Hanif Kureishi - Gabriel's Gift

Carlo was bony and crop-haired, with a criminal grimace, wearing a Chelsea shirt over torn baggy jeans; his feet were bare and dirty.

‘How are you today?’ said Dad. ‘This is my boy, Gabriel. He goes to Chapman High. D’you know it?’

‘Na.’

‘Where do you go?’

‘Nowhere … if I can ’elp it.’

‘What, if anything, do you want?’

There was a silence. At last the boy said, ‘A tattoo.’

‘Right. Where?’

‘On me bollocks and round me arse.’

‘I see,’ said Dad. ‘Interesting. Not a lot of people are going to enjoy it there.’

‘’Ow d’you know?’

‘I don’t, really. I don’t do tattoos, but I can play guitar at bit.’

Carlo had undoubtedly been well brought up but was unable to put one word beside another without grunting and snarling between them, and he suffered to look anyone in the eye.

‘This way, I suppose,’ Carlo mumbled, after the three of them had been shuffling about. To Gabriel he said, ‘You coming an’ all?’

‘D’you want me to?’ murmured Gabriel.

‘It’s up to you.’

Carlo started up the stairs.

‘Public school education,’ muttered Dad to Gabriel. ‘One of those schools for talented parents. At least the working class have manners. A Chelsea supporter too, of all things. I’m off.’

‘Wait.’ Gabriel held on to his father with both hands. ‘Come on. At least let’s have a look.’

Gabriel and his father followed Carlo up the staircase to a vast living room with a view of the Thames. There the boy stood with his back to a bookcase and stuck his arse out. At this the bookcase smoothly swung open into his part of the house.

Behind the bookcase Carlo had two or three teenage rooms, including a kitchen and bathroom. It was a rich squalor the boy had made for himself; among the mounds of clothes, magazines and CDs, Gabriel noticed computers, a drum kit, various guitars and, in the distance, a shiny grand piano. There was a basket containing dozens of pairs of sunglasses.

Carlo sat in a window, turned away from them, craning his neck as if he urgently needed to inspect Battersea.

‘D’you want to play something … on the guitar?’ said Dad. ‘Or do you want to do something else? I don’t give a —’ Gabriel gave his father a scalding look. ‘I don’t really mind. It’s your time.’ He was looking at the boy in annoyance and sat there with his coat buttoned up.

Carlo shrugged.

Gabriel was becoming apprehensive, wondering how long Dad would remain patient. If his father walked out, it would be the end, his teaching career terminated within twenty minutes. Gabriel had no idea what sort of job his father would do, anyway. It was true that Dad could play; he could also scratch his backside and fiddle in his ear at the same time: it didn’t follow that he could instruct anyone in ambidexterity.

Carlo did, at last, decide to say something. ‘You know what you are?’

‘What am I?’ said Dad. ‘Been trying to find out for years.’

‘You’re a … You’re a …’

Dad said, ‘I’m waiting here, but you haven’t got the balls to say it, little big guy. If you do it’ll be annoying, but at least it will be rock ‘n’ roll.’

‘Wanker,’ said Carlo.

Gabriel was holding his breath. Dad winked at him.

Dad unzipped his acoustic guitar and lightly strummed what sounded like a pleasant folksy tune.

‘What d’you think?’ said Dad.

‘Wanker scumbag,’ the boy repeated.

‘Hey!’ said Gabriel.

‘What is it?’ said the boy. ‘Something to say?’

‘Dad —’ said Gabriel

‘Dad …’ imitated the boy. ‘Is that your daddy-poo?’

Gabriel’s eyes fixed on a Coke bottle on the table. He intertwined his fingers and clicked them. Carlo was sneering. Gabriel started to get up, breathing hard. Carlo got to his feet, too. The boys moved towards one another until they were face to face.

‘Yeah?’ said Carlo.

‘Yeah?’ said Gabriel.

Dad said, ‘Sit down, Gabriel. You, too, Carlo. Sit down! Now, cool it, people. Cool it! Jesus, I’m sweating all over the place now. Good.’

When the boys had regained their places Dad lay the guitar down and looked about enquiringly with meanly flashing eyes. Things weren’t right for him and they weren’t getting better. ‘Funky Fingers’ had, after all, played with Lester Jones at Madison Square Garden. For three nights they’d ripped the place apart. No one, apart from the Stones, had been that good.

Dad removed his coat, tossed the Coke bottle across the room into a bin, and picked up one of the kid’s electric guitars.

‘Carlo, tell me something,’ he said. ‘What d’you call this?’

‘Some people call it a guitar.’

Dad plugged it in and stroked the strings. A tinny noise emerged.

‘What the hell’s that — a weeping mouse?’ said Dad.

The boy shrugged. ‘Call it what you like, man, I don’t give a monkey’s.’

Dad got to his feet.

Gabriel’s father, in most ways by now a respectable middle-aged father, stepped back and took a kick at one of the expensive speakers, his boot breaking through the front of it. They would, surely, be ejected now.

Dad, grinning with satisfaction at this memory of rock ‘n’ roll, turned the volume up to ‘unbearable’, and scythed across the strings. Ablaze of noise and jagged feedback penetrated the three of them like fiery arrows. The boy, who had sat up at Dad’s attitude, seemed to stagger under the noise.

‘Why whisper?’ said Dad. ‘This is the devil’s music. Or it is when it’s done properly.’

It was a blues number, one of Gabriel’s favourites, ‘Mean Old World’. Dad was banging his foot and singing, though they couldn’t hear a word but saw only his opened mouth so that he resembled one of Bacon’s screaming Popes.

Crouched over as if to avoid a hail of bullets, two of the staff ran into the room with their hands over their ears. They struggled to close the windows and to indows, and, make absolutely sure, dragged the curtains across. Then they scurried out across the vibrating floor, whimpering.

The boy grabbed a guitar, turned up the volume, stabbed and twisted his foot in the front of another speaker — at least he had learned that aggression was imperative for a vivid performance — and started to play, pursuing his teacher into the distance.

The boy managed a decent bluesy sound and when Dad paused, keeping the rhythm, the boy took over.

As his father worked, letting Carlo play along with him, not forcing him to do anything, and the boy began to see he could do it, Gabriel could settle down to biting his fingernails and chewing his cheek. Gabriel had never worried about anything as much as Lester’s picture, though perhaps he didn’t have to take any action at the moment. Lester might not become aware of the picture’s whereabouts for a long time, and even then, might not realize that the picture was a forgery. Maybe, in the future, he could write Lester a letter. Dad had the address.

When Gabriel and his father got up to leave he noticed, to his surprise, Carlo’s father standing in the door. The film producer was small, jovial and bald, in a good suit without a tie. With the top button of his shirt done up and his Adam’s apple seeming to still bob with the beat, his head looked constrained, like a boil about to burst.

Dad had told Gabriel that Jake Ambler was so busy he would invite people who sought meetings with him to sit in his car on the way to the airport, or even to walk around the building with him, as he ate his lunch or went to the toilet.

‘Thank you so much,’ Jake said, following Dad and Gabriel down the stairs, tearing notes from an impressive wad and pushing them into Dad’s hand. ‘You deserve this. I enjoyed that so much I felt like getting my leather trousers let out.’