Дэвид Митчелл - Utopia Avenue

He wakes in the Hotel Shit-hole. He’s itchy. He inspects his torso. It’s speckled with insect bites. Several are smeared with blood where he scratched them in his sleep. What wouldn’t I do for a cigarette? He gets up and pees in the shit-hole. His pee smells like chicken soup. He’s thirsty. He’s hungry. In the last twenty-four hours he’s eaten … fuck-all, is what. He knocks on the door. It hurts his knuckles. ‘Hello?’ Nobody comes. ‘HELLO?’

Nobody comes. Don’t give up.

He knocks out the bass-line for ‘Abandon Hope’ …

Footsteps clomp. The eye-hatch snaps open. Dean thinks of the Scotch of St James. ‘ Stai morendo? ’

Meaning? Dean asks for ‘ Aqua, per favore. ’

A blast of pissed-off Italian. The hatch snaps shut.

Time drags. The food-hatch snaps open. Breakfast is almost the same as dinner. The bread is staler. There’s coffee served in an aluminium mug but the foam on the surface looks worryingly like phlegm. He thinks about trying to scoop it off to get at the coffee below, then pictures Ferlinghetti’s satisfaction so he leaves the coffee on the tray untouched. He thinks how the middle-classes – the Clive and Miranda Holloways of the world – go from cradle to grave believing that every police officer is a devoted servant of the law. A chant rises up from Dean’s recent memory.

Fuck the pigs!

Fuck the pigs!

Fuck the pigs!

RingRingRing!

RingRingRing!

RingRingRing!

The doorbell at Chetwynd Mews woke Dean up. His head pounded. The day before, the band had played a festival in a field near Milton Keynes. Elf had gone on to Birmingham to visit Imogen, Lawrence and her baby nephew Mark. Dean, Griff and Jasper had brought the Beast back to London, popped a pill and gone to the Ad Lib club. Jasper had left with an Olympic show-jumper from Dulwich and Griff with an Avon Lady, leaving Dean to woo a laughing-eyed half-Cypriot – until Rod Stewart waltzed up and stole her away. The pool of Ad Lib’s 2 a.m. leftovers was by then a puddle. He walked back to the flat with a strong suspicion that the Swinging Sixties weren’t all the papers cracked them up to be, even for a musician who had been on TV not once but twice …

RingRingRing! ‘Oy! Deano! I can see yer boots!’

Kenny Yearwood. Guilt propelled Dean to the front door. His hometown friend was living in a Hammersmith commune with a lentil-eating Tarot-reading girl called Floss. Dean had visited his art college buddy and Gravediggers bandmate exactly once. Kenny had played him a few forgettable self-penned songs, suggesting Dean ‘add a few finishing touches’ and record them with Utopia Avenue under a Yearwood-Moss credit. Dean had laughed at the joke until he realised Kenny was serious. They hadn’t met since. Kenny left messages a couple of times, but Dean assured himself he was too busy to call back. Then Griff had his car crash and Kenny slipped off Dean’s ‘to-do’ list.

‘Open up,’ called Kenny through the letter-box, ‘or I’ll huff ’n’ I’ll puff ’n’ I’ll blow— ’ Dean opened up, and was shocked by Kenny’s wholesale transformation from Gravesend ex-mod to West London hippie: caftan, headband, poncho. ‘Yer can run but yer can’t hide.’

‘Morning, Kenny. Floss, how’s tricks?’

‘It’s the afternoon, yer dope,’ said Kenny.

‘The afternoon of the big demo,’ said Floss.

‘Yer what? What big demo?’

‘The biggest demo of the decade,’ said Floss, ‘against American genocide in Vietnam. We’re gathering in Trafalgar Square and marching to the US Embassy. You are coming?’

If the United States government was hell-bent on turning a luckless country in Asia into an inferno of death, and forcing American teenagers to go and fight and die there, Dean doubted that walking down Oxford Street blowing whistles would change its mind. Before Dean could say so, a young woman floated up the steps to Jasper’s front door, opening a packet of Marlboro. ‘Hi, Dean, I’m Lara. Can we talk as we walk? Mustn’t miss Vanessa Redgrave.’

Lara looked superimposed onto the grey March afternoon. She wore a man’s black parka, open at the front, jeans, boots. Her black hair was streaked with red and she looked capable of anything. Unspent lust woke Dean up. ‘I’ll grab my coat.’

Speeches echoed off the National Gallery. ‘ The American war machine won’t stop until every man, woman, child, tree, ox, dog, cat is killed … ’ Trafalgar Square was jammed with hippies, students, trade unionists, CND supporters, Trotskyites and concerned citizens of all stripes and none. ‘ The economic crisis facing Great Britain and America has its roots in this suicidal war in Vietnam … ’ Hundreds more watched from the edges while the police guarded the Whitehall and Pall Mall exits leading to Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. ‘ We have travelled from West Germany for a new society, a better future, where imperialism, where war, where capitalism, belong only in the dustbin of history …’ The crowd generated a dim roar by its mere existence. Kenny put the number at ten thousand, Floss at twenty thousand and Lara thought it closer to thirty. Whatever its size, the crowd was a power grid. Dean felt his own nervous system connect to it. Scores of Vietcong flags were clustered around the foot of Nelson’s Column. Placards passed like pages: ‘HELL NO WE WON’T GO!’; ‘VICTORY TO THE VIETCONG!’; ‘WE ARE THE PEOPLE OUR PARENTS WARNED US ABOUT.’ Dean wondered how any of this would stop B52s bombing Vietnamese villages.

After the speeches, the mass of people began to drain up Charing Cross Road. Kenny, Floss, Lara and Dean followed the flow. Past the Phoenix Theatre, past Denmark Street, past Selmer’s Guitars, where Dean’s debt was paid off, finally. Past the doorway that led into the defunct UFO Club. At Tottenham Court Road, the crowd flowed left along Oxford Street. A young squaddie, acne on his face, emerged from the tube station. Peace demonstrators yelled abuse: ‘ How many kids did you kill, Soldier Boy? ’ before a paternal copper pushed him back down into the tube. ‘ Long – live – Ho Chi Minh! Long – live – Ho Chi Minh! ’ Oxford Street itself was shuttered, as if in preparation for invasion. Dean thought he glimpsed Mick Jagger, but wasn’t sure. Floss and Kenny told him they had heard John Lennon and his new girlfriend Yoko Ono were marching with the crowd. Whatever the truth, Dean felt the power. He and it were one. The road was theirs. The city was theirs.

‘Do you feel it too?’ asked Lara.

‘Yeah,’ said Dean. ‘Yeah, I do.’

‘Do you know the name of this feeling?’

‘What?’

‘Revolution.’

He looked at her, sideways.

Lara looked back. ‘We’re marching with the suffragettes, the Durruti Column, the Communards, the Chartists, the Roundheads, the Levellers, Wat Tyler …’

Dean didn’t admit he hadn’t heard of these bands.

‘… with everyone who stuck two fingers up to the bloodsucking Establishment of their age and said: “FUCK YOU.” Causes change, but power is in flux and its ownership is temporary.’

‘What’s yer surname, Lara?’ asked Dean.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘One day yer going to be famous.’

Lara lit a Marlboro. ‘Lara Veroner Gubitosi.’

‘Wow. That’s … long.’

‘Most names on Earth are longer than “Dean Moss”.’

‘S’pose so. Are yer Italian, then?’

‘I’m from many places.’

They turned into North Audley Street, where the march was funnelled south: ‘ Hands – off – Vietnam! Hands – off – Vietnam! ’ Faces watched from Mayfair townhouses. Two blocks south lay Grosvenor Square. Cordons of police and a defensive line of Black Marias walled off the American Embassy: a squat, modernist five-floor bunker, topped by an eagle.