Hanif Kureishi - Gabriel's Gift

‘I’ve just been to the library,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out books on teaching and music. Reading’s pretty interesting, you know. I wish I’d done more of it, instead of watching telly or sitting in the pub.’

‘What’s made you start reading now?’

‘To keep a few feet ahead of my students. Some of them are pretty bright. My diary is filling up. I’m taking bookings into the New Year.’

Gabriel was surprised his father had a diary at all; until recently what would he have put in it? He didn’t even go to the dentist. Before, when he bought a diary, he waited until March, when they were half price.

‘You like teaching, don’t you?’ said Gabriel. ‘How’s that little idiot who reckons he —’

‘You mean Carlo? I’m starting to work him out. It’s like going for a walk with a little kid. They’re slow and stop all the time. They won’t go at your speed. You have to go at theirs, finding their rhythm. Carlo’s closed up … but there are chinks of light — because there are things he likes to play and to listen to. He’s a fascinating case. Making him feel better — when I can see the pleasure in his eyes, makes me —’

‘The pleasure in his eyes?’

‘Yes. It makes me feel better, too. Whatever else goes on, learning is something healthy.’

Gabriel said, ‘You spend more time with him than you do with me.’

Dad put his arm around Gabriel. ‘Christ, man, is that how it feels? Have you been lonely?’

During the past fortnight Gabriel’s mother had been going out most evenings when she wasn’t working. She was seeing George, he guessed. One night she didn’t return at all, but came home early in the morning and pretended she’d just got up.

‘Sleep well?’ he had said.

‘Yes, thank you.’

He suspected, from the anxious look on her face, and the modesty of what she wore, that she was also going out to see Dad on occasion.

When she was at home she talked on the phone for hours to her women friends. She shouted at Hannah about the state of the house, before going out again. She told Gabriel nothing about what she was doing, no doubt for ‘his own good’.

Yet when it comes to their parents, all children are detectives, working in the dark, looking for clues and examining any evidence that might yield knowledge of these enigmas. He had heard Mum listening to her ‘Learning Italian’ tapes. She was, too, looking at a book of Piero della Francesca paintings. He remembered George saying that Piero’s ‘Madonna del Parto’ — the young woman in the blue dress — wasn’t far from his castle.

However, ‘his teenage mother’, as he called her, didn’t seem well. She looked as though she wept a lot; she was losing weight and had begun to accumulate even more self-help books; her bed was full of chocolate wrappers and she drank Tia Maria in the morning. She wasn’t yet old but he was beginning to see what sort of old woman she would be, and it wasn’t the picture she had presented to him in Kew Gardens. It was sadder and more desperate than that.

He was angry that she wasn’t at home more. He wanted to ignore her but he needed her there to ignore; you couldn’t ignore someone who didn’t realize they were being ignored, or who was ignoring you. She had made up her mind that he was to be a lawyer and that was that. She thought that she had to take no other interest in what he was doing.

Dad went on, ‘Now I’m not living at home there’s more of a distance between you and me, Gabriel. Each time we meet we have to start again. We’ll have to put the effort in. But you’ve had a lot of me, over the years, and I have to do my job, now I’ve got one,’ Dad pointed at the gutter. ‘Angel, you know where I’d be without this work.’

‘Is it well paid?’

‘Unfortunately, yes. At the end of the lesson I’m always embarrassed when they start scribbling cheques. I want to say, “What is this for?”’

‘You don’t though, do you?’

‘You think I’m an idiot?’

‘What have got in your music bag?’

‘It’s light — and heavy. Mahler’s Fifth.’

‘Is that all?’

‘I’ll only play the Adagietto to this kid — maybe a few times so he gets it in his bones,’ said Dad, thumping himself in the stomach.

‘But you’re teaching blues guitar, aren’t you?’

‘I’ve become passionate for Mahler.’

‘Keep that to yourself.’

‘The kid will understand the sadness of the piece. What d’you expect me to play him — the Supremes?’

‘You love the Supremes.’

‘It could have been worse. I might have made him listen to that Bartók string quartet. Most of the old music bores me. The fifties not the sixties was the golden age of American music. Almost anything after that is overestimated. In my opinion, pop nowa-days is panto for young people and paedophiles. But as I discovered today, the German writer Goethe said that music begins where words end. For some people words seem to make everything too clear. So I can only say — words drop dead here, pal, with Mahler!’

‘Yeah?’

Gabriel was nervous that Dad’s pupils would mock him as they mocked their other teachers, sneering at the maddening tangle of wires about his neck, from his Walkman, his glasses and his phone; or the way he pulled his trousers up over his belly; or at his habit of scratching his body with the backs of his fingernails, and even at his enthusiasm, as he sat there with moist eyes, collapsing and wailing over some doleful piece of Mahler at their parents’ expense.

His father said, ‘Tell them to play it at my funeral. Something by Miles, perhaps. And that Adagietto.’

Originally, the mention of his own death had been an occasion for emotional blackmail, but now Dad presented his passing away as an opportunity to consider his favourite tunes.

The bus stop was a few yards away from their house, at the top of the road. As Dad seemed agitated today, Gabriel decided to wait with him.

Dad put his hand in his pocket and gave Gabriel some money. ‘This is for you. I’ve been meaning to … I haven’t been able to, before …

Gabriel took some money and went to give the rest back. ‘That’s all I need. I’ve got to pay my bill at the video shop.’

‘Take the lot. All I need is my bus fare. Give Mum the rest. Don’t forget to say it’s from me. How is the old girl?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘What? Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. Help me out, Gabriel — does she speak fondly of me, at all?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Once hatred is expressed, love has a chance. Isn’t that always the way? What are you doing right now? Shall we have a quick drink?’

Gabriel said, ‘Dad, what’s up with you today? You’ve got that staring-eyed look. Are you nervous about teaching? What if they don’t want to learn?’

‘It’s not difficult to see that people assume you’re a sadist masquerading as an educationalist. If they don’t want to learn, I sit with them — thinking.’

‘Thinking about what?’

‘What I’m doing is teaching people how to listen to what is going on in the music, to hear what is there. You can’t make music yourself if you don’t know what the possibilities are. The kids see that. The kids don’t bother me. I can get straight to them, and them to me. It’s the older ones and their parents I mind. Have you got a minute to talk?’ said Dad. ‘Let’s have just the one. It’s not the intoxication I’m interested in — I’m parched. I only want to quench my thirst.’

Dad was already hurrying across the road, towards his old local on the corner, where children were allowed until eight, and they knew Rex and Gabriel well.

The place was full of childish men from the post office and the local bus garage gazing up at the big TV screen. Dad’s grey-faced mates were playing pool. They all looked the same to Gabriel, with their roll-ups, pints and musty clothes. They rarely went out into the light, unless they stood outside the pub on a sunny day, and they were as likely to eat anything green as they were to drink anything blue or wear anything pink.