The Breezes (6 page)

Pa slammed down the bonnet and came in out of the wind. ‘That should hold her together until I can reach a garage,' he said, putting on his seat belt. ‘It was a good thing we stopped. I reckon there's an oil leak in there. It could have seized up at any minute.'

We drove off again. Thanks to the pit stop, the incident
with Rosie no longer fouled the atmosphere, and when a short while later we got held up in more traffic by the docks, I felt able to turn on the car radio. I moved the dial to Station 5, the sports station. John Hall was on, previewing the next day's soccer fixtures. Pa turned up the volume.

‘It's the last day of the season,' John Hall said, ‘and, the championship having already been won by Clonville, attention will be focused on the relegation clash at the bottom of the First Division between Rockport United and Ballybrew. It's make or break time. Both teams have the same number of points, but United have marginally the better goal difference. They can therefore settle for the draw, whereas Ballybrew need maximum points – a problem, since Ballybrew have yet to win a game away from home this season. My prediction? United to avoid the drop.'

‘Let's hope he's right,' Pa said as the car inched forward. The wind had dropped but the sky had darkened further. The wipers were slowly mowing rain from the windshield. Pa tapped the wheel. ‘Johnny, what are we doing down there, scratching about with the likes of Ballybrew? A big club like United should be right up there with the Clonvilles, contesting the championship.' We moved forward by a car-length. The rain relentlessly arrived on the windscreen, each surge of droplets wiped out then instantaneously replaced by fresh, momentary troops, in turn effaced in their thousands as the wiper swung back over the glass. ‘I remember when United were a great team, when we won the league, the Cup and the Continental Cup in three straight years. I tell you, Johnny, those were the days. What a line-up: Neville Clarke, the Tiger of Antigua, in goal, Guthrie, Knox, Walker and Janusz at the back, Dingemans, Dean and Lazarus in midfield, Loasby, Le Quesne and Newman up front. Sixty thousand for every home match and never once a fight.' Yet again, Pa shook his head. ‘You should have seen Redrock Park in those days, Johnny. The stands would be bursting over and the schoolboys would be passed down over our heads to the front of the terraces. The atmosphere was different. You didn't see moats or fences or firecrackers, you didn't see pitch invasions. And the
singing…' Pa swallowed. ‘By God, Johnny, you should have been there to hear the singing.'

I did not reply to this, because I knew that Pa had not been there to hear the singing either. The first time Pa had even taken notice of Rockport United was when I began supporting them as an eight-year-old and when every match day saw his white-fisted, oblivious boy hunched over the radio and transported in its tiny racket to the heart of the ringing stadium, my day, sometimes even my week, hinged precariously on the game's outcome. Out of sympathy, Pa became a Rockport United fan, too. He enrolled me in the supporters' club and then, to keep me company, put his own name down. He bought me all of the gear so that I could listen to the game properly kitted out: the strip, the red and white scarf, the bobble hat incorporating the club's famous symbol, the prancing red lambs. Pa bought a club rattle and he bought a pair of lucky underpants to wear on Cup days. Why he thought those underpants – red and white checks – were lucky, I do not know, because in all of the time that he wore them United never won a thing. But that did not deter him. Every season the Cup would start afresh, every year Pa pulled on those shorts and every year United got knocked out.

Christmas Day, 1979. I am twelve years old, Pa is forty-two and there is my mother in her blue apron, temporarily leaving the last turkey that she will ever cook to watch her children open their presents. There, under the Christmas tree, is a record with my name,
Johnny
, written on the wrapper between the sledges and the snowmen. Eagerly I rip open the package, hoping for the album that all my classmates are listening to –
Spare Head: I Shouldn't Have Eaten That Second Banana
– but it is not to be. What I have instead is a recording of the 1968 Continental Cup final, when on a hot and floodlit Parisian night United beat Lisbon 4-1 after extra time to win the trophy.

Pa swoops as I kneel there, removing my gift from my hand. ‘This is brilliant,' he says, clumsily dropping the disc on the turntable. ‘This,' Pa says, ‘is what I call
brilliant.
'

He listens to the record – both sides – maybe three times that day, and that day the house resonates with the euphoria of one hundred thousand supporters of Rockport United. Each time a
goal is scored my father's arms half rise in joy and a great smile cracks across his face; then, quickly, before the cheering has died down, he darts over to the record-player, returns the needle by a fraction of an inch, switches up the volume by a notch or two and listens to it one more time.

My father is scoring goals at will.
It's there!
the commentator cries again and again.
It's there! It's there!

The windowpanes clank and shudder in the wind. I take a look outside. It's still raining, and still there's no sign of Angie; no sign of anyone in the street except a young boy on a bicycle, standing up on the pedals and swaying from side to side as he climbs into the gale. The windows shudder again, clattering violently this time, as though rocked by a tremor.

Well, at least that's one thing I can rest assured about: quakes. No movement of the earth's crust has ever been recorded in Rockport and that, according to Steve, is a fact. I'm happy to believe him. Thanks to his newfound enthusiasm for the
Time-Life
pamphlets about natural disasters, Steve actually knows something about planetary spasms. It's not the first time he has mastered a peculiar field of expertise. He used to be an authority on new consumer goods, the novelty products advertised in the morning junk mail that puddled in the hallway door every morning. Steve used to peruse those catalogues for hours, lost in a world of doggy boot-scrapers, portable intercom door-chimes, sonic mole-chasers, therapeutic putty and extra-loud personal alarms, dreaming, perhaps, of – well, who knows what he was dreaming of? Now, though, the innovation reports have been supplanted in his imagination by the
Time-Life
pamphlets offering books about the inimical forces of nature. Although Steve has never bought a page of the menacing literature on offer, he enjoys reading about reading it. There is one particular leaflet, called ‘Storm (Discover the Deadly Forces That Shape Our World)', which he consults time after time.

‘God, just listen to this,' he said one time. ‘This is just amazing. Just listen to this.' He started to recite the text in a painstaking monotone. ‘‘Man lives at the bottom of a dense and turbulent sea of gases. Ten miles deep, the atmosphere is constantly in motion; and when one mass collides with another, the skies erupt, scouring the earth and purging the atmosphere
with unbridled fury. The result,”' Steve quoted, ‘‘is storm …”'

At this point I left the room to make myself a coffee, but there was to be no escape. Steve raised his voice for my benefit, so that even from the kitchen I continued to hear his intonings.

‘‘In 1938 a hurricane veered away from its expected path and cut into the East Coast of America. At a windspeed of 120 mph it cut a swathe between New York and Boston leaving over 600 dead, 60,000 homeless and caused damage estimated (1938 values) at over a third of a billion dollars.”' Steve paused to assimilate these statistics. ‘‘On December 8 1963, a bolt of lightning struck a 707 jet sending it plummeting to the ground in a ball of flame. Eighty-two people died.” God,' Steve said. ‘‘These natural catastrophes are evidence of the deadly power of man's oldest enemy, and demonstrates that with all our advanced technology, our satellites and computers, we are always at the mercy of mighty, ever-threatening forces.”' Steve put down the leaflet. ‘God,' he said again in a dazed voice.

It is possible that this apocalyptic material provides a clue to why Steve is so indisposed to leave the flat. Perhaps he regards Rockport – a wholesome, unperilous city in the general view – as an environment of native wantonness. Maybe this is why he adheres so devoutly to the inside world: because he has seen through Rockport, that comfortable haven, seen through its façade of well-being, its superficies of bottlebanks and grass-anchored dunes, of cycling lanes, malls, shipyards and open-air skating-rinks, of pike-stocked canals and theatres, of all-ticket football matches, academic symposia, stinking fish-markets, parks sprinkled with deck-chairs and bars pouring out pint after black pint of thick stout. Maybe Steve has identified all of these as mere phenomena and maybe, in accordance with some privately held epistemology, he has discovered that things are not as ordered and purposeful as they might seem; that Rockport, like the boiling Venus of his pamphlets, is in essence a place of hostility. Maybe, in the light of this alarming data, he is simply holing up, keeping his head below the parapet, in the hope that Rockport, like some passing storm, will somehow blow over.

Maybe; but I doubt it. I think that you have got closer to the bottom of the matter once you have recognized that Stephen Manus is a member of that old-fashioned psychological species: the lazybones.

But who I am to criticize him for doing nothing?

A month or so ago I was in the basement, smoking a cigarette, and although as usual the door was closed, through the floorboards I could hear the voices directly above me, in the sitting-room.

Pa's voice: ‘What's the matter with him? Why won't he let anyone go down there? Every time I come around he's locked away like a hermit.'

Rosie's voice: ‘Pa, take a plate, would you? You're spilling crumbs everywhere.'

‘Sorry, my love.' Then, after a pause, ‘Is he always like this? Look at the time. It's seven-thirty. If he carries on like this he'll burn himself out.'

Rosie says, ‘Don't talk nonsense. You know as well as I do that he's not doing a thing down there.'

Pa says, ‘I wish you wouldn't say these things, Rosie, my love. You're being harsh.'

‘Well, how many chairs have you seen recently?' There's a long pause.

‘I'm telling you, Rosie, you're wrong,' Pa says. ‘John's a grafter, he always has been. Remember how he got stuck into his accountancy exams? Remember how hard he worked to set up his exhibition?'

‘I don't want to argue about this. You believe what you want to.'

‘But, Rosie, if you're right, then we've got a problem; and if we've got a problem, we've got to do something about it.'

Rosie laughs drily. ‘
We
haven't got a problem, Pa.
He
has.' Raising her voice, she says, ‘Pa,
don't
look at me like that. What am I supposed to do? Make the chairs for him? Am I supposed to get the glue and get the wood and get whatever
shit
he keeps down there and do it myself?'

‘Keep your voice down, he'll hear you.'

‘What do I care? It's about time we had some truth around here. I'm sick of it, sick of all this pretence.' Now she's shouting.
‘He's crap, Pa. Your son is crap. He's a
crappy furniture-maker
.'

‘Rosie. Stop it.'

But she keeps on shouting. ‘He's a waste of money. He's a waste of space and you know it.'

Pa shouts down the stairs, ‘Don't listen to her, John, it's not true, she's just being spiteful!'

‘Prove me wrong, Johnny,' Rosie shouts. ‘Bring up a chair and prove me wrong.'

‘Don't do it, John!' Pa shouts. ‘You don't have to prove anything! Do you hear me? You don't have to prove a thing, son!'

I stay where I am, behind the locked door.

I can't prove Rosie wrong. I haven't made a chair in six months.

But it isn't laziness. If only it were.

I'm ashamed about it. I daren't mention it to anyone – not even to Angela; at least, not now.

Things have changed since Angela and I started off four years ago. I am no longer the budding professional she met and she is no longer the provincial student on a holiday job whom I managed to impress. In the course of the intervening years, Angela Flanagan has become a high-flier. She has accumulated more degrees and diplomas than all of the Breezes put together – a BSc in economics, an MSc in statistics and an MBA. The result is that six months ago she landed her job at Bear Elias, the management consultants. As I understand it, she's part of a team of brainstormers that visits disorganized organizations – often furtively – in order to recommend their reorganization. Angela loves her work and does it very well, and not long ago she was promoted to number two in the team. Professionally, things are coming along just fine for her.

Pa holds her in awe. He seeks out her opinion on various matters with great seriousness. ‘What are the prospects, Angela, of an early recovery from the recession?' Or, ‘Is it true that the poverty of the Third World is the most vital economic challenge of all?' ‘She's something else, that Angela,' he says to me in a hushed voice when she has temporarily left the room. ‘So intelligent, so well educated. A fine young woman,' he says. ‘Just the sort of person we're crying out for at the Network.
A few more like her and we'd turn the whole thing around.' Angela returns, and Pa again assumes a shy, almost humble posture. She, of course, is embarrassed, and does her best to put him at his ease by giving him modest and respectful answers. She likes Pa a lot. ‘He's wonderful, your father,' she said to me after they first met. And then she put her arms around me and kissed me fully on the mouth. ‘Just like his son,' she whispered.

As a result of Angela's success at Bear Elias, Pa, like me, has had less opportunity to enjoy her company. I don't resent this one bit – I am delighted, I really am, that Angela is prospering to such a degree; nothing brings me more joy than the proud pleasure she derives from her work – but there is, inevitably, a flip side. While Angela has been on the up and up, I have been on the slide. The disparity is not trivial. Winners do not stick around for ever with losers. I also suspect that there comes a time when a woman takes a cold look at her partner and asks herself whether this is the man she wants to father her children. I walk over to the mirror. I do not see, in the rather shambling figure with the Breeze sloping shoulders reflected there, a likely paterfamilias.

But then I don't hold myself out as promising fatherly material. Although, at the beginning, we toyed like every new couple with the notion of a baby and tried out names for fantastical offspring, I've since made my position clear: I'm not bringing another soul into this world, not if I can help it. As far as I'm concerned, the Breezes have reached the end of the line. I said so in terms only three months ago: this is where the Breezes get off.

‘But why?' Angela said. ‘Why, my darling?'

We were seated at that table there and had just finished eating. I pushed at my empty plate and picked up my glass of red wine. ‘It's not justifiable,' I said. ‘When you look at what's going on, when you consider how, how, you know, how …' My voice broke. I speechlessly waved my hand and drank a mouthful of wine. ‘I don't know, Angie, bringing some poor defenceless kid into the world just so that we could have something to do with our lives …' I looked into the blues of her eyes. ‘I just don't think I'm cut out for it,' I said. ‘So many
things can go wrong. I mean, look at Pa. Look at what he goes through. I just couldn't take it.'

‘Johnny, he's happy. You could do a lot worse than have what your father has.'

‘That's what worries me.'

She filled my glass. ‘But without a family, what have you got?' There was affectionate tolerance in her face as she humoured me.

I said, ‘You've got a clear conscience, because you haven't inflicted life on anybody.'

She saw I was serious and came over and sat on my lap, her left arm hooked around my neck, her lips brushing lightly against my brow. ‘Really, Johnny? Is that how you really feel?'

I nodded. I was holding her tightly by the waist, my hand against her skin beneath her blouse. Her skin is always so warm.

‘But things aren't really that bad, are they? Hmm?' She kissed the corner of my mouth. ‘Don't look so glum. Come on, cheer up, you're making me feel sad.' I stayed seated, holding her, drawing strength from her heat.

She said, ‘Johnny, it's not good. It's not good.'

Like a deer emerging from forest into a space of light, a truth enters a mental clearing: there is no way that Angela will ever become a Breeze.

I crush out my cigarette and go to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water. Then I remain standing there like a man recovering from a run, both hands pushing against the edge of the work surface, head down, shoulders hunched.

I go to the lavatory. I wash my hands. I find myself back in the empty living-room.

When I telephoned her at work on Friday, I didn't press her for a timetable of her movements this weekend. I wasn't going to ask her to account for her activities – why should I? Angela would go her way and I would go mine, and we would meet up at her flat at nine o'clock.

So why isn't she here?

She could, I suppose, be working. This past fortnight has seen her going flat-out on one of her projects – don't ask me which one – and in fact I haven't laid eyes on her for a week.
Every time I have rung her at the office to fix something up, an obstacle has arisen.

‘I don't think so, darling, not tonight. I'm working late.'

‘OK,' I say. ‘How about tomorrow night?'

‘Darling, I'm working tomorrow night, too. I'm not sure when I'll be back. And I just wouldn't be any fun, I'd just come home and flop out.'

I swallow my disappointment. I cannot bring myself to say anything. These are not easy times and I need her. I need every hand on deck.

Angela detects my upset. ‘How's work going?' she says.

‘OK,' I say shortly. ‘Same as ever.' There is a silence as I compose myself. Then I say, ‘Well, then, how about …'

She interrupts me. ‘I've got to go now,' she says in the flat voice she uses when someone comes into her office. ‘Speak to you later, OK?'

That is how it has been all week.

She could be seeing someone else. At this very moment she could be seeing another man.

No. There is no way that she would ever two-time me. Not Angela. If there's one person in the world I can bank on not to let me down, it's her. I
know
her: she's not the type to cheat. She's open and straightforward. Any time that there has been a problem, she has come straight out with it.

But maybe she has changed. Maybe she has hardened, like her body. This year, thanks to her work-outs at the fitness club, Angela's physique, like land visited by a glacier, has been smoothened, transformed from soft bumpy terrain into an unfamiliar plain of muscle. Normally, of course, this would be cause for erotic celebration and renewal; but there's something aloof about that revamped body – the taut, independent stomach, the unmalleable buttocks, the tense, untrembling thighs – which makes me nervous. That body is under new management, and I'm not the reason why.