Utopia Avenue : A Novel

by Mitchell, David

  Griff started with a tom-tom and came in with a minute’s solo in the style of Cozy Cole. Then he grabbed his sticks and played a solo, heavy on back-beats and rim-shots, with a snare interlude. Elf watched his hands with a faraway smile on her face. Griff showed off an Art Blakey press-roll; a skipping run of ostinato; an Elvin Jones rolling triplet pulse; some swing era cymbal-playing; and a glorious free-form crescendo as Elf’s hand slowly rose … and … fell. Griff stopped his overlay. The original drum-track ran for five bars.

  Thump! two three four five

  Thump! two three four five

  Thump! two three four five

  Thump! two three four five

  Thump! two three four five – and …

  Stop.

  Elf just shook her head. ‘Fabulous.’

  Digger’s voice came through on speaker. ‘Got it.’

  Griff took off his earphones. ‘So what’s it for? Is it a song you’re working on? Or …’

  ‘I’d call it a song we’re working on. If I do anything with it, you’re getting a writing credit.’

  Griff imagined their names in brackets on the record label – (Holloway-Griffin). The studio door burst open. Dean and Jasper burst in. ‘Our train got stuck in the tunnel for a quarter of an hour up by Tottenham Court Road. Some poor sod threw himself on the line. What’ve yer been up to? Twiddling yer thumbs?’

  ‘They broke the mould when they made Elf,’ says Griff. ‘I weren’t sure about her at first. I couldn’t see her surviving the slog of clubs. I thought Dean, Jasper and me were fine as a trio. But Levon insisted we ask her for a try out, and … yeah, he was right. I was wrong. She drives. She carries the gear. She’s bullet-proof against hecklers. Onstage, she’s two musicians for the price of one: a fookin’ great keys player – and that voice. It’s instantly her.’

  ‘That “Mona Lisa” gets under your skin. It makes Debs cry.’

  ‘Elf’s problem’s her taste in men,’ says Griff. ‘Fookin’ chronic. She’s back with this Australian singer …’

  ‘Love’s blind,’ says Steve, ‘and is no fan of eye-doctors. So … do you see you and her as an item?’

  ‘Me and Elf?’ Griff splutters a laugh. ‘No. No no no.’

  ‘What’s so funny? She’s got the right curves and bits.’

  He imagined Elf’s response. ‘Maybe if we weren’t in the same band … but sex can’t compete with music.’

  ‘If you say so. So are you getting any?’ asks Steve.

  ‘Any what?’

  ‘Oh, butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.’

  Griff thinks of Mary and Venus. They moved into his new flat the night of the Paradise party at the Duke of Argyll. They have a key and come and go as they wish, but most nights, the three of them share a bed. They cook and clean. They smoke dope together. They tell him next-to-nothing about themselves, and Griff has stopped probing. If I find out too much, Griff half fears, they’ll vanish in a puff of reality. They don’t make the usual demands. They don’t want gifts. They don’t want access to parties. They are absolutely in control. And Griff is fine with his abdication of control. He doubts their affair – if that’s the right word – can last. Maybe that’s why he hasn’t told anyone about them, not even Dean, who met them briefly. Mary and Venus are one of the strangest paragraphs in his life. ‘No,’ Griff lies to his brother. ‘I’m still on the prowl …’

  ‘HULL 40,’ says a road sign. The Jaguar’s needle touches 40 m.p.h. Even I can do the maths. It’s 2.15 a.m. now so they’ll get to Albert Avenue in forty minutes, give or take.

  ‘Will Dad still be up, do you reckon?’ asks Griff.

  ‘He’ll be on the sofa,’ predicts Steve. ‘He’ll say “By heck, look what the cat dragged in.” And he’ll look at your moustache and say, “Something’s stuck to your lip, son. Is it a squashed mouse?”’

  ‘Good old Dad. Always standing by with a big shiny needle, in case we get too puffed up.’

  ‘Don’t go thinking he’s not proud as Punch. This is the man who once bragged to his passengers how his son was Yorkshire’s youngest ever professional drummer. And now you’ve been on the BBC, there’s no stopping him. He’s even dug out that biscuit tin drum-kit me and him put together for you.’

  Griff glances sideways. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘He’d kept it in his shed.’ Steve is strobed by the orange gleam of a motorway light. His brother laughs. ‘He even—’ Steve’s face changes to wide-eyed horror. Griff looks ahead and sees the juggernaut ahead jack-knifing and tipping over. A second oncoming truck is ripping up the centre barrier. Its undercarriage fills the Jaguar’s windscreen. Griff’s hauling at the wheel like a sailor in a storm. Tyres shriek. The steering locks. We’ll need a miracle to—

  ‘We’re all right.’ Steve’s voice, from light years and inches away. A croak. Something’s pressing into Griff. He’s squashed. That truck hit us. It was bad. I’m alive. So’s Steve. Where there’s life … Griff opens one eye. The other eye is gone. I can still play the drums with one eye. One leg, one arm, that would be harder. One eye, I can do. Orange light seeps into the wrecked car. Steve’s bent like an Action Man with its limbs twisted the wrong way. The floor’s the roof. We flipped over. Griff tries to move his right arm. Nothing happens. Not fookin’ good. Griff tries moving his legs. Nothing. He’s not in pain. A mercy. An ominous mercy. If your spine’s snapped you won’t feel pain. A noise comes from Steve’s mouth. Not words. A bubbling gurgling. Griff says, ‘It’s okay, we’ll be okay,’ but what comes out is, ‘Shkay, ee’ll eeshkay.’ Like Griff’s granddad after his stroke. Or like I’m bladdered. Blood dribbles from Steve’s mouth. It drips up his face, the wrong way. Black as oil in orange light. Pooling in his eye-sockets. Dripping off his eyebrows. He splutters feebly. Griff says, ‘Steve, stay with us.’ It comes out as ‘Shtee, shaywhus …’ A tide comes rushing in.

  Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. A tide goes out. Griff re-enters his body. My pulse. A jagged groan. He’s cold. That’s good. People freezing to death feel warm. Steve’s next to him. Steve’s very still. Maybe he’s saving his strength. I’d like stars. There should be stars. There’s Steve, the roof, a thousand bits of glass scattered on the floor. Which was the roof. There are the pedals. A, B, C. Accelerator, brake, clutch. Close enough to touch. If only my arms worked. Glinting amber from the M1 lights. Voices. A long way off. Or tiny, tinny and close. Coming through the speaker, late at night, under the blanket, in his and Steve’s old room at Albert Avenue. ‘Love Me Tender’. Dean strums it sometimes when he does his Elvis impression. Elf looks across the Beatles table at the Blue Boar. Jasper glances up at the end of ‘Purple Flames’, ready to kill the song stone dead on the same beat. ‘Cyril! Over here! Bring the cutting gear!’ Why? The accident. What accident? This accident. Griff tries to call out, to tell them Steve needs help first. His voice isn’t working. It just isn’t. Where there’s life there’s hope. But that ain’t necessarily so. There’s a song. About things you’re liable to read in the Bible. Griff’s mum sang it as she hung out the washing. Stars. A spring day. Griff was the boy at the window. Stars.

  Waiting for his life to start.

  Builders

  Rain drummed on the umbrellas and on the coffin lid. Rain whisked the water in the rectangular hole: seven feet long, three feet wide and, famously, six feet deep. Levon pitied the gravediggers who had shifted these one hundred and twenty-six cubic feet of cold wet earth. Somebody sobbed. When the chapel bell fell silent, the vicar – who had a bad cold – began: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return …’ Yobbish crows in the yews half smothered the Book of Genesis. The vicar’s voice began to crack and fade, like a dying amp. ‘Tragedy … Only the Almighty understands … Gave so much, had so much yet to give.’ A percussive boom boom boom, deep as a bass drum, struck the outer edge of Levon’s hearing. The North Sea, perhaps. His f
eet were wet. His socks sponged up water from the sodden turf. As the vicar wound up his brief address, a line to sign the book of condolence formed. Levon thought they should have done this during the service in the chapel, out of the rain. Sixty or seventy people filed past Mr and Mrs Griffin and their eldest daughter and son, both in their thirties. Gloves on gloves. Levon shook their hands in turn. The family resemblance was immediate. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told Griff’s dad, the bus driver. Such inadequate words, Levon thought, but then what words could begin to dent this grief? Mr Griffin looked back like a man who could not understand how this day could be happening. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told Griff’s mum, from whom Griff got his chin. Her eyes were sunken and red. Her lips twitched as if to say, ‘Thank you’ but no sound escaped. Levon doubted she knew who he was. At the end of the line, a sexton offered a trowel for anyone who wanted to tip some earth onto the coffin in the grave. About half did. Elf, ahead of Levon, shook her head and swallowed a sob. Dean put his arm around her and escorted her off. Jasper took the trowel, looking around him like an observant anthropologist in the field. The hollow rattle of wet earth on wood was, to Levon’s ear, the saddest sound he had ever heard.

  Back at the Hull Royal Infirmary, bandaged, plastered and trussed, Griff listened to Levon’s account of Steve’s funeral. He avoided eye contact. Levon tried not to stare at Griff’s shaven skull: they had removed his hair to fit the metal plate. Levon stuck to the facts. The facts were starkly eloquent. Somebody down the corridor was coughing his guts out – an incessant, barely human, smoker’s cough. It was Griff lying in the bed, but Griff wasn’t Griff any more. This Griff looked like he’d never smiled in his life, and never would smile again. Frank Sinatra crooned ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’ on the hospital radio, even though Christmas had come and gone. ‘More grapes?’ asked Elf.

  ‘No, ta.’

  ‘A ciggie?’

  ‘Don’t mind.’

  ‘Got yer a fresh box o’ Dunhills.’ Dean put a cigarette to Griff’s lips and lit it.

  Griff held the smoke in his lungs for a while. ‘I don’t know if I’m coming back.’ His voice was a shadow of its old self. ‘I can’t think about drumming. Or gigs. Or chart positions. Steve’s dead.’

  ‘We understand,’ said Levon.

  ‘No you don’t.’ Griff rubbed his red eyes. ‘You think I’m only saying this because Steve’s dead. But I don’t know if I want it any more. It’s so fookin’ hard. Night after night after night after night.’

  ‘This isn’t like you, mate,’ said Dean.

  ‘That’s the point. I’m not the me I was. My brother’s dead. I was driving.’

  ‘Nobody’s saying this was your fault,’ said Elf.

  ‘Not the cops,’ agreed Dean, ‘not Steve’s wife. Nobody.’

  ‘Fault,’ sighed Griff. ‘Fault, fault, fault. I shut my eyes, and I’m back there. On the motorway. I know what’s coming. I can’t change the ending. It’s always the same. The truck. Me, Steve, there. Upside down like a fookin’ bat. I can’t fookin’ sleep.’

  ‘Have you told the doctor?’ asks Elf.

  ‘More pills? I’m a walking Boots the Chemist. Well. Moot fookin’ point. I’m a lying-down Boots the Chemist.’

  ‘Your dad said the doctor said—’

  ‘That could’ve been my funeral. If I hadn’t put my seatbelt on. If the truck’d hit us differently. If the car had flipped over another way. The whole fookin’ universe, a gazillion little ifs. If, if, if. So fookin’ easily, I could be dead in that box …’

  The man in the next bed along snored.

  It would have been funny, in other circumstances.

  ‘But you aren’t dead in that box,’ said Jasper.

  ‘And Steve is. That’s what’s killing me, Zooto.’

  It was still raining when the train back left Hull, early the next morning. Roofs, an estuary, a fleet of trawlers, a hard town, a football stadium and bands of rain rolled into the past. Nobody had the heart for small-talk, and there was only one subject that wasn’t small-talk: what now for Utopia Avenue? Elf got out The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Jasper had The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Dean was reading the Daily Mirror. Thinking about other things was not a luxury available to a manager. Levon had cancelled the New Year gig at the Hammersmith Odeon and all bookings for the next month, adding up to four hundred pounds in fees no longer coming in to Moonwhale. Bills were due. Moonwhale’s landlord, the Inland Revenue and the telephone company did not care about Steven Griffin’s tragic death. Levon still had to pay Bethany. Fungus Hut. Fire insurance. Paradise Is the Road to Paradise had crawled up to number fifty-eight on the album chart, but ‘Abandon Hope’ had flopped. Ilex were ‘disappointed’. Victor French had told Levon that the third single would need to ‘perform substantially better’ than ‘Darkroom’. Victor had not needed to add, ‘Or we’ll be dropping the band’. Levon thought of Don Arden’s aphorism about having to woo a record label three times: first, when they sign the act; second, when you need their money to promote the band; third, to get them to stick with the act after a song flops. Levon thought of Mussolini’s son-in-law’s aphorism: Victory has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan. Gazing out at the bleak landscape, Levon felt orphan-like. Many people’s view of a band manager was formed by the acerbic, exploitative bully in A Hard Day’s Night. The reality was much harder. Depending on the band, Levon had been a gopher, moneylender, drug-supplier, fall-guy, shrink, pimp, ego-stroker, babysitter, punching bag and diplomat, as the situation demanded. If your act got rich, you might make money. If your act stayed poor, you got poorer. Utopia Avenue was Levon’s last, best shot. Levon liked them as people. Most of the time. He loved their music. But he was exhausted. London was grinding him down. The weather was grey. The gay scene was infested with blackmailers, the vice-squad and chancers. He missed having someone to love. A manager’s life was gruellingly thankless. Could they not say, ‘Thank you, Levon, for believing in us and busting your ass for us morning noon and night?’ Just once? When things went right for a band, it was down to their God-given genius. When things went wrong, blame the manager.

  Fact one: the band needed a new single out in the New Year – ‘Mona Lisa Sings The Blues’ – and they needed to promote the hell out of it from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. And in Europe.

  Fact two: this wouldn’t happen without a drummer.

  Dean reached the back page of the Daily Mirror. Levon had a clear view of the front, promoting the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign to save British industry by getting workers to put in an unpaid half-hour every day. Pye Records was bringing out a campaign single by TV face Bruce Forsyth, and DJ Jimmy Savile was working for nine whole days as a volunteer porter in Leeds General Infirmary. Jimmy’s Doing His Bit – Are You?! read the caption. For Levon, the whole campaign belonged in the hinterlands of Bad, Stupid and Naive. The train rocked Dean, Jasper and Elf to sleep. A headache was hatching in Levon’s brainstem, but he had to think. That was his job. Griff said he wasn’t sure if he’d be back. Was this grief talking? Or was it act one of a breakdown? Or a genuine wish to leave the gruelling life of a musician? Should Moonwhale seek to terminate Griff’s contract? What about future percentages? Howie Stoker and Freddy Duke wanted a return on their investment. All Levon had to show them was a modest hit and an LP that had sold poorly. What if ‘Darkroom’ had been a fluke? What if ‘Abandon Hope’ was the real indicator of Great Britain’s appetite for the band he had hand-crafted? What if the real action wasn’t in London any more? What if the epicentre had shifted to San Francisco?

  The band drove Levon crazy. Dean’s demands for money they hadn’t earned yet. Elf’s insecurities. Jasper’s day-to-day uselessness. Now Griff was wavering. Levon lit a cigarette. He looked out of the window. Still northern, still rainy, still drab.

  He remembered arriving in New York, still deluded enough to believe that he was going to be, simultaneously, a Greenwich Village Baudelaire-in-exile, a beatnik folk singer and author
of the Great Canadian Novel. Ten years on, the only part that smacked of any truth was ‘exile’. Propelled by an impulse he hadn’t felt in years, Levon turned to the last page of his accounts book.

  Levon’s watch insisted that ninety minutes had passed. From the five pages of scribblings and crossings-out, four simple verses emerged. He made a neat copy on a fresh page.

  Love found me when I was young.

  A tent, a lake, a shooting star.

  I built Utopia in my head, where

  We could be the way we are.

  They beat me up, they kicked me out,

  They fed me to their godly flames.

  ‘Pervert’, ‘monster’, ‘deviant’

  Were just some of the nicer names.

  Conform, conform, or be cast out.

  The dogma is intense.

  To build your own Utopia is

  A criminal offence.

  What is plotted will unravel.

  What is built slip out of joint.

  Good intentions get forgotten.

  Makes you wonder, what’s the point?

  Levon knew it wasn’t Robert Lowell or Wallace Stevens, but it had passed the time. Self-pity can lift one’s mood. The landscape now was as flat as a prairie but wet, criss-crossed with wide ditches and drainage channels. A cathedral floated into view. Levon wondered which one it was. Lincoln? Peterborough?

  ‘Ely.’ Jasper yawned. ‘Where I went to school.’

  ‘So that’s Ely. Fond memories?’

  ‘Memories,’ replied Jasper.

  Levon closed his notebook.

  ‘You wrote a poem.’

  If Elf or Dean had asked, Levon might have lied. ‘Yes.’