Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

‘God, just listen to this,’ he said one time. ‘This is just amazing. Just listen to this.’ He started to recite the text in a painstaking monotone. ‘‘Man lives at the bottom of a dense and turbulent sea of gases. Ten miles deep, the atmosphere is constantly in motion; and when one mass collides with another, the skies erupt, scouring the earth and purging the atmosphere with unbridled fury. The result,”’ Steve quoted, ‘‘is storm …”’

At this point I left the room to make myself a coffee, but there was to be no escape. Steve raised his voice for my benefit, so that even from the kitchen I continued to hear his intonings.

‘‘In 1938 a hurricane veered away from its expected path and cut into the East Coast of America. At a windspeed of 120 mph it cut a swathe between New York and Boston leaving over 600 dead, 60,000 homeless and caused damage estimated (1938 values) at over a third of a billion dollars.”’ Steve paused to assimilate these statistics. ‘‘On December 8 1963, a bolt of lightning struck a 707 jet sending it plummeting to the ground in a ball of flame. Eighty-two people died.” God,’ Steve said. ‘‘These natural catastrophes are evidence of the deadly power of man’s oldest enemy, and demonstrates that with all our advanced technology, our satellites and computers, we are always at the mercy of mighty, ever-threatening forces.”’ Steve put down the leaflet. ‘God,’ he said again in a dazed voice.

It is possible that this apocalyptic material provides a clue to why Steve is so indisposed to leave the flat. Perhaps he regards Rockport — a wholesome, unperilous city in the general view — as an environment of native wantonness. Maybe this is why he adheres so devoutly to the inside world: because he has seen through Rockport, that comfortable haven, seen through its façade of well-being, its superficies of bottlebanks and grass-anchored dunes, of cycling lanes, malls, shipyards and open-air skating-rinks, of pike-stocked canals and theatres, of all-ticket football matches, academic symposia, stinking fish-markets, parks sprinkled with deck-chairs and bars pouring out pint after black pint of thick stout. Maybe Steve has identified all of these as mere phenomena and maybe, in accordance with some privately held epistemology, he has discovered that things are not as ordered and purposeful as they might seem; that Rockport, like the boiling Venus of his pamphlets, is in essence a place of hostility. Maybe, in the light of this alarming data, he is simply holing up, keeping his head below the parapet, in the hope that Rockport, like some passing storm, will somehow blow over.

Maybe; but I doubt it. I think that you have got closer to the bottom of the matter once you have recognized that Stephen Manus is a member of that old-fashioned psychological species: the lazybones.

But who I am to criticize him for doing nothing?

A month or so ago I was in the basement, smoking a cigarette, and although as usual the door was closed, through the floorboards I could hear the voices directly above me, in the sitting-room.

Pa’s voice: ‘What’s the matter with him? Why won’t he let anyone go down there? Every time I come around he’s locked away like a hermit.’

Rosie’s voice: ‘Pa, take a plate, would you? You’re spilling crumbs everywhere.’

‘Sorry, my love.’ Then, after a pause, ‘Is he always like this? Look at the time. It’s seven-thirty. If he carries on like this he’ll burn himself out.’

Rosie says, ‘Don’t talk nonsense. You know as well as I do that he’s not doing a thing down there.’

Pa says, ‘I wish you wouldn’t say these things, Rosie, my love. You’re being harsh.’

‘Well, how many chairs have you seen recently?’ There’s a long pause.

‘I’m telling you, Rosie, you’re wrong,’ Pa says. ‘John’s a grafter, he always has been. Remember how he got stuck into his accountancy exams? Remember how hard he worked to set up his exhibition?’

‘I don’t want to argue about this. You believe what you want to.’

‘But, Rosie, if you’re right, then we’ve got a problem; and if we’ve got a problem, we’ve got to do something about it.’

Rosie laughs drily. ‘ We haven’t got a problem, Pa. He has.’ Raising her voice, she says, ‘Pa, don’t look at me like that. What am I supposed to do? Make the chairs for him? Am I supposed to get the glue and get the wood and get whatever shit he keeps down there and do it myself?’

‘Keep your voice down, he’ll hear you.’

‘What do I care? It’s about time we had some truth around here. I’m sick of it, sick of all this pretence.’ Now she’s shouting. ‘He’s crap, Pa. Your son is crap. He’s a crappy furniture-maker .’

‘Rosie. Stop it.’

But she keeps on shouting. ‘He’s a waste of money. He’s a waste of space and you know it.’

Pa shouts down the stairs, ‘Don’t listen to her, John, it’s not true, she’s just being spiteful!’

‘Prove me wrong, Johnny,’ Rosie shouts. ‘Bring up a chair and prove me wrong.’

‘Don’t do it, John!’ Pa shouts. ‘You don’t have to prove anything! Do you hear me? You don’t have to prove a thing, son!’

I stay where I am, behind the locked door.

I can’t prove Rosie wrong. I haven’t made a chair in six months.

But it isn’t laziness. If only it were.

I’m ashamed about it. I daren’t mention it to anyone — not even to Angela; at least, not now.

Things have changed since Angela and I started off four years ago. I am no longer the budding professional she met and she is no longer the provincial student on a holiday job whom I managed to impress. In the course of the intervening years, Angela Flanagan has become a high-flier. She has accumulated more degrees and diplomas than all of the Breezes put together — a BSc in economics, an MSc in statistics and an MBA. The result is that six months ago she landed her job at Bear Elias, the management consultants. As I understand it, she’s part of a team of brainstormers that visits disorganized organizations — often furtively — in order to recommend their reorganization. Angela loves her work and does it very well, and not long ago she was promoted to number two in the team. Professionally, things are coming along just fine for her.

Pa holds her in awe. He seeks out her opinion on various matters with great seriousness. ‘What are the prospects, Angela, of an early recovery from the recession?’ Or, ‘Is it true that the poverty of the Third World is the most vital economic challenge of all?’ ‘She’s something else, that Angela,’ he says to me in a hushed voice when she has temporarily left the room. ‘So intelligent, so well educated. A fine young woman,’ he says. ‘Just the sort of person we’re crying out for at the Network. A few more like her and we’d turn the whole thing around.’ Angela returns, and Pa again assumes a shy, almost humble posture. She, of course, is embarrassed, and does her best to put him at his ease by giving him modest and respectful answers. She likes Pa a lot. ‘He’s wonderful, your father,’ she said to me after they first met. And then she put her arms around me and kissed me fully on the mouth. ‘Just like his son,’ she whispered.

As a result of Angela’s success at Bear Elias, Pa, like me, has had less opportunity to enjoy her company. I don’t resent this one bit — I am delighted, I really am, that Angela is prospering to such a degree; nothing brings me more joy than the proud pleasure she derives from her work — but there is, inevitably, a flip side. While Angela has been on the up and up, I have been on the slide. The disparity is not trivial. Winners do not stick around for ever with losers. I also suspect that there comes a time when a woman takes a cold look at her partner and asks herself whether this is the man she wants to father her children. I walk over to the mirror. I do not see, in the rather shambling figure with the Breeze sloping shoulders reflected there, a likely paterfamilias.