Utopia Avenue : A Novel

by Mitchell, David

  Dean went back inside. ‘Why?’ His voice shook.

  ‘Why what?’ Dean’s father still didn’t look up.

  ‘What was the point o’ that?’

  ‘Till now yer’ve been a work-shy long-haired pansy with a guitar. Now yer just a work-shy long-haired pansy. That’s’ – Dean’s dad looked up – ‘a step in the right direction.’

  Dean got his rucksack and packed his nine albums, twenty singles, a packet of guitar strings, his birthday cards from Mum, his best clothes, mock crocs, photo album and his notebook of songs. He said goodbye to his old room for the last time and went downstairs. Before he could undo the chain, a force hurled him down the hall. Dean’s ear smacked into a doorframe. Footsteps approached on the lino. Dean slid himself vertical. ‘What? Yer going to keep me locked up here?’

  ‘No son of mine’s a guitar-twanging fairy faggot.’

  Dean looked into the hard eyes and hated them. Was his dad in there? Was the vodka talking? ‘Yer dead right, Harry Moffat.’

  ‘Yer what?’

  ‘I’m not yer son. Yer not my father. I’m off. Now.’

  ‘Piss and wind. It’s high time yer stopped fannying about with art ’n’ music ’n’ this shit and got yerself a real job. Like Ray. I warned yer, but now I’ve – I’ve – I’ve taken action. Yer’ll thank me for it.’

  ‘I’m thanking yer now. Yer’ve opened my eyes, Harry Moffat.’

  ‘Say that again – once again – and by fuck you’ll regret it.’

  ‘Which bit, Harry Moffat? The I’m-not-yer-son bit, or—’

  Dean’s jaw cracked, his skull smacked the wall; his body thudded; and he came to on the lino. He tasted blood. Pain in his skull and jaw tapped in time with his pulse. He looked up.

  Harry Moffat looked down. ‘See what yer made me do?’

  Dean got up. He checked his mouth in the mirror. A cut lip, blood, a mashed gum. ‘Is that what yer used to tell Mum? When yer hit her? “See what yer made me do”?’

  Harry Moffat’s sneer was gone.

  ‘No secrets in Gravesend. The whole town knows. “There goes Harry Moffat, beat his wife like a carpet, she got cancer and she died.” Never to yer face. But they know.’

  Dean undid the chain and stepped into the November night.

  ‘I’m done with yer!’ shouted Harry Moffat. ‘Yer hear me?’

  Dean kept walking. Curtains were twitching.

  Peacock Street smelt of frost and fireworks.

  Seven years and a quarter of a mile away, Dean wakes to the sound of rain and Kenny snoring on the sofa. Someone has put a cushion under Dean’s head. Ray’s in the armchair, asleep. The hookah is surrounded by glasses, bottles, ashtrays, peanut shells, cards. Dean pads into the kitchen for a mug of water. Gravesend water tastes less soapy than London water. He sits at the table and munches a Jacob’s cracker. From its high shelf, a spider-plant has unfurled tendrils over a tapestry of a god with an elephant’s head and a photo of Shanks and Piper somewhere foreign and sunny. The furthest Dean’s ever been from Gravesend was a Battleship Potemkin gig in Wolverhampton. His share of the cut was less than a pound. He would have earned more busking at Hyde Park Corner. Is Utopia Avenue a cul-de-sac? We were good last night, but that was a home match … What if nobody wants us? Roofs step down from Queen Street to the river. Tugs pull a freighter out of Tilbury Docks. As the freighter’s middle section clears the hospital, its name is revealed to Dean a letter at a time – STAR OF RIGA. Shanks’s Gibson acoustic sits on the chair opposite. Dean tunes it and, accompanied only by the hiss of rain and his own thoughts, he lets his fingers strum and pick …

  ‘One o’ yours?’ Ray stands in the doorway of Shanks’s kitchen.

  Dean looks up. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘That tune.’

  ‘Just something I’m messing about with.’

  Ray drinks a mug of water. ‘Aunt Marge was right, Mum’d be that proud. It’d be “’Course, Dean always was the artistic one.”’

  ‘It’s you she’d be proud of. “’Course, Ray always was the one who applied himself.” She’d spoil Wayne rotten, too.’

  Ray sits down. ‘Are you ’n’ Dad going to bury the hatchet?’

  Dean plays a discordant twang. ‘He’s the original hatcheter.’ A droplet of rain runs down the window. ‘Bill’s been more of a dad to me. You, too. And Shanks.’

  ‘I’m not trying to excuse him, but he’s lost everything.’

  ‘We’ve been here before, Ray. “It’s the vodka’s fault”, “His dad slapped his mum ’n’ him about too”, “He went through hell watching Mum die”, “Refusing to call him ‘Dad’ is a childish grudge that’s eating me up.” Miss anything?’

  ‘No. But if he could un-burn yer guitar, he would.’

  ‘Told yer that himself, did he?’

  Ray makes a face. ‘He’s not a man to discuss his feelings.’

  ‘Stop. This isn’t a grudge. It’s consequences. If yer want him in yer life, great. Bully for you. That’s yer choice. I don’t want him in mine. That’s my choice. End o’ story. Just … stop.’

  ‘Men his age can and do drop dead. ’Specially if their liver’s fucked. The dead can’t sign peace treaties. And he’s still yer dad.’

  The dead can’t sign peace treaties, thinks Dean. Good line. ‘Genetically, legally, yeah, he’s my father. In every other sense, he’s not. I’ve a brother, a nephew, Nan, Bill, two aunts, but not a dad.’

  Ray heaves out a long sigh. Drains gurgle.

  Shanks’s phone in the hallway starts ringing.

  Dean doesn’t answer: Shanks is a man with fingers in many pies and any pie might be calling. Their host’s bedroom door opens and his footsteps thud up the hallway. ‘Yeah?’ A long pause. ‘Yeah, he is … Yeah … Who shall I say is calling?’ Shanks appears in the doorway. ‘Dean, son. It’s yer manager.’

  ‘Levon? How did you know I was here?’

  ‘The Dark Arts. Is Jasper there?’

  ‘Sort of. He’s with a girl.’

  ‘I need both of you at Denmark Street.’

  ‘But it’s Sunday morning.’

  ‘I know. Griff and Elf are on their way.’

  This sounds like urgent bad news. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Victor French happened.’

  ‘Who’s Victor French?’

  ‘The A&R scout for Ilex Records. He was at the Captain Marlow last night. He wants to sign Utopia Avenue.’

  He wants to sign Utopia Avenue. Six little words.

  I have a future, after all. Shanks’s hallway is listening.

  ‘Hello?’ Levon sounds worried. ‘Still there?’

  ‘I am,’ says Dean. ‘I heard. That’s … Bloody hell.’

  ‘Don’t buy your Triumph Spitfire yet. Victor’s putting in an offer for three singles, then an album, if – if – interest builds. Ilex isn’t one of the Big Four, but it’s a solid offer. Being a middle-sized fish in a small pond could work better for the band than being a tadpole in a lake. Victor wanted to sign you last night, but I pushed for more money and told him EMI were sniffing. He called his boss in Hamburg this morning for approval – and it’s a yes.’

  ‘Yer never told us last night’s gig was an audition.’

  ‘No good manager would. Get dressed, get Jasper, get on the next train to Charing Cross, get to Moonwhale. We’ve got details to discuss ahead of a meeting at Ilex tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay, see yer. Uh, thanks.’

  ‘Any time. Oh – and, Dean?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Congratulations. You’ve earned this.’

  Dean hangs up. The phone pings.

  We’ve got a bloody record deal.

  ‘Mate?’ His big brother appears from the kitchen, looking concerned. ‘Yer okay? Yer look like someone’s died.’

  The platform roof drips. The mouth of the tunnel drips. Signage, cables and signals drip. Pigeons huddle on the dripping girders of the dripping footbridge. The platform is an archipelago of damp patches between puddles. Dean’s
right foot’s wet. He has to take his boots back to the cobbler. No, Dean realises. No, I don’t. I’ll walk into Anello and Davide in Covent Garden and I’ll say, ‘Hi, I’m Dean Moss, I’m in Utopia Avenue, we just signed with Ilex Records, so kindly show me the best bloody boots yer’ve got.’ Dean snorts a laugh.

  ‘What’s funny?’ asks Jasper.

  ‘My mind keeps wandering off, and I sort o’ forget, and I think, Why am I feeling so fantastic? Then I remember – Oh, yeah, that’s it, we’ve got a record deal! – and it all goes boom! again.’

  ‘It is good news,’ agrees Jasper.

  ‘West Ham winning three–nil away at Arsenal is “good news”. Getting a contract is … orgasmic news. And you get it on top of a real orgasm. Yer should be in a state o’ rapture.’

  ‘I guess so.’ He opens his packet of Marlboro. ‘Two left.’

  They light up. ‘I’m half afraid,’ says Dean, ‘I’ll wake up on Shanks’s floor and this’ll all be a hookah dream.’

  Jasper holds out his hand. Raindrops splash on his palm. ‘That’s not dream-rain. It’s too wet.’

  ‘Expert in these matters, are yer?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  Dean looks up the London-bound railway tracks. He thinks of his younger selves, gazing up the same tracks towards a formless future. He’d like to send a telegram back in time: You’ll be ripped off, mugged and shat on, but Utopia Avenue’s waiting for yer. Hang on in there. The tracks quiver. ‘Here comes the train.’

  Dean and Jasper have their own window seats. Dean looks out onto the far platform, into the waiting room for eastbound trains, and sees Harry Moffat sitting by the window. He’s reading a paper. Before Dean can hide, Harry Moffat looks up and stares straight back. Not maliciously, not accusingly, not mockingly, not despairingly, not imploringly. It’s a simple ‘Yes, I see you’ – like a telephonist putting through a call. Harry Moffat can’t have planned this encounter. Dean didn’t know he was going to be on this train until ten minutes ago. Why is Harry Moffat travelling to Margate on a rainy Sunday morning in July? A holiday? Harry Moffat doesn’t do holidays. Harry Moffat returns to his paper … and at this angle, Dean can no longer swear it’s him. They are, after all, two rainy windowpanes and twenty rainy yards apart. There’s an undeniable resemblance – the glasses, the posture, the thick dark hair, but … it might not be. The London-bound train tenses, takes the strain, and heaves away. The man does not look up again.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Jasper.

  Gravesend station slides into the past.

  ‘Someone I thought I knew.’

  Unexpectedly

  Levon’s parked car was hot and airless. Elf yawned and checked her makeup in her hand-mirror. It’s running. ‘Is it Thursday?’

  A concrete mixer rumbled by, churning fumes and dust.

  ‘Friday.’ Dean lay in the back seat, his notebook open on his chest. ‘Oxford tonight. Southend tomorrow. Don’t look now. It’s Lovely Rita, Meter Maid.’ A traffic warden walked past, examining the meter. Dean called, ‘Lovely day.’ She did not reply.

  Elf yawned again. ‘Last time Bruce and I did a gig at Oxford, a student accused us of looting songs from the proletariat. Bruce told him he grew up having to walk through snake-infested bush to an outdoors dunny every time he needed to take a shit, so Oxford Varsity Boy could kiss his arse.’

  ‘Huh.’ Dean was only half listening.

  Elf wondered what Bruce was doing at that very second. Who cares? I’ve got Angus. ‘So. Oxford tonight. Southend tomorrow.’

  ‘Southend tomorrow.’

  ‘Ever played there?’

  Dean wrote something in his notebook. ‘Once. With Battleship Potemkin. At the Studio at Westcliff. Lots of mods. They hated us, so here’s hoping they don’t recognise me.’

  Elf switched on the car radio: ‘Even The Bad Times Are Good’ by the Tremeloes was playing. ‘Why’s this at number fifteen when “Darkroom” is nowhere? It’s rubbish.’

  ‘Airplay, airplay, airplay. The piano part’s pretty good.’

  ‘Where’s our airplay? “Darkroom”’s piano part is incredible.’

  ‘If you do say so yourself.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘It’s a chicken ’n’ egg thing. If we don’t climb up the charts, we don’t get airplay. If you don’t get airplay, no chart entry.’

  ‘What do other bands do?’

  Dean rested his notebook on his chest. ‘Sleep with DJs. Have a record label rich enough to pay the stations. Write a song so irresistible that it practically plays itself.’

  Elf turned the radio dial, finding the final bars of the summer’s biggest hit. The DJ rounded it off: ‘Scott McKenzie, still going to San Francisco, and still wearing flowers in his hair. You’re tuned to the Bat Segundo Show on Radio Bluebeard one-nine-eight long wave, brought to you by Denta-dazzle gum, now in triple mint and fruity toot. Time for one more summer sizzler. Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made To Love Her”. Weren’t we all, Mr Wonder?’

  Elf switched the radio off and sighed.

  ‘What’s wrong with Stevie Wonder?’ asked Dean.

  ‘Every time it’s not us I feel sick.’

  Dean screwed the cup-lid off his Thermos and poured himself a cupful of cold water. ‘Thirsty?’

  ‘Parched. Which side have you drunk from?’

  ‘No idea.’ Dean handed it through the gap between the seats. ‘What’s a spot of oral herpes between bandmates?’

  ‘When did you become an expert on oral herpes?’

  ‘No comment.’

  Elf drank. A guy and a girl rode past on a scooter. ‘How did Jasper and Griff wriggle out of these courtesy calls again?’

  Dean sighed through his nose. ‘Griff, by being so rude Levon doesn’t dare send him. Jasper, by sounding like he’s on drugs.’

  ‘So you and I are being punished for being polite and sane.’

  ‘Me, I’d rather be doing this with you than stuck in the belly of the Beast with Griff, lugging the gear round.’

  A lunchtime lollipop lady took up position on the pelican crossing and directed a crocodile of infants across the road.

  The nib of Dean’s pen scratched his notebook.

  Elf asked, ‘Still doing those lyrics?’

  ‘When you’re not asking me stuff.’

  ‘Can I take a look? I’m boooooooooooored …’

  Dean surrendered and handed her the notebook.

  Fireworks split the sky at night

  A hundred rockets screamed and fell.

  You swung the axe with all your might

  At my guitar and gave it hell.

  My record player was next to catch

  it. Little Richard had to pay.

  You poured on paraffin, one match

  lit – awop-bop-a-loola-awop-bam-bay.

  Elf smiled at that and Dean asked, ‘What? What?’

  ‘Good line. “Awop-bop-a-loola”.’

  Dean looked relieved. ‘What d’yer think ’bout—’

  ‘Ssh. Let me finish.’

  Hope that bonfire in the garden

  Still burns purple in your eyes,

  Still turns my future into carbon,

  Still smoulders, your November prize.

  ‘Don’t dream bigger than I do.

  You are what I say you are.

  You’ll do what I tell you to.’ Go

  Tell your friend, the morning star.

  ‘An X-ray of the soul,’ said Elf. ‘Is it about your dad?’

  ‘Uh, not exactl— uh … kind o’ … Yeah.’

  ‘Do you have a title yet?’

  ‘I was thinking about “Still Burning”.’

  Not great, thought Elf, scanning the lines.

  ‘Don’t yer like it? Have yer got a better one?’

  Elf scanned the lines. ‘What about “Purple Flames”?’

  Dean thought. An articulated lorry rumbled by. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You’ve deployed trochaic tetrameter, I see.’

  ‘I
’ve got some ointment for that, but you can’t have sex for a week after the symptoms have cleared up.’

  Elf tapped the page. ‘Dum-dah dum-dah dum-dah dum-dah. “Hope that bonfire in the garden”. A “dum-dah” is a trochee. The word “trochee” is also a trochee, which proves Greeks were show-offs. The word iamb – a “dah-dum” – is also an iamb. Your lines are four trochees long – fiddly bits aside – so it’s a trochaic tetrameter.’

  ‘So that’s what yer learn in posh schools.’ Dean put a fruit pastille in his mouth and offered her the tube.

  Elf took one. Lemon. ‘At the poshest posh schools – like Jasper’s – you study metre in Latin and Greek. Not just English.’

  ‘At the shittest shit schools – like mine – yer study smoking, skiving, dodging shit and petty theft.’

  ‘Crucial skills for the Great British workplace.’ Elf reread the lyrics. Lemony saliva floods her mouth. ‘No chorus, no bridge?’

  ‘Not sure if it needs one. If an X-ray of the soul has a catchy chorus, is it still an X-ray of the soul?’

  ‘“Tell your friend, the morning star.” It’s lonely.’

  ‘Morning Star vodka was Harry Moffat’s main food source.’

  Dean tended to veer away from discussion of fathers, but Elf sensed that a locked door was ajar. ‘If he ever got in touch – if, say, we end up recording that song … what would you do?’

  Dean didn’t reply for a while. ‘I’ve spotted him in Gravesend, now ’n’ then. Sat in a barber’s. At the market. Waiting for a train. But I just blank him out. S’prisingly easy. Since that –’ he nodded at his notebook ‘– Bonfire Night, we never spoke again. Not once.’

  ‘How about when Ray and Shirl got married?’

  ‘Ray fixed it so Harry Moffat was at the register office, and I was at the reception. Never the twain. Happy days.’

  Elf looked at the lyrics again. ‘These lyrics aren’t an olive branch, but they are a message. “You exist, and I still think about you.” If he was totally dead to you, why write it?’

  Dean tapped cigarette ash out of the window.

  He’s gone moody. ‘Sorry if I overstepped the mark.’