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.