Дэвид Митчелл - Utopia Avenue

The magic blue pill did not rescue him and, dimly, Dean realised that twenty onlookers would tell twenty others who would tell twenty others that a tosser called Dean Moss had made an utter prat of himself in the Bag o’ Nails.

‘It’s okay, Dermott.’ Rod Dempsey appeared at Dean’s shoulder. ‘I’ll guarantee the tab. Standard ceiling.’

The barman’s face changed instantly. ‘Ah, well, in that case …’ he looked back to Dean ‘… Mr Moss has a tab.’

Dean burned with gratitude. ‘Rod, I …’

Rod made an it’s-nothing gesture.

Dean jumped onto a table. ‘Bag o’ Nails! Whatever yer having, ask at the bar to put it on Dean Moss’s tab. Dean Moss . My band’s Utopia Avenue. Our album’s Paradise is the Road —’ A surge to the bar nudged Dean off his stool, and he half fell to the sticky floor. Hands lifted him up, laughing, and a string of brand-new lifelong friends toasted him with the Singapore Slings, Manhattans, triple Scotches, Babychams and pints of stout that Dean, Dean’s talent and Dean’s generosity had paid for. His friends loved ‘Darkroom’, and Dean promised them ‘Abandon Hope’ would blow their minds.

The night became aquatic. Girls asked, ‘So you really are a pop star!’ Dean said, ‘It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it,’ or ‘I am now, but I started off as a boy with a crazy dream.’ Girls asked if he knew any Stones or Beatles. Girls listened to his true lies with wide eyes. Girls shepherded Dean to the dance-floor. One slid her hands around the back of his neck. He must have asked her name because she put her lips to his ear, like a fish nibbling the maggot on a hook. ‘Izzy Penhaligon.’

‘Would I still be working class,’ Dean repeats the question, ‘if I had a mansion in Surrey, a Triumph Spitfire ’n’ all that shit?’

Amy Boxer – Amy – nods as if she knows the answer.

A one-legged pigeon lands on the ledge of Levon’s window.

Who cares? ‘Ask me when it happens.’

‘“When it happens”?’ asks Amy. ‘Not “if”?’

‘Yeah. “When”.’ Cheeky cow.

Scratch, scratch, scratch, goes Amy’s pen.

‘Are yer going to make me out to be an idiot?’

Amy looks up, doesn’t say no and doesn’t say yes.

‘Amy’s okay,’ Levon tells Dean. ‘We go back a ways.’

Dean scratches an itch at the base of his spine. ‘That thing she wrote about John’s Children made ’em look like pillocks.’

‘They didn’t need my help,’ says Amy, ‘to look like pillocks.’

‘John’s Children?’ Elf knows them. ‘The ones who tried to upstage the Who by getting the crowd to wreck the venue?’

‘The Who could shit a turd each into a bucket,’ grunts Griff, ‘and that bucket’d still be a better band than John’s Children.’

‘Ooh, can I quote you on that?’ asks Amy.

‘Utopia Avenue,’ said Levon, ‘wish John’s Children—’

‘Aye, quote me on it,’ says Griff.

Amy’s biro scratches her notepad. ‘One last question for all of you, if I may. When I listened to Paradise Is the Road to Paradise , I kept wondering about politics. We live in revolutionary times. The Cold War. The end of empires. The erosion of authority. Attitudes to sex and drugs. Should music mirror change? Should music try to trigger change? Can it? Does yours?’

‘It’s easier when they ask about pets and favourite food,’ mutters Griff, still under his cowboy hat.

‘“Abandon Hope” ends with the atom bomb,’ says Elf.

‘“Mona Lisa” has feminism at its core,’ remarks Jasper. ‘Its “sister song”, so to speak, is Nina Simone’s “Four Women”.’

‘Even “Darkroom” has a with-it free-love friskiness,’ suggests Dean. ‘It’s not ’xactly “I Want To Hold Your Hand”.’

‘You each nominated someone else’s song,’ says Amy.

‘That’s us,’ growls Griff. ‘One big happy family.’

‘Yet “A Raft and a River” is an ode to music,’ Amy continues. ‘“The Prize” is about the swings and roundabouts of success. “Purple Flames”, one of my songs of the year by the way –’ she looks at Dean who throbs with pleasure before reminding himself that critics are the enemy ‘– is acutely, nakedly personal. These aren’t political.’

‘Where does it say a band can’t be both?’ asks Elf.

‘Now ’n’ then yer get a song that’s both great music and makes a statement,’ says Dean. ‘“For What It’s Worth”. “Mississippi Goddamn”. “A Change is Gonna Come”. But a whole album o’ stuff busting its guts to be political with a capital P? That’s not pretty. I should know. I was in Battleship Potemkin.’

‘The Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Kinks,’ says Griff. ‘They’re not trying to change the world. They don’t buy their mansions by writing anthems about CND or making a socialist paradise. They’re just out to make fookin’ good music.’

‘The best pop songs are art,’ says Jasper. ‘Making art is already a political act. The artist rejects the dominant version of the world. The artist proposes a new version. A sub version. It’s there in the etymology. Tyrants are right to fear art.’

‘And music scares ’em shitless,’ says Dean. ‘It’s the hooks. Once music’s in yer, it’s in for good. The best music’s a kind o’ thinking. Or a kind o’ re thinking. It doesn’t follow orders.’ Bloody hell , thinks Dean, I sound intelligent.

Early on Sunday morning after the Bag o’ Nails, Dean stood outside Izzy Penhaligon’s house feeling stupid. London’s edges and signs were blurred by a cold fog that Dean’s Napoleon coat did little to keep out. Nobody was around. The night had been a disappointment. Izzy Penhaligon kept flinching, and her parting words were, ‘I think you’d better leave now’. They hadn’t exchanged phone numbers. He set off down Gordon Street, discovering only when he reached Euston Road that he had walked north instead of south. He waited at a bus stop for a number 18. He wondered where Kenny and Stew had ended up last night. He’d said his friends could kip at Chetwynd Mews, a promise he conveniently forgot when Izzy Penhaligon said, ‘Come back to mine’. He thought of how Harry Moffat had needed vodka to feel normal, and wondered if he himself needed sex to feel normal, or loved, or successful, or real. The idea was unpleasantly plausible. The number eighteen bus continued not to show up, so Dean set off down Euston Road on foot. A number eighteen overtook Dean thirty seconds later. Its conductor watched Dean’s attempts to flag it down as the bus was swallowed by fog.

Dean turned into Gower Street. As he pounded along the pavement, a guitar line marched along with him. He adjusted it, distorted and spiky and metallic, two bars long. The first half of the phrase asked a question that the second half answered. A perfect hook. He skirted Bedford Square. Dead leaves clung to trees. Morwell Street, where he used to live, opened on his left. Dean entered its narrow gullet. Visibility was down to ten paces or so. He passed Mrs Nevitt’s house. He thought of the five pounds she had stolen from him. Her sign, ‘BEDSIT TO LET – BLACKS & IRISH NEED NOT APPLY – ENQUIRE WITHIN’, sat on her windowsill. In the gutter, he noticed a loose cobble and decided it had been put there for a reason. Checking nobody was emerging from the fog in either direction, Dean hurled the cobble through the window. It entered with little fuss – just a brief, musical shattering of glass. He jogged away, exhilarated. Nobody called out, nobody saw him – a secret he would take to his urn.

Oxford Street was populated only by a few refugees from Saturday night. In Soho Square a wiry black dog was dogging a chubby pale bitch. Sex is the puppet-master, he thought, and scribbled the five words on an old bus ticket with a biro. Elf says, ‘ If you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen. ’ Rhymes cropped up: disaster, sticking-plaster, faster and faster . He passed the clinic where ‘Hopkins’ had sent him running for a stretcher all those months ago. London is a game. It makes its rules up as it goes along. One of Mr Craxi’s nephews was mopping the floor of the Etna café. Dean considered dropping by Elf’s flat in Livonia Street with croissants from the French bakery, but remembered Bruce would be there. If Dean could click his fingers and erase Bruce Fletcher’s existence, no questions asked, no murder investigation, he wouldn’t hesitate. In fact, he clicked his fingers now, just on the off-chance it would work. He’d be seeing Elf at Pavel Z’s for rehearsal. They were playing in Brixton that night. Not too far to drive. He emerged from Soho onto Regent Street, a curved fog-canal, and crossed into Mayfair. He decided to ring Jude after he’d had a bath. He decided to treat her better. Even Griff was calling him a tart. Dean should send her some flowers. Girls like flowers. He might turn his hook into a song for Jude, he thought, or write a song around her, like ‘Darkroom’ was around Mecca. At the Polish grocer’s on Brook Street, Dean bought a box of eggs, a loaf of bread, a Daily Mirror and a packet of Dunhill. ‘Foggy day,’ said the man.