‘Wotsit! How the bugger are you?’
‘Alive. Well. Hydra was Paradise. You have to go.’
‘God, I’d love to. I’m stuck here for now, though.’
‘This,’ Wotsit turned to Elf, ‘must be … uh …’
Bruce stepped in. ‘The one, the only, Elf Holloway.’
Elf shook his bony hand. ‘Bruce has told me a lot about you.’
‘Of all the gorgeous male Aussies in London,’ Wotsit had a toothy smile, ‘why pick this shameless larrikin, eh?’
‘Sexual charisma,’ said Bruce. ‘Genius. My vast estate.’
‘That must be it,’ said Elf, who paid all the bills and expenses.
Wotsit ushered them down a hallway, past a mural of an elephant, a jade Buddha in a nook and an Om prayer flag hanging in the stairwell. The Freak Out! album by the Mothers of Invention boomed through a marshy pong of dope, lentils and incense. In the long lounge, thirty or forty people were chattering, drinking, smoking, dancing, laughing. ‘Hey, everyone,’ Wotsit announced, ‘this is Bruce and his good lady Elf.’ There was a small chorus of ‘Hi, Bruce!’ and ‘Hi, Elf!’ and someone gave Elf a beer. She had a few sips. A sleek woman in copper and gold with kohl-ringed eyes materialised. ‘Elf, I’m Vanessa. I adore your records.’ Home Counties. ‘“Shepherd’s Crook” overwhelms me. I do a bit of modelling, and I was at Mike Anglesey’s studio in Chelsea for a Christmas knees-up, and at some point Mike put your EP on and told us all,’ Vanessa does a posh girl’s Cockney imitation, ‘“Get your shell-likes around this!” and … wow.’
‘Thanks, Vanessa,’ said Bruce. ‘We’re proud of it.’
Someone tapped Elf’s shoulder. She turned to find Marc Bolan’s big doggy eyes. ‘Where’ve you been hiding, Goldilocks?’
‘Marc! Bruce and I have been—’
‘I heard “Shepherd’s Crook” EP.’ Marc wore mascara, a leather jacket and a knotted scarf. ‘Lots there to admire. The best songs reminded me of yours truly’s new work, in fact. I’ve got these new songs that would fit perfectly on your label. It’s an album’s-worth, really. Who should I speak to?’
‘Toby Green. But it’s only a small—’
‘Toby Green. Got it. He’ll cream his pants when he hears my idea: a song for each companion in The Fellowship of the Ring – with an interlude for Gollum and a climax for the One Ring itself.’
Elf guessed she was supposed to be bowled over. She looked around for Bruce for clues but he had vanished. As had Vanessa.
‘You have read The Lord of the Rings?’ asked Marc Bolan.
‘Bruce lent me the first volume, but if I’m honest—’
‘I always tell girls: “If you want to understand me, read The Lord of the Rings right now.” It’s that simple.’
Elf wished she had the nerve to say, ‘In that case, I’ll avoid it like the plague.’ She said, ‘Good luck with the songs.’
He kissed his forefinger and planted it between Elf’s eyebrows. ‘I’ll tell Toby Green you sent me.’
Elf forced a smile but wanted to wash her face. ‘Bruce is around. He’ll want to speak with you, too …’
Bruce was nowhere. The bodies grew denser. The air grew smokier. The Butterfield Blues band was on. Half an hour passed. Elf fended off a folk-bore, who took her to task for sullying the purity of the 1765 version of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ on her ‘Oak, Ash And Thorn’ EP. Bruce reappeared. ‘Wombat, let me take you away from all this.’
‘Where were you? I just got cornered by—’
‘The real party’s up in Wotsit’s room. C’mon.’ Bruce spoke low. ‘Everyone’s waiting.’
‘Look, I’m not sure if I’m really in the mood for—’
‘Trust me.’ Bruce gave her a conspiratorial wink. ‘The next few hours could change your life.’ He led her through bodies, up steps, up steeper steps, past snoggers and up even steeper steps to a purple door. He knocked a pattern of knocks. A bolt was unbolted.
‘Aha.’ The door was opened by Wotsit. ‘Sorry for the cloak and dagger –’ he re-bolted the door behind them ‘– but if word got out, the hoi-polloi would be kicking my door down.’ Wotsit’s room was lit by a paper lamp on a tripod. Its beam revolved like a lighthouse’s, traversing yellow walls, floorboards painted purple and yellow, and a boarded-up fireplace. Black tulips stood in a black vase. The window showed a South Kensington nocturne of chimney pots, TV aerials and gutters. Six people sat or lay on beanbags, a low bed and cushions. Vanessa from earlier said, ‘We thought we’d lost you. Do you know Syd?’ Syd Barrett, the singer with Pink Floyd, was strumming a guitar and singing, ‘Have you got it yet?’ over and over. He didn’t appear to notice Elf. A man with an imperial beard, a rose-print shirt and a shiny pate, introduced himself. ‘Al Ginsberg. Great to meet you, Elf. Bill Graham’s gonna love this.’ He held up Fletcher & Holloway’s ‘Shepherd’s Crook’ EP.
‘Allen Ginsberg the poet?’ Elf checked with Bruce. ‘The Allen Ginsberg?’ Bruce had a what-did-I-tell-you face.
‘Don’t believe everything you read about me,’ said Allen Ginsberg. ‘Just most of it. My friend Bill just happens to own the Fillmore Auditorium. You’ve heard of the Fillmore, right?’
‘Of course. It’s the venue in San Francisco, bar none.’
‘You’d fit right in there,’ says Ginsberg. ‘You’re folkier than a lot of the acts, but you’re not just folkie.’
‘We’d be over like a shot,’ said Bruce, ‘if Mr Graham could sort the flights for us. Right, Elf?’
Elf was too stunned to do much but nod. ‘Definitely.’
‘I’m Aphra Booth.’ The woman in a denim suit was sitting against the far wall. ‘This reprobate –’ she indicated the guy with a cloudy Afro who lay with his head in her lap and who raised a lazy hand ‘– is Mick Farren.’ Aphra Booth was another Australian. ‘I’m sceptical on the whole Doors of Perception thing, but in the spirit of scientific enquiry, I’d like to experience what I’m sceptical about.’
This didn’t make much sense to Elf, but Aphra Booth’s demeanour prompted her to say, ‘Absolutely.’
Syd Barrett detuned his guitar, still chanting ‘Have you got it yet?’ in a quiet, demonic round.
‘So, Elf.’ Wotsit indicated a shelf of drinks. ‘What’s your rocket fuel? Brandy? A sugar cube?’
‘Sorry to be square, but just a Coke, please.’
‘If you were square,’ said Wotsit, ‘you wouldn’t be here.’
‘Bags Elf sits next to me.’ Vanessa patted a beanbag next to her. ‘Even if her talent makes me green with envy. Piano and guitar, you play? Isn’t that just showing off?’
Elf sank into the beanbag, wondering if Vanessa was there with Syd or Allen Ginsberg. She was way above Wotsit’s class. ‘I’m not that great on the guitar. Bruce calls me “The Claw”.’
‘Then I think Bruce is perfectly horrid.’
Wotsit brought her Coke. ‘Enjoy the trip.’
Elf guessed the phrase was an Australianism. ‘Thanks.’ She swigged a mouthful of dark sweetness.
‘You’re clearly not a virgin,’ observed Aphra Booth.
Elf guessed this was feminist forthrightness. ‘Um … Neither are you, I guess.’
Aphra looked confused. ‘Didn’t you hear me earlier?’
‘So, Elf.’ Bruce was doing his naughty-boy smile. ‘Me and Wotsit have given you an early birthday present.’
‘Oh?’ Elf looked around. There was no sign of a gift.
‘We all dropped acid ten minutes ago,’ said her boyfriend, ‘but it wouldn’t be the same without you, so …’
Elf followed his gaze to her Coke, but dismissed the idea that Bruce would spike her drink with LSD as preposterous – until Wotsit giggled, snaggle-toothed.
‘Sometimes you need a little push, Wombat,’ said Bruce.
Horrified, Elf put the bottle down. Shock trumped anger but anxiety trumped shock: Elf didn’t want to start tripping in front of these strangers. She didn’t want to start tripping at all. Bruce and a few of the C
ousins crowd had dropped acid, but Elf was not attracted by the stories of archangels, or fingers turning into penises, or the death of the ego.
‘Am I reading this right?’ Aphra asked Bruce. ‘You put LSD in your girlfriend’s drink without telling her?’
‘Just relax into it,’ Bruce told Elf.
Elf stopped herself yelling, ‘You stupid moron, how dare you?’ Allen Ginsberg was looking on, and to fail this acid test might be to kiss a gig goodbye at the mythical Fillmore. She looked at her bottle of Coke. She had only drunk about a quarter.
Bruce pouted on his beanbag. ‘It’s your birthday present. You’re not this square.’ He told Allen Ginsberg, ‘She’s not.’
‘Have you got it yet?’ sang Syd Barrett. ‘Have you got it yet?’
‘No truly independent mind,’ said Allen Ginsberg, ‘is square. And if Elf isn’t in the mood, a bad trip is far likelier.’
Elf handed the Coke to Wotsit. ‘I’ll hear about your adventures in the morning.’ Bruce looked sulky. Elf asked Aphra Booth. ‘Look after him, will you?’
‘Certainly not. Do I look like his mother?’
On Cromwell Road, night had drawn a curtain of drizzle. A 97 bus groaned up to Elf’s stop. Downstairs was packed, so she went upstairs, and took the last free double seat near the front. She leaned her head against the glass and replayed the scene in Wotsit’s room from various angles. Had she just turned down a lysergic acid golden ticket to San Francisco? Had she flunked a rite of passage? Was she a prisoner too afraid to escape from mind-prison? The bus stopped at the Natural History Museum. A tired-looking Caribbean woman appeared at the top of the stairs, making the quick-fire calculations women have to make when choosing a seat: Where am I least likely to get hassled? It must be doubly tricky if you’re black and female, Elf figured, so she made a sisterly feel-free-to-sit-here nod at the seat next to her. The woman took the seat with a silent nod back. Within a minute she had fallen asleep. Elf studied her, sideways. She was Elf’s age, give or take, with smoother skin, fuller lips and thicker, curlier hair escaping from a headscarf. A silver cross rested on her clavicle behind the collar of a nurse’s uniform …
‘Elf Holloway is a dyke,’ stated Imogen.
Elf sat very still. Imogen was in Malvern, a hundred and forty miles away, and not riding on the 97 bus in South Kensington.
‘Dyke,’ repeated Imogen’s voice. ‘Dyke, dyke, dyke.’
Elf was either mad or hallucinating her voice.
‘You sleep with boys to hide what you are,’ said Imogen’s voice. ‘And you’ve fooled your friends, you’ve fooled our parents, you’ve fooled Bea, you’ve half-fooled yourself – but you can’t fool me. I’m your big sister. I know when you’re lying. I always did. I know what you’re thinking even as you think it. Bruce is camouflage. Isn’t he, Your Dykeness?’
Elf shut her eyes and told herself this was the acid-spiked Coca Cola. Imogen wasn’t here. She wasn’t going mad. Truly mad people don’t query their own sanity.
‘Rubbish, said Imogen’s voice. And I note you haven’t denied that you’re a dyke. Have you, Your Dykeness?’
Sitting meekly and pretending nothing was wrong and odd was, itself, wrong and odd, but Elf didn’t know what else to do. A taxi would get her home more quickly, but if none appeared, she might start tripping by a wintry Hyde Park. She might imagine she’s a fish out of water and jump into the Serpentine and drown.
‘Good riddance to bad rubbish. You’re fat. Your songs are stupid. You look like a man in a wig. You’re a failure. Your music is a joke. Bea only talks to you out of pity …’
‘Golly, you’re right about the loos.’ Bea sits down, here and now, in the Gioconda café, on a lovely day in April, a hundred nights after Elf huddled under her blanket in her flat waiting for the Imogen of the Mind to subside. ‘It really is a journey to the Centre of the Earth. I heard magma flows bubbling through the tiled floor.’ Bea sees the lovers in the doorway across Denmark Street, still snogging. ‘My, those two are going for it.’
‘I know. I don’t know where to look.’
‘I do. He’s a hunk. I like her miniskirt. Remember Mum’s verdict on minis? “If the goods aren’t for sale …”’
‘“… don’t put ’em in the window.”’
The lovers pull away, their fingers intertwined until the last moment. They turn, take a few paces, turn again and wave.
‘It’s like ballet,’ says Bea.
People sweep up and down Denmark Street. Elf twists a silver ring she bought from a market stall in King’s Lynn on a sunny Sunday before a Fletcher & Holloway gig. Bruce didn’t buy it for her – giving rings isn’t his style – but it’s proof that the Sunday was real, that there was a time when he loved her.
‘So when’s Bruce due back from France?’ asks Bea.
Yesterday, Elf came home exhausted after eight hours of rehearsals. Waiting for her was a phone bill, an invitation for Fletcher & Holloway to play at a folk club last August in the Outer Hebrides and a postcard of the Eiffel Tower. The mere sight of his handwriting tautened her innards:
Elf catalogued her thoughts. First, exasperation that the bastard had sent only one miserly card after a hundred days of nothing. Second, anger at its breezy tone – as if Bruce hadn’t bruised her heart, sliced Fletcher & Holloway in half and left her to sort out the mess. Third, a mortifying bliss at the ‘Dear’, the ‘Wombat’ and ‘Kangaroo‘, the ‘avec bises’… and dismay at the ‘flat upstairs I share’. Share with whom? ‘Très amicable’ French girls? Fourth, suspicion that the ‘Hope we’re still friends’ is a hedge-bet – as if Bruce is lining up a bed for when he gets back to London. Fifth, fresh anger at the way Bruce uses her. Sixth, a resolve to slam the door in his face if he shows up at Livonia Street. Seventh, a dread that she won’t be able to. Eighth, disgust that one measly little postcard could still trigger a bout of Brucesickness. Elf ran a hot bath. She climbed in and read The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing to take her mind off Bruce Fletcher, but in the event Bruce Fletcher took her mind off Doris Lessing. Elf kept imagining him and a French girl having baths together, him wearing nothing but his corks-on-strings hat …
‘Bruce is staying in Paris a little longer.’ Elf tells Bea. A blind man walks by with his guide dog. ‘Australians like to see as much of Europe as they can when they’re here.’ Elf turns to Bea, so she won’t think Elf’s avoiding eye-contact.
‘Happy Together’ by the Turtles comes on the radio.
‘So is Fletcher and Holloway on hiatus?’ asks Bea.
The worst part is lying to Bea, thinks Elf. ‘Kind of.’
‘While you’re recording with Utopia Avenue?’
Elf notices a cigarette lighter wedged between the ketchup and the HP Sauce bottles. On the side is enamelled a red devil with a pitchfork, horns and tail. She flicks the spark wheel and a flame appears. ‘I wonder if one of those dishy art students forgot it.’
‘What dishy art students?’
Elf snorts. ‘You’ll have to do better than that at RADA.’
Bea does Bea’s impish smile. ‘If this was a story, one of them would come back in and say, “Have you seen a lighter?” and you’d say, “What, this lighter?” and he’d say, “Thank God, my dying mother gave it to me on her death-bed” and your fates would be entwined for evermore.’
Elf’s smile is swallowed by a mighty yawn. ‘Sorry.’
‘You must be exhausted, poor thing. You were up at six?’
‘Five. Graveyard-shift sessions are cheaper. Howie Stoker may be a millionaire playboy but he’s not throwing money at Utopia Avenue willy-nilly.’
‘Are you making money, if it’s not a rude question?’
‘It’s not. We’re not. We’ve only done four gigs and our fee is minuscule. Minuscule gets divided five ways. I was earning more when I was headlining at folk festivals.’
‘So you’re all paying to be in the band?’
‘Kind of. I’ve still got a trickle of Wanda Virtue money coming in. Jasper’s ekin
g out an inheritance from his grandfather and stays at a flat his father owns in Mayfair. Dean’s moved in with Jasper, so he’s rent-free too. Griff’s living in an uncle’s back garden in Battersea. I should’ve invited you into Fungus Hut just now to introduce you, but I … was sick of the sight of them.’
‘Oh dear. What did they do?’
Elf hesitates. ‘Their default response to any of my ideas is to tell me why it’s no good. An hour later, they’ll arrive at the same idea – and truly not remember me saying it. Drives me mental.’
‘Theatre’s the same. It’s as if “Female director” is an oxymoron, like “woman prime minister”. Are they always that bad?’
Elf makes a face. ‘Not always. Dean shoots his mouth off, but it comes from insecurity. I think. On charitable days.’
‘Is he good-looking?’
‘Girls think so.’
Bea makes a face.
‘No no no. Never in a million years. Griff the drummer’s a northern diamond in the rough. Anarchic, sweary, likes a drink. Great drummer. He’s more at home in his skin than Dean. Jasper’s … Mr Enigma. Sometimes he’s so spaced-out he’s barely there. Other times he’s so intensely there, he uses all the oxygen in the room. Don’t tell Mum and Dad, but he was in a psychiatric clinic in Holland for a while, and sometimes you think, Yes, I believe it. He reads a lot. Went to boarding school at Ely – there’s real money on the Dutch side of his family. You should hear him play guitar, though. When he’s on form, words fail me.’
‘Two coffees’ – Mrs Biggs arrives – ‘and a bacon butty.’ The sisters thank her and Elf takes a big bite. ‘Dear God, I needed that.’
Utopia Avenue : A Novel Page 12