Gabriel's Gift

  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.

  It reminded him that he had been intending to speak to Dad about the ‘hallucinations’ and other strange scenes and nightmares taking place within the theatre of his mind. He saw now that his father was burdened enough as it was.

  Gabriel finished pinning the picture up and noticed his father’s eyes were as wet as the wall.

  ‘Magic,’ said Dad. ‘A few more of those and I’ll be tickling myself under the chin rather than trying to cut my throat. You’re good to me, Angel. I hope, whatever happens, that I will be the same to you. I think we should find a restaurant.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Stop saying that!’

  In the pizza place Dad ate nothing but drank a beer and watched Gabriel, asking him about school and his friends. Gabriel didn’t know if his father had lost his appetite; it occurred to him that Dad couldn’t afford to eat.

  He said, ‘Where have you been, Dad?’

  ‘Yes, sorry. Trying to get my life started again –’

  ‘Why didn’t you phone? I thought you’d gone gay.’

  ‘Gay?’ Dad looked shocked. Then he laughed. ‘I remember you said that’s what happened to your friend Zak’s father. One day he woke up and decided he wanted to be with boys. Why would that happen to me? Didn’t Zak’s father always collect teapots? And you say he didn’t know he was homosexual! Have I ever taken such a turn with teapots or any such fancy, nancy objects?’

  Gabriel recalled Zak’s father, who had had blond streaks painted into his thinning hair and wore tight white T-shirts with a packet of Marlboros shoved up the sleeve.

  Zak and Gabriel had been friends since the first day at school, when they discovered that they not only liked the same films and music but were likely to have the same enemies.

  Zak’s parents were well off; his father was a computer magazine publisher and his mother a journalist. Zak had been sent to a state school rather than a fee-paying one ‘on principle’. While he might not be the recipient of any worthwhile information at the school, at least, it was thought, for the only time in his life, he would mix with ordinary people, an education almost worth paying for. Some other kids were in the same situation: their parents were politicians or actors, or they ran the local arts cinema where Gabriel and Zak were let in for free. These kids were bullied for being ‘snobs’, as if they were slumming or thought they were doing the school a favour by attending it, popping in for a lesson after breakfasting with their parents and the children of other celebrities in some hip Notting Hill café where models, producers and movie stars took their first calls of the day. The rough kids knew that no parents in their right mind – unless they were spectacularly privileged or politically perverse – would actually volunteer to send their child to the school.

  Zak had never been poor. He didn’t know what it was like. The established middle class had different fears from everyone else. They would never be desperate for money; they would never go down for good.

  Sometimes Gabriel was regarded in the same light as Zak. Although there was no question of his parents being able to send him anywhere else and Gabriel’s father turned up at the school not in a car, like some other parents, but on his bicycle, waiting outside with a roll-up and a newspaper he had pulled from a dustbin, he was still regarded as a ‘rock star’ for having played with the still popular Lester Jones. He was both derided and admired for this. The kids would sing Lester’s songs in the playground behind Gabriel’s back.

  Gabriel said now, ‘You used to wear glitter and make-up.’

  ‘Of course I did! I was a pop boy. Heterosexual Englishmen love getting into a dress. It’s called pantomime. Anyhow, I admire Zak’s dad.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Changing his whole life like that. It’s a big, magnificent thing to do. Funny how everyone seems to be living a bohemian life now, except for people in the government, who have to be saints. And me.’ He said grandly, ‘I have had a job.’

  ‘A job?’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Your surprise surprises me. I’ve been in gainful employment – out in the fresh air.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘It was just a fantasy I had. Gabriel, I was a sort of coolie. A bicycle courier.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I found it very hard, very hard. I got sick. It exhausted me. The distances, across London, were too great for me. I had no idea this city was so … undulating.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Fucking hilly. I thought my chest would explode.’

  ‘You’ve stopped doing it?’

  ‘I … sort of collapsed. I’m looking for something more brain-based.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Don’t ask so many questions. How’s the film?’

  ‘It’s nearly ready to be shot,’ lied Gabriel. ‘All I’ve got to do now is save up for a movie camera.’

  ‘I wish I could help you. I will get you a camera from somewhere, I promise. What we need is a stroke – one stroke of luck. Tell me what else has been happening at home.’

  ‘We’ve got a hairy au pair called Hannah.’

  ‘I know. I saw her watching me. What was her last job, turning on the gas in Auschwitz?’

  ‘Actually, she’s an immigrant. She’s lost in a bad dream. Most of the time she doesn’t know where she is.’

  ‘Yes, yes, sorry. And this woman is lazing around in those leather chairs I got for a good price? I hope she hasn’t scratched them up.’

  ‘Not at all. Mum exchanged them for a new futon.’

  ‘She exchanged them! Didn’t you try to stop her?’

  ‘You know what she’s like when she makes up her mind. Out they went!’ Dad looked away. Gabriel said, ‘Now she’s at work, waitressing. You know that, too.’

  ‘Has anyone come round?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘To the house.’

  ‘Only Mum’s friends – Norma, that fat woman who always says, “Kiss me, stupid.” And the other women – Angie and that lot – who wear big overcoats and too many scarves.’

  ‘Anyone I don’t know? Strangers?’

  Gabriel shook his head. ‘No, no strangers.’

  Dad drank his beer. ‘I’m afraid she’s going to fi
nd it tough to survive without me there to guide her. When she phones for advice, I might refuse her. You will learn that women like to think they get by without us. But we give them –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Erm … stability.’

  Gabriel pushed his plate away. ‘Don’t want any more.’

  Dad finished the pizza himself, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Apart from your hair, you look so much like your mother. You sound like her, too.’

  ‘I can’t help it, Dad.’

  ‘No, no, course not. Come on.’

  Back at the room Gabriel sat on the edge of the bed. Looking at his father’s acoustic guitar he had the feeling Dad hadn’t touched it for a while. ‘Dad, will you play?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think a game of noughts and crosses will cheer us up. You used to love it.’

  Gabriel remembered – maybe it was only a few years after Archie died – asking his father, ‘What are songs for?’

  ‘Amongst other things, to make us feel better,’ his father had replied, ‘when things are so hard.’

  This remark made Gabriel start to believe in the uses of entertainment.

  He said, ‘I want to draw a man playing a guitar. There’s a picture here I want to copy. If you play … it helps me concentrate.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Please.’

  It was Picasso’s Blind Guitarist, which featured an emaciated, long-limbed, blue figure, not playing his guitar but resting over it sadly.

  While Gabriel studied it, his father reached for his beer can and cigarette, and started to play a blues tune with his eyes closed. He even played a little bottle-neck guitar, explaining in his endearing but inevitably pompous way that the song was one of the oldest of modern music.