Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

Hoarsely, Pa said, ‘I prayed for him, Johnny. I lit a candle for him.’ He swallowed hard.

I felt angry on his behalf. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘You did everything you could.’

‘It’s not right. It shouldn’t happen.’ He hesitated, his face a grimace. ‘Where is God in all of this. Where does He fit in, Johnny?’

I knew the answer to that one, but I was not going to tell my father. Although, for the sake of his own well-being, I had wanted him to be more realistic about things, I didn’t want him to be too realistic. I did not want him finishing up a no-hoper like me, good for nothing but inaction in the daytime and the shakes at night.

I stayed the night at Pa’s, in my old bedroom. The window, set in a dormer in the rear roof of the house, gave upon the same old silhouettes of the dunes, and the bookshelf was as ever piled with the ancient, battered hardbacks of the adventures of Tintin. I threw my clothes on the floor, climbed into my childhood bed and worked through the books one after the other, summoned utterly to the familiar, funny, inextinguishable otherworld of Red Rackham’s Treasure, The Broken Ear and The Crab with the Golden Claws. Time and again Tintin found himself in a tight spot from which, time and again, by hook or by crook, he slipped. Take Tintin in America. Every page ended with the boy reporter and his dog, Snowy, in a jam of one terrible kind or another: falling over a precipice, trussed up for a lynching, bound to a rail track with a train approaching, tossed into Lake Michigan with a dumbbell tied to his feet — these were the hottest waters imaginable and yet somehow, wonderfully, Tintin always escaped.

Lights off. It was so quiet I could hear the sea arriving and rearriving on the strand half a mile away.

This was the room where I had first started making chairs. Even now there remained some wood shavings ingrained at the edges of the carpet, beyond the suck of the vacuum cleaner. What a crazy idea that was, that I might build a life around such an activity. I turned, and the murmur of sheets in my ear momentarily replaced the murmuring of the waves. Maybe things would be different if I had a decent job, one like Angela’s, a job which impacted on people’s lives …

The brooding, the doom and gloom, had to come to an end. And not just for my own peace of mind. Angela didn’t like it. It made no sense to her that someone could be derailed by the simple knowledge of futility. Nobody else seemed to suffer from this problem, certainly no one at Bear Elias. Either that, or they hid it very well. Maybe that was the truth, that people toughed it out secretly, ashamed and anxious, without heroism. They kept busy, stopping up those loopholes in the day when one had nothing better to do than to fall into contemplation, those minutes which, in my case, invariably added up to the small, unlit hours. If you bent your back all day at the office and immediately followed that up with an evening with a hungry, exhausting family and then got up early the next morning and clocked in all over again, day in, day out, that, with luck, should do the trick: send you flying to dreamland the moment your head hit the pillow — like Angela.

A cold feeling of powerlessness overcame me.

I rolled on to my stomach, facing the wall. At least Pa was in bed now, with a glass of milk and half an orange inside him. I had peeled it for him myself and presented it to him on a saucer. What a marvellous package of nutrition, with its brightly dimpled, waterproof overcoat and its perfectly segmented contents. How could such a thing come to be?

I felt hopeful and sleepy. I remembered a green jungle bug which miraculously resembled, down to the last quirk, the leaves of the rare bush that was its habitat: what was the explanation for that wonderful creature? Holed up in this warm mystery, I fell asleep.

The next morning I arose purposefully and went down to the shops and bought newspapers and coffee and croissants. This, I determined as I returned in the new summery heat, was going to be a good day; a fresh start, even.

I entered the back way, through the kitchen. I shut the door and jumped, almost dropping my purchases. A shrill, unrelenting tintinnabulation had begun to sound wildly throughout the house. This was Pa’s doing: he had fixed the burglar alarm so that it did not work.

I ran up the stairs in the din. He was still in bed, lying on his side with his head barely emerging from under the bedclothes. ‘How do I switch off this racket?’ I shouted. ‘Pa!’ I pushed at his unbudging shoulder. ‘What’s the matter with you? Get up. The bloody alarm’s gone off! Can’t you hear? Get up!’ I shouted. I could feel his body tense at the touch of my hand. ‘Pa!’

Pa turned and swung his arm like a backhand topspin smash and struck me on the right side of the face.

We stared at each other speechlessly. The alarm kept belling away.

Finally, he said, ‘The cellar.’ He pointed in no particular direction. ‘The cellar. The red box.’

‘What about it?’

‘You pull it,’ he said. ‘The lever. You pull it.’

I switched off the alarm and stayed downstairs. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe what he’d done.

A few moments later the stairs groaned with his heavy tread. He came in, hands sheepishly buried in his dressing-gown pockets, and stood at the doorway for a few moments. He said, ‘Johnny, I’m sorry. I just— ’

I interrupted him. ‘Forget it.’

He shook his head in dismay. ‘I can’t understand it. I …There’s no excuse —’

‘Pa, forget it,’ I said. I inhaled from my cigarette. ‘Now, do you want to go to this cremation or not? If you do, you’d better get dressed and get shaved. We’ve got to go in five minutes.’

‘I don’t think I’ll be going.’

I said, ‘Do what you want. He was your friend. If you don’t want to go, that’s fine with me.’

An expression of exhaustion crossed his face as he took a deep breath. He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘OK. I’ll be down in a minute.’

I switched on the television and watched a game show. Shortly afterwards Pa came down, wearing a black suit.

I drove the car, he gave monosyllabic directions. He knew the way. We were going to the place where the incineration of my mother’s body, already half charred by the thunderbolt, had been completed.

Outskirts of Rockport passed by, the deep pavements plotted with intensely coloured grass. We arrived. I said, ‘You go on in, Pa. I’ll wait for you here.’

He sat there for a few moments, looking up at the red-bricked building at the top of the knoll. He had not shaved carefully and a tufty, dirty-white fringe of stubble showed under his nostrils. It was a lovely, slightly windy day. Daisies speckled the lawns of the crematorium.

‘You’d better get going,’ I said softly. I undid the catch of his seat belt. Slowly, he got out. I watched him trudge up the shallow slope, head down, body leaning forward.

I remained seated, smoking. One or two cars drove by. Then I looked up and saw that the doors of the building were closed. The proceedings were under way.

I knew the drill. The priest. The quiz-show organ music. The sudden alarm as the conveyor belt jolted into action. The irrevocable exit of my mother in her coffin through wine-red curtains into the wall. Then the small reception in the hospitality room, where strongly scented adults shook me and Rosie by the hand and kissed us. Unable to bear it, we made for the garden. That was a hot day, too, with bees at work everywhere, and I was happy enough sitting there on a bench in the sunshine until my sister touched my arm and pointed upwards at the black smoke escaping urgently from the tall cement chimney.

It was incomprehensible. I said, ‘Do you really think that that’s Ma? It’s not, is it?’