The Breezes (16 page)

‘OK,' Steve replied, mumbling. He pointed questioningly to his mouth, which was full of cheese and bread.

‘That's OK,' I said, ‘help yourself.' I opened the refrigerator. A segment of beef tomato, raspberry jam, margarine. No milk. I rose tiredly. Steve yes, milk no. In the chaos of the universe, certain things remained fixed.

I abandoned any thought of making myself a coffee and a sandwich and headed for my room. Just as I was about to exit, I turned and said to Rosie, who had not moved from her seat,
‘So when are you going to start? Are you just going to sit there while the rest of us have to put up with this –' I shouted the word – ‘this
shit
?' I scooped up half of a plate with my foot and with a swing of the leg sent it flying against the wall, where it broke into still smaller pieces. ‘Just who the fuck do you think you are?' I shouted.

Rosie stood up. ‘How dare you? I clean this place up every time I come home. You and him just sit here all day doing
nothing.
I'm always clearing up after you,
always.'
  Her voice grew high-pitched.
‘You
should be clearing this up, it's about bloody time that
you
did something for me for a change.'

I was not going to take this. I picked up a hard green apple from the fruitbowl and hurled it as hard as I could two feet or so wide of her head at the far wall. With a splat, half of the apple disintegrated, leaving a wet patch and debris on the wallpaper. Steve took cover behind the opened door of the fridge. ‘Do you think you can fuck up the whole flat and expect us to say nothing about it? You fucking terrorize us with your fucking moods, you smash up these plates given to the both of us by Pa, plates which I fucking
own,
and you don't give a shit! You just do it without a fucking thought for anyone else! Well, here,' I shouted, grabbing a framed photograph belonging to her which had remained on the bookcase, ‘here, I don't give a shit either.' I stamped repeatedly on the photograph, pulverizing the glass and wrecking the snapshot of a suntanned Rosie on holiday in Spain.

‘Stop it,' she said, ‘stop it, Johnny.'

I kicked the photograph aside. I was close to tears myself. I said, ‘Rosie, this is the kind of crap which you put us through the whole time. Look, just look at what you've done: you've completely wrecked the flat! I mean, are you crazy or what? Maybe you should see a doctor, I don't know. Do you think this is normal? What's the matter with you?' There was a quaver in my voice. Rosie was hunched forward on the edge of the sofa, sniffing and pointing her face at her toes. Had her hair been long it would have fallen before her face, but now that hiding-place was gone. ‘You can't go on like this,' I continued, speaking more gently. ‘You've got to start giving some thought to what other people are going through. You're not the
only one with problems. Everybody's got problems. Look at Pa: did you know that he's been fired?' Rosie stiffened. ‘That's right, Pa's been fired,' I said. ‘At this moment he's lying in bed with the curtains drawn, and you don't even know about it.' My voice was hoarse. ‘Oh, yes; and Merv Rasmussen has died.'

I went to my room and dropped face-down on the bed.

That was at four in the afternoon. When I awoke, still in my clothes, it was seven in the evening and the window was a faint pink rectangle. My headache had gone and the house was quiet. I moved slightly, turned the pillow over to its cool side and closed my eyes again.

The telephone began ringing. I tensed. I was not going to answer it because it had to be Devonshire. I could picture him at the other end of the line, the brutal contours of the blazer, the fury mounting each time a bleep of the call went unanswered by me, a pipsqueak whom he had done such a great favour.

Nobody picked up the phone. The ringing stopped as the answering machine was activated. I got out of bed and went to play the message. ‘This is Whelan,' the voice said, ‘of Whelan Lock & Key. I'm ringing to say that I can come round this Saturday, if you like. Thank you.'

A shriek of laughter came from Rosie's room. The door crashed open and my sister stumbled out, still laughing dementedly. A rolled-up sock flew at her from the bedroom, flung by her boyfriend in a parody of violence. Rosie was clutching a copy of the
Crier
and pointing convulsively at the photograph of Steve. Unbalanced in her merriment, she plunged on to the sofa and smothered her gleeful screams into the cushions. I started grinning, too, because Rosie's laughter is air scooped from the lungs and expelled in the purest, most infectious note of hilarity, and also because the sight of her animated is always in itself a relief and a joy.

‘Look,' she said, her eyes wet, ‘look.'

‘I know,' I said. ‘I thought you knew. It's wonderful, isn't it?'

She could barely speak. ‘Man of the Month,' she whispered, shuddering with mirth, ‘Man of the Month.'

Steve came in, tucking his shirt into his trousers and sheepishly
smiling. Rosie pointed at him, uttered the words ‘Man of the Month', and started shrieking all over again. Her haircut wasn't bad at all, I thought, once you got used to it.

‘Get me the phone, my hero,' she said to Steve, who complied. Still chortling, Rosie ordered a pizza supreme and six beers for delivery. ‘My warrior,' she said, handing him back the telephone. ‘We're going to celebrate the fame which you have brought to this house. Now get me the duvet,' she ordered, ‘and bring me the TV guide.' Steve obeyed, and the two of them settled down on the sofa face to face, their legs interlocked beneath the quilt.

The room, already oppressive in its disarray, shrank with their happiness. I put on my jacket. ‘I'm going to Pa's,' I said. ‘I'll leave you two lovebirds to get on with it.'

‘I'll call him tomorrow,' Rosie said. ‘I promise. I'm just not up to it now. I'll call him first thing.'

I arrived at the house to find that my father had finally got out of bed. He was sitting downstairs in the living-room in a vest and pyjama bottoms, a can of Heineken in his hand. The curtains were drawn and the room's darkness was relieved only by the luminosity of the television, a fifteen-year-old black-and-white portable which he had brought down from the spare room. He was watching football. I recognized the team in dark-and-light: Rockport United. It was a programme about last Sunday's game.

I fetched a beer, too, and took over an armchair on the other side of the room.

They were showing Ballybrew's fateful last-minute free kick. The picture froze just as the kick was about to be taken. The analyst, a distinguished former international, drew a white arrow from the ball to the corner of the goal. ‘This is where Burke is aiming – to the goalkeeper's, Taylor's, left. That's at least thirty-five yards away. Now, unless you're Koeman or Cantona or one of the other great strikers of the ball, your chance of scoring from there is very remote indeed. I question the need for having a wall there at all.' The analyst paused for emphasis. ‘Now take a look at what happens next.' Burke hoofed the ball in slow motion. ‘The ball hits the wall, deviates to the keeper's right and ends up in the back of the net. There.' He circled the ball. ‘So if Burke's kick had gone as intended, there would not have been a goal, because the keeper had his left corner covered and would have saved it. And if United had not been extra cautious and had not put a wall in front of the kicker, there wouldn't have been a goal either.' We were returned to the studio, where the three members of the panel were grinning ruefully. ‘Sometimes you just can't win,' the analyst said, laughing.

‘Rubbish,' Pa said forcibly. ‘They're just rubbish. I'll never waste my time on that team again.' He looked at me. Threadbare
silver stubble sprouted from his soft face like grass in poor soil. ‘You want another beer?' I shook my head. Barefooted, he went to the kitchen to help himself. His toenails, hard, shining curves in the half-light, needed cutting.

The curtains were billowing. I went over to investigate.

‘Pa, the windows are completely broken. Anybody could walk in.'

‘What do you want me to do, call that clown Whelan? Anyway, what does it matter? If somebody wants to come in here, that's fine by me.' Pa fell into his chair with a fresh can. ‘As far as I'm concerned, they can all come in and help themselves. I mean it.' He made a sweeping gesture. ‘The TV, the chairs, the lot. It's all theirs.'

I didn't react.

Fresh figures appeared on the television: athletes, lining up on their blocks for a sprint. Down they went, into a crouch, waiting. The starting pistol cracked, then cracked once more. A false start.

Perhaps it was just the light of the television and the shadows it pooled in the sockets of his eyes, but my father's pale face looked ghostlier than ever.

‘Have you eaten, Pa?'

‘I'm not hungry.'

‘I'll make you some soup, if you like. I think I've seen some onion soup somewhere.'

‘Son, I'm
not hungry
.'

The sprinters crouched once more. Crack. This time it was for real. They ran as fast as they could for a hundred metres.

It was all too dismal. ‘What about Steve, eh?' I said, pointing at the discarded copy of the
Crier
on the floor. ‘Who would have thought it?'

Pa took a sip from his can and shrugged. ‘It's all phoney, all that Man of the Month stuff. It's all done to sell newspapers.'

‘I know,' I said, ‘but still …' Jesus, I had never known him to be so negative. ‘I just think that it's great for Steve, that's all. I don't know, maybe this is the break he's been looking for.'

‘Getting your picture in the papers doesn't mean a damn thing. Look at me, I've got my photograph all over Rockport.'

I said, with an actual flicker of conviction, ‘Maybe this will
be the turning-point for him; maybe this will give him the push he needs.'

Pa gave a dry laugh. ‘John, let's not kid ourselves any longer about Steve: the boy's a complete washout.'

Hold on, I felt like saying, I've never deluded myself about Steve; you're the one who keeps saying what a great guy he is underneath it all.

‘I think you're being harsh,' I said. ‘It's not a small thing, what he did.'

‘The fellow's a halfwit,' Pa said. ‘Otherwise what would he be doing with Rosie?'

I could not believe what I had heard.

‘Don't look so shocked, Johnny,' he said, pronouncing my name with a touch of mockery. ‘Would
you
want her as your girlfriend? All that screaming and shouting and selfishness?' He tilted the last drops of Heineken down his throat. ‘I've been doing some thinking,' he said. ‘I've been sorting things out in my mind and seeing things as they are. See things as they really are,' he said. ‘And I'm telling you, Rosie's no good.' He began to extend the fingers of his left hand one by one, numbering. ‘She's selfish. She's mean-minded. She's unloving. She doesn't give a moment's thought either to me, or to you, or to Steve, or to anybody else.' He flicked his hand dismissively. ‘Those are the facts.'

‘She's your daughter.'

‘So? She's nearly thirty. She can't ask us to suspend our judgements for ever. She takes and she takes and she takes. She never gives. Do remember what she said when I asked her to come and visit Merv? Do you remember?' Pa made a noise of disgust. ‘She exploits everybody around her. She manipulates us all with her unhappiness.'

‘She doesn't mean to be unkind,' I said. ‘You think that she wouldn't change if she could?'

He stared at the television. ‘I don't know,' he eventually said tiredly. ‘I don't know anything any more.' He kept staring. A long-distance race was now in progress, the athletes bobbing along on the inside track.

I noticed a card on the floor. It was an invitation to the
cremation of Mr Mervyn Rasmussen, taking place the next day.

‘Are you going to this?' I said. There was a silence. ‘I'll come with you, if you like,' I said.

Pa asserted suddenly, ‘You spend years, your whole life, making a family, a home, working, and then …' He clicked his fingers, making a small sound. ‘What's the use.'

He was beginning to sound like me.

I said, ‘You're bound to feel low. You've gone through a terrible patch which nobody deserves. The job, Merv Rasmussen, Jesus, even Trusty …'

‘I don't care about the dog. I could get another dog tomorrow. They're all the same. They're just dogs.' He rubbed his eyes. ‘Anyway, I'm better off without her. All she's ever been good for is …' He motioned tiredly at the carpet.

Around the track the runners went and then around once more. A small group broke free at the front.

Hoarsely, Pa said, ‘I prayed for him, Johnny. I lit a candle for him.' He swallowed hard.

I felt angry on his behalf. ‘I know,' I said. ‘You did everything you could.'

‘It's not right. It shouldn't happen.' He hesitated, his face a grimace. ‘Where is God in all of this. Where does He fit in, Johnny?'

I knew the answer to that one, but I was not going to tell my father. Although, for the sake of his own well-being, I had wanted him to be more realistic about things, I didn't want him to be too realistic. I did not want him finishing up a no-hoper like me, good for nothing but inaction in the daytime and the shakes at night.

I stayed the night at Pa's, in my old bedroom. The window, set in a dormer in the rear roof of the house, gave upon the same old silhouettes of the dunes, and the bookshelf was as ever piled with the ancient, battered hardbacks of the adventures of Tintin. I threw my clothes on the floor, climbed into my childhood bed and worked through the books one after the other, summoned utterly to the familiar, funny, inextinguishable otherworld of
Red Rackham's Treasure, The Broken Ear
and
The Crab with the Golden Claws.
Time and again Tintin found
himself in a tight spot from which, time and again, by hook or by crook, he slipped. Take
Tintin in America.
Every page ended with the boy reporter and his dog, Snowy, in a jam of one terrible kind or another: falling over a precipice, trussed up for a lynching, bound to a rail track with a train approaching, tossed into Lake Michigan with a dumbbell tied to his feet – these were the hottest waters imaginable and yet somehow, wonderfully, Tintin always escaped.

Lights off. It was so quiet I could hear the sea arriving and rearriving on the strand half a mile away.

This was the room where I had first started making chairs. Even now there remained some wood shavings ingrained at the edges of the carpet, beyond the suck of the vacuum cleaner. What a crazy idea that was, that I might build a life around such an activity. I turned, and the murmur of sheets in my ear momentarily replaced the murmuring of the waves. Maybe things would be different if I had a decent job, one like Angela's, a job which impacted on people's lives …

The brooding, the doom and gloom, had to come to an end. And not just for my own peace of mind. Angela didn't like it. It made no sense to her that someone could be derailed by the simple knowledge of futility. Nobody else seemed to suffer from this problem, certainly no one at Bear Elias. Either that, or they hid it very well. Maybe that was the truth, that people toughed it out secretly, ashamed and anxious, without heroism. They kept busy, stopping up those loopholes in the day when one had nothing better to do than to fall into contemplation, those minutes which, in my case, invariably added up to the small, unlit hours. If you bent your back all day at the office and immediately followed that up with an evening with a hungry, exhausting family and then got up early the next morning and clocked in all over again, day in, day out, that, with luck, should do the trick: send you flying to dreamland the moment your head hit the pillow – like Angela.

A cold feeling of powerlessness overcame me.

I rolled on to my stomach, facing the wall. At least Pa was in bed now, with a glass of milk and half an orange inside him. I had peeled it for him myself and presented it to him on a saucer. What a marvellous package of nutrition, with its
brightly dimpled, waterproof overcoat and its perfectly segmented contents. How could such a thing come to be?

I felt hopeful and sleepy. I remembered a green jungle bug which miraculously resembled, down to the last quirk, the leaves of the rare bush that was its habitat: what was the explanation for that wonderful creature? Holed up in this warm mystery, I fell asleep.

The next morning I arose purposefully and went down to the shops and bought newspapers and coffee and croissants. This, I determined as I returned in the new summery heat, was going to be a good day; a fresh start, even.

I entered the back way, through the kitchen. I shut the door and jumped, almost dropping my purchases. A shrill, unrelenting tintinnabulation had begun to sound wildly throughout the house. This was Pa's doing: he had fixed the burglar alarm so that it did not work.

I ran up the stairs in the din. He was still in bed, lying on his side with his head barely emerging from under the bedclothes. ‘How do I switch off this racket?' I shouted. ‘Pa!' I pushed at his unbudging shoulder. ‘What's the matter with you? Get up. The bloody alarm's gone off! Can't you hear? Get up!' I shouted. I could feel his body tense at the touch of my hand. ‘Pa!'

Pa turned and swung his arm like a backhand topspin smash and struck me on the right side of the face.

We stared at each other speechlessly. The alarm kept belling away.

Finally, he said, ‘The cellar.' He pointed in no particular direction. ‘The cellar. The red box.'

‘What about it?'

‘You pull it,' he said. ‘The lever. You pull it.'

I switched off the alarm and stayed downstairs. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe what he'd done.

A few moments later the stairs groaned with his heavy tread. He came in, hands sheepishly buried in his dressing-gown pockets, and stood at the doorway for a few moments. He said, ‘Johnny, I'm sorry. I just– '

I interrupted him. ‘Forget it.'

He shook his head in dismay. ‘I can't understand it. I …There's no excuse –'

‘Pa,
forget
it,' I said. I inhaled from my cigarette. ‘Now, do you want to go to this cremation or not? If you do, you'd better get dressed and get shaved. We've got to go in five minutes.'

‘I don't think I'll be going.'

I said, ‘Do what you want. He was your friend. If you don't want to go, that's fine with me.'

An expression of exhaustion crossed his face as he took a deep breath. He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘OK. I'll be down in a minute.'

I switched on the television and watched a game show. Shortly afterwards Pa came down, wearing a black suit.

I drove the car, he gave monosyllabic directions. He knew the way. We were going to the place where the incineration of my mother's body, already half charred by the thunderbolt, had been completed.

Outskirts of Rockport passed by, the deep pavements plotted with intensely coloured grass. We arrived. I said, ‘You go on in, Pa. I'll wait for you here.'

He sat there for a few moments, looking up at the red-bricked building at the top of the knoll. He had not shaved carefully and a tufty, dirty-white fringe of stubble showed under his nostrils. It was a lovely, slightly windy day. Daisies speckled the lawns of the crematorium.

‘You'd better get going,' I said softly. I undid the catch of his seat belt. Slowly, he got out. I watched him trudge up the shallow slope, head down, body leaning forward.

I remained seated, smoking. One or two cars drove by. Then I looked up and saw that the doors of the building were closed. The proceedings were under way.