Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

‘Pa, that’s the engine. That’s the sound of the engine.’

He pulled over to the side of the road. ‘I’m going to have a look,’ he said. ‘I’m going to open her up.’ He stepped out into the wind and raised the bonnet.

I stayed where I was. As usual, Pa was hearing things. Although he drives a Volvo of perfect reliability, my father never stops detecting problems with it and constantly takes it to the garage for unnecessary services and check-ups and all-clears. The cause, I suspect, is this: Pa cannot believe that, unlike almost everything else in his life, his car will not let him down. Far from comforting him, this makes him anxious. Oppressed by the knowledge that this state of affairs cannot last for ever, that trouble simply has to be brewing somewhere in that machine, Pa drives around in a state of fretfulness, waiting for the worst. I just wish that the damn thing would break down and put him out of his misery once and for all.

‘Try her now,’ Pa shouted from behind the hood.

I switched on the motor. It made a faultless, purring sound.

‘OK!’ Pa shouted. He leaned over into the engine and made an adjustment. ‘OK, try her now!’

Again I turned the key and again the motor sounded like a stroked cat.

Pa slammed down the bonnet and came in out of the wind. ‘That should hold her together until I can reach a garage,’ he said, putting on his seat belt. ‘It was a good thing we stopped. I reckon there’s an oil leak in there. It could have seized up at any minute.’

We drove off again. Thanks to the pit stop, the incident with Rosie no longer fouled the atmosphere, and when a short while later we got held up in more traffic by the docks, I felt able to turn on the car radio. I moved the dial to Station 5, the sports station. John Hall was on, previewing the next day’s soccer fixtures. Pa turned up the volume.

‘It’s the last day of the season,’ John Hall said, ‘and, the championship having already been won by Clonville, attention will be focused on the relegation clash at the bottom of the First Division between Rockport United and Ballybrew. It’s make or break time. Both teams have the same number of points, but United have marginally the better goal difference. They can therefore settle for the draw, whereas Ballybrew need maximum points — a problem, since Ballybrew have yet to win a game away from home this season. My prediction? United to avoid the drop.’

‘Let’s hope he’s right,’ Pa said as the car inched forward. The wind had dropped but the sky had darkened further. The wipers were slowly mowing rain from the windshield. Pa tapped the wheel. ‘Johnny, what are we doing down there, scratching about with the likes of Ballybrew? A big club like United should be right up there with the Clonvilles, contesting the championship.’ We moved forward by a car-length. The rain relentlessly arrived on the windscreen, each surge of droplets wiped out then instantaneously replaced by fresh, momentary troops, in turn effaced in their thousands as the wiper swung back over the glass. ‘I remember when United were a great team, when we won the league, the Cup and the Continental Cup in three straight years. I tell you, Johnny, those were the days. What a line-up: Neville Clarke, the Tiger of Antigua, in goal, Guthrie, Knox, Walker and Janusz at the back, Dingemans, Dean and Lazarus in midfield, Loasby, Le Quesne and Newman up front. Sixty thousand for every home match and never once a fight.’ Yet again, Pa shook his head. ‘You should have seen Redrock Park in those days, Johnny. The stands would be bursting over and the schoolboys would be passed down over our heads to the front of the terraces. The atmosphere was different. You didn’t see moats or fences or firecrackers, you didn’t see pitch invasions. And the singing…’ Pa swallowed. ‘By God, Johnny, you should have been there to hear the singing.’

I did not reply to this, because I knew that Pa had not been there to hear the singing either. The first time Pa had even taken notice of Rockport United was when I began supporting them as an eight-year-old and when every match day saw his white-fisted, oblivious boy hunched over the radio and transported in its tiny racket to the heart of the ringing stadium, my day, sometimes even my week, hinged precariously on the game’s outcome. Out of sympathy, Pa became a Rockport United fan, too. He enrolled me in the supporters’ club and then, to keep me company, put his own name down. He bought me all of the gear so that I could listen to the game properly kitted out: the strip, the red and white scarf, the bobble hat incorporating the club’s famous symbol, the prancing red lambs. Pa bought a club rattle and he bought a pair of lucky underpants to wear on Cup days. Why he thought those underpants — red and white checks — were lucky, I do not know, because in all of the time that he wore them United never won a thing. But that did not deter him. Every season the Cup would start afresh, every year Pa pulled on those shorts and every year United got knocked out.

Christmas Day, 1979. I am twelve years old, Pa is forty-two and there is my mother in her blue apron, temporarily leaving the last turkey that she will ever cook to watch her children open their presents. There, under the Christmas tree, is a record with my name, Johnny , written on the wrapper between the sledges and the snowmen. Eagerly I rip open the package, hoping for the album that all my classmates are listening to — Spare Head: I Shouldn’t Have Eaten That Second Banana — but it is not to be. What I have instead is a recording of the 1968 Continental Cup final, when on a hot and floodlit Parisian night United beat Lisbon 4–1 after extra time to win the trophy.

Pa swoops as I kneel there, removing my gift from my hand. ‘This is brilliant,’ he says, clumsily dropping the disc on the turntable. ‘This,’ Pa says, ‘is what I call brilliant. ’

He listens to the record — both sides — maybe three times that day, and that day the house resonates with the euphoria of one hundred thousand supporters of Rockport United. Each time a goal is scored my father’s arms half rise in joy and a great smile cracks across his face; then, quickly, before the cheering has died down, he darts over to the record-player, returns the needle by a fraction of an inch, switches up the volume by a notch or two and listens to it one more time.

My father is scoring goals at will. It’s there! the commentator cries again and again. It’s there! It’s there!

The windowpanes clank and shudder in the wind. I take a look outside. It’s still raining, and still there’s no sign of Angie; no sign of anyone in the street except a young boy on a bicycle, standing up on the pedals and swaying from side to side as he climbs into the gale. The windows shudder again, clattering violently this time, as though rocked by a tremor.

Well, at least that’s one thing I can rest assured about: quakes. No movement of the earth’s crust has ever been recorded in Rockport and that, according to Steve, is a fact. I’m happy to believe him. Thanks to his newfound enthusiasm for the Time-Life pamphlets about natural disasters, Steve actually knows something about planetary spasms. It’s not the first time he has mastered a peculiar field of expertise. He used to be an authority on new consumer goods, the novelty products advertised in the morning junk mail that puddled in the hallway door every morning. Steve used to peruse those catalogues for hours, lost in a world of doggy boot-scrapers, portable intercom door-chimes, sonic mole-chasers, therapeutic putty and extra-loud personal alarms, dreaming, perhaps, of — well, who knows what he was dreaming of? Now, though, the innovation reports have been supplanted in his imagination by the Time-Life pamphlets offering books about the inimical forces of nature. Although Steve has never bought a page of the menacing literature on offer, he enjoys reading about reading it. There is one particular leaflet, called ‘Storm (Discover the Deadly Forces That Shape Our World)’, which he consults time after time.