Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

He walked forward for a few steps, making sure he was not mistaken. Then, without turning, he ran away like a boy towards the playing fields. He had found himself a game.

‘We’re almost there, madam.’

It is the man sitting across from me, and he wears an expression of happiness.

‘Really?’ the woman asks. ‘Where are we?’

‘This is Waterville now,’ the man says. ‘We’ll be there in a few moments.’

He’s right. I recognize those rooftops slewing by, the leafless overgrowth of the antennae.

A pang like a punch hits me in the stomach. She will have received the message I left on her answering machine and she will be at the station waiting for me. She will meet me as she always does, with a newspaper under one arm which she will toss into a bin as she walks up the platform, smiling at the ground, shapely in that blue-flowered dress she loves to wear on hot days, her ears decked out with marigold earrings, her ankles titillatingly unsteady in those shoes, those high ones — what do those high shoes look like again, exactly?

Wild ideas occur to me: pulling the emergency cord, hiding in the train until the coast is clear.

It won’t work.

The train dips into the tunnel down to the station and darkens.

Holding fast to the luggage rack, I stand up in anticipation of arrival — and it is there again, the dizzying weightlessness I felt that night at her flat, hovering in her rooms like a man of air. Hitting some swerve in the rails, the train sways violently, and I’m hanging on to the rack as I’m swung around by the machine’s huge straying energy. There is another swerve, but this time I’m ready for it, I’m riding with the shock; the tremor passes through me easily, as though I were not here.

The train gathers speed as the tunnel tilts still deeper into the earth. I still feel hollow and, all of a sudden, elated. I’m ready for her, for her and for all the circumstances that’ll pass through in the way that they do, without care, without looking where they’re going. Bring them on, too, what the hell, let’s get it over with. Maybe it’s a Breeze thing, to be vessels for the careless transit of events. Maybe we’re built for it. Look at Pa, the hapless, steadfast bastard, look at how he’s come through it all. Why shouldn’t I be a chip off the same block?

My ears pop as the train begins to surface.

But anyway, you never know, things may turn out all right. You just never know.

That’s right, isn’t it?

The windows flash like spooks with daylight. Here we are, then. Here we go.

JOSEPH O’NEILL was born in Cork in 1964. He is the author of three novels — Netherland, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Breezes, and This Is the Life — and a family history, Blood-Dark Track. A barrister in London for many years, he now lives in New York.