Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

I felt nauseous. How could this happen? Why hadn’t she pulled out of the project?

A fresh wave of nausea. Surely the report was the full extent of their collaboration? Surely the Sunday all-nighter was purely professional? Surely there was no possibility of a double betrayal, of Angela and Browne …

I said, ‘I don’t understand it, Pa. I had no idea. She never told me.’

He was facing away from me towards the garden. Bushes were in blue blossom now.

I lit a cigarette. Jesus, she was hard. She was so hard.

Suddenly I was afraid.

Pa said, ‘We were going to take up golf. And travel — we were going to do a lot of travelling, see the world. We had plans. You kids would be standing on your own two feet and we would have the time.’ He was facing away from me and the backs of his ears loomed in profile from his head. ‘You see, we were a team,’ he said. ‘We did everything together.’ He caressed the table with his hand. ‘She should be here with me right now. I wouldn’t give a damn about any of this if she were here. But she isn’t,’ he said, amazement in his voice. ‘That’s the truth. She’s gone. That’s what’s happened. This is it, you see. She’s actually gone.’

He cleared his throat. I could not say anything. He was telling the truth.

There is a noise: it is my fellow traveller, returning with a cup of coffee. He takes a sip and places the plastic cup on the ledge beneath the window and sits back.

The train jogs. We’re under way again, moving along with a thin clack of the wheels.

‘Look,’ he says, almost speechless. I do: the coffee in his cup is trembling so violently that drops have spilled on to his briefcase, staining his letter. ‘It’s unspeakable,’ he says. ‘Simply unspeakable.’

I make a sympathetic face, but then I leave in order to have another cigarette. This time I push down a window in the train corridor and lean out on my elbows, the smoke from my cigarette disappearing instantaneously in the train’s envelope of wind.

It was early evening by the time I returned from Pa’s, and a pile of pink sunlight broke into the hallway when I opened the front door. I walked through to the sitting-room. An attempt to clear up had been started but then abandoned. Steve, a crumb-filled plate on his lap, was at full-stretch on the sofa, poring over the latest junk mail — a religious missive entitled ‘Who Really Rules the World?’. On the cover was a picture of the earth held like a cricket ball by an enormous white hand, the index finger taking a grip like a spin bowler’s on a ridge of Asian mountains. I took a look at the pamphlet. Satan governed the world, it explained. There is no need to guess at the matter , it asserted, for the Bible clearly shows that an intelligent unseen person has been controlling both men and nations.

I handed Steve back the pamphlet. Looking at him sprawled out there, I couldn’t help feeling a soft gut-punch of disappointment. His famous citizen’s arrest had not given him the push which, I had fleetingly dreamed, was all that he required to propel him into action. My error was clear: I had wrongly assumed that Steve’s position in life was, in its relentless quiescence, like that of the schoolboy’s classic example of latent energy, the static boulder perched on the top of the hill, shown in the diagram with arrows pointing downhill to demonstrate the rock’s potential to rumble down the slope and transform its stored power into kinetic energy. But Steve was not ready to roll, a one-man landslide waiting for that happy impetus which would send him careering down the slope of achievement; he was flat-out on the sofa like a cracked slab-stone in a skip.

In the kitchen, meanwhile, Rosie was making coffee for one.

A seen-it-all-before feeling came over me. It wasn’t anything so mystical as déjà vu; it was the letdown that comes with the recognition of unprogressable circumstances which, like unceasing encores of a terrible performance, will recur and recur.

I soldiered on. ‘I’ve been to Pa’s,’ I said to Rosie.

‘How is he?’ she said.

I dropped into a chair. ‘Not great,’ I said. ‘Merv’s cremation has really knocked him out. I left him in bed. He’s thinking about Ma.’

I didn’t say anything about Angela. Rosie was liable to go over to her flat and throw bricks though all of the windows.

I pushed my feet forward into some of that pink dusk light lying around on the floor. ‘When are you going to see him?’

‘I will,’ Rosie said irritably. ‘I’ll phone him tomorrow.’

‘Why tomorrow? That’s what you said yesterday. It’s always tomorrow. Why not today? I mean, I don’t understand you. Why don’t you just give him a call now and get it over with?’

‘Oh, stop whining,’ Rosie said, sitting on the sofa. ‘Move over, Slug,’ she said, rapping Steve’s shins sharply with her knuckles. ‘Ow,’ Steve complained, and withdrew his legs. Rosie took a sip from her coffee, lit a cigarette and, ostensibly aiming at the plate which he held on his lap, flicked the ash on to his trousers. ‘What’s on TV?’ she said.

Something had to be done.

I picked up the phone and rang the dogs’ home. Trusty had not made an appearance, they told me.

Rosie said, ‘Trusty’s missing?’

‘Yes. Since Sunday.’

‘What, you mean she’s run away?’

‘That’s right. You’d know about it if you bothered to speak to Pa.’

‘Trusty,’ Rosie said, sobbing suddenly.

I said, ‘Jesus, Rosie, don’t do that. Not now. I can’t take that bullshit right now.’

Steve said, ‘Johnny, that guy rang for you again. Mr Devonshire. Oh, yes, and you got some mail from him, too.’

I got up and walked out into the street and kept going. Run, Johnny, a voice in my head was telling me. Run.

In a daze, I walked aimlessly for an hour, past hamburger bars, West Indian restaurants, drink shops, drugstores, trees, cars, Pakistani grocers, pubs and travel agencies, past houses and more houses, past underground stations. I walked through a park and a housing estate, past a roundabout with signs pointing the traffic in every direction possible and then down towards the shore, the beam of the lighthouse beginning to swing over the city as the darkness encroached from the east.

Halfway down to the shoreline, I stopped and sat on a bench. Where to? The Foreign Legion? The sea? The west? The circus?

Two huge seagulls floated down to the ground in front of me.

I got on the bus to the Birds’ District.

Pa was upstairs when I arrived, and I didn’t disturb him. I sat alone in the living-room and drank a beer with the television switched on.

I noticed, on the floor beneath the table, the Bear Elias report.

Hadn’t Angela realized what this would mean? Did she really think that she and I could go on as before?

Of course not. She wasn’t stupid. She had known all along what the consequences would be.

There was only one conclusion, then. She wanted the consequences. She wanted the damage.

Well, fuck her. Fuck her.

I climbed up the stairs and knocked on the door of my father’s bedroom and entered. He was not asleep. He was lying on his side, staring as though in a transfixion at the space between the bed and the cupboard. I looked at his limp palm and imagined it helplessly grabbed and squeezed goodbye by the huge golden hand of the Network.

‘Can I get you anything?’ I said. ‘A cup of tea?’

One eye flicked in my direction and locked there.

An unventilated reek reached my nostrils. On the floor, trails of unwashed clothes led to the crammed laundry basket. There, crumpled at the foot of the bed, was his referee’s shirt.

I stooped to the ground and picked up an old newspaper. I sat on the edge of the bed and turned the pages. ‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘that I might be getting myself a job.’ This was not strictly true, of course, but I could think of no other way of bringing up the subject. I glanced at him. His eye was still unblinkingly pointing at me from the corner of his face, like the eye of a fish. I came to the appointments pages. Warehouse manager. Quality supervisor. Construction superintendent. Development manager. Mechanical engineer. Team leader, housing support staff. Seasonal ranger. Nothing for which Pa, with his twenty-five years plus in the railways, was particularly qualified.