Hanif Kureishi: Gabriel's Gift

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 charisma. 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.