The Breezes (2 page)

‘Light, Johnny, light!' he exclaimed suddenly. ‘Johnny, here's what you do: you get Whelan to install floodlights around the house so that you don't get any shadows out there. You know what they say, a shadow is a burglar's best friend. Yes,' Pa said, ‘floodlights. With electronic triggers. My God, when I think of your sister alone at home, and those men lurking about outside her window …' He lost his voice.

‘Take it easy, Pa,' I said.

Pa resumed, his voice straining, ‘Remember, Whelan's the man you want. Ring Whelan. You can count on Whelan.'

‘Leave it with me, Pa,' I said. I did not tell him that twice already I had rung Whelan, twice Whelan had promised to come and twice Whelan had let me down. Pa had enough to worry about without worrying about Whelan. Thinking
about it, there was not a significant aspect of his life that did not have him on tenterhooks. Everything gave him cause for keen suspense: work, where his job was under review; Rosie and her boyfriend, Steve; Merv Rasmussen; and me. Yes, Pa was losing sleep over me, too, the poor bastard. For three years now I have been one of the reasons why he gets out of bed in the mornings with black rings under his eyes.

Pa's eyes. Among the traits which I am anxious not to inherit from my father, the eyes feature prominently. I roll off the sofa, walk over to the mirror resting on the fireplace and regard myself. What I am looking for is any sign that my eyeballs are losing their alignment. Pa has a wall-eye – a lazy eye. The left eye points in the correct direction but the other eye, the lazy one, looks about a foot to the right. In this respect, Pa has been unlucky. The divergence of his gaze is sufficient to confuse the onlooker, but not quite marked enough to reveal quickly to him which eye is the focused one. To obscure this defect, Pa has taken to wearing tinted glasses, phototonic shades which darken or lighten in accordance with the air's luminousness. The ploy has not come off for him. I am afraid that the main effect of Pa's shades and the just-visible wall-eye beneath them is to give him an insecure, shifty air.

I light a cigarette and for a moment watch myself smoking. Then I look closely at the eyes: still, I am glad to say, perfectly parallel.

However, I have seen photographs of the young Pa. At my age, his eyes were straight as arrows. The famous honeymoon portrait of him and Ma in Donegal shows it clearly: cheek to cheek with his brand-new, bursting, laughing wife, his shirt white and pressed and his tie knotted cleanly, Pa flies the camera a dead-on, bull's-eye of a look, a look that has not the merest trace of a swerve. I know what this means: any day, without warning, some sleeping Breeze gene could wake up and order one of my eyes to make a sideways move.

I turn away from my reflection. There is no point in worrying about it, because there's another paternal characteristic I can do without: the tendency to live in dread. I do not want to end up with a pockmarked, crack-lined face and a head of blitzed white hair. Come to think of it, I do not want to end up
like Pa at all. Like father, like son is the last thing I want to hear in connection with me and my father.

Angela promised to meet me here, at her flat, at nine o'clock. It is now ten past nine. Ten minutes' delay may not sound like very much, but Angela is as punctual as they come. By her standards, she's late.

I go over to the windows, which stretch extravagantly from the floor to the high ceiling. It's a foul night, the rain violently connecting with the tarmac and spinning like tinsel in the beam of the lampposts. Not to worry. Any minute now I'll hear that struggle with the door, that clatter of things falling to the ground and that dramatic sigh of relief – and then in she'll come, wet and breathless and ready to be held.

I return to lie down on the sofa; and I cannot help but think of Steve, the master of recumbency. Steve lives with me and Rosie in the flat that Pa bought for us. In the days before the flat, Steve and Rosie were sharing cramped rooms at the top of a high tower block and it was generally agreed that, spiritually, financially and geographically, Rosie was going nowhere. Steve was identified as a factor in her malaise and one of the ideas behind buying the new place was that she would be able to come down from that tower block and start afresh.

‘You wait and see,' Pa promised. ‘It'll be a new leaf for her, just mark my words. There'll be no stopping that girl now,' he said, raising his arm in an upward motion to suggest a rising aeroplane. That was the plan: he would buy the flat and Rosie would leave stranded Steve and all he stood for and remove like a jet into the blue atmosphere.

The change of address almost did the trick. Rosie did get a job – and as an air stewardess, it so happened – but when she and I moved into the new flat, somehow Steve tagged along. No one is sure how it happened, no one can pinpoint the day when he finally settled in. All we know is that now, two years later, he is implanted in the premises like one of those long-rooted desert trees that sucks up the water for miles around.
Simply to say that Steve
lives
with us is misleading, because that word does not convey the fantastic degree of occupation which he exercises. Stephen Manus, to give him his full name, is no mere inhabitant or tenant of the flat. He is a fixture of it, a presence so constant and unbudging that were the property to be sold he would have to be included in the conveyance, along with the light switches and the radiators. For, like a millionaire recluse or an exquisite endangered salamander, it is only on the rarest occasions that Steve is sighted outside his – correction, outside Pa's – front door. His occupation? Layabout. What he does is nothing, and he goes about it full-time, twenty-four hours a day: Steve rests around the clock. Night or day you'll find him in bed or on the sofa or in an armchair, taking it easy with style and technique. He can stay put for as long as he likes, in any position he chooses. Whereas normal people might grow restless or develop cramp or pins and needles if they didn't move for hours, not so Steve. He's an athlete of immobility.

The funny thing is, you would not guess it to look at him. Like Pa, my first impression of Steve was of an up-and-at-'em type. ‘I like the look of the boy,' Pa had said. ‘I like the way he presents himself. He'll go far,' he predicted.

Even to this day, Steve looks like a man with a destination. He stills wears sporty sweaters and ironed cotton shirts with button-down collars, he still has that purposeful, closely shaven jawline. There is no trace of idleness in his appearance; with his healthy red cheeks and his wiry frame, Steve looks like an outdoors man. Only the shoes on his feet – loafers – give any clue to his true nature. But it is only a small clue. After two years' living with him, Steve is still a mystery to me. Every time I think I am making progress, advancing into the district of dreams and fears that make him tick, I hit a brick wall. That's Steve for you: a dead end.

Of course, given the work that I do, there is a hideous irony in my mockery of his sedentary habits.

What an empty phrase:
the work that I do …

It was three years ago that I broke the news of my chosen profession to Pa. I was twenty-three years old.

Pa was stunned. ‘What? You're going to
what
?'

I made no reply.

Pa rubbed his face like a man trying to wake up. ‘I can't believe what I'm hearing. Johnny, what about your career? Are you just going to let that drop? Stick at it for two more years and you'll be qualified. Just think about it!' Pa urged. ‘Two more years and you'll be a chartered accountant!'

I explained to Pa that I had thought about that. ‘I'll be fine,' I said. ‘It's what I want to do. Don't worry. I'll be all right, you'll see.'

‘But how are you going to manage? How are you going to support yourself?' Pa started walking around the room, the way he always did when he became agitated. ‘I never heard of anyone making a living in that line of work.' And round he went again, not even looking where he was going – it is a route he has come to know off by heart, that circumnavigation of the two armchairs and the glass coffee-table. ‘Where will it take you, this work? What will it lead to?' This was a typical Pa enquiry – Pa, who has always embraced this teleology in respect of employment: that jobs are the cars on the highway of life. ‘And, son, I don't want to seem discouraging, but you don't have any training, you don't have any background. Besides,' he said, ‘you're all thumbs. Haven't I always told you you've two left hands?' I kept quiet while he shook his head and circled the furniture. ‘This is a real shocker for me, Johnny, a real shocker. Frankly, I don't know what to say to you.'

I could not blame him for reacting in this way. Not only had he sunk thousands into my education and training, he had sunk a pile of hope down there, too. My father had been banking on my accountancy career in every way. Thus, for a couple of months, he sought to induce and cajole and beg me to change my mind. One day I had just got out of the bath and was running shivering to my bedroom with a towel around my waist when he approached me in the corridor and said, ‘Son, I think it's time we talked about where you are going with your life.'

I kept on running. ‘Pa, I've just got out of the bath, OK?'

But Pa was not to be put off and he followed me into my bedroom and addressed me while I towelled my hair and
dried my toes and looked for socks. ‘Johnny,' he said, ‘what do you want from your life? What are your goals?'

I turned from the cupboard to answer but I did not get any further than opening my mouth, because right in front of me my father was holding up a large home-made cardboard lollipop, and on it was written, in arresting black letters,
GOALS.

I started laughing.

‘Son,' Pa said, ‘think about it. You're a man now. What are you aiming for?' He put down the lollipop and brandished another:
MONEY. ‘
Is this what you want? Do you want money?' He pulled out another:
FAMILY WITH HOUSE, SECURITY.
‘A family, a house?'
JOB SATISFACTION,
the next placard said. ‘How about job satisfaction?' Pa said. ‘How important is that to you?' He pointed at my feet. ‘Are you really going to wear those socks together? Look, they don't even match.'

‘Don't worry,' I said, forcing my damp thighs into some jeans, ‘I'm not going out today.'

Pa was about to reply when he remembered the original point of the conversation. With an effort, he raised the three lollipops in his right fist, displaying them in a crooked fan, and then with his left hand he pulled a final lollipop from behind his back: in red letters,
EVALUATION AND CHOICE.
He stood there for a moment, arms aloft, like a man trying to wave in a wayward aeroplane. ‘You've got to work out which of these—' he shook his right hand – ‘you want, and why, because I'm telling you now – and believe me, Johnny, I know what I'm talking about, I've been in this world a little longer than you have, listen to what I'm saying to you – I'm telling you that in this line of work you've taken up, you can forget about this—' He dropped the
MONEY
lollipop on the floor. ‘And without money, it becomes very hard to have this—'
JOB SATISFACTION
fell to the ground. ‘And this—' Down with a clatter went the surviving sign,
FAMILY WITH HOUSE, SECURITY
. ‘Take it from me, Johnny, you're running a big, big risk with this – this project of yours.' He wiped sweat from his mouth and waited for me to respond. He had planned this presentation down to the last detail, that was obvious. I envisaged him with his glue and scissors and felt-tips, anxiously
cutting circles in the cardboard, rehearsing his speech. Now the decisive moment had arrived: was I going to buy?

To stop Pa from seeing the laugh on my face, I pulled a jumper over my head and pretended to get caught up in the neckhole. ‘OK, Pa,' I said, muffling my voice. ‘I'll think about it. Thanks very much. I'll get back to you,' I said, still faking a struggle with my jumper.

‘I'm glad,' Pa said, his voice trembling a little. ‘You think about it. Remember, don't hesitate to come to me with any problems or ideas, or feedback generally. My door is always open,' Pa said.

I am not sure which door my father was referring to when he said that, but of course I never took up his invitation. My mind was made up, and soon after what Pa liked to call our ‘meeting' (‘Son, have you thought about our meeting? Have you got anything you want to tell me?'), I threw the lollipops into the bin in my bedroom, where they protruded from the yoghurt cartons and the tangerine peel and the other trash. Pa got the message.

Shortly after that, he approached me with his hands in his pockets. I knew what that meant; it meant that he was about to apologize. Whenever Pa is about to say he is sorry, his hands disappear into his trousers.

‘Listen, Johnny, I hope I haven't upset you with what I said about your new line of work. I'm sorry if I have.'

‘No, Pa, of course you haven't, I said.

He said, ‘I just want you to know that I'm on your side, son. I'm right behind you. You do what you want to do. What's important is that you're happy. As long as you're happy, that's all that counts.' In his emotion he left the room and went to the kitchen and put his head into the fridge, pretending to look for something to eat.

What was it, then, that had blown Pa off course like this?

Chairs. That was all. I had decided to make a living making chairs.

‘You know, I've been thinking about it,' he said when he returned from the kitchen. ‘Maybe it's not such a bad idea.' He started trying to light his pipe, the bowl of which was carved into the wise and unblinking visage of an ancient philosopher.
At that time, Pa was going through a phase of pipe-smoking. ‘There's a good market for chairs. People are always going to need to sit down. Let's work it out.' He took a company biro from the row of pens snagged on his breast pocket and flipped open a company scratch pad. ‘I'd say that people sit down now more than they ever did. I read about it somewhere – nowadays people are sitting down a whole lot more than they used to.' Pa winked at me with his good eye. ‘Which means they're going to need more chairs than ever before.' He breathed on the nib of his biro, then slowly wrote down in capitals – Pa always writes in capitals –
MORE CHAIRS THAN EVER BEFORE
. ‘Yes,' he said, growing excited, ‘and when you consider that more people are getting older now and that
old people are always sitting down …'
INCREASED DEMAND
, Pa wrote.

That clinched it for him. He threw down the biro with a bold finality. ‘Increased demand, Johnny. That's what it's all about. They demand, you supply. That's the golden rule.' He stood up, waving his pipe. ‘You know, I think you may be on to something. I think you may be on to something big.'

I said carefully, ‘I'm not sure how commercial I'm going to be, Pa.'

Pa was sucking away at his pipe, having another attempt at lighting it. ‘You may not be sure, son, but I am,' he said, inhaling noisily. The philosopher's cranium released a small cloud. ‘I see great possibilities in what you're doing. Which is why I've come to a decision. I'm going to invest in you.'

‘Invest?'

‘That's right. I'm going to set you up. I'm going to get you a proper workplace with proper equipment. No more scratching around in your bedroom upstairs.'

I stood up in protest. ‘There's no need,' I said. ‘I'm managing fine as it is. Pa, don't even think about it,' I said.

‘This isn't a hand-out, this is business. You'll pay me back with interest once you get going.' He turned towards me with his skewy eyes wide open. ‘Johnny, we're going to be partners!'

Looking back at that episode, at my unqualmish acceptance of finance, I cannot avoid a feeling of shame. In those days I
found my father's donations a marvellously uncomplicated business. I needed the money, and not just for tools, materials and workspace – the fact was, I needed the money generally. I was twenty-three – I needed to live, didn't I? And as I saw it, money was simply part of the deal with Pa: subsidies, allowances and disbursements came with the terrain of his acquaintance. Besides, in the final analysis I was doing him a favour by taking his money – what else was he going to spend it on? Why shouldn't he buy a flat for his kids if that was what made him happy?

Maybe
buy,
with its connotation of outright purchase, is not quite the right word, because that makes it sound as though Pa just reached into his pocket and handed over the cash. It did not happen that way. To finance the transaction, Pa had to remortgage his house, the family home at 75 Turtledove Lane. The agreement was that Rosie and I would pay what rent we could afford. Property was buoyant, Pa said. You'll see, he told us happily as he showed us his name on the deeds, we're going to come out of this smelling of roses.