Gabriel's Gift (3 page)

His idea was for a story called ‘Dealer's Day', about a young drug courier who is used by his older brother to make deliveries, and eventually gets caught and sent to a ‘secure' institution.

Gabriel was saving up to get a 16mm film camera, but that would take time. He would have to find lights and buy film stock. He would not use cheap video. His best friend Zak, a natural exhibitionist who fancied himself as an actor and singer, a boy who took it for granted that he would be successful, would play the lead; local kids would play extras and help with equipment. Gabriel wanted to make the film soon, before Zak was too old to play the kid.

Meanwhile, as he could see the film in his mind but was afraid of forgetting parts of it – once he started work new ideas occurred every day, often in a rush and usually on his way to school, where they faded like hidden murals exposed to the light – his father suggested he draw it. Dad had taken him to buy story-boards, books consisting of rows of white squares, like film frames, into which you could draw the scene. Beneath the pictures Gabriel neatly wrote the dialogue and had persuaded his father to start writing the soundtrack.

Lately he had done virtually nothing. Since Dad had left, it wasn't that Gabriel had lost concentration, for this came and went, like everything; it was that his sense of purpose was wavering. His father's interest had worked as a little driving motor. Why would anyone think they could achieve something? Only because someone believed in them.

Gabriel's grandfather – Dad's father – had been a greengrocer,
with a shop in the suburbs. He had spent his days serving others, of whom he had a high opinion. Anyone who walked into his shop was better than him. He was a tight-lipped man from a generation who believed you ‘spoiled' children by being pleasant to them; you certainly shouldn't praise them. So convinced had he been by this that he had taken no interest in his son whatsoever. Dad felt he had been held back by this ‘small' idea of himself. He didn't want his son to be the same.

Gabriel thought of his father climbing into the van and being driven God knows where. This incident replayed itself repeatedly in his mind like a song that wouldn't go away. He remembered his mother crying in this room, his parents' bedroom, emptied now of his father's guitars, tablas and other musical instruments.

He thought, too, of the time, a few months ago, when his father had come to look for him after Gabriel had started to hang out in the local flats.

His mother had been working hard in her room and Dad had at last managed to get a job playing sixties songs in a bar in Oslo, sitting on a stool surrounded by blondes, going ‘Rebel, rebel, you're a star …'

After school, Gabriel had been meeting with some older and more ‘advanced' adolescents who had taken over a flat – known as the ‘drum' – in a nearby block. The place was filled with stolen junk like black and white TVs which the local fences couldn't pass on in neighbourhood pubs.

The kids watched satellite TV with Bullseye, the albino Alsatian, and whisperingly busied about with much secret urgency, labouring at the most desirable alchemy known to mankind: how to earn money without getting a job. It wasn't too difficult. Many eleven-year-olds turned up after school, wearing Tommy Hilfiger coats over their uniforms, to buy hash. The demand was so great that an older kid had set up a counter in the kitchen called ‘the tuck shop', from behind which blocks of dope were handed over, like putrid chocolate bars.

A few street beggars came by, too – local kids, and children blown down from the North, who mostly slept in children's homes and hostels. Not only were they more experienced than Gabriel, but they had lived under harsh, cruel regimes. Terrible
things had happened to these unprotected children, and, Gabriel guessed, somehow always would.

Despite his normalcy, or because of it, Gabriel was sent on errands to flats, squats and street corners, delivering packages that he hid in his underwear and shoes. Being a ‘tiddler', and young and white, and knowing the local short cuts and hideouts, he was less likely to be stopped by the police, or worse – other gangsters. Sometimes on these trips he pushed the prams of locals girls. Later he was told that the baby's nappies had been stuffed with sachets of uplifting powder.

Unlike some of the other kids his age, he had never had a regular girlfriend. But there was a sex room in the drum. A couple of the girls were so amused by his virginity that as a favour they had pushed him onto the dirty mattress and stolen his cherry, taking it in turns to hold a crying baby while the short, absurd ceremony continued.

‘You won't forget that – buoy,' one of them had said.

‘No, I don't think I will,' he had replied.

When Gabriel's father returned from Norway and failed to find him, he called at Zak's and other school friends of Gabriel's. No one had seen the boy. Asking everywhere for his son, Dad visited shebeens where sixties reggae was played over card games – there were towering piles of money on the tables and a threatening unease; he visited community centres where he heard ‘lovers' rock', and pool halls full of bejewelled gangs and posses in ‘pukka' gear.

Gabriel remembered Dad walking into the filthy drum, coming over to pick him up from the floor, and trying to heave him over his shoulder as if he were a child.

‘I can walk,' Gabriel had said. ‘You'll ruin your back again.'

Dad had been carrying a guitar, and one of the older boys thought he was a tube busker looking for a score or a place to sleep. Gabriel giggled to himself at the thought of how irked his father would have been had he known this.

Gabriel had been impressed by how his father hadn't been afraid; he would have known that the kids were contemptuous of authority and carried knives and worse. But Gabriel saw, as his father touched fists with the kids and sat down to talk with them, that Dad didn't believe they were beyond his human reach.

When Dad led Gabriel away and told him never to return,
saying he was too young for such a forlorn and unhappy place, Dad himself was troubled by the prohibition. He had grasped that Gabriel required other worlds and needed to move away from his parents. The ‘drum' was something Gabriel should know about, Dad said, but he didn't think, at the moment, that Gabriel could come through it intact. Some people felt compelled to live self-destructive lives, but these lives could become addictive and impossible to escape.

Dad had ridden to the rescue at the right moment: a grille for the drum door was arriving, and older, more serious villains were starting to use the place as a hide-out. A few weeks later Gabriel heard at school that the ‘drum' had been raided, the police forcing everyone to lie on the floor. Some of the kids had been hauled out, smacked hard in the stomach and taken away. There were many available crimes for them to be fitted to.

After this, Gabriel was at home most of the time and his trespasses – horrid though they were – were mostly of the imagination. Fortunately there were plenty of them, since his mother, clearing out her room, had inadvertently made him a great gift. She had leaned a gilt-edged mirror against the wall at the end of his bed.

Looking in it one wet-fingered day after school, he had fallen in love. There would be a lifetime of such swooning! He understood why grown-ups whispered and what there was to hide. There was a secret. The world was a façade. It was the beyond, behind and underneath – a nether factory making dreams and stories that writhed with strange life.

He went to work.

In the glass-walled world, listening to music by Lester Jones, Gabriel liked to watch himself smoking a cigarette in a kooky hat and exotic waistcoat, as if he were a movie character. Adjusting the angle of the mirror, he could pretend to be someone else, any woman he wanted to be or have, particularly if he had painted his toenails in some dainty shade and was wearing his mother's rings, necklaces and shoes. He preferred the ones with straps and heels, or anything that resembled a cross between a dagger and a boat. Low-heeled sandals did nothing for him. Perhaps they were an acquired taste. His mother, to his chagrin, didn't wear boots any more.

When he was in the ‘shoe' mood, the different characters he brought together enacted rumbustious scenes as he tore in and out of the mirror's eye, a crowd of actors in one body. It wasn't an uncreative pastime. If, like all children, he was a pervert, he was also a film director and screenwriter.

Today, however, he wasn't in a ‘shoe' mood. Earlier he had thrown a sheet over the mirror. He wanted to draw. A thought had remained in his mind from watching TV the other night. As far as he could remember, it went something like this: art is what you do when other people leave the room.

Left in his mother's room, he turned the pages of the art book until something attracted his attention.

He found himself looking at a picture of a pair of boots – gnarled, broken, old work boots. Often, when he wanted to draw, he copied something, to warm up. He decided to work in charcoal. As he sketched, the boots came easily, the lines seeming to make themselves in the way his legs did when running, without persuasion.

After a few minutes he noticed an unusual smell. He went to the door to see if Hannah was standing outside the room, as she was a person around whom different odours seemed to congregate, like bums on a street corner. He could hear her moving about downstairs in the kitchen. Probably she was dyeing her hair, which she did at least once a fortnight: this involved her putting a plastic bag on her head, which didn't stop strings of dark colour running down her face, until she resembled a Christmas pudding.

No; the smell wasn't her.

Turning around, he saw that in the middle of the room were the boots he had copied from the book.

He walked around them, before going closer and squatting down. They smelt of dung, mud, the countryside and grass.

He picked the boots up, touched them, slipped off his shoes and tried them on, shuffled a little way, and collapsed. He couldn't stop laughing in surprise and perplexity. When he tired of this, he returned to the sketchbook. In the centre of the page was a boot-shaped hole. As he turned the page, the boots were sucked back onto it, and everything returned to normal.

Or did it?

He looked about fearfully. An eerie terror, like a ghost, had swished into the room. The purple knob of the wardrobe handle seemed like one of Hannah's eyes. Perhaps it had detached itself from her face and flown up here to spy. He was reminded of a picture by Marc Chagall that featured a barn-like house with a huge all-seeing brown eye in the roof. When Gabriel returned the stare, the eye turned back into a dull rough surface.

He was disturbed but excited by what he'd done. It didn't seem like a dangerous ability. But it was wrong to mess with magic, wasn't it? He didn't know. Who would know? Parents and teachers were there to be believed in, or at least argued with. If they no longer functioned, or, like his father, were blasted by doubt, where was there to turn for the rules? Who knew what was going on?

He did what he always did at times like this: consulted his twin brother, Archie, truly his other half.

There would today – if fate hadn't fingered one of them – be two identical boys sitting side by side in this room, one born a few breaths later, clutching the heel of the other. Gabriel would be talking to, and looking at, himself and not-himself, face to face with his own features, worn by another.

Instead, the dead brother, alive inside the living half, had become a magic, and wiser, boy – Gabriel's daemon or personal spirit.

Gabriel's father still talked of how proud he had been, pushing his two sons up a hill in the tank of a double pushchair, face into the wind, to the park. Wherever he went with them, they drew crowds and comment. ‘Two for the price of one,' he would say, standing back so others could look at, converse with or tickle his boys. ‘Double trouble,' he'd add fondly.

Then, aged two and a half, one boy died from meningitis. It was a miracle, the doctors said, that the other survived.

How could Gabriel and his parents ever recover? For a long time he had been an imprisoned prince, living with an elusive woman who had gained a child and lost one. She could be both indifferent and passionate. He had never learned how to convert the one into the other, except in his imagination, where he could do anything, apart from be with other people; that was, he guessed, the hardest art of all.

When Gabriel was four, he almost drowned in the sea, his father running in to save him. At this, Mum almost drowned in sadness and terror herself. Afterwards, she had become too careful with Gabriel, not letting him live for fear he might die. Worry was like an engine that kept people alive. Fortunately, her husband had a reckless, frivolous, streak, which stopped them all from suffocating, but she had entered a zone of fear that she was unable to leave. When he was young, they rarely left the house.

Gabriel didn't remember Archie outside of the many photographs of the twins together, displayed in the hall, his parents' bedroom and the living room. These precious framed pictures were never touched, moved or commented on, but they had always disturbed Gabriel for one important reason. His parents didn't know which boy was which. His mother claimed that, when Archie was alive, they and they alone could tell the two apart. But recently his father had admitted that he had given one boy a dose of medicine twice, and that sometimes they put them in the wrong cots and didn't realize the mistake until the morning.

This made Gabriel wonder whether they had been permanently mixed up. Perhaps he was Archie and Gabriel was dead. Certainly, he was always aware of his brother's absence, and whenever he saw a pair of twins he wanted to rush over and tell them or their mother that there were two of him, too; it was just that one of them was a shadow.

‘Will Archie come back?' he liked to ask Mum, from the age of six. They had gone to visit his grave, as they always did on the anniversary of his death. Gabriel's birthday – their birthday – was always sad, too.