Hanif Kureishi - Gabriel's Gift

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The protagonist of this novel is a 15-year-old North London schoolboy called Gabriel. He is forced to come to terms with a new life, and use his gift for painting in order to make sense of his world, once the equilibrium of the family has been shattered by his father's departure.

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Hearing a whimpering noise, Gabriel went out onto the landing. Her door was open.

She was sitting up on the high bed wearing nothing but her knickers and one shoe. Mum must have been weary; she could hardly sit up. One of her arms, pressing against the bed, kept giving way Her other hand was between her thighs.

Gabriel heard a voice but couldn’t tell, at first, where it was coming from. At last he realized that one of the men was sitting on the floor with his head on his chest, singing to himself and trying to take his shirt off.

Gabriel encouraged him to stand up.

‘That’s George’s,’ slurred the man, pointing at the bed. ‘I will climb up there in a bit and conquer. First I want the toilet.’

‘This way,’ said Gabriel. ‘Give me your shirt.’

‘Thank you, sir. You aren’t, by any chance, a shirt-lifter?’

‘No.’

Before the man knew where he was, Gabriel had led him downstairs, opened the front door and pushed him out onto the freezing street. He quickly locked the door behind him and turned the lights off.

Watching the man unbutton his fly in the middle of the road, Gabriel shouted through the letter box. ‘It’s an outside toilet! There, on the left! Don’t forget to flush it! Mind that car behind you!’

He had never seen Mum this drunk. As she subsided Gabriel saw she was about to drop down onto the floor. He climbed the ladder, put his arms around her and dragged her heavy body further onto the bed. She didn’t seem to notice him pulling her into her pyjama jacket but as he did up the buttons she started to kiss him and call him ‘darling’.

‘But it’s Gabriel,’ he said.

Her mouth was open; she was already breathing heavily.

He could have drawn her. Not that he needed to fetch his sketchbook; it was a scene he would remember.

Gabriel covered her up and kissed her goodnight.

Chapter Six

Next morning Gabriel was up before his mother, preparing for school while Hannah soldered the scrambled eggs to the side of the frying pan and torched the toast.

‘How’s the picture?’

Dad was already on the phone. From where he stood, Gabriel could see a man’s shirt hanging over the back of a chair.

‘Fine.’

‘Finished with it?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Mum see it?’

‘Yes.’

‘How come?’

Gabriel said, ‘She’s nosy. She finds things.’

‘Yes.’ said Dad. ‘Did she like it?’

‘Quite.’

‘What did you tell her?’ Dad asked. ‘Did you mention Lester?’

‘Yes. Is that OK? She was impressed by that, Dad.’

‘I’m sure. You didn’t tell her anything bad about me?’

‘Like what? No.’

Dad sighed. ‘You’re keeping the picture safe? Is it right there beside you?’

‘Oh yes. It’s right here. In fact … I’m looking at it!’

‘Call me when you’re ready. Maybe I’ll pick it up later today, after school.’ Dad added politely, ‘Is that fine by you?’

Gabriel said, ‘What else are you doing today, Dad?’

‘I don’t know yet. We’ll have to see what develops.’

‘Where’s Lester’s picture?’ Gabriel asked Hannah, biting into a charcoal and peanut butter mixture. ‘Have you seen it?’

She looked at him in bewilderment. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

The last time Gabriel had seen the picture, it was on the living-room table. But it wasn’t there any more. His mother had probably taken it into her own room for safe keeping. She wouldn’t thank him for going in there and waking her up.

He went to school but didn’t pay attention to his lessons. He was beginning to think he was too old for school, or the school itself was somehow backward, or too old-fashioned for him. It didn’t give him enough to think about. As soon as he began to concentrate on a piece of school work, he became aware that more exciting things were going on somewhere else.

That morning, catching him jotting film ideas in his notebook before he forgot them, Gabriel’s teacher snatched away the notebook, saying, ‘Why aren’t you concentrating, Gabriel Bunch?’

‘It’s not interesting enough to keep my attention, sir,’ he replied, without thinking.

‘Not interesting enough! What do you think this is — an entertainment?’

‘If only, sir. If only.’

The other kids were laughing.

The teacher said, ‘I’ll come down on you like a pile of bricks.’

One of the other kids yelled, ‘The customer is always right, sir!’

Someone else chipped in, ‘One size fits all! One fit sizes all!’

‘Always follow the instructions!’

‘Don’t try this at home!’

‘Look away now!’

‘We’re on our way to Wembley!’

It was a madhouse.

Gabriel looked at the teacher and replied, ‘That’s all you are, sir. A big pile of bricks.’

‘Repeat that, Bunch.’

It was the only instruction Gabriel felt happy to follow.

The teacher refrained from striking him, but Gabriel was supposed to be in detention for a week. Not that he would turn up. Zak, who read a lot and used difficult words (he could even spell ‘precocious’), had said not to worry, the system lacked imagination and was so coercive that failure was the only distinction; conformity was a kind of death. And as Dad pointed out, it was supposed to be a school, not a lunatic asylum, and certainly not a prison.

Gabriel had been sent out of the schoolroom, and stood alone in the corridor, like a dog forced to wait outside a shop for its owner.

‘Fascism,’ Zak had mouthed, passing by. ‘Ring me.’

‘I will,’ Gabriel replied.

At school, he and Zak were now in different classes and barely met. To keep out of trouble for being middle class, Zak had had to become a librarian. Books, he had discovered, were good for hiding behind. Adults respected books, though no one had explained why.

Zak was bright; he took things in. He could work things out for himself, too. ‘Parents are funny,’ he said once. ‘What do they want from us? Our respect and for us to listen. But do they bother to respect us? How often do they listen to us and think about what we want?’

School didn’t interest Zak either. He put up with it because he knew he was just passing through. He could see how much there was ahead of him.

Gabriel had hardly seen Zak out of school since his father had left. Zak knew what had taken place — the same thing had happened to him, as it had to several others in the class. To be part of a ‘complete’ family was, these days, to be in a minority. But Gabriel hadn’t wanted to talk about the break-up. Words were as dangerous as bombs, as Gabriel discovered when he swore in front of his mother. They didn’t only describe; they did things to other people, or made things happen, and more than enough was happening at the moment.

Anyway, children understood tyrannies, he thought, living with those vicious moody bosses called parents, under a regime in which their thoughts and activities were severely constrained. The kids were anarchists and dissidents, operating underground, in secret cells, trying to find an inviolable privacy.

At that moment he didn’t feel like a glorious anarchist.

A passing teacher who had hardly addressed more than a handful of phrases to him, stopped for a moment and said, ‘I remember you, Bunch. That is your name, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘When you arrived here you were full of confidence. Now you look scared all the time.’ The teacher touched his face. ‘That twitch of yours has come back.’

‘Has it, sir?’

Gabriel had had a twitch in one eye, which flickered like a faulty camera shutter. When he was made conscious of it, it felt as if his face was inhabited by spiders; insects were rushing beneath his skin.

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