Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

I opened the door to two uniformed constables, a man and a woman. The woman was the senior of the two. She looked around and asked the questions while her colleague wrote down my replies in his notebook. ‘This stuff that’s been stolen,’ she said, ‘is it yours? Or is it your dad’s?’ She wandered over to the french windows.

‘My father’s,’ I said.

‘Is he in?’

‘He’s upstairs,’ I said. ‘Up in his bedroom.’ (This wasn’t like him — he normally would have been the first to greet the forces of law and order.)

‘Could we have a word with him?’ the policewoman asked, peering out into the garden. ‘We have to take a statement.’

I’ll get him, I said, and ran up.

But Pa was not in his bedroom. I went out on to the landing and said, ‘Pa?’ and there was no reply; but then, as I quietened, I heard a snuffling noise from the third floor. I went up the stairs. ‘Pa?’

I stood still. There it was again: snuff, sniff, snuff. I pushed open the door to Rosie’s old bedroom — the bedroom with the big skylight and the blue-flowered wallpaper and the piles of children’s books.

It was him all right. He was standing in the no man’s land between the bed and the wall, his head turned away towards the corner of the room. He was still in his track suit. On the bed was an old, torn bin-liner and a scattering of photographs. As Pa drew his sleeve across his nose he sniffed again, and the daylight caught his face and I saw that his eyes were more red and glistening and swollen than ever.

I went across to the bed, to the photographs. These were the leftovers — the last pictorial records of the Breezes in our possession. They were also the worst ones. The clear, lovely pictures — of my mother holding the hands of her two children one snowy winter, of summer picnics, of my parents at the altar — had been taken by Rosie just before she went to university and collected in a marvellous album. Then Rosie, in the way that she mislays all of the gold rings and heirlooms that she is given, lost the album. No one blamed her, but for months afterwards she would burst into tears of bereavement at the thought of those essential images being gone for ever. Now that Pa’s silver-framed photos had gone, those snapshots on Rosie’s old bed were, apart from our memories, the remaining threads to the family’s past. I took a look at them. There was only one picture left of my mother: seated on a patio somewhere — at a friend’s house, I supposed; I did not recognize the background — my mother’s face is plunged into darkness, the photographer (Pa, no doubt) having made the mistake of shooting into sunlight. All you can make out of her is the curled outline of a 1960s haircut and the silhouetted knees, crossed; apart from a chin and nose which show as flecks in the gloom, she is faceless.

I checked the bin-liner once more, but no, that was all that remained of Ma. There were no other pictures of her.

I put the photos back into the bin-liner and touched his shoulder. ‘Pa,’ I said. ‘Pa, the police are downstairs,’ I said.

He followed me down.

The policewoman asked him the same questions she had asked me. He replied in a toneless voice, after lengthy pauses, looking stupidly into space. Meanwhile, the other policeman had started sniffing around — literally. His nostrils were twitching, as if he had caught the whiff of something.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Breeze,’ the policewoman said gently. ‘Your father’s still in a state of shock,’ she said to me.

The policeman whispered something in her ear. In response, she too began breathing in sharply.

‘It’s the dog,’ I said with embarrassment. I pointed to the stain in the hallway. ‘We have a dog. I haven’t had time to clean all of it up yet.’

They looked at each other, then examined the traces ingrained in the carpet. Then they looked at each other again.

‘You sure, sir?’ the policewoman asked. ‘You sure it’s the dog?’

‘Well, yes. I mean, what else …’

‘You see, sir,’ the policewoman said, looking me in the eye for the first time, ‘it’s, well, it’s becoming something of a thing for burglars to, well, defecate in the house they’ve robbed. It’s like their signature.’

Their signature?

The policeman, meanwhile, kneeled down and snipped a few of the darkened threads and placed them in a little plastic bag. ‘Exhibit A,’ he said.

I washed the carpet as soon as they left. Then I ran Pa a fresh bath and made sure he undressed and got into it. I went to the kitchen and made us some sandwiches and tea. When, quarter of an hour later, Pa, an in-and-out bather, had not yet come down, I went up to see what was going on.

He was still in the bath, lying hip-deep in the shallow, lukewarm water, his torso completely dry. He did not turn when I came in.

‘Are you OK?’ I said.

He turned his eyes — one pointed at me, one at the shower-curtain — and blinked: in the affirmative, I thought.

‘I’ve made some tea and sandwiches,’ I said.

He stirred, his knees sploshily displacing water, but he did not get up. The movement sent red and green and white trails of dissolved soap smoking up through the bathwater. Pa has this habit of gumming together the slivers of used soap into a multicoloured bar, like an Italian ice-cream.

He raised his elbows and took hold of the rim of the tub, perfect, shiny particles of water starrily clustered on the silver and black hairs of his armpits. Then he let go and slid back down the slope of the tub, the skin of his bottom making a squeak.

‘Come on,’ I said softly, my hands under his armpits, smelling for the first time in a long time the tang of my father. I hauled up his dripping, aged form — the tender pectorals, the diminished penis, the gleaming, brittle shinbones. It was palpable, the terrible vicinity of death.

I dropped a large towel over his shoulders. ‘You go on ahead,’ I said.

I pulled the plug and the water began to sluice away, stranding green and red nuggets of soap on the white floor of the bath.

If Whelan, of Whelan Lock & Key, 24-hour Service, had done his job properly — if he had repaid the faith which Pa had shown in him — that burglary would probably never have taken place. All it needed was a half-decent lock on those french windows and an alarm that actually worked. But Whelan messed up. It doesn’t surprise me. The man is hopeless. For seven days now I have been imploring him on the phone to come round and fit new locks on the front door of the flat, and for seven days — and in spite of three appointments — he has failed to show. The last time I spoke to him was on Friday, immediately after Pa’s anxious call. Although Whelan had let me down twice already, I decided to have another crack at it. Third time lucky, I figured. Besides, I wanted an explanation for his conduct.

‘Mr Whelan, I waited for you all morning yesterday,’ I said.

‘Yesterday morning, was it?’ Whelan enquired. There was genuine curiosity in his voice.

‘We’d made an appointment,’ I said.

‘Number 47, was it?’

It was. I did not say anything.

‘I remember now,’ Whelan said. ‘It’s all coming back to me now. Yes, that’s right. I came round in the afternoon, but there was no reply when I rang. Yes, I remember now,’ Whelan said.

‘Mr Whelan,’ I said tiredly, ‘I was in all afternoon.’

Whelan said, ‘Were you? Well, isn’t that a strange thing?’

Desperately, I said, ‘How about this afternoon? Can you come this afternoon?’

Whelan sucked in air. ‘This afternoon is hard, Mr Breeze. Very hard. It would have to be tomorrow, Saturday. It would have to be Saturday.’

I had to get the door fixed. Saturday, I agreed. Ten o’clock.’