Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

Pa grunted. He still could not find it in him to give Paddy Browne that credit. It has not always been like this. When Paddy Browne first arrived on the scene two years ago, Pa was all in favour of him. ‘That’s what we need around here,’ he said at the time. ‘New blood. We need dynamic young guys like Paddy to shake things up a bit, guys with new ideas. There are too many timeservers in the Network, too many people stuck in their old ways. It’s time we cleared out the dead wood. We need imagination and vision,’ Pa said boldly. ‘We need to take the Network into the year 2000. Paddy Browne is just the fellow I could use at my side. Pa did not figure at the time that he might be counted as dead wood — wood that could be cut without injury.

Then Pa said with a sudden gasp, ‘My gosh, John, those burns! Those burns!’ He put his hands to his cheeks. ‘What’s going to happen to him? What’s he going to look like?’

I dreaded to think. The scarring would be monstrous. Merv would be unrecognizable beneath the fibrous, melted, contracted tissue. They would have to get him a new face. I remembered reading somewhere how they did it: by cutting away undamaged skin from one part of the body and transplanting it to the burned part. But apart from his right foot, Merv was burned all over. How far could the skin from one foot stretch?

‘My God,’ Pa said, as we walked slowly out to the car. ‘My God. Merv.’ He fell into his seat and gripped the wheel tightly. He was horrified. His mouth hung loose and he stared through the windscreen.

I had nothing comforting to say. Either way, things looked bad for his best friend. If he pulled through, he would be hideously disfigured. If he did not, well, then that would be that; then he would be dead.

Pa turned the ignition key. The engine started, then quit. But instead of simply giving it more choke, Pa for some reason decided that this was the moment to take a precautionary look under the bonnet. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said. ‘There’s something I want to double-check.’

For a minute I waited in the car, but then I got out and walked over to the boundary of the car-park and rested my elbows against the safety rail put there to stop people from tumbling down over the cliff edge. Apart from the usual couple of bushes grittily sprouting from some schism in the rock, the drop was sheer. A faller would land two hundred feet directly below, on the tiled roofs of the old fishermen’s cottages now painted in pastel colours. I raised my eyes. Beyond the haven and the pretty jetties crammed with sailing-boats, the roll-on, roll-off docks of the modern port began: trucks, containers, container ships, warehouses, cranes, tugs, forklifts, more cranes. Slightly to the right of that you could see, in an inland quay, the fishing smacks and trawlers. To the south and west of the port was the city proper, eighteenth-century in the centre, then tower blocks, then the floodlights of the soccer stadium, then a dense mishmash of buildings which finished up by sprinkling suburbs evenly over the lower flanks of Rockport Mountains, which curved down from my right to the coastal plateau where I stood. Supervising all of this, its beacons sparking in the slow, regular beat of a steady heart, was the Wilson Tower, its translucent lightning conductor glowing with extra clarity in the darkness of the afternoon.

That lightning conductor — we could have done with having it up there a few years sooner.

I turned around with a sudden irritation that I could not suppress. What the hell was he doing? The car was fine, for God’s sake. ‘Come on,’ I called. ‘Let’s get going.’

‘One second, son,’ Pa promised, bending deep into the engine, ‘just one second.’

I looked out over Rockport, a model congregation of six hundred thousand human beings. I remembered a history schoolbook illustration of what it had looked like in the olden days: a sea-threatened hamlet hulked over by rain and hills, with a boundary wall raised miserably against vehement casual forces — invaders, floods, wolves, sea gales. A large shanty stood at the centre of the village and a thread of smoke climbed through the hole in its roof. That was where hopeful sacrifices were made in appeasement of the gods, where the population slept together in a warming pack, their bodies each other’s radiators, dreaming of security. Now the boot was on the other foot, now Rockport bossed the elements. The earth, the waters, the fires and even the mobile air had been harnessed like a team of horses and made to run and run, towing the city like a quick chariot. Energy! The metropolis, hot and kinetic, growled and twitched and glittered with its mutations. The traffic moved constantly through streets teeming with dynamized citizens, themselves yoked and consentingly driven by the strong flow of money. Such unity, such output: I could smell them in the industrial aromas that drifted up to me from below. Yes, Rockport had the whip hand now, Rockport had the power. There were no more wolves. Any animals that were not milked or eaten or kept as pets were designated as wildlife and preserved for our enjoyment. The dangerous heaths had been turned into football fields, the dunes splashed delicately with the greens of golf courses, the sea tamed by breakwaters and looted steadily for fish and gases. Invasions were history and hunger was history. Subsistence was no longer the aim of the game: now, by such fabulous cities, we had minimum standards of welfare and economic safety nets — now we had surplus, and from that hilltop it looked as though the dream of security had been realized and wondrously surpassed. It looked as though we were home and dry.

Then came the slam of a bonnet. I turned to see Pa walking over to the driver’s door, wiping his hands. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

I got back into the car. Pa started the car and ran the engine — and kept running it. I turned my head. His eyelids were fluttering and his Adam’s apple ducked rapidly in his throat. His hands were trembling on the steering wheel. ‘Stop the car,’ I said. He obeyed me. ‘Now, take it easy,’ I said. ‘Just wait a while.’

Again Pa obeyed, breathing deeply and systematically for several moments. Then he started up.

We drove slowly through the car-park. Pa said, ‘You want me to drop you off at home?’ I said, Yes, that would be great. He pressed on the accelerator as we hit the road and kept his foot down for some time, which was unlike him. He said ‘That’s better, isn’t it? You hear how she’s running better?’ Yes, I said. ‘Tell you what,’ my father said after several moments. ‘Here’s what we do tomorrow. I’m refereeing in the morning. Why don’t you meet me at the pitch? Then maybe we could have some lunch and watch the United game at the house, have a couple of beers. How does that sound to you?’

I thought about it. Why not? I thought. The chairs — there was no point in kidding myself about them. I was through with the chairs. And Pa could do with the company. And I could do with taking it easy at his place and getting out of the flat, away from Rosie and Steve. I’d get a bus to Angela’s afterwards. Yes, I thought, not a bad schedule for a Sunday.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Good thinking,’ I said.

Down we drove, down into Rockport.

It is five to twelve and I am sweating in my coat and I have run out of cigarettes. This cannot go on. This has to end.

I write a note for Angela: GONE TO DOOLEY’S. BACK SOON, LOVE, JOHNNY. Then I walk down the stairs of the apartment block and step outside, my umbrella rattling under the lightening rain. The wind has died down.

The walk to Dooley’s takes two minutes. Inside, it is quiet as usual. Two men and a woman sit around the corner of the bar and an old fellow is on his own at a table, studying and fingering his glass of whiskey like a grandmaster pondering the endgame. Nothing much else is going on. The gambling machine is popping out colours over by toilets but no one feels lucky enough to play. Up in a nook of the ceiling, images come and go on a silent television that nobody is watching.