Hanif Kureishi - Gabriel's Gift

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

Dad drank his beer. ‘I’m afraid she’s going to find 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.

‘You have to settle in a very deep part of yourself when you play the blues.’

‘Right. I see.’

Gabriel opened his sketchbook and started to draw. Sometimes when he copied something he altered the original picture; this time he cheered up the blue guitarist, giving him sight and pleasure in what he was doing.

There was a loud banging on the wall.

‘Turn it off!’ shouted someone.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Gabriel.

‘Turn it off!’

‘They’re madmen,’ said Dad. ‘The room next door. Unusual place, full of mad characters.’

‘We’re praying!’

Gabriel said, ‘From the sixties?’

‘Whenever,’ said his father. ‘They’re not going to last into the next century.’ He shouted, ‘Pray on, mothers!’

Dad’s face was starting to churn. When the banging happened again Gabriel became apprehensive. At home his father had thrown plates, books and records around, though nothing too valuable; he could sulk for days, or walk around the streets in a fury for hours. He could take five steps up the road and find someone to argue with. Had he been a woman, he might have been called hysterical. Instead, he was deemed ‘moody’, which, because of its ‘artistic’ overtones, unfortunately suited him. Whenever it was said, he turned up his collar and looked for a mirror, a move Gabriel liked to imitate for his mother’s benefit, saying, ‘The James Dean of Hammersmith.’ It always amused her.

Yet his father had, with Gabriel, almost always been his best self. Gabriel was the one thing he’d been consistently proud of.

Dad threw his guitar down, removed his shoe, and smashed at the wall with it.

‘Leave us alone!’ he yelled, hopping up and down. ‘If you want to discuss it, meet me in the corridor, motherfucker!’

‘Go to hell!’ the neighbour called.

‘And you, and you! See me outside!’

Gabriel tried to distract his father.

‘Look at what I’ve done!’

He was holding up his sketchbook.

His father sat with his head in his hands. At last he studied the picture and smiled.

‘Beautiful. You’re getting better and better. Let’s get out of this dump.’

‘Where?’

‘Maybe we should watch TV, eh? A couple of hours of stupidity might calm us down. My nerves are twanging like piano wires.’

‘I wish I’d brought some videos.’

For years they’d watched films together. The Graduate was one of their favourites, with a soundtrack they liked. Performance , too — kept in a plain cover — Gabriel was allowed to watch, when Mum wasn’t around. The Godfather they had seen repeatedly, and most of Woody Allen, particularly Play It Again, Sam. Summer with Monika, My Life as a Dog and anything by Laurel and Hardy, as well as Tarkovsky, they knew backwards. Gabriel could repeat the dialogue as it played and used to run the films, with the sound down, as he did his homework. If each frame of a film told a story, he had to watch them repeatedly, until he knew them. Then he started to imagine the scene with his own characters in them, speaking his dialogue.

Gabriel glanced around the room, wondering whether the TV and video were concealed in a cupboard.

‘Where is the telly?’

‘Downstairs. There’s no TV in this room. That would be an extra. Extras are out. Extras are well out.’

In a smoke-filled room on the ground floor, they watched a programme about a garden make-over, joining a handful of preoccupied foreign men staring up at the television, which was padlocked to an iron arm extending from the wall.

It wasn’t long before Gabriel’s neck began to ache from looking up.

‘Boring,’ Gabriel was about to say, when he noticed that his father wasn’t even looking at the screen but, like the other men, seemed to have become uncontactable.

A man wearing a long white robe and slippers that curled at the end like question marks came to the door.

‘Phone.’

‘Dad.’ Gabriel nudged his father, who looked blankly at the hooded-eyed man.

‘Phone,’ the man repeated.

‘Who is it?’ Dad turned to Gabriel, ‘Not that I know anyone!’

‘Maybe it’s Mum,’ said Gabriel.

‘What would she want? To check up on you? You’re all right here, aren’t you? Haven’t I been looking after you?’

‘Yes.’ said Gabriel.

The man said, ‘Lester.’

Dad stood up. ‘Lester? Did you say Lester?’

‘Yes. I think I did say that name several times.’

Dad gripped Gabriel’s arm.

‘Gabriel boy, it’s Lester — Lester Jones on the phone to us — right now!’

Gabriel followed his father to the door and watched him flapping up the hall. His ‘war wound’, which, oddly enough, he had actually acquired when with Lester, had miraculously mended.

From the door, Gabriel scrutinized his father talking animatedly to Lester. He noticed that the man who had called Dad to the phone had not gone away but was also watching his father, from the other end of the hall.

Dad finished talking and replaced the receiver.

‘Gabriel —’ he began.

The man in the curly slippers went to Dad, grabbed him by the shoulders, pushed him against the wall and wagged his finger at him. As the man addressed him, Dad struggled and knocked his ear. When someone else went past, the man let him go.

For a moment they stood there, snarling at one another. Gabriel was about to attack the man with his fists and feet; Dad ordered him to stay where he was.

‘Don’t mention any of this to Mum.’ White-faced and shaking, Dad was pushing Gabriel away. ‘It’ll only make her worry. Promise?’

‘O?. But what did he want?’

‘Forget it! Listen: we’ve been stroked. I knew we would be. It was Lester on the phone! Lester — speaking to me!’

If Dad was mellow, he would talk of the time he had toured the world, playing bass for Lester Jones in the Leather Pigs, more than twenty-five years ago.