Дэвид Митчелл - Utopia Avenue

Yet Jasper notices Don Glossop’s foot tapping and, almost imperceptibly, his wife’s head nodding in time to the rhythm.

Or maybe it can.

The sound of knocking Jasper heard on the cricket field during the match against Peterborough Grammar didn’t reoccur that day, or the next, or the next. Jasper persuaded himself it hadn’t occurred at all. Late one afternoon, the master of Swaffham House sent Jasper to the cathedral with a satchel full of sheet music for the chorister. An east wind was rising. It tore the last of the blossom from the cherry trees and shoved Jasper along The Gallery, one of Ely’s medieval streets. Up ahead, he heard a door being slammed open and shut and open and shut and open, and as he passed an archway, a wooden gate, torn loose from its hinges, bowled past him with demonic force, missing his sixteen-year-old head by no more than twelve inches, and smashed into kindling against a wall across the road. It could have snapped Jasper’s neck, cracked his ribs or staved in his skull. Shaken by the near miss, Jasper nevertheless hurried onwards to the cathedral, through the great door and into the cavernous gloom. Candles flickered. The organist wove chords. A few tourists were shuffling around, but Jasper did not pause to observe the masterpiece of medieval architecture. It was a bad evening to be out on. He walked around the cloisters to the chapter house, where the chorister had his office. He approached the door and was about to knock, when—

Knock-knock …

Jasper hadn’t knocked, but he had heard the sound.

He looked around for an explanation.

There was no explanation. Cautiously, Jasper raised his knuckles to knock again—

Knock-knock …

He hadn’t touched the door.

Was someone knocking on the inside of the door?

Why? A prank? Was this funny?

How were they timing it? There was no spyhole.

A third time Jasper readied his fist to knock.

Knock-knock …

Someone must be in the chorister’s room.

Jasper tried the door. Stiffly, it opened.

The chorister was behind his desk, across the room, reading The Times. ‘Ah, de Zoet. You know, a chap of your manners really should know better than to enter a room without knocking …’

Purple Flames

Dean steers the Beast off the A2 at the Wrotham Road roundabout. It’s a miracle we got this far. They’d had a flat tyre at Blackheath. Dean and Griff changed it while Jasper sat by the roadside. How come the rich own the world when they’re so bloody useless? The Beast’s engine is snarling. If the carburettor’s buggered , that’s another fifteen quid gone, easy, on top of the fiver for a new tyre. Despite two or three gigs a week, Dean still owes Moonwhale and Selmer’s Guitars an impossible number of pounds. I had more spare cash when I worked for Mr Craxi … We need a record deal, we need a hit, we need to raise our gig fee. Past the twenty-four-hour Watling Street café, favoured by long-distance truckers on the London–Dover–Continent run; past the old army barracks, mothballed for a future war; past a maze of council houses that was all fields when Dean was a boy; and over the lip of Windmill Hill, where gravity takes over and pulls the Beast down into Gravesend’s spillage of roofs; its cheek-by-jowl streets, alleyways, bomb sites, building sites, cranes, the railway to Ramsgate and Margate, steeples, gasworks, the new hospital sticking up like a box, blocks of flats and the sewage-brown Thames where barges dock at Imperial Paper, at Smollet Engineering, at the Blue Circle Cement works and, over on the Essex side, the Tilbury power stations. Smoke from the factory chimneys hangs over this hot, still, late-July afternoon.

‘Welcome to Paradise,’ pronounces Dean.

‘If you think this looks grim,’ says Griff, ‘just try Hull in the middle o’ January.’

‘Paradise is the road to Paradise,’ says Jasper.

Whatever the bollocks that means , thinks Dean.

‘It all looks very … authentic,’ says Elf.

Is she taking the piss? ‘Meaning?’ asks Dean.

‘Nothing,’ says Elf. ‘It was a pleasantry.’

‘Sorry it’s not all lovely like Richmond.’

‘No, I ’m sorry I’m such a clueless little rich girl, so out of touch with reality. I’ll watch Coronation Street to make amends.’

Dean presses the clutch and lets the Beast coast downhill. ‘I thought yer were taking the piss.’

‘Why would I?’

‘It’s hard to tell with yer …’

‘“Clueless little rich girls”?’

Dean says nothing for a bit. ‘I’m on edge. Sorry.’

Elf huffs. ‘Yeah. Well. Playing for the home crowd’s a big deal.’ The slope steepens and the Beast gains momentum. Truth is , thinks Dean, I’m worried Jasper and Elf’ll take one look at Nan and Bill and Ray and think , ‘Who are these troglodytes?’ I’m worried Nan and Bill and Ray’ll take one look at Jasper and Elf and think , ‘Christ, who are these la-di-dahs?’ I’m worried we’ll get booed offstage at the Captain Marlow. I’m worried we’ll be a laughing stock. And most of all, the closer I get to Harry Moffat, the colder and sicker I feel …

‘What the blue bloody fuck are yer playing at?’ Dean’s dad glared down at him. The Queen Street market was in full swing and Dean’s skiffle band, formed that very week, were playing ‘Not Fade Away’. Bill and Nan Moss had organised a whip-round and bought Dean a real live Czechoslovakian Futurama for his fourteenth birthday. It stayed in tune for a whole song. Dean had already collected a few coppers in the tobacco tin. Kenny Yearwood and Stewart Kidd were singing and playing a washboard but it was Dean’s band, Dean who had learned the chords, Dean who had claimed the pitch, Dean who had stopped Kenny and Stewart chickening out. Girls were watching. A few looked impressed. For the first time in months he felt more joyful than flat, sick and grey. Until his dad arrived. ‘I said , what the blue bloody fuck are yer playing at?’

‘We’re only busking, Dad,’ Dean managed to reply.

‘“Busking”? You’re begging .’

‘No, Mr Moffat,’ Kenny Yearwood began, ‘it’s not like—’

Dean’s dad pointed a single finger. ‘Fuck off. Both of yer.’

Kenny and Stewart Kidd gave Dean a pitying glance, and went.

‘What would yer mother say? Eh?’

Dean swallowed hard. ‘But Mum plays the piano. She—’

‘At home! In private! Not where the whole world can see! Pick that up.’ Dean’s dad scowled at the tin of coins and led him across the street to the collection box for a guide-dog charity outside Mr Dendy’s newsagents. It was coloured and shaped like a black Labrador. ‘All of it. Every farthing.’ Dean had no choice. Every coin went through the slot on the dog’s head. ‘Pull a stunt like this again, that guitar’s a goner. I don’t care who bought it yer. Am I clear?’

Dean hated his dad, hated himself for not standing up to him, and hated his dad for making him hate himself.

‘AM I CLEAR ?’

Vodka fumes and tobacco. That Harry Moffat smell.

Passers-by slowed down to rubber-neck.

Dean wished he could kill his dad right then.

Dean knew his Futurama was vulnerable.

Dean addressed the hollow dog: ‘Yes.’

Elf vamps a piano solo in ‘Moon River’ on Nan Moss’s piano. Dean breathes in the smell of bacon fat, old carpet, old person, cat litter. Nan’s entire ground floor, Dean guesses, would fit into Jasper’s lounge at Chetwynd Mews. Jasper looks as relaxed as Jasper ever does, and the four generations of assembled Mosses and Moffats are more curious about than disapproving of Dean’s exotic bandmates. So far. Griff, who grew up in a two-up-two-down, would feel at home here, but he’s taken the Beast down to the Captain Marlow to set up and meet a friend from his Archie Kinnock days. White-haired and crinkled, Nan Moss hums, sways and half-sings along to ‘Moon River’. Bill, Nan’s common-law husband and no mean piano player himself, nods at Elf’s style. Loud Aunt Marge and quiet Aunt Dot look on benignly. Their sister, Dean’s mum, watches from her photo frame. Next along is Dean’s brother Ray, Ray’s pregnant wife, Shirl, and their two-year-old, Wayne, enacting motorway crashes with his Dinky cars. Jasper sits in the corner of Nan’s parlour beneath a chevron of porcelain ducks. Dean studies his flatmate. They’ve shared boxes of cigarettes, boxes of Durex, boxes of eggs, tubes of toothpaste, books, pints of milk, guitar strings, bottles of shampoo, colds and Chinese takeaways … Sometimes he’s childishly unguarded; other times, he’s like an alien passing himself off as an earthling. He mentioned a breakdown he had at school, and a spell in a clinic in Holland. Dean didn’t probe. It felt wrong. He isn’t even sure if Jasper’s detachment from the real world is a cause, or a scar, of those days.