The Breezes (3 page)

Soon after Pa bought the flat the property market plunged. For two years now we have kept watch on the house prices, waiting for an end to their descent like spectators waiting for the jerking bloom of a skydiver's parachute as he plummets towards the earth. But two years on, the prices are still falling and interest rates are still rising and Pa has to make whacking monthly payments which he cannot afford to make. Even so, he has never asked Rosie or me for a cent, with the result that no real rent has ever been paid. Now, there are reasons for this inexcusable situation. In my case, the answer is poverty: I'm broke. Unlike two years ago, though, at least now I experience genuine guilt about it. But by the operation of a circuitous, morally paralysing causality, somehow this guilt expiates its cause: the worse I feel about not paying Pa, the more penalized and thus virtuous and thus better I feel. As for Rosie – well, Rosie has other things to do with her money and no one, least of all Pa, is going to give her a hard time about that. Allowances have to be made as far as Rosie is concerned because allowances have always been made as far as Rosie is concerned. Besides, there is Steve. There is no point in being
unrealistic about it – Steve is not the type to pay for anything. Steve lives for free.

And yet, despite all of this, Rosie sticks with him. It is hard to understand, to identify the perverse adherent at work between them. Rosie has wit, intelligence and beauty, and all of the Breezes have had a special soft spot for her for as long as anybody can remember. She has dark eyes set widely apart and a mane of auburn hair which ran until recently down her back like a fire. She is twenty-eight, two years older than me, and by any reasonable standard Steve Manus, agreeable though he is in his own way, is not fit to lick her boots. Rosie herself recognizes this, and although Steve shares her bed and her earnings, for some months now she has denied that he is her boyfriend.

‘It's finished,' she says. ‘You don't think I'd stay with a creep like that, do you?'

But – but what about their cohabitation?

Rosie reads the question on my face. ‘He's out of here,' she says, ‘as soon as he finds somewhere to live. I'm not having that parasite in this house for one minute longer than I have to.' We are in the kitchen. She raises her voice so that Steve, who is in the sitting-room, can hear her. ‘If the Slug doesn't find a place by this time next month, that's it, I'm kicking it out,' she shouts. ‘Let it slime around on someone else's floor for a change!'

Then the same thing always happens. Rosie goes away for two or three weeks to the other side of the world – Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Chicago – and by the time she descends from the skies we are back to square one. Square one is not a pleasant place to be. It is bad enough having Steve in the house, but when both he and my sister are here together for any length of time – usually when she has a spell of short-haul work – things become sticky.

It starts when Rosie comes home exhausted in the evening, still wearing her green and blue stewardess's uniform. Instead of putting her feet up, she immediately spends an hour cleaning. ‘Look at this mess, just look at this pigsty,' she says, furiously gathering things up – Steve's things, invariably, because although fastidious about his personal appearance, he
is just about the messiest and most disorderly person I know. On Rosie goes, rearranging cushions and snatching at newspapers. ‘Whose shoes are these? What about this plate – whose is that?' Steve and I keep quiet, even if she is binning perfectly usable objects, because the big danger when Rosie comes home and starts picking things up is that she will hurl something at you. (Oh, yes, make no mistake, Rosie can be violent. In those split seconds of temper she will pick up the nearest object to hand and aim that missile between your eyes with a deadly seriousness. If she's not careful, some day she will do somebody a real injury.) Rosie does not rest until she has filled and knotted a bin-liner and until she has hoovered the floors and scrubbed the sinks. She sticks to this routine even if the flat is already clean on her return. She puffs up the sofa, complains bitterly that the sink is filthy and redoes the washing up, which she claims has been badly done. (‘The glasses!' she cries, holding aloft an example. ‘How many times do I have to tell you to dry the glasses
by hand
!') Only once all of the objects in the sitting-room – many of which have remained untouched since they were moved by her the day before – have been fractionally repositioned does she finally relent. But what then? This is what concerns me, the horrified question I see expressed on my sister's face once she has finished. What happens once everything is in its place?

Usually what happens next is that Steve gets it in the neck.

‘What have you done today?' she demands.

‘Well,' Steve says, ‘I've …'

‘You haven't done anything, have you?'

The poor fellow opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again.

‘You're pathetic,' Rosie says quietly. ‘Don't talk to me. Your voice revolts me.' Then she lights a cigarette and momentarily faces the television, her legs crossed. She is still wearing her uniform. She inhales; the tip of her cigarette glitters. She turns around and looks Steve in the eye. ‘Well?' Steve does not know what to say. Rosie turns away in disgust. ‘As I thought. Slug is too spineless to speak.
Pathetic
.'

‘I … No,' Steve says bravely, ‘I'm not.'

Suddenly Rosie bursts into laughter. ‘No?' She looks at him with amusement. ‘You're not pathetic?'

‘No,' Steve says with a small, uncertain smile.

‘Oh, you sweetie,' Rosie says, sliding along the sofa towards him. Holding him and speaking in a baby voice, she says, ‘You don't do anything, do you, honey bear? You just sit around all day and make a mess like a baby animal, don't you, my sweet?'

Steve nods, happy with the swing of her mood, and nestles like a child in her arms. With luck, Rosie, who can be such good value when she is happy, has found respite from the awful, intransigent spooks that have somehow fastened on her, and we can all relax and get on with our evening.

How, then, do I put up with such horrible scenes? The answer is, by treating them as such: as scenes. It's the only way. If I took their dramas to heart – if I let them come anywhere near my heart – I'd finish up like my father.

I have poured myself a glass of water. This waiting around is thirsty work, especially if, like me, you're already dehydrated by a couple of lunchtime drinks. These came immediately after the refereeing débâcle, when Pa and I walked over to the nearest bar for a beer. Afterwards, the plan was, we were off back to Pa's place to watch a proper game of football on the television: the relegation decider between Rockport United and Ballybrew. We Breezes, of course, follow United.

It was only when Pa returned with the drinks and took off his glasses to wipe the mud from them that I was able to observe his face closely. I thought, Jesus Christ.

It was his eyes. Looked at closely in the midday light, they were appalling. The eyeballs – I gasped when I saw the eyeballs: tiny red beads buried deep in violet pouches that sagged like emptied, distended old purses. Pa had always had troublesome old eyes, but now, I suddenly saw, things had gone a stage further. These were black eyes, the kind you got from punches; these were bona fide shiners.

How was this possible? How could this assault have happened?

I am afraid that the answer was painfully obvious. It was plain as pie that Pa has walked into every punch that life had swung in his direction. With his whole, undefensive heart, Pa has no guard. Every time a calamity has rolled along, there he has been to collect it right between his poor, crooked peepers. And in the last three days, of course, two real haymakers had made contact: first, the news that his job was in jeopardy; and second, Merv. It was doubtful that Pa had slept at all since Thursday night, the night of the crash.

I remembered the time I became acquainted with Merv: about four years ago, when I was looking for my first job and needed a suit for interviews. Pa said he had the answer to my problem. 'There's this fellow in my office with a terrible
curvature of the spine,' he said, ‘but you'd hardly know it to look at him. He strolls around like a guardsman. It's his suits that make all the difference,' Pa said. 'The jackets fit him like gloves. There's the man you want – the man who makes his suits.'

That was Merv – not the tailor, but the dapper hunchback. Every time I've met him I have been unable, hard as I might try, to keep my eyes off his back, off the hump, under his shirt.

Pa took a slug of his beer and threw me a packet of salt and vinegar crisps. Then he opened a packet of his own.

We sat there in silence for a few moments, crunching the potatoes. I said, ‘Are you sure you're OK? You're not looking well.' He did not reply. I drank some beer and regarded him again. Then I said, ‘Listen, Pa. I know you don't agree with me on this, but I really think you ought to consider packing in the reffing.' Pa tilted his face towards the ceiling and tipped the last crumbs from the crisp packet into his mouth. ‘I'm not saying you should just sit at home doing nothing,' I said. ‘Do something else. I don't know, take up squash or something.' No, that was too dangerous: I could just see him stretched out on the floor of the court, soaked in sweat and clutching his heart. ‘Or golf,' I said. ‘Golf is a great game. Just give up the reffing. It isn't worth it, Pa. You don't get any thanks for what you do.'

Pa took a mouthful of beer and shook his head. ‘Johnny, I can't. If I wasn't there, who else would do it? Those kids rely on me. They're counting on me to be there. Besides,' he said, ‘I want to put something back into the game. Pay my dues.'

This last reason, especially, I did not and do not understand. The fact of the matter is that Pa, never having played the game, has not received anything from it which he could possibly pay back. Pa owes soccer nothing.

It was only thanks to me that he came into contact with football in the first place. I was eight years old and had begun to take part in Saturday morning friendlies in the park, and, along with the other parents, Pa took to patrolling the touch-line in his dark sheepskin coat. ‘Go on, Johnny!' he used to shout as he ran up and down. ‘Go on, son!' At first, my father was just like the other fathers, an ordinary spectator. But there
came a day when he showed up in a track suit, the blue track suit he wears to this day with the old-fashioned stripes running down the legs. When, at half-time, he called the team together and the boys found themselves listening to his exhortations and advice, it dawned on them that Mr Breeze – a man who had never scored a goal in his life – had appointed himself coach. While Pa's pep talks lacked tactical shrewdness, they were full of encouragement. ‘Never say die, men,' he urged as we chewed the bitter chunks of lemon he handed out. ‘We're playing well. We can pull back the four goals we need. Billy,' he said, taking aside our tiny, untalented goalkeeper, ‘you're having a blinder. Don't worry about those two mistakes. It happens to the best of us. Keep it up, Sean,' Pa said to our least able outfield player. ‘Don't forget, you're our midfield general.'

Pa's involvement did not end there. No, pretty soon he had come up with a car pool, a team strip (green and white) and, without originality, a name: the Rovers. He organized a mini-league, golden-boot competitions, man-of-the-match awards, knock-out tournaments and, finally, he began refereeing games. He was terrible at it right from the start. Never having been a player himself, he had no idea what was going on. Offside, obstruction, handball, foul throw – Pa knew the theory of these offences but had no ability to detect them in practice. This incompetence showed, and mattered, even at the junior level of the Rovers' matches between nine- and ten-year-olds. Needless to say, it was not much fun being the ref's son. It made me an outsider in my own side.

I looked at my father, Eugene Breeze, sitting in front of me with his pint, resting. The creased, criss-crossed face, the leaking blue venation under the skin, the thin white hair pasted by sweat against the forehead. The red eyes blinking like hazard lights.

‘Pa,' I said as gently as I could. ‘Face it. It's time to quit. It's time to move on to something else.'

He shrugged obstinately. ‘I'm not a quitter,' he said.

That was true – he's not a man to throw in the towel. When I stopped playing for the team – I must have been about eleven years old – Pa kept going. He kept right on refereeing the
Rovers, running around the park every Saturday morning waist-deep in a swarm of youngsters. Even when the Rovers eventually disbanded, he did not give up. On the contrary, he decided to enter the refereeing profession properly. He bought himself a black outfit, boots with a bolt of lightning flashing from the ankle to the toe, red and yellow cards, a waterproof notebook and the Association Football rule book. Then one day he came home with a flushed face and a paper furled up in a pink ribbon. Wordlessly he handed me the scroll. I opened it and there it was in bold, splendid ink,
Eugene Breeze,
spectacularly printed in a large Gothic script.

This is to certify that Eugene Breeze is a Class E referee,
the document announced. It was signed by Matthew P. Brett, Secretary of the Football Association.

‘Congratulations,' I said. I was sixteen and laconic.

‘I took the exams and passed them straight off,' Pa said. He retrieved the certificate from me and slapped it against his palm. ‘Do you realize, Johnny,' he said, ‘do you realize that now I'm
qualified
?'

‘Great,' I said. ‘You're in the way,' I said, leaning sideways to see the television.

‘This could lead anywhere.' He shook the certificate as though it were a magical document of discovery and empowerment, a passport, blank cheque and round-the-world ticket rolled into one. ‘Who knows, with a bit of luck I could be refereeing professionally in a couple of years' time, couldn't I, Johnny? I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but it's
possible,
isn't it?'

That's right, I said. It's possible.

Possibilities! Pa, the numbskull, is a great one for possibilities. Stars in his eyes, he signed up officially with the Football Association and put his name down on the match list. He developed a scrupulous pre-match routine, ticking off checklists, boning up on the laws of the game and the weather reports, checking his studs and, late on the night before, ironing his kit and laying it out on the floor like a flat black ghost. But his dream of ascending the refereeing ladder did not materialize. For a while he took charge of good fixtures, games between ambitious young teenagers playing for serious clubs.
But then, after his lack of ability became known and complaints had been made, the invitations dried up. ‘Never mind,' he said to me eventually. ‘I'll find my own level.' That was when he took to wandering around football fields in his kit, haunting the touchlines, his silver whistle suspended unquietly from his neck. He would approach teams that were warming up and say, ‘Need a ref? Look, I'm qualified …' and he would unfurl his certificate. Usually that was enough to do the trick, and that is how Pa has ended up where he is, officiating bad-tempered confrontations between pub teams and office XIs, ridiculed and bad-mouthed by players and onlookers alike. Even when he does well the abuse keeps coming, because the referee – that instrument of injustice – is never right. And still he persists and still, rain or shine, every weekend finds him out on the heath, looking for a game.

This state of affairs is unlikely to last for long, because Pa has become truly notorious for his incapability, even amongst occasional teams. One time he so mishandled a game that the players, unanimous in their infuriation, ordered him to leave the field; and so Pa is famous, in the small world of Rockport amateur football, for being the only referee ever to have been sent off. As a result, he is finding it harder and harder to get a game. Increasingly his polite offers of his services draw a blank and he has to content himself with running the line, waving the offsides with his red handkerchief. The day cannot be far away when my father finds that, like it or not, his officiating days are behind him.

‘And how about you?' Pa asked, dropping two fresh beers on the table. ‘How's it going? How's the exhibition coming along?'

‘Just fine,' I said, raising my glass to my mouth. ‘It's all under control.'

The exhibition. Two weeks tomorrow, on 16 May, my chairs are scheduled to go on show at the Simon Devonshire Gallery. It took months of pleading, telephoning, writing, lying, boasting and begging to get that show. The good news finally came one day last October, when Simon Devonshire rang me in person. ‘Well, John,' he said, ‘you can't keep a good man
down. A week starting from 16 May, next year, how does that sound to you?'

I could not believe it. Simon Devonshire himself, patron, connoisseur and big shot, was giving me the nod. This was it, this was the big break. ‘Are you serious?' I said with a laugh.

‘Certainly I'm serious,' Devonshire said. ‘Now, you're not going to let me down, are you, John? I'm putting my neck on the line for you. You appreciate that, don't you?'

‘Of course,' I said breathlessly, ‘of course. Don't worry, Mr Devonshire,' I said. ‘You won't regret this.'

I was overjoyed. I rang Angela straight away. She was overjoyed, too. ‘Johnny, that's marvellous!' She burst out laughing. Her laugh: a wonder, a full, chuckling letting go, a pure unzipping of joy … What a find Angela was. To this day I cannot believe my luck. You hear stories of those poor boys who, steering their goats from thistle to thistle upon some African tableland, happen upon a priceless stone in the dust. Well, that was how it was with me and Angela. It was during my time as a trainee accountant, when I was doing an audit in the offices of a transportation company out in some small wet town in the middle of nowhere. It was my job to make sure that the books balanced, that the debits and credits added up, a lonely, discouraging job, the nights spent on my own in a two-star hotel, the days working away in the small isolated room to which I had been consigned, a hole darkened from wall to wall with piles of thick, inscrutable ledgers – auditors always get the lousiest workspace going. After about a week, the task arrived of checking up on three trucks that the company had listed amongst its assets. It was time to pay a visit to the warehouse.

It was raining. I walked quickly across the muddy car-park to the Portakabin that served as the warehouse office and introduced myself to the girl who was writing there, her head lowered over her paper. Hello, I said, I'm with the auditors. If it's possible, I'd like to do a stock-check and … I did not say another word, because suddenly I found myself looking into these two blue rocks.

‘Of course,' the girl said, brushing her hair from her face, smiling. ‘Just go straight in.' Then she looked at me and laughed, and even now it thrills me to recall that sound and the
sight of her head thrown back dramatically, the paper-white teeth shining in her open mouth, the red tongue clean as a cat's.

Pa pushed his beer aside, licked the froth from his upper lip and said, ‘Johnny, I've been thinking. There's a lot of people with back trouble in this world. A lot of people need chairs they can sit on without hurting the base of the spine. I'm telling you, you should hear the complaints I get from the people at work. It's a complicated thing, the spine. A mystery. Even doctors don't know how it works. Anyway, I was thinking that there must be a market for specially designed chairs for people with back problems. Do you follow me?' Pa spread his pale, veiny hands on the table. ‘I reckon that if you could come up with something along those lines you'd be made. I read something about it the other day,' he said. ‘In the paper. They've now got chairs with no backs. You just have a seat which is tilted forwards and these pads to rest your knees on. Did you know that?'

‘It's not a bad idea, Pa,' I said, but I left it at that. In the furniture circles that I move in, it is artistic and not ergonomic considerations that prevail. The people who go to Simon Devonshire's are not interested in lumbar comfort. They want pieces that make a statement, that provoke discussion. They want chairs with suggestive titles. Take last year's two successes. The first was a chair called
ouch.
On its back were carved figures engaged in all kinds of monsterish copulations: goats doing it with men, women doing it with horses, dogs doing it with cats and so forth. But they were not the main feature; that was the wooden phallus which rose from the middle of the seat, so located that you could not sit on the chair without being penetrated by it. But that, of course, was not a problem, since the chair was not designed to be sat on. The same thing applied to the second success of the season. Entitled
Caramba, Yes,
it was just an ordinary wooden chair with four legs and a back, a chair of the cheap, plain, functional kind that you saw in garden sheds all over the country. Because of its strong ironical content, it is cheaper to buy certain new cars than
Caramba, Yes.