Gabriel's Angel

by Mark A Radcliffe

  He was still breathing, albeit through a ventilator, and his heart was still beating. And so she waited. She waited until she could decide what to do. She waited for something about which she might have a decision to make. She nodded as the doctors spoke and seemed to understand the words she heard, but made no sign to suggest she understood what they combined to mean. The doctors were not unfamiliar with this kind of response from grieving relatives; they knew she would come to understand. They had seen dozens of people struggle to accept terrible truths, sometimes after those truths had made themselves more than apparent.

  However, there was something different about this case. As the consultant and his registrar got to the door, Ellie said: ‘I need his sperm.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I need you to give me his sperm.’

  The consultant, a thin-faced man with the most pointed chin Ellie had ever seen, and the registrar—Indian, much younger, chubby-faced and seemingly more anxious—looked at each other. At least one of them was slightly irritated about still being in the room.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked the older man.

  ‘We are in the middle of IVF treatment.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ the consultant said. ‘But you must understand, this young man is in no state to continue with that process.’

  ‘I’ve been jabbing myself in the bottom with a needle every day for a fortnight and sniffing drugs for four weeks,’ said Ellie. ‘I am having my eggs harvested in two days—the same day I need his sperm to make us a baby. I need you to give me his sperm.’ She wondered if what she imagined he saw, an empty grey-skinned woman on the verge of collapse, illustrated her point well enough to make him change his mind.

  The consultant sat down beside Ellie. ‘We can’t do that.’

  ‘Yes you can.’

  ‘No, we can’t. We don’t have his permission.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ Her voice began to shake. ‘He is undergoing IVF treatment; he has signed the forms. What clearer permission can a man give?’

  ‘He would need to give permission for us to invade his body and take the sperm, and he hasn’t done that.’ The consultant spoke softly, aware of the fact that the tired woman in front of him, full of borrowed hormones and crashing grief, was just barely holding herself together.

  ‘Hell, he’s got tubes in every orifice! What is that if it isn’t invading his body?’

  ‘Those tubes are there to keep him alive.’

  ‘This is a man who has already signed up to a course of treatment that involves his sperm being added to my eggs in a lab.’ She could feel reason leaking out of her. ‘He has said it’s OK!’

  ‘Yes, but not to us taking the sperm without his consent.’

  ‘Well sir, it wouldn’t actually be without his consent, would it?’ said the registrar. The consultant ignored the registrar—who probably realised he had just made the rest of his time working with the eminent and deeply traditional doctor hell—and said, ‘I think you need to talk to a solicitor if you insist on continuing with this. I certainly know I cannot extract sperm from this man without legal clarification.’

  Ellie could feel her breath quickening. ‘I don’t have the time. You just said he might not wake up, and I am having my eggs taken the day after tomorrow. They’ll be wasted unless you give me his sperm.’

  The consultant looked away. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘There is nothing I can do. I can talk with the medical director for clarification, but I am sure he will agree with me.’

  ‘Well, do it anyway,’ said Ellie. ‘And I’ll do the same.’ She knew she wouldn’t do anything of the sort. She didn’t have the time. She would have to find another way.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. And both the consultant and the embarrassed-looking registrar left the room.

  And for the first time since she had arrived at the hospital, for the first time since the police had called round to her house to tell her what had happened, and for the first time since she had seen her lover being kept alive by a machine, she cried. From the bottom of her belly to the top of the sky she wailed, and Gabriel didn’t even hear her.

  9

  Izzy’s sister Moira, five years younger and with none of the complexion problems, had always stood out from the crowd. Mainly because she dressed each morning as if Stevie Wonder were picking her clothes. For Moira, colour coordination was for interior decorators; she believed that one dressed most comfortably if one chose each item of clothing in perfect isolation from each other. She looked a bit like a cross between one of those people who had had their colours done (‘no, really, purple is you—in another life you may have been a plum’) and an art student who had run out of grant. In fact, she worked for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau as a debt adviser, which came as a surprise to just about everyone who came through the door.

  Look a little closer or, indeed, ask her why she has such beautifully clear skin, and she will tell you that everything good about her, from her generous spirit to her spotless bottom, is down to complementary therapies. Moira is as close to being an expert on Reiki, crystal healing, reflexology, aromatherapy, Bach flower remedies and homeopathy as one can get outside of a yurt. Her fascination with all things alternative began when she managed to rid herself of a wart on her thumb at the age of fourteen with a dab of ylang-ylang and a crushed dandelion. Quickly converted, she steadfastly refused to go to hospital with severe stomach pains at the age of seventeen, instead insisting her close friend Patricia come round with some crystals and her healing books. When she woke pain-free the following morning, she quite understandably felt redeemed and not a little proud of herself. Izzy maintained that wind passes regardless of whether you place a rock under your pillow or not, but that was the kind of cynicism that Moira knew she would have to get used to.

  ‘It wasn’t wind, it was peritonitis.’

  ‘Oh right, a burst appendix was miraculously reformed by your friend Patricia and some glass stones on your bed,’ mocked Izzy.

  ‘It must be horrible being so cynical all the time, Isabel. You know, I think that’s why you keep getting those big spots. It’s all that bile you carry about all the time trying to get out.’

  Moira had grown into a woman of many interests and few ambitions. She had formerly been a sub-editor on a series of business magazines ranging from Cement Monthly to The World of Wound Care, but while the social life that existed in magazine companies probably suited her best, she couldn’t help but find herself frustrated by the absolute pointlessness of what she was doing with her time. Particularly when she was working for Cement Monthly, which had an editor who behaved as though he were putting out The Washington Post each month, only focusing pretty much on the cement-centred stories.

  To train up to work at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, she had to do three different courses and take an £11,000 pay cut. Everyone she worked with considered her ridiculous for the first three days of her tenure. After one month they considered her indispensable, albeit badly dressed. After three months she was simply Moira.

  Her relationship history was as chaotic as her clothes. She had lived near and had a lot of hurried, largely unsatisfying and guilt-laden sex with a married father of three who was twelve years her senior—a man she continued to sleep with long after any inkling of attraction had passed, partly because, as she told Ellie and Izzy: ‘I feel a bit sorry for his wife, the only time she gets to herself is when he comes round to shag me.’

  She fell hopelessly in love with a part-time croupier, part-time drug dealer who could only write his name in capitals and who used to rifle her purse when she was in the bathroom. She stuck by him for nearly three years, half of which he spent in prison.

  She also had a couple of half-hearted affairs with friends of Sam’s, explaining later that she didn’t like to let Sam down by telling him that she thought his friends were dull and, most lately, she had agreed to marry a Croatian asylum-seeker who she said ‘looks a bit like George Clooney but with just the one eye.’ A
marriage of convenience that couldn’t take place because one-eyed George, who it turned out was actually from Limerick, was already married to three other women.

  As if all that weren’t enough, Moira differed even further from her older sister in that she adored Gabriel. It was never a ‘wish he were mine’ kind of thing: she simply didn’t think about the world in that way; although she kind of assumed that she would have shagged him under other circumstances. But she really, really liked him. They made each other laugh and while they never, ever arranged to go out together, just the two of them—somehow that would have been odd—but whenever circumstance, or Sam and Izzy, brought them together, they behaved like long-lost best friends and immediately slipped into what seemed to Izzy, at least, some kind of private comedy language. All of which probably made Izzy dislike Gabriel all the more.

  However, caricature Moira as the fly-by-night, dizzy little sister if you like (it’s OK, everyone does), as soon as she heard Gabriel had been hurt, she became the most focused, ordered, and generous friend anyone could have wished for. She went straight to the hospital and sat with Ellie. She came back the next day and the next. She brought tuna sandwiches and spare knickers and a constant flow of coffee and bottled water. She didn’t cry once, at least not in anyone else’s company. She spoke charmingly with nurses and, on the one occasion that Ellie slept for an hour, Moira sat beside Gabriel and spoke to him about work, football, and the Croatian George Clooney bloke, whom Gabriel had met and been very nice to even though he thought he was ‘a one-eyed mad bastard.’

  When Ellie woke, Moira quietly slipped away for more coffee or more pants or whatever. It’s often—Ellie might have reflected if she had been capable of cogency—the quiet ones you don’t expect to have to rely on who are the only people there when you need them.

  10

  A few days before the accident, Julie had, ironically under the circumstances, decided to change her life. In a cottage in the Norfolk countryside, James Buchan, the man she was living with, had just got off of the telephone, the words of his accountant ringing in his ears.

  ‘My advice,’ the accountant had said, ‘would be to make some money, proper money, fucking quick.’

  Julie was sitting on the sofa leafing through the Norfolk Herald and not really helping. ‘Get a job,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not qualified for anything. What do you want me to do, apply to be a bus conductor? A milkman? A hospital bloody porter?’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Oh don’t be so fucking stupid, how’s that going to look? James Buchan, one-time pop star, now reduced to being a bloody bus conductor. If the papers get hold of that, I’ll be a laughing stock.’

  James was an overweight man with thinning, just too long, black wavy hair. His fat had gone to his face first, forcing his already slightly withdrawn chin into what looked like full-blooded retreat. When he sweated he went red, and when he went red, the bald spot on the crown of his head looked like a strawberry gateau. When Julie looked at him, she wondered why she had ever spoken to him, let alone slept with him or moved into his silly bloody house.

  She breathed deeply and decided not to call him a deluded twat. ‘You were never that famous. And anyway, my father was a bus conductor,’ lied Julie, whose father had been a maths teacher.

  ‘You told me your father was a maths teacher.’

  ‘Not all the time,’ she said and returned to her magazine. Julie knew a job was out of the question. James was forty-five and had no useful skills. All the jobs that didn’t require skills were either taken or about to be taken by twenty-three-year-old geography graduates. She knew he was unemployable but sometimes, just for fun, she left job adverts around the house. Most recently, ones for a trainee estate agent and a bus conductor. He hadn’t pursued either opportunity.

  The phone started ringing. Julie looked at James. He made no move to answer it, secure in the knowledge that it was either his bank phoning to remind him that he was £8,876 overdrawn, which he had promised to rectify two weeks ago. Or it was the building society phoning to tell him he was now three months behind on his mortgage payments, and while it really didn’t want to repossess, it would. Or it was his accountant phoning back to remind him about the £500 he had been stupid enough to lend James to tide him over the previous month.

  The ringing stopped, and for a moment James imagined all of his creditors had, as one, decided to let him off. Either that or the phone had been disconnected.

  He could always sell the cottage. That would clear his debts, get the building society off his back, and perhaps leave enough for a small deposit on a two-bedroom flat in King’s Lynn. But the cottage was all he had and besides, if he sold that, he also sold his livelihood, pathetic as that was. Without it this time next year he would be in the same position, except worse: he’d be in King’s Lynn. Fuck, he was annoyed. This shouldn’t be happening to him, it never happened to Sting for chrissakes, or any of Adam’s Ants. Why should it happen to him?

  Nearly twenty years ago, James had been the voice of post-post-punk pop outfit Dog in a Tuba. The high point of his and their career had come with the single ‘Red,’ which reached No. 3 in the charts and was No. 1 in Japan for four weeks. As a result of that single, the ridiculously titled album ‘The Animals are Coming’ (yes, it had a big picture of lots of animals, including a pink rhino and a giraffe with a really big scarf on running after Dog in a Tuba on the front cover) sold quite well and spawned two other, less-successful singles ‘Insect Control’ and ‘Partytime’ (16 and 28, respectively). The low point of his career came when that whole Manchester baggy-jeans thing took off. Overnight Dog in a Tuba went the way of Gerry and his sodding Pacemakers.

  Since then, he had eked out a living renting out a small recording studio and rehearsal space to wannabe bands who didn’t mind paying that little bit extra for being in the presence (or at least the converted barn) of a man who had not only been on Top of the Pops, but had also shared lipstick with The Cure’s Robert Smith and, allegedly, urinated into Dave Lee Travis’s thermos flask at a Radio One road show in Great Yarmouth. Rock ‘n roll.

  However, in the past few years, recording studios in converted barns had become rather old hat. While he still played host to the occasional metalheads, most people recorded at home these days, on computers. Converted barns were for games rooms, holiday lets, or housing tractors. Countryside recording studios were to music what the Spinning Jenny was to the manufacturing industry. And anyway, it would be fair to say his studio was not exactly state of the art.

  Last night, as he lay on the floor upstairs in his quiet room—the place he went to think, to smoke grass and, more recently, to sleep—he played Dog in a Tuba’s last (second) album. It had sold about 700 copies. More, James liked to point out at the time, than Mick Jagger’s solo work. The sleeve lay on the floor beside him; pinned to the inside of the cover was a faded review ripped from the pages of the NME. It said: ‘Truly awful. If you have ever wanted to make someone an interesting ashtray out of a crap record, this is your chance, because you are sure as hell not going to play it more than once.’

  And a possible desperate solution had, through the mists of cheap grass, suddenly come to him. Only 720 people had heard that record, most of them must have forgotten it; hell some of them might be dead. If Dog in a Tuba were remembered, it was as the band that recorded ‘Red’. The band that had once been described as Norwich’s answer to the Psychedelic Furs, albeit by James himself.

  ‘Hell,’ he had said aloud to the empty room, ‘if Go fucking West can do it, so can I.’

  Meanwhile, Julie had sat on the bed in the room next door and contemplated her escape. She knew that she could not muster the energy for any heartfelt goodbyes; ideally she would leave when he was out, but he didn’t go out very much. She gave no thought to leaving James, beyond the practicalities of where to go, but she did think about herself, the habitual leaver. She glanced in the mirror, but quickly turned away. She was 35. She knew that
if you look too often or too long at yourself at that age, then you are looking for decay. Julie had naturally pale skin, stroked by delicate, near-invisible freckles. She was tall, thin, athletic; she could have been a contender except that her eyes were not fashionable eyes: they weren’t big and moist and always close to surprise. They were bluey-green, but they didn’t shine; even when she smiled they didn’t shine, and that detracted slightly from what would otherwise be considered a conventional English beauty. Her eyes were thin and half-alive; if an interesting man shot Julie an admiring glance, invariably she responded with a wince, whether or not she meant to.

  ‘There’s only one thing to do. I’m phoning Bernie,’ James announced.

  ‘Is that a good idea?’ asked Julie sarcastically; she had absolutely no idea who Bernie was.

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ said James.

  The former manager of Dog in a Tuba, Bernie Skyte was a recovering alcoholic and one-time club owner whom James had last spoken to in 1991, when the words ‘fuck,’ ‘off,’ and ‘die’ might have been uttered. James phoned what had, ten years earlier, been The Bernie Skyte Management Agency. It was now a kebab shop.

  So James called The Roadie. Despite the fact James had not spoken to him for at least five years, The Roadie seemed unsurprised to hear his voice. Nothing surprises a roadie, thought James. ‘Hello Jimmy, how’s it hanging?’

  ‘By a thread. I need Bernie’s number.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I just need to talk to him.’ James remembered why roadies always irritated him. It was because they were irritating.