Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

Nobody will have noticed his and Jasper’s absence yet. Griff’s flatmate won’t be raising any alarms. It’ll take Bethany a while to smell a rat tomorrow, but with luck she’ll call Enzo Endrizzi by mid-afternoon. Then the cavalry should be mobilized. I hope. The floor-level hatch slides open. A tray appears. Dean kneels down by the hatch and fires questions out: “Oy! Where are my friends? Where’s my lawyer? How long—”

  The hatch snaps shut. Footsteps recede.

  Two slices of white bread spread with margarine, a plastic cup of tepid water. The bread tastes of paper. The water tastes of crayons. So much for great Italian food.

  Time passes. The hatch slides open. “Vassoio,” says a man.

  Dean crouches down by the hatch. “Lawyer.”

  The voice repeats itself: “Vas-soi-o.”

  “Ferlinghetti. Fer-lin-ghetti.”

  The hatch snaps shut. Keys jingle. A heavy lock in the door grinds. A big cop with a big nose, big mustache, and big gut steps inside. He holds up the tray, points at it, and tells Dean, “Vas-soi-o.”

  “Vassoio. Tray. Got it. Lawyer? Ferlinghetti? Embassy?”

  The big cop’s nasal snort means, Dream on.

  “Grazie mille, Roma.” Dean quotes the line Enzo taught him at the Mercurio Theatre. “Anche noi vi amiamo.”

  The cop hands Dean a skimpy roll of skimpy toilet paper and a blanket and slams the door shut. Dean lies down, hungry for an apple, his guitar, a newspaper, or even a book. Thoughts whisper: What if Günther Marx and Ilex throw yer to the wolves? What if Ferlinghetti decides to send yer down just for a laugh?

  The light above the door clicks off. The cell is dark.

  A little light enters under the door. That’s it.

  Why were you such a jealous hypocrite with Amy?

  * * *

  —

  DEAN WISHES THAT he hadn’t flown off the handle when he saw Marcus Daly of Battleship Aquarius drooling over Amy at the 100 Club in Oxford Street two weeks ago. He wishes he hadn’t told Amy to cut the night short, prompting her to reply, “Go if you want, but I’m staying,” and forcing him to leave or to stay and look like a toothless fool. He wishes that when Amy got back—to her own flat—he hadn’t actually said, “What time do yer call this?” As if he was her father, not a lover. Dean wishes, too, he hadn’t started interrogating her like Inspector Moss of Scotland Yard. He wishes he hadn’t called her a “Leech with a Typewriter.” He wishes he hadn’t called her a paranoid bitch when she told him she knew about the Dutch girl in Amsterdam. How did she know? Dean wishes he hadn’t flung a marble ashtray into her glass-fronted cabinet, like Harry Moffat on a three-day bender. He wishes he had been man enough to apologize the next day instead of hiding at Chetwynd Mews and letting Amy leave his stuff in a box at Moonwhale. When he went in for a band meeting the day after, Bethany had a look in her eyes and the look said, Coward. Dean could not disagree. It was no way to say goodbye.

  * * *

  —

  HE WAKES IN the Hotel Shithole. He’s itchy. He inspects his torso. It’s speckled with insect bites. Several are smeared with blood where he scratched them in his sleep. What wouldn’t I do for a cigarette? He gets up and pees in the shithole. His pee smells like chicken soup. He’s thirsty. He’s hungry. In the last twenty-four hours he’s eaten…fuck-all, is what. He knocks on the door. It hurts his knuckles. “Hello?” Nobody comes. “HELLO?”

  Nobody comes. Don’t give up.

  He knocks out the bass line for “Abandon Hope”…

  Footsteps clomp. The eye-hatch snaps open. Dean thinks of the Scotch of St. James. “Stai morendo?”

  Meaning? Dean asks for “Aqua, per favore.”

  A blast of pissed-off Italian. The hatch snaps shut.

  Time drags. The food-hatch snaps open. Breakfast is almost the same as dinner. The bread is staler. There’s coffee served in an aluminum mug but the foam on the surface looks worryingly like phlegm. He thinks about trying to scoop it off to get at the coffee below, then pictures Ferlinghetti’s satisfaction so he leaves the coffee on the tray untouched. He thinks how the middle classes—the Clive and Miranda Holloways of the world—go from cradle to grave believing that every police officer is a devoted servant of the law. A chant rises up from Dean’s recent memory.

  Fuck the pigs!

  Fuck the pigs!

  Fuck the pigs!

  * * *

  —

  RINGRINGRING!

  RingRingRing!

  RingRingRing!

  The doorbell at Chetwynd Mews woke Dean up. His head pounded. The day before, the band had played a festival in a field near Milton Keynes. Elf had gone on to Birmingham to visit Imogen, Lawrence, and her baby nephew, Mark. Dean, Griff, and Jasper had brought the Beast back to London, popped a pill, and gone to the Ad Lib club. Jasper had left with an Olympic show-jumper from Dulwich and Griff with an Avon Lady, leaving Dean to woo a laughing-eyed half-Cypriot—until Rod Stewart waltzed up and stole her away. The pool of Ad Lib’s 2 A.M. leftovers was by then a puddle. He walked back to the flat with a strong suspicion that the Swinging Sixties weren’t all the papers cracked them up to be, even for a musician who had been on TV not once but twice…

  RingRingRing! “Oy! Deano! I can see yer boots!”

  Kenny Yearwood. Guilt propelled Dean to the front door. His hometown friend was living in a Hammersmith commune with a lentil-eating, tarot-reading girl called Floss. Dean had visited his art college buddy and Gravediggers bandmate exactly once. Kenny had played him a few forgettable self-penned songs, suggesting Dean “add a few finishing touches” and record them with Utopia Avenue under a Yearwood–Moss credit. Dean had laughed at the joke until he realized Kenny was serious. They hadn’t met since. Kenny left messages a couple of times, but Dean assured himself he was too busy to call back. Then Griff had his car crash and Kenny slipped off Dean’s “to-do” list.

  “Open up,” called Kenny through the letter box, “or I’ll huff ’n’ I’ll puff ’n’ I’ll blow—” Dean opened up, and was shocked by Kenny’s wholesale transformation from Gravesend ex-mod to West London hippie: caftan, headband, poncho. “Yer can run but yer can’t hide.”

  “Morning, Kenny. Floss, how’s tricks?”

  “It’s the afternoon, yer dope,” said Kenny.

  “The afternoon of the big demo,” said Floss.

  “Yer what? What big demo?”

  “The biggest demo of the decade,” said Floss, “against American genocide in Vietnam. We’re gathering in Trafalgar Square and marching to the U.S. Embassy. You are coming?”

  If the United States government was hell-bent on turning a luckless country in Asia into an inferno of death and forcing American teenagers to go and fight and die there, Dean doubted that walking down Oxford Street blowing whistles would change its mind. Before Dean could say so, a young woman floated up the steps to Jasper’s front door, opening a packet of Marlboros. “Hi, Dean, I’m Lara. Can we talk as we walk? Mustn’t miss Vanessa Redgrave.”

  Lara looked superimposed onto the gray March afternoon. She wore a man’s black parka, open at the front, jeans, boots. Her black hair was streaked with red and she looked capable of anything.

  Unspent lust woke Dean up. “I’ll grab my coat.”

  * * *

  —

  SPEECHES ECHOED OFF the National Gallery. “The American war machine won’t stop until every man, woman, child, tree, ox, dog, cat is killed…” Trafalgar Square was jammed with hippies, students, trade unionists, CND supporters, Trotskyites, and concerned citizens of all stripes and none. “The economic crisis facing Great Britain and America has its roots in this suicidal war in Vietnam…” Hundreds more watched from the edges while the police guarded the Whitehall and Pall Mall exits leading to Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. “We have traveled from West Germany for a new society, a better future, where imperialism, where w
ar, where capitalism belong only in the dustbin of history…” The crowd generated a dim roar by its mere existence. Kenny put the number at ten thousand, Floss at twenty thousand, and Lara thought it closer to thirty. Whatever its size, the crowd was a power grid. Dean felt his own nervous system connect to it. Scores of Vietcong flags were clustered around the foot of Nelson’s Column. Placards passed like pages: HELL NO WE WON’T GO!; VICTORY TO THE VIETCONG!; WE ARE THE PEOPLE OUR PARENTS WARNED US ABOUT. Dean wondered how any of this would stop B-52s bombing Vietnamese villages.

  After the speeches, the mass of people began to drain up Charing Cross Road. Kenny, Floss, Lara, and Dean followed the flow. Past the Phoenix Theatre, past Denmark Street, past Selmer’s Guitars, where Dean’s debt was paid off, finally. Past the doorway that led into the defunct UFO Club. At Tottenham Court Road, the crowd flowed left along Oxford Street. A young squaddie, acne on his face, emerged from the tube station. Peace demonstrators yelled abuse: “How many kids did you kill, Soldier Boy?” before a paternal copper pushed him back down into the tube. “Long—live—Ho Chi Minh! Long—live—Ho Chi Minh!” Oxford Street itself was shuttered, as if in preparation for invasion. Dean thought he glimpsed Mick Jagger, but wasn’t sure. Floss and Kenny told him they had heard John Lennon and his new girlfriend, Yoko Ono, were marching with the crowd. Whatever the truth, Dean felt the power. He and it were one. The road was theirs. The city was theirs.

  “Do you feel it too?” asked Lara.

  “Yeah,” said Dean. “Yeah, I do.”

  “Do you know the name of this feeling?”

  “What?”

  “Revolution.”

  He looked at her, sideways.

  Lara looked back. “We’re marching with the suffragettes, the Durruti Column, the Communards, the Chartists, the Roundheads, the Levellers, Wat Tyler…”

  Dean didn’t admit he hadn’t heard of these bands.

  “…with everyone who stuck two fingers up to the bloodsucking Establishment of their age and said: ‘FUCK YOU.’ Causes change, but power is in flux and its ownership is temporary.”

  “What’s yer surname, Lara?” asked Dean.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “One day yer going to be famous.”

  Lara lit a Marlboro. “Lara Veroner Gubitosi.”

  “Wow. That’s…long.”

  “Most names on Earth are longer than ‘Dean Moss.’ ”

  “S’pose so. Are yer Italian, then?”

  “I’m from many places.”

  They turned into North Audley Street, where the march was funneled south: “Hands—off—Vietnam! Hands—off—Vietnam!” Faces watched from Mayfair townhouses. Two blocks south lay Grosvenor Square. Cordons of police and a defensive line of Black Marias walled off the American Embassy: a squat, modernist five-floor bunker, topped by an eagle.

  “Didn’t the SS have an eagle too?” asked Floss.

  The crush from behind grew as demonstrators ahead filled the road around the square. The big area of grass and trees in the center of Grosvenor Square was walled off by police, who had badly underestimated the size of the crowd they needed to contain. Exits from the square were blocked, so the thousands of marchers at the front had nowhere to go. The crush grew denser until the barriers around the park in the square gave way, in several places at once. A body fell on top of Dean and a heel pressed his knee into the soft turf. A roar rose up, like at the start of a football game or a battle. If the day had been a summery pop single, it was now flipped over onto its darker, rockier B side…

  * * *

  —

  DEAN WAS LIFTED up by Lara Veroner Gubitosi, who murmured in his ear, “Let the love-in begin,” and was lost in bodies. Whistles blasted. Smoke stained the air. Kenny and Floss were nowhere to be seen. The sun had dimmed to half-light. “Fuck the pigs! Fuck the pigs! Fuck the pigs!” Officers manning the lines around the square retreated back to the police phalanx in front of the embassy. Who was on whose side? What were the sides? Projectiles rained. A tinkle of glass—a ragged cheer—“We got a window!” Another cheer. “Another one!” Screams. “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” An earthquake? In London? Horses charging, a dozen or more, straight at Dean. Mounted officers swung truncheons like Victorian cavalry swinging cutlasses. People ran under the trees, where the branches were too low for the mounted police. Dean fled into the path of another horse and into the path of another and into the path of another, and tripped, saving his skull from a skull-crushing truncheon by a whisker. A hoof slammed the turf inches away from his head. Dean scrambled to his feet, finding a rag of hairy scalp stuck to his hand. A man with an LBJ mask hurled a smoke bomb at the police. Dean ran in the other direction but no longer knew which direction that was. The battle line kept looping in on itself. Louder, louder: “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh! Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” A gang of coppers caught a man and pounded, pounded, pounded him with truncheons and boots. “That enough love an’ peace for yer?” They dragged him off by his hair. “Out of the way!” A copper was being stretchered past, his face like a butcher’s tray. Dean wanted out of Grosvenor Square. The band was due to fly to Italy in forty-eight hours. Getting arrested would be bad: a trampled hand, disastrous. But where was the exit? Police blocked the Brook Street exit with a wall of Black Marias into which they were slinging protesters indiscriminately. “Fuck the pigs! Fuck the pigs! Fuck the pigs!” A black horse pranced Dean’s way. A hand grabbed Dean’s scruff and pulled him onto a doorstep. “Mick Jagger?”

  Dean’s rescuer shook his head. “Nah, I’m an impersonator. Go thataway, this ain’t no place for a street-fighting man.” He pointed to the mouth of Carlos Place, where the police were letting people out of the square.

  Dean made no eye contact as he passed through the uniformed filter. He remembered the end of the nursery rhyme: Here comes the chopper to chop off your head. He walked down Adam’s Row. Through an archway, he saw a gang of three kicking a hippie on the ground. They had shaved heads, like monks, and one had a Stars-and-Stripes flag T-shirt. What tribe were these? Not mods, not rockers, not Teds. They worked methodically. Their victim had curled into a shuddering ball. One of the shaved-heads noticed Dean watching. “Yeah? Want a taster too, do yer, yer cunt?”

  Dean ran through his options. He walked away…

  * * *

  —

  …LIKE A COWARD. Dean revisits the scene on a bedbug-infested mattress in a police cell in a suburb of Rome. Kenny, he found out the next day, had been arrested and had had his nose broken. And now it’s my turn to spend a night in a cell. If Harry Moffat could see Dean now, banged up in prison, he’d laugh his tits off. “I fuckin’ told yer so!” Or maybe not. He’d had a letter from Ray the day before they left for Italy. A contact at Alcoholics Anonymous had got Harry Moffat a job working nights as a security guard. One slip off the wagon, though, and he’s out. But for now, he’s a nightwatchman. Like Jasper’s song. Ray says he’s changed a lot. Maybe Ray’s right. Maybe I’ve been carrying a hatchet so long I don’t even notice it.

  A mosquito flies into Dean’s field of vision.

  It settles on the wall by his head.

  Dean splats it and inspects the wreckage.

  Have yer forgotten how the old bastard used to belt Mum? If that’s not worth a lifelong hatchet, what is?

  Lunch arrives. It’s a mug of instant soup. Dean can’t identify the flavor. He can only hope it hasn’t been gobbed into. There’s an apple and three biscuits with the word TARALLUCCI baked into them. The biscuits are bland, but the sugar’s welcome. Footsteps approach and a key turns. It’s Big Cop making a beckoning gesture. “Vieni.”

  Dean’s hopes surge: “Are you letting me go?”

  “Hai uno visitatore.”

  * * *

  —

  THE WINDOWLESS INTERROGATION room is lit by a striplight speckled with flies, living and dead. Dean sits at the t
able, alone. He hears a typist on the other side of the door. Two men are laughing. Minutes limp by. The men are still laughing. The door opens.

  “Mr. Moss.” An Englishman in a pale suit, riffling through papers. He looks over his gold-rimmed glasses. “Morton Symonds. Consular Affairs at Her Majesty’s Embassy.”

  Ex-military, thinks Dean. “Good afternoon, Mr. Symonds.”

  “Not for you, it isn’t.” He sits ramrod straight. He places an Italian newspaper in front of Dean and points to a photograph. “This is not the publicity your Mr. Frankland was hoping for.”

  The photograph shows Dean Moss being frog-marched out of the airport with his hands cuffed. “Is this a national paper?”

  “It certainly is.”

  Then if I know my Mr. Frankland, thinks Dean, he’ll be over the bloody moon. “At least they printed my best side.”

  A pause. “Do you think this is all a lark?”

  “Dunno ’bout ‘lark.’ The way I’ve been treated’s a farce. What’s the story with the others?”

  Morton Symonds performs a small huh. “Mr. de Zoet and Mr. Griffin have been released without charge. They’re staying at a pensione near the airport. Mr. Frankland is being questioned about tax obligations and monetary control violations.”

  “Which means what?”

  A sigh. “You can’t just take five thousand dollars out of the country. There are laws against it.”

  “It wasn’t five. It was two. And why not? We earned it.”

  “Immaterial. And, for you, the least of your problems. You’re being charged with common assault”—Morton Symonds checks a file—“assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and, most gravely, drug trafficking.” He looks up. “Still a lark, is it?”

  “It’s bullshit is what it is. They punched me. See?” Dean stood, undid his shirt, and showed his bruises. “I might’ve kicked a reporter ’cause he shot off a flash in my face but the dope—was—planted.”