Gabriel's Angel Page 24

  ‘Well full marks for trying,’ said Michael. ‘Er, did she pose for these?’

  ‘Good lord no, I did them after I heard about the accident.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The police found this address in her bag; they came round that night. I was so upset. I sat up all night. In the morning I went into her room. I didn’t like to, I respected her privacy and she came here for—well, sanctuary, in a way, and I wanted to respect that, but I decided that I couldn’t help her if I didn’t go into her room.’

  ‘Help her?’ Michael felt a little anxiety creep into him. He walked over to one of the pictures and lightly touched the corner of the thick dry paper.

  ‘Yes. I needed to get a sense of how she was feeling before the accident, where she was in her life. So I sat in her room all morning, looked at her things, tried to soak up the atmosphere. She hadn’t been here long, only about two hours, but I have known her for a while.’ Brenda paused and looked into Michael’s eyes. ‘It feels like I’ve known her for a very long time indeed.’

  Michael thought about how he might change the subject, but before he could Brenda had followed him across the room to the painting and was standing so close it made him step sideways and bump his leg on a small coffee table.

  ‘Do you think she was happy the last time you saw her?’ she said. She spoke with a clipped authority, as if she was used to giving orders and used to having her questions answered. But she retained enough gentleness, or so Michael felt, to stop anyone from commenting on her tone. She sounded, he thought, like a policewoman.

  ‘Yes, yes I do.’

  ‘Do you think that maybe that was because of you? At least in part.’

  ‘I’d like to think so.’ He had not articulated to himself what Julie might have thought or felt about him. He had been rather overwhelmed by the fact that he had found himself feeling so full of her. But he did suppose she was moved in some way by him. He felt it in the café; if he had been honest or at least attentive, he had felt it when he had been at James’s house on lots of occasions. He had dismissed the flirting and the directness of their conversation as being playful but somewhere he ‘knew’ it was more than that.

  ‘So would I. Shall we paint?’ And Brenda started to take paints out of the paint box and line them up on the table. Michael looked nervous. Not just about the threatened art lesson, but also about the mad woman who kept painting Julie.

  ‘Er, I’m not really much for painting.’

  Brenda turned and looked at him. ‘When did you last try?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Quite.’

  Michael watched as Brenda took her painting from the easel and placed it on the ever-growing Julie pile. She put a fresh piece of paper up, picked up a brush, and handed it to him.

  ‘Brenda, I don’t want to paint.’ He put the brush down firmly on the coffee table he had just bumped into.

  ‘Oh, but you must.’

  ‘Why.’

  ‘Because it will help.’

  ‘Help what?’

  ‘Help Julie.’

  ‘How? How will me, painting badly in Norfolk, help Julie?’ Michael was exasperated now. More, he was frightened. He didn’t know how this little old lady with the mad ideas and the houseful of portraits could do him harm, although it was possible she had drugged the tea. But he was anxious anyway and he wanted to leave. In fact he wanted to run, but that would not help Julie either, not unless he ran via her bedroom upstairs.

  Brenda looked at him. She didn’t say anything at first, just invited him to look into her eyes, pale grey and watery, challenging him to find some lunacy, inviting him in. She put the brush down on the table and said softly, ‘I’m sorry, this must seem like madness to you.’ Which is a disarming thing to hear from a mad person. ‘Look,’ said Brenda. ‘How can Julie live, if we can’t imagine her living?’

  Michael stared at her. Her voice, which had been nearly severe in its efficiency a few moments ago, was soft; her eyes moist. ‘I think of Julie all the time. I remember her here, and the spring in her step after she came back from seeing you, and I think of her in that hospital bed all wired up …’

  ‘There aren’t really all that many wires …’ offered Michael.

  ‘But I can’t see her with her eyes open. And I thought, well, I can pray. And I do believe. But if I can’t imagine her being awake, then being awake must be a long way away. Do you see?’

  Michael didn’t understand remotely what the old woman was saying, but he could see that she meant it, whatever it was. Instinctively he took her hand, and said, quietly, ‘How about we go through Julie’s things? Do you know, I have never been in any room that has just been hers. I’d really like, with your help, to see where she was going to sleep, maybe choose a few things to take back to London, and then we could sit together while you paint, and just talk?’

  Brenda stared at him blankly, then nodded. ‘OK, let’s do that,’ she whispered. ‘But remember that while the odds are I am quite insane,’ she opened her eyes widely and shook her head, ‘quite, quite insane, you, young man, don’t actually believe in anything right now. Nothing. And if there is a one in a million, even one in a billion chance that humouring a tweedy old girl in the country might help the woman you were meant to meet in this lifetime to live again, then it’s you who would be completely mad to turn that chance down, wouldn’t you?’

  46

  Bernie and Gary Guitar had spent two and a half hours approaching the Dartford Tunnel the way a lion approaches a gazelle: slowly, very slowly. They were in Bernie’s VW Golf. Gary had been planning to buy a car, something big and German probably, but as he never had anywhere to go, he hadn’t got round to it. He wasn’t comfortable in the Golf and he wasn’t comfortable in the traffic jam.

  When Dog in a Tuba were a proper band, Bernie quite liked Gary, albeit mainly because he didn’t cause him too many problems. As long as he had some cough linctus and his plectrums and, for a while, Alice, he was happy. Gary on the other hand came to resent the fact that Bernie gave James so much more attention than him, reasoning the way the average ten-year-old does that bad behaviour really shouldn’t be so readily rewarded. Gary kept his resentment to himself, although when Bernie called after Gary made it big in America he was slow to call back. He didn’t want Bernie asking for any work or anything.

  But all that was in the past, now they were just two middle-aged blokes going to meet old friends in the country. Should they ever escape the M25.

  ‘Where the fuck are all these people going?’ asked Gary again.

  ’Where the fuck have they come from, you mean?’ said Bernie. ‘It’s only a little country, overpopulated by people with cars.’

  ‘Yeah, people with cars who want to go to Norwich.’

  ‘Exactly, you are not going to tell me that everyone wants to go to Norwich. Nobody wants to go to fucking Norwich, or Chelmsford or whatever the hell else is up the M11. I tell you this is probably small fry. Just imagine what the traffic is like on the way to places that lots of people actually do want to go to.’

  ‘Well, lots of people want to go to Norwich, Bern, I think.’ Gary was tapping out a rhythm on his legs; he got louder whenever Bernie talked.

  ‘Nah, it may feel busy Gary, but this won’t even make it on to the traffic bulletins. This is normal. That’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘Right. What are you saying, Bern?’ Gary tapped and as Bernie began talking, Gary hummed quietly.

  ‘I’m saying that if you could see right round the country now you’d probably find this kind of tailback on the M6, the M1, the lead-up to the Blackwell Tunnel, the M62. All probably chocka.’

  ‘Is that up near Liverpool?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Fuck off, won’t even be a queue coming out of Liverpool.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Everyone would have had their cars nicked.’ Gary laughed at his own joke and played his thighs with a flourish.

  ‘Nah I’m serious, Gary, t
his queue here is probably nothing compared to the rest of the country. Our little island is too full.’

  ‘Maybe, or maybe it’s just too full of people with cars.’

  ‘Same thing.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  And so it continued for two and a half hours. By the time Bernie and Gary were on the M11, they pretty much hated everything on the planet, including each other.

  Meanwhile Alice, Matthew and the Reverend Adam Aldanack were at a service station near Cambridge, trying far too hard to make a dull journey interesting.

  ‘Have you ever stolen anything?’ asked Adam smiling. He was usually smiling. It made him feel serene.

  ‘Er no, I don’t think I have,’ said Matthew. Matthew had driven the BMW X5 and had insisted on stopping. They were in a Costa Coffee sipping lattes.

  ‘Maybe we should,’ said Alice excitedly.

  ‘Why would we do that? We’re rich.’

  ‘For the thrill,’ Alice whispered loudly. Alice, it was fair to say, had embraced the Church of Three Gods and its message to live life as fully as possible with the enthusiasm she once reserved for cocaine. Matthew looked around. They were in a motorway service area. The most soulless place in England. The magazine shop sold some stuffed toys, some coloured mugs with names on them, and a lot of sweets.

  ‘Do we need any coloured mugs, I wonder?’

  ‘Oh Matthew stop being so … so...’

  ‘Frightened?’ suggested Adam.

  ‘It isn’t fear so much as … well, it’s a silly thing to do. Pointless.’

  ‘Oh honey …’ purred Alice. ‘There’s a mug over there with my name on it.’

  47

  Michael didn’t believe in a lot of things. God, astrology, performance art, crystal healing, the impartiality of the BBC, reflexology and aqua-aerobics, for a start. He was a polite sceptic. He was too mellow a man to make a big song-and-dance about not believing in things that others might love (God) or enjoy (aqua-aerobics), and so he kept his beliefs to himself unless of course he was stuck for something to write about for a magazine that didn’t care how it filled the spaces round the adverts as long as it filled them. Then he’d wheel out disdain and call it wit as willingly as the next man.

  However, he was at heart a man who believed mainly in what he saw. And what he had seen at Brenda’s house was a woman who believed in a whole realm of possibilities that he had never remotely entertained. A pile of mumbo-jumbo rubbish. At its heart was the belief that they—together—could paint Julie awake. It was, he thought, like straying into someone’s dreams. But while that was what he thought, it wasn’t what he felt. Brenda had said quite clearly that he might consider her mad and that he might be right, but in a world like this one, where so much that passed as knowing was just guessing or hoping, what difference could it make to humour her? And she said it with a gentle smile on her face and held his gaze as she spoke.

  He didn’t know what to do. Part of him—the part that thought she was two tokens short of a pop-up toaster—thought it best if he played along. He did, after all, need Julie’s stuff. But there was a tiny part of him slightly mesmerised by the idea of sitting in that tiny cottage painting Julie as though she were awake. Therapy, he decided; he needed it as therapy. He wasn’t proud of the fact that he had needs when he wasn’t the one in the coma, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have them. Sitting with Brenda and painting quietly whilst she talked about the Julie she knew made him feel better, and so did the paintings he now had sitting in the back of the car. Anyway, given that he had got through the last few years by sleeping with people without knowing their second name, this might even constitute progress.

  Brenda had talked about Julie as they painted. She told him that the Julie she knew was quite reserved when she first started teaching at the day centre. When they had asked her questions about herself she had avoided them and they had experienced this as shyness bordering on coldness. But after a few weeks one of the older men told them about the cancer in his liver, as he painted a carefully constructed pile of books. He said that he wasn’t afraid of dying, but he was worried about his wife who he felt needed looking after. He talked about her maybe finding someone else after he had gone and he seemed sad as he did it.

  Julie asked him how old his wife was and he said ’Seventy-nine. Eighty next month.’ And Julie laughed. Brenda said that to her credit, even though everyone looked at her she didn’t seem embarrassed to be laughing.

  ‘How long have you been married?’ she asked. Fifty-eight years he said. And Julie said that she didn’t imagine his wife would look for someone else because she wouldn’t need to, and she explained that she was in her mid-thirties and living with a man she didn’t remotely like and wondering if she would ever meet someone that she wanted to be with for ten years, let alone sixty. And Brenda said that Julie smiled at the old man and said with an unusual honesty, ‘I would give twenty years of life—and I believe in life—to be able to die knowing the sort of love you have.’

  And after that, she seemed far more relaxed. It turned out that she had been told not to talk too much about herself, as it would be considered ‘unprofessional.’ As Julie later joked, ‘they don’t actually pay me enough to be able to call me a professional.’

  He did feel calmer. When he had left James’s house, all he could think was that he needed to get to Brenda’s, be polite, pick up Julie’s stuff, back to James’s, grab anything James had found, and get back to London. But he’d stayed at Brenda’s for more than four hours. He had picked up a few clothes: a green cardigan that smelt so much of Julie he insisted on putting it on the seat beside him; some pictures from when she was travelling, and a lot of her music. Some Nick Cave and Paul Quinn and the Independent Group, which was in her CD player, so she must have been listening to it before she left. And some old compilation tapes that, because they were tapes, made him think they might remind her of someone or something from a long time ago. From when she was conscious.

  As he drove toward James’s house, he tried to imagine anything that might exist in the world that could appeal to whatever senses were currently available to Julie. What might James have found? And then he reminded himself that this was James he was thinking about. Lynne had said that ‘when Julie leaves, she leaves.’ She probably wouldn’t have left anything at James’s house.

  Michael asked himself how he would feel if he didn’t go back. Guiltlessly relieved was the answer. Although he had spent more time up here than he had planned, he had got what he had come for, and more besides. He could phone James from London. He lightly touched the green cardigan, put the Paul Quinn CD on, and headed for the A11. James would be fine.

  And at that point James was. He’d unthinkingly rolled a fat joint as soon as he had got home and put his head round the door to what had been Julie’s room to confirm his impression that there was nothing left. He ambled downstairs smoking and went to the CDs. There were three or four that must have been Julie’s. Belle and Sebastian, Mazzy Star, Tompaulin. Ridiculous names; no wonder they didn’t have any hits. He would give these to Mikey, he wouldn’t miss them.

  His joint had gone out. He grabbed some matches as he went through the kitchen and into the barn. It was a mess, the big rusty metal barrels took up more space then he’d noticed, and they smelled. The smell made his eyes water.

  No matter, he thought. Soon everyone would be here and it wouldn’t look or feel like a barn. It would become a studio. James lit his joint and inhaled deeply. The smoke ran up behind his eyes, made the inside of his head foggy. When everyone was here, it would all be OK; it would all fall nicely into place.

  48

  Ellie stared at the ceiling, her hand on her stomach. She could smell something, a staleness. Unwashed clothes maybe, dirty air perhaps. She hadn’t opened the windows for days. But the smell suited her; she didn’t want it to go away.

  The thing about love, one of the things about love, is that it arms you against your failures. There are those who think that the
cloud-stopping, breath-catching, blood-freezing love that charges every cell of your body fades in time, into something like companionship or, worse, forgetful surrender. Ellie didn’t believe that was true. She knew the clouds started moving again and her blood thawed; she knew that if it hadn’t, nothing would ever happen. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t the same love. The feeling she found herself with after that first weekend with Gabe, which was still messing around with her ability to function properly when they first went on holiday and when they first moved in together—that feeling was still there. There had been times when she wished it wasn’t, and she thought about them now. But she knew those times would do her no good: they didn’t before, why would they now? After all, what kind of person wishes away love?

  He had gone away for a weekend a few months ago. Ostensibly to see his mum in Spain, but it felt to her like he was offering her some time. A chance to see if she missed him. She thought it was a reasonable thing to do and she accepted it with grace. She felt quite clinical about it. She arranged to go out for a drink with Izzy and Moira, but she didn’t fill the whole weekend. She wanted to rattle around in the flat, listen to her own music, watch her own trash on TV without either having to compromise or listen to Gabe commentate on the inanity of ‘Strictly Come Dancing.’

  The first evening was nice: she stayed in and watched a film, went to bed late and read. The next morning was fine: she messed around at home, tidying and playing old Smiths CDs and listening to Radio 4. The afternoon was good too: a film, a wander round the shops, home for a bath, and out to meet the girls.

  That was when his absence began to unnerve her, and then slowly make her feel incomplete. Izzy was talking rubbish, Moira was encouraging her by arguing, and Ellie’s soul began to itch. When she lay in bed that night, she thought about what she was missing. The familiarity? Someone to dissect the day with? Surely not the sarcasm or the irritability. It might, she thought, have been the ‘old’ Gabe who she was missing, even though that Gabe hadn’t been around for a while. She wondered if maybe the possibility of him—the man she had fallen in love with—was closer when the shell he had formerly occupied, but lent to the grumpy bastard currently calling himself her boyfriend, was in the house? But even as she thought, and even as she grew annoyed at the bloke not occupying the empty space beside her, she knew that it was Gabriel she missed. In all his misery.