Дэвид Митчелл - Utopia Avenue

‘Is this a strength or a weakness?’

‘I’ll let you know when I do.’

The oncoming train blasts into the grimy light.

The darkroom at Mike Anglesey’s studio is crimson black, save for a small rectangle of brightness under the projector. Fumes from chemicals stiffen the air. It’s as quiet as a locked church.

Mecca murmurs, ‘One hundred seconds.’

Jasper sets the timer and flips the switch.

Using a pair of tongs, Mecca dunks the print in the tray of developer fluid and tilts it to and fro to keep the liquid moving over the paper. ‘If I do this a million times, even, still it is magic.’

As they watch, a ghost of Elf emerges on the paper, in a state of rapt concentration at Pavel’s Steinway. Mecca has the same expression now. Jasper remarks, ‘It’s like a lake giving up its dead.’

‘The past, giving up a moment.’ The timer buzzes. She lifts the print, lets it drip, and transfers it to the stop-bath. ‘Thirty seconds.’

Jasper sets the timer. Mecca has him tilt the tray of fixing fluid while she records timings and filter types. When the timer buzzes she flicks on the overhead bulb. Jasper’s eyes hum in the yellow light. Mecca rinses the fluid from the print. ‘Photography needs lots of water, like all living things.’ She pegs the photo of Elf over the sink to drip dry, next to an Elf in full-throated song and an Elf tuning her guitar. Further along are a Griff in freak-out mode, a Griff with a cigarette dangling from his lips, and a Griff doing a drumstick spin. There’s a shot of Dean’s hands on the fretboard with an out-of-focus face above, one of him playing harmonica, and one of him smoking.

Is the past tense a trick of the mind?

Is sanity a matrix of these tricks?

Mecca turns to Jasper. ‘Your turn.’

Their pulses slow from demented to aquatic. Her coccyx presses into his appendix scar. He inhales her. She swirls into his lungs. His heart pumps her around his body. He covers their fused form with her blanket. Sweat puddles in a groove on her fuzzy neck. He laps it up. Ticklishly, she mumbles, ‘ Du bist ein Hund .’

He tells her, ‘Fox.’

An angle-poise lamp slouches in the corner.

Later, she wriggles free of him, rolls over, slips on her nightgown, rolls back and sinks into sleep.

01.11 a.m., says her clock. A classical LP is on her Dansette. Jasper clicks the PLAY toggle. An oboe has lost its way. Upon hearing a violin in the thorns, the oboe picks a path towards it, metamorphosing into what it seeks. It’s beautiful and perilous. Sleep pulls Jasper down, hypnagogic fathoms down. Nothing of her that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. Far above, the hull of the steamer darkens the lilac sea. Look . A coffin sinks, trailing bubbles. Inside is Jasper’s mother, Milly Wallace. From inside the coffin, Jasper hears a knock … knock … knock … Soft, yes, drowned, yes, persistent, yes, real? Yes.

Jasper wakes. 04.59 a.m. He listens to the knocks until they’ve gone. The whorls of Mecca’s ear form a question mark.

Under the strip light in the staff kitchen, Jasper studies the sleeve of The Cloud Atlas Sextet. Apart from the lines ‘ Composed by Robert Frobisher ’ and ‘ Overlapping solos for piano, clarinet, cello, flute, oboe and violin ’, there are no words on the front. The back is even sparser: ‘ Recorded in Leipzig by R. Heil, J. Klimek & T. Tykwer 1952 ’, and the label, Augustusplatz Recordings. Regarding the soloists, engineers, arrangers and studio, there is nothing. Jasper wants to hear it again, but the record player is in Mecca’s room and she’s fast asleep. Using a biro and a notepad he finds in a drawer, Jasper draws a stave and hums his memory of the ‘Cloud Atlas’ melody. It’s in 4/4, simple enough, and starts on an F. No, an E. No. An F. The further along the melody he goes, the more it differs from Robert Frobisher’s … but I like it. By the sixteenth bar, he realises he’s writing his first song since he arrived in London. He remembers seeing a guitar in the studio downstairs. It was on a hay bale, used as a prop. Jasper goes and finds it. It’s so cheap it hasn’t even got a maker’s name, but it’ll just about do.

After devising a chorus, Jasper starts looking for lyrics. Phrases of Mecca’s from last night return. She was explaining the dangers of overexposure. ‘Without the dark there is no vision.’ What rhymes with vision? Collision. Titian. Manumission. It’s a bold near-rhyme. But how to contrive an uncontrived-looking link between slavery and photography? Writing is a forest of faint paths, of dead-ends, hidden pits, unresolved chords, words that won’t rhyme. You can be lost in there for hours. Days, even.

Jasper plunges in.

‘You’re wearing a tablecloth.’ Mecca yawns in the doorway. ‘You look like Grandmother in Rotkä ppchen .’

The clock insists it’s 08.07. ‘What? Who?’

‘The wolf who ate Grandmother.’ Mecca’s hair’s a dark gold mess and she’s wearing a blanket like a cloak. ‘The lost girl in the woods.’ The kitchen window is still dark, but Blacklands Terrace is waking up. A van with a phlegmy carburettor passes.

On the table is a pot of tea Jasper doesn’t recall making, the core of an apple he doesn’t recall eating and a page of staves, notes and lyrics he knows he wrote. ‘You’re wearing a blanket.’

Mecca pads over and looks at Jasper’s notes. ‘A song?’

‘A song.’

‘Is it good?’

Jasper looks at it again. ‘Could be.’

Mecca notices the Cloud Atlas sleeve. ‘You like this LP?’

‘Very much. I’ve never heard of Robert Frobisher.’

‘He is … obskur. “Obscure”. The same word, yes?’ Jasper nods. Mecca curls her legs up on the chair. ‘Robert Frobisher is not in Enzyklopädie so I asked a collector in Cecil Court. He was English. He studied with Vyvyan Ayrs in the 1930s. He died young, by suicide in … Edinburgh or Bruges? I forget. This record is his only work. A fire burned the warehouse, so it is very rare. The collector offered ten pounds for a good copy. True value is more, I think. Ten was his first offer.’

‘How much did you pay for it?’

‘Zero.’ Mecca lights a cigarette. ‘At Christmas, Mike my boss had a party here, and the next morning, the record was left. By magic. To sell it does not feel right. So, if you like it, you keep it.’

Say thank you. ‘Thank you.’

‘Now,’ says Mecca, ‘my final English bath.’

‘Do you need any help shampooing?’

An illegible look. ‘Finish your song.’

‘It’s finished,’ says Jasper.

‘Put me into a line, so when the radio plays it, I can boast to everyone, “That part is me.”’

‘You’re already in it.’

‘May I hear the song?’

‘Now?’

‘Now.’

‘Okay.’

Jasper plays the song from beginning to end.

Mecca nods, seriously. ‘Yes. You may shampoo me.’

On the first landing up the stairs from Denmark Street is a black-on-gold sign for ‘THE DUKE-STOKER AGENCY’. Jasper holds open the door and says ‘Take a quick peek’. Inside is Reception, the receptionist’s desk, a palm-tree in a pot, framed photographs of Howie Stoker and Freddy Duke with Harry Belafonte, Bing Crosby, Vera Lynn and others. Through a screen is a bustling office, two telephones ringing at different pitches, a typewriter’s hammers slapping paper, and Freddy Duke, heard but not seen, barking into a telephone: ‘Sheffield is the twenty- seventh and Leeds on the twenty- eighth – not Leeds on the twenty-seventh and Sheffield on the twenty-eighth. Say it back!’