Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

I light a cigarette. Maybe I am heartless; but what choice have I got?

Look at what happened on Friday, for God’s sake. She came home at about midday and bolted straight past me and Steve to her room, slamming the door behind her and falling on her bed with a dead thud. Two things were shocking. First of all, she seemed to be liquefying: teardrops were travelling over her cheeks down to her chin, her lips shone with run from her nose, and even her fingers were dripping. Then I registered the second thing about her: her hair.

Ah, Rosie’s hair … Rosie’s hair is a family legend. It is packed securely in that suitcase of Breeze myths that is clicked open from time to time at family gatherings, its hand-me-down contents familiar and sentimental and orienting. Rosie’s hair is in there with the story of Grandma Breeze’s radical feminism as a young woman and the time when she granted asylum in her bedroom cupboard to a suffragette wanted for vandalism; of the number of languages (six: English, Irish, French, German, Italian and Spanish) which my mother’s mother, Georgina O’Malley, spoke fluently; of the invention by great-grandfather Breeze of an egg incubator, and of how he failed to patent the invention and missed out on millions.

Rosie’s long Irish locks, which when gathered and braided dropped from her head in a thick, fiery rope, have made her stand out like a beacon at baptisms, Christmases and weddings, and be recognized and kissed and admired by distant Breezes who have never met her but who have received word of her flaming head. If I should have children, no doubt they too will learn of the two-foot mane that Aunt Rosie once sported and how one day, the day before yesterday to be precise, Friday, she came home with it cropped down to her skull, dashing past me like a carrot-topped soldier late for parade.

Rosie barricaded herself into her room for the rest of the day. When Steve occasionally emerged from it to fetch her something from the kitchen and left the door ajar, I could hear muffled sobbing. I did not say anything; what was there to say? Pa, though, could not restrain himself when he came round yesterday morning on his way to visiting Merv Rasmussen in hospital.

‘Rosie … Your hair.’

She said nothing. She was in the kitchen with her back turned to him, busying herself with dishes in the sink. Pa was stock-still, his head tilted sideways, rooted in the hallway like a nail badly hammered into wood.

After a moment he looked up at me. Then he looked at Rosie again and then he looked at me again. He rubbed his face with one hand. He was lost for words, that was obvious. He wanted to say something, but as usual could not think what. No matter what he says or does not say, no matter how gently he treads, his words always seem to snag on Rosie’s tripwire sensibilities and blow up in his face. To her chagrin, Rosie, who is always buying him presents and sending him cheerful and amusing postcards from around the world, simply cannot talk to him face-to-face without something going off within her. When that detonation happens, she instinctively produces a wounding remark, retaliating for some nameless injury which my innocent father has caused her to suffer.

So Pa decided not to pursue the matter. He said, with a forced casualness, ‘So, who’s coming with me to see Merv?’

Not me, I thought. Although I knew Merv, I hardly knew him well enough to visit him in intensive care.

‘Well?’ Pa said, jingling his keys. He still had not moved from his original spot in the hallway. ‘Johnny? Rosie? Are you coming, my love?’

Rosie said from the kitchen, ‘Johnny and I don’t know him. He’s your friend. You see him.’

Pa said, ‘But Rosie, my love, the man’s at death’s door. He needs all the support he can get. He’s met you and Johnny. He knows you. He knows you’re my children. I’m sure he’d like you to be there.’

Racking up soapy plates with a clatter, Rosie said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She scrubbed furiously at a frying-pan, rasping it with all of her strength. ‘I mean, let’s be honest, it won’t make any real difference to Johnny or me whether what’s his name — Marv? — lives or dies. We hardly know him.’ She banged a dish. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s that kind of hypocrisy.’

Pa flinched. He gripped his car keys and there was a moment of silence.

Then he said, ‘Is that what you think, Rosie? Is that really what you think?’ He slowly shook his head. ‘Well, I’m getting out of here,’ he said, disgust in his voice. ‘All of you, you all …’ He did not finish his sentence. He walked out of the front door and made for his car.

‘Brilliant, Rosie,’ I said. ‘Bloody brilliant.’

Rosie turned towards me and shouted, ‘Go with him! Don’t let him go there alone! Can’t you see that he needs someone to go with him? Go on,’ she shouted, ‘get after him!’

She was right; and I snatched a jacket and ran out into the street and caught up with my father just as he was steering the car out of its parking slot. I opened the front passenger door and got in.

We drove along in silence.

The hospital was situated a few miles to the north, at the top of the hill overlooking the old harbour. It was a dark, cloudy afternoon. The leafing trees shook around in the wind and Rockport and its components — the oily canals, the bunched cranes and, north of the river, the housing towers with balconies flagged with drying clothes — jerked slowly by as we stopped and started.

Two miles and ten log-jammed minutes later, Pa still had not spoken. Usually, when Pa has been hurt by Rosie, he pours his heart out to me. ‘What’s the matter with that girl?’ he asks helplessly. ‘She’s got everything: she’s smart, she’s got a good job, and, to cap it all, she’s beautiful!’ He shakes his head. ‘She doesn’t mean the things she says, Johnny, not deep down. I know that. It breaks my heart to see her so unhappy. I just don’t know what to do about it. I’m at a loss. There’s something gnawing away at her and God help me I don’t know what it is.’ And off he goes, beating a path around the room. ‘Is it money? How’s she doing for money? Maybe she needs some funds. Here,’ he says, taking out a pen and cheque book, ‘I want you to give this to her.’

‘Pa, don’t do that,’ I say. I physically stop him from writing the cheque. ‘She’s fine for money. You know it’s not money.’

‘What is it, then? Johnny, all I know is that when she was a kid she was a little bundle of dynamite. You’d have to see it to believe it. Do you know that she used to bring your mother and me breakfast in bed? She was just four and half years old.’ I know what Pa is going to say next. He is going to say, She used to bring us boiled eggs with our faces drawn on them, can you imagine? ‘She used to bring us boiled eggs with our faces drawn on them,’ Pa says. ‘Can you imagine? Then you used to come in as well, and the two of you kids would jump into bed with us.’ Those were glory days for my father, the days when his double bed bulged with all four Breezes. ‘I don’t know,’ Pa says. ‘Maybe she misses your mother. A girl needs to have her mother. She really loved Ma, you know, Johnny. The two of them were like two peas in a pod.’ Then he says, ‘But your mother’s not with us, God rest her soul, and what can I do about that?’

But this time Pa was not coming out with all of this. This time he was keeping quiet.

I felt bad. I should have agreed to go with him to the hospital without hesitation.

‘What’s that noise?’ Pa suddenly demanded.

I could hear nothing.

‘You hear that? I’m stopping the car.’

‘I can’t hear a thing,’ I said.

‘You can’t hear that? You can’t hear that humming noise?’