Utopia Avenue : A Novel

by Mitchell, David

  ‘All empires rest on violence,’ says Jasper. ‘The colonised resist looting and pillage, so the colonisers have to suppress the natives. Or replace them. Or kill them. The USSR’s at it now. The French, in North Africa. The Dutch in the Dutch East Indies, until recently. The Japanese in the last war. The Chinese in Tibet. The Third Reich all over Europe. The British, everywhere. The USA’s hardly unique.’

  This is the most Jasper’s said since they left London.

  Elf’s worried about him. There’s something wrong …

  Max dabs his lips with the linen napkin. ‘Here in the land of the free, you’ll meet some of the gentlest, smartest, wisest people who ever lived. But when violence comes, it’s merciless. Without warning. Out of the bluest sky. Quick as that.’ Max mimes a gun going off. ‘Enjoy the land of the free. But be careful.’

  Dean and Griff decide to join Elf at the rooftop gathering of Lenny’s friend. Jasper bows out. Utopia Avenue’s first show is tomorrow night, preceded by a day of media. Waiting for the elevator, a bearded man in an angel robe and wings approaches Griff: ‘I’ll flagellate myself later if I don’t ask you, where did you get those cheekbones?’

  Griff reddens. ‘My cheekbones?’

  ‘Your cheekbones are deee-vine.’

  ‘Uh … thanks. They came with the rest of me.’

  ‘Sweet God above. Your accent! Adorable. I’m Archangel Gabriel and you are?’

  Elf helps out. ‘His friends call him Griff.’

  ‘I’ll pray we’ll be friends, Griff. Look, your elevator’s here.’

  ‘Going our way, Gabriel?’ asks Dean. ‘Griff’ll be happy to make space for yer in the back.’

  ‘I’ll fly up the shaft later, thank you.’

  Inside the elevator, Dean presses R for ROOF. Jasper presses 7. The angel flutters her fingertips. ‘Don’t be a stranger.’

  The elevator begins its grinding ascent. Dean peers at the drummer’s cheekbones. ‘Deee-vine.’

  ‘Fook off,’ says Griff, amiably.

  Elf asks Jasper, ‘Are you still feeling sick?’

  Jasper doesn’t realise he’s being spoken to.

  Dean clicks his fingers in front of Jasper’s face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Elf just asked if yer feeling any better.’

  Jasper frowns. ‘I have my doubts.’

  ‘Doubts?’ asks Elf. ‘About what?’

  ‘About what comes next,’ says Jasper.

  Dean loses patience. ‘Don’t be such a wet bloody blanket. We’re playing New York. It’s what we’ve always dreamed of.’

  Jasper presses 4. The elevator stops. He lets himself out and takes the stairs. Dean slams the doors and presses R again. ‘When he’s in his tortured genius mood he’s bloody impossible.’

  Jasper doesn’t have ‘tortured genius moods’, thinks Elf. She resolves to knock on his door later, after the party.

  Camellias in tubs, topiary in planters, cosmos in pots are flourishing. Candles blink green-gold in jars and blue-gold in lanterns. A pyramid-shaped penthouse and a giant slabbed chimney enclose the rooftop garden on two sides, and railed walls complete the rectangle. Two or three dozen people sit around talking, smoking and drinking. Dope flavours the air. A swashbuckling guitarist is sitting on a bench fingerpicking, superbly, with a trio of women at his feet. Mum would call him a dreamboat, thinks Elf. Then she thinks of Luisa. It hurts.

  ‘Elf.’ Lenny appears, martini in hand. ‘I’m so very glad you’re here, but I’m mortified that I didn’t recognise you, earlier.’

  Dean recognises him and blurts it out: ‘Leonard Cohen!’

  The singer shrugs. ‘I’ve given up pretending otherwise.’

  Dean turns to Elf. ‘Why didn’t yer warn us?’

  ‘I …’ Elf’s blushing. ‘Lenny, sorry, I feel awful.’ She turns back to Dean. ‘He doesn’t look like his picture on the LP.’

  ‘Which is my defence for not recognising you,’ says Lenny. ‘Griff, Dean, I know Paradise. My friend on Hydra plays it constantly.’

  ‘The number of times I’ve played “Suzanne” in clubs,’ says Elf. ‘Lord, the royalties I must owe you …’

  ‘For a bourbon on ice, and the chords to “Mona Lisa”, I’ll call off my lawyers. Do you know our hostess, Janis?’

  A woman turns around. She wears a pink boa woven through her hair, the gown of a damsel in distress, enough bracelets and chains to open a stall, and is one of America’s most famous singers.

  ‘Janis fookin’ Joplin?’ This time it’s Griff who blurts.

  ‘Utopia Avenue!’ She has a ten-thousand-volt smile.

  ‘You’re class you are, Janis,’ says Griff. ‘Real class.’ He turns to Elf. ‘So yer didn’t know this was her party?’

  ‘I misheard Lenny,’ explains Elf. ‘I thought “Janis” was “Janet”.’

  Janis Joplin puffs on her cigarette. ‘When Lenny told me he’d met a London Elf, I thought, C’mon, how many Elves can there be? So I phoned Stanley and, lo, the truth was revealed.’

  Elf blinks. Janis Joplin knows my name. ‘Did our aeroplane go down off Newfoundland? Is this Heaven?’

  ‘Janis’s parties are much more fun than Heaven,’ says Lenny.

  ‘If fire could sing,’ Elf tells Janis, ‘it would sing like you.’

  Janis sighs. ‘I can’t let compliments like that go, y’ know, unanswered.’ Elf loves how her accent turns ‘can’t’ into ‘cay-ant’. ‘I got a copy of Stuff of Life.’ Janis twists a string of amber beads around her little finger. ‘I – lost – my – shit.’

  Elf looks at Dean who looks at Griff. ‘We’re still learning American. Is losing shit a good thing or a bad thing?’

  ‘A great thing,’ affirms Lenny. ‘We dug Road to Paradise, too. It helped me and Janis get through last winter.’

  Elf intercepts his glance at Janis. They’re together; or have been. She points to the pyramid. ‘This is where you live, Janis?’

  ‘It’s from a fairytale, isn’t it? Not the cheapest pad in the Chelsea, but why work as hard as we do if you don’t live a little?’

  ‘The Pyramid has an illustrious guest-book,’ says Lenny. ‘Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe rented it. Jean-Paul Sartre. Sarah Bernhardt. The one and only Janis Joplin …’

  Janis looks around. ‘Where’s Jasper?’ she half whispers. ‘How do you say his family name?’

  ‘“Zoot”,’ replies Elf. ‘Gone to bed. He and flying do not get on, and our four nights at the Ghepardo begin tomorrow.’

  ‘Some folks here’d like to meet him. Jackson, for one.’ She nods at the glossy-haired, finger-picking dreamboat. ‘Come inside and try my peach punch. My daddy’s recipe. And I do believe …’ she squints at her watch ‘… it’s reefer o’clock.’

  Three guys have made passes at Elf. Each one makes her miss Luisa a little more. Janis Joplin finds her in a corner of the Pyramid and places an opaque cocktail in Elf’s hand. ‘Try this. The Brutal Truth. That’s its name. My cocktail man created it for me. Gin and nutmeg with a dash of damage.’ They clink their Brutal Truths and drink. ‘Holy God above,’ declares Elf.

  ‘Was the runner-up name.’

  ‘That could propel missiles.’

  ‘Here’s hoping, Lady Englisher. Tell me a thing. Have you worked out a method for this?’

  The Brutal Truth anaesthetises Elf’s oesophagus. ‘A method?’

  ‘How to do what we do, as a woman.’

  Close up, Elf sees crazed veins in the whites of Janis’s eyes and scars on her face. ‘I don’t have an answer. That’s the brutal truth.’

  ‘Ain’t it, though? If you’re a guy, it’s easy. Sing your songs, shake your tail-feathers. After the show, go down to the bar and score chicks. But if you are a chick who’s a singer, what’re you supposed to do? We’re the ones being scored. The bigger the star we are, the more that’s true. We’re like … we’re like …’

  ‘Princesses in the age of dynastic marriages.’

  Janis bites her lower lip and nods.
‘And our fame raises the value of locker-room bragging. Which the guys gain from. “Oh, yeah, Janis Joplin? I know Janis. She gave me head on the unmade bed.” I hate it. But how do you fight it? Or change it? Or survive it?’

  The Byrds sing ‘Wasn’t Born To Follow’ on a superb hi-fi.

  ‘I’m not on your level yet,’ says Elf. ‘Have you any advice?’

  ‘No advice. Only a fear and a name: Billie Holiday.’

  Elf takes a third sip of Brutal Truth. ‘Didn’t Billie Holiday die a heroin addict with no functioning liver, under arrest on her death-bed, with only seventy cents in her bank account?’

  Janis lights a cigarette. ‘That’s the fear.’

  An American moon is wedged between two skyscrapers, like a nickel fallen down a crack. Elf looks through the railing over the city. The edge of a battlement on the eve of war. Her core is buzzing from the Brutal Truth. Her extremities are buzzing from Janis’s weed. She imagines Luisa appearing like the Virgin Mary in Janis’s rooftop garden, and aches that it can’t happen. Elf remembers feeling grief when Bruce dumped her for Vanessa the Model. Losing Luisa feels more like the loss of a body part. What did I do wrong? It must have been me. It must have been.

  ‘Is that one’ – Dean points – ‘the famous one?’

  Elf has no idea what Dean means. Leonard Cohen replies. ‘The Empire State. The tallest building on the planet.’

  ‘Where’s King Kong, swatting the biplanes?’ asks Dean.

  ‘He’s had his hours cut,’ says Lenny. ‘Times is hard.’

  In the windows of nearer, lower buildings, a few lamps are still on. Each square light, thinks Elf, is a life as big as mine.

  ‘Hear that?’ asks Dean, cupping his ear.

  ‘What are we listening to?’ asks Elf.

  ‘New York’s soundtrack LP. Ssshhhhh …’

  Beneath the party chatter and Sam Cooke singing ‘Lost and Lookin’’ lies a composite hum of engines, cars, trains, lifts, horns, sirens, dogs … Everything. Doors, locks, drains, kitchens, robberies, lovers. ‘It’s like an orchestra tuning up,’ says Elf, ‘except it’s the main show. A cacophony symphony.’

  ‘She says things like that,’ says Dean to Lenny, ‘even when she’s not on the baccy.’

  ‘Elf’s a natural-born poet.’ He turns those I-see-your-soul brown eyes on her in the moonlight.

  ‘You’re a natural-born flirt, Mister,’ thinks Elf, and realises she just said it out loud. Janis’s weed. Hey-ho.

  ‘I’ve changed my plea to “Guilty”,’ concedes Lenny.

  Elf imagines Lenny asking Dean about her boyfriends and Dean telling him, and Dean asking Lenny about Janis, and Lenny telling him. Women share intelligence in the Battle of the Sexes: men, surely, do the same. She misses Luisa more than ever. She is her refuge from all that. Was. Is. Was. Is.

  ‘Why’d yer leave New York?’ says Dean to Lenny, looking out at the city of their dreams. ‘Once yer were settled here?’

  ‘I’m not one of life’s settlers. I came here to write The – or just A – Great American Novel. I wince at the cliché. I fancied myself a big fish in a small pond, but I wasn’t even a fish. I was susceptible to distraction. Greenwich Village. Beatnik readings. Folk sessions. I went on long walks, posing as a flâneur, but only the French can get away with that. I watched the boats on East River. Once, I took the elevator up there.’ Leonard nods at the Empire State Building. ‘I looked over Manhattan and was seized by an absurd desire to take it. To own it. Do we write songs as a substitute for possession?’

  ‘I write songs to discover what I want to say,’ says Elf.

  ‘I write ’em ’cause I just bloody love it,’ says Dean.

  ‘Maybe you’re the purest artist here,’ remarks Lenny.

  A stoned voice calls from the Pyramid. ‘Hey, Lenny! We need you to adjudicate.’

  Lenny calls back. ‘On what?’

  ‘The difference between melancholy and depression.’

  Leonard Cohen looks apologetic: ‘Duty calls …’

  ‘He’d be up for it if you are,’ Dean tells Elf.

  ‘You sound like a pimp. Or a go-between.’

  ‘Just worried my bandmate’s not getting a lot.’

  Is that sweet? I don’t know. ‘Janis tells me he has a kind-of wife and step-kid in Greece. Call me picky, but I’ll pass.’

  Dean passes her the joint. ‘Nine months without any action … I’d be going bloody mental.’

  ‘Action’? Like a military exercise. Elf inhales, lets the smoke out, and warns herself that anything she says about Luisa can’t be unsaid. Sam Cooke has moved on to ‘Mean Old World’. ‘Men,’ says Elf, ‘need to get laid. For women it’s less of a “must” and more of a “might be nice” or a “possibly”. We can’t win. If we don’t play the game, we’re frigid or we can’t get a man. If we play the game too much, we’re a slut, the village bike, damaged goods. Not to mention the joy of an unplanned pregnancy sitting in the corner of the room, watching you getting it on.’ Elf passes him the joint. ‘None of which is your fault. But you should know: patriarchy is a stitch-up.’

  ‘Yer an education.’ Dean flicks the dead joint into the void. ‘My paternity woes’ve shed a new light on casual hook-ups.’

  So he wants to talk. ‘Have you decided anything?’

  ‘The test result’ll be waiting when we fly back, but it ain’t a straight yes or no. If I ain’t the baby’s father, there’s a ten per cent chance the blood groups’ll say so for sure.’

  ‘That’s hardly conclusive.’

  Dean says nothing for a while. ‘I s’pose we’ll wait till the kid’s old enough for family features to show up. Do I pay “Miss Craddock” any money till then, though? That’s the question. If I’m not the dad, and I pay, I’m a bloody mug. But if I am, and I pay nothing, what’s the difference between me ’n’ Guus de Zoet?’

  Shouts float up from the street thirteen floors below.

  ‘If I had three wishes,’ says Elf, ‘I’d let you have one.’

  ‘When Levon first called me with the news, I’d’ve done anything to wish it away. Anything. But now, even if this kid isn’t mine, he’s someone’s. Yer can’t wish life away. Can yer?’

  Elf thinks of Mark and Mark’s tiny coffin.

  ‘Oh, shit, sorry, Elf. My big mouth. I’m a bloody eejit.’

  Elf squeezes Dean’s hand. ‘No. Life’s precious. We forget it. All the time. We shouldn’t wait until a funeral to remember.’

  Dean peels the label from his beer bottle. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I love you all,’ Janis Joplin stands on a pedestal in the garden, ‘but I’ve a session tomorrow, so I’m volunteering Jackson to play one of his for the road home, and he’s volunteered me to sing it.’

  Jackson counts them in, then plays the same descending cascade, ending in a major seventh. The breeze ruffles his hair. Elf recognises the opening of ‘These Days’ from the Chelsea Girl LP, but where Nico sings it with icy Nordic sobriety, Janis scorches the song, varying the colour from phrase to phrase. It’s a trick, Elf thinks, to keep your attention, and she’s really good at it. Jackson improvises a bridge before the final verse and Dean whispers in Elf’s ear, ‘Handsome Pants is a player and a looker.’

  Elf whispers back, ‘Worried you’ve met your match?’

  Janis serves up the last four lines a cappella.

  Jackson emulates a bell on his guitar, chiming ten times:

  Please don’t confront me with my failures

  I had not forgotten them.

  Two dozen people on a rooftop in New York applaud. Janis performs a wobbly curtsy. Jackson bows. Someone asks, ‘One more, Janis?’ She laughs her bronco-bucking laugh – ‘For free? Get outa here! Maybe Lenny has something up his sleeve.’

  The Canadian permits himself to be cajoled to the front and receives Jackson’s Gibson with a smile. ‘Friends. If you insist, here’s a song I first learned at Camp Sunshine, aged fifteen. There, I acquired my trademark sunny disposition, and the rest is musical his
tory.’ He tunes the guitar by ear. ‘Two Free French fighters-in-exile wrote it in London, and it’s called “The Partisan”. And a-one, two, three, four …’

  Lenny’s guitar skills are basic compared to Jackson’s and his voice is both nasal and gravelly, but the song gives Elf goosebumps. Its narrator is a soldier who cannot, as ordered, surrender, as the enemy pour across the border. Instead he takes his gun and vanishes into the frontier to survive, somehow, until freedom comes. The lyrics are telegrammatic yet vivid, like instructions for a short play to be staged in the listener’s imagination – There were three of us this morning, I’m the only one this evening … There is no word-play. There are no tricks. The song barely rhymes. Elf thinks how hard ‘Prove It’ tries to impress, and feels embarrassed. ‘The Partisan’ just is. Leonard sings three verses in French, then the song ends in English in a graveyard with a resurrection, of sorts. Elf is gripped and moved. The bearded angel from the lobby earlier, whose arrival Elf didn’t notice, murmurs in her ear, ‘It’s as much a seance as a song.’ The applause is warm. Someone calls out, ‘A surefire smash from Lenny “The Hit Factory” Cohen!’ The Canadian smiles and shushes the applause. ‘I wish to nominate a new friend for the last song, but she only flew in today, so she mustn’t feel pressured. However. Might Miss Elf Holloway bless us with her musical grace?’

  Everyone looks at her. Dean looks hopeful.

  It’s easier to do it than not. ‘Okay, then, but—’ Cheers smother Elf’s disclaimer as she perches on the bar-stool and Lenny hands her Jackson’s guitar. ‘If it all goes tits up, I’m blaming Janis’s weed. Um …’ What to sing? ‘I’ll try something I wrote on the plane.’ Back when I hoped Lu might be waiting at Arrivals. She takes her notepad from her handbag and sits a candle-jar on the corner of the page. ‘It follows the tune of an old English folk song, “The Devil And The Pigman”. Could anyone lend me a plectrum?’ Jackson hands her his. ‘Thanks.’ She counts herself in.

  As far off as an icy glare

  is from summer laughter –

  as ‘Once upon a time’ is from