The Breezes (9 page)

Before us was an enormous open-plan working-space where all the men, without exception, wore creaseless white shirts, dark ties and dark trousers and sat behind glossy black desks. O'Reilly was no different. The moment he saw us he leapt to his feet and gave me a firm handshake. ‘How are you, John? Tommy O'Reilly.' He was about thirty-five years old. His hair was slicked back in long gleaming furrows. ‘Let me get you some coffee,' he offered smilingly. ‘Please, sit down.'

Pa and I sat down. He winked at me. I imagine he thought that, like him, I was nervous. ‘Look around you,' Pa whispered, peering furtively about him. ‘Drink it all in.'

After a delay, O'Reilly returned with three coffees. He fell into his leather swivel chair and smiled at me like an old pal.
Then, pulling out a sheaf of papers from a drawer, he said, Let's just complete this questionnaire before we do anything else. For the next ten minutes we filled out those papers question by question, box by box, with O'Reilly making simple personal enquiries in a quiet voice and transcribing the information I gave him in a slow, soothing, methodical hand. It was so relaxing that, by the end, I was on the point of sleep. Then he put the sheets away and took a sip from his coffee. Mock horror in his voice, he said, ‘John, don't tell me you're not interested in a pension?'

I wanted to please O'Reilly for the patient interest he had shown in me. I smiled at his joke and made an equivocal movement with my hands.

‘Pensions are for old guys, right?' O'Reilly was still spinning around in his chair, handling his coffee. ‘Financial planning – that's for guys with big bucks, right?'

Again, I made a noncommittal, open-minded movement. ‘I don't really know much about it,' I said.

O'Reilly put down his coffee, plucked a fresh black biro from the special thicket of black biros at his elbow and started drawing and writing as he talked. ‘Then, John, with due respect, you're what we call an
uninformed client.
This firm does not do business with any person unless he or she has been properly informed. We do not wish to take advantage of anyone or push anyone into something they don't understand. What I'll do today, then, is simply give you some information.' He looked up at me, his scribbling finished. ‘Once you've had a chance to think about it, you may want to come back and talk to me further. But take a look at this. This goes to the question you must have in your mind right now: why even think about financial planning?'

Bringing his paper with him, O'Reilly got up from his chair and sat right next to me on my left, shoulder to shoulder. On my right side, Pa put on his glasses and craned over to see what was going on.

The paper was headed
JOHN BREEZE
. On it was drawn a line, a line which was regularly intersected with vertical ticks, respectively marked, from left to right, with the numbers 0, 10,
20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 and 80. Each space between the ticks – an inch or so – represented a decade of my life.

‘OK,' O'Reilly said. ‘This is you now.' He marked the mid-twenties spot. ‘No worries, no responsibilities. Right now, you're concentrating on developing your chair-making business. And that's how it should be,' O'Reilly said benevolently. ‘But let's look a little further down the road, shall we? OK. John, you want kids, a family, right?'

‘Well, yes,' I said automatically. ‘I suppose I do. Yes.'

‘And somewhere to live?'

I nodded dumbly.

With hypnotizing carefulness, O'Reilly drew two minuscule children and a box-like house. They hovered stupidly over my thirties. Then he drew an arrow from 30 to 50. ‘That's twenty years of responsibility, Johnny. Minimum. Twenty years of shelling out – even if you don't want to have your children privately educated. Gene, am I right?'

Pa gave a strange intoxicated chortle. ‘You certainly are.'

O'Reilly said, ‘What about you, John? Anything you disagree with there?'

I shook my head.

‘Right. Now, you're not going to work for ever, are you? When do you want to retire? Around sixty? Sixty-two? Let's call it sixty.' He drew an old man with a stick at the 60 mark and then grinned, mock apologetically, at Pa. ‘What are you going to live off? You're self-employed, right? Well, that means you're going to have to
make provision
for these eventualities.' He gave me a friendly smile. ‘You understand what I'm saying?'

I nodded.

As an afterthought joke, O'Reilly sketched a coffin at the end of the line. ‘There's no need to provide for that – at least, not yet.' He winked.

I smiled back, but already I had stopped listening. Like a sucker punch, that diagram had caught me unawares. There it was, the long and the short of my life, reduced to an ineluctable line eight inches across the page. The A to Z of John Breeze.

I can see, here, that my shock might be characterized as an
imbecility. Well, it is true, anyone can tell you that life is short and then you die. Everybody knows that. But there are degrees of knowledge, and in this instance I was in the grip of an extreme state of cognition. This was not a case of simply being apprised of a new fact; no, judging by the sudden sensory jolt I experienced, I had, like the man in the sci-fi movie, the fall guy in the silver pyjamas frozen by the beam of the nerve gun, been
zapped
– the information of my doom had hit me at some electrical, irrational, neurovascular level.

That was it. From that moment forwards – yes, I can time it that precisely – things began to go downhill. The panics returned. Worst of all, it made no difference whether Angela lay with me or not and whether I stuck to her like a mollusc to rock. Even she, even love, was not enough.

I stopped functioning. When my faulty tripods came back from the workshop, I could not bring myself to fix them. Day after day I went down into the basement and day after day, I just sat there on the box, smoking cigarette after cigarette.

I have tried to speak to Angela about it – in a roundabout way. ‘What's the point?' I have said. ‘Who needs these things? Who cares whether I make them or not? The world is full of chairs. The last thing anybody needs is yet another place to sit down.'

‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself,' Angela said.

‘I'm not feeling sorry for myself,' I argued. ‘I'm being honest. Whether I finish these chairs or don't finish them won't make a scrap of difference to anything. I go down there and I feel totally superfluous. I feel like nothing, like I'm disappearing from the face of the universe.' Angela laughed. ‘I'm being serious,' I said. ‘That's what I feel. If you're so much as a minute late for work, all hell breaks loose. If I decided never to chop another piece of wood again, no one would give a damn. I'm telling you, it scares the shit out of me.'

‘My God, you've become so self-obsessed, so self-indulgent. It's not attractive, you know.'

Not attractive? What the hell did that have to do with it?

Angela said, exaggerated patience in her voice, ‘Johnny, I know what you're thinking: everything is meaningless. Well, you're right. Management consultancy is meaningless, farming
is meaningless, running a railway is meaningless. So what? I mean, what are you going to do about it? You have to accept it and get on with it.'

‘Why should I accept it?' I said. ‘Where does it say that I have to accept it?'

‘Because what else are you going to do? Spend the rest of your life with that miserable look on your face?' She kneeled down on to the floor to pick up some papers. ‘Johnny, a part of me doesn't believe that we're having this conversation. This is all so
basic
.'

I began to get angry. ‘Basic? What are you suggesting, that I'm stupid to think about these things? You think that this is a question of intelligence?'

Angela looked at me. ‘No, not intelligence. Maturity, maybe.'

‘Well, that's just fine. I'm immature. And so were Shakespeare and Plato and anybody else who ever asked himself what the hell it's all about. They were just immature. They should have kept their thoughts to themselves.'

Angela came over to me, laughing. ‘Don't get upset now, darling. You should hear yourself.'

I pushed her away from me. ‘I'm sorry, but this isn't funny. Just because I've got the guts to take on board that we're going to die – that's right, Angela, even you're going to die, you're going to end up something that a Hoover could suck up – you think I'm some kind of a jerk.'

It was Angela's turn to lose her temper. ‘Do you think you're the only one with this problem? Don't you think that we've all got to face up to the same thing?'

‘Face it? The only thing you ever face are those fucking files you're always reading.'

A silence fell.

‘I'm sorry,' I said eventually. ‘I don't know why I said that. I'm sorry.'

Angela went back to organizing her papers. ‘John, don't worry,' she said with a sigh. ‘I can understand. You've lost your mother.'

I shouted, ‘This has nothing to do with my mother.'

She came to me. I was trembling. She came over to me and
held me in a tight, continuing hug. I was scared, but I didn't say anything. I know, she said. She kept squeezing me. I still didn't say anything, but nevertheless Angela said, I know.

I miss her. I wish she were here right now.

We'd be lying down together on the sofa with a blanket pulled over us. We'd be lying there thankful for each other's simple existence. That's not sentimentality, that's a fact. Or we would be passing the time in some other way – joking around with cards, maybe, or working out a crossword. Something simple. Over there on the table, for example, is the one-thousand-piece jigsaw it took us a fortnight to finish. That scene from New England in the fall has lain there for a year, serving as a table mat. Angela did the sky, assiduously fitting the pale blue pieces at the top and the marginally less pale blues below, whereas I concentrated on the trees, thousands of fiendishly jumbled golds and reds. Then there was the toughest part, which we did together, the ground covered with fallen leaves, leaves of every possible kind of yellow.

Maybe I should get us another jigsaw. Yes, I think that's what I'll do. I'll go out tomorrow and get us another one, a real monster with nothing but sky and sky-reflecting water. It's time we did another one.

Apart from anything else, it'll do me good. That's just what I need after all that time in the cellar, some kind of occupational therapy. I've been going bananas down there. I've killed the best part of the last month manipulating a board known as the Master Maze, spending hours dribbling a small silver ball through a labyrinth punctured by one hundred holes. I became hooked, and even once I mastered the technique of effortlessly reaching the safety zone at the centre of the board, I kept playing like a moron, setting myself the goal of reversing the ball from the maze's heart right back to the starting point.

That hasn't been the worst of it. There was that period when, still clammy from the fear of the night before, I dedicated a large part of the day to obsessively quantifying my remaining lifetime. Pa was my yardstick. Thus I would take his age, fifty-six,
and calculate that there were still thirty years before I reached it. Thirty years, I reminded myself, was four years more than the entirety of my life to date. That wasn't too bad, was it? But then I would work out that, aged twenty-six, probably a third of my life had already passed, and that in ten years' time – ten years being a mere five-thirteenths of my life already lived, being merely the years that had flicked past since the time I was sixteen years old, a time which felt like yesterday! – I would probably have used up
half of my total existence allotment
! In just ten years from now! I also realized that my age was
catching up
with Pa's in terms of the latter's divisibility by the former: whereas, not so long ago, at the age of twenty, I had been a mere two-fifths of my father's age, four years hence I would be only half as young as him. And then this question arose: what about Pa? How long did old Pa have to go – before he was under the ground, alone and cold?

Pa! My Pa!

It's not right. I can just see him, innocently sweating in the garden in his V-neck pullover and his beige self-belt trousers. ‘I wonder what she's up to now,' he is saying. He is hoeing the soil where the rose-bushes are planted. ‘This is what she loved to do when she could get a minute to herself, away from you kids. You were a handful, I can tell you.' He sinks the hoe into the ground and turns the earth. Worms appear. ‘This was hers. This was where she found herself, when she worked the garden. And I mean work. Those weeds didn't stand a chance once she'd pulled her boots on, and her hat (remember her hat?). It was a massacre.' He picks up a pair of old shears and snaps at the border of the lawn. His breath is short. ‘If she could see the garden now …' He rises from his stoop and points at a bush with the shears. ‘See that? Your mother planted that.' Then he looks upwards in the mild spring sunshine. ‘I'll bet you anything she's looking down and wishing she could be here.' He sweeps his eyes around the garden, then suddenly kneels by a patch of sprouting grass he has spotted. ‘I'd better take care of this,' he says, clacking the shears, ‘or she'll give me hell.'

I thank my stars that this is one area where he and I definitely differ: death. Just about the one worry he does not have
is that of meeting his Maker. For Pa that phrase is literal – he really does believe that when he dies he will, God permitting, encounter the Man Upstairs Himself. In his belief, not only will he meet up with the Lord, but he will also run into his parents, his old buddies and, best of all, Ma. Pa looks forward to the time he will be reunited with his wife and his marriage will resume from where it left off and these years of separation will come to an end. He anticipates that day with the certainty of a man in the night anticipating the dawn. Which is great; it's wonderful he has this consolation. The snag is that, however talented he may be at scheduling railway timetables and fixing points failures, Eugene Breeze is not the country's foremost theologian.

I discovered this early on, in the course of my preparation for my first communion. One Sunday, due to the absence of the regular teacher, Pa volunteered to take the CCD class I attended after each mass and to undertake our sacramental instruction for that day. The subject under discussion, I remember, was the parable of the house built on rock and the house built on sand. The illustrated children's booklet showed it all. Two men decided to build houses for themselves. The first man – a hippie with smooth cheeks and long, curling hair – quickly put up a rickety shack on the beach which rested precariously on stilts. While the hippie strung up bring lights on his bamboo balcony and partied the nights away, the second man – a serious fellow with a dark beard and a steady gaze – unceasingly swung a pickaxe on an unpromising pile of rock, digging foundations and laying bricks until, slowly but surely, a sturdy detached home took shape there. So there you had it, one house built on sand and the other on rock, and even the class dunce knew what was going to happen next. We turned the page and, sure enough, up blew a storm, up curled a giant angry blue wave and down went the beach-house.

‘What do we learn from this?' Pa asked us.

There was a silence. We knew that this was a parable and therefore that the story was not about what it seemed to be about, namely the importance of location and materials in the construction of houses. But that was all we knew. Also, I think that the story had frightened us a little bit. The last drawing
showed the hippie lying on the beach next to his wrecked house, and we could not tell if he had pulled through or not. Eventually a seven-year-old arm went up. ‘You have to do things properly,' someone said.

‘That's right,' Pa said encouragingly. He waited a while longer for another interpretation, tossing a piece of chalk in his hand. Then he said, ‘But let me tell you something else this story says. It says that if you believe in God, God will be like a rock in your life. He'll always be there with you.'

This was met with another silence. Then a girl said, ‘But why shouldn't we believe in God?'

This only threw Pa for a moment. ‘Well, Deirdre, some people don't believe in God. But they're wrong, because God is real. He sent Jesus, his only son, down to the world to show us how much he loved us.'

‘What about people who don't believe in God, like the savages?' Deirdre said. ‘Do they go to hell?'

Pa smiled. ‘No, God looks after them as well. God loves the whole world.'

Then Deirdre said what we were all thinking. ‘I don't understand. What about him?' She jabbed her finger at the unconscious figure stretched out on the beach.

This question clean-bowled Pa. I remember him mumbling something, but whatever he said was not an answer, and to this day the problem of evil has Pa defeated; thus whenever news of suffering innocents hits our screens, he looks on in a distressed confusion, muttering to himself. There but for the grace of God go we, I hear him whispering as we watch footage of an earthquake in central India where over a hundred thousand people dreamlessly lie in the rubble of their homes. This, remember, from a man fully insured against Acts of God.

To be fair, I do not blame Pa for his failure to crack these puzzles. Why should he have a watertight theory of everything? After all, who the hell is he? Just another human being who gets up in the morning and does his best to get through the day without mishap. Like everybody else, he leaves the business of ontological breakthroughs to the specialists, relying on any developments to filter down through the usual channels. Good news travels. Look at the Gospel. A few
fishermen – correction, a few writers who borrowed their names – record pure hearsay concerning a long-gone woodworker and before you know it, on the strength of evidence that wouldn't stand up a second in any half-decent court, the whole world has latched on to it. Even now, two thousand years later, a huge infrastructure is still in place to broadcast these same glad, unreal tidings. You can't turn a corner in Rockport without running into a church. So who can blame Pa for falling into line on religion and leaving the fine detail of it to the experts?

The problem, though, comes when you actually scrutinize these experts in action. Just the other day, for example, I came across a theological debate in the newspaper which was literally a scandal – a stumbling-block to faith.

The subject of the argument was the efficacy of prayer. The first writer, an Anglican bishop I believe, stated that prayer had no power to alter the relationship between the beneficiary of the prayer and the real world. It did, however, strengthen the relationship between the worshipper and the Lord. Thus praying for the success of your child in his or her exams would confer a spiritual benefit upon you, but would not help your child. The Lord did not give preferential treatment to examinees lucky enough to have people requesting His intercession.

This theory, with its implicit admission that God is at best a concerned bystander, was depressing enough, but at least it made sense. The next theory – by a Roman Catholic bishop, a leader of my own church – was not merely disheartening, it was ludicrous. He said this: that a prayer for good exam results would be efficacious
even if you were standing there with the results letter unopened in your hand.
The reasoning: that since the Lord's omniscience extended to a knowledge of the future, He would have known about your last-minute, too-late prayer in advance and would therefore have interceded
before the prayer was made
!

What really got me down was the glee with which the prelate expounded this exquisite absurdity. It was clear, from the note of exclamation and grinning triumph upon which his argument ended, that he felt it possessed an ingenuity and logic that made it truly irresistible. Even now I can see the
bishop at his desk, licking the envelope addressed to the newspaper with a long, satisfied application of the tongue. That is that, he thinks. My good deed for the day.

When I think of Merv, the poor fucker! And these are the clowns we're supposed to go to for guidance!

Suddenly everything swerves, and without warning I find myself recalling an afternoon many years ago when Pa and I sat before the television watching the live broadcast of Rockport United versus Clonville in the replay of the semifinals of the FA Cup. The red United shirts are swarming forward towards the Clonville goal as the team searches for an equalizer, and in the stands fluid crowds surge and eddy like sea water trapped in a creek, the fans pouring through the crush-barriers in red and white currents each time the team comes close to scoring and then sucking back up the terraces in the aftermath of the near-miss. One-nil down and ten minutes to go! My father and I are transfixed by that game and when the sound of descending feet comes from the staircase we do not look up – how can we, when at that exact moment Mickey Lazarus is swinging over a deep cross to the leaping figure of Dean? Then, just as the header skims the bar, there is the noise of the front door shutting quietly, a click of locks, and though Pa looks up momentarily to see who it is, his attention is drawn straight back to the television, to the action replay of that last attack. There is the move all over again, Lazarus jinking left and then jinking right and then striking that high, floating ball one more time.

‘He was pushed!' I shout. ‘That should have been a penalty! Pa, Dean was fouled when he went for the ball!'

We hear the distant slam of a door, a car door, and Pa gets to his feet and goes to the window, all the time keeping an eye on the television, where for a last, agonizing time, Peter Dean and his marker are slowly rising together at the far post. An engine starts in the street, and just as Pa goes to open the curtains to look outside, another
ooh
rips out from the turned-up soundbox of the TV and he spins round just in time to catch Seamus Loasby, the legendary United centre forward, clean through with no one to beat but the keeper, scoop the ball over the bar
and into the crowd, and just in time to miss waving goodbye to his wife as she drives off into town for the last time.

That moment, which came only months after Pa's best-ever day, Christmas Day, 1979, was probably the worst in Pa's life. It was at that moment that United blew their last chance of a big trophy; and it was at that moment, at twenty-five minutes to five on Wednesday, 16 April 1980, that Ma was lost for good. All of this on a day my father was wearing his lucky underpants.

It could happen to me. I could lose Angela just as my father lost my mother. Not literally; not lightning striking twice. But any day Angela could be gone, for good.