Дэвид Митчелл - Utopia Avenue

‘Don’t do heroin in Berlin,’ suggests Jasper.

‘Dreams are basically garbage,’ suggests Mecca.

‘Both of you could be right.’ David Bowie lights a Camel and nods up the stairs. ‘So, you’re friends of Mr Frankland?’

‘Levon’s our manager,’ replies Jasper. ‘I’m in a band with Dean and Griff from 2i’s, and Elf Holloway on keyboards.’

‘I’ve seen Elf play at Cousins. You must be something. What name are you trading under?’

‘Utopia Avenue.’ That sounds good. That’s us now.

David Bowie nods. ‘Should do the trick.’

‘Are you thinking of working with Levon?’ asks Jasper.

‘No, this is just a courtesy call. I’ve signed my soul away elsewhere. I’ve a single out on Deram next month.’

‘Congratulations,’ Jasper remembers to say.

‘Yeah.’ Smoke trickles from David Bowie’s nostrils. ‘“The Laughing Gnome”. Vaudeville psychedelia, you could call it.’

‘I have to get Mecca to Victoria Coach Station, so good luck with your gnome.’

‘As Our Saviour said, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is to change music into money.” Be seeing you.’ He gives Mecca a salute and a heel-click – ‘ Bis demnächst , Mechthild Rohmer.’ In a whirl of trench coat and hair, David Bowie resumes his climb to the top.

Victoria Coach Station churns with engine noise, fumes and nerves. Pigeons roost on struts and supports. Jasper tastes metal and diesel. People stand in queues looking tired and unlucky. LIVERPOOL. DOVER. BELFAST. EXETER. NEWCASTLE. SWANSEA. Jasper has visited none of them. If Great Britain was a chessboard , I’d know less than a single square.

‘Hot dogs,’ calls a vendor from his trolley. ‘Hot dogs.’

Mecca and Jasper find the Heathrow coach with only a minute to spare. As Mecca gives her rucksack to the driver to stow in the luggage hold, a large agile woman in a headscarf presses a wilting carnation into Jasper’s hand and closes his fingers over it. ‘Only a shilling, love. Buy it for the young lady.’ She means Mecca.

Jasper gives the flower back, or tries to.

‘Don’t!’ The woman looks shocked. ‘Or you may never see her again. Imagine how you’ll feel if something happened …’

Mecca resolves Jasper’s dilemma by taking the carnation herself, putting it in the woman’s basket and telling her, ‘Ugly.’

The woman hisses at Mecca but moves on.

‘Dean says I’m a nutter magnet,’ says Jasper. ‘He says I look both vulnerable and as if I have money in my wallet.’

She frowns at him. For Jasper, frowns are even trickier to decipher than smiles. Angry? Then she cups his face and kisses his mouth. Jasper suspects this is their last kiss. Press play and record . ‘Don’t change,’ she says. ‘Thanks for the last three days. I wish we had three months.’ Before he can answer, a large Indian family files onto the coach, forcing Jasper and Mecca apart. The grandmother is last, glaring at Jasper. A crackly Tannoy announces that the Heathrow coach is about to leave.

Jasper guesses he should say, ‘ I’ll write, ’ or ‘ When can I see you again? ’ but Mecca’s future is not Jasper’s to make claims on. She’s not making claims on his. Remember her now – face, hair, black velvet jacket, her moss-green trousers. ‘Can I come with you?’

Mecca looks uncertain. ‘To Chicago?’

‘The airport.’

‘Elf and Dean are expecting you at your flat.’

‘Elf usually guesses what’s happened.’

Mecca wears a new smile. ‘Sure.’

Roadworks on Kensington Road make for slow progress. Jasper and Mecca watch shops, offices, queues at bus-stops, double-deckers full of humans reading or sleeping or sitting with their eyes shut, rows of soot-blackened stuccoed houses, TV aerials sieving the dirty air for signals, cheap hotels and tenements with grubby windows, the mouths of tube stations swallowing people at the rate of hundreds per minute, railway bridges, the brown Thames, the upside-down table of Battersea Power Station, smoke gushing from its three working chimneys, muddy parks where daffodils wilt around statues of the forgotten, bomb sites, where ragged children play among dirty pools and mounds of rubble, a bony horse hauling a rag-and-bone cart, a pub called the Silent Woman whose sign shows a woman with a missing head, a flower-seller in a wheelchair, billboards for Dunhill cigarettes, for Pontins Holiday Camps, for a British Leyland dealership, busy launderettes, where patrons stare into the machines, Wimpy Bars, betting shops, sunless back yards where lines of damp washing stay damp, gasworks, allotments, fish-and-chip shops, locked churches in whose graveyards addicts sleep atop the dead. The coach ascends the Chiswick flyover and picks up speed. Roofs, chimneys and gables slide by. Jasper considers how loneliness is the default state of the world. Friends, family, love or a band are the rare anomalies … You’re born alone, you die alone, and for most of what lies between, you are alone. He kisses the side of Mecca’s head, hoping his kiss passes through her skull and lodges in a crevice in her brain. The sky glows grey. The miles pass. Mecca lifts the back of his hand to her lips and kisses it. That kiss could mean nothing. Or anything. Or something.

Neither Jasper nor Mecca has been to an airport before. It feels futuristic. A man ‘checks in’ Mecca’s luggage, swaps her ticket for ‘a boarding card’ and directs them to a door marked ‘DEPARTURES’. Most of the passengers are dressed as if they’re going to a wedding or a job interview. They arrive at a doorway marked ‘PASSENGERS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT’.

This is the end. They hug. Ask if you can visit her in Chicago. Ask her to come back to London on her way home . Her eyes drink him in. Drink me up . What to say? Tell her you love her … but how would I know if I did? Dean says, ‘You just know’ … but how do you know that you ‘just know’? ‘I don’t want you to go,’ says Jasper.

‘Same here,’ says Mecca. ‘That’s why I should.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I know.’ She lifts his knuckle to her lips, then the queue shuffles her away. She looks back one last time, the way you’re warned against by myths and fairy tales. She waves from the gateway and she’s going, going … gone. A person is a thing that leaves. Jasper retraces his steps and joins another queue, for a coach back to Victoria. It’s a cold March night. He feels what you feel when you’ve lost something, but before you’ve worked out what it is. Not my wallet, not my keys … In his jacket pocket he finds an envelope stamped ‘Mike Anglesey Studio’. Opening it, he finds a photograph of the shot he took of Mecca in Ho Kwok’s only yesterday, after Jasper asked her to imagine her homecoming in Berlin. For once I don’t have to guess what anybody’s thinking. I know. On the reverse side she has written a message:

Smithereens

For a lost tourist, the door of 13A Mason’s Yard in Mayfair would not merit a second glance. For Dean, it was a magic portal to the land where the in-crowd frolic, frequented by A&R men and producers; by columnists who can make or break you by tomorrow lunchtime; by masters of the realm and their daughters after a bit of exotic rock ’n’ roll rough; by the designers of next year’s fashions, the models who’ll wear them and the photographers who’ll shoot them; and by musicians who no longer dream of success because they have it; by Beatles and Stones, Hollies and Kinks; by visiting Monkees, Byrds and Turtles; by Gerry, with or without a Pacemaker; by Dean’s future peers who’ll tell him, ‘ Send me a demo, I’ll give it a play, ’ or ‘ Our support act just doesn’t cut it – could Utopia Avenue step in? ’ Behind the door of 13A Mason’s Yard is the Scotch of St James club. Members only.