Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

Strengthlessly, I sat down on the box again. The day of the exhibition, 16 May, was approaching with every passing second and there was nothing I could do about it. Inevitability had snared me, bagged and unstruggling. I was caught.

And there is another irony — another twist apparent in retrospect: the very reason I started making chairs in the first place was precisely to evade this — the trap of certainty. It was not accountancy I wanted to escape from, it was the guaranteed future it offered. Even from where I stood, halfway through my traineeship, I could see the whole of the way ahead — a road without corners, straight and relentless as a highway through wheatfields, one that took you cleanly through bright and glassy distances, through exams, years in junior and middle management, a partnership in a small firm, through a mortgage and kids and retirement and through, finally and blindingly, to the end. The end! It hit me night after night. No matter how tired or drowsy I was and no matter how many sheep I counted, inevitably it flapped down towards me as I lay there in the distractionless dark; and then it suddenly arrived, all claws — that realization. The repercussions were physical. My entire organism was thrown into confoundment: something catapulted in my gut, my face flushed with heat, my brain dispatched furious signals to my extremities. Most strongly of all, though, in the midst of this panic, I felt hoodwinked. Most of all I felt like a man stung by a terrible con.

I would leap out of bed in horror. I would hit all of the lights, grab a cigarette and begin walking around in my bare feet, trying to clear my mind. I would switch on the radio and, if things were really bad, the television, trying to find a late-night movie or game show, anything. Only when Angela lay with me, when, the warm freight of her breasts in my hands, I glued her to me for the long duration of the night, were things any better. But it was not enough — a man cannot lead the life of a limpet. So I turned my hobby into my career. The make-or-break, one-day-at-a-time life of a chair-maker, I reasoned, would be a life of corners, of hairpin twists and turns. There would be no long view. There would be nothing in sight but the job in hand.

Fat chance. I was like the prisoner who lowers himself down on a rope of bedsheets only to discover that he has escaped into the punishment wing. That is to say, for a while, my extrication looked like coming off. I worked hard, ideas came, I worked hard at the ideas. I made chairs, sold them all and made a small name for myself. But as soon as things started to go right, things started to go wrong. ‘Your struggling days are over,’ Pa said, hugging me like a goalscorer when he heard the good news about the exhibition. ‘You’re getting there, son. Now you’ve got some light at the end of the tunnel.’ This immediately made me feel uneasy: the whole point of the exercise was to stay in the tunnel, in my burrow of activity. A day or two later, I received an enigmatic telephone call. ‘Put on a jacket and tie,’ my father said. ‘I’m picking you up in fifteen minutes.’

‘What for?’

‘Just get dressed,’ Pa said.

I did as I was told and put on the outfit Merv’s tailor had made for me. It didn’t fit, but it was the only suit I had.

In the car, Pa said, ‘Johnny, I’m taking you to see a friend of mine — an adviser. I’d like you to listen to what he has got to say. Just hear him out, that’s all I’m asking.’

‘Who is this guy?’ I said.

‘Mr O’Reilly,’ Pa said.

‘Who’s Mr O’Reilly?’

The pensions and insurance man, that was who. The last person in the world I needed to see. But fifteen minutes later, there I was with my father at the office of the man to whom he had entrusted the best part of his income. O’Reilly worked high up in the Wilson Tower, the tallest skyscraper in the city, its transcendent bulk edged with blinking lights to warn off aircraft. Those beacons were redundant when Pa and I arrived there when the huge dusk sun reflected on the Tower’s steel-and-glass flanks lighting the building like a blaze. Inside, though, all was cool and regulated, and when the bing of the elevator sounded and we were delivered into the air-conditioned chill of the thirty-first floor, it felt like we were aboard a jet plane, as though the Tower gathered momentum as it gained altitude until, at a crisis in its ascent, it took flight.

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?’