Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

  “Jasper’s dad bought the place as an investment. Jasper’s the caretaker, and I’m Jasper’s caretaker, I s’pose.”

  “So where’s Jas-pah now?” Kenny did a posh accent.

  “Oxford. He’s back tomorrow. And just so’s yer know, he’d never take the piss out o’ your accent.”

  “Punch his bloody lights out if he tried,” said Kenny.

  Stew was still gazing at the flat. “Yer’ve been living here since January and yer only inviting us for a gander now?”

  “Ain’t Dean’s fault,” stated Rod Dempsey. “It’s a brutal game, showbiz. Bet he hardly has time to take a crap.”

  “Yer not wrong,” said Dean. “Shoes off, Stew. House rules.”

  Stew went Huh? but Rod Dempsey was already unstrapping his biker boots. “This flooring’s worth more than yer aunt Nelly’s house and everything in it.”

  “Including yer aunt Nelly,” added Kenny. “Who charged top dollar in her day. Worth every penny, mind. Like yer mum.”

  “Hilarious.” Stew unlaced his shoes. “Can I take a wazz, or would it stain the gold toilet bowl?”

  “Down the passageway, second on the left.”

  Stewart followed the directions while Kenny went to inspect the record collection.

  “I’m glad for yer, Dean.” Rod Dempsey had a checkered reputation in Gravesend. At sixteen, he was sent to Borstal for torching his truancy officer’s car; at eighteen, he joined a biker gang; at twenty, he fell through a skylight during a burglary and lost an eye. He left prison homeless, jobless, and penniless, but Bill Shanks loaned him enough to open a market stall dealing in biker gear. Now he had a shop in Camden Town.

  “You too,” Dean told him.

  “We use the gifts we’re given. Speaking of which.” From his jacket he took a tin of Nipits licorice pellets and gave it to Dean.

  Inside was a lump of hash as big as his thumb.

  Dean held it up. “Standing by for takeoff…”

  * * *

  —

  ARE YOU EXPERIENCED boomed out of Jasper’s speakers. Dean stretched out on the fleecy rug, sinking into Noel Redding’s bass on “The Wind Cries Mary.” The darkness was colored by a glow-in-the-dark Dutch gnome called Mr. Kabouter. Kenny passed him the joint. “Spill the beans, Rock Star.”

  Dean toked. He floated and sank. “What beans?”

  Stew knew what he meant. “How many girls’ve had the Dean Moss Experience in yer shag-pad?”

  “I don’t notch ’em on my bedpost.”

  “Are yer in double figures?” probed Kenny. “Are yer still knobbing that hairdresser from Brighton?”

  Dean passed the joint to Rod. “This is God’s own dope.”

  “Helmand Chestnut, brought from Afghanistan in the panels of a VW van. Seeing as we’ve got history, I can get it you at cost.”

  It dawned on Dean that Rod Dempsey wasn’t dealing only in biker accessories. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “The hairdresser,” Kenny reminded him. “Yer stalling.”

  Dean’s conscience gave him a slap. “I see Jude on ’n’ off.”

  “Yer bastard,” groaned Kenny. “Why did I give up the music? I soddin’ hate my job. The gaffer’s a ponce. Shop steward’s a berk.”

  “But yer’ve got a girlfriend,” pointed out Stew.

  “She’s all nag, no shag.” The dope made Kenny confessional. “I tell her, ‘Let’s just do it.’ She gets weepy, and goes all, ‘Are yer playing me for a fool, Kenny?’ If I was Dean, if I was on Top o’ the shittin’ Pops, I’d give her the heave-ho, swan around Soho ’n’ drop acid ’n’ sleep with models ’n’ hippie chicks and do something with my life. I’m dying in Gravesend.”

  “Follow in Dean’s footsteps, then,” said Rod. “Like they say with the football pools, ‘If you are not in, you cannot win.’ ”

  Kenny toked. “For two pins, I’d move up tomorrow.”

  Dean considered giving an honest account of how the modest advance from Ilex hadn’t paid off his debts to Moonwhale, Selmer’s Guitars, and his brother; how his slice of the “Darkroom” money won’t add up to three wage-slips from a union job like Kenny’s…but their envy tasted too good. “It ain’t all cakes ’n’ ale.”

  “Says he with a flat in Mayfair…” Stew took the joint. “With his mug on the telly and a bird he ‘sees on and off.’ ”

  “All shag, no nag,” remarked Kenny.

  “Got any famous mates yet?” asked Stew.

  For a few seconds Dean considered saying no. The bass on “3rd Stone from the Sun” giddy-upped. “Does Brian Jones count?”

  “The Brian Jones?” Stew gaped. “From the Rolling Stones?”

  “Of course he bloody counts,” said Kenny. “Brian Jones!”

  Dean buzzed with the dope. “We bump into each other on the scene. We talk guitars, venues, labels. Just between us, he’s a bit slow to buy his rounds.” Dean’s half-fib grows into a lie. “Unlike Hendrix. Jimi’d give you the shirt off his back.”

  “Yer know Hendrix?” asked Kenny. “I don’t bloody believe it!”

  But they did believe it, and Dean’s escape from Gravesend never felt so secure or so triumphant. He passed the joint to Rod, whose one eye housed a tiny, reflected, grinning, glow-in-the-dark Mr. Kabouter, in on the secret.

  * * *

  —

  LATER THAT EVENING, Dean and Kenny were waiting at the bar of the Bag o’ Nails. Rod and Stew had gone to find a table. Dean slipped five one-pound notes into his friend’s pocket. “That’s that fiver yer lent me last year. The 2i’s bar. Not a quick grope in yer trousers.”

  “Cheers, Dean. Thought yer’d forgotten.”

  “Never. Yer saved my arse. Thanks.”

  “Yer’ve come a long way since then.”

  “S’pose so.”

  “Seriously, I want a bite o’ this,” said Kenny. “London. Could I doss on yer sofa for a bit?”

  Dean pictured Kenny trading on the scene as Dean Moss’s best mate, and didn’t relish the idea. “What’d yer do here?”

  “What you’ve done. Get a guitar, write a few songs, put a band together. I wasn’t the worst guitarist in the Gravediggers, was I?”

  “Mate, it’s a cutthroat game.”

  “It’s working out sweet enough for you.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve practiced guitar for…years.”

  “Or I could dust off my art diploma, get a job at Oz or the International Times. Or sell antiques up the Portobello. Or set myself up as a photographer. All I need’s a base. So…yer sofa?”

  He’s got no idea, thinks Dean. “Thing is, it ain’t my sofa. It’s Jasper’s dad’s, and he could turf us out at any time. If yer serious, yer’ll need somewhere more stable. It’s Rod yer want to speak to.”

  Before Kenny cottoned on that he was being given the brush-off, Dean caught the barman’s eye. “Four pints o’ Smithwick’s!”

  * * *

  —

  THE LAST BAND on at the Bag o’ Nails was a five-piece from Ipswich called Andronicus. They weren’t great, but they kept up a driving, danceable beat and Dean, in his Napoleon coat from I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, invented a new dance called the Flamingo. He couldn’t afford the coat, but he figured he’d soon be able to. Dean felt overwhelmed by love. Love for his brothers and sister in music, Jasper, Elf, and Griff. Love for Levon, whose name had “love” hiding inside it. Love for his mum, who’d slipped away with the wonderful, the marvelous, the beautiful “Tennessee Waltz.” Dean wiped his eyes. Love for Little Richard, for saving that snotty Tarzan boy at the Folkestone Odeon. Love for Nan Moss and Bill. He swore he’d buy them a bungalow in Broadstairs, maybe, with his first royalty check from “Abandon Hope,” or the second check, or the third. Love for Ray, his nephew Wayne, and, okay, pregnant Shirl his sister-in-law. Harry Moffat could wait for
his handout in Hell—even Rod’s happy pills had limits. But Dean felt love for the pirate-eyed Rod, who supplied these magic pills at cost. Love for Andronicus and every other musical mediocrity whose murk let Utopia Avenue shine all the brighter. Love for Jude, fast asleep in Brighton. Dean had been ordinary too, not so long ago. Love for Stew and his old friend Kenny—even if he didn’t want to babysit him. Love rotated its beam like a lighthouse on a rock. When Andronicus finished, Dean went to the bar and told the barman, “Drinks for my friends!”

  The barman asked, “Who’re your friends?”

  Dean looked at the faces. “All of ’em!”

  The barman looked dubious. “All of them?”

  “Everyone! The lot! Put ’em on my tab.”

  “Who are you again?” replied the barman.

  “Dean Moss. My band’s Utopia Avenue. We were on Top of the Pops last month. And I would like a tab.”

  The barman did not say, ‘Sorry, Mr. Moss, I didn’t recognize you.’ The barman said, “Can’t open a tab without the boss’s say-so.”

  The magic blue pill did not rescue him, and, dimly, Dean realized that twenty onlookers would tell twenty others who would tell twenty others that a tosser called Dean Moss had made an utter prat of himself in the Bag o’ Nails.

  “It’s okay, Dermott.” Rod Dempsey appeared at Dean’s shoulder. “I’ll guarantee the tab. Standard ceiling.”

  The barman’s face changed instantly. “Ah, well, in that case…” he looked back to Dean, “…Mr. Moss has a tab.”

  Dean burned with gratitude. “Rod, I…”

  Rod made an it’s-nothing gesture.

  Dean jumped onto a table. “Bag o’ Nails! Whatever yer having, ask at the bar to put it on Dean Moss’s tab. Dean Moss. My band’s Utopia Avenue. Our album’s Paradise Is the Road—” A surge to the bar nudged Dean off his stool, and he half fell to the sticky floor. Hands lifted him up, laughing, and a string of brand-new lifelong friends toasted him with the Singapore Slings, Manhattans, triple Scotches, Babychams, and pints of stout that Dean, Dean’s talent, and Dean’s generosity had paid for. His friends loved “Darkroom,” and Dean promised them “Abandon Hope” would blow their minds.

  The night became aquatic. Girls asked, “So you really are a pop star!” Dean said, “It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it,” or “I am now, but I started off as a boy with a crazy dream.” Girls asked if he knew any Stones or Beatles. Girls listened to his true lies with wide eyes. Girls shepherded Dean to the dance floor. One slid her hands around the back of his neck. He must have asked her name because she put her lips to his ear, like a fish nibbling the maggot on a hook. “Izzy Penhaligon.”

  * * *

  —

  “WOULD I STILL be working class,” Dean repeats the question, “if I had a mansion in Surrey, a Triumph Spitfire, ’n’ all that shit?”

  Amy Boxer—Amy—nods as if she knows the answer.

  A one-legged pigeon lands on the ledge of Levon’s window.

  Who cares? “Ask me when it happens.”

  “ ‘When it happens’?” asks Amy. “Not ‘if’?”

  “Yeah. ‘When.’ ” Cheeky cow.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch, goes Amy’s pen.

  “Are yer going to make me out to be an idiot?”

  Amy looks up, doesn’t say no and doesn’t say yes.

  “Amy’s okay,” Levon tells Dean. “We go back a ways.”

  Dean scratches an itch at the base of his spine. “That thing she wrote about John’s Children made ’em look like pillocks.”

  “They didn’t need my help,” says Amy, “to look like pillocks.”

  “John’s Children?” Elf knows them. “The ones who tried to upstage the Who by getting the crowd to wreck the venue?”

  “The Who could shit a turd each into a bucket,” grunts Griff, “and that bucket’d still be a better band than John’s Children.”

  “Ooh, can I quote you on that?” asks Amy.

  “Utopia Avenue,” said Levon, “wish John’s Children—”

  “Aye, quote me on it,” says Griff.

  Amy’s biro scratches her notepad. “One last question for all of you, if I may. When I listened to Paradise Is the Road to Paradise, I kept wondering about politics. We live in revolutionary times. The Cold War. The end of empires. The erosion of authority. Attitudes to sex and drugs. Should music mirror change? Should music try to trigger change? Can it? Does yours?”

  “It’s easier when they ask about pets and favorite food,” mutters Griff, still under his cowboy hat.

  “ ‘Abandon Hope’ ends with the atom bomb,” says Elf.

  “ ‘Mona Lisa’ has feminism at its core,” remarks Jasper. “Its ‘sister song,’ so to speak, is Nina Simone’s ‘Four Women.’ ”

  “Even ‘Darkroom’ has a with-it free-love friskiness,” suggests Dean. “It’s not ’xactly ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’ ”

  “You each nominated someone else’s song,” says Amy.

  “That’s us,” growls Griff. “One big happy family.”

  “Yet ‘A Raft and a River’ is an ode to music,” Amy continues. “ ‘The Prize’ is about the swings and roundabouts of success. ‘Purple Flames,’ one of my songs of the year by the way”—she looks at Dean, who throbs with pleasure before reminding himself that critics are the enemy—“is acutely, nakedly personal. These aren’t political.”

  “Where does it say a band can’t be both?” asks Elf.

  “Now ’n’ then yer get a song that’s both great music and makes a statement,” says Dean. “ ‘For What It’s Worth.’ ‘Mississippi Goddamn.’ ‘A Change Is Gonna Come.’ But a whole album o’ stuff busting its guts to be Political with a capital P? That’s not pretty. I should know. I was in Battleship Potemkin.”

  “The Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Kinks,” says Griff. “They’re not trying to change the world. They don’t buy their mansions by writing anthems about CND or making a socialist paradise. They’re just out to make fookin’ good music.”

  “The best pop songs are art,” says Jasper. “Making art is already a political act. The artist rejects the dominant version of the world. The artist proposes a new version. A subversion. It’s there in the etymology. Tyrants are right to fear art.”

  “And music scares ’em shitless,” says Dean. “It’s the hooks. Once music’s in yer, it’s in for good. The best music’s a kind o’ thinking. Or a kind o’ rethinking. It doesn’t follow orders.” Bloody hell, thinks Dean. I sound intelligent.

  * * *

  —

  EARLY ON SUNDAY morning after the Bag o’ Nails, Dean stood outside Izzy Penhaligon’s house feeling stupid. London’s edges and signs were blurred by a cold fog that Dean’s Napoleon coat did little to keep out. Nobody was around. The night had been a disappointment. Izzy Penhaligon kept flinching, and her parting words were, “I think you’d better leave now.” They hadn’t exchanged phone numbers. He set off down Gordon Street, discovering only when he reached Euston Road that he had walked north instead of south. He waited at a bus stop for a number 18. He wondered where Kenny and Stew had ended up last night. He’d said his friends could kip at Chetwynd Mews, a promise he conveniently forgot when Izzy Penhaligon said, “Come back to mine.” He thought of how Harry Moffat had needed vodka to feel normal, and wondered if he himself needed sex to feel normal, or loved, or successful, or real. The idea was unpleasantly plausible. The number 18 bus continued not to show up, so Dean set off down Euston Road on foot. A number 18 overtook Dean thirty seconds later. Its conductor watched Dean’s attempts to flag it down as the bus was swallowed by fog.

  Dean turned into Gower Street. As he pounded along the pavement, a guitar line marched along with him. He adjusted it, distorted and spiky and metallic, two bars long. The first half of the phrase asked a question that the second half answ
ered. A perfect hook. He skirted Bedford Square. Dead leaves clung to trees. Morwell Street, where he used to live, opened on his left. Dean entered its narrow gullet. Visibility was down to ten paces or so. He passed Mrs. Nevitt’s house. He thought of the five pounds she had stolen from him. Her sign, BEDSIT TO LET—BLACKS & IRISH NEED NOT APPLY—ENQUIRE WITHIN, sat on her windowsill. In the gutter, he noticed a loose cobble and decided it had been put there for a reason. Checking nobody was emerging from the fog in either direction, Dean hurled the cobble through the window. It entered with little fuss—just a brief, musical shattering of glass. He jogged away, exhilarated. Nobody called out, nobody saw him—a secret he would take to his urn.

  Oxford Street was populated only by a few refugees from Saturday night. In Soho Square a wiry black dog was dogging a chubby pale bitch. Sex is the puppet-master, he thought, and scribbled the five words on an old bus ticket with a biro. Elf says, “If you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen.” Rhymes cropped up: disaster, sticking-plaster, faster and faster. He passed the clinic where “Hopkins” had sent him running for a stretcher all those months ago. London is a game. It makes its rules up as it goes along. One of Mr. Craxi’s nephews was mopping the floor of the Etna café. Dean considered dropping by Elf’s flat in Livonia Street with croissants from the French bakery, but remembered Bruce would be there. If Dean could click his fingers and erase Bruce Fletcher’s existence, no questions asked, no murder investigation, he wouldn’t hesitate. In fact, he clicked his fingers now, just on the off chance it would work. He’d be seeing Elf at Pavel Z’s for rehearsal. They were playing in Brixton that night. Not too far to drive. He emerged from Soho onto Regent Street, a curved fog-canal, and crossed into Mayfair. He decided to ring Jude after he’d had a bath. He decided to treat her better. Even Griff was calling him a tart. Dean should send her some flowers. Girls like flowers. He might turn his hook into a song for Jude, he thought, or write a song around her, like “Darkroom” was around Mecca. At the Polish grocer’s on Brook Street, Dean bought a box of eggs, a loaf of bread, a Daily Mirror, and a packet of Dunhills. “Foggy day,” said the man.