Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

By the time I returned home it was evening, with red clouds scrawled to the west above the mountains.

Angela called at about nine o’clock. She knew that I knew.

‘I’m sorry, Johnny, I’m sorry,’ she said. She began to cry. ‘I feel so terrible, I can’t tell you how terrible I feel, Johnny.’

I could not say anything. My throat had dried up completely.

Angela sniffed. ‘Just a moment,’ she said, ‘I’m just going to close the door.’ She returned. ‘Johnny, are you still there? Say something. Johnny? My love?’

‘I’m here,’ I said.

‘Johnny, my love,’ Angela said. She sniffed again.

There was a silence.

Then I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, Angie, I just don’t know any more.’ My voice was low and very calm.

Angela said, frightened, ‘Johnny?’

Another silence.

Then she said, ‘Johnny, I have to see you. Why don’t you come here on Saturday? My parents are going to be away and we could go and stay at their place. It would just be the two of us.’

I said, ‘You want me to drive all the way to you? All the way out to Waterville?’

Angela said quickly, ‘No, I just, I just thought that …’ She stopped. ‘I’ll come,’ she said decisively. ‘I’ll get the train.’

‘No, wait,’ I said. I had to get out of the flat, out of Rockport. ‘I’ll come. I can’t say when yet. I’ll see you when I see you. At your parents’ house.’

‘Johnny?’ Angela said. ‘I’ll be waiting for you, my love.’

That’s right, I thought as I hung up, you bloody wait. You get a taste of what it’s like.

I slept badly that night. I was worried about everything. I was worried about Angela and I was worried about Pa and I was worried about what I was going to do with the rest of my days. I was so worried about my life that I wasn’t worried about dying.

The train is rumbling slowly forward. The lady is asleep, mouth open, nose upturned, lightly snoring. The man has cast aside his newspaper and is staring dispiritedly out of the window, his shoulder leaning against the side of the carriage. He has abandoned his coffee-stained letter of complaint, which lies crumpled on the floor, there being no litter bins.

‘I might enter this quiz,’ Steve said. This was yesterday, Friday, morning. Rosie had left for work and I was watching him watching TV while trying to cut his big toenail with a small pair of nail scissors. It was an unequal struggle, the blades flapping fruitlessly against the hard white outcrop. He was always grooming himself in public like this, filing his warts or picking his corns or pushing down his cuticles right in front of you. ‘Bakelite,’ he said to the television as he focused on his foot. ‘I could win this thing,’ he said. He put down the nail scissors and went to the kitchen to open the cutlery drawer. Returning with the large wine-coloured industrial scissors, he placed his foot on the edge of a chair and concentrated with a grimace. Crack: a solid fleck sprang across the room like a grasshopper. ‘Riyadh,’ Steve told the quizmaster.

The phone rang.

It was Pa. ‘Son, I wonder if you would come down to the tennis club with me this morning.’

‘Yes,’ I said, surprised, ‘of course.’

‘I’ll be round in twenty minutes,’ he said.

He hung up without further explanation, so I changed into tennis gear, white shirt and white shorts, and dug out an old wooden racquet with crooked cat-gut strings. Although tennis is not my game, I was happy enough to bat back a few balls to Pa. It was a positive sign of rehabilitation.

But when he arrived he was not in his sports gear; he was wearing his dark suit, a dark tie and clip-on shades over his glasses. ‘Johnny,’ he said falteringly, regarding me. ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Don’t bother changing. Let’s get going, otherwise we’ll be late.’

Late for what? I thought, but he was not saying anything. He just chucked me the car keys and fell into the passenger seat.

The tennis club, dreamily secluded in urban woodland, was just ten minutes away. I reversed into a parking space and looked to Pa for an indication of what to do next. He had not spoken during the journey, and now he just wound down the window and rested his elbow on the ledge and looked out at the surrounding scene. Through the brilliant and shadowy foliage you could see the soft orange terrain of the clay courts and the pale movements of players. The pick-pock of tennis balls being struck drifted through the trees. Pa took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, then opened them wide and blinked hard, as though sleep still glued the lids together. Then he laid his head against the headrest and closed his eyes. A neat split had appeared at the exact centre of his flaking bottom lip. Apart from yellow-grey, that red gash was the only colour on his face.

Pa moved his head. A brown saloon had turned into the car-park. He sighed. ‘Come on,’ he said.

We stepped out. To my dismay, the saloon yielded the two Rasmussens, mother and son. Pa and Mrs Rasmussen kissed, and then she presented him with an object. Pa accepted it with both hands. It was a pewter urn and he held it by his waist like a bashful cup-winner.

Billy and I shook hands after a moment of hesitation. He must have wondered why I, a complete stranger to him, kept showing up at these most private and solemn moments. He must also have wondered what I was doing all in white, dressed for a spot of tennis.

Pa gave Amy Rasmussen his arm and they began walking.

‘Merv was at his happiest here, when playing with your father,’ Mrs Rasmussen said to me as I accompanied them. ‘It was the highlight of his week.’

Pa led us through to the one unoccupied court. On each side, games were in progress. He looked at Mrs Rasmussen, who nodded. Then he looked at Billy, and I was prepared, after his jokiness in hospital, for an ill-judged one-liner. But Billy said nothing.

Pa removed the lid from the pot and said some words in a tired voice. ‘Merv,’ he said, ‘was a fine man. He was a fine husband to Amy and a fine father to Billy. He was a fine friend to me. Merv was a loved man,’ he said. He paused. The pause continued. ‘May God rest his soul,’ he blurted. In one decisive movement, he tilted the urn and spilled the ashes on to the back of the court, creating a small black and grey mound. Treading carefully, as though afraid to foot-fault, he scattered the rest of the ashes along the base line. Then he shook the pot into the air and the last particles of Merv came forth in a cloud and blew away in a drift of air. Out! shouted one of the players in the adjoining court. Pa crossed himself instinctively and we all remained where we were, contemplating the dust pile that the breeze was already dispersing.

A voice was raised in a shout. ‘Oi! You there!’ A man was approaching from the direction of the clubhouse. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded loudly, so that by the time he reached us people were watching. I guessed, from the broom he was brandishing, that this was the groundsman. ‘You can’t just come here and dump this dirt all over my courts.’

Pa said weakly, ‘These ashes are Mervyn Rasmussen’s.’ He hesitated. ‘He’s a member here, like me. He came here a lot, you’d know him if you saw him.’ Pa clumsily hunched his back in an attempt to trigger a memory in the groundsman.

‘I don’t care who you are,’ the groundsman said, ‘and I don’t care who this rubbish is.’ He began sweeping up the ashes towards the drainage ditch at the side of the court. ‘This is my court and you don’t put nothing on it, not without special permission’

Pa said, ‘Please, don’t, listen— ’

Billy Rasmussen moved forward and snatched the groundsman’s collar with his left hand and his wrist with the other hand, forcing him to drop the broom. ‘Billy!’ Mrs Rasmussen cried, ‘don’t!’ Billy lifted the groundsman’s small frame into the air, carried him forward and then threw him down hard beyond the doubles tramlines. Then he stepped towards the remains of his father and, knee-deep in a cloud of dirt, furiously kicked and stamped at the ash-heap until it had irrevocably scattered and petered out. ‘Are you happy now?’ Billy shouted at the groundsman. ‘Is this what you want?’