Gabriel's Angel

by Mark A Radcliffe

  ‘Christ, I’ve even heard “Prince Charming” referred to as a classic and people were throwing up in the streets when that came out.’

  Gary didn’t look at James while he spoke, which made him feel a bit like a vacuum-cleaner salesman, but he did pour a couple of glasses of scotch, almost distractedly, and James took that as a sign to carry on with even more enthusiasm. He talked about maybe writing some new songs together, about seeing and being with the others, about playing with old friends like Blancmange and those fellas out of Spandau.

  ‘We never met them, did we?’ said Gary.

  ‘No I don’t think so, but we probably will this time—all in the same boat and all that,’ said James.

  ‘But you’re missing one vital thing,’ said Gary, handing James a glass. ‘Why bother? I mean what would be the point, it sounds like some kind of hell to me. Singing songs I can’t remember to an audience of tired, bald, fat people who won’t be asking for an encore because they have to get home to the babysitter by eleven. I mean why? What would be the point?’

  ‘Fun.’

  ‘You call that fun?’

  ‘The musical challenge?’

  ‘Pur-leeze.’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘Ah, money. Now we are getting to the point. James, you haven’t changed: still full of bullshit and still crap with money. Well sorry man, but I don’t need the money.’

  ‘Everyone needs money, Gary, even rich people. Let’s face it, it won’t do your profile any harm to be seen in your old band again.’

  Gary Guitar laughed. ‘Well, it depends what you mean by profile, James. A load of overweight has-beens doing Eighties cabaret? I think if you want a profile that says “loser,” that’s a pretty good way to go about getting it.’

  ‘Oh don’t be such a snob. OK, it’s not ideal, but you are not going to tell me that the manufactured crap around at the moment is better pop music.’

  ‘I am not interested in pop music James, pop music is for the young, it‘s for the impatient for chrissakes; that’s why it’s always just three minutes long.’

  ‘Well, the audience won’t be young, they’ll be adult. We don’t just have to play the old stuff, do we?’

  ‘What? New songs?’ For the first time Gary had stopped sneering.

  ‘Yeah new songs, new audience; I haven’t actually written much yet but …’

  ‘No, but I have.’

  James’s blood froze. People didn’t buy Rolling Stones records to hear Bill Wyman songs. They didn’t go to see The Police to see what Andy Summers was writing about, and they weren’t going to welcome Dog In a Tuba back into their lives if they had to listen to the interminable mid-Atlantic drivel that Gary Guitar would almost definitely inflict upon them.

  ‘Nah, hang on mate, I’m the songwriter. You’re the musical craftsman. It’s what made us such a good band, we knew our roles.’

  ‘We didn’t know jack shit, James, we were kids. Well I’ve been playing pretty much non-stop since then; have you? If I’m going to do this, and I’m not saying I am, I’m doing my own songs.’

  James nodded. Like fuck you are, he thought, but this wasn’t the time. That will come later, with the cough medicine. ‘Be great to get together again after all these years. We’ll be better this time round, I know it.’

  22

  After the group, Gabriel wandered outdoors and down toward the lake. From the semi-circular building it was about 150 metres to the pale uncut grass. The ground sloped a little as he drew nearer to the water, and the smell of honeysuckle and lavender faded, but the beginnings of a path, made by the near-dead who had gone before him, was clearly forming. Gabriel followed it and quite naturally turned to the left toward what city dwellers might call a wood, but Gabriel knew was simply a few trees and some bushes. He had begun to develop a habit of heading for the side of the water and coming to rest among the trees; he liked the illusion of being out of sight, as if anyone can be out of sight so close to heaven. When he thought he was out of view, he sat down on the grass and threw bits of fallen bark into the water.

  Julie tended to go back to her room after a group but sometimes, like today, she would wander out, too. Unlike Gabriel she didn’t have a fixed routine, she would just stroll around and would often stand for quite a while staring at something. Looking at the light on the trees and the shadows on the water, she wondered what it would be like to paint there. In fact she wondered sometimes if she was actually in a painting, able to move freely around as long as nobody was looking, trapped and still if someone stopped to stare. It made as much sense as God had before she had found herself surrounded by angels. After gazing into space she moved on and walked away down toward where the dry bush was at its most dense, near where Gabriel sat, lobbing wood at water.

  When she saw him she paused. She hadn’t spoken to anyone alone since the accident and, given the circumstances, talking to Gabriel seemed the hardest place to start. But she had always gravitated toward the more difficult choices and anyway, he seemed a decent bloke. She moved closer and said, ‘What is it with men and water?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘If you put a man in front of water for long enough he will eventually start throwing things into it. Why is that?’

  Gabriel thought for a moment. ‘It’s genetic,’ he said. ‘We throw stuff; women need to pee. It’s just one of those gender-difference things.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Women: show them an expanse of water and within five minutes they need to go for a pee.’

  ‘That’s rubbish.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Gabriel carried on throwing bits of bark and Julie turned to go.

  ‘See,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re off for a pee, aren’t you?’

  ‘No I’m not, I was looking for something to throw,’ said Julie.

  Gabriel smiled. ‘So, what do you make of all this?

  Julie didn’t answer.

  ‘I’ve been wondering if I’m mad,’ said Gabriel. ‘Ellie is a mental health nurse; she says that a lot of madness revolves around religion. Being God or Jesus is a very popular delusion. I’ve wondered if maybe I am in some kind of delusional state.’

  ‘And what about the rest of us?’

  ‘I don’t know, you either don’t exist or you are just people who I imagine to be other dead people in a therapy group with me.’

  ‘Does madness work like that?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been mad, unless of course I am mad now.’

  ‘I’m not convinced.’

  ‘Got any better ideas?’

  ‘No. I wondered about it being a dream, it even crossed my mind that I was part of some sicko experiment, you know, been kidnapped … or something …’

  ‘What, we are here being forced into therapy by some rogue group of psychology students?’ smiled Gabriel.

  ‘Something like that. But the longer I am here, the more I wake up in the room, and the more I have to sit in a circle with you and the others the more it occurs to me that this is what Pinky and Perky say it is. The tragedy is, I don’t feel the things I know I should feel.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t feel grief. I just feel numb.’

  ‘I feel sick; I feel as though I am going to explode, and just start screaming.’

  ‘But that would make sense, why don’t you do that? It would make sense to go crazy.’

  ‘I don’t know … something stops me. Every night I go back to my room, I try to cry, but I just stare at the ceiling until I sleep and then like a moron I show up for toast and therapy in the morning.’

  ‘Well we have to go to the group,’ said Julie.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it is the only way out of here and it feels like an unbreakable law.’

  ‘But what if it isn’t a way back? What if Pinky and Perky, as you so rightly call them, just want to run a fucking therapy group fo
r eternity? Christ, what if this is hell? It does feel a bit like hell listening to Kevin talk about killing people, and having to look at Clemitius nodding his fat head like a pig watching a bungee jump. And what if there is something else I could be doing to get back to Ellie?’

  ‘Maybe that’s why I don’t feel the way I think I should feel, and maybe that’s why I don’t quite believe this is happening.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Gabriel. ‘I don’t quite follow you.’

  ‘Well, you have Ellie. You obviously love her very much, and from what Christopher said the other night at dinner she must love you, too.’

  ‘Christ knows why …’

  ‘Whatever, but she does, and I don’t have anyone like that. Nothing anchored me to life, or no one … and maybe I was just realising that … I had wondered if someone I had met might become … you know … hell, I can’t even think about that. When I hit you I was on my way to stay with a friend I hadn’t seen for ages. She was a constant, but apart from her I think I had realised I felt quite lonely. I didn’t want to be that way, I was going to do something about it, I think, but I didn’t. I was just living in Norwich waiting for my life. Maybe I deserved this.’

  ‘Norwich, you were living in Norwich? Talk about out of the frying pan.’

  ‘Have you ever been to Norwich?’

  ‘No, sorry, it’s kind of a habit, saying stuff like that.’

  Julie smiled. ‘Take it to the group.’

  She sat down beside him and started making a small pile of twigs. The water was flat apart from the ripples growing around Gabriel’s tiny missiles, and the lake seemed to go on for miles. She wondered what would happen if someone walked into the water and started to swim. Not stopping, not looking back, just kept on going until you couldn’t go any more, the way that angel had. You can’t die twice. Maybe you’d just wake up in your bed like nothing had happened, or maybe you wouldn’t wake up at all, having passed on your last chance. Or perhaps it took you somewhere else? It wouldn’t make sense to have a trap door from heaven, nor would it make sense for there to be choices for any of them that were not already explicit. But you can’t change the beliefs of a lifetime, and Julie believed that there were always choices; you just had to be brave enough or desperate enough to make them.

  ‘I want to see this viewing room,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Then I might start believing … or I might not, but that is what we should be saying.’

  ‘What, to Pinky and Perky?’

  ‘Yes, that it’s hard to take all of this in and to work on our issues and concentrate and all of that. That what we need is some kind of proof or—’

  ‘—perspective,’ offered Julie. ‘We could say we need a little perspective to come to terms with our changes in circumstances.’

  ‘Yeah and then, well … then we’d know.’

  ‘Let’s do it,’ said Julie turning to go.

  ‘No not now, we should do it in the group.’

  ‘Yes, you’re probably right, but what about the others, should we talk to them?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yvonne, maybe, but Kevin? I don’t think that would be a good idea, I think the bloke is pretty eager to please and this might seem too much like a plan.’

  Julie stared some more at the water and thought There is always a choice. And said, ‘I don’t trust people who kill other people anyway. Let’s do whatever we need to do to see what’s left of our lives, eh?’

  Although at the back of her mind she wondered, ‘Can any conversation here be secret?’

  23

  James and Gary were on their fourth whisky, and while James felt the nice warm glow that came from not having been thrown out yet, he was pretty uncomfortable with the idea of Gary providing songs for the comeback.

  ‘So what do the others say?’

  ‘Haven’t asked anyone yet; I thought I should come to you first. After all, you were the guitarist.’

  ‘And you did shag my girlfriend.’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake Gary, I didn’t mean to …’

  ‘Oh it was an accident was it—your dick accidentally slipped?’

  ‘No I mean … Christ, you know what it was like.’

  ‘I know what you were like.’ They sat in silence. James wanted to say more, explain away his mistake, but the truth was he couldn’t really remember it very well. He knew that Gary was kind of seeing Alice, but everyone was kind of seeing everyone in those days. It was quite a small bus, and it wasn’t like Gary and Alice could hide away together, or did they? He couldn’t remember.

  He was pretty sure it was Alice who made the first move, or they were drunk or something, one evening when the others had gone up to the hall for a sound check. Leicester? Coventry? Fuck knows, somewhere in the middle of the country. And he remembered that she had a long skirt on and took her knickers off remarkably early in the proceedings, like before they’d even kissed, and he certainly remembered Gary and Bernie coming back because they’d forgotten strings or more likely, Gary’s spare cough linctus. There must have been one hell of a row but he couldn’t remember it, so he said the only thing he could think of under the circumstances: ‘Shit happens.’

  ‘She’s with Matthew now, you know.’

  ‘Yeah I heard—hard to imagine.’

  ‘Yeah, ‘til you see them together, then it makes some kind of sense.’

  ‘What, you see them?’

  ‘Oh yeah, they were up for the weekend earlier this month. Did you hear about their lottery win? Really pleased for them. They’re quite religious, you know?’

  ‘Blimey. So anyway’—James didn’t really take in information about other people’s lives— ‘all I’m asking is that you’ll think about it.’

  ‘Well there’s a lot to think about, James, and I have other responsibilities.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well for one thing I am contracted to tour with Karma for the first four months of next year, and we are recording from October through to February of the following year, so I have to build any other projects round that.’

  ‘Yeah right, of course,’ said James.

  ‘Mind you, it might be worth thinking about.’

  ‘Yeah that’s right, just think about it, Gary, that’s all I’m asking.’

  ‘I mean it could be a way of showcasing some of my new stuff.’

  ‘No, hang on Gary. I mean, each band on these reunion tours … they are only getting like four or five-song sets.’

  ‘Well we only had one hit.’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘One.’

  ‘ “Partytime” made Number Three in Germany.’ James was staring at the rug, wondering if it was real animal. Everything in this house was expensive: tasteless, but expensive. It was probably a big sheep, he thought. Not a baby polar bear.

  ‘Yeah but Germany … And either way that leaves two or three songs.’

  ‘Yeah, but they would be my songs, Gary.’

  ‘No James, they would be mine.’

  ‘Sorry, I can’t allow it! I mean, I’m the bloody songwriter; Christ you don’t go to a Rolling Stones gig in the hope that Bill Wyman is going to step forward and do “Je Suis un Rock Star,” do you?’

  ‘No you go to hear Keith Richards, and anyway Wyman left the Stones.’

  ‘I know, but the point’s the same.’

  ‘No it isn’t. For all you know, he left because Mick wouldn’t sing his songs.’

  ‘He left because he was about seventy-eight.’

  ‘I want to do my songs, James. That is the only circumstance under which I would consider it. Think about it.’

  James looked at Gary and whilst a big, big part of him wanted to punch the linctus freak in the mouth and remind him that he was just a fucking guitarist, he knew that you only did that kind of thing when you were actually in a band, not simply talking about being in one again. Anyway, Gary was thinking about it. As things stood, this constituted a result.

  There would be plenty of time f
or fighting later. Dog in a Tuba would just be a stepping-stone anyway. When James went solo, Gary could do his songs as much as he liked. ‘All right Gary,’ he said. ‘Can I ask a question?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Did that rug used to be a polar bear?’

  24

  Ellie was, in the words of her consultant Dr Samani, ‘ready to pop,’ which meant that her eggs were ready to be harvested and she would need to come into hospital the day after tomorrow to have them removed. Dr Samani had asked where Gabriel was; he had, after all, been with her every time she visited the unit up until these last two visits, and although Ellie had decided that she was going to lie if and when this came up—and she was sure when they started looking around for the right semen, it would most definitely have to be mentioned—she had not actually thought up the exact lie she was going to tell. She had thought of taking Sam along and saying she had changed men, and she had thought about saying that Gabriel had broken a leg and wouldn’t be able to attend, but would most definitely be sending sperm on a motorbike when the big moment arrived.

  However she was so tired, so full of fear and loneliness and stuffed to the gills with artificial hormones and grief, that when Dr Samani finally asked directly about Gabriel, no doubt expecting something like ‘Oh he’s at work,’ instead he got ‘He’s in a coma’ and the whole story poured out.

  She tried not to mention the doctors who said they would not supply the sperm. She tried to talk round that bit but Dr Samani said, in that irritatingly direct way that doctors have, ‘I assume his doctors know that you are in an IVF cycle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And are they being helpful?’

  ‘Not really. They say that Gabriel has not given consent for his sperm to be taken and therefore they can’t do anything, and so I am going to … to be supplying the sperm myself.’ She was clinging to a chair in his office, holding the seat hard because hearing her own words actually leaving her mouth was making her dizzy, and she realised that it could all end here. She might think she could trick the doctors looking after Gabe, she might think that she could smuggle some sperm from his sleeping testes whilst they were looking the other way, and get someone to drive it across town while her eggs waited impatiently in a dish, checking their hair and putting on some lippy. But without this man’s say-so, without him willing to put the assorted gametes together and then putting the cells they make back into her, she was lost.