Hanif Kureishi: Gabriel's Gift

He was disturbed but excited by what he’d done. It didn’t seem like a dangerous ability. But it was wrong to mess with magic, wasn’t it? He didn’t know. Who would know? Parents and teachers were there to be believed in, or at least argued with. If they no longer functioned, or, like his father, were blasted by doubt, where was there to turn for the rules? Who knew what was going on?

He did what he always did at times like this: consulted his twin brother, Archie, truly his other half.

There would today — if fate hadn’t fingered one of them — be two identical boys sitting side by side in this room, one born a few breaths later, clutching the heel of the other. Gabriel would be talking to, and looking at, himself and not-himself, face to face with his own features, worn by another.

Instead, the dead brother, alive inside the living half, had become a magic, and wiser, boy — Gabriel’s daemon or personal spirit.

Gabriel’s father still talked of how proud he had been, pushing his two sons up a hill in the tank of a double pushchair, face into the wind, to the park. Wherever he went with them, they drew crowds and comment. ‘Two for the price of one,’ he would say, standing back so others could look at, converse with or tickle his boys. ‘Double trouble,’ he’d add fondly.

Then, aged two and a half, one boy died from meningitis. It was a miracle, the doctors said, that the other survived.

How could Gabriel and his parents ever recover? For a long time he had been an imprisoned prince, living with an elusive woman who had gained a child and lost one. She could be both indifferent and passionate. He had never learned how to convert the one into the other, except in his imagination, where he could do anything, apart from be with other people; that was, he guessed, the hardest art of all.

When Gabriel was four, he almost drowned in the sea, his father running in to save him. At this, Mum almost drowned in sadness and terror herself. Afterwards, she had become too careful with Gabriel, not letting him live for fear he might die. Worry was like an engine that kept people alive. Fortunately, her husband had a reckless, frivolous, streak, which stopped them all from suffocating, but she had entered a zone of fear that she was unable to leave. When he was young, they rarely left the house.

Gabriel didn’t remember Archie outside of the many photographs of the twins together, displayed in the hall, his parents’ bedroom and the living room. These precious framed pictures were never touched, moved or commented on, but they had always disturbed Gabriel for one important reason. His parents didn’t know which boy was which. His mother claimed that, when Archie was alive, they and they alone could tell the two apart. But recently his father had admitted that he had given one boy a dose of medicine twice, and that sometimes they put them in the wrong cots and didn’t realize the mistake until the morning.

This made Gabriel wonder whether they had been permanently mixed up. Perhaps he was Archie and Gabriel was dead. Certainly, he was always aware of his brother’s absence, and whenever he saw a pair of twins he wanted to rush over and tell them or their mother that there were two of him, too; it was just that one of them was a shadow.

‘Will Archie come back?’ he liked to ask Mum, from the age of six. They had gone to visit his grave, as they always did on the anniversary of his death. Gabriel’s birthday — their birthday — was always sad, too.

‘No,’ she would say sharply. ‘Never, never.’

‘Does he hear us talking about him?’

‘No.’

‘Does he think?’

‘No.’

‘Does he see?’

‘No.’

‘Not even black?’

‘No. He sees nothing. Nothing for ever.’

‘Is he in heaven as well as under the ground?’

‘He could be. Gabriel —’

‘With his friends?’

‘Gabriel, we carry him with us, wherever we go, in our minds but he will be dead for ever and ever and ever.’

She would say no more and would clench and unclench her fists as if trying to retain water in the palm of her hand.

If Archie was in his mind, Gabriel always had someone to talk to. Together, the boys could conspire against their parents. If Gabriel didn’t fidget and listened carefully he could hear Archie, for Archie looked out for his brother and was sensible and always knew what to do. Sometimes, if he felt frivolous, Gabriel would call up Archie by singing ‘Two of Us’ by the Beatles.

Now Gabriel became silent so as to hear his brother’s voice whispering within his body.

Archie was saying not to be afraid; Gabriel should go on drawing. If the objects became real, it wasn’t bad or black magic, just an unusual gift that could be of use. When Gabriel hesitated, Archie said that things might change, but that he should go on to see what might happen.

First, though, Gabriel would have to see if it might be possible to repeat the strange exercise.

On the next page of the art book was a picture of a yellow chair. He didn’t want to admit liking this kind of art, just right for the front of a postcard. He’d rather prefer the stronger stuff: toilets, blood and pierced eyeballs with titles like ‘Pulsations of the Slit’. The pretty pictures that had so shocked people in the old days had lost their power. But this one spoke to him now.

It was, as Archie murmured, useful. There was no point being snobbish. Their father, who had plenty of curiosity but little taste, except in music, might like it. The last time Dad had rung, he said he’d found somewhere to live. He had taken a room in a big house not far away.

‘It’s a little bare and cold,’ he had said. ‘But there’s a bed and —’

‘And?’

‘Wardrobe.’

What he needed were some bright pictures.

‘What did he say? What did he say?’ asked Gabriel’s mother, who had fortuitously overheard the conversation, no doubt by bending over and pressing her ear to the door.

‘Dad’s found a room.’

‘What sort of room?’

‘It’s bare and cold.’

‘Oh dear.’ Mum had giggled. ‘Very cold? But he hates the cold.’

‘He hasn’t got anywhere to sit.’

He imagined his father standing up to read, eat and watch television, or leaning against the wall now and again, for relief.

As Gabriel started to copy the chair, he began to feel he was bringing it into existence. He worked rapidly; it was like singing a song: once you’d started you shouldn’t think about it. When he had finished drawing and colouring in, he closed his eyes and looked up.

There it was.

He ran his hand over its ridges and curves. Gingerly, wondering whether it might collapse, he sat down. It was secure and comfortable. Gabriel stood on it, and danced a bit. It took his weight; this was a chair you could put your arse on and wiggle about.

When he returned to his sketchbook and turned the page, the real chair disappeared, but his copy remained.

The more he considered what he had done, the more disturbing he found it. Winking daffodils had tried to communicate with him. Dead brothers spoke within him. The earth, surely, had tilted and was trembling on its axis. Who would put it back before it tipped into eternity?

To check that everything else was as he’d left it, he went down to the living room to find Hannah watching television, her wayward eyes flickering fitfully in the darkening room.

‘Hannah.’

She looked about in surprise. ‘Bah!’

‘What?’ he said, grateful, almost, to hear another human voice.

‘Bath!’

‘Right.’

She ran his bath.

He could do it himself but he liked her to feel capable. Really, the poor woman, of all people, was only his mother’s conscience. Sometimes he wondered whether he thought about Hannah more than she thought about him.