’re the size of chocolate coins. “Of what?”

  “I photograph what I wish to photograph,” says Mecca, “for myself. I photograph what I am paid to photograph, for money.”

  “Art for art’s sake and money for God’s sake, eh? Your accent’s a long way from home. Deutschland?”

  Mecca makes a facial gesture that means, Ja.

  “I dreamed of Berlin only the other night,” says David Bowie. “The Berlin Wall was a mile high. Ground level was perpetual dusk, like René Magritte’s The Empire of Light. KGB agents kept trying to inject my toes with heroin. What do you suppose it means?”

  “Don’t do heroin in Berlin,” suggests Jasper.

  “Dreams are basically garbage,” suggests Mecca.

  “Both of you could be right.” David Bowie lights a Camel and nods up the stairs. “So, you’re friends of Mr. Frankland?”

  “Levon’s our manager,” replies Jasper. “I’m in a band with Dean and Griff from 2i’s, and Elf Holloway on keyboards.”

  “I’ve seen Elf play at Cousins. You must be something. What name are you trading under?”

  “Utopia Avenue.” That sounds good. That’s us now.

  David Bowie nods. “Should do the trick.”

  “Are you thinking of working with Levon?” asks Jasper.

  “No, this is just a courtesy call. I’ve signed my soul away elsewhere. I’ve a single out on Deram next month.”

  “Congratulations,” Jasper remembers to say.

  “Yeah.” Smoke trickles from David Bowie’s nostrils. “ ‘The Laughing Gnome.’ Vaudeville psychedelia, you could call it.”

  “I have to get Mecca to Victoria Coach Station, so good luck with your gnome.”

  “As Our Savior said, ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to change music into money.’ Be seeing you.” He gives Mecca a salute and a heel-click—“Bis demnächst, Mechthild Rohmer.” In a whirl of trench coat and hair, David Bowie resumes his climb to the top.

  * * *

  —

  VICTORIA COACH STATION churns with engine noise, fumes, and nerves. Pigeons roost on struts and supports. Jasper tastes metal and diesel. People stand in queues looking tired and unlucky. LIVERPOOL. DOVER. BELFAST. EXETER. NEWCASTLE. SWANSEA. Jasper has visited none of them. If Great Britain was a chessboard, I’d know less than a single square.

  “Hot dogs,” calls a vendor from his trolley. “Hot dogs.”

  Mecca and Jasper find the Heathrow coach with only a minute to spare. As Mecca gives her rucksack to the driver to stow in the luggage hold, a large agile woman in a headscarf presses a wilting carnation into Jasper’s hand and closes his fingers over it. “Only a shilling, love. Buy it for the young lady.” She means Mecca.

  Jasper gives the flower back, or tries to.

  “Don’t!” The woman looks shocked. “Or you may never see her again. Imagine how you’ll feel if something happened…”

  Mecca resolves Jasper’s dilemma by taking the carnation herself, putting it in the woman’s basket, and telling her, “Ugly.”

  The woman hisses at Mecca but moves on.

  “Dean says I’m a nutter magnet,” says Jasper. “He says I look both vulnerable and as if I have money in my wallet.”

  She frowns at him. For Jasper, frowns are even trickier to decipher than smiles. Angry? Then she cups his face and kisses his mouth. Jasper suspects this is their last kiss. Press play and record. “Don’t change,” she says. “Thanks for the last three days. I wish we had three months.” Before he can answer, a large Indian family files onto the coach, forcing Jasper and Mecca apart. The grandmother is last, glaring at Jasper. A crackly Tannoy announces that the Heathrow coach is about to leave.

  Jasper guesses he should say, “I’ll write” or “When can I see you again?” but Mecca’s future is not Jasper’s to make claims on. She’s not making claims on his. Remember her now—face, hair, black velvet jacket, her moss-green trousers. “Can I come with you?”

  Mecca looks uncertain. “To Chicago?”

  “The airport.”

  “Elf and Dean are expecting you at your flat.”

  “Elf usually guesses what’s happened.”

  Mecca wears a new smile. “Sure.”

  * * *

  —

  ROADWORKS ON KENSINGTON Road make for slow progress. Jasper and Mecca watch shops, offices, queues at bus stops, double-deckers full of humans reading or sleeping or sitting with their eyes shut, rows of soot-blackened stuccoed houses, TV aerials sieving the dirty air for signals, cheap hotels and tenements with grubby windows, the mouths of tube stations swallowing people at the rate of hundreds per minute, railway bridges, the brown Thames, the upside-down table of Battersea Power Station, smoke gushing from its three working chimneys, muddy parks where daffodils wilt around statues of the forgotten, bomb sites where ragged children play among dirty pools and mounds of rubble, a bony horse hauling a rag-and-bone cart, a pub called the Silent Woman whose sign shows a woman with a missing head, a flower-seller in a wheelchair, billboards for Dunhill cigarettes, for Pontins Holiday Camps, for a British Leyland dealership, busy launderettes where patrons stare into the machines, Wimpy Bars, betting shops, sunless backyards where lines of damp washing stay damp, gasworks, allotments, fish-and-chip shops, locked churches in whose graveyards addicts sleep atop the dead. The coach ascends the Chiswick flyover and picks up speed. Roofs, chimneys, and gables slide by. Jasper considers how loneliness is the default state of the world. Friends, family, love, or a band are the rare anomalies…You’re born alone, you die alone, and for most of what lies between, you are alone. He kisses the side of Mecca’s head, hoping his kiss passes through her skull and lodges in a crevice in her brain. The sky glows gray. The miles pass. Mecca lifts the back of his hand to her lips and kisses it. That kiss could mean nothing. Or anything. Or something.

  * * *

  —

  NEITHER JASPER NOR Mecca has been to an airport before. It feels futuristic. A man “checks in” Mecca’s luggage, swaps her ticket for “a boarding card,” and directs them to a door marked DEPARTURES. Most of the passengers are dressed as if they’re going to a wedding or a job interview. They arrive at a doorway marked PASSENGERS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.

  This is the end. They hug. Ask if you can visit her in Chicago. Ask her to come back to London on her way home. Her eyes drink him in. Drink me up. What to say? Tell her you love her…but how would I know if I did? Dean says, “You just know”…but how do you know that you “just know”? “I don’t want you to go,” says Jasper.

  “Same here,” says Mecca. “That’s why I should.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know.” She lifts his knuckle to her lips, then the queue shuffles her away. She looks back one last time, the way you’re warned against by myths and fairy tales. She waves from the gateway and she’s going, going…gone. A person is a thing that leaves. Jasper retraces his steps and joins another queue, for a coach back to Victoria. It’s a cold March night. He feels what you feel when you’ve lost something, but before you’ve worked out what it is. Not my wallet, not my keys…In his jacket pocket he finds an envelope stamped “Mike Anglesey Studio.” Opening it, he finds a photograph of the shot he took of Mecca in Ho Kwok’s only yesterday, after Jasper asked her to imagine her homecoming in Berlin. For once I don’t have to guess what anybody’s thinking. I know. On the reverse side she has written a message.

  SMITHEREENS

  For a
lost tourist, the door of 13A Mason’s Yard in Mayfair would not merit a second glance. For Dean, it was a magic portal to the land where the in-crowd frolic, frequented by A&R men and producers; by columnists who can make or break you by tomorrow lunchtime; by masters of the realm and their daughters after a bit of exotic rock ’n’ roll rough; by the designers of next year’s fashions, the models who’ll wear them, and the photographers who’ll shoot them; and by musicians who no longer dream of success because they have it; by Beatles and Stones, Hollies and Kinks; by visiting Monkees, Byrds, and Turtles; by Gerry, with or without a Pacemaker; by Dean’s future peers who’ll tell him, “Send me a demo, I’ll give it a play,” or “Our support act just doesn’t cut it—could Utopia Avenue step in?” Behind the door of 13A Mason’s Yard is the Scotch of St. James club. Members only.

  Dean told Jasper, “I’ll do the talking.”

  He pressed the bell and an eye-level door slot snapped open. An all-seeing eye examined the pair. “And you gentlemen are?”

  “Friends o’ Brian’s. Said he’d put us on the list.”

  The reply came, “Brian Jones or Brian Epstein?”

  “Epstein.”

  “Then I’ll just check my list…Ah, right, Brian is expecting…uh…Are you Neil and Ben, by any chance?”

  Dean couldn’t believe his luck. “That’s us.”

  “Perfect. Let me double-check the surnames…so you’d be Mr. Neil Downe and your mate here’s Mr. Ben Dover?”

  “That’s us all right,” said Dean, then got the puns.

  The All-Seeing Eye gleamed and the slot shut.

  Dean pressed the doorbell again. The slot opened and the All-Seeing Eye peered out. “And you gentlemen are?”

  “I was out of order just now. Sorry. But we are musicians. We’re in Utopia Avenue. We’re playing Brighton Poly tomorrow.”

  “Submit a membership application, plus fee, and management will consider the matter. Or get on Top of the Pops and the fee might be waived. Step aside, please.”

  A quiff, a nose, and a neck-ruff whooshed past Dean. The door of 13A half-opened and a burst of “How’ve yer been, Mr. Humperdinck?” escaped before the door closed again.

  Dean jabbed the doorbell three times.

  The slot snapped open. “And you gentlemen are?”

  “Dean Moss. This is Jasper de Zoet. Remember our names. One o’ these days we’re coming in.” He strode off across Mason’s Yard.

  Jasper trotted to keep up. “Maybe it’s for the best. Our first gig’s tomorrow. A hangover won’t help.”

  “That smug shit was a shitting ponce.”

  “Was he? I thought he was quite polite.”

  Dean stopped. “Don’t yer ever get pissed off?”

  “I’ve tried, but I’m unconvincing.”

  “It’s not a matter of ‘convincing’! It’s a bloody emotion!”

  Jasper blinked. “Exactly.”

  * * *

  —

  THE TRAFFIC IS sluggish all the way from Waterloo to Croydon, so Dean doesn’t have the chance to take the Beast above 30 mph. The gearstick is clunky as hell and the van keeps stalling at junctions. South of Croydon, they get stuck behind a slow convoy of caravans, so only now, beyond the yawn-and-you-miss-it town of Hooley, where the A23 crests the shoulder of the South Downs, is the road empty enough for Dean to put his foot down.

  “It’s not exactly built for speed,” says Dean.

  “She’s a ‘she’ not an ‘it,’ ” says Griff in the back. “And she’s loaded up with four musicians and their gear.”

  When the speedo touches 45 mph, the Beast starts to shudder ominously.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” says Elf.

  Dean drops back down to forty and the shuddering subsides. “Griff, did yer actually test-drive this piece of crap?”

  “Never look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  Dean had to borrow fifteen pounds from Moonwhale to pay his quarter share of this “gift.” More debt…I’m going to have to start serving coffees again, at this rate. “Yer should always look a gift horse in its mouth. They’re never gifts.”

  “We needed a van so I got us one,” said Griff.

  “Yeah—we needed a van. Not a twenty-five-year-old ex-hearse with holes in the floor yer can see the road through.”

  “Didn’t see you putting in the legwork,” says Griff.

  “Well, I think the Beast has character,” says Elf.

  “As long as it gets us from A to B,” says Jasper.

  “Thanks for yer expert opinions,” Dean retorts. “When the crankshaft shears off at two A.M. on the hard shoulder I’ll let yer fix it with a bit o’ ‘character,’ Elf. And when are you,” he asks Jasper, “getting your driving license so you can do that A-to-B bit?”

  “I’m not sure I’d trust myself behind the wheel.”

  “How bloody convenient.”

  Jasper, predictably, says nothing. Is he pissed off? Cowed? Or does he not give a toss? Dean is still never sure what his flatmate-bandmate’s thinking. Guessing gets tiring.

  “There’s a bloke in Wales,” says Griff, “who’ll sit your test for you. You pay twenty-five quid and a fortnight later your license arrives. Keith Moon got his that way.”

  The anecdote deserves a response, but Dean’s heard it before. “Anyone got a ciggie?” Nobody replies. “Please.”

  Elf lights a Benson & Hedges and passes it to him.

  “Ta. If this is the Beast’s top speed”—Dean takes a drag—“we’re in for some long bloody drives. Radio’s knackered too.”

  “If someone gave you a million quid,” says Griff, “you’d complain they didn’t fookin’ pack it right.”

  “Comrades,” says Elf, schoolmarmishly, “tonight’s our first gig. We’ll make music history. Let love and peace reign.”

  The A23 curves out of the woods and climbs a hill.

  Sussex unrolls all the way to the English Channel.

  The golden afternoon is threaded by a silver river.

  * * *

  —

  THE SKY TURNS dark. Dean sucks a toffee as the Beast passes through Pease Pottage, a village less quaint than its name. “If I had to choose one gig, it’d be Little Richard at the Folkestone Odeon. ’Bout ten years ago. Bill Shanks took us. Bill owns the record shop in Gravesend and sold me my first proper guitar. He drove my brother Ray ’n’ me and a few of us down to Folkestone in his van. Little Richard…Jesus, he’s a one-man power station. The screaming, the energy, the theatrics. The girls. I thought, Well, now I know what I’m doing when I grow up. Then, halfway through ‘Tutti Frutti,’ he was doing his thing, leaping on the piano, howling like a werewolf—when he stopped. Clutched his chest, went into a spasm…and hit the deck like a sack o’ spanners.”

  The Beast passes a gypsy encampment in a lay-by.

  “That was part of his act, right?” asks Elf.

  “So we thought. Little Richard’s such a card, we thought. He’s codding us, we thought. But then the band noticed. They stopped playing. Then, dead silence. Little Richard lay there, twitching…and then stopped. Meanwhile a manager dashed up, tried to find a heartbeat, and shouted, ‘Mr. Richard? Mr. Richard?’’Yer could hear a pin drop. The manager stood up, dead pale ’n’ sweaty, and asked if there was a doctor in the house. We all looked at each other thinking, Bloody hell, Little Richard’s dying on us…A man called back, ‘I’m a doctor, let me through, let me through.’ He hurried up onto the stage, took Little Richard’s pulse, uncorked a bottle, held it under his nose, and then this”—Dean overtakes a tractor pulling a load of horse manure—“ear-splitting ‘Awop-bop-a-loo-bop a-lop-bam-boom!’ rang out. Little Richard sprang up—and the band came in bang on the chorus. The whole thing had been a put-on. Even the guys screamed! And it was on with the show.”

  Raindrops splatter on the
windscreen.

  The wiper scree-scraws ineffectually.

  Dean drops down to 30 mph. “After the show, Shanks ’n’ Ray and the others pissed off down the boozer. I was left to my own devices so I reckoned I’d go for Little Richard’s autograph. Told the bouncer at the Odeon that I was Little Richard’s nephew, and if he didn’t let me in, he’d be in trouble. He told me to piss off. So I went round the back and joined the fans at the stage door. After a bit the manager showed up and said Little Richard’d gone already. They all believed him. The very same geezer who’d given it the whole is-there-a-doctor-in-the-house stunt. I played along but I sneaked back a minute later just as a window opened, three floors up. There he was. Little Richard, large as life. He took a few puffs of his joint, flicked away the butt, then shut the window. I did what any normal twelve-year-old Tarzan fan’d do. Climbed the drainpipes.” The Beast approaches a bedraggled hitchhiker whose sign reads ANYWHERE. The ink is running. Dean asks, “Can we squeeze that poor bastard in?”

  “Not unless he’ll fit in the fookin’ ashtray,” says Griff.

  “So you were climbing up the drainpipes,” says Elf.

  The Beast passes the hitchhiker. “Got to the third floor, where I shimmied up a diagonal pipe toward Little Richard’s window…and the drainpipe came away from the wall. Fifty feet up! I lunged for the vertical section, grabbed it, and heard the pipe smash on the ground below. It looked like half a mile down. My only hope was to haul myself up to Little Richard’s windowsill and go knock-knock-knock on the glass. It was that cloudy glass you can’t see through. No one answered. I was clinging to the pipe like a koala but my hands were cramping up and my feet couldn’t get any purchase. I knocked again. Nothing. Thought I was a goner—and if the window hadn’t slid upward on my third knock, I would’ve been. It was Little Richard himself. Shiny quiff, pencil mustache, looking at this kid literally hanging on by his fingernails saying, ‘Hello, Mr. Richard, can I have yer autograph please?’ ”