Born Different Read online

  “Gabe! I’ve got a client coming first thing darling.”

  “Ok mum. I’ll be down in ten.”

  Gina, Gabe’s mum, was a therapist of sorts. She was into all the new age and old age therapies, the homeopathic and holistic. Massage, meditation, crystals, chakras. When her business had started picking up, they had converted the small office at the front of the house into a therapy room for her and they had converted the garage in the garden into a private art studio for Gabe.

  Gina’s clients didn’t like to think there was a teenager hanging around just as much as Gabe hated bumping in to the various people that came to see his mum. People liked to keep their healing all a bit anonymous and shrouded in a cloak of something. Pride, guilt, denial or whatever. But still, in the past, when they had caught sight of Gabe, their panic soon turned to pity. They had said things like, ‘But for the Grace of God’, suddenly feeling much more grateful for their own lives and lack of deformity; which was a bit much when they were obviously in need of healing themselves. To make life simpler for all concerned, Gabe kept out the way. He hid in his studio, or went out and walked the streets even when he didn’t want to, so as to stay out of the house and avoid the strangers.

  Everyone is a stranger, thought Gabe as he looked out of his window again, Grace had disappeared and Gabe looked at all the other people that were out there today. He recognised a few of them, the same faces that he saw everyday even though he had never spoken to them and had no idea who they were. They too, like clockwork, were going about their lives wrapped around a rigid timetable. There were men, women and children and they were all scuttling around like beetles. Gabe thought of all the people that were alive now. There were hundreds of thousands of them that lived in this city, millions and millions more of them beyond what his eyes could see. In other cities, in other countries, all across the world.

  Gabe thought of all the billions of different people that were out there now, living their lives. Getting up, going to bed, having sex, fighting, shitting, being born and dying. In all the different cultures, in all the different countries, in all the different time zones. Were they all as sour faced and robotic as the people here in what they had been told was a civilised society?

  Gabe wondered if there was anyone else out there just looking out of their window like he was. Was anyone else looking out for someone else, for something more? Someone, something, or someplace more...like them? Was anyone else seeing, searching and not just looking? Was there really no one else out there with wings?

  Gabe thought of Grace and how she made him feel. How just a brief glimpse of her caused his heart to jump in his chest, made his breath catch in his solar plexus and how even just expecting to catch sight of her caused the sensation of a hundred butterflies to dance in his abdomen as they headed, fluttering, down towards his groin.

  Grace’s presence and aura had shifted something in him and awakened parts of his physicality that had not stirred before. Gabe didn’t know what it was about her other than something in her chemistry and his chemistry made his biology go haywire. Grace, without even knowing it or trying, made Gabe feel like he touched at those magical and elusive feelings that made everything, somehow alright. That is why he took the torture, for the pleasure it still gave him.

  He had to do something now to get her attention.

  But he had never even said hello. Even when he had seen her again and again, every day, he still had never made a single move. Why? Shyness, fear, embarrassment? And what was there to lose, Gabe asked himself continuously, by simply saying hello! Compared to what there was potentially to gain, which was what Gabe fantasised about in his wildest dreams. Gabe would work himself up and convince himself in a dozen ways and say to himself ‘tomorrow’.

  Tomorrow, I will get the courage to speak to Grace, to ask her how she is. To just say hello! To reach out somehow to her and make some sort of contact. But he never did. He was always stopped by something. Some inner voice that told him that it would be too weird, that she would think that he was a creep and too ugly and desperate, or pass some other unfavourable judgement. So Gabe had always, despite all of his plans and promises, done nothing. He had convinced himself that it was better to dream than to try and live that dream.

  Gabe thought in his darkest moments that this was exactly what he was, just a collection of dreams that he would never fulfil. All these dreams he had, that kept him going, were just that, dreams! Gabe felt an ever present anxiety, like a cloak of nervousness, that he would never achieve any of his dreams. It would be so easy not to. To just say ‘tomorrow’ and get into the next routine and watch the time tick by, fast forward, decade by decade. Wake up at sixty, never having achieved anything. Never having felt the elements on his back, on his wings. Never having learnt to fly. Never having sold a painting. Never having made the effort to find out anything about his own father. Never moving out of home even, staying here forever. Isolated, dreaming and trapped. Alone. This was his current path and what was currently looking like his fate in life.

  But it had come to the point that the thought of nothing changing from how it was now, the thought of never seeing Grace again, the thought of never being able to paint, the prospect of living all bandaged up like this forever, like an invalid, it was getting too painful, which in turn was forcing Gabe tight in to a corner and the only way out was to see if he could possibly do anything about trying to change his own destiny.

  But Gabe didn’t know where to start. Gabe couldn’t even speak the words to Grace that were on the tip of his tongue. And all of it, the pain of it all, was all making him ill. He was convinced of it. Like a sickness in his soul and heart, the massive difference between his dreams and his reality.

  Gabe suspected that life really was just a game and if you lost, you missed out on all the prizes. And if that was the case, that life was a game, a complicated, complex, confusing game with secret rules, then Gabe doubted if he was even taking part. Was life just another team sport that he had failed to get picked for?

  All Gabe knew was that the tomorrows were running out. The last tomorrow was looming. Gabe knew it and he suddenly felt it in every atom of his entire being. Time was running out.

  Gabe’s phone buzzed again, shaking him out of his trance. This time, he picked it up and checked the text messages that had been coming through all morning. All of them were from his friends; Dave, Frank and Johnny. All of the messages saying the same sort of thing, wanting him to come out and meet them as soon as he could as Johnny had a plan. Gabe knew exactly what sort of plans Johnny made. They involved getting rich quick by any means possible, which were by design, blurring the lines of legality.

  Johnny’s text said to wear dark clothes but as Gabe was already dressed in what he always wore, a combination of multi coloured, paint splattered, heavy and bulky check shirts and an old patterned jumper. And the fact that he had no dark clothes anyway, this would have to do.

  As Gabe went to leave his bedroom he instinctively checked himself in the mirror for the very last time before he would be in the arena of the general public and he saw that he was all bent over and stooping. The hump looked worse when he stooped but it was hard not to with the wings buckled up behind him and weighing heavily, folded up tight shut on his back. He tried to stand tall and straight. It was an improvement, but too painful to maintain for long.

  Gabe looked at the way that he was dressed and for the first time he realised that it didn’t help his cause. The way he looked, the way he dressed, the way he presented himself. He looked like a clown down on his luck. A distorted, well washed, rainbow with holes in it. He looked a state, he looked more like a homeless children’s party entertainer than an artist. Talk about looking the freak. He certainly was dressed the part. Gabe didn’t mind being an outcast but he did think he minded looking like one. Gabe accepted he was different, he wanted to be different, but he just didn’t want to come across as just a weird scruffy bastard anymore.

  He had never really figured o
ut how to dress to suit his form, not that he had really given it that much thought. It wasn’t exactly easy to find clothes that fitted a hump and outcasts aren’t known to follow fashions. But it dawned on Gabe that perhaps now, with The Exhibition coming up, with time running out to get Grace’s attention and the prospect of being in the ‘real world’, he needed to change all that too. What he needed a complete over haul and quick, before it was too late. He needed to change. And he needed to change everything about his whole life.

  Another text came in from Johnny.

  DRIVER NEEDED. BE HERE 9AM. 1K GUARENTEED.

  It seemed like too much money. The higher the price the bigger the risk. But short of a lottery win or finding a bag of notes on the side of the street, this offer, at this precise moment in time, as far as Gabe could see it, was his only option.

  Downstairs, Gina was waiting for him like she always did. A chance to connect before their days began. “Last one today Gabe, darling. Are you going to do some revising or…”

  “I’m going to go out this morning mum, clear my head. If I don’t know it by now I never will.” He certainly was not going to revise now. If he hadn’t learnt it by now, then he wasn’t going to learn it all in half a day. He wasn’t going to tell her about what he was really up to either.

  “Right you are, do you want to borrow this new meditation CD I’ve just come across. It’s just wonderful, relaxing, affirming...”

  “No you’re alright mum.” His mum was always trying to get him to take up some of her therapies but Gabe was having none of it. Not without a fight anyhow. It might have been great for her and all that but it had been bad enough being a kid that constantly smelt of Nag Champra incense without getting all involved in it too.

  But of course he did get involved, it would have been impossible not to. He even burnt incense for himself now. But now was not the time to go and sit and listen to a guided meditation. Gabe had always felt a bit of a fool when he had agreed finally to take, or let Gina practise, some of the therapies that she was into on him. Even if he felt better afterwards, he felt like an idiot for kidding on to what he couldn’t believe in intellectually.

  Gina had chased him out the house with burning charcoal sticks on the day of his first exam and it would have been funny, if only he hadn’t been so consumed by embarrassment. But she believed it all, it was only Gabe knowing what normal people would make of it all that made his rash start to heat up.

  “Well you know, if you want to darling, I’ll leave it on the kitchen table. Just in case.”

  “I’ll see you later then mum.”

  “Good luck if I don’t see you before darling, and you know, anything you ever want to talk about, I am here for you. I’ll make it for The Exhibition I promise.”

  Gina had been neurotic since the first day she had started seeing clients in the house. Neurotic and guilty that her work and family life balance wasn’t right, that she would be in some way neglecting Gabe. She saw how he hid or ran out of the house if she had clients and she couldn’t blame him. But Gina couldn’t think of any better options and it had got Gabe more into his art and closer to his friends, in a gang even, so she thought she must be doing something right.

  “I know mum…err…one thing I have been thinking about recently. You always said you had a photo, you know, of the man. And I always said when I’ve finished my exams and leave school...”

  “The man that got me pregnant?” Neither of them felt it was appropriate to call him dad or father, nor even the man that helped make you. And ‘sperm donor’ seemed a bit too harsh. Gina, who didn’t like saying nor hearing his name, disappeared into her office and came out holding an envelope with the word ‘Cassiel’ printed on it. The same name now ringing in her head and making her nervous, but she knew it was time.

  “He was an artist too you know.”

  Gabe didn’t know. Gabe didn’t know anything about this man. He didn’t even know if he wanted to open the envelope his mother had just handed him. Instead, he put it in his back pocket like it was merely a shopping list and not, what he hoped, an old photograph of his father.

  So his father was an artist too, that made sense. Gabe liked it when things made sense.

  Gina had said that she had a photo of him but Gabe had always brushed it off so as not to appear that he needed to know; that he needed more than she was giving him. She had said that she would give it to him when he left school and then he could take it from there. And ever since, Gabe had counted down the days but now, he just couldn’t wait or put it off for any longer.

  Gina had been waiting for this day to come for a long while too. People can leave physically but there are always the memories of them. Like ghosts, but of the still living but absent.

  Chapter 5

  Gabe got to the end of the street, turned towards the direction of school and was a distance away from his house and his mum when he started debating with himself whether he should take a look inside the envelope or not. He had waited so long. He always imagined that he would tear the envelope open immediately and go searching but when it came down to it, there were other pressing questions instead. Like, what was the point? A father who had run away and not made contact perhaps didn’t want contacting and what if he looked nothing like Gabe had imagined, totally different to him? A stranger! And what did Gabe have now that made him appealing? All he was, was a kid with dodgy friends, no money and no girlfriend. He hadn’t achieved anything yet. And then Gabe had the thought that was almost as secret as his wings. What if I am just not likable enough to have a father love me?

  Gabe realised he was marching and he tried to relax and slow down a bit, the contents of his pocket, the envelope and its contents, was almost calling him, but something was stopping Gabe from taking it out and opening it.

  Like, why had his father left them? Gabe knew that Gina had had somewhat of a complex life before she’d had him. She had been living in a small village just outside of the city, which was not a very good place to be if you were gifted or different, Gina had once said. When she had Gabe and it had become clear that she was going to be a single parent, they had upped sticks and moved to the city.

  Gina had been tempted to move to the middle of nowhere and bring Gabe up alone and totally protected from the outside world, and therefore give him the freedom to use his wings more. And then of course she could also have him all to herself, but she had quickly realised that this wasn’t fair. Gabe had to have a life too, a life with friends and people, an education and as normal a childhood as possible. She also had to pull herself together and get on with her life, get a career and do all the things that good mothers do. It was a question she often asked herself, “Would a good mother do that?” So they had moved to the city where there were far more different sorts of people with busy and full lives where they could blend in a bit better and with any luck, disappear.

  Cassiel, the boyfriend, Gabe’s ‘father’, had only been in the village for a short while, a foreigner in a foreign land, running away from or to something no doubt. He had been very exotic, charming and good looking and he had driven a motorbike, and Gina had fallen head over heels in love with him. She had thought that he had loved her too. But soon enough, his actions had indicated that he obviously hadn’t loved her that much. Shortly after she had discovered that she was pregnant with Gabe, he had run off. He went out one day on the pretext of an errand and he just never came back.

  Gina had, after repeatedly, frantically calling around all the emergency services, slowly come to realise that he had gone and was not in some hospital or police cell somewhere. Then she had no other option than to just wait. And she had waited. For months she had waited as she grew and changed with the growing baby inside of her, always half expecting the baby’s daddy to knock on the door at any moment or to feel his hand slide over the crest of her baby bump. She had waited until it was impossible to wait any longer. Until she had gone through the birth and all that entailed alone. Gina had waited until she had been
forced into a corner to make the decision to go. To move forward, to accept that ‘the family’ was just the two of them and scrap all the dreams she’d that had involved Cassiel and start again.

  Gabe always said, almost flippantly whenever asked, that he never missed having a father as he had never known what it was like to have one. He hoped saying this would make Gina feel less bad or guilty, like she always looked like she did anytime this father person had been brought up in conversation. When Gina would turn from her usual, well bright and bubbly self into a pain gripped, lonely looking woman.

  Gabe thought if he said it enough it might actually come true. It seemed to make her happy. Little did they realise, the mother and son in trying to keep the other one happy, found themselves resorting to lying to each other for fear of hurting the other one’s feelings. Gabe did miss his father. He often wondered what his father might look like, if they had any similar habits or traits. Gabe wondered if he would recognise him instantly if he ever saw him. Gabe looked very different to Gina, he was tall and lean and she was small and petite. Their faces were vaguely similar but Gabe knew that his nose and colouring had come from a different gene pool. A gene pool that he knew nothing about and this fascinated him. Gabe had always dreamed that one day, when he was rich and famous and selling paintings for half a million dollars that his father would read about him or hear about him and contact him with open arms. Then, all the pieces of the jigsaw would fit together and Gabe might be able to understand what it might feel like to feel complete.

  But go chasing for him now, even looking at his image? Would that serve to fulfil his dreams or, more than likely, just shatter them?

  It was still early and Gabe had plenty of time. No doubt his friends would be at the park already, keen to get out of their own homes for one reason or another. They would already be waiting for him, waiting to elaborately inform him of their plans. Gabe was still not one hundred percent sure if he really should get involved, not at this late stage of the game. He had an exam that afternoon that he couldn’t miss. He was so nearly free. Free to go about his own life. Playing with fire now could ruin things, everything, the rest of his life. It might have been OK for them; they wanted to be ‘business men’, gangsters. They wanted to be a part of that world but Gabe didn’t. He couldn’t think of anything worse.