Utopia Avenue

Mecca speaks carefully. “My father was a history teacher in Prague. Before the Wehrmacht took him and sent him to Normandy. He did not wish to go, but if he refused, he would be shot. My mother escaped Prague ahead of the Russians to Nuremberg with me. So I know about history. Lebensraum. Genocides. War crimes. I know. But I was born in 1944. I gav

“The mystery o’ fishing’s this,” said Dean’s dad, “what’s the hook, who’s got the rod, what’s the maggot, what’s the fish?” “Why’s that a mystery, Dad?” “Yer’ll understand when yer older.” “But ain’t it obvious what’s what?” “It changes, son. In a heartbeat.”

Elf looks out at Denmark Street. Hundreds of people pass by. Reality erases itself as it rerecords itself, Elf thinks. Time is the Great Forgetter. She gets her notebook from her handbag and writes, Memories are unreliable…Art is memory made public. Time wins in the long run. Books turn to dust, negatives decay, records get worn out, civilizations

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.

THE SKY TURNS dark. Dean sucks a toffee as the Beast passes through Pease Pottage, a village less quaint than its name. “If I had to choose one gig, it’d be Little Richard at the Folkestone Odeon. ’Bout ten years ago. Bill Shanks took us. Bill owns the record shop in Gravesend and sold me my first proper guitar. He drove my brother Ray ’n’ me and a

“Some kid of Joe Boyd’s. His name didn’t stick. Nick Duck, Nick Lake, or something. I need to clean some of your shit up.”

“The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” says Tiffany. “That’s jolly evocative,” says Elf. “I love it.” “The title’s from Bashō,” says Jasper. “The Japanese poet.”

Where do I begin? “His brother’s dead. He was driving. He blames himself. The whole thing’s hit him very hard.” “Once I knew a stable-boy,” says Francis Bacon. “He used to say, ‘Grief is the bill of love, fallen due.’ I can’t recall his face or even name, but I remember that line. Isn’t it odd, what sticks?”

“Here’s to friends who know when to bully us”—the