Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

‘Well, yes,’ I said automatically. ‘I suppose I do. Yes.’

‘And somewhere to live?’

I nodded dumbly.

With hypnotizing carefulness, O’Reilly drew two minuscule children and a box-like house. They hovered stupidly over my thirties. Then he drew an arrow from 30 to 50. ‘That’s twenty years of responsibility, Johnny. Minimum. Twenty years of shelling out — even if you don’t want to have your children privately educated. Gene, am I right?’

Pa gave a strange intoxicated chortle. ‘You certainly are.’

O’Reilly said, ‘What about you, John? Anything you disagree with there?’

I shook my head.

‘Right. Now, you’re not going to work for ever, are you? When do you want to retire? Around sixty? Sixty-two? Let’s call it sixty.’ He drew an old man with a stick at the 60 mark and then grinned, mock apologetically, at Pa. ‘What are you going to live off? You’re self-employed, right? Well, that means you’re going to have to make provision for these eventualities.’ He gave me a friendly smile. ‘You understand what I’m saying?’

I nodded.

As an afterthought joke, O’Reilly sketched a coffin at the end of the line. ‘There’s no need to provide for that — at least, not yet.’ He winked.

I smiled back, but already I had stopped listening. Like a sucker punch, that diagram had caught me unawares. There it was, the long and the short of my life, reduced to an ineluctable line eight inches across the page. The A to Z of John Breeze.

I can see, here, that my shock might be characterized as an imbecility. Well, it is true, anyone can tell you that life is short and then you die. Everybody knows that. But there are degrees of knowledge, and in this instance I was in the grip of an extreme state of cognition. This was not a case of simply being apprised of a new fact; no, judging by the sudden sensory jolt I experienced, I had, like the man in the sci-fi movie, the fall guy in the silver pyjamas frozen by the beam of the nerve gun, been zapped — the information of my doom had hit me at some electrical, irrational, neurovascular level.

That was it. From that moment forwards — yes, I can time it that precisely — things began to go downhill. The panics returned. Worst of all, it made no difference whether Angela lay with me or not and whether I stuck to her like a mollusc to rock. Even she, even love, was not enough.

I stopped functioning. When my faulty tripods came back from the workshop, I could not bring myself to fix them. Day after day I went down into the basement and day after day, I just sat there on the box, smoking cigarette after cigarette.

I have tried to speak to Angela about it — in a roundabout way. ‘What’s the point?’ I have said. ‘Who needs these things? Who cares whether I make them or not? The world is full of chairs. The last thing anybody needs is yet another place to sit down.’

‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ Angela said.

‘I’m not feeling sorry for myself,’ I argued. ‘I’m being honest. Whether I finish these chairs or don’t finish them won’t make a scrap of difference to anything. I go down there and I feel totally superfluous. I feel like nothing, like I’m disappearing from the face of the universe.’ Angela laughed. ‘I’m being serious,’ I said. ‘That’s what I feel. If you’re so much as a minute late for work, all hell breaks loose. If I decided never to chop another piece of wood again, no one would give a damn. I’m telling you, it scares the shit out of me.’

‘My God, you’ve become so self-obsessed, so self-indulgent. It’s not attractive, you know.’

Not attractive? What the hell did that have to do with it?

Angela said, exaggerated patience in her voice, ‘Johnny, I know what you’re thinking: everything is meaningless. Well, you’re right. Management consultancy is meaningless, farming is meaningless, running a railway is meaningless. So what? I mean, what are you going to do about it? You have to accept it and get on with it.’

‘Why should I accept it?’ I said. ‘Where does it say that I have to accept it?’

‘Because what else are you going to do? Spend the rest of your life with that miserable look on your face?’ She kneeled down on to the floor to pick up some papers. ‘Johnny, a part of me doesn’t believe that we’re having this conversation. This is all so basic .’

I began to get angry. ‘Basic? What are you suggesting, that I’m stupid to think about these things? You think that this is a question of intelligence?’

Angela looked at me. ‘No, not intelligence. Maturity, maybe.’

‘Well, that’s just fine. I’m immature. And so were Shakespeare and Plato and anybody else who ever asked himself what the hell it’s all about. They were just immature. They should have kept their thoughts to themselves.’

Angela came over to me, laughing. ‘Don’t get upset now, darling. You should hear yourself.’

I pushed her away from me. ‘I’m sorry, but this isn’t funny. Just because I’ve got the guts to take on board that we’re going to die — that’s right, Angela, even you’re going to die, you’re going to end up something that a Hoover could suck up — you think I’m some kind of a jerk.’

It was Angela’s turn to lose her temper. ‘Do you think you’re the only one with this problem? Don’t you think that we’ve all got to face up to the same thing?’

‘Face it? The only thing you ever face are those fucking files you’re always reading.’

A silence fell.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said eventually. ‘I don’t know why I said that. I’m sorry.’

Angela went back to organizing her papers. ‘John, don’t worry,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I can understand. You’ve lost your mother.’

I shouted, ‘This has nothing to do with my mother.’

She came to me. I was trembling. She came over to me and held me in a tight, continuing hug. I was scared, but I didn’t say anything. I know, she said. She kept squeezing me. I still didn’t say anything, but nevertheless Angela said, I know.

I miss her. I wish she were here right now.

We’d be lying down together on the sofa with a blanket pulled over us. We’d be lying there thankful for each other’s simple existence. That’s not sentimentality, that’s a fact. Or we would be passing the time in some other way — joking around with cards, maybe, or working out a crossword. Something simple. Over there on the table, for example, is the one-thousand-piece jigsaw it took us a fortnight to finish. That scene from New England in the fall has lain there for a year, serving as a table mat. Angela did the sky, assiduously fitting the pale blue pieces at the top and the marginally less pale blues below, whereas I concentrated on the trees, thousands of fiendishly jumbled golds and reds. Then there was the toughest part, which we did together, the ground covered with fallen leaves, leaves of every possible kind of yellow.

Maybe I should get us another jigsaw. Yes, I think that’s what I’ll do. I’ll go out tomorrow and get us another one, a real monster with nothing but sky and sky-reflecting water. It’s time we did another one.

Apart from anything else, it’ll do me good. That’s just what I need after all that time in the cellar, some kind of occupational therapy. I’ve been going bananas down there. I’ve killed the best part of the last month manipulating a board known as the Master Maze, spending hours dribbling a small silver ball through a labyrinth punctured by one hundred holes. I became hooked, and even once I mastered the technique of effortlessly reaching the safety zone at the centre of the board, I kept playing like a moron, setting myself the goal of reversing the ball from the maze’s heart right back to the starting point.