Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

‘Rosie! For fuck’s sake!’ I shouted.

I jumped up to stop her but by this time she was already down on her knees next to Steve and sobbing ashamedly, Sorry, sorry, sorry …

Christ, it makes me sweat just thinking about it. So I say into the telephone, ‘Rosie, calm down, all right? Don’t get angry with him. He’s just gone out, that’s all. He’ll be back.’

But then my anxiety about Rosie’s death threats wanes a little, because I remember that for a long, long time now there has been a chasm between Rosie’s promised actions and her actual ones. I’m going to … How many times have we heard that phrase from her over the years? ‘I’m going to quit that job tomorrow,’ she vows almost every time she returns from a hard day at work. ‘I’m going to go to Mrs Freely and hand in my notice.’ Her cigarette catches fire, the lighter lid snaps down hard beneath her thumb, the flame is engulfed. ‘I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. It’s all so disgusting, everything about it makes me feel sick — the passengers, the food, the pilots, the stewards, the girls, these clothes…’ She makes a gesture of revulsion at her uniform. ‘One of these days I’m going to … I’m going to …’ She sucks at her cigarette, plotting. ‘Yes, I’ll show them.’

I’m going to … It could be Rosie’s motto. ‘At the end of this week I’m going to tell Steve to pack his bags.’ Or, when Pa is about to pay us a visit, ‘I’m going to cook us all a nice meal: steaks, salad, vegetables, the works. I’ll get some good fillet steaks. I’m going to spoil him, the poor thing; he’s working much too hard.’ Those are another couple of I’m going tos which have yet to reach fruition. Yes, even my sister’s best intentions, of which, at one time, there used to be plenty, have not come good. Poor Rosie! For her whole adult life she has teetered between potentialities and their realization. When she left university in her early twenties, nobody doubted that Rosemary Breeze would feast on life’s dangling fruit. With the long reach which her brains and her beauty afforded her, success and happiness would be easy pickings. But it just never happened. Her first scheme was to go abroad for a year, but that did not really come off because the waitressing job she took to raise the money did not pay well enough. All that her year of travel added up to was three weeks in Spain and six months at the Rockport Pizza Hut. Returning from Spain all brown and skinny and raring to go, her red hair streaked with yellow, it was I’m going to be a teacher. When, during the year of professional training, she discovered that the work disagreed with her, she took a temporary job, again as a waitress. It was around this time, when she was twenty-three, that Steve made his appearance. He was temporary, too, according to Rosie. A plaything for the summer, nothing more. I’m going to have some fun for a while, she said defensively. It isn’t for ever. (Temporary: who can blame her for wanting temporary? Who wants finality?) Soon afterwards, Rosie fell out with her flatmate and, as an interim measure, moved in to Steve’s place in that tower block. For a year or two Pa and I hardly saw her. During this time the waitressing job ended — we were never told how or why — and for a long time, for over a year, Rosie did not go back to work. When asked by Pa about getting a job, any job, out it came, I’m going to , the phrase used for the first time by way of postponement and not anticipation. Then Pa bought the flat. ‘A fresh start,’ he said. Shortly after, Rosie joined the airline: I’m just going to do this while I look for something else. A stopgap, that was the thinking. Wishful thinking, because Rosie has not, so far as I am aware, got round to job-hunting. It is not surprising. Five years ago, yes, you could understand her ambition and believe in it. But since that time — this is a terrible thing to say, but it is true — Rosie has gone into a decline. Her nerves, her stamina, her sociability, even her intelligence: they are not what they were. So much so that, far from quitting her job, Rosie will do well to hold on to it. At twenty-eight, she is still teetering, except now it is no longer on the rim of success, but on a brink. My sister is toeing a sheer drop.

Pa can’t bear it. ‘Why did she do it, Johnny?’ he asked. (This was yesterday, on our way back from the hospital.) ‘Why did she do it?’ He turned the car around a corner.

I didn’t have the strength to say anything. Seeing Merv had wiped me out.

Pa said, ‘It’s a crime. It’s a crime when you’ve hair that long and beautiful to just chop it all off.’ He took a right. ‘Where will it end?’

‘He’s seeing another woman,’ Rosie says. She cries out, ‘The shit! The shit!’

‘Come on, Rosie,’ I say, ‘don’t get all worked up. You know that’s not true. Steve would never do anything like that.’

‘You don’t know him,’ Rosie says. She sniffs. ‘And I’ve been so horrible to him,’ she says with a trembling voice.

I automatically begin to take issue with her, in order to comfort her, but then I stop. She has been horrible to Steve.

Rosie starts crying. ‘My hair,’ she says. ‘That’s what did it. My hair.’

I feel awful for her. ‘Rosie,’ I say.

Rosie’s hair. Here is the terrible truth about it: not that cutting it was vandalism, but that it was not. The fact is, Rosie was beginning to look a little absurd with that girlish, overlong fleece.

‘Johnny,’ she says, ‘what am I going to do?’

There is nothing Rosie can do. ‘Just wait,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be back.’ There is a pause. ‘Just be nice to him when he gets back, all right?’

There is a desperate silence.

‘Rosie?’

‘He’s seeing someone else,’ she says finally. ‘I know he is. I don’t know what I’m going to do if I lose him,’ she says. She hangs up.

I’m very tired and I have to sit down. I fish out a crooked cigarette from its packet. Angela, I think.

Then I think, Losing Steve: is it possible? Mislaying Mr Stay-Put himself? I suppose if anybody could manage it, it is Rosie. She could squander just about anything. Her beauty, for example. Her marvellous idiosyncratic looks are leaving her, moving on to settle down on other faces. When I see the sparkle of my sister’s blue-green eyes, it is not in her face but in the girl’s at the supermarket check-out; her smooth cheekbones now belong to the woman at the travel agency; and now the redhead turning heads in the street is somebody else. Of course, nobody keeps their looks for ever, but Rosie seems to be discarding hers, trashing them before their time in the way that, in her cleaning frenzies, she throws away half-full cartons of milk and newly opened jam-jars. Her hair needed to be cut, yes, but not savaged like that. She smokes, she cakes her face every morning in a thick muck of make-up, she constantly eats junk food, she takes no exercise. Of course, there would be nothing wrong with all of this self-neglect if it did not bother her. But it does. She inspects herself in the morning and says, ‘Wrinkles. More wrinkles every day.’ And it’s true, there they are, fanning out from the edges of her oval eyes at the slightest move of her face. Her voice grows hoarse. ‘One year. I’ve got one more year. Then that’ll be it. It’ll be over. And look at these open pores,’ she wails, pointing at microscopic apertures under her eyes. ‘Look at them. They’re everywhere. I’ve got a face like a dartboard!’ She laughs at the simile — we all laugh, because it’s a good one — and then begins to weep. I would like to hug her tightly at this point, to take her in my arms and secure her with a brother’s love.