Utopia Avenue

by David Mitchell

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.