Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

I light a cigarette and for a moment watch myself smoking. Then I look closely at the eyes: still, I am glad to say, perfectly parallel.

However, I have seen photographs of the young Pa. At my age, his eyes were straight as arrows. The famous honeymoon portrait of him and Ma in Donegal shows it clearly: cheek to cheek with his brand-new, bursting, laughing wife, his shirt white and pressed and his tie knotted cleanly, Pa flies the camera a dead-on, bull’s-eye of a look, a look that has not the merest trace of a swerve. I know what this means: any day, without warning, some sleeping Breeze gene could wake up and order one of my eyes to make a sideways move.

I turn away from my reflection. There is no point in worrying about it, because there’s another paternal characteristic I can do without: the tendency to live in dread. I do not want to end up with a pockmarked, crack-lined face and a head of blitzed white hair. Come to think of it, I do not want to end up like Pa at all. Like father, like son is the last thing I want to hear in connection with me and my father.

Angela promised to meet me here, at her flat, at nine o’clock. It is now ten past nine. Ten minutes’ delay may not sound like very much, but Angela is as punctual as they come. By her standards, she’s late.

I go over to the windows, which stretch extravagantly from the floor to the high ceiling. It’s a foul night, the rain violently connecting with the tarmac and spinning like tinsel in the beam of the lampposts. Not to worry. Any minute now I’ll hear that struggle with the door, that clatter of things falling to the ground and that dramatic sigh of relief — and then in she’ll come, wet and breathless and ready to be held.

I return to lie down on the sofa; and I cannot help but think of Steve, the master of recumbency. Steve lives with me and Rosie in the flat that Pa bought for us. In the days before the flat, Steve and Rosie were sharing cramped rooms at the top of a high tower block and it was generally agreed that, spiritually, financially and geographically, Rosie was going nowhere. Steve was identified as a factor in her malaise and one of the ideas behind buying the new place was that she would be able to come down from that tower block and start afresh.

‘You wait and see,’ Pa promised. ‘It’ll be a new leaf for her, just mark my words. There’ll be no stopping that girl now,’ he said, raising his arm in an upward motion to suggest a rising aeroplane. That was the plan: he would buy the flat and Rosie would leave stranded Steve and all he stood for and remove like a jet into the blue atmosphere.

The change of address almost did the trick. Rosie did get a job — and as an air stewardess, it so happened — but when she and I moved into the new flat, somehow Steve tagged along. No one is sure how it happened, no one can pinpoint the day when he finally settled in. All we know is that now, two years later, he is implanted in the premises like one of those long-rooted desert trees that sucks up the water for miles around. Simply to say that Steve lives with us is misleading, because that word does not convey the fantastic degree of occupation which he exercises. Stephen Manus, to give him his full name, is no mere inhabitant or tenant of the flat. He is a fixture of it, a presence so constant and unbudging that were the property to be sold he would have to be included in the conveyance, along with the light switches and the radiators. For, like a millionaire recluse or an exquisite endangered salamander, it is only on the rarest occasions that Steve is sighted outside his — correction, outside Pa’s — front door. His occupation? Layabout. What he does is nothing, and he goes about it full-time, twenty-four hours a day: Steve rests around the clock. Night or day you’ll find him in bed or on the sofa or in an armchair, taking it easy with style and technique. He can stay put for as long as he likes, in any position he chooses. Whereas normal people might grow restless or develop cramp or pins and needles if they didn’t move for hours, not so Steve. He’s an athlete of immobility.

The funny thing is, you would not guess it to look at him. Like Pa, my first impression of Steve was of an up-and-at-’em type. ‘I like the look of the boy,’ Pa had said. ‘I like the way he presents himself. He’ll go far,’ he predicted.

Even to this day, Steve looks like a man with a destination. He stills wears sporty sweaters and ironed cotton shirts with button-down collars, he still has that purposeful, closely shaven jawline. There is no trace of idleness in his appearance; with his healthy red cheeks and his wiry frame, Steve looks like an outdoors man. Only the shoes on his feet — loafers — give any clue to his true nature. But it is only a small clue. After two years’ living with him, Steve is still a mystery to me. Every time I think I am making progress, advancing into the district of dreams and fears that make him tick, I hit a brick wall. That’s Steve for you: a dead end.

Of course, given the work that I do, there is a hideous irony in my mockery of his sedentary habits.

What an empty phrase: the work that I do …

It was three years ago that I broke the news of my chosen profession to Pa. I was twenty-three years old.

Pa was stunned. ‘What? You’re going to what ?’

I made no reply.

Pa rubbed his face like a man trying to wake up. ‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Johnny, what about your career? Are you just going to let that drop? Stick at it for two more years and you’ll be qualified. Just think about it!’ Pa urged. ‘Two more years and you’ll be a chartered accountant!’

I explained to Pa that I had thought about that. ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘It’s what I want to do. Don’t worry. I’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

‘But how are you going to manage? How are you going to support yourself?’ Pa started walking around the room, the way he always did when he became agitated. ‘I never heard of anyone making a living in that line of work.’ And round he went again, not even looking where he was going — it is a route he has come to know off by heart, that circumnavigation of the two armchairs and the glass coffee-table. ‘Where will it take you, this work? What will it lead to?’ This was a typical Pa enquiry — Pa, who has always embraced this teleology in respect of employment: that jobs are the cars on the highway of life. ‘And, son, I don’t want to seem discouraging, but you don’t have any training, you don’t have any background. Besides,’ he said, ‘you’re all thumbs. Haven’t I always told you you’ve two left hands?’ I kept quiet while he shook his head and circled the furniture. ‘This is a real shocker for me, Johnny, a real shocker. Frankly, I don’t know what to say to you.’

I could not blame him for reacting in this way. Not only had he sunk thousands into my education and training, he had sunk a pile of hope down there, too. My father had been banking on my accountancy career in every way. Thus, for a couple of months, he sought to induce and cajole and beg me to change my mind. One day I had just got out of the bath and was running shivering to my bedroom with a towel around my waist when he approached me in the corridor and said, ‘Son, I think it’s time we talked about where you are going with your life.’

I kept on running. ‘Pa, I’ve just got out of the bath, OK?’

But Pa was not to be put off and he followed me into my bedroom and addressed me while I towelled my hair and dried my toes and looked for socks. ‘Johnny,’ he said, ‘what do you want from your life? What are your goals?’

I turned from the cupboard to answer but I did not get any further than opening my mouth, because right in front of me my father was holding up a large home-made cardboard lollipop, and on it was written, in arresting black letters, GOALS.