Дэвид Митчелл - Utopia Avenue

‘Dr Galavazi could pull strings for you. Surely?’

Jasper was unconvinced. ‘I’ll think about it.’

‘Do.’ His friend’s frown unwrinkled. ‘Now, come in. Everyone’s eager to meet a real live professional guitarist.’

‘I’m more semi-professional at present.’

‘Don’t say that. I’ve been boasting about you. There’s an itinerant German photographer here. She’s a She, rather a striking She, at that. I’m reliably told she’s a Wunderkind . I had the devil of a time working out who she reminds me of before it hit me – you , de Zoet. She’s a female you. And , she happens to be unattached …’

Jasper wondered why Formaggio was telling him this.

Heinz Formaggio’s dinner party was high-brow, academic and free of drugs: the opposite of the musicians’ gatherings that Jasper had been to since arriving in London last November. By midnight the caterers had gone and only five overnight guests remained. Jasper had intended to walk back to Chetwynd Mews, but the icy weather, the brandy, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue , gravity and a sheepskin rug had changed his mind. He semi-snoozed as wine-oiled voices discussed the future. ‘I give late capitalism twenty more years,’ predicted the seismologist. ‘By the end of the century we’ll have a Communist world government.’

The philosopher issued a corvid rattle of Scouse laughter. ‘Bollocks! The Soviet Empire’s morally bankrupt since we learned about the gulags. Socialism’s a twitching corpse.’

‘Damn right,’ agreed the Kenyan. ‘Pinko-grey humanity will never share power with the rest of us. You all think, What if they do to us what we’ve done to them? ’

‘The Bomb lengthens the odds on any future,’ said the climatologist. ‘The future’s an irradiated wasteland. Once a weapon’s been invented, it gets used.’

‘The H-bomb may be different,’ answered Mecca the photographer. Jasper liked her brushes-on-cymbals voice. ‘If you use it, and if your enemy has it, your children die also.’

‘A right bundle of laughs, you lot,’ said the economist. ‘How about Martian colonies? TV-telephones? Jetpacks, silver clothes, robots who say, “Affirmative” instead of “Yes”?’

The Kenyan snorted. ‘I’m betting on intelligent robots who see that Homo sapiens is breeding like rabbits and killing the planet, who do the sensible thing, and use our weapons to wipe us out.’

‘What does the musician say?’ asked the climatologist. ‘Whither the future?’

‘It’s unknowable.’ Jasper forced himself upright. ‘Fifty years ago, how many foresaw Hiroshima, Dresden, the Blitz, Stalingrad, Auschwitz? A big wall dividing Berlin in two? Television? Decolonisation? China and America fighting a proxy war in Vietnam? Elvis Presley? The Stones? Stockhausen? Jodrell Bank? Plastics? Cures for polio, measles, syphilis? The Space Race? The present is a curtain. Most of us can’t see behind it. Those who do see – via luck or prescience – change what is there by seeing. That’s why it’s unknowable. Fundamentally. Intrinsically. I like adverbs.’

The song ‘Flamenco Sketches’ finished. The LP clicked off. Silence was lush and lapping.

‘A bit of a swizz, Jasper,’ said the philosopher. ‘We asked for a prediction and all you said was “ No idea ” in an impressive way.’

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 w örtlich ? 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 towards 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.