Gabriel's Gift (4 page)

‘No,' she would say sharply. ‘Never, never.'

‘Does he hear us talking about him?'

‘No.'

‘Does he think?'

‘No.'

‘Does he see?'

‘No.'

‘Not even black?'

‘No. He sees nothing. Nothing for ever.'

‘Is he in heaven as well as under the ground?'

‘He could be. Gabriel –'

‘With his friends?'

‘Gabriel, we carry him with us, wherever we go, in our minds but he will be dead for ever and ever and ever.'

She would say no more and would clench and unclench her fists as if trying to retain water in the palm of her hand.

If Archie was in his mind, Gabriel always had someone to talk to. Together, the boys could conspire against their parents. If Gabriel didn't fidget and listened carefully he could hear Archie, for Archie looked out for his brother and was sensible and always knew what to do. Sometimes, if he felt frivolous, Gabriel would call up Archie by singing ‘Two of Us' by the Beatles.

Now Gabriel became silent so as to hear his brother's voice whispering within his body.

Archie was saying not to be afraid; Gabriel should go on drawing. If the objects became real, it wasn't bad or black magic, just an unusual gift that could be of use. When Gabriel hesitated, Archie said that things might change, but that he should go on to see what might happen.

First, though, Gabriel would have to see if it might be possible to repeat the strange exercise.

On the next page of the art book was a picture of a yellow chair. He didn't want to admit liking this kind of art, just right for the front of a postcard. He'd rather prefer the stronger stuff: toilets, blood and pierced eyeballs with titles like ‘Pulsations of the Slit'. The pretty pictures that had so shocked people in the old days had lost their power. But this one spoke to him now.

It was, as Archie murmured, useful. There was no point being snobbish. Their father, who had plenty of curiosity but little taste, except in music, might like it. The last time Dad had rung, he said he'd found somewhere to live. He had taken a room in a big house not far away.

‘It's a little bare and cold,' he had said. ‘But there's a bed and –'

‘And?'

‘Wardrobe.'

What he needed were some bright pictures.

‘What did he say? What did he say?' asked Gabriel's mother, who had fortuitously overheard the conversation, no doubt by bending over and pressing her ear to the door.

‘Dad's found a room.'

‘What sort of room?'

‘It's bare and cold.'

‘Oh dear.' Mum had giggled. ‘Very cold? But he hates the cold.'

‘He hasn't got anywhere to sit.'

He imagined his father standing up to read, eat and watch television, or leaning against the wall now and again, for relief.

As Gabriel started to copy the chair, he began to feel he was bringing it into existence. He worked rapidly; it was like singing a song: once you'd started you shouldn't think about it. When he had finished drawing and colouring in, he closed his eyes and looked up.

There it was.

He ran his hand over its ridges and curves. Gingerly, wondering whether it might collapse, he sat down. It was secure and comfortable. Gabriel stood on it, and danced a bit. It took his weight; this was a chair you could put your arse on and wiggle about.

When he returned to his sketchbook and turned the page, the real chair disappeared, but his copy remained.

The more he considered what he had done, the more disturbing he found it. Winking daffodils had tried to communicate with him. Dead brothers spoke within him. The earth, surely, had tilted and was trembling on its axis. Who would put it back before it tipped into eternity?

To check that everything else was as he'd left it, he went down to the living room to find Hannah watching television, her wayward eyes flickering fitfully in the darkening room.

‘Hannah.'

She looked about in surprise. ‘Bah!'

‘What?' he said, grateful, almost, to hear another human voice.

‘Bath!'

‘Right.'

She ran his bath.

He could do it himself but he liked her to feel capable. Really, the poor woman, of all people, was only his mother's conscience. Sometimes he wondered whether he thought about Hannah more than she thought about him.

She was watching him. ‘Those clothes – to me give.'

‘What will you do with them?'

‘Wash.'

‘Hannah …'

‘No, you mama says – three days too long without washing clothes. Every day you change clothes – she has ordered.'

‘You know it takes me a few days to start feeling comfortable in anything. Thinking about new clothes makes me feel tired. And I haven't got a girlfriend at the moment.'

‘Here!'

He put on a dressing gown and handed her his clothes. ‘Still, as Dad says, never wear anything that is actually stiff. Hannah, he's a funny guy.'

‘He is?'

‘You should hear him. You'll understand when you meet him some time.'

‘You mama say, he is fool.'

‘What? She's a fool to say that.'

Scowling, Hannah fetched clean towels.

He locked the door, bathed quickly and went to his room to do more ‘homework'. When Hannah had checked on him and gone back to watch television, he crept into his mother's room. He picked up the art books from the floor, and looked and thought, afraid he might cry.

He had no idea what time his mother would come home; he had given up waiting for the hiss and rustle of her clothing, the trail of her perfume, the swing, fall and tickle of her hair, and her arms around him, pulling him into her. Samuel Beckett, whose play he had seen at school, produced by the local college, had been on to something: waiting was hard, wearing work, probably the worst torture of all, turning people into both victims and murderers in their minds.

Since his father had left and she had got a job, Mum had changed in other ways. For a start she had acquired a new wardrobe.

Late at night, when she came in to kiss him, she would wear a big fur-collared overcoat, jewellery and high heels. She would be accompanied by a symphony of new smells: the night air of unfamiliar parts of the city – he believed he could smell the East End on her at times, as well as aftershave, alcohol and marijuana. She
had even, late in the evening, brought men he hadn't met into the house. Loud music would be played, bottles would be emptied, and there'd be dancing. In the morning she'd forget who he was and call him ‘Sugar'.

Now, back in his bedroom, lying in the dark, he heard the door open slowly. He was afraid; it had been too strange a day already.

‘Gabriel …' whispered Hannah. ‘Are you in this world?'

‘At the moment.'

‘Something to tell.'

‘Mum's going to be even later?'

‘Your dadda has ringed.'

‘Dad? It was him?'

‘Yes.'

‘Didn't he want to speak to me?'

‘He offer a message to say he will pick you up tomorrow.'

‘He's coming here?'

‘He taking you to him place.'

‘To his house for the night? Is it that Mum's given permission?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did he say what has happened to him? Is he all right?'

‘No. No more enquiry. Pack your vest and underpant.'

It would be the first time he had stayed with his father. Gabriel had been hoping for this.

‘Sleep well,' said Hannah. ‘Peace for me, tomorrow then.'

‘Get lost.'

‘What?'

‘An English expression: may you get lost in sweet dreams.'

‘I get. Thanks. Get lost to you and God bless you fresh cheeks all night.'

‘And all your fresh cheeks, Hannah.'

After school the next day Gabriel was waiting at the living-room window with Hannah behind him. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them his father was at the gate.

‘Yes!' Gabriel shouted. ‘Yes, yes!' He turned to Hannah. ‘See, he did come.'

‘No noise,' said Hannah. She was watching Dad warily.

Even though he knew Gabriel's mother was out at work, Dad didn't come into the house but stood on the step with his back to the door, tapping his foot as Gabriel packed his drawing things and art books into his rucksack.

Dad was unshaven, wore dark glasses and had his woollen hat pulled down. Gabriel remembered Mum saying to him, ‘Careful: people will take you for a burglar. A police record is the only recording you're going to make!'

‘I'll burgle your arse in a minute!' he had replied, grabbing her.

On good days he would be affectionate, always touching, kissing and hugging. But Mum said he was clumsy, and didn't know how to touch.

Under his hat Dad was balding; the hair he did have was pulled back by a rubber band he picked up off the street. The rest was straggly and frizzy. His jeans were ripped – ‘ventilation' he called it – and he wore plimsolls, which gave him ‘uplift'. His idea of dressing up was to pull a fresh pair from a number of similar boxes he kept in the cellar.

‘Let's get going,' Dad said, hurrying Gabriel away from the house.

Hannah stood at the window, mouthing, ‘Get lost!'

Gabriel said, ‘I've been excited all day. Two houses instead of one. I'll be like other kids now.'

Gabriel was thinking of children whose absent parent felt so guilty they became eternally indulgent, and couldn't stop giving them presents.

‘It's a kind of flat, not a house,' said Dad.

To Gabriel's surprise they didn't go straight to Dad's place, but to the V&A in South Kensington, walking around the old jars and pots in an agitated silence that Dad called ‘meditative'.

Gabriel was used to his father taking him to see the latest work – the strangest stuff – by young artists working in squats, lofts and abandoned garages. Gabriel had looked at heads made of blood, hair and old skin; he had seen dissected animals, and strange photographs of body-parts. The only canvas he saw was Tracy Emin's tent. Gabriel had learned that anything could be art. His father had no shame about knocking on the door of young artists he admired, and going in for ‘a chat', since he knew they had been keen to talk about their work. Today, however, he wasn't feeling ‘inquisitive'.

Gabriel had started to draw seriously two years before, when his father hardly worked and was at home much of the time. There were no artists in the family, but perhaps Gabriel had turned to art and making films because it wasn't something Dad had ever thought of doing.

Unlike most musicians, Dad could read music as well as play several instruments pretty well. The house had been full of guitars; Dad also used to have a saxophone, a piano and a drum kit. At one time, in a garage near by, he had started to build his own harpsichord.

From the age of fourteen, Dad had played in many longhaired, short-haired and now, mostly, bald bands. He could play in any style, and sing in only one. Gabriel's mother called him Johnny-about-to-be-famous. Dad was smart enough to know that by his age you had either become successful, rich and pursued by lawyers, stalkers and the press, as some of his former friends had been, or you found something else to do. ‘Something else', of course, was an admission of failure; ‘something else' was the end.

Worse than this, according to Mum, was to play pool in the pub every day with other ‘superannuated long-hairs in dirty jeans', saying how the latest ‘beep-beep' music wasn't a patch on Jimi's or Eric's. This group of has-beens, who, as Gabriel once quipped, could hardly manage ‘joined-up talking', only left the pub to attend AA meetings. Mum, who remembered being at the centre
of the rock scene, wouldn't have these bums in the house. At night Dad went to his mates' houses to drink, jam and smoke dope.

At least Dad had never stopped loving music. It was just that he didn't get paid for it.

He still played live with these friends, in pubs or at parties and weddings, where no one listened and middle-aged people danced without moving their bodies. Not long ago they had been invited to play in a hotel while the guests had supper. It was a pretentious place but seventies music had been requested. Gabriel had gone along to help set up, as most of the band were in such bad shape they could barely lift their instruments.

Dad's band had played the tunes that millions had liked when he had been in Lester Jones's group, but one by one the guests were driven like refugees from the dining room, carrying their plates and some of them still chewing, until only one red-faced old man remained, dancing in front of the band. He danced till he collapsed into the arms of a doctor who was staying there.

Sometimes Dad became dejected, or distraught with envy at the young kids, not much older than Gabriel, who flashed across the nation's televisions, into the charts and
Hello!
magazine, and then were gone, carrying a good deal of money with them, if they were lucky.

Gabriel had played both guitar and piano from a young age and had been in a school group, playing indie rock, for a few weeks. He couldn't write songs and didn't improve as a musician. The pained look on his father's face – Dad hated him to play badly – made murder more likely and learning impossible. It was easier for Gabriel not to play, and, anyhow, Dad hated anyone touching his instruments. If Dad watched Gabriel, it was because he was worried about whether the boy would drop his best guitar. When, to the relief of them both, Gabriel ‘retired', what he did miss was having something big to be interested in.

One day his mother had taken him to see an exhibition of old and new drawings at the British Museum. Afterwards, she bought him pencils and a sketchbook. Like his father, Gabriel soon had his own ‘sacred' objects, obtained cheaply from the numerous second-hand shops in the area: paintbrushes, pencils, videotapes, old Kodaks. He started to take his ‘objects' wherever
he went, in his special rucksack. If he placed something like a pencil or camera between himself and the world, the distance, or the space, enabled good ideas to grow. He and his father were working in parallel, rather than in competition.

When the weather was good and Dad was feeling ‘inquisitive', Gabriel and Dad used to ride their bicycles along the river. Dad refused to leave London: for him, the rest of the country was a wasteland of rednecks and fools, living in squalor and poverty. Luckily, parts of the towpath were so secluded you could almost believe you were in the country, but only a few miles from the fizz and crackle of the city.

In the early evening, before going to the pub, his father would practise his instruments, his bass guitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, his mandolin, even his old banjo. He said he felt they were looking at him reproachfully, yearning to be played. He devoted time to them all.

As Dad played cross-legged on the floor, humming to himself and swigging beer, a roll-up fixed between his stained fingers, the hard pads of flesh on his right hand, where he held down the notes, flying across the frets, Gabriel had worked too. He drew his father's face and hands; he drew the guitars and the faces of his school friends; he experimented with crayons, with pen and ink, and paints: he and his father together, both lost in something.

It was dark when they arrived now at Dad's new place. Gabriel had the impression that his father wanted to get there as late as possible. It was a vast collapsing house sliced into dozens of small rooms.

‘Magnificent old building, full of original features,' said Dad. ‘Worth millions. My room is the penthouse, at the top.'

Gabriel took a camera from his rucksack. ‘You stand over there, Dad, by that rotting pillar.'

‘Later. Put it away.'

‘Dad –'

‘Put it away, I said. You might notice … there are some strange characters here. You'd learn a lot if you talked to them. It's a bit like the sixties.'

‘Cool.'

‘Right.'

His father spoke of the sixties with reverence, in the way others
spoke of ‘the war': as a time of great deeds and unrepeatable excitement. Somehow, all the windows everywhere were open, and, in a ‘universal moment', God's favourite album,
Sgt. Pepper
, was being played for the first time. Many of Dad's sentences would begin: ‘One day in the sixties …' as in ‘One day in the sixties when I was playing Scrabble with Keith Richards – he was a particularly tenacious opponent and fond of the word “risible” …'

Gabriel thought he might make a film about his father entitled
One day in the Sixties
. Gabriel suspected that his father had actually been quite young in the ‘sixties', and that he'd seen less of it than he liked to make out. But fathers didn't like to be doubted; fathers lacked humour when it came to themselves.

In the hallway Dad said, ‘Now, deep breath, heads down. There isn't a lift, I'm pleased to say. This is an opportunity for much-needed exercise.'

Gabriel kept his head down but couldn't help noticing that the colourless stair carpet was ripped and stained. When he looked up he saw that on each landing there were toilets and waterlogged showers. Outside the rooms, bearded men in robes, turbans, fezzes and tarbooshes seemed to talk backwards in undiscovered languages.

Dad followed Gabriel awkwardly, stopping to rest at each bend. He had a limp, or ‘war wound', which sometimes he told strangers he had acquired in the ‘revolutionary struggle of making the world a better place, with free food and marijuana all round'. In fact his ‘wound' was of an altogether more ignoble, though – to some – more amusing, origin.

When at last they got to the top, and Dad had to stop and lean against a damp peeling wall for a breather, which left a white mark on his coat, Gabriel took his father's key and inserted it into the lock. But the lock was stuck and the door already open. Gabriel reached out and snapped on the overhead light.

‘A cosy little place.' Dad's breath seemed to scrape in his throat. ‘It could be pretty fine, eh? What d'you think?'

Gabriel looked about.

Dad was not unclean but he was the sort who'd wipe a room over in July and be surprised in December that the grime had returned. Not that there was much anyone could do with this room.

The wind seethed at the rattling window, like an animal trying to get in; the basin in the corner was sprinkled with cigarette ash. There was a single bed covered by an eiderdown and blanket.

Gabriel couldn't help wondering what Archie would have thought.

‘Original features, eh? What's in the other room?'

‘What other room?' said his father. ‘The English never stop talking about property. The price of their house is the price of their life. They'd trade their souls for a sofa. Have you ever known me to cling to material possessions? I'm asking you, Gabriel, how many rooms does a man need?'

‘Well, one for sitting in and one for –'

‘Don't get technical with me, boy. This is the best I could get … for the money I have.'

‘Have your mates been here?'

‘No. No one. I couldn't exactly have a supper party. I've been writing letters, though. I didn't think, when I was younger, that I would end up here. It's not that I'm particularly foolish. I can't even explain to myself how such things happen.'

‘That's all right, Dad.'

‘It's very disturbing, the sudden feeling that your life is already over, that it's too late for all the good things you imagined would happen.'

‘Dad, it's not.'

‘No. I've been trying to see this break as a beginning but this room keeps making me think that I've been here before.'

‘Déjà vu or reincarnation?' said Gabriel. ‘Are you beginning to believe in weird –?'

‘What? No. Stop it. This is what everywhere looked like when I was a kid, before the world bent a bit –'

‘In the sixties?'

‘That's right,' said Dad.

‘Cool.'

Presumably, his father's clothes were in the wardrobe. As for music, Dad had brought a few tapes and only one acoustic guitar, leaving his other instruments with a friend, for fear they would be stolen from the room.

‘What do you do here?'

‘What does anyone do anywhere? You know me: if I need a
song I'll sing one. Now, I should feed you otherwise your mother will accuse me of … unspeakableness. Was she nervous of letting you come here?'

Gabriel didn't want to tell his father what Mum had said the previous night, when she woke him up to talk about the next day Dad hadn't ‘disciplined' Gabriel sufficiently; Gabriel was doing badly at school because of his father's bad example. Hannah had been brought in to aid the ‘discipline' process. If it showed signs of breaking down, further ‘measures' would be taken; and if, during Gabriel's visit, Dad started drinking, ‘you're to call me,' she said, ‘and I'll fetch you home. If he depresses you, or it's too squalid, ring and I'll be there.'

Gabriel said, ‘Not really, Dad. I think she wants to do other things now.'

‘Like what?'

‘I'm not really sure. Just something else.'

‘Right, well, that's exactly what I want to do, too. Let's eat, pal.'

On the single gas burner, Gabriel had noticed an opened tin of ravioli, black around the bottom and with a spoon in it, probably still hot.

‘Wait,' Gabriel said.

From his bag he produced some tacks and pinned the picture of the yellow chair over his father's bed.

He regretted it was a copy of another picture; he wished he had done something original. He would do something original.

In the meantime the yellow chair would do.