The Breezes (17 page)

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?'

‘Of course it is,' Rosie said. ‘She's being burned, isn't she?' She wrinkled her face. ‘God, sometimes you're so
thick
.'

We went back inside. The reception was coming to an end and our father was speaking with the funeral director. ‘Not for another hour or two,' the funeral director was saying. He was a cheerful, happy-looking man.

‘We'll wait,' Pa said. ‘I don't mind waiting.'

‘There won't be any need for that,' the funeral director said. ‘We'll look after everything. We'll telephone you when we're ready.' He looked at us with a kindly eye. ‘The children will want to be going,' he said.

Pa was not listening. ‘We'll wait,' he said. ‘It's no bother.'

The funeral director said, ‘Well, it's most unusual … And there'll be another cremation following shortly …'

‘I'll be back in one hour,' my father said, taking Rosie and me by the hand.

We went to a coffee bar. From time to time, Pa started to say things. Rosie and I poured sugar in our Cokes to make them fizz. We weren't thirsty, anyway.

We went back to the crematorium. Pa said, ‘Stay in the car, you two,' but we followed him anyway.

Pa said, ‘I've come for my wife. Mary Breeze.'

The receptionist said, ‘If you would take a seat for a moment.' Shortly afterwards, the funeral director came in. He presented Pa with what looked like a fun-size cereal packet. ‘My condolences, Mr Breeze,' he said. Pa nodded and quickly left. Once outside, he turned his back to us and opened the packet. For several seconds he inspected its contents, touching the ashes with his index finger. Then he began walking back towards the car and Rosie and I ran down the slope ahead of him and impatiently clicked the handles of the doors of the station wagon. He leaned backwards from the driver's seat to unlock the doors. He placed the packet of ashes in the dashboard compartment along with the Kleenex packet and the
road maps and the can of engine oil and started the car. Then he switched off the engine and sat there without a word.

After long minutes of silence, he looked at us. ‘I want you kids to stay here. And I mean it.'

He retrieved the packet and stepped out and walked down the leafy road and around the bushes at the corner of the block. He thought that we could not see him through the intervening undergrowth; but we could. We could see everything. Looking around to make sure he was unwatched, my father was rapidly sprinkling the powdery leftovers over the flowerbeds that ornamented the sidewalk – were they rose-bushes? Whatever they were, I had seen it with my own eyes: my mother reduced to fertilizer.

It's incredible – her sheer nowhereness.

The train has stopped again. This time we're in the outskirts of some town, with a view of clothes lines, underwear and gardens full of bathtubs, shopping trolleys, bits of wood and other junk.

‘Are we there yet?' the woman asks.

The man sighs from behind his newspaper and I notice the sports page splash:
WE'LL BE BACK, VOWS UNITED BOSS.
‘Not yet, madam,' the man says. ‘I'll tell you when we are.'

‘I don't want to be late,' she says. She fiddles with her bandage, revealing an eyeball of pure red. ‘It's my dog, you see.'

The man looks out of the window. ‘I mean, this really is quite extraordinary. What possible reason could there be for stopping here?'

A minute passes. ‘That's it,' the man says. ‘I'm lodging a complaint. One simply can't take these things lying down.' He opens his briefcase and takes out a pen and a piece of writing-paper. He clicks down the point of the biro, places the paper on his briefcase, which he balances on his knees, and starts writing.

A few moments later, he puts his pen down and stands up. ‘Would you keep an eye on my stuff?' he asks, and I nod.

I cannot resist looking at the letter, which is still on the briefcase.

Dear Sir or Madam … 
The paragraph that follows is scribbled out, as is the paragraph below that one.

At least that's one letter Pa will no longer have to deal with.

He was flummoxed by the pulverization of his friend.

‘I don't know,' he muttered, as we drove back from the crematorium, ‘I just don't know.' He clenched and unclenched his mouth and unrhythmically drummed his fingernails against the window. ‘What does it all mean? I mean …' He stopped speaking, struggling with his feelings, ashamed about burdening me, an innocent whom he had brought unconsulted
into the world, with his doubts. Perhaps, too, he was afraid of what my answer might be.

We reached the pacific streets of the Birds' District, passing a playground with see-saws and a sandpit where mothers pushed tots skywards on the swings and supervised their gleeful experiments on the slides with the sweet tug of gravity. On an impulse, I pulled over at the supermarket and, while Pa waited in the car, loaded up a trolley with loaves of wholemeal bread, eggs, a kilo of apples, butter, beers, ready-made mixed salad, Brie, mature Cheddar, salami, oranges, cans of soup, toilet paper, tomatoes, two rump steaks, minced meat, onions and bananas. Stuff he liked. And when we got home I made him a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and while he took it easy I filled up the dishwasher, cleaned the kitchen and stocked his fridge.

Then I checked the mailbox. A large brown envelope stamped with the Network logo fell to the floor.

I handed it to Pa, who was sitting at the dining-table.

He dropped it on the table and pushed it away. ‘It's Paddy Browne's report. I don't want it. I've had it with them. They can keep their rubbish. I don't want to hear from those people ever again.'

‘What about your action for reinstatement? Are you just going to let that drop?'

‘It's over, John. Can't you understand? It's over. There's nothing I can do about it.'

I was suddenly angry. ‘What happened to your fighting talk? Are you just going to let them walk all over you?' I tore open the envelope.

The covering letter said,
Dear Gene, Herewith a copy of the report which you requested. I hope that all is well. Yours, Paddy.
I picked up the enclosed booklet. ‘Here we go, it's a copy of– '

After a moment, Pa said, ‘What's the matter?'

I passed him the booklet. The authors of the report were identified on the front. ‘Bear Elias,' Pa read out.

He looked at me and winked involuntarily with his lazy eye.

He said, ‘You don't think that Angela … Surely, she …'

I pointed. There was her reference number at the foot of the last page, AF/103/2.

It was Angela who had fired Pa.

Pa removed his glasses from the reddened ridge of his nose and began pressing and kneading his brow with his fingers, as though desperately trying to reshape the contours of his skull. ‘She was only doing her job,' he said finally.

I felt too guilty to reply.

He picked up the report and thumbed at its pages. He raised the silver of his eyebrows, curved faintly on his brow like moons in daylight, and pointed at some coloured pie charts. ‘What did I tell you? Paddy Browne.'

Paddy Browne, Pa's worst enemy, and Angela, a virtual member of the family, a
de facto
Breeze, collaborating intimately and secretively to produce a report of this kind.

The bitch. The fucking bitch. So that's what she'd been doing Sunday night – while I, like an idiot, rotted in her flat, fearing the worst.

I pictured it: in the early hours of the morning, Angela sits flashing her fingers at the word processor with her long brown hair tumbling over her shoulders while Browne, his jacket long since discarded, informally brings her a cup of coffee to keep her going. He makes a humorous remark to which she replies, refining his joke in the special bantering manner which they have developed over weeks of teamwork; he, in turn, takes the joke one step further, and they both start tittering, delighted with themselves and each other.

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.

‘There are plenty of jobs here which you could do in your sleep,' I said. ‘With your experience– '

‘Stop fooling around, John,' Pa said, his voice half muffled. ‘I'm not a baby. I don't need mollycoddling.'

‘I'm not mollycoddling anybody,' I said. ‘I'm serious. This is a big opportunity for you to do all those things which you've always been interested in.'