Hanif Kureishi: Gabriel's Gift

The kids watched satellite TV with Bullseye, the albino Alsatian, and whisperingly busied about with much secret urgency, labouring at the most desirable alchemy known to mankind: how to earn money without getting a job. It wasn’t too difficult. Many eleven-year-olds turned up after school, wearing Tommy Hilfiger coats over their uniforms, to buy hash. The demand was so great that an older kid had set up a counter in the kitchen called ‘the tuck shop’, from behind which blocks of dope were handed over, like putrid chocolate bars.

A few street beggars came by, too — local kids, and children blown down from the North, who mostly slept in children’s homes and hostels. Not only were they more experienced than Gabriel, but they had lived under harsh, cruel regimes. Terrible things had happened to these unprotected children, and, Gabriel guessed, somehow always would.

Despite his normalcy, or because of it, Gabriel was sent on errands to flats, squats and street corners, delivering packages that he hid in his underwear and shoes. Being a ‘tiddler’, and young and white, and knowing the local short cuts and hideouts, he was less likely to be stopped by the police, or worse — other gangsters. Sometimes on these trips he pushed the prams of locals girls. Later he was told that the baby’s nappies had been stuffed with sachets of uplifting powder.

Unlike some of the other kids his age, he had never had a regular girlfriend. But there was a sex room in the drum. A couple of the girls were so amused by his virginity that as a favour they had pushed him onto the dirty mattress and stolen his cherry, taking it in turns to hold a crying baby while the short, absurd ceremony continued.

‘You won’t forget that — buoy,’ one of them had said.

‘No, I don’t think I will,’ he had replied.

When Gabriel’s father returned from Norway and failed to find him, he called at Zak’s and other school friends of Gabriel’s. No one had seen the boy. Asking everywhere for his son, Dad visited shebeens where sixties reggae was played over card games — there were towering piles of money on the tables and a threatening unease; he visited community centres where he heard ‘lovers’ rock’, and pool halls full of bejewelled gangs and posses in ‘pukka’ gear.

Gabriel remembered Dad walking into the filthy drum, coming over to pick him up from the floor, and trying to heave him over his shoulder as if he were a child.

‘I can walk,’ Gabriel had said. ‘You’ll ruin your back again.’

Dad had been carrying a guitar, and one of the older boys thought he was a tube busker looking for a score or a place to sleep. Gabriel giggled to himself at the thought of how irked his father would have been had he known this.

Gabriel had been impressed by how his father hadn’t been afraid; he would have known that the kids were contemptuous of authority and carried knives and worse. But Gabriel saw, as his father touched fists with the kids and sat down to talk with them, that Dad didn’t believe they were beyond his human reach.

When Dad led Gabriel away and told him never to return, saying he was too young for such a forlorn and unhappy place, Dad himself was troubled by the prohibition. He had grasped that Gabriel required other worlds and needed to move away from his parents. The ‘drum’ was something Gabriel should know about, Dad said, but he didn’t think, at the moment, that Gabriel could come through it intact. Some people felt compelled to live self-destructive lives, but these lives could become addictive and impossible to escape.

Dad had ridden to the rescue at the right moment: a grille for the drum door was arriving, and older, more serious villains were starting to use the place as a hide-out. A few weeks later Gabriel heard at school that the ‘drum’ had been raided, the police forcing everyone to lie on the floor. Some of the kids had been hauled out, smacked hard in the stomach and taken away. There were many available crimes for them to be fitted to.

After this, Gabriel was at home most of the time and his trespasses — horrid though they were — were mostly of the imagination. Fortunately there were plenty of them, since his mother, clearing out her room, had inadvertently made him a great gift. She had leaned a gilt-edged mirror against the wall at the end of his bed.

Looking in it one wet-fingered day after school, he had fallen in love. There would be a lifetime of such swooning! He understood why grown-ups whispered and what there was to hide. There was a secret. The world was a façade. It was the beyond, behind and underneath — a nether factory making dreams and stories that writhed with strange life.

He went to work.

In the glass-walled world, listening to music by Lester Jones, Gabriel liked to watch himself smoking a cigarette in a kooky hat and exotic waistcoat, as if he were a movie character. Adjusting the angle of the mirror, he could pretend to be someone else, any woman he wanted to be or have, particularly if he had painted his toenails in some dainty shade and was wearing his mother’s rings, necklaces and shoes. He preferred the ones with straps and heels, or anything that resembled a cross between a dagger and a boat. Low-heeled sandals did nothing for him. Perhaps they were an acquired taste. His mother, to his chagrin, didn’t wear boots any more.

When he was in the ‘shoe’ mood, the different characters he brought together enacted rumbustious scenes as he tore in and out of the mirror’s eye, a crowd of actors in one body. It wasn’t an uncreative pastime. If, like all children, he was a pervert, he was also a film director and screenwriter.

Today, however, he wasn’t in a ‘shoe’ mood. Earlier he had thrown a sheet over the mirror. He wanted to draw. A thought had remained in his mind from watching TV the other night. As far as he could remember, it went something like this: art is what you do when other people leave the room.

Left in his mother’s room, he turned the pages of the art book until something attracted his attention.

He found himself looking at a picture of a pair of boots — gnarled, broken, old work boots. Often, when he wanted to draw, he copied something, to warm up. He decided to work in charcoal. As he sketched, the boots came easily, the lines seeming to make themselves in the way his legs did when running, without persuasion.

After a few minutes he noticed an unusual smell. He went to the door to see if Hannah was standing outside the room, as she was a person around whom different odours seemed to congregate, like bums on a street corner. He could hear her moving about downstairs in the kitchen. Probably she was dyeing her hair, which she did at least once a fortnight: this involved her putting a plastic bag on her head, which didn’t stop strings of dark colour running down her face, until she resembled a Christmas pudding.

No; the smell wasn’t her.

Turning around, he saw that in the middle of the room were the boots he had copied from the book.

He walked around them, before going closer and squatting down. They smelt of dung, mud, the countryside and grass.

He picked the boots up, touched them, slipped off his shoes and tried them on, shuffled a little way, and collapsed. He couldn’t stop laughing in surprise and perplexity. When he tired of this, he returned to the sketchbook. In the centre of the page was a boot-shaped hole. As he turned the page, the boots were sucked back onto it, and everything returned to normal.

Or did it?

He looked about fearfully. An eerie terror, like a ghost, had swished into the room. The purple knob of the wardrobe handle seemed like one of Hannah’s eyes. Perhaps it had detached itself from her face and flown up here to spy. He was reminded of a picture by Marc Chagall that featured a barn-like house with a huge all-seeing brown eye in the roof. When Gabriel returned the stare, the eye turned back into a dull rough surface.