Gabriel's Angel

by Mark A Radcliffe

  Gabriel was a man of few sperm. As he had recently said to surprised guests who had come round for dinner to celebrate Ellie’s 37th birthday, ‘I have so few sperm I could name them after the Waltons and still have a couple of names, maybe a Jim Bob and a Mary Ellen left over.’ They had, after four years of hopeful distracted sex, turned to Dr Science and his modern bag of tricks. Dr Science, being a busy old sod, had taken his time to get back to them.

  They spent a good six months attending an NHS clinic that, after a lot of hanging about and a few tests, had proved to be about as useful as a piano in a canoe. After a handful of appointments, a stale-smelling old Russian woman who said she was a doctor told them: ‘It’s a shame, but you two cannot have children. We recommend donor sperm. We can get you donor sperm.’ She sounded like she was selling watches in Stalingrad.

  ‘But what about ICSI?’ Ellie mumbled. People this infertile always do their homework, and both Ellie and Gabe had worked out for themselves that the technique whereby one of Gabriel’s limited but able sperm was injected directly into Ellie’s willing and ready eggs was the only chance they had.

  The Russian shrugged. ‘We don’t do ICSI, why you worry about this ICSI?’ She looked around the room with disdain; to Ellie she looked as if she were trying to find her spittoon.

  ‘Can you recommend anywhere that does?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘So you don’t want donor sperm?’ she said. ‘It really is very good quality.’

  Gabriel and Ellie left before the woman offered to show them samples and decided, in anger as much as anything else, to go private.

  So for the past few weeks they had been attending St Catherine’s College Hospital in the middle of London. The new place seemed much better; it had a waiting room for one thing, and furniture. As Gabriel said when they first came in, ‘I like a place with carpets.’

  Their first visit had gone well. The most noticeable thing about St. Catherine’s was that when you saw a member of staff, they smiled at you, and when you spoke to the woman on the front desk, she knew your name.

  ‘Hello, Ellie,’ the young, smiling receptionist said. ‘Would you and—’

  ‘Gabe. Gabriel. Gabriel,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘Would you and Gabriel like to come through? Dr Samani will see you now.’

  Dr Samani was a tall, middle-aged Middle Eastern man with thin black hair that had a distinctly orange tint, who was wearing an expensive suit. He sat behind an oak desk with his fingers to his lips. When Gabriel and Ellie entered, he got up, shook both their hands, and offered them a seat. If he knew how nervous they were, he pretended not to, speaking in a matter-of-fact way.

  ‘I understand you have had some difficulty at a previous hospital.’

  ‘We were told that there was nothing that could be done,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Who told you that? The cleaner?’ laughed Dr Samani.

  ‘She was a doctor.’

  ‘She was an idiot, an idiot in doctor’s clothing. There are lots of things that can be done, but I think given the semen report your GP so kindly sent us, Mr Bell, ICSI is the best course of action. Might I suggest you go and provide another sample?’

  He waved Gabriel out of the room. Outside, a waiting nurse escorted him to a small, wood-panelled room with a plastic seat, a small specimen container, and some old porn magazines. To the nurse’s eternal credit, she didn’t look him in the eye.

  Gabriel started flicking through the magazines. Far from being arousing, they were vaguely amusing—a woman who may have once been in Bucks Fizz was playing with herself. Try as he might, Gabriel couldn’t get ‘Making Your Mind Up’ out of his head. Over the page, a man with a curly perm and handlebar moustache was thrusting himself unconvincingly at a blonde girl with a centre parting, flicks, and blue eye shadow. Gabriel imagined a queue of embarrassed men beginning to form outside the door, and the nurse whose job it was to police the masturbation room waiting impatiently to go for lunch, where she might meet her boyfriend, who would ask her how her morning went, only to be told, ‘Well there was this one weird guy who stayed in the wank room for half a day; not that it was worth the wait, according to the lab.’

  Gabriel put down the magazine, closed his eyes and thought of Ellie. Did it every time.

  Meanwhile, Dr Samani was running through the proposed procedure with Ellie. ‘If we go with ICSI, we need to test you thoroughly first: two scans and some simple tests. If all is clear, you could start on the drugs after your next period. It will take four weeks to develop the eggs for collection; two days later we should have some embryos ready to implant.’

  ‘That quickly?’

  ‘Why wait? Surely you have waited long enough?’ He smiled with a mix of reassurance and pride in his work. ‘First we need to take control of your ovaries, stimulate them, and encourage them to produce more than just the one egg. Then we harvest the eggs, add one of your husband’s sperm directly into the egg, and wait 24 hours to see how many embryos we have. ICSI is good for creating embryos—something like an over 90% success rate—then we implant two and hope.’

  ‘What are the chances?’ asked Ellie nervously.

  ‘About one in three, but it all depends. Statistics don’t mean much once you have started—you just aim to get from one part of the process to the next, and we see if we can help you have your baby. OK?’

  Ellie was crying when Gabriel returned, having deposited his jar with the nurse and, to his credit, not looked her in the eye, either. But he knew it wasn’t an unhappy kind of crying.

  Dr Samani went through the explanation again gently, before saying ‘I suggest you wait in the waiting room. He shook their hands.

  Within twenty minutes he called them into the reception area. ‘Yes, ICSI. You have few sperm but enough, don’t worry,” he said to Gabriel. ‘Ellie, we have booked you an appointment for a scan next week and a hysterosalpingogram one week after, as you have to have that just before a period. If all that is clear, you begin the drugs after that, but you will come back and we will teach you. Goodbye.’

  And with that, he was off. The man with the slightly orange hair had given them more information, more help, and more hope in thirty minutes than they had found anywhere else over the past two years.

  That night, they went to their favourite restaurant and laughed together for the first time in months. They got drunk on two and a half bottles of wine and had careless sex in the kitchen when they got home. But carelessness never lasts.

  Gabriel didn’t list the emotions he experienced in the face of infertility and all that it entailed. If someone has lots of emotions they rarely waste time naming them, instead they waste time trying to cope with them, or to hide them, or to live in spite of them or to gather them together into little emotion bags to be buried at the bottom of the garden. Mainly Gabriel became quieter, more bitter. He thought about sperm sometimes, but mostly he thought about Ellie; he found that when he struggled with life, life seemed to move faster; time changed gear and put its foot down, and the quicker it went, the fewer options there were.

  Ellie, on the other hand, simply became more serious. It wasn’t that she felt she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders, it was more that she had come to believe that she should behave as if she did, as if austerity and a straight face were some kind of penance. Feeling bad was her communion with God. A God, incidentally, she had no belief in whatsoever. Perhaps she imagined she was being watched by the heavens, to see if she was worthy. So she became more ascetic. She lived as though she was on her way to an interview, and that is no way to live.

  6

  Ellie had been lying in bed half asleep for a couple of hours before giving up. She always struggled to doze off when Gabe wasn’t there, and the drugs from the IVF were making her feel a little nauseated anyway. So she had got up and gone to the fridge, got some chocolate ice cream and sat in front of the television, flicking between ‘America’s Next Top Model’ and ‘Wife Swap’ and enjoying neither.

  She heard the
doorbell before the police rang it. Maybe she’d heard the footsteps, perhaps the police radio squeaking out its annoying white noise. For whatever reason, she was up from the sofa and heading for the door when the bell rang.

  Opening the door, she saw a short blonde policewoman with strikingly red cheeks and thin pink lips, looking grave and sympathetic. A young policeman, tall and thin-faced, stood just behind her looking embarrassed. Ellie felt an electric cold.

  ‘Where is he?’ she managed to say.

  ‘Ellie Field?’ asked the policewoman.

  ‘Where is he, what’s happened?’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s been an accident. Can we come in, please?’

  Before she could open the door and stand aside to let them in, Ellie was sick on the hall carpet.

  No matter how hard you try, how much you concentrate, when a stranger is telling you that someone you love is on life support, you don’t hear full sentences. Ellie sat hunched on the sofa, trying not to be sick again, trying to breathe the way she had told a thousand patients to breathe when they were close to panic. She heard a few key words: ‘Hit by a car,’ ‘Shoreditch,’ ‘head-injuries,’ ‘internal bleeding’ and—from the embarrassed young policeman who was probably trying to join in but not actually helping—‘bagels.’

  She threw on some clothes and kept asking questions that made no sense but reinforced the words she was taking in: ‘What car?’ ‘Shoreditch?’ ‘Head injuries?’

  ‘We don’t have any more details, Ms Field,’ the woman said.

  Ellie had never been in the back of a police car before. The policeman asked if she still felt sick, She shook her head, not really understanding the question. He didn’t look convinced. As they drove to the hospital, Ellie stared out of the window at the lights. Cars, shop windows, street lamps—she didn’t really go out at night much these days. She didn’t recognise the lives after dark that were going on around her nightmare. They stayed in a lot, arguing. Waiting. Hiding. They: her and Gabe.

  ‘Shoreditch,’ she said out loud. ‘What was he doing in Shoreditch?’

  The A and E department was bright and ugly. They are always grubbier and more desperate than the ones they show on TV. Ellie noticed a couple of anxious-looking parents gathering around a pale child, and a couple of drunks in the corner shouting at nobody in particular. She could have been dreaming … except she was so cold and she had a policewoman guiding her toward the receptionist.

  To whom, with a lucidity she hadn’t expected, she said, ‘My partner, Gabriel Bell, was admitted earlier,’ then spoiled the momentary picture of calm with ‘Is he dead?’

  The receptionist looked at the policewoman and then to her computer.

  ‘He went straight into surgery,’ she said. ‘Third floor.’ She began talking to a man with a very bloody head who had appeared beside Ellie and had asked how long he would have to wait, and could he borrow a cloth.

  ‘Surgery,’ murmured Ellie. ‘That’s probably good.’

  The policewoman smiled. ‘Is there anyone you want to call?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thank you. Not just yet. I’ll just go up.’

  ‘I’ll come too.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ lied Ellie.

  ‘I think there is.’

  They walked away from the lights and the shouting, down the main corridor to the lifts. Opposite the lifts was the hospital shop run by the League of Friends. Closed. Ellie stared through the window and saw a jar of fudge. She used to eat the same fudge with her granddad when she was a child. Who on earth would have thought you could still get fudge in a jar? She was staring at the shop, wanting her granddad to pick her up and take her home, when the policewoman said quietly, ‘Ellie, the lift.’

  7

  Kevin had decided to embrace the therapy with a vigour he had not shown since the time he garrotted a stoned drug dealer for £1,500.

  ‘It was when I turned forty-two that I realised forty-two felt very symbolic to me,’ he said, pausing briefly for dramatic effect. He wasn’t someone used to having people listening to him, and he wanted to make the most of it. Gabriel stared out of the window at the still, grey lake. Julie shuffled in her chair. And Yvonne glared at Kevin, who found himself feeling quite exhilarated.

  ‘Elvis,’ said Kevin.

  ‘What?’ said Julie. ‘What about Elvis?’

  ‘Elvis was forty-two when he died,’ said Kevin. ‘Tragically young.’

  ‘And remarkably big,’ said Gabriel, distractedly.

  ‘Yes, he had a weight problem,’ acknowledged Kevin, ‘but let’s not forget the impact that man had on the world, an impact that lingers even now. How does it go … ‘If all the world was a stage … The King … “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” ’

  ‘Shakespeare actually,’ said Yvonne.

  Kevin ignored her. ‘He may have died young, but he had lived a life that was full.’

  ‘He’d travelled each and every highway,’ smiled Yvonne.

  ‘Yeah, looking for biscuits,’ said Gabriel. And they both—much to their own surprise—started laughing.

  ‘He’s being sarcastic,’ complained Kevin.

  Clemitius looked at Kevin solemnly. ‘I don’t think they are laughing at what you have said or what you have experienced, Kevin. I think they are laughing because they don’t know what else to do with the things they are feeling. In my experience, people find coming into a group like this both profound and threatening.’ Clemitius paused for a moment, looked intently around him, and tapped himself on the chin. ‘It is a great testament to your courage that you are able to speak about your experiences so soon. If I may say so, my sense is that everyone moves at their own pace, and Yvonne and Gabriel are struggling to come to terms with this experience. Please try to be tolerant if you can.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Yvonne. ‘Don’t kill us! Oh, too bloody late.’

  Kevin, who was still riding the crest of the wave that was finding he hadn’t gone straight to hell for the twenty-one lives he had taken for money, closed his eyes and remembered what it had felt like to hit Yvonne with that ashtray. It helped somehow; it even made him smile. He had come across people like Gabriel and Yvonne many times in his life. Sometimes he had envied them their comfort with themselves; other times he had murdered them. Once or twice he had pitied them their detachment from the rawness he felt; he knew himself to be in touch with the realities of life in a way people like them never could be. They thought they were sophisticated, they thought they were clever, but they weren’t. Rather, they were muffled: wrapped up in something insulating and protecting. They could not feel life the way he could.

  Mostly because they had never killed anyone. Kevin believed courage and understanding came from being able to sustain yourself alone. Separate from the world. Without anything like love or even company. Gabriel, Yvonne, and probably Julie were not the types to have spent long periods of their lives alone; they were too pretty—and too needy. This Clemitius, he seemed understanding, and of course quite possibly the person in the room most likely to help him. Kevin glanced over at Clemitius and decided to press ahead.

  ‘Anyway,’ he continued. ‘Elvis had lived a full life despite dying by the age of forty-two, and I hadn’t done a damn thing; well, nothing of note. I’d been in the army and done what I was told. I’d worked, eaten, and slept. That was pretty much it.’

  ‘Tell us more,’ said a very earnest Clemitius.

  ‘Well, I travelled a bit, I marched in and out of countries, blew some of them up, did the things soldiers do, but I never really visited anywhere. I never really did anything and I never really felt happy, or comfortable. It may seem strange to you,’ he said loudly and self-consciously, ‘but I was never very happy around other people.’

  ‘So you decided to kill them?’ asked Julie.

  ‘Not straight away, I didn’t. I was working as a security guard at the time—easy work, crap money. I knew I had to do something different. I kind of thought: What kind of life is it that feels unlived, you know?’
he said, looking at Julie.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Julie, genuinely confused.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Kevin. ‘So I knew I had to do something, something that made me feel my life stood out, something that made me feel in control, if you like.’

  ‘How do you do it?’ said Yvonne.

  Kevin paused for a moment, staring at the floor, seemingly deep in thought. Finally, he looked at Yvonne shrugged and said, ‘S’easy.’

  ‘How can killing someone be easy?’ said Julie.

  Kevin’s face loosened somehow, his jaw slackened and his eyes slipped further back into his skull as he stared at her and then at Clemitius. He shrugged again, and everyone was silent.

  Until finally, Gabriel said: ‘What the fuck did I do to end up anywhere with you?’

  8

  The only time Ellie left Gabriel’s bedside was to go home to wash and to give herself hormone injections. Shock and grief numbed her. She had forgotten how to think. She just was. She hadn’t so much as wondered what use the treatment was without Gabe, and none of her friends had found a way of asking her. She clung to what felt like the important things: the artificial hormones—the life bringers—and going to see Gabe—the reality bringer. Beyond that she was not eating, not sleeping, not thinking, and not conscious of talking to anyone. She was simply taking medication designed to make her super-ovulate and waiting for Gabriel to wake up.

  On the third day the doctors came and told her that they didn’t think he was going to. The operation had lasted nearly seven hours. His skull was fractured and his brain was swollen. Worse, it was likely to swell more post-operatively, and the surgeon felt sure there would be a bleed. The optic nerve in his left eye was severed and his left cheekbone was shattered, as was his eye socket. His pelvis was in five pieces, his hip in two, his liver had been pierced by a shattered piece of bone and was bleeding. There was more, but it made Ellie dizzy to hear it.