Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

I found him in the near-darkness of his room, lying as usual on his side of the bed, my mother’s vacant half still topped off by two separate unwrinkled pillows. Although his eyes were closed, I could tell he wasn’t sleeping.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Pa,’ I said softly. ‘Pa. The kennels. We’re supposed to be going to the kennels. To look for Trusty.’ There was no response. He remained completely motionless, his eyes bunched shut into purple knots, like blackberries.

Eventually, I said, ‘I’m going to go down and make us tea, OK? Pa? Then we’re going to go. OK?’

He didn’t answer.

I went down and made two cups of tea and a couple of slices of toast just the way he liked them, with thick-cut marmalade.

‘OK, come and get it,’ I shouted up. ‘Breakfast.’ But he did not come and get it; there was no heavy, flat-footed descent of the stairs and no subsequent slurping of tea, no annoying clinking of the spoon in the cup.

I went up with the breakfast on a tray.

‘Have some of this,’ I said. I touched him lightly on the shoulder. ‘Come on.’ I started to drink my own tea to encourage him. ‘Have some toast, it’s getting cold.’

But again, he just lay there. On the wall over his bed were the yellow Post-it stickers upon which he had scribbled down the brainwaves which had occurred to him in the nights, rough jottings which in the light of day never did justice to the flickering and boundless notions they sought to capture. All the same, my father has persisted with them, these mistranslations of his dreams, hopeful that one morning he will awake and simply peel from the wall the solution to his conundrums.

‘Pa?’ No answer.

So this was it, his first day of unemployment. The fighting spirit he had shown the day before was revealed for what it was, the short-lived euphoria which a misfortune of special purity can occasion. It had finally happened: the punishment had taken its toll and at last he was out for the count. I looked at him, a shapeless bulge under the bedclothes. When, watching Muhammad Ali fighting Joe Frazier as a kid, I had said to him, ‘Pa, you could beat them, couldn’t you? Couldn’t you, Pa?’ he had replied without hesitation, ‘Of course I could. Your old dad could lick those guys, no problem.’

‘Look, you just take it easy,’ I said to him. ‘I’ll go to the kennels on my own.’ I fished the car keys out of his jacket. ‘I’ll be back later. All right?’ There was no reply, and so I got up to leave.

When I reached the door, I heard him mumble something. ‘What was that?’ I said.

‘Merv’s dead,’ he said.

‘Pa,’ I said, ‘I— ’

‘Go away, John. Leave me alone now.’

The train starts up its whining, rumbling engine.

Merv Rasmussen. I can see him on the tennis court, serving underarm because his hump, big as a boulder under the sweaty, clinging white shirt, does not permit a full overhead swing of the racquet …Despite the handicap, Merv was a more talented, less erroneous player than my father, the one with the groundstrokes and the positional sense to play the odd winner. But the two of them — at least, on the two or three times when, for one reason or another, I watched them play their doubles matches, usually from the vacant umpire’s seat — never blamed or criticized one another. In fact, they said very little to each other at all, even after the game, when they sat in their track suits and drank a shandy each at the club bar. They simply enjoyed being there together — or, more accurately perhaps, not being there; because when they played they must surely have embraced the self-vanishing possibilities of the sport, so that for the duration of a set or two and of a drink thereafter there would be a welcome respite, a time-out, from the existences of Eugene Breeze and Mervyn Rasmussen, railway executives, family men, taxpayers and whatever other onerous identities they laboured under off the court.

Well, Merv has certainly been released from himself now; only Merv is not playing tennis.

The train has started moving again, rumbling uncomfortably as it slowly eases free of the embankment and open fields, efficiently sprinkled with cows, come into view. I return to my seat.

The lady is worrying out loud about her dog. ‘My nephew,’ she is saying, ‘he’s a doctor, he usually takes the dog in while I’m away, but he can’t today because he’s away at a conference. He’d said he’d be back on the Friday, but now he won’t be able to come back until the Sunday. Or until this evening, at the earliest. Not before Saturday night, that’s what he said.’ She rubs at a bump on her face. ‘I’m just hoping that nothing has happened to her. She’s all alone in the house and she won’t understand it. The girl next door is supposed to feed her, but she’s very particular about who feeds her and I’m just worried that she won’t eat. She’s a very nervous dog, the vet said so. He said she needs a lot of affection, and she gets terribly upset if I’m away.’

The man makes a noise of acknowledgement but continues to read his paper.

Dogs. When I arrived at the dogs’ home on Tuesday morning I asked the fellow at the enquiries desk — Tony, his badge said — whether a basset bitch had made an appearance. ‘She should be wearing a blue collar and a disc with her name on it — Trusty Breeze.’

Shaking his head gloomily, Tony, a thin man with a scrupulously ironed white T-shirt, tapped into his computer. ‘I don’t think so. We’ve got a basset, as it happens, but I don’t think she’s called Trusty.’ He tapped again. ‘Mabel,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a Mabel. That’s a pretty name, isn’t it?’ He stood up and clasped his hands. ‘Still, we’d better check, hadn’t we?’

I followed him into a small covered courtyard surrounded by three levels of kennels on each side. It stank. The air resounded with yelps, barks and howls of every kind. Apart from the greyhounds — and there were greyhounds everywhere, silently curled up into sad balls — I couldn’t identify the breed of any of these strays, their snouts looming from the dark cells as they pressed against the grilles. They were all mongrels, it seemed, unbred, unwanted nothing dogs.

Tony stopped. ‘This is she,’ he said.

Inside the cell, the sleeping dog lifted its head a fraction from its front paws and opened a baggy red eye. It paused for a slothful moment, regarding us. Then it slowly got up, shook itself, and came forward hopefully, tail waving.

The cage was too dark for me to be sure. I went down on my haunches to get a better look. ‘Trusty,’ I said. ‘Trusty.’ No response. ‘Mabel,’ I said, and immediately the dog reacted, barking.

I stood up, defeated.

Everywhere locked-up dogs bayed in frustration or lay slumped and dispirited. ‘What happens to them all?’ I asked.

‘Well, we keep them for a week, and then we assess them, and then the suitable ones are put forward for the sales,’ Tony said. ‘Most of them find new homes, you know.’

‘What about the ones that don’t?’

‘Well, we have to think of the dog’s welfare,’ Tony said defensively. ‘If it can’t be found a home, or if it’s sick, well, we have to put it to sleep.’

We looked at Mabel. She was gaping at us expectantly, her mouth slightly ajar. ‘They’ll be plenty of takers for her, I’ll bet,’ I said, trying to find something positive to say.

He looked pained. ‘Well, actually, no,’ he said. ‘Mabel is unsuitable for sale. She’s very aggressive, poor thing. She bites everything that moves. I was hoping that you might be her owner.’

I left the dogs’ home depressed. Trusty had been missing now for two nights and a day.