Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

  Jasper didn’t have the mental wattage needed to refute philosophers. He picked up Formaggio’s guitar. “May I?”

  “You don’t have to ask, maestro,” said Formaggio.

  Jasper played “Asturias” by Isaac Albéniz. Formaggio’s guitar wasn’t the best, but the half-dozen fell under the moon-swaying, sun-cracking, and blood-thumping spell, and when Jasper finished, nobody moved. “In fifty years,” said Jasper, “or five hundred, or five thousand, music will still do to people what it does to us now. That’s my prediction. It’s late.”

  * * *

  —

  JASPER AWOKE ON Formaggio’s uncle’s sofa. He went to the kitchen, poured himself a mug of milk, lit a cigarette, sat by the rain-smeared window, and watched the dark naked trees lining the crescent. The lawns were dotted with crocuses. A milkman in a sou’wester swapped the empties for full bottles, doorstep by doorstep, putting jam jars over the foil tops to stop the birds getting to the milk. “You rise early,” said Mecca. The thin pale young woman had her black velvet jacket on and looked ready to leave.

  Jasper wasn’t sure what to say. “Good morning.”

  “You play the guitar beautifully.”

  “I try.”

  “Where did you learn?”

  “In a sequence of rooms over six or seven years.”

  Mecca’s face became illegible.

  “Was that a weird answer? Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Heinz said you are very wörtlich? Literalish?”

  “Literal. I try not to be, but it’s a hard thing to try not to be. Your voice is soothing. Like steel brushes on cymbals.”

  Mecca’s face did what it had done a moment ago.

  “That was weird too, wasn’t it?”

  “Steel brushes on cymbals. That’s nice.”

  Ask her, thinks Jasper. “Do you know Pink Floyd?”

  “Some of Mike’s assistants talk about this band.”

  “They’re playing at the UFO tomorrow night. I know Joe Boyd, who runs the club. If you’d like to go, he’ll let us in.”

  Mecca’s eyebrows went up. Surprise. “An official date?”

  “Official, unofficial, date, no date. As you wish.”

  “A young lady in a foreign city must be careful.”

  “True. Why don’t you interview me over dinner first? If I strike you as too weird, you can vanish while I’m in the gents. There’ll be no hard feelings. I’m not sure if I can even do hard feelings.”

  Mecca hesitated. “Do you have a phone number?”

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS, TWO nights, and a Sunday morning later, Ho Kwok’s is steamy and loud with rapid-fire Chinese. A white porcelain cat with a swinging paw beckons good fortune in from Lisle Street. Jasper and Mecca are lucky to get a window seat.

  “Chinatown’s like Soho,” says Jasper. “It’s made by outsiders and the usual rules don’t apply.”

  “An Enklave. Is the same in English?”

  Jasper nods. A waitress brings jasmine tea and takes their order of wonton noodles, without comment. Outside, collars are up and hats are pulled down. Across the street, between a Chinese herbalist’s and a dry cleaner, a man takes a battered guitar from a cardboard case into which he puts a few coins from his own pocket. He launches into a gravel-throated bash at the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” Before he reaches the second verse, three Chinese grandmothers appear. They wield brooms and tell him, “Go way, go way!” The busker protests—“It’s a free bloomin’ country!”—but the grandmothers sweep at his ankles. A few people stop and stare at the fun, and a skinny girl darts off with the coins in the busker’s guitar case. The busker hares after the thief, trips over, lands in the gutter, and snaps his guitar’s neck. He stares at his broken guitar in disbelief and looks around for somebody to complain to, or blame, or roar at. He finds himself alone. Gusts of March wind roll a can along the gutter, past his feet. The ex-busker hobbles back to his guitar case, loads up the broken instrument, and limps off toward Leicester Square.

  “He can’t get no satisfaction,” says Mecca.

  “He should have chosen his pitch more carefully. You can’t just set up any old where and hope for the best.”

  “You do this busking a lot?”

  “In Amsterdam, in Dam Square. London’s riskier. As you saw. Or, people try to join in.”

  The waitress brings their order and four plastic chopsticks. Jasper holds his face over the hot pond of noodles, pork, half a soy-stained boiled egg, and Chinese cabbage. The steam softens his eyelids. Click, scrit-scrit. Jasper looks sideways into the round eye of Mecca’s Pentax and click, scrit-scrit. She replaces the lens cap.

  “Are you never off duty?” asks Jasper.

  “I want a souvenir. Before your band is famous.”

  “I want a souvenir of you. Would you lend me your camera?”

  “Would you lend just anyone your guitar?”

  “No. To you, I would.”

  Mecca passes him her Pentax. Jasper looks through the viewfinder at customers slurping noodles, nodding, joking, sitting in silence. The viewfinder frames Mechthild Rohmer, this unusual woman. She’s staring back like a photographic subject.

  “That’s not the you I want to remember,” remarks Jasper.

  “What is the me you want to remember?”

  “Imagine you’ve been away for two years in America. Imagine you’re home at last. Imagine ringing the doorbell of your parents’ house. They’re not expecting you. This is a surprise. Imagine hearing their footsteps in the hall…” Mecca’s face is changing, but it’s still not quite right. “Imagine the sound of the bolt being slid. Imagine the looks on your parents’ faces when they realize it’s you.”

  Click, scrit-scrit.

  * * *

  —

  ELF’S BOOGIE-WOOGIE ROLL, Griff’s rimshots, and Dean’s bass go from muffled to loud as Jasper opens the third-floor door marked CLUB ZED. The band is playing Dean’s twelve-bar blues monster “Abandon Hope.” Mecca hesitates. “You’re sure they won’t mind?”

  “Why would they?”

  “I’m an outsider.”

  Jasper takes her hand and leads her through the velvet curtain into a spacious room modeled on a Mitteleuropean salon. High armchairs sit around tables under dim chandeliers. Paintings and photographs of Polish military heroes watch from the wall. A Polish flag, riddled with bullet-holes from the Warsaw Uprising, is framed above the smoky-mirrored bar lined with a hundred vodkas. Many an anonymous Soho doorway, Jasper is learning, is a portal to another time and place. Club Zed is a jazzer’s hangout as well as a Polish one, and it houses a fine Steinway grand and an eight-piece Ludwig drum kit on which Elf and Griff are playing while Dean wrings howls from his harmonica. The audience of two consists of Levon and Pavel, Club Zed’s owner. They smoke cheroots. Dean notices Mecca and “Abandon Hope” clatters off the tracks. Elf and Griff look up and stop a few notes later.

  “Sorry I’m late,” says Jasper. “I was delayed.”

  “I bet you were.” Griff’s looking at Mecca.

  “So this is her?” Dean asks Jasper.

  “Yes, this is her,” replies Mecca. “You are Dean, I guess.”

  Griff twirls his stick and does a thump-thump.

  Introduce her, remembers Jasper. “So everyone, uh, this is Mecca. Levon, our manager, and Pavel, who lets us rehearse here.”

  Everyone says hello, except Pavel. He tilts his Leninesque head. “German, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “You are not. To do a wild guess”—she looks around—“you are from Poland.”

  “Kraków. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”

  “Why would I not know Polish geography?”

  Pavel makes a hmm noise. “It’s the history you people prefer to forget. The Lebensraum glory days.”

&nbs
p; “Many Germans do not say ‘glory days.’ ”

  “Really? The ones who commandeered my family home did. The ones who shot my father did.”

  Even Jasper senses Pavel’s hostility.

  Mecca speaks carefully. “My father was a history teacher in Prague. Before the Wehrmacht took him and sent him to Normandy. He did not wish to go, but if he refused, he would be shot. My mother escaped Prague ahead of the Russians to Nuremberg with me. So I know about history. Lebensraum. Genocides. War crimes. I know. But I was born in 1944. I gave no orders. I dropped no bombs. I am sorry your father died. I am sorry Poland suffered. I am sorry all Europe suffered. But if you blame me…for what I am—a German—why are you different from a Nazi who says, ‘All Jewish are this’ or ‘All homosexuals are this’ or ‘All gypsies are this’? That is Nazi thinking. You think this way if you want but I will not. That way of thinking made the war. I say, ‘Fuck all war.’ Fuck old people who start them, who send young people to die in them. Fuck the hate that war makes. And fuck people who feed that hate, even twenty years after. The fucks is finished now.”

  Griff fires off a quick volley of drums and hi-hat.

  “I will leave your bar, if you wish,” says Mecca.

  Don’t go, thinks Jasper. Pavel stares at Mecca for a while. Everyone waits. “In Poland, we appreciate a good speech. And that was a good one. Would you care for a drink? On the house.”

  Mecca stares back. “In that case, I would like the very best Polish vodka, if you please.”

  * * *

  —

  “NO, NO, NO,” Elf huffs. “G, A, D, E minor.”

  “I bloody played E minor,” protests Dean.

  “No you bloody didn’t,” says Elf. “That was E. Here.” She scribbles in her notebook, rips out the page and hands it to him. “Roll out the E minor at the end of the second and fourth lines, here, when I sing ‘raft and river’ and again on ‘forgiven and forgiver.’ Griff, could you play…featherier?”

  “ ‘Featherier’?” Griff frowns. “Like Paul Motian?”

  Elf frowns back. “Paul who?”

  “Bill Evans’s drummer. Shuffly, breathy, whispery.”

  “Try it. Jasper, could you shorten the solo by two bars?”

  “Okay.” Jasper notices Levon speaking in Mecca’s ear.

  “From the top, then,” says Elf. “One and two and—”

  “Sorry, folks, sorry.” Levon stands. “Quick band meeting.”

  Griff plays a cymbal roll. Elf looks over. Dean lets his guitar hang. Jasper’s wondering what this has to do with Mecca.

  “We’ll be needing band photos,” says Levon, “for posters, for press, for—who knows?—album covers. By a happy fluke, a photographer has landed among us. The motion is, do we commission Mecca to shoot off a few rolls? Right now.”

  “Isn’t Mecca off to the States tomorrow?” Elf asks.

  “Yes. I shoot you now, develop the film tonight, and bring the best shots to Denmark Street tomorrow on my way to the airport.”

  “What about clothes and hair and stuff?” asks Griff.

  “Mecca’ll shoot while you’re playing,” says Levon. “In situ. Nothing cheesy. Think of those portraits on the Blue Note albums.”

  “You only said ‘Blue Note’ so I’d agree,” grumbles Griff.

  “You can see into my soul,” agrees Levon.

  “I vote yes,” says Elf.

  “I’ve seen Mecca’s work,” says Jasper. “I vote yes.”

  “No offense to Mecca,” says Dean, “but shouldn’t we hire a famous name? Terence Donovan. David Bailey. Mike Anglesey.”

  “Famous names,” says Levon, “charge famous-name prices.”

  “Yer get what yer pay for in this world,” says Dean.

  “North of two hundred. Per shoot.”

  “I’ve always said,” states Dean, “famous names’re bloody ripoff merchants. I say we vote Mecca. Is it a full house, Griff?”

  “Can you make me look like Max Roach?” the drummer asks the photographer.

  Mecca considers. “If we apply much makeup, and print the negative, Max Roach’s mother will mistake you for her son.”

  “Ooo, sharp as a blade and dry as the fookin’ Sahara,” says Griff. “The ayes have it.”

  * * *

  —

  THE DUKE OF Argyll on Brewer Street opens at six on Sundays. At a few minutes after six, the band plus Mecca shuffle into a nook by the window. The glass is frosted but for an engraved escutcheon through which Jasper can see passersby and the chemist opposite. It’s a classy Victorian pub with brass fittings, upholstered chair backs, and NO SPITTING signs. Griff empties a paper bag of pork scratchings into a cleanish ashtray, and the band and Mecca clink their mismatched glasses. “Here’s to Mecca’s photos,” says Dean, “being on our first LP cover.” He downs half his pint of London Pride. “No harm being optimistic.”

  “Here’s to ‘A Raft and a River,’ ” says Griff. “Could be a single.”

  “Or a damn good B side.” Dean wipes froth off his lip.

  Elf raises her half-pint of shandy to Mecca. “Safe travels in the States. I’m jealous as heck. Think of me now and then, stuck here with this lot, while you travel around like a Jack Kerouac character.”

  Dean and Griff find this amusing, so Jasper acts a smile.

  “You’ll be touring America,” predicts Mecca, “soon. You four have a special chemistry. It’s fühlbar—what is fühlbar? I feel it.”

  “ ‘Palpable,’ ” suggests Elf.

  A group files in wearing Carnaby Street fashion and longer hair than Jasper. Nobody gawps. In Soho it’s the squares who are freaks.

  “Guys,” begins Elf. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Uh-oh,” interrupts Dean. “Sounds serious.”

  “I’ve tried to like the Way Out as a name. Truly. But I’ve failed. And half the people I’ve told it to keep saying ‘the Far Out’ by mistake. It’s not sticking. Can we—please—think of a new name?”

  “What,” says Dean, “right now?”

  “Soon it’ll be too late to change,” says Elf.

  Jasper lights a Camel. Griff asks, “Crash us a fag.”

  “ ‘Crash us a fag’…” Dean misunderstands; or pretends to, for comic effect. Jasper isn’t sure which. “Nah. A fag’s a queer in the States. It’ll give people the wrong idea. Keep looking.”

  “Write a joke book,” says Griff. “Start with your sense of timing.”

  “I’m kind o’ getting used to the Way Out,” says Dean.

  “Why settle for a name you’ve had to get used to?” asks Elf. “Why can’t we have one that makes you think, What a great name! at first encounter? Mecca. ‘The Way Out’: Do you like it?”

  “She’ll agree with yer,” says Dean. “She’s a girl, too.”

  “I would agree with Elf also if I was a boy,” says Mecca. “ ‘The Way Out’ is flavorless. It is not even properly bad.”

  “Yeah, but yer German,” says Dean. “No offense.”

  “To be German is not an offense to me.”

  “I mean, yer’ve got German ears. We’re a British band.”

  “You do not wish to sell records in West Germany? We are sixty million. A big market for British music.”

  Dean exhales smoke ceilingwards. “Fair point that.”

  “To point out the obvious,” says Griff, “most bands are ‘the’—somethings. The Beatles. The Stones. The Who. The Hollies.”

  “Which is why,” says Dean, “we shouldn’t follow the herd.”

  “ ‘The Herd.’ ” Griff tries it for size. “ ‘Baa-Baa-Black Sheep’?”

  Dean sips his London Pride. “My second choice for the Gravediggers was Lambs to the Slaughter.”

  “Great,” says Elf. “We can come onstage in bloodied aprons an
d with a pig’s head on a stick like Lord of the Flies.”

  Jasper guesses this is sarcasm, but is less sure when Dean asks, “What did Lord of the Flies sing?”

  Elf frowns, then asks, “Seriously?”

  Dean asks, “Seriously what?”

  “Lord of the Flies is a novel by William Golding.”

  “Is it? Frightfully sorry.” Dean does a posh accent. “Not all of us read English at university, you know.”

  Jasper hopes this is banter and not a verbal knife fight.

  “New American bands”—Griff muffles a burp—“have names that stick in the head. Big Brother and the Holding Company. Quicksilver Messenger Service. Country Joe and the Fish.”

  Elf spins a beer mat. “Nothing too wordy or gimmicky. Nothing too obviously desperate for attention.”

  Dean downs the rest of his pint. “So what is the perfect name, Elf? Fairy Circle? The Folk Tones? Illuminate us.”

  Griff munches a pork scratching. “The Illuminators.”

  “If I had a corker,” says Elf, “I’d suggest it. But at the very least, something less random than the 2i’s guy’s misunderstanding? A name that sends a message about who we are as a band.”

  Dean shrugs. “So, who are we? As a band?”

  “We’re a work-in-progress,” says Elf, “but looking at ‘Abandon Hope’ and ‘A Raft and a River,’ we’re oxymoronic. Paradoxical.”

  Dean squints at her. “Yer what?”

  “An oxymoron’s a figure of speech made of contradictory terms. ‘Deafening silence.’ ‘Folky R&B.’ ‘Cynical dreamers.’ ”

  Dean assesses this. “Okay. Based on our catalogue of two songs. Yer turn, Jasper. It’s Moss, one, Holloway, one, de Zoet, nil.”

  “I can’t shit songs out on command,” says Jasper.

  “Maybe not the best metaphor,” suggests Mecca.

  Griff does his gur-hur-hur. “Ladies and gentlemen, please give a big hand to—the Song Shitters!”

  Elf asks Jasper, “Do you think we need a new name?”

  Jasper considers. “Yes.”

  “Any ideas up those embroidered sleeves?” asks Dean.