A compliment, thinks Jasper. ‘Thanks.’ Be agreeable. ‘We think so too.’ Everyone looks at him. I said something off-key.
‘What’s remarkable,’ says Tiffany Hershey, ‘is that my favourite song changes every time we play it.’
‘So what song’s yer favourite right now?’ asks Dean.
‘Where do I begin? “Unexpectedly” pulls my heart-strings. “Darkroom” sends shivers down my spine, but if you tied me up and forced me to choose …’ she looks at Dean ‘… “Purple Flames”.’
Dean says nothing. Jasper guesses he’s pleased.
‘If it’s not too cheeky, Tiffany,’ Elf brings out an autograph book from her handbag, ‘would you mind ever so?’
‘How awfully sweet,’ says Tiffany, taking the pen. ‘It’s been simply ages since I signed anything. Except cheques.’
‘My mum took my sisters and me to see Thistledown at the Richmond Odeon. Afterwards my sister Bea announced, “I’m going to be an actress.” Now she’s in her first year at RADA.’
‘Oh, my golly!’ says Tiffany Hershey. ‘What a story!’
‘See, Tiff?’ says Hershey. ‘Your fans haven’t gone anywhere.’
Tiffany Hershey writes: ‘To Bea Holloway, my sister in drama, Tiffany Seabrook.’ ‘Thank you,’ says Elf. ‘She’ll have this framed.’
‘What’s your new film about, Tony?’ asks Jasper.
‘It’s what Hollywood calls “a road movie”. A London pop star is told he has only a month to live and hitches to the Isle of Skye to address unfinished business. He’s accompanied by the ghost of his dead sister, Piper. Adventures and epiphanies along the way guaranteed. Emotional climax. Twist in the tail. The End – until the Oscars flood in.’
‘Who’s playing the star,’ asks Levon, ‘if it’s not an impertinent question?’
‘It’s a moot and pressing question. Should I go for an Albert Finney or a Patrick McGoohan? Or for a bona fide singer who’s actually, you know, lived through it?’
‘Cast the Real McCoy,’ says Dean. ‘Every time. I’ll do it. I’ve got bags o’free time over the next few months, right Levon?’
He looks and sounds as if he meant it, but Jasper guesses from everyone else’s smile that he was joking, and that it’s not a serious offer. Jasper acts a smile. ‘Do you have a title?’
‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North,’ says Tiffany.
‘That’s jolly evocative,’ says Elf. ‘I love it.’
‘The title’s from Basho¯,’ says Jasper. ‘The Japanese poet.’
‘Someone’s an omnivorous reader,’ says Tiffany.
‘I had lots of time to read when I was young.’
‘Before you joined the Old Farts’ Club, you mean?’ The director says it half smiling, but Jasper doesn’t get the joke.
‘Tiffany will be making her acting comeback as Piper.’ Hershey sips his Pimm’s. ‘After four years away.’
‘Five,’ says Tiffany Hershey. ‘Six, by the time it’s out. Your song, Jasper, “The Prize”’ – Tiffany turns to Jasper – ‘reminds me of “Tomorrow Never Knows”. How conscious was that?’
‘Not very,’ says Jasper. A pause. Do they want more?
‘John’s here, you know,’ says Anthony Hershey.
‘No fookin’ way!’ says Griff. ‘Lennon? Here? At this party?’
‘In the living room, I believe,’ said the host. ‘By the punchbowl. Tiffany, would you make the introductions? I was on a quest to find some green olives for Roger Moore …’
‘Three facts.’ The man by the punchbowl is not John Lennon, but an older man with bad teeth, a shark’s-tooth necklace and evangelical eyes. Tiffany and the others move off, but Jasper likes facts. ‘Fact one: UFOs from other stars visited Earth during the Neolithic era. Fact two: ley-lines were their navigation aids. Fact three: where ley lines converge, we have a landing site. Stonehenge was the Heathrow Airport of pre-Roman England.’
‘A real archaeologist might point out,’ says an Australian woman, ‘that a fact is only a fact if it’s derived from proof.’
‘How lucky we are,’ says the ufologist, ‘that the anarchists can spare Aphra Booth for the day. The Ivory Tower Brigade did indeed bleat at my book and I gave them the response I now offer Miss Booth. “My book contains six hundred pages of proof: piss off and read the damn thing!”’ He pauses to enjoy the laughter. ‘Did they take my advice? Of course not. Academics are thought-policed from cradle to grave. During my lost years at Oxford, I attended their conferences. I had but one question: how did human societies as far-flung as the Nile Valley, China, the Americas, Athens, Atlantis, India, et al., invent metallurgy, agriculture, law and mathematics within decades of one another? Their answer?’ The ufologist mimed someone with Parkinson’s looking up a word. ‘“Oh, let me check my textbook …”’ He mimes turning a page. ‘“Ah, yes, here it is … Coincidence!” Coincidence. The last refuge of the bankrupt intellectual.’
‘If the skies over Stonehenge once swarmed with little green men,’ asks Aphra the Australian, ‘where are they now?’
‘They fled in disgust.’ The ufologist’s smirk fades. ‘The Visitors gave us the wisdom of the stars. We used it for warfare, slavery, religion and trousers for women. And yet, and yet. Our myths, legends and literature are replete with entities from other planes of being. Angels and spirits, Bodhisattvas and fairies. Voices in the head. My hypothesis unifies these phenomena: these beings are extraterrestrial in origin. For millennia they’ve visited us, to see if Homo sapiens is ready for the Final Revelation. The answer has always been “Not yet.” But that “Not yet” is turning into “Very soon.” UFO sightings are multiplying. Psychedelics are guiding us to higher states. Soon, extraterrestrials will initiate a sea-change. Or, as I call it in my book, a “star-change”.’
A thoughtful silence settles. Someone says, ‘Far out.’
The expression is new to Jasper. He guesses it means ‘Wow’.
‘If you were a sci-fi writer,’ Aphra Booth taps her cigarette, ‘I’d think, Well, it’s clichéd drivel, but his fans’ll go, “Far out.” Or, if you’d fabricated a cult, I’d think, Scientologists, Hare Krishna and the Vatican peddle their hogwash, you may as well peddle yours. But what sticks in my craw is how you tosh up your drivel in the lexicon of science. You piss in the well of knowledge.’
‘We should thank Miss Booth,’ says the ufologist, ‘for revealing how academia thinks. If I don’t believe it, it’s not knowledge.’
Aphra Booth exhales smoke. ‘Fifty years from now, you’ll look back at this horse-shit and cringe with embarrassment.’
‘You’ll look back in fifty years, and think, Why was my thinking so shackled and anal?’
‘Shackled and anal?’ Aphra Booth stubs out her cigarette. ‘My God, how we give ourselves away …’ She walks off, stepping aside for Elf who is with an exotic looking young woman in black velvet with silver designs.
‘Jasper, there’s someone I’d like you to meet. This is Luisa.’
‘Hello Luisa,’ says Jasper.
‘I love your music.’ Luisa sounds American. ‘I adore Elf’s songs, I hasten to add’– the women exchange a bright look –‘but I played “Wedding Presence” so often, I wore out the track. It’s numinous, if I can use that word.’
Numin, thinks Jasper, from ‘divine will’. ‘Thank you. Are those comets embroidered on your jacket?’
‘Uh, yeah. Stylised ones.’
‘Luisa did them herself,’ says Elf. ‘I got an “E” for Needlework and the remark, “Could try harder”. Scarred for life.’
‘Are you a ufologist?’ Jasper asks the American. ‘Or a fashion designer?’
Luisa finds the questions amusing. ‘Neither. I’m a journalism student, here on a Fulbright Scholarship. Lucky me, right?’
‘I doubt luck has anything to do with it,’ objects Elf.
‘Aw, shucks. I was in Three Kings Yard when Elf had her Martin Luther King moment.’
‘God, that all went by in a blur,’ says E
lf. ‘I don’t recall what I said, but I sure as heck know it wasn’t “I have a dream …”’
‘Too modest, Elf. I covered the story for Spyglass magazine, and I quoted you, and hey presto – my first by-line in an international publication. So. I owe you.’
‘Ah, stuff and nonsense.’ Elf’s smiling in a way Jasper hasn’t seen since before the death of her nephew.
‘Do you guys have any plans to tour in the States?’ asks Luisa. ‘They’d eat you with a spoon in New York, in LA.’
‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’ asks Jasper.
‘Oh, it’s good,’ says Luisa. ‘Definitely good.’
‘Our label’s mooting a short US tour,’ says Elf, ‘now Paradise is selling in reasonable numbers. Who knows?’
Halfway down the curving stairwell, Jasper hears a voice. ‘Hello, Mr Famous.’ Its owner has one blue eye and one black eye. He’s dressed in a black suit with silver buttons and white piping. ‘We met on the stairs last time, too,’ says David Bowie. ‘I was on my way up, then. Now I’m going down. Is that a metaphor?’
Jasper shrugs. ‘If you want it to be.’
David Bowie looks behind Jasper. ‘So … is Mecca here?’
‘Her last letter was from San Francisco.’
‘Where else? Ninety-nine people, you forget instantly. Mecca’s one in a hundred. Five hundred. She shines.’
‘I agree.’
‘Jealousy is not a demon that tortures you.’
‘Women go with who they want to go with.’
‘Precisely! Most men are “Me Tarzan, you Jane”. I’m jealous of your sales, though. If it’s not a cheeky question,’ David Bowie leans in, ‘did Levon cook the whole Italian affair up?’
By chance, Levon is in Jasper’s line of sight, topping up Peter Sellers’s wine glass at the foot of the stairs. ‘Not unless he’s ten times craftier than we know.’
‘Mine’s ten times crappier than I thought. My singles got no airplay. My label didn’t promote the album. It flopped, too.’
‘I bought it, David. I found a lot to admire.’
‘Ugh. A glass of whisky and a revolver would be kinder.’
‘Sorry if I’ve offended you.’
‘No. Excuse my thin skin.’ David Bowie runs his hand through his ginger hair. ‘I’ve been the Next Big Thing since I left school, but I’m still broke. Hobnobbing with stars at Anthony Hershey’s Midsummer Ball is nice, but tomorrow I’ll be Xeroxing reports in a shitty office. What if my only talent is kidding people I have talent?’
Two women in thigh-length boots pad by.
‘Overnight success,’ says Jasper, ‘takes a few years.’
David Bowie swirls the ice in his glass. ‘Even yours?’
‘Three years of busking in Dam Square. After –’ can I trust him? ‘– a long spell in psychiatric care.’
David Bowie meets Jasper’s gaze. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘A discreet clinic in Holland. I don’t advertise it.’
David Bowie hesitates. ‘My half-brother Terry’s in and out of Cane Hill Hospital, near my parents’ house.’
Jasper shakes his head, like a Normal might. Or should I nod?
‘I was with him when his first episode happened. We were walking down Shaftesbury Avenue, and he started screaming about the tarmac cracking and magma oozing up. For a few seconds I thought he was joking. I was like, “Okay, Terry, it’s gone far enough.” But he meant it. These two coppers thought he was high so they wrestled him to the ground – into the magma that was now burning Terry’s flesh. Fucking terrifying stuff, psychosis.’
Jasper remembers Knock Knock in mirrors. ‘It is.’
David Bowie crunches an ice cube. ‘I worry it’s ticking away in me, too. Like a time-bomb. These things run in the family.’
I know it’s ticking in me. ‘I’ve got two half-brothers. So far, they’re fine. The de Zoet side of the family blame it on my mother.’
‘How did you get it under control?’
‘Psychiatry. Music helps. A …’ what to call the Mongolian? ‘… a kind of mentor.’ Jasper drinks his punch and lays out his theory. ‘A brain constructs a model of reality. If that model isn’t too different from most people’s model, you’re labelled “Sane”. If the model is different, you’re labelled a genius, a misfit, a visionary or a nutcase. In extreme cases, you’re labelled a schizophrenic and locked up. I’d be dead without Rijksdorp sanatorium.’
‘Madness is a label you can’t peel off, though.’
‘You write about it, David. Or atypical states of mind. Perhaps your phobia will make you famous.’
David Bowie’s nervy smile comes and goes. ‘Got a ciggie? Lennon cadged my last one. Like the Scouse millionaire he is.’
Jasper gets out his packet of Camels. ‘Is he still here?’
‘Yes, I think so. He was in the cinema.’
‘What cinema?’
‘Anthony Hershey has a cinema in the basement. How the other half live, eh? Down that corridor, past that big Ming vase thing’ – he points – ‘there’s a door. You can’t miss it.’
The steep stairs descend at right-angles. Posters of films line the glossed walls. ‘Les Yeux sans visage’. ‘Rashomon’. ‘Das Testament des Dr Mabuse’. The stairs continue for longer than is likely. They end in a small lobby that smells of bitter almonds. A woman, absorbed in her needlepoint, occupies an armchair. Her head is hairless. ‘Excuse me, is this the cinema?’
The woman looks up. Her eyes are voids. ‘Popcorn?’
Jasper sees no sign of popcorn. ‘No, thank you.’
‘Why do you play these games with me?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘That’s what you always say.’ She pulls a cord. Curtains part to reveal a slab of darkness. ‘Enter, then.’
Jasper obeys. He cannot see his own hand. Another curtain touches his face. He steps into a tiny auditorium of six rows of six seats. Each one is occupied except for an aisle seat on the front row. Through the cigarette smoke, a title is projected onto a screen: PanOpticon. Jasper’s shadow hunches low as he makes his way to the free seat. If John Lennon is here, Jasper fails to recognise him. The film begins.
In a black and white city of winter, an omnibus shoulders its way through a crowd. A careworn middle-aged passenger looks out at busy snow, newspaper vendors, policemen beating a black marketeer, hollow faces in empty shops and a burned skeletal bridge. Jasper guesses the film was shot behind the Iron Curtain. Getting off the bus, the man asks the driver for directions. By dint of reply, the driver nods at the enormous wall obscuring the sky. The protagonist walks along its foot, looking for the door. Craters, broken things, wild dogs. Circular ruins where a hairy lunatic talks to a fire. Finally the man finds a wooden door. He stoops and knocks. Knock-knock. No reply. Knock-knock. A tin can is hanging from a piece of string vanishing into the masonry and the man speaks into it. ‘Is anybody there?’ The subtitles are English, the language is all hisses, slushes and cracks. Hungarian? Serbian? Polish? ‘I’m Dr Polonski. Warden Bentham is expecting me.’ He puts the can to his ear and hears what sounds to Jasper like drowning sailors. Knock-knock-knock. The prison door opens. A hood of tiredness gathers around Jasper’s head. He submits …
… and wakes in a tiny cinema, lit by the mercury sheen of the vacant screen. Jasper looks around. Everybody’s gone. The film’s over. ‘Sorry for your loss,’ says a cultured voice next to him.
Jasper swivels and sees a face from an album cover: Syd Barrett. Pink Floyd’s ex-singer is printed in black and white on the glowing dark. ‘How was the film? I nodded off.’
Syd Barrett runs a Rizla along his tongue. ‘People who never set foot beyond the Land of the Sane just don’t understand.’
‘Understand?’
Syd Barrett taps the long joint on its filter. ‘How indescribably sad it is, here on the outside. Got a light?’ Jasper finds Grootvader Wim’s lighter and holds up the flame. The big spliff in his lips, Syd leans in. He fills himself with smok
e and offers the spliff to Jasper. The hit is instant. It is not just cannabis. Syd’s words arrive late and fragmented, as if bounced off the moon. ‘We think we are a One, but you and I know an “I” is a “Many”. There’s Nice Guy Me. Psychopath Me. Wife-beater Me. Narcissist Me. Saint Me. I’m-all-right-Jack Me. Suicidal Me. The Me Who Dares Not Speak My Name. Dark Globe Me. I is an Empire of “I”s.’
Jasper thinks of Knock Knock. He wonders if a whole minute ever passes when he hasn’t thought of Knock Knock. Only inside music. He asks, ‘Who is the emperor, Syd?’
Syd Barrett stares back through black holes, opens his mouth and puts out the joint on his tongue. It hisses.
Another film begins. The screen glows blue. Stippled sea, glazed sky, a bandage-coloured coastline. Onscreen, a White Star liner fills the shot. Its horn blasts three times. A caption reads ‘OFF THE COAST OF EGYPT, NOVEMBER 1945’.
Cut to – deck of the SS Salisbury. The captain squints at the prayer book: ‘Lord God, by the power of your Word you stilled the chaos of the primeval seas …’ The man is a northerner not given to theatrics. He recites the prayer as if reading nautical protocol: ‘You made the raging waters of the Flood subside, and you calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee.’
Cut to reveal – the deck. Passengers and crew stand around the coffin. A haggard nurse holds a three-day-old baby. The baby is crying. The captain pushes on. ‘O Lord, as we commit the earthly remains of Milly Wallace to the deep, grant her peace …’
Cut to – Two English ladies look down on the service from the railing of the first-class deck. ‘A tragedy,’ remarks the first lady.
‘My maid heard from Mrs Davington’s girl that she’ – the woman points a gloved finger at the coffin – ‘was no “Mrs” Wallace at all, but an unmarried “Miss”.’
‘Servants are such incorrigible gossips.’
‘As if they’ve nothing better to do. Apparently, Miss Wallace was originally a nurse who went out to Bombay on “the fishing fleet”, if I may use the vulgar term. One of those young women who go to India with the purpose of netting themselves a better catch than they might at home. Miss Wallace, it seems, overestimated her talent as an angler. She got “hooked” by a Dutchman, who,’ she whispers, ‘already has a wife and family in Johannesburg …’
Utopia Avenue : A Novel Page 41