The Breezes. Joseph O’Neill

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СКАЧАТЬ security at the flat I share with my sister Rosie, which has double-glazed windows which explode when punctured, an impenetrable front door and a film of burglar-proof plastic on every pane of glass. Besides, even if some crook did break in, his pickings would not be rich. Whatever else our flat might be, it is no Aladdin’s cave. But I went along with Pa because I had learned that once he is gripped by a sense of imperilment in respect of his family – which is often – he will not be deflected. This is why we Breezes are insured against every imaginable risk. Pa has taken out a comprehensive family protection package that defends the three of us against the consequences of fire, theft, death, sickness and personal injury, of litigation, lock-outs, flooding, explosions, automobile collisions and war, of aviation mishaps, professional negligence, spatial fall-out, forgery, business interruptions and acts of God. You name it, we’re indemnified against it.

      My father’s precautions do not end there. In order to guard against the tax detriments of his own death, he has ploughed as much cash as he can into an accumulation and maintenance fund in his children’s names and he has transferred to me, as a nominal gift, the ownership of the flat we live in. ‘In case I die within the next seven years,’ he said. I told him he was crazy. ‘What are you talking about? Seven years? You’re never going to die in the next seven years,’ I said. I put my hand on the curve of his shoulder, rounded like a rock worn smooth by years of water. ‘A fit man like yourself? Why should you?’

      ‘I could go any minute,’ he said, clicking his fingers. ‘Just like that.’ He gave me a look. ‘What are you looking so shocked about? That’s how it is, son, here today and gone tomorrow, and there’s no point in fighting it.’

      One reason that Pa so often feels us to be threatened is that he believes that any adversity which befalls someone else is the prognostic of a Breeze adversity. This explained his present concern: having read about an unpleasant burglary in the neighbourhood (a case where the intruders had thrown acid in the face of the elderly woman who opened the door, blinding her), he was determined to take extra measures to ensure our safety.

      ‘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.

       2

      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 СКАЧАТЬ