The Lives of Gadu Tom Phillips

Everyone knew Gadu told lies. But  no matter. He was an artist, and while nobody believed he’d run a cocaine factory in the Bolivian rain forest whilst living with an uncontacted tribe or been chief stone mason during the reconstruction of Mostar’s Stari Most, his stories were hilarious.

“Marriage, yes,” he might say. “Of course, I have been married – let me see – five times now.”

And so he would list off his wives and the reasons he’d had to break up with them. In most cases, the cause would be a minor western celebrity with whom he’d caught his wife in flagrante. Every now and then, however, he would come up with openly unlikely scenarios, such as discovering that one of his wives had been an arms smuggler during the war in Kosova, that another was in love, not with him, but their refrigerator (“I caught her whispering sweet nothings to the freezer compartment while she was defrosting it”) or that another turned out to be a man (“I may only be vaguely familiar with the female clitoris, but I do know that it generally isn’t eight inches long”).

Another of Gadu’s favourite categories included stories pertaining to disasters. It was, of course, entirely possible that he’d been in New York at the time of the 911 attacks, but very much less likely that he’d provided vital information that led to the capture of one of the atrocity’s perpetrators. The laws of probability also suggested that it wasn’t possible for one person to have survived so many earthquakes, tsunami and volcanic eruptions. And what had taken Gadu to Haiti, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Indonesia precisely when these various catastrophes had struck in the first place? Nobody knew or would ever know, but the chronology of Gadu’s life was vague enough for his claims to sound plausible.

The regulars of The Feather, as everyone calls our city’s drinking district on account of the distinctive layout of its streets, were hooked. Whichever pub, bar or late-night dive Gadu went in, he was met with open arms and drinks he never had to pay for. And, of course, it wouldn’t take long for someone to make a comment that would prompt him to say “Ah, now that reminds me of the time I was in …” and extemporise a tale that, depending on how drunk he was, related more or less to the general topic of discussion. Occasionally, said story would be set close to home and involve the fuckwittery of a particularly bureaucratic bureaucrat or culminate in a philosophical axiom he’d no doubt found rolled up in a little plastic tube on the saucer of his coffee cup, but, for the most part, it would take us, if only momentarily, to somewhere that seemed impossibly exotic to the poor drinkers in the backstreets of the forgotten city of V.

Gadu was aided in his efforts by the absence of anyone who had known him for longer than a year or two. His schoolfriends had emigrated to the USA and Australia, while, of his acquaintances in V, I was now the one who had known him the longest. According to Gadu, we’d met while we were studying at university. A good choice on his part as I have no recollection of that period of my life at all. Maybe he was one of the hazy figures I got drunk with in late-night clubs or smoked weed with at festivals up in the mountains. Or maybe, back then, he was doing his basic military training and being kicked out of the army for assaulting an NCO, as one of our fellow drinkers claimed shortly before she migrated to Canada.

In my version of the story, I met Gadu when I was working as a waiter in a small seaside town. He was running an eccentric antiques shop that he’d inherited from his uncle. It was notable for the large suit of armour on display in the window – Gadu claimed it had been left in our part of the world by Crusaders returning from the Holy Land, but it looked very much like it had been knocked up for a movie filmed in the ancient ruins above the town. It didn’t much matter. The suit of armour was not for sale. It was a lure for tourists, although Gadu never seemed to sell any of the communist memorabilia, militaria, old postcards, stamps and coins he kept in stock. That didn’t bother him and for three or four years we would meet once a week, drinking beer in his favourite beachside bar and coming up with plans for our futures that were as unlikely as the stories Gadu would tell when he pitched up in V all those years later.

Knowing that I intended to become a writer, Gadu often suggested that we move to the capital where he would start a theatre company dedicated to putting on my plays. In another scheme, I would become a journalist with the national TV company and produce a programme in which he, Gadu, would share his not inconsiderable knowledge of the communist memorabilia his uncle had amassed. In yet another, he would set up an IT design company for which I would provide clients with online content.

In the event it was me who moved to the capital and yet, despite our many conversations about the great future ahead of us, Gadu never got as far as going to the bus station and buying a ticket. There was always a reason for staying for one more season. None of our magnificent plans were put into action and, for the next ten years or so, I only saw Gadu on very rare occasions and always in that same seaside town. He’d sold the antiques shop not long after I’d moved away and appeared to have done nothing much in particular ever since. He was one of those people who always have a few banknotes in their wallet without having any visible means of support. I assumed he must have had what’s usually referred to as a private income.

Gadu  reappeared when I took up a job at the university in our beloved city of V. Being Gadu, he arrived unannounced. Sabrina and I had gone out for dinner at our favourite restaurant on one of the branching streets of The Feather and not long after we’d decided to skip dessert in favour of coffee and liqueurs, a familiar figure swaggered over. Gadu had put on weight and lost some of his hair, but it was unmistakably him and our greetings were appropriately warm and enthusiastic. He refused to join us at our table, but we made arrangements to meet the following morning for coffee.

‘”You won’t believe the crap I’ve been through,” he’d begun. “Oligarchs, mafia, fuck me.”

According to his version of events, he had been pressured into selling the antique shop by criminals unknown, but had then used the money to invest in a beachfront franchise – a games shack, the sort that cons holidaymakers into parting with ever larger wads of cash in the hopes of winning a faded stuffed panda by landing three balls in a bucket or three darts in the bullseye. He had made, he said, “shedloads of money” without having to do anything  other than “sign up the appropriate number of flirtatious girls” to staff the shack. Such success, however, had attracted the attention of yet more criminals unknown who had begun extorting protection money from Gadu and the other co-owners of the shack. According to him, the apotheosis of the disaster had come when one of the flirtatious girls had been shot in the leg by a mafia tough guy and Gadu had discovered there was a price on his head.

Whatever the truth, Gadu was now living in V and we resumed our friendship. Despite his repeated claims that “the mafia took everything”, he still didn’t appear to need to work. Whatever his actual situation, he was soon frequenting The Feather’s numerous drinking holes. I, of course, was present at a significant proportion of these gatherings and heard him unleash his flagrant fabrications on an unwitting audience. For one reason or another, however, I decided there was no point challenging the truth of his sensational assertions. The majority of his audience were wholly convinced and would egg him on to provide ever more details about Bolivian tribes or his bridge-building activities in Mostar. Although this was potentially a problem, in that it was precisely on such details that Gadu might stumble and reveal the yawning gulf between his story and the truth, he responded with barrages of random information. He would blind his audience with pseudo-documentary.

“The village was almost unreachable,” he might say. “Five days in a canoe. I ate nothing but cayman eggs for a week. We made fires out of dried spider’s webs. A piranha bit my toe.”

The more absurd the details the more convincing they became.

I did nothing to disabuse his fan club. Perhaps I should have done. The crisis was inevitable.

It occurred shortly after the end of the summer term and I woke to find Sabrina violently shaking my right shoulder. One of my students was in the street, calling up to our apartment. There was a drunk man on the campus with a bottle of whisky in his hand, howling at the moon. That the student had come to me rather than the security guards or someone more senior in the department meant that it could only be Gadu. I threw on some clothes and hurried past the empty bottles left on the tables of the now closed drinking holes in The Feather. The university campus was a monochrome assemblage of rectangles and squares and there, right in the middle of it, was Gadu, his head thrown back, wailing at the sky.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said when I approached him. “Have a drink!”

“No, that’s not a good idea,” I replied, even though I could probably have done with one. “Shall we find somewhere to sit down?”

Gadu was beyond drunk. Another few glugs from the bottle he was swinging around might well cause both his brain and his liver to implode.

As if resorting to automatic pilot, he began listing off all the things he’d done that I knew he hadn’t.

“I was just trying my best,” he said when I’d managed to wrest the bottle from his grip and lead him to a bench on the far side of the courtyard.

The ambulance took half an hour to get there. The paramedics asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital with him, but I told them I wasn’t related and would come see how he was in the morning. I watched them put him in a wheelchair and push him up a ramp. Gadu gave a weak, pathetic wave as the doors shut and the ambulance drove away.

Although I’m a doctor of philology rather than of medicine (“The only colon I can help you with is related to punctuation,” I’d once joked to a baffled airline check-in guy), I could tell that Gadu had suffered some form of nervous breakdown. The fragile carapace of fictions he had constructed had collapsed, not due to external pressure – an audience who had punctured said carapace with the arrows of disbelief – but as a result of some kind of internal fissure. His mind had turned on itself and declared civil war. The part he had long suppressed, the part that had once known that his stories were pure fantasy, had launched an attack from the darkness. Or at least that’s how I imagined it as I sat there in the silence that followed the ambulance’s departure.

That Gadu had chosen to drag his addled, but conflicted mind to the university campus didn’t strike me as significant at first. But then, as I drank the remains of the bottle of whisky I’d liberated from him and looked at the vacant windows of the campus buildings, I could imagine how he’d come to regard it as an allegorical landscape. For him, it was the setting for his own personal Divine Comedy, his Pilgrim’s Progress, his 1984. The epicentre of a world in which every square inch represented an emotional or psychological state, a philosophical concept or a moral imperative. Living in such a world must have been unbearable – to be constantly assaulted with significance, with the idea that you were an imperfect aberration wandering through a fabricated world of ideas and judgements. He had chosen to take his last stand, to make a final effort to retrieve his sanity, in a place he considered to be the epitome of knowledge and truth.

I presumed the hospital would treat his condition in the usual fashion – with medication, therapy and rehabilitation – and yet it turned out that Gadu had already begun to cure himself. On the very edge of the abyss, almost too drunk to string a sentence together, he had, in the thirty minutes we waited for the ambulance to arrive, unburdened himself. In a state in which most people lose all sense of reality, he had regained it, if only in fragments.

“I’ve talked bollocks my whole life,” he’d begun when he’d calmed down enough for us to have something resembling what most people consider to be a conversation.

“Everyone talks bollocks sometimes,” I’d offered, but he’d merely snorted.

“I talk bollocks all the time,” he’d gone on. “Not one thing I’ve said in the last forty years is true. Those stories? Ha! Not a single thing. But you know that, I think, only you’re too good, too weak, to … I shouldn’t expect you. No, not anyone. No. That’s wrong … Not your fault. Not anyone’s …”

He’d paused for a moment. I’d half-expected to hear a story that would be the closest he’d ever get to explanation. How he’d been abused as a child, bullied at school. How he’d suppressed his sexuality, tried to cover up his past as a thief, a murderer, a member of the mafia.

“There’s no great secret,” he’d said. “Oh, sure, maybe my parents had very high expectations of me that I could never fulfil. But they didn’t care when I accepted my uncle’s offer to take over that shop – you remember? Of course you do. The one with the suit of armour. I probably could have gone to university instead but … Nobody ever said anything. Never showed any surprise. That’s just Gadu. You know? That’s just Gadu.”

The word seemed to ring with a peculiar violence. Just. It was something I’d probably said myself when I’d been excusing one of his more obviously fabricated anecdotes at one or other bar in The Feather.

“I don’t want to be just Gadu.”

He had smoked his way through a packet of cigarettes and I offered him mine.

“I used to think the human imagination was a wonderful thing,” he said. “But it’s our greatest curse. We’ve turned it into our greatest curse … Do you know what I’ve really been doing all these years?”

I must have looked blank, my face half-lit by the security light over the gateway. He laughed, a bitter laugh I’d not heard from him before.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Skating across the surface of the earth. Life avoidance. That’s probably what one of those gurus on the internet would call it. Slumping into escape … one more fad, one more addiction. Sometimes I look at myself …”

That was the last thing he’d said before the ambulance arrived. Perhaps he’d intended it to be deliberately provocative, to be something that would cause me to imagine yet more stories he’d never told me.

It would be another year before I saw Gadu again. He took his time in recognising me. And even then I’m not entirely sure he knew who I was or how he knew me. There was something frail about his way of speaking. Words began, but never came to an end.

“We used to be friends,” I said as he stirred five sugars into his coffee.

“Were we?”

“Yeah, we met at university. You were doing something to do with computing – I guess it’s called IT these days. You got me a summer job in the town where you grew up. On the coast. Then you went travelling. Bolivia, Bosnia, the States … You’ve got some amazing stories.”

Gadu drank his coffee and looked away, watching the people passing by on the pavement.

“Maybe I should have written them down,” he said.

He threw a couple of coins on the table and stood up.

“We could meet for coffee again next week if you like,” I suggested.

“Yeah, OK, maybe,” he replied, but I already knew that was the end. He would go home, switch on his TV and watch other people’s stories instead.

I counted the coins he’d left. He’d not been out for coffee for a good long time.

Tom Phillips

Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay – interior of an antique shop with lots of stock.