Gaby Rado, 1955-2003
Gaby Rado, 1955-2003Patrick sits opposite me, looking so much like David Beckham it’s untrue. (I’m briefly reminded of a pubescent phase speculating on the implications of marrying one’s first cousin, because I fancied all of mine.) I’m awkward with people I see rarely, clumsy and shy, yet he’s always been the one to make me feel at ease. A similar humour, an unconscious affinity bred from being, temporarily, our respective families’ black sheep.
My grandmother’s senile and jabbering away in a corner to herself like Katie says I do when I’m drunk. She’s being stubborn, and I recognise my obduracy, childish and futile. Marcus texts (O rare occurrence) and tells me Gaby Rado has died. I feel unbearably selfish for enjoying the company, and this glass of wine that nobody, miraculously, has commented on, when a man of such talent and integrity is dead. (It’s the first since Oates, but this seems like suicide, and I’ve understood that for a long time.)
I read the obituary and feel selfish that although I’m crying for him, I’m also, as Patrick Bateman put it, weeping for myself. For the knowledge that, as a colleague put it, a newsroom is a family, a knowledge that will always keep Marcus from me. Terrified that he will die in something like this. The terrible knowledge that doing humanity an essential service seems so much less noble when it mortally threatens someone you love. (But, ironically, exalts the protagonist in society’s eyes.) I would give anything for my work, but, unless you see So Solid rather too often, music doesn’t kill. (And yet there’s also the fact that nobody – not him, not Katie, not even Miriam, a musician herself – could ever understand, not in a million words, what music is to me.)
In memoriam, I play Rachmaninov (badly) and Radiohead (worse).
I use the words ‘love’ and ‘hate’ far too easily. I dislike myself intensely today.
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
The way I feel today - 10 July 2004
Just seventeen - 17 March 2004
Roads to freedom - 25 February 2004
Confessions of a failed self-harmer - 25 February 2004
Manchester, united - 25 February 2004