Gabriel's Gift

Chapter Two

After school the next day Gabriel was waiting at the living-room window with Hannah behind him. He shut his eyes, and when he opened them his father was at the gate.

‘Yes!’ Gabriel shouted. ‘Yes, yes!’ He turned to Hannah. ‘See, he did come.’

‘No noise,’ said Hannah. She was watching Dad warily.

Even though he knew Gabriel’s mother was out at work, Dad didn’t come into the house but stood on the step with his back to the door, tapping his foot as Gabriel packed his drawing things and art books into his rucksack.

Dad was unshaven, wore dark glasses and had his woollen hat pulled down. Gabriel remembered Mum saying to him, ‘Careful: people will take you for a burglar. A police record is the only recording you’re going to make!’

‘I’ll burgle your arse in a minute!’ he had replied, grabbing her.

On good days he would be affectionate, always touching, kissing and hugging. But Mum said he was clumsy, and didn’t know how to touch.

Under his hat Dad was balding; the hair he did have was pulled back by a rubber band he picked up off the street. The rest was straggly and frizzy. His jeans were ripped — ‘ventilation’ he called it — and he wore plimsolls, which gave him ‘uplift’. His idea of dressing up was to pull a fresh pair from a number of similar boxes he kept in the cellar.

‘Let’s get going,’ Dad said, hurrying Gabriel away from the house.

Hannah stood at the window, mouthing, ‘Get lost!’

Gabriel said, ‘I’ve been excited all day. Two houses instead of one. I’ll be like other kids now.’

Gabriel was thinking of children whose absent parent felt so guilty they became eternally indulgent, and couldn’t stop giving them presents.

‘It’s a kind of flat, not a house,’ said Dad.

To Gabriel’s surprise they didn’t go straight to Dad’s place, but to the V&A in South Kensington, walking around the old jars and pots in an agitated silence that Dad called ‘meditative’.

Gabriel was used to his father taking him to see the latest work — the strangest stuff — by young artists working in squats, lofts and abandoned garages. Gabriel had looked at heads made of blood, hair and old skin; he had seen dissected animals, and strange photographs of body-parts. The only canvas he saw was Tracy Emin’s tent. Gabriel had learned that anything could be art. His father had no shame about knocking on the door of young artists he admired, and going in for ‘a chat’, since he knew they had been keen to talk about their work. Today, however, he wasn’t feeling ‘inquisitive’.

Gabriel had started to draw seriously two years before, when his father hardly worked and was at home much of the time. There were no artists in the family, but perhaps Gabriel had turned to art and making films because it wasn’t something Dad had ever thought of doing.

Unlike most musicians, Dad could read music as well as play several instruments pretty well. The house had been full of guitars; Dad also used to have a saxophone, a piano and a drum kit. At one time, in a garage near by, he had started to build his own harpsichord.

From the age of fourteen, Dad had played in many longhaired, short-haired and now, mostly, bald bands. He could play in any style, and sing in only one. Gabriel’s mother called him Johnny-about-to-be-famous. Dad was smart enough to know that by his age you had either become successful, rich and pursued by lawyers, stalkers and the press, as some of his former friends had been, or you found something else to do. ‘Something else’, of course, was an admission of failure; ‘something else’ was the end.

Worse than this, according to Mum, was to play pool in the pub every day with other ‘superannuated long-hairs in dirty jeans’, saying how the latest ‘beep-beep’ music wasn’t a patch on Jimi’s or Eric’s. This group of has-beens, who, as Gabriel once quipped, could hardly manage ‘joined-up talking’, only left the pub to attend AA meetings. Mum, who remembered being at the centre of the rock scene, wouldn’t have these bums in the house. At night Dad went to his mates’ houses to drink, jam and smoke dope.

At least Dad had never stopped loving music. It was just that he didn’t get paid for it.

He still played live with these friends, in pubs or at parties and weddings, where no one listened and middle-aged people danced without moving their bodies. Not long ago they had been invited to play in a hotel while the guests had supper. It was a pretentious place but seventies music had been requested. Gabriel had gone along to help set up, as most of the band were in such bad shape they could barely lift their instruments.

Dad’s band had played the tunes that millions had liked when he had been in Lester Jones’s group, but one by one the guests were driven like refugees from the dining room, carrying their plates and some of them still chewing, until only one red-faced old man remained, dancing in front of the band. He danced till he collapsed into the arms of a doctor who was staying there.

Sometimes Dad became dejected, or distraught with envy at the young kids, not much older than Gabriel, who flashed across the nation’s televisions, into the charts and Hello! magazine, and then were gone, carrying a good deal of money with them, if they were lucky.

Gabriel had played both guitar and piano from a young age and had been in a school group, playing indie rock, for a few weeks. He couldn’t write songs and didn’t improve as a musician. The pained look on his father’s face — Dad hated him to play badly — made murder more likely and learning impossible. It was easier for Gabriel not to play, and, anyhow, Dad hated anyone touching his instruments. If Dad watched Gabriel, it was because he was worried about whether the boy would drop his best guitar. When, to the relief of them both, Gabriel ‘retired’, what he did miss was having something big to be interested in.

One day his mother had taken him to see an exhibition of old and new drawings at the British Museum. Afterwards, she bought him pencils and a sketchbook. Like his father, Gabriel soon had his own ‘sacred’ objects, obtained cheaply from the numerous second-hand shops in the area: paintbrushes, pencils, videotapes, old Kodaks. He started to take his ‘objects’ wherever he went, in his special rucksack. If he placed something like a pencil or camera between himself and the world, the distance, or the space, enabled good ideas to grow. He and his father were working in parallel, rather than in competition.

When the weather was good and Dad was feeling ‘inquisitive’, Gabriel and Dad used to ride their bicycles along the river. Dad refused to leave London: for him, the rest of the country was a wasteland of rednecks and fools, living in squalor and poverty. Luckily, parts of the towpath were so secluded you could almost believe you were in the country, but only a few miles from the fizz and crackle of the city.

In the early evening, before going to the pub, his father would practise his instruments, his bass guitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, his mandolin, even his old banjo. He said he felt they were looking at him reproachfully, yearning to be played. He devoted time to them all.

As Dad played cross-legged on the floor, humming to himself and swigging beer, a roll-up fixed between his stained fingers, the hard pads of flesh on his right hand, where he held down the notes, flying across the frets, Gabriel had worked too. He drew his father’s face and hands; he drew the guitars and the faces of his school friends; he experimented with crayons, with pen and ink, and paints: he and his father together, both lost in something.

It was dark when they arrived now at Dad’s new place. Gabriel had the impression that his father wanted to get there as late as possible. It was a vast collapsing house sliced into dozens of small rooms.

‘Magnificent old building, full of original features,’ said Dad. ‘Worth millions. My room is the penthouse, at the top.’

Gabriel took a camera from his rucksack. ‘You stand over there, Dad, by that rotting pillar.’

‘Later. Put it away.’

‘Dad —’

‘Put it away, I said. You might notice … there are some strange characters here. You’d learn a lot if you talked to them. It’s a bit like the sixties.’

‘Cool.’

‘Right.’

His father spoke of the sixties with reverence, in the way others spoke of ‘the war’: as a time of great deeds and unrepeatable excitement. Somehow, all the windows everywhere were open, and, in a ‘universal moment’, God’s favourite album, Sgt. Pepper, was being played for the first time. Many of Dad’s sentences would begin: ‘One day in the sixties …’ as in ‘One day in the sixties when I was playing Scrabble with Keith Richards — he was a particularly tenacious opponent and fond of the word “risible” …’

Gabriel thought he might make a film about his father entitled One day in the Sixties. Gabriel suspected that his father had actually been quite young in the ‘sixties’, and that he’d seen less of it than he liked to make out. But fathers didn’t like to be doubted; fathers lacked humour when it came to themselves.

In the hallway Dad said, ‘Now, deep breath, heads down. There isn’t a lift, I’m pleased to say. This is an opportunity for much-needed exercise.’

Gabriel kept his head down but couldn’t help noticing that the colourless stair carpet was ripped and stained. When he looked up he saw that on each landing there were toilets and waterlogged showers. Outside the rooms, bearded men in robes, turbans, fezzes and tarbooshes seemed to talk backwards in undiscovered languages.

Dad followed Gabriel awkwardly, stopping to rest at each bend. He had a limp, or ‘war wound’, which sometimes he told strangers he had acquired in the ‘revolutionary struggle of making the world a better place, with free food and marijuana all round’. In fact his ‘wound’ was of an altogether more ignoble, though — to some — more amusing, origin.

When at last they got to the top, and Dad had to stop and lean against a damp peeling wall for a breather, which left a white mark on his coat, Gabriel took his father’s key and inserted it into the lock. But the lock was stuck and the door already open. Gabriel reached out and snapped on the overhead light.

‘A cosy little place.’ Dad’s breath seemed to scrape in his throat. ‘It could be pretty fine, eh? What d’you think?’

Gabriel looked about.

Dad was not unclean but he was the sort who’d wipe a room over in July and be surprised in December that the grime had returned. Not that there was much anyone could do with this room.

The wind seethed at the rattling window, like an animal trying to get in; the basin in the corner was sprinkled with cigarette ash. There was a single bed covered by an eiderdown and blanket.

Gabriel couldn’t help wondering what Archie would have thought.

‘Original features, eh? What’s in the other room?’

‘What other room?’ said his father. ‘The English never stop talking about property. The price of their house is the price of their life. They’d trade their souls for a sofa. Have you ever known me to cling to material possessions? I’m asking you, Gabriel, how many rooms does a man need?’

‘Well, one for sitting in and one for —’

‘Don’t get technical with me, boy. This is the best I could get … for the money I have.’

‘Have your mates been here?’

‘No. No one. I couldn’t exactly have a supper party. I’ve been writing letters, though. I didn’t think, when I was younger, that I would end up here. It’s not that I’m particularly foolish. I can’t even explain to myself how such things happen.’

‘That’s all right, Dad.’

‘It’s very disturbing, the sudden feeling that your life is already over, that it’s too late for all the good things you imagined would happen.’

‘Dad, it’s not.’

‘No. I’ve been trying to see this break as a beginning but this room keeps making me think that I’ve been here before.’

‘Déjà vu or reincarnation?’ said Gabriel. ‘Are you beginning to believe in weird —?’

‘What? No. Stop it. This is what everywhere looked like when I was a kid, before the world bent a bit —’

‘In the sixties?’

‘That’s right,’ said Dad.

‘Cool.’

Presumably, his father’s clothes were in the wardrobe. As for music, Dad had brought a few tapes and only one acoustic guitar, leaving his other instruments with a friend, for fear they would be stolen from the room.

‘What do you do here?’

‘What does anyone do anywhere? You know me: if I need a song I’ll sing one. Now, I should feed you otherwise your mother will accuse me of … unspeakableness. Was she nervous of letting you come here?’

Gabriel didn’t want to tell his father what Mum had said the previous night, when she woke him up to talk about the next day Dad hadn’t ‘disciplined’ Gabriel sufficiently; Gabriel was doing badly at school because of his father’s bad example. Hannah had been brought in to aid the ‘discipline’ process. If it showed signs of breaking down, further ‘measures’ would be taken; and if, during Gabriel’s visit, Dad started drinking, ‘you’re to call me,’ she said, ‘and I’ll fetch you home. If he depresses you, or it’s too squalid, ring and I’ll be there.’

Gabriel said, ‘Not really, Dad. I think she wants to do other things now.’

‘Like what?’

‘I’m not really sure. Just something else.’

‘Right, well, that’s exactly what I want to do, too. Let’s eat, pal.’

On the single gas burner, Gabriel had noticed an opened tin of ravioli, black around the bottom and with a spoon in it, probably still hot.

‘Wait,’ Gabriel said.

From his bag he produced some tacks and pinned the picture of the yellow chair over his father’s bed.

He regretted it was a copy of another picture; he wished he had done something original. He would do something original.

In the meantime the yellow chair would do.

It reminded him that he had been intending to speak to Dad about the ‘hallucinations’ and other strange scenes and nightmares taking place within the theatre of his mind. He saw now that his father was burdened enough as it was.

Gabriel finished pinning the picture up and noticed his father’s eyes were as wet as the wall.

‘Magic,’ said Dad. ‘A few more of those and I’ll be tickling myself under the chin rather than trying to cut my throat. You’re good to me, Angel. I hope, whatever happens, that I will be the same to you. I think we should find a restaurant.’

‘Cool.’

‘Stop saying that!’

In the pizza place Dad ate nothing but drank a beer and watched Gabriel, asking him about school and his friends. Gabriel didn’t know if his father had lost his appetite; it occurred to him that Dad couldn’t afford to eat.

He said, ‘Where have you been, Dad?’

‘Yes, sorry. Trying to get my life started again —’

‘Why didn’t you phone? I thought you’d gone gay.’

‘Gay?’ Dad looked shocked. Then he laughed. ‘I remember you said that’s what happened to your friend Zak’s father. One day he woke up and decided he wanted to be with boys. Why would that happen to me? Didn’t Zak’s father always collect teapots? And you say he didn’t know he was homosexual! Have I ever taken such a turn with teapots or any such fancy, nancy objects?’

Gabriel recalled Zak’s father, who had had blond streaks painted into his thinning hair and wore tight white T-shirts with a packet of Marlboros shoved up the sleeve.

Zak and Gabriel had been friends since the first day at school, when they discovered that they not only liked the same films and music but were likely to have the same enemies.

Zak’s parents were well off; his father was a computer magazine publisher and his mother a journalist. Zak had been sent to a state school rather than a fee-paying one ‘on principle’. While he might not be the recipient of any worthwhile information at the school, at least, it was thought, for the only time in his life, he would mix with ordinary people, an education almost worth paying for. Some other kids were in the same situation: their parents were politicians or actors, or they ran the local arts cinema where Gabriel and Zak were let in for free. These kids were bullied for being ‘snobs’, as if they were slumming or thought they were doing the school a favour by attending it, popping in for a lesson after breakfasting with their parents and the children of other celebrities in some hip Notting Hill café where models, producers and movie stars took their first calls of the day. The rough kids knew that no parents in their right mind — unless they were spectacularly privileged or politically perverse — would actually volunteer to send their child to the school.

Zak had never been poor. He didn’t know what it was like. The established middle class had different fears from everyone else. They would never be desperate for money; they would never go down for good.

Sometimes Gabriel was regarded in the same light as Zak. Although there was no question of his parents being able to send him anywhere else and Gabriel’s father turned up at the school not in a car, like some other parents, but on his bicycle, waiting outside with a roll-up and a newspaper he had pulled from a dustbin, he was still regarded as a ‘rock star’ for having played with the still popular Lester Jones. He was both derided and admired for this. The kids would sing Lester’s songs in the playground behind Gabriel’s back.

Gabriel said now, ‘You used to wear glitter and make-up.’

‘Of course I did! I was a pop boy. Heterosexual Englishmen love getting into a dress. It’s called pantomime. Anyhow, I admire Zak’s dad.’

‘You do?’

‘Changing his whole life like that. It’s a big, magnificent thing to do. Funny how everyone seems to be living a bohemian life now, except for people in the government, who have to be saints. And me.’ He said grandly, ‘I have had a job.’

‘A job?’ said Gabriel.

‘Your surprise surprises me. I’ve been in gainful employment — out in the fresh air.’

‘What for?’

‘It was just a fantasy I had. Gabriel, I was a sort of coolie. A bicycle courier.’

‘What happened?’

‘I found it very hard, very hard. I got sick. It exhausted me. The distances, across London, were too great for me. I had no idea this city was so … undulating.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Fucking hilly. I thought my chest would explode.’

‘You’ve stopped doing it?’

‘I … sort of collapsed. I’m looking for something more brain-based.’

‘Like what?’

‘Don’t ask so many questions. How’s the film?’

‘It’s nearly ready to be shot,’ lied Gabriel. ‘All I’ve got to do now is save up for a movie camera.’

‘I wish I could help you. I will get you a camera from somewhere, I promise. What we need is a stroke — one stroke of luck. Tell me what else has been happening at home.’

‘We’ve got a hairy au pair called Hannah.’

‘I know. I saw her watching me. What was her last job, turning on the gas in Auschwitz?’

‘Actually, she’s an immigrant. She’s lost in a bad dream. Most of the time she doesn’t know where she is.’

‘Yes, yes, sorry. And this woman is lazing around in those leather chairs I got for a good price? I hope she hasn’t scratched them up.’

‘Not at all. Mum exchanged them for a new futon.’

‘She exchanged them! Didn’t you try to stop her?’

‘You know what she’s like when she makes up her mind. Out they went!’ Dad looked away. Gabriel said, ‘Now she’s at work, waitressing. You know that, too.’

‘Has anyone come round?’

‘Sorry?’

‘To the house.’

‘Only Mum’s friends — Norma, that fat woman who always says, “Kiss me, stupid.” And the other women — Angie and that lot — who wear big overcoats and too many scarves.’

‘Anyone I don’t know? Strangers?’

Gabriel shook his head. ‘No, no strangers.’

Dad drank his beer. ‘I’m afraid she’s going to find it tough to survive without me there to guide her. When she phones for advice, I might refuse her. You will learn that women like to think they get by without us. But we give them —’

‘What?’

‘Erm … stability.’

Gabriel pushed his plate away. ‘Don’t want any more.’

Dad finished the pizza himself, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ said Gabriel.

‘Apart from your hair, you look so much like your mother. You sound like her, too.’

‘I can’t help it, Dad.’

‘No, no, course not. Come on.’

Back at the room Gabriel sat on the edge of the bed. Looking at his father’s acoustic guitar he had the feeling Dad hadn’t touched it for a while. ‘Dad, will you play?’

‘I don’t think so. I think a game of noughts and crosses will cheer us up. You used to love it.’

Gabriel remembered — maybe it was only a few years after Archie died — asking his father, ‘What are songs for?’

‘Amongst other things, to make us feel better,’ his father had replied, ‘when things are so hard.’

This remark made Gabriel start to believe in the uses of entertainment.

He said, ‘I want to draw a man playing a guitar. There’s a picture here I want to copy. If you play … it helps me concentrate.’

‘Really?’

‘Please.’

It was Picasso’s Blind Guitarist, which featured an emaciated, long-limbed, blue figure, not playing his guitar but resting over it sadly.

While Gabriel studied it, his father reached for his beer can and cigarette, and started to play a blues tune with his eyes closed. He even played a little bottle-neck guitar, explaining in his endearing but inevitably pompous way that the song was one of the oldest of modern music.

‘You have to settle in a very deep part of yourself when you play the blues.’

‘Right. I see.’

Gabriel opened his sketchbook and started to draw. Sometimes when he copied something he altered the original picture; this time he cheered up the blue guitarist, giving him sight and pleasure in what he was doing.

There was a loud banging on the wall.

‘Turn it off!’ shouted someone.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Gabriel.

‘Turn it off!’

‘They’re madmen,’ said Dad. ‘The room next door. Unusual place, full of mad characters.’

‘We’re praying!’

Gabriel said, ‘From the sixties?’

‘Whenever,’ said his father. ‘They’re not going to last into the next century.’ He shouted, ‘Pray on, mothers!’

Dad’s face was starting to churn. When the banging happened again Gabriel became apprehensive. At home his father had thrown plates, books and records around, though nothing too valuable; he could sulk for days, or walk around the streets in a fury for hours. He could take five steps up the road and find someone to argue with. Had he been a woman, he might have been called hysterical. Instead, he was deemed ‘moody’, which, because of its ‘artistic’ overtones, unfortunately suited him. Whenever it was said, he turned up his collar and looked for a mirror, a move Gabriel liked to imitate for his mother’s benefit, saying, ‘The James Dean of Hammersmith.’ It always amused her.

Yet his father had, with Gabriel, almost always been his best self. Gabriel was the one thing he’d been consistently proud of.

Dad threw his guitar down, removed his shoe, and smashed at the wall with it.

‘Leave us alone!’ he yelled, hopping up and down. ‘If you want to discuss it, meet me in the corridor, motherfucker!’

‘Go to hell!’ the neighbour called.

‘And you, and you! See me outside!’

Gabriel tried to distract his father.

‘Look at what I’ve done!’

He was holding up his sketchbook.

His father sat with his head in his hands. At last he studied the picture and smiled.

‘Beautiful. You’re getting better and better. Let’s get out of this dump.’

‘Where?’

‘Maybe we should watch TV, eh? A couple of hours of stupidity might calm us down. My nerves are twanging like piano wires.’

‘I wish I’d brought some videos.’

For years they’d watched films together. The Graduate was one of their favourites, with a soundtrack they liked. Performance, too — kept in a plain cover — Gabriel was allowed to watch, when Mum wasn’t around. The Godfather they had seen repeatedly, and most of Woody Allen, particularly Play It Again, Sam. Summer with Monika, My Life as a Dog and anything by Laurel and Hardy, as well as Tarkovsky, they knew backwards. Gabriel could repeat the dialogue as it played and used to run the films, with the sound down, as he did his homework. If each frame of a film told a story, he had to watch them repeatedly, until he knew them. Then he started to imagine the scene with his own characters in them, speaking his dialogue.

Gabriel glanced around the room, wondering whether the TV and video were concealed in a cupboard.

‘Where is the telly?’

‘Downstairs. There’s no TV in this room. That would be an extra. Extras are out. Extras are well out.’

In a smoke-filled room on the ground floor, they watched a programme about a garden make-over, joining a handful of preoccupied foreign men staring up at the television, which was padlocked to an iron arm extending from the wall.

It wasn’t long before Gabriel’s neck began to ache from looking up.

‘Boring,’ Gabriel was about to say, when he noticed that his father wasn’t even looking at the screen but, like the other men, seemed to have become uncontactable.

A man wearing a long white robe and slippers that curled at the end like question marks came to the door.

‘Phone.’

‘Dad.’ Gabriel nudged his father, who looked blankly at the hooded-eyed man.

‘Phone,’ the man repeated.

‘Who is it?’ Dad turned to Gabriel, ‘Not that I know anyone!’

‘Maybe it’s Mum,’ said Gabriel.

‘What would she want? To check up on you? You’re all right here, aren’t you? Haven’t I been looking after you?’

‘Yes.’ said Gabriel.

The man said, ‘Lester.’

Dad stood up. ‘Lester? Did you say Lester?’

‘Yes. I think I did say that name several times.’

Dad gripped Gabriel’s arm.

‘Gabriel boy, it’s Lester — Lester Jones on the phone to us — right now!’

Gabriel followed his father to the door and watched him flapping up the hall. His ‘war wound’, which, oddly enough, he had actually acquired when with Lester, had miraculously mended.

From the door, Gabriel scrutinized his father talking animatedly to Lester. He noticed that the man who had called Dad to the phone had not gone away but was also watching his father, from the other end of the hall.

Dad finished talking and replaced the receiver.

‘Gabriel —’ he began.

The man in the curly slippers went to Dad, grabbed him by the shoulders, pushed him against the wall and wagged his finger at him. As the man addressed him, Dad struggled and knocked his ear. When someone else went past, the man let him go.

For a moment they stood there, snarling at one another. Gabriel was about to attack the man with his fists and feet; Dad ordered him to stay where he was.

‘Don’t mention any of this to Mum.’ White-faced and shaking, Dad was pushing Gabriel away. ‘It’ll only make her worry. Promise?’

‘O?. But what did he want?’

‘Forget it! Listen: we’ve been stroked. I knew we would be. It was Lester on the phone! Lester — speaking to me!’

If Dad was mellow, he would talk of the time he had toured the world, playing bass for Lester Jones in the Leather Pigs, more than twenty-five years ago.

He would open a shoe box full of photographs and pictures cut from magazines and newspapers, of him and Lester together. At that time Lester was one of the world’s biggest pop stars, idolized and followed by millions of fans in dozens of countries, his songs and style imitated by many other groups. Like most pop heroes, Lester contained the essential ingredients of both tenderness and violence, and was neither completely boy nor girl, changing continuously as he expressed and lost himself in various disguises.

In this world before Gabriel was born, people did stranger things than they seemed to now. It amused Dad to boast of ‘going to bed in Memphis and waking up in San Francisco’. He had worn a silver suit open at the front to reveal a shaggy chest on which a heavy medallion bounced. He had padded shoulders on which his curly hair rested — so luxuriant that Gabriel wondered where he had obtained the wig — and dark eye shadow, applied only ‘approximately’, as well as what looked like his grandmother’s earrings. On his feet, fatefully, Dad wore boots with platform soles.

Mum, who had just left art school, helped with the costumes. That was how she and Dad had met, she on her knees, measuring Dad’s inside leg for a pair of red satin trousers though he’d only requested a spangled waistcoat.

It was the platform soles, those Eiffel Towers of footwear with flashing lights in the heel, that had proved calamitous. Lester and the Leather Pigs were playing a gig in the north of Finland. It was dark on stage, and Rex, becoming overexcited as a woman in the audience bared her chest, essayed an ill-advised shimmy. Normally, when performing, he didn’t stir at all; Lester did more than enough of that for the whole band.

Suddenly Rex twisted his ankle. As he struggled to maintain his balance, he saw Lester smiling at him, imagining that Rex was dancing. Rex crashed down from his platform boots to find himself grovelling on the floor of the stage like an injured insect. Craggy roadies immediately ran to him. But instead of rushing him to hospital, they attempted to reinstate Rex so that he could complete the gig, propped up like a shattered ornament between a couple of speakers.

It was discovered that Rex’s leg and ankle were broken. The roadies suggested that for the rest of the tour Rex be held up in a harness, suspended from the ceiling, not unlike a puppet. Rex objected to this humiliation; while the band completed the tour, he made his way home.

By the time Rex had mended, Lester had moved on to a style of music involving flatter shoes, funkier tunes and darker hair. When Rex begged Lester to let him rejoin him Lester insisted he wanted a different sound and less hirsute musicians. Rex volunteered to shave his body, but he never worked with Lester again.

Dad had first gone to gigs as a teenager. It wasn’t long before he was playing live himself. He loved the fear and anticipation of walking on stage with a band, and the noise of the crowd and their adoration. He liked seeing different cities and concert halls. He began to understand the need of actors to perform; he knew, too, that they never did the same thing every night. He believed the audience understood that what he was playing was different, or difficult, or ironic, or was just what was required in the circumstances.

After a good gig there were parties and backstage foolishness. Dad said that then you were your own drug, and the intoxication lasted several hours, though it wasn’t long before you had to repeat it. It was a ‘sailor’s’ existence that Dad thought would be his life, insulated from the steep complications of the everyday world, like having to prepare food or form relationships that could survive daylight.

Following the accident he did, after a year, go on the road with Charlie Hero, a follower of Lester Jones whose music resembled Jones’s. But Dad was getting older. In the bands he played with, though he was often the most accomplished musician, he was made to stand at the side of the stage, in shadow, where he got cold and had to wear thick socks; he was kept out of the videos for being too ugly, and eventually out of the bands altogether.

Before the accident Dad had been known as Free-standing Fred. Unlike many musicians, he rarely drank or used stimulants. But after it he was known as Restless Rex. People said he could never stand unaided again, without a drink in his hand.

After the phone call from Lester, Dad bought some beers to celebrate. They hurried up the stairs once more and lay down together in the single bed.

‘I like a hard bed,’ said Dad.

‘Good for our backs.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Dad, your ear is bleeding.’ Gabriel fetched a wet towel and bathed his father’s ear. ‘Now keep still.’

‘That really was Lester Jones. He’s been receiving my correspondence.’

‘You write to him?’

‘Always have. His manager and I once spent a night in jail together. I keep Lester informed about what’s going on in the real world and so on.’

‘How would you know?’

‘Don’t be cheeky.’

‘I didn’t know you were writing to him.’

‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me. I go to cafés with the other old men, and just write anything. Children only see a small part of their parents.’

‘Oh,’ said Gabriel. ‘Will I be shocked by you? Should I see a psychiatrist?’

‘I’ve witnessed it, pal. When the parents go mad, they rush their kids onto the couch. Isn’t that what happened to Zak?’

‘Yeah, when his old man came out — over Sunday lunch — Zak was sent to a suit who asked him dirty questions and told him to express himself.’

‘Did he express himself?’

‘So much so that his mother stopped him going and told the psychiatrist to see a psychiatrist. She had thought it would make Zak good, not rebellious.’

Dad was laughing.

‘Luckily for you, we can’t afford that funny stuff. And you’re a beautiful kid, Angel.’ He went on, ‘Lester’s been commissioned to work on his autobiography. The only problem is, his head is riddled with holes. All I’ve lost is my hair. Lester needs to be reminded of what close mates we were, and how I helped him make those records. That’s partly my guitar sound on there. It was me who told him to be bold. “Go further,” I said all the time. “Be as mad as you can be.” He always reminded me of Orson Welles.’

‘Sorry? Is that the younger Welles or the older? When are you going to see him?’

‘When are we going, you mean?’

‘You’re taking me?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘I’m supposed to be at school.’

Dad hesitated. ‘You’ve had more than enough education. Lester is more important than algebra. Promise you won’t tell Mum.’ Dad started to roll a joint. ‘Don’t tell her anything about me, except that there’s some kicking life in your old dad yet.’

Two years ago the three of them had gone to see Lester perform in a football stadium. He, Mum and Dad spent the day searching through boxes in order to dress up in ‘Lester’ gear, seventies clothes, glitter and make-up, applied by Mum. Of course, Lester walked on stage wearing a dark suit, although he did wear high heels with it. Gabriel had been pained to see his father among the ticket touts and pushing hysterical crowd, ankle-deep in the rubbish on the floor, surrounded by people wearing T-shirts with Lester’s face on, knowing Dad could have been rocking on stage.

‘Dad, can you tell me who that man was?’ said Gabriel.

‘Which man?’

‘The one who held you against the wall. What does he want?’

‘Don’t ask. He wants … only money. He was good enough to lend me something a few days ago, when I was cycling for the company. I thought I’d be able to pay him back.’

‘And will you?’

‘I think we’ll be all right now.’

‘How?’

‘Lester will take care of us. I’m certain of it. I’ll be out of here in a few weeks. Maybe in a few days. It’s going to be the high life for us! I’m thinking of taking you to New York for a bit.’

‘New York!’

‘We’re going into the pleasure zone! Now, let’s get into this bed.’

Gabriel and his father undressed to their underwear and got into the tiny bed. As a child Gabriel had loved sleeping wedged between his parents; they had had to repeatedly replace him in his own cold bed. Now he wished he had his own bed, for with a burp, fart and a rug, his father pulled the eiderdown over himself, not realizing Gabriel was left with only a thin sheet to cover him.

His father was excited, wondering aloud whether Lester might give him a job in the new band he was taking on the road; or perhaps he might want to hear one of Dad’s recent songs, or even write one with him. He became dreamy, Dad, when he’d had a smoke.

Dad then started to imagine the kind of flat — in a mansion block, with a porter — he would buy with the money from this enterprise.

‘What I want, one day,’ said his father, ‘is for you and me to live together again.’

‘You mean you’re thinking of coming home?’

‘Why? Does Mum keep saying she wants me to?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Right. What I do want is my own place and to come home from a gig somewhere, knowing you’re there sometimes, my son. I can’t wait for that.’

Gabriel tried to encourage his father away from these speculations by bringing the subject round to music.

Dad was soon ‘monologuing’ about the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors; about soul music, and Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone and the Supremes. He talked of how the lyrics and the music worked together and of the work’s cultural and political context.

When at last his father fell asleep, still muttering about why the brass on one record was better than on another, Gabriel was able to relax at last. He thought about painting, and about Degas, and then Degas’s girls. He couldn’t sleep with an erection. He masturbated quickly — taking care not to splash his father — and slipped from the bed.

He heard doors slamming in the depths of the house; someone laughed for a long time; he thought he heard a window break and a rat scratching behind the skirting board; he saw, under the newspaper, the corner of a crumpled pornographic magazine and read the words ‘beyond blue’. He thought of two boys whose mothers were dead, Lennon and McCartney, in Paul’s front room, writing songs all afternoon, with guitars in their laps, wanting to be the best. He whispered to Archie, but even he didn’t respond.

All sleeping; all safe. But not Gabriel, not tonight, with so much to think about.

He opened the window, finished Dad’s joint and threw it down to the street, watching the little sparks scatter and expire in the darkness.

Sitting on the windowsill, next to Dad’s milk and trainers, and looking out over West London, he took out his sketchbook and pencils and drew his sleeping, open-mouthed father, with little snores, like bubbles, emerging from his mouth into the cold room. Meanwhile, in this city, not far away, Lester Jones was living and breathing, with Rex on his mind. Tomorrow he would see them both.