The Breezes

So there is something else for me not to worry about – the calamitous possibility of Pa being laid off tomorrow, the day that the management report comes out. Calamitous is not an exaggeration. My father without employment is simply unimaginable. His veneration of work is such that, whenever he picks up a newspaper, the first place he turns to, before even the sports pages, are the appointments pages.

‘Listen to this, son,’ he says, reading out an advertisement in a low, reverential voice. ‘And this,’ he says turning to another one, ‘just listen to this one.’ He holds up the sheets to the light in wonderment. ‘Would you believe it?’ he says. ‘Would you believe it?’

There he sits, his mouth open. And we are not concerned with especially desirable posts here, with company directorships or academic sinecures. No, we are concerned with ordinary vacancies, openings for sales engineers and area housing managers, for biomedical technicians and senior improvements officers. These are the jobs that enthral Pa.

It is almost inevitable, when he peruses the jobs pages, that he suddenly drops the paper, produces a pair of scissors and starts cutting away at the broadsheet. ‘Johnny,’ he says as he snips away, ‘Johnny, this is it. This is the one.’ He thrusts his handiwork at me and sits back to study my reaction.

SALES PEOPLE – Young progressive advertising company requires Sales People in all areas to carry out major expansion programme. Training and support will be provided, car with a telephone a prerequisite. Generous expense allowance plus commission.

‘Well? What do you think?’

‘Pa, Steve doesn’t have a car.’

He is thrown for a moment, but then he bounces right back. ‘That’s just a detail,’ he says boldly. ‘What’s a car? We can find Steve a car no problem. No,’ he says, waving the cutting like a winning lottery ticket, ‘this is just the job for Stephen. Look – it says he’ll get training and support. I’m telling you, that boy has it in him to do great things. It’s not too late. He’s just a young man, he has his whole life ahead of him. With a bit of help, who knows how far he’ll go?’ Pa tucks the cutting into his wallet. ‘I’ll send it to him straight away.’

I have been through this with my father many times before, so I do not say anything. The short point is that Steve is not a worker. He has not lifted a finger in the five years that I have known him and he is not about to change now. While his inner being may be a mystery, I do know Steve this well: if you offered him a salary of twenty thousand a month to do exactly what he liked, he would turn you down – it would sound too much like work. I have not reached this conclusion lightly. Like Pa, I used to pass on to Steve ads which I had seen in the newspapers. That’s right. I used to get the scissors out, too. Whenever I got wind of a cushy number, old Steve was the first to hear about it. But that strategy was like Steve himself: it didn’t work; and after what happened last time, I have sworn that I will never try it again.

Wanted, the advertisement said. Trustworthy house-sitter for period residence while owners go abroad for a month. Generous pay.

‘Steve,’ I said, ‘take a look at that. Now that’s what I call a job.’

Steve reached out from the sofa and looked at the newspaper for a whole minute. ‘Thanks, Johnny,’ he said. Then he carefully placed the paper on the floor.

I made a decision. I fetched a sheet of paper and typed out the application myself. ‘Sign here,’ I said to Steve.

‘God, thanks, John,’ Steve said as he wrote his name.

Then I posted the letter. I went to the post office, bought a stamp and personally mailed the fucker.

The reply came quickly. It was good news: Steve had been granted an interview on Thursday, at nine in the morning. Great, Steve said. Great stuff.

That Thursday morning I arose early – those were the days when I was still productive, back in September of last year. By eight-fifteen, though, Steve had not stirred from his bed: Rosie’s bed: the bed which Pa had shelled out for. When I opened the bedroom door, there he was, a mound under the duvet.

‘Wake up, Steve,’ I said, shaking him by the shoulder. ‘Wake up. You’ve got to go to your interview.’

He rolled over and stared at me with uncomprehending, unconscious eyes. Then he rolled over again and went back to sleep. There was nothing I could do to rouse him. I said to Rosie, Rosie, for God’s sake, tell him to get up. Tell him to go.

Rosie, who was busy getting ready for work, said, ‘Oh, forget it. He won’t do it, he’s useless.’ She put her head through the door and shouted, ‘You’re useless, aren’t you, Slug?’ Then suddenly she snatched up a handful of objects – lipsticks, hairbrushes, books – and started hurling them at him. ‘You just lie there and rot and vegetate and do nothing, you bastard! Get up!’ she screamed, tugging at the duvet. ‘Get up, you shit!’

‘Take it easy, Rosie,’ I said. ‘It’s all right, don’t worry about it.’

Rosie started weeping with anger and humiliation, the tears leaving tracks through her deep stewardess’s make-up. ‘He’s so …He’s just so …’

I said, ‘It’s OK, Rosie … Rosie, it’s all right.’ I led her out of the bedroom and up to the front door. ‘We’ll sort it out. Now you just go to work, all right?’

‘He’s such a bastard, Johnny,’ Rosie said, swallowing back mucus and cleaning her face. ‘He’s such a bastard.’ Then she put on her green hat and headed out into the street to the job she hates.

What a dope I was to allow myself to get into that situation – to allow myself to get involved with Steve like that.

Never again.

Pa, though, does not see it that way. Again and again is his motto. As far as he is concerned, where there is life there is hope, and in spite of everything he still believes that inside Steve there lie secret deposits of energy waiting to be tapped, gushers. Pa has got it wrong. Steve is not the North Sea or the Arabian peninsula. There are no oilfields in Steve.

5 (#ulink_3b736d25-6746-578f-85bc-98922945ba4a)

I have to be careful – careful of letting myself be sucked in by Rosie and Steve and their wretched problems which I can do nothing about. But I can’t stop it because I have to live with them; and I have to live with them because there’s nowhere else for me to go.

This may sound strange, but not long ago I believed that I had gone, that I had swum free from the dismal whirlpool of their lives and had hauled up here, with Angela. My clothes were in that cupboard, my toothbrush and razor were in that bathroom cabinet and my books and records were stacked on those shelves over there, indistinguishable from Angela’s. I spent nine nights out of ten here and the only reason I ever went back to the Breeze flat was because that’s where my studio was, in the basement. As far as I was concerned, I had flown the cage.

Then one day – this was about four months ago, in January –an electoral registration form arrived in the mail. I got out a biro and filled in the form. I wrote our names, Angela Flanagan and John Breeze, in the Names of Occupants box.

Angela laughed when she picked up the form that evening. ‘What’s this?’ She pointed at my name, then started laughing again.

I didn’t see what was so funny.

She came over and sat down next to me. She put an arm around my shoulders and gave me a soft, sympathetic kiss on the cheek, and then another. There was a silence as she continued to hold me close to her, her face brushing against mine, her light breath exhaled in sweet gusts. ‘Oh, Johnny,’ she said. I kept still, waiting for the retraction of that laughter, confirmation that this place was officially my home. It never came. She released me, kissed me one more time and went over to the table. She picked up a yellow highlighter, opened a fat ring binder and started reading, brightening the text with crisp stripes.

Ring binders. I’m sick of the sight of them. Towards the end of January, a messenger arrived with ten cardboard boxloads of the things – heavy, glossy purple files stamped with the Bear Elias logo.

‘It’s the Telecom privatization,’ Angela said excitedly as she tore the tape from the boxes. ‘There are over ten thousand documents. I’ve got to store them here because there simply isn’t the space in the office.’

‘Where are you going to put them? There’s no storage space here either.’

She ripped open a box, the sellotape tearing crudely away from the cardboard. ‘I thought that I might be able to use the cupboard.’

I said, ‘But that’s got my things in it.’

She said nothing.

‘But where will my stuff go?’ I said. ‘There’s nowhere else for me to put it.’

Angela said, ‘Well, I don’t know, my darling. I haven’t really thought about it. Maybe we could fix up a clothes rail or something. We’ll find the space somehow.’

But there was no space to be found, and we both knew it. There was nothing for it but to move my things out. ‘It’s only for the time being, my love,’ Angela said, hugging me as I packed up. ‘I’m not going to have these things here for ever.’

I didn’t make a scene. I packed my clothes and, in order to create more shelf-space, took away my books and music in the cardboard boxes in which the ring binders had arrived. The binders moved in, I moved out. It bothered me, but I knew that I’d be back before long. There was no way I was going to be displaced by chunks of paper.

They’re still here. In fact, there are more binders stored here than ever before.

The telephone rings.

It’s her. At long last.

‘Hello?’

‘John,’ Rosie says to me. ‘Listen, John – do you know where Steve is?’

A numb moment passes and I sigh, ‘Rosie.’