Gabriel's Gift

  ‘Unlike you, she’s incredibly cheap to run,’ was the reply. ‘What were you expecting?’

  ‘Julie Andrews, actually. Hannah’s fat.’

  ‘I know.’ She was laughing. ‘But make friends with her. If you let yourself get to know people, you might come to like them.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Please try and help me, Gabriel. I’ve never been through such a difficult time. I want us to have a good life again.’

  He had to promise to try. But his mother didn’t trust him and she could have; she seemed to take pleasure in punishing him, as if she wanted to hurt everyone around her for what had happened.

  Hannah was, as far as Gabriel was able to make out, from a town called Bronchitis, with a winding river called Influenza running through it. She had been recommended to them by a friend, or perhaps the person was secretly their enemy. Whatever the situation, when Hannah came to them with her Eastern European clothes and cardboard suitcase, she had nowhere else to live.

  Mum had explained, in her practical way, ‘Hannah, you will have to sleep in the living room. But at least you will have accommodation, a little pocket money, and as much as you can eat.’

  The words – ‘as much as you can eat’ – had proved to be unwise.

  Hannah, whose only qualification with children was the possibility that she might once have been a child herself, at least knew how to eat. When she first arrived in England after spending three disoriented days in a coach admiring the motorways of Western Europe, she would walk around those heavens called supermarkets, twisting with desire and moaning under her breath like someone who had pushed a door marked Paradise rather than Tesco. To her, what people threw away would be a banquet.

  Hannah could eat for England; she saw any amount of food in front of her as a challenge, a food mountain to be scaled, swallowed, flattened. Once, Gabriel found her squeezing a tube of tomato puree down her throat.

  Sometimes, to tease Hannah, Gabriel would say, ‘If you could choose to have anything in the whole world to eat, what would it be?’

  ‘Ice-cream,’ she would say in her strange accent. ‘Um … and burgers. Pigs’ trotters. Pies. Rabbit stew. Jam. And … and … and …’

  As she described her favourite meals, electric-eyed, lips moist and chest heaving, Gabriel would sketch the food. She would laugh at the drawings and pretend to eat the paper. Once he drew a picture featuring her several chins, inserting a zip into one, with half a sausage extending from it, a drop of mustard and smear of mayonnaise on the tip. This offended and upset her.

  What she did like was Gabriel photographing her ‘in London’, as she put it. Recently Gabriel had been taking photographs with cheap, disposable cameras which he used like a notebook. He liked to photograph odd things: street corners; people from behind; lamp-posts; shop fronts. He took Polaroids and drew on them with a pen. He didn’t like anything too designed, too careful or artificial. Some of the pictures his father’s friend had blown up onto large sheets, which Gabriel drew and painted on.

  Gabriel had noticed that whenever he picked up a camera, Hannah became watchful and would wipe her crumby mouth, plump her split ends and adjust her collar. The pictures he did take, she sent home to her family. She was quite nice to him afterwards.

  Mum knew it wasn’t much fun with Hannah. At first Gabriel had refused to walk home with her. It wasn’t just that he was too old to be walked home; he didn’t want the others to know he had an ‘au pair’. In some schools the middle class – to which Gabriel almost, but not quite, belonged – was a persecuted minority, and anyone who had the misfortune to come from such a minority did all they could to disguise it. They were so loathed, the members of this class, they even had their own schools. Luckily, there were several entrances to Gabriel’s school and he could elude Hannah altogether, or just run away. But his mother became so upset that he compromised by having Hannah meet him not outside the school but on the corner; she walked home behind him. ‘I think that woman’s following us,’ his friends would say.

  ‘She’s one of the local madwomen,’ Gabriel would say. ‘Ignore her.’

  However, she always had crisps and drinks for him, and as they neared the house and his friends went in different directions, he and Hannah would end up together.

  As compensation, and to show off the benefit of her wage packet, Mum had taken him to see the Who – her favourite band – up the road at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Mum still knew someone from the old days connected to the band, and they had great seats in the front of the circle. ‘I hope it’s going to be loud,’ Mum had said, as they went in. It was. Afterwards, they had gone out to supper with their ears still numb. It seemed a long time ago.

  Now Gabriel sat at the table eating his tea.

  ‘I’ll watch him, Mum,’ Hannah had promised. ‘Don’t you worry, like a vulture I will observe the bad boy.’

  She did watch him; and he watched her watching him. Hannah had a queer look, for her eyes, instead of focusing on the same point in the normal way, pointed in different directions. He wondered if she might be able to watch two television programmes simultaneously, on different channels, on each side of the room.

  What she could certainly do was watch TV and keep an eye on him at the same time, while pressing boiled sweets into the tight little hole beneath her nose. To ‘improve my English’ as she put it, she watched Australian soap operas continuously, so that her few English sentences had a Brisbane accent.

  Even if Gabriel wasn’t doing anything wrong, one of her eyes hovered over him. His mother must have given Hannah an unnecessarily prejudiced report of the scrapes and troubles he was prone to. But to Hannah, being a kid in the first place was to be automatically in the wrong and these wrongs – which were going on all the time – had to be righted by adults who were never in the wrong since adults were, all the time, whatever they did, the Law. Perhaps her experience of Communism had given her this idea. Wherever she had obtained it, she would prefer it if Gabriel didn’t move at all, ever again. She liked it best when he wasn’t there but was somewhere else, preferably asleep and not dreaming.

  She loved food, but the meals she cooked tasted of dirty dishcloths and toenails, topped with a blood and urine sauce. Gabriel considered picking up the plate and flinging it at the wall. The pasta would, at least, make a pretty shape on the yellow wallpaper.

  It had been his policy to be horrible to Hannah in the hope that he would drive her away and his mother would look after him again. But if he made a mess, Hannah would make him clear it up. If he sulked, she didn’t notice; if he whinged, she turned the TV up louder.

  He pushed his plate away. Today Gabriel had an idea.

  ‘Hey!’ said Hannah.

  ‘French homework. Vous comprendez? If Dad phones, you’ll call me, won’t you?’

  ‘If I am available.’

  ‘Available?’ He was laughing. ‘What else might you be doing?’

  ‘Mind your own nose,’ she said, tapping her forehead. ‘He won’t call anyway. He gone for good.’

  ‘No, Hannah. You don’t know him. You’ve never met him.’

  ‘I won’t met him.’

  ‘I’d watch what you say. He was a friend of the Rolling Stones. He played with Lester Jones, actually! His eyes get big and he shakes. He might come back and bite you somewhere you won’t like.’

  ‘Bah!’

  He picked up his school bag, fetched some other things from his own room, and went into his mother’s bedroom.

  His mother had always been tiresomely strict about his homework. She didn’t want Gabriel to fail at school, for fear he would become an artist. Having spent her life among musicians, singers, songwriters, clothes designers and record producers, she knew how few of them had country houses with recording studios and trout farms. Most were on the dole, passing through rehabs, smelling of failure or dying of disappointment. It wasn’t only lack of talent, though most were prodigiously untalented, with stupidity coming off them like bad chari
sma. Few had the basic ability to organize and preserve the proficiency they did have. When she was in a good mood, his mother said humorously that she didn’t want to discourage Gabriel’s artistic endeavour but crush it altogether, so he’d go into business, or become a doctor or lawyer able to support her in her ‘old age’.

  For a moment Gabriel stood at the window, wondering whether someone he knew might be walking up the street. He closed his eyes, hoping that when he opened them the person might appear. It was turbulent: clouds sailed past, as if being tugged by invisible strings; the sun and moon sat side by side in the sky, flashing on and off. All the weather seemed to be coming at once. Perhaps, when this strange period ended, there would be no climate at all but an enormous blankness.

  His mind seemed to have turned into one of the psychedelic records his father used to play, closing his eyes and moving his arms like hypnotized snakes. This was a mystery tour he couldn’t stop.

  He pulled the curtains and climbed up to his mother’s bed, which, to make more space in the high-ceilinged room, was on legs, with a little ladder up to it, and a table and chair under it. There was a padlocked metal drawer in the base of the bed, full of old cosmetics. On a shelf beside the bed was a pile of small and large art books he loved to look at. His mother had used them a long time ago, at art school. The books smelled musty but it was a seductive perfume. Within were worlds and worlds. Unlike films, they didn’t move; he could get lost inside the colours and shapes.

  He wondered what talking to the people would be like. Van Gogh’s friendly-looking postman, no doubt smelling of tobacco, seemed like someone to give lengthy advice. Degas’s dancers, standing in a big ornate room with a churlish teacher waving a cane in front of them, seemed like girls he could take an interest in. One of the warm, pink dancers seemed to reach out to take his hand.

  Gabriel had brought his sketchbook into his mother’s room, along with the old pencil box with iron corners that his father had given him just before he left home, made up of drawers for pens, trays for rubbers and pencil sharpeners, and a hidden section that so far had nothing in it.

  In the last few days he had been drawing the story-board for a short film. He and his father had been watching Carol Reed’s Oliver!, which, when Gabriel was younger, had been one of his favourites. The ‘Dodger’ had been his original punk hero. At the annual school concert, Gabriel’s version of ‘Consider Yourself’, done in ripped tails, top hat, muddy boots and orange-tinted shades, had been much applauded by the junkies, paedophiles, no-hopers and greedy bastards called parents. Gabriel had thought it was still possible to make a film about the parts of London that most people never saw.

  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 carryin
g 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.