Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

At home?

‘You’re sure?’ I said.

‘Er, yes,’ the woman said. ‘I …’ She stopped. ‘At least, I assume he is. He’s not here, I know that.’

I rang off and dialled Pa’s home number.

No answer. Where the fuck was everybody?

Brushing perspiration from my mouth, I telephoned Angela at home — nobody there — and again at work. This time somebody else from her department answered, another man, another shithead with a glib tone of voice. No, he said, Angela was still not around. Yes, he said, he’d take a message that I had called.

Who were all these characters? Were there no women in management consultancy?

I smashed down the receiver.

I became aware again of the state of the room.

I had to get out. I went out and jumped on a bus to Pa’s place.

The bus climbed up to the leafy suburb where Pa lives, known as Birds’ District because all of the streets are named after birds. A prickling feeling of relief came to me as the bus turned slowly through Merl Street and Crow Street and on to Bluebird Lane, scattering young boys with bats who were warming up for the cricket season. The neighbourhood was changeless. At Canary Street I rang the stopping-bell when I saw the grocer’s, just as Ma had coached me to do almost twenty years ago when together we travelled on this same bus route every day for a week so that I would learn how to get to school. The bus stopped at the corner of Curlew Lane and Turtledove Lane. I jumped off heavily and slowly walked down the street, familiar with each step of the way, with every jutting paving-slab, every manhole and gas outlet, every cleanly shaped hedge. I passed the house where Mr Murphy, the anaesthetist with the home-made nuclear bunker in the garden, still lived, then the house of Dr Michaelson, the mathematics professor who played chess with Pa in the evenings over a glass of Bushmills, then the house of Mr Johnson, the schizophrenic. And then, looking ahead, I saw my father’s silhouette a hundred yards away, hosing the ground in front of him with a strong jet of water. Pa! I shouted, and I waved, and he looked up and straightened, sending an arc of water into the sunlit air, and the moment that followed was a moment from an idyll, my upright father strongly waving one arm, while the other arm, perfectly still, sprayed a perfectly crayonned rainbow over the road.

He was washing dog-shit from the pavement. When I reached him I stood silently by for a moment or two, watching the accurate torrent crumbling the foul then sending it streaming down over the edge of the kerb.

The pavement cleansed and darkened, Pa turned the hose on to his car, rinsing off the dust and the massive patches of brown and white goose-crap that had exploded on the roof and front windscreen. Then he turned off the tap at the front of the house and energetically looped the green hose around it. He looked at me with his one straight eye, said, ‘Come in’, and marched me into the kitchen, where he began making two coffees. ‘Well, son,’ he said, ‘you may be wondering how Paddy Browne’s review meeting went today.’

I accepted the coffee he offered me and followed him into the living-room. A toolbox and electrical equipment lay by the broken french windows. Pa got down on to his knees and started playing with a volt-meter.

‘Well?’ I said. ‘How did it go? What did Paddy Browne have to say?’

Momentarily distracted by his work, he took a few seconds to reply. ‘Browne? Browne said nothing,’ he said. ‘I haven’t spoken to Browne.’

I looked into the garden. The pear tree in blossom there reappeared indoors, adrift in the spotless glass of the coffee table.

My father stood up and raised his eye-patch to his forehead in order better to examine the volt-meter. ‘Johnny, there was no review meeting. They fired me.’

I said, ‘What?’

‘They canned me, son. They gave me the bullet. Hold this,’ he said, passing me a Philips screwdriver. He looked up and saw my face. He laughed. ‘Don’t look so shocked, boy. It happens, you know.’

‘But, Pa,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand. They can’t do this, not after all your years of service.’

‘Well, Johnny, they just did.’ He concentrated on inserting a screw into the windowframe. ‘Fifteen minutes. They gave me fifteen minutes to clear my desk. I give them twenty-six years and they give me quarter of an hour.’ He reached up and took back the screwdriver.

I could not believe it; most of all, I could not believe how robustly Pa, who only last night had been unable to climb out of his own bath, was taking it. ‘What are you going to do?’ I said.

‘You know who else they sacked?’ Pa said, standing up. ‘Merv. They sacked Merv.’ He wiped his face. ‘They’re going to pay for this,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been in this business for a quarter of a century for nothing. I know my rights, and I’m going to sue them. Unfair dismissal,’ Pa said. ‘I wasn’t consulted,’ he said, pointing his screwdriver at his heart. ‘Nobody asked me anything — me, a man of my seniority. No warning, no nothing. They just went ahead and fired me like a nobody.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s terrible,’ I said.

‘It isn’t right, Johnny. I should have a say in what happens to me, I’ve earned it with my own sweat. I’ve given nearly half my life to the Network.’

I said nothing. Pa said, ‘And they’re telling me it’s redundancy. Johnny, there’s no way that my job is redundant. What are they trying to say, that there’s no need for a Network manager? That there’s nowhere else they can fit me in? I’m a railway man through and through, John, I worked my way up from the bottom, there isn’t a job in that organization that I can’t do.’

‘Take them to court, Pa,’ I said proudly. ‘Show them that they can’t treat you like this.’

‘It’s these outsiders that Paddy Browne brought in. Corporate advisers, or whatever they are. Browne’s trying to palm the responsibility off on to them. The Network’s merely following their recommendations, he says. Here,’ Pa said, handing over the letter of dismissal. ‘But what I say, Johnny, is that these people have to work with the information they’re given. And who was giving them the information? Browne. Browne was. Whereas me, I didn’t even get to meet these people. I don’t even know who they are. I wasn’t consulted,’ Pa said again. ‘I wasn’t consulted once.’

I looked at the letter. Pressing business needs, it said, necessitated a radical restructuring of the Network. An independent external report recommended severe cost-cutting. Unfortunately, this unavoidably entailed a degree of decruitment …

Pa gave me another piece of paper. It was headed, in his writing, PLAN OF ACTION. ‘You see, I’ve got a battle plan. I’m not going to rush into anything without first having thought it through. If you’re going to take on an outfit like the Network, you’ve got to have a strategy. It’s no good just charging in head-first; you’ve got to do it step by step.’ He rolled his sleeves down and began to button them at the wrist. ‘They’re going to find out, with a nasty shock, exactly who it is they’re dealing with here.’ He said, ‘If they think that I’m just some pushover who’ll gratefully pocket his severance money and go away, they’re sorely mistaken.’

I studied the plan.

GOALS? REINSTATEMENT. STRATEGY? UNFAIR DISMISSAL PROCEEDINGS/NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENT THEREOF. COST-EFFICIENCY? GOOD. TIME-EFFICIENCY? ADEQUATE. DOWNSIDE? TIME, MODERATE EXPENDITURE. ALTERNATIVE? COMPENSATION. TIMETABLE? 1. SEE LAWYER. 2. ISSUE PROCEEDINGS. 3. CO-ORDINATE WITH UNION ACTION. 4. ENCOURAGE OTHERS TO SUE.

So this was Pa’s quick response to the problem. Mark Q. Fincham would have been proud of him.