Gabriel's Angel

by Mark A Radcliffe

  ‘So why were you?’

  Ellie didn’t say anything. She’d thought about leaving, she’d thought about how it would feel to leave a man with no sperm and potentially go off and get pregnant by some other bloke, and she thought about whether or not it was that that kept her with Gabriel. But she had never thought about being a mother in isolation from Gabriel. Somehow it wasn’t the same project, it didn’t feel as right. And anyway she did still love him. That may have annoyed her these days, but it remained a glowing unalterable fact. ‘Dunno, why do you think?’

  ‘To annoy Izzy.’

  Ellie nodded. ‘She never really took to him, did she?’

  Moira ignored the past tense. ‘No.’

  ‘Why do you think that is? And don’t say she fancied him.’

  ‘She probably did, but I don’t think it was that. Christ, I fancied him, when I first met him … .’

  ‘When you first met him, you were so pissed you’d have fancied Andrew Lloyd Webber!’

  ‘Bloody wouldn’t ’ave. Anyway I meant after that, but the point is, I liked you two together more than I liked the idea of being with him myself.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Christ, I don’t think I could ever feel like that for anyone. I’m too selfish,’ said Ellie.

  ‘It’s not about selfish, it’s about how you see the world. I think of all things as being in pursuit of harmony, of some kind of precise balance, if you like. You and Gabriel look like harmony.’

  ‘So why does Izzy dislike him so?’

  ‘Because where I see harmony, she sees a couple of good-looking people laughing a lot. If you are unhappy or insecure or generally tense the way my sister is, there is nothing quite so annoying as seeing people laughing all the time.’

  ‘We did used to laugh a lot, didn’t we?’ But as she said it she couldn’t remember what laughing felt like.

  ‘Yeah you did.’

  They fell silent. After a minute or so Moira said ‘Do you want a coffee?’

  Ellie tried to smile and said, ‘What do you think of my fiendishly desperate plan to get Izzy to steal his sperm while I lay in a hospital bed having my eggs removed?’

  ‘I think it’s a great idea,’ Moira said softly.

  Ellie glanced across the room at Gabriel and said quietly, ‘So do I,’ then asked, ‘Do you think Izzy will do it?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Moira, not entirely convincingly. Ellie was quiet again.

  ‘Of course,’ said Moira. ‘I could always kind of help, if you want?’

  Ellie started to cry softly. Moira came over and put her arms around her, feeling her sob into her chest. Ellie pulled her head back long enough to nod almost violently through the tears. Moira stroked her hair, looked at Gabriel, and whispered, ‘It’s what friends are for.’

  20

  ‘I don’t feel dead.’ Gabriel was looking around him as he spoke. It was hard to tell if his heart was actually in what he was saying, but his position was that this constituted an effort.

  ‘Well, of course not,’ said Kevin. ‘And you don’t look it. I’ve seen enough dead bodies to know what dead looks like, and it doesn’t talk. Smells after a while though.’ He smiled at his little joke.

  Gabriel ignored him. ‘I mean I felt … like I was in the middle of something … in the middle of lots of things … not at the end.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Julie.

  ‘We were in the middle of IVF for one thing, and it feels like, well … you didn’t let me finish anything.’

  ‘Well, who gets to finish everything?’ said Clemitius. ‘The nature of life is that you are always in the middle of something when it ends.’

  ‘Yeah I get it,’ said Gabriel irritably, ‘but I’m talking about how that makes me feel, which was I thought the fucking point of the group.’

  Clemitius held his expression and shuffled his feet uncomfortably under his robe. ‘Of course,’ he said, forcing a smile.

  ‘In fact, I don’t think there was a day in my life when I could possibly have felt more in the middle of my life than I did the day I died. Is that the lesson I’m supposed to learn? I shouldn’t have started anything for fear of getting run over? “Don’t take life for granted?” Because I’m infertile, mate, and that teaches you pretty bloody quickly not to take anything for granted.’

  ‘It’s not our job to teach you any lessons.’

  ‘No of course not, that would be a bit too Old Testament, right?’

  Everyone was silent. Christopher found himself struggling not to speak and he thought about why. He felt embarrassed. Embarrassed to be listening to things he could have seen just by looking. Gabriel was staring at his feet; Julie looked at him, perhaps still struggling with the fact that she’d run him over. Kevin seemed as though he was going to burst unless someone said something.

  ‘Funny, I felt like I was maybe at the start of something,’ said Julie. ‘That’s probably easier in some ways but …’

  A sticky silence descended, cloying and awkward. Julie thought it was like being in a lift going a long, long way up, except in therapy you can’t all stare at the door hoping nobody speaks. You face each other, aware that the doors won’t open and nobody is going to get out, not for a while yet anyway.

  ‘Well if there’s one thing my job has taught me, it’s that nobody gets to choose when they go,’ said Kevin, looking at Clemitius for approval.

  ‘Hmm, I wonder if you had to become a murderer to learn that?’ said Yvonne, curling her mouth to add extra venom.

  ‘Tell me more about feeling unfinished,’ said Clemitius.

  ‘You see,’ said Gabriel, ‘that’s what annoys me. It’s so false, that kind of question, it makes my teeth itch, and I can just feel myself getting irritated. “Tell me more about feeling unfinished”—for fuck’s sake!’

  Christopher listened but didn’t move. If he had, he would have found himself nodding and so he stayed perfectly still.

  ‘That sounds like a defence mechanism to me,’ said Clemitius, a bit defensively. ‘A way of acting that prevents you, or excuses you, from saying or thinking about things that are too hard.’

  ‘Or maybe the problem is the words simply sound like a lie dressed as a question?’ Gabriel looked up at the smooth white ceiling, then at Clemitius.

  ‘How can a question be a lie?’ said Clemitius.

  ‘If the person asking it does so believing they already know the answer?’

  Another silence. Kevin struggled the most when nobody was speaking, he almost changed colour, from his usual pinky grey to a bright puce.

  Finally Gabriel said, ‘So you’re saying I’m in some kind of denial.’

  ‘I didn’t use those words.’

  ‘But that’s what you mean.’

  ‘I just mean that you say you haven’t been happy, and when someone asks you anything about yourself you get cross, which serves to prevent you thinking about why you were unhappy.’ Now Clemitius was in his element.

  ‘I’m not unhappy, I wasn’t unhappy, I was … frustrated, irritable maybe, not in control of my life. I wanted to be a dad, I wanted to be the father of Ellie’s child, and I couldn’t.’ He paused, thinking hard. ‘I couldn’t figure out what to do about that. But I wasn’t unhappy.’

  ‘So you got cross and stayed that way for about a year and a half?’ Christopher asked.

  ‘I don’t know. There’s more to it than that.’

  ‘Which is why you’re here,’ said Clemitius.

  ‘I don’t think I could have handled it, mate, firing blanks, too embarrassing,’ Kevin said. ‘I admire you for even admitting it. I mean, I was all right in that department; my first wife said I got her pregnant by looking at her from across the room.’ He laughed.

  ‘Yeah, I hear that kind of thing a lot,’ said Gabriel, unmoved.

  ‘I can’t imagine any woman wanting you to get any closer,’ shuddered Yvonne. ‘Did it never occur to you that maybe that was her way of telling you t
hat it was someone else’s child?’

  Gabriel continued, ‘I did think about things, not just the fertility stuff but why I was, well, moody …’

  ‘And what did you think?’ asked Clemitius.

  ‘I thought of a hundred reasons why I was behaving the way I was, but knowing them doesn’t change anything, knowing them just gives you something to talk about while you are behaving that way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Kevin to Yvonne.

  Gabriel ignored them. ‘Worrying about getting older, and more unsure about things, less in control of my life. I mean my hair started to fall out, I know it’s not important in the scheme of things, other people are losing kidneys and loved ones, what’s a bit of baldness? But it was my baldness, and I got to thinking: Well, it’s the first thing that has happened to my body that I didn’t choose, and it felt like a sign of things to come, you know? Dodgy knees, arthritis, getting fat, a fucking lack of sperm …’

  ‘What do you mean someone else’s child? She didn’t, she wouldn’t have dared,’ said Kevin.

  ‘Because you’d have killed her?’

  ‘Yes, actually.’

  ‘All the more reason not to tell you.’ Yvonne smiled.

  ‘There seem to be two conversations going on at the same time,’ said Clemitius.

  ‘You see it’s always the bloke’s fault isn’t it’ said Kevin. ‘We can’t do right for doing wrong.’

  ‘Oh yes, you poor little contract killer you,’ sneered Yvonne.

  ‘If I’d met you before I’d been paid to kill you, I’d have done it for nothing,’ spat Kevin.

  ‘Yes I’m sure you would, you have the demeanour of an amateur,’ she said.

  Kevin clenched his fists and looked at Clemitius, who said, and he had probably been practising this for a long time: ‘I sense some hostility in the group.’

  21

  Gary Guitar was—as Eighties pop refugees go—quite a success. And a lot of it was down to a reliance on cough medicine.

  In the last throes of Dog in a Tuba, Gary was rarely seen without a bottle of cough medicine in his hand. He could get through seven bottles a day when things were at their worst. That constituted a £70 a week habit. After Dog in a Tuba split up, he found his way into drug rehab. He loved it. Not only did he manage to kick the linctus but his cough cleared up, too. And if that weren’t enough, he met Brett BigHair, lead singer with American AOR ‘legends’ Karma. Brett was doing battle with the evil twin axes of cocaine and sex addiction. He was also quite pissed off by the defection of Karma guitarist Stevie ‘Strings’ Logan to a bunch of Seventh Day Adventists who liked Stevie’s cash but not the devil’s music he played to earn it. Brett needed a guitarist; Gary Guitar had a guitar. A union made in rehab that earned Gary more than $5 million over the next seven years.

  He needed Dog in a Tuba about as much as a polar bear needed an anorak. Nothing would get him on stage with James Buchan again. He had better things to do. He wasn’t exactly sure what they were at the moment, which is why he found himself watching ‘U.K. Style Horizon’ more than he might have anticipated and, as a result of ‘Watercolour Challenge,’ trying to teach himself to paint.

  Gary Guitar had returned from the U.S. after a messy divorce expecting to lose himself in meaningless sex, song writing and some music production. Only the song writing had materialised. As a result he had 24 new songs, mostly about his ex-wife and estranged daughter, although one or two touched on the sensitive subject of addiction (example: ‘My Coughing Soul’). He had imagined that a few young women might want to sleep with him. However, he didn’t get out all that much and, when he did, it appeared that the local females saw not a rock star but a forty-five-year-old fat bloke with a mullet wearing pressed denim and some cowboy boots. It hadn’t been much better in the States either. Brett had banned girls from the backstage area as part of his recovery. Gary Guitar had considered this unfair, as he wouldn’t dream of demanding the other band members renounce cough medicine if they needed it. But it felt unsympathetic to say anything.

  So anyway, Gary Guitar did what he did and waited. At first he had been waiting for someone to call about producing a new band who had always admired him, or wondering if he had any plans for some solo work, but as the days turned into weeks, and the endless re-runs of ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ turned into endless re-runs of ‘Dad’s bloody Army,’ he realised he was waiting for just about anything. And then, after the phone call, Gary Guitar realised that perhaps he had been waiting for James.

  James left the hospital with a mix of relief and excited nervous energy normally the preserve of new fathers. Of course he was worried about the possibility of getting punched by Gary Guitar. And he was even more worried about Gary not even answering the door. But he was also looking forward to seeing the silly sod. The prospect of seeing the man he had once thought about calling Lennon to his McCartney, but hadn’t because he didn’t want to give Gary delusions of equality, warmed him.

  By the time he had got out of the West End and up past Hampstead Heath, Julie and her coma couldn’t have been further from his mind. As he drew nearer to the address Michael had distractedly given him, all other thoughts and feelings had drained away, being replaced by an overwhelming ‘creosote-my-bollocks-and-call-me-a-coconut-because-that’s-how-much-this-hurts’ jealousy. The houses weren’t just houses, they were small mansions, estates even, and in London, which made them worth about as much as Luxembourg. This was the stuff of ‘Through the Keyhole’, the stuff that James believed was meant for him.

  Most of these places had security systems. Many had closed gates; some had yellow signs threatening trespassers with large dogs. Gary’s house, he was relieved to discover, had none of that stuff. Bloody big, though. In order to get from Gary’s gate to his front door, James was better off staying in the car. He had to drive up his guitarist’s front path, that was obscene, and all the way he was driving he was surrounded by a garden, more a field really, with a couple of trees. The drive was lined with large ornamental urns, each about the size of James’s bath, and they were all full of flowers. James decided he would piss in one of the bloody things if Gary wasn’t in.

  The grass was freshly cut, which James thought probably meant a gardener, and the drive had gravel. James wasn’t certain why this above everything else annoyed him the most, but it really did; as he cruised up the driveway the sound of his guitarist’s gravel under the wheels almost made him throw up. Still, this was no time for bitterness or retribution: all that could come later, along with some carefully placed Benylin in Gary’s hotel room. Jammy bastard. First things first, thought James, let’s get Dog in a Tuba back together again.

  The doorbell chimed ‘Eye of the Tiger.’ It wasn’t being ironic. James waited. He thought of ringing again, but who wants to hear that repeated? And anyway, it was a big house; Gary Guitar might have been down in the cellar, or in the fucking sauna.

  When Gary finally answered they just stared at each other. They had met nearly twenty years earlier, written bad songs together, shared poverty, pot noodles and instant mashed potato, and whilst they had also grown to hate each other, there are moments when you forget the loathing and remember the mashed potato. Moments when you romanticise your past or, as James would say, ‘go a bit soft in the head.’

  It may be that Gary was having one of those moments, because he neither slammed the door shut nor hit James. He did say, ‘Whatever you’re selling I ain’t buying,’ with a slightly mid-Atlantic twang to his voice that made James want to tell him he sounded like Sheena Easton.

  ‘Nice house Gary; is it yours?’

  ‘No, I’m squatting. What do you want?’

  ‘To talk.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Any chance of coming in? Or you worried I’ll see you don’t have any furniture?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got furniture, I just don’t want you sitting on it.’ But as he said it Gary Guitar turned away from the door and walked through a large hallway into the livin
g room. As he hadn’t closed the door or set any killer dogs on him yet, James took that as the nearest thing he was going to get to an invitation to come in.

  In the living room Gary was already lounging on a long, cream-coloured leather sofa. Behind him were enormous French doors leading on to the garden. It was a lovely room being slightly strangled by crap, thoughtless furniture. A series of three large rugs—one burgundy, in the middle of the room, one off-white, and one multi-coloured African style affair over by the French doors—gave the impression that Gary had decided to spend what he saved on interior designers down at the ‘Lucky Dip Carpet and Rug Emporium’. On the wall, above an original and quite stunning fireplace, was the same picture James had back in the cottage, the Rothko poster.

  ‘Hey’ exclaimed James ‘I’ve got that at home too!’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Gary. ‘He only did it the once.’

  ‘Yeah well, I mean I’ve got a copy.’

  Gary enjoyed the following silence, and couldn’t resist smiling and saying in a stage whisper: ‘That’s the original. I bought it off Sting.’

  James coughed, then realised that perhaps coughing was insensitive. So he coughed again. ‘Nice house Gaz, bit different to Dalston Road, eh?’

  ‘Long time ago. What do you want?’

  James had the spiel ready. How Dog in a Tuba had been, even if Gary didn’t realise it, a seminal part of all of their lives, and how the advantage of a reunion is that people only remember the good things the band did, they don’t remember the crap, and even if they do remember the crap they don’t remember it as crap because they remember how happy or hopeful or thin they were when they were listening to it.