Gabriel's Gift (9 page)

He was about to mention this when one of the men said, ‘The tension is killing us – let's have a look!'

He went to Gabriel's mother, put his arm around her and lifted her arse. Gabriel didn't like the way he touched her, but couldn't wait to see what the man made of the picture.

The man laughed and turned back to Gabriel. ‘Couldn't you have made me more handsome, you little devil? I look like a wild boar!'

‘I wonder why!' said the other man.

‘Look at what he's done with you!' said the first. ‘Microwaved pizza comes to mind!'

His mother took the picture, folded it up, and put it on the table.

‘Aren't you going to bed, Mum?' Gabriel said.

‘Yes, yes, soon.'

She accompanied Gabriel upstairs to bed, forgetting to kiss him because she was thinking hard about something else.

‘Dad wouldn't like these people,' Gabriel said.

‘It's none of his business. Nothing is, now.'

Much later the front door slammed. A man's voice echoed up the street; then a bottle smashed. She went into her room and everything was quiet again.

Hearing a whimpering noise, Gabriel went out onto the landing. Her door was open.

She was sitting up on the high bed wearing nothing but her knickers and one shoe. Mum must have been weary; she could hardly sit up. One of her arms, pressing against the bed, kept giving way Her other hand was between her thighs.

Gabriel heard a voice but couldn't tell, at first, where it was coming from. At last he realized that one of the men was sitting on the floor with his head on his chest, singing to himself and trying to take his shirt off.

Gabriel encouraged him to stand up.

‘That's George's,' slurred the man, pointing at the bed. ‘I will climb up there in a bit and conquer. First I want the toilet.'

‘This way,' said Gabriel. ‘Give me your shirt.'

‘Thank you, sir. You aren't, by any chance, a shirt-lifter?'

‘No.'

Before the man knew where he was, Gabriel had led him downstairs, opened the front door and pushed him out onto the freezing street. He quickly locked the door behind him and turned the lights off.

Watching the man unbutton his fly in the middle of the road, Gabriel shouted through the letter box. ‘It's an outside toilet! There, on the left! Don't forget to flush it! Mind that car behind you!'

He had never seen Mum this drunk. As she subsided Gabriel saw she was about to drop down onto the floor. He climbed the ladder, put his arms around her and dragged her heavy body further onto the bed. She didn't seem to notice him pulling her into her pyjama jacket but as he did up the buttons she started to kiss him and call him ‘darling'.

‘But it's Gabriel,' he said.

Her mouth was open; she was already breathing heavily.

He could have drawn her. Not that he needed to fetch his sketchbook; it was a scene he would remember.

Gabriel covered her up and kissed her goodnight.

Next morning Gabriel was up before his mother, preparing for school while Hannah soldered the scrambled eggs to the side of the frying pan and torched the toast.

‘How's the picture?'

Dad was already on the phone. From where he stood, Gabriel could see a man's shirt hanging over the back of a chair.

‘Fine.'

‘Finished with it?'

‘Not yet.'

‘Mum see it?'

‘Yes.'

‘How come?'

Gabriel said, ‘She's nosy. She finds things.'

‘Yes.' said Dad. ‘Did she like it?'

‘Quite.'

‘What did you tell her?' Dad asked. ‘Did you mention Lester?'

‘Yes. Is that OK? She was impressed by that, Dad.'

‘I'm sure. You didn't tell her anything bad about me?'

‘Like what? No.'

Dad sighed. ‘You're keeping the picture safe? Is it right there beside you?'

‘Oh yes. It's right here. In fact … I'm looking at it!'

‘Call me when you're ready. Maybe I'll pick it up later today, after school.' Dad added politely, ‘Is that fine by you?'

Gabriel said, ‘What else are you doing today, Dad?'

‘I don't know yet. We'll have to see what develops.'

‘Where's Lester's picture?' Gabriel asked Hannah, biting into a charcoal and peanut butter mixture. ‘Have you seen it?'

She looked at him in bewilderment. She didn't know what he was talking about.

The last time Gabriel had seen the picture, it was on the living-room table. But it wasn't there any more. His mother had prob
ably taken it into her own room for safe keeping. She wouldn't thank him for going in there and waking her up.

He went to school but didn't pay attention to his lessons. He was beginning to think he was too old for school, or the school itself was somehow backward, or too old-fashioned for him. It didn't give him enough to think about. As soon as he began to concentrate on a piece of school work, he became aware that more exciting things were going on somewhere else.

That morning, catching him jotting film ideas in his notebook before he forgot them, Gabriel's teacher snatched away the notebook, saying, ‘Why aren't you concentrating, Gabriel Bunch?'

‘It's not interesting enough to keep my attention, sir,' he replied, without thinking.

‘Not interesting enough! What do you think this is – an entertainment?'

‘If only, sir. If only.'

The other kids were laughing.

The teacher said, ‘I'll come down on you like a pile of bricks.'

One of the other kids yelled, ‘The customer is always right, sir!'

Someone else chipped in, ‘One size fits all! One fit sizes all!'

‘Always follow the instructions!'

‘Don't try this at home!'

‘Look away now!'

‘We're on our way to Wembley!'

It was a madhouse.

Gabriel looked at the teacher and replied, ‘That's all you are, sir. A big pile of bricks.'

‘Repeat that, Bunch.'

It was the only instruction Gabriel felt happy to follow.

The teacher refrained from striking him, but Gabriel was supposed to be in detention for a week. Not that he would turn up. Zak, who read a lot and used difficult words (he could even spell ‘precocious'), had said not to worry, the system lacked imagination and was so coercive that failure was the only distinction; conformity was a kind of death. And as Dad pointed out, it was supposed to be a school, not a lunatic asylum, and certainly not a prison.

Gabriel had been sent out of the schoolroom, and stood alone in the corridor, like a dog forced to wait outside a shop for its owner.

‘Fascism,' Zak had mouthed, passing by. ‘Ring me.'

‘I will,' Gabriel replied.

At school, he and Zak were now in different classes and barely met. To keep out of trouble for being middle class, Zak had had to become a librarian. Books, he had discovered, were good for hiding behind. Adults respected books, though no one had explained why.

Zak was bright; he took things in. He could work things out for himself, too. ‘Parents are funny,' he said once. ‘What do they want from us? Our respect and for us to listen. But do they bother to respect us? How often do they listen to us and think about what we want?'

School didn't interest Zak either. He put up with it because he knew he was just passing through. He could see how much there was ahead of him.

Gabriel had hardly seen Zak out of school since his father had left. Zak knew what had taken place – the same thing had happened to him, as it had to several others in the class. To be part of a ‘complete' family was, these days, to be in a minority. But Gabriel hadn't wanted to talk about the break-up. Words were as dangerous as bombs, as Gabriel discovered when he swore in front of his mother. They didn't only describe; they did things to other people, or made things happen, and more than enough was happening at the moment.

Anyway, children understood tyrannies, he thought, living with those vicious moody bosses called parents, under a regime in which their thoughts and activities were severely constrained. The kids were anarchists and dissidents, operating underground, in secret cells, trying to find an inviolable privacy.

At that moment he didn't feel like a glorious anarchist.

A passing teacher who had hardly addressed more than a handful of phrases to him, stopped for a moment and said, ‘I remember you, Bunch. That is your name, isn't it?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘When you arrived here you were full of confidence. Now you look scared all the time.' The teacher touched his face. ‘That twitch of yours has come back.'

‘Has it, sir?'

Gabriel had had a twitch in one eye, which flickered like a
faulty camera shutter. When he was made conscious of it, it felt as if his face was inhabited by spiders; insects were rushing beneath his skin.

‘Look after yourself,' the teacher said.

‘Thank you, sir.'

He would look after himself. The experience with Lester had taken him into another world, where he seemed to belong. He couldn't wait to remind himself of it by examining the picture again.

That afternoon, when he got home, he couldn't find it anywhere, not in his mother's room, and not in his own.

He turned out cupboards and looked in the same place again and again, before going to Hannah, who was standing outside the bathroom.

‘Sorry, Hannah,' he said in a businesslike voice. ‘I've got to go out to a meeting. I'd be grateful if you'd keep my supper warm.'

‘I'll warm your arse in a minute!' When necessary Hannah could find the appropriate phrase. She had made friends with other au pairs; in some ways, as London became richer, it was becoming more Victorian. Her friends must have been coaching her. ‘It's bath time! Water all over!'

She pointed at the full bath.

‘
You
get in,' he said. ‘You could do with a wash!'

She was even more shocked when he put his coat on, took the man's shirt from the back of a chair, and went out of the house, announcing, ‘What a lovely evening for a stroll!'

She stood on the doorstep and cried in reasonable English, ‘Wait, wait! I am in charge!'

‘I'm going to see Mum,' he said. ‘I'm not a child.'

When he looked back he saw that she was intending to start off behind him, but it didn't take him long to lose her.

His mother worked several streets away, and he was soon there.

The bar became raucous after work, filling up with office workers in black clothes. At the door a waitress tried to stop him. ‘You're too young!'

‘Put me in jail.'

He saw his mother across the room, standing at a table beside a man he recognized without knowing where from. It was
Strange: she was the most important woman in his life, and unimportant here, just another waitress. Worse, at that moment she probably wasn't thinking of him.

‘Mum!' He was standing on tiptoe.

At his voice she looked up. He could, suddenly, command her attention and make her his again. It was a wonderful power.

She hurried over. ‘Is something wrong?'

‘Yes.'

‘What is it? Tell me! Are you not well?' She pressed her hand to his forehead. ‘You are hot!'

‘Course I'm hot! Where's my picture? The one Lester gave me.'

‘Oh, that. Is that why you've come? What's that in your hand?'

‘The shirt one of those sweaty men left last night.'

She took it and folded it up a little too neatly for his liking. She said, ‘I've put the picture away for safekeeping.'

‘Thanks. But I want it now.'

‘What for?'

‘That's up to me.'

‘Don't shout at me. I'm a single mother and I've got a headache!'

‘I'm surprised you can stand up at all.'

She had her hurt face on, making him feel that it was his fault, that his demands were unreasonable.

The waitress who had tried to stop him coming in went up to his mother. ‘Christine, there's a customer waiting.'

‘Coming.' To Gabriel, Mum said, ‘Go home.'

He said, ‘I want to look at it.'

‘Don't mess it up. It'll get damaged with everyone pulling at it,'

‘You mean Dad?'

‘That man's an old hippie. They were a generation that didn't want to understand the value of things. Why d'you think we've been poor all these years? Dad didn't want to be “materialistic”. Where I've put the picture … it'll be safe. You can have it – of course you can have it – when you're older.'

‘Older! Will I never be the right age? I was old enough when he gave it to me. It's mine and that's a fact.'

‘A fact? A fact!' she laughed. ‘But we're family.'

‘A family!'

‘We can look at it as a family, when I say.'

Gabriel said, ‘I want Dad to look at it sometimes, too.'

‘I'll think about that. He's gone. He doesn't want us. Why d'you think he walked out?'

Gabriel was shaking; he hated her and was afraid of his own fury. She refused to understand him, or take him seriously. She was even angry with his anger.

‘What I notice,' she said as they walked to the door, ‘is how you come here only when you want something for yourself. Why, when I saw you, I almost thought you had come in to see how I'm getting on!'

‘How are you getting on?'

‘What? Fine,' she said. ‘I like it here. Your father once told me that I have the mind of a waitress. Maybe he was right, eh?'

He looked up to see the black post-box of Hannah heaving through the door.

‘Bad, bad boy.'

She almost collapsed and had to lean against a table.

‘Thank you, Hannah,' said his mother, returning to her work.

‘Boy,' said Hannah. ‘Boy – come here.'

Outside, Hannah took his hand and tried to pull him across the road as though he were a short-legged child. He stumbled along behind her, reminded of being dragged by his mother and slapped on the legs by her as an infant.

At the edge of the pavement he stopped and wrenched his hand away from her; if she touched him, he would flatten her and take the consequences.

Hannah was looking at him: his eyes must have blazed; there was fear in hers.

‘O?, OK,' she said. ‘Follow up.' She started off in one direction, and then in another.

‘Which way?' he asked.

‘Oh, I don't know,' she said. ‘Where are we?'

‘London.' He added, ‘You'd better follow me.'

Turning the corner at the end of their street, Gabriel saw that Dad was standing outside the house. Gabriel took Hannah's hand and pulled her behind a van.

‘I'm staying here,' he whispered. ‘You go to the house. Let him see you.'

Hannah was perplexed but did what he said. When Dad saw her approaching, he walked away quickly and turned the corner without looking back.

Later, Gabriel searched for the picture again but couldn't find it. He became increasingly annoyed with his mother and decided to wait until she returned, and interrogate her later. But when she came in he heard a man's voice and decided to wait until the front door slammed. By that time, however, he was exhausted and had fallen asleep.