The Breezes

by Joseph O'Neill

  I drove on through the familiar bends of the road home, amazed at how swiftly my father had recovered from the morning’s degradations. Just twenty minutes ago he had been spat in the face and insulted, and less than an hour before that he had been sexually assaulted by a terrier and publicly reviled. Yet here he was again, restored to enthusiasm. Was there no limit to his resilience?

  It could only be that this ability to recuperate and rally was a product of Pa’s faithfulness. Pa is the most faithful person I know. There is no thing or person which he does not believe in. God and the life hereafter, the future well-being of his children, the success of his football team, the loyalty of his dog, the reliability of Whelan, the potential of Steve, the value of employment, the upturn in the housing market: come what may, Pa has been absolutely trusting and hopeful in respect of all of these glassy entities. No matter how often and violently they shatter on the floor and how irreparable their fragmentation, by a mystery of fidelity the smithereens are always reconstituted in Pa’s mind. But where does this credulous optimism come from? Is it a necessary biological witlessness, a natural reality-blocker secreted by some gland in the brain? Or does it arrive from some occult, immaterial source?

  I enjoyed my father’s crazy hopefulness while it lasted, because it would, of course, be followed by a crazy nervous fearfulness that his hopes would be dashed, and I knew that before long the confidence would drain from him and he would be transformed into a wreck barely able to remain in the same room as the televised football match, that he would stand rooted at the doorway to the kitchen, a man appalled and mesmerized by a scene of horror, half watching the action through the fingers clasping his white face as the opposition advanced on the United goal like zombies from a nightmare …

  I pulled up in front of the house. Although we were in a hurry, Pa remained seated for a moment and breathed, as he often does when he arrives at his front door, Home sweet home. I think that he can be forgiven this sentimentalism. That building – a detached three-storeyed suburban house with a garden, green-railed balconies at the front and back, a pear tree, two lilac trees, double garage, clambering roses and four bedrooms – has been the asylum of the Breezes for almost twenty years.

  We walked up the path to the front door, which I unlocked and pushed open. Then we saw it: a pile of shit on the floor at the bottom of the staircase. We looked at each other: Trusty.

  I said heavily, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll fix it. You go on upstairs and have your bath.’

  Before I went to fetch the tissues, scrubber and carpet shampoo, I went to the sitting-room to switch on the television. I did not want to risk missing a minute of the game. I picked up the remote control, aimed it at the corner of the room, and punched the button.

  Nothing happened. The television was not there. I realized instantly, even before I noticed that the curtains were billowing in the broken-open french windows, that there had been a burglary. I wiped my face with my hand. Then I called upstairs. ‘Pa, can you come down?’

  ‘What?’ he asked nervously as he descended the stairs in his socks and track suit. ‘What’s the matter?’

  I said nothing. I just led him into the living-room.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Pa said. ‘Where’s the TV? Where’s the CD?’ He turned around on the spot. ‘But that’s impossible,’ he said. ‘There’s a safety catch on those windows. Whelan put it there himself. And there’s an alarm – why isn’t the alarm ringing?’

  He walked over to the french windows and tried to drag them shut, but the hinges had been broken. The draught kept pouring through and the living-room fluttered like a field. ‘I just don’t understand this,’ Pa said. ‘What about Trusty? How could she let this happen? Where is she, anyway?’

  There was a silence as we stood there trying to take things in.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I guess we can forget about watching the game.’

  Pa was not listening. He was moving his palm over the vacant mantelpiece in a slow caress. He raised his hand to his face and blankly regarded his powdery fingertips. The photographs. The one-and-only, silver-framed family photographs had been removed. The famous honeymoon picture; the last remaining picture of my father’s mother, a young woman in the 1920s leaning confidently against a car upon which the photographer, his head under the hood of his camera, has cast his shadow; long-haired Rosie at her first communion; me, a ten-year-old in my Rovers kit, drinking juice during the half-time break with my team-mates; and several others that I can’t bring back. Holiday snapshots, most of them, nothing special when they were up there. The usual lucky moments captured in the usual way.

  Pa sat down wordlessly. Upstairs, the falling bathwater thundered against enamel.

  I went up and turned off the taps. When I returned downstairs, he was still sitting, looking dumbly ahead of him. ‘Pa,’ I said. I touched him on the shoulder. ‘Your bath’s ready.’

  He got to his feet. He slowly walked up the stairs. He went into his bedroom and closed the door behind him.

  I got on to the telephone and rang the police.

  ‘I suppose we’d better send somebody over,’ the switchboard operator said. ‘We’ll have someone there within half an hour.’

  ‘Should I touch anything?’ I said.

  The officer sighed. ‘Look, if you want us to carry out a forensic examination and the rest of it, then I suppose you should leave things as they are. But frankly, Mr Breeze …’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘I mean, there are so many break-ins these days,’ he said apologetically. ‘Besides, you don’t really want us camped in your house for hours, do you?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  The first thing to do was clear up Trusty’s mess. But where was Trusty? Outside, most probably, looking for some action. Trusty was on heat, and although she is only two years old, when she is on heat, she’s hot. If you even half open a window or a door she will be through it like a shot, frenzied by her lust. There are many evenings which Pa and I have spent combing the neighbourhood gardens where that dog engages in her trysts, whistling and calling her name in the moonlight: Trusty! Trusty! And when we do finally spy her, she snarls furiously and makes another dash for it through the hedges. The scenario of Trusty’s disappearance was therefore obvious: instead of recognizing the intruder for the enemy he was, she had welcomed him as a rescuer and had bolted through the french windows he had cracked open. So much for the BEWARE OF THE DOG sign which Pa had posted at the front and back of the house.

  I have my theory as to why Trusty has turned out this way. At the time of her very first period in heat, Pa and I took her for a walk in the field near the house. Trusty was still young and innocent and had barely learned to walk without treading on her long ears. So there she was, hopping over the grassy earth with her nose to the ground, eagerly inhaling the novel smells, when a large muscular animal, an Alsatian, ran up to her and fucked her without hesitation. Then it ran off.

  We had all been helpless – Pa, Trusty and I. Pa had a go at pulling off the Alsatian by the collar, I shouted and waved and threw sticks, Trusty wriggled and fought. But the police dog stuck to its guns and we were forced to watch as Trusty, a dazed look in her beseeching, unconsenting brown eyes, was raped by a beast twice her size. I think that this shocking experience, which should have turned Trusty off sex altogether, probably had the opposite effect. I think that it turned her into the libidinist that she is.

  Once I had tidied the living-room there was nothing for it but to clean up in the hallway. I retrieved the necessary equipment from the broom cupboard and approached the pile of excrement, which for some reason looked odd. I scraped it up quickly, leaving only a faint stain on the floor. Just as I was getting out the carpet shampoo, the door rang: the cops.

  I opened the door to two uniformed constables, a man and a woman. The woman was the senior of the two. She looked around and asked the questions while her colleague wrote down my replies in his notebo
ok. ‘This stuff that’s been stolen,’ she said, ‘is it yours? Or is it your dad’s?’ She wandered over to the french windows.

  ‘My father’s,’ I said.

  ‘Is he in?’

  ‘He’s upstairs,’ I said. ‘Up in his bedroom.’ (This wasn’t like him – he normally would have been the first to greet the forces of law and order.)

  ‘Could we have a word with him?’ the policewoman asked, peering out into the garden. ‘We have to take a statement.’

  I’ll get him, I said, and ran up.

  But Pa was not in his bedroom. I went out on to the landing and said, ‘Pa?’ and there was no reply; but then, as I quietened, I heard a snuffling noise from the third floor. I went up the stairs. ‘Pa?’

  I stood still. There it was again: snuff, sniff, snuff. I pushed open the door to Rosie’s old bedroom – the bedroom with the big skylight and the blue-flowered wallpaper and the piles of children’s books.

  It was him all right. He was standing in the no man’s land between the bed and the wall, his head turned away towards the corner of the room. He was still in his track suit. On the bed was an old, torn bin-liner and a scattering of photographs. As Pa drew his sleeve across his nose he sniffed again, and the daylight caught his face and I saw that his eyes were more red and glistening and swollen than ever.

  I went across to the bed, to the photographs. These were the leftovers – the last pictorial records of the Breezes in our possession. They were also the worst ones. The clear, lovely pictures – of my mother holding the hands of her two children one snowy winter, of summer picnics, of my parents at the altar – had been taken by Rosie just before she went to university and collected in a marvellous album. Then Rosie, in the way that she mislays all of the gold rings and heirlooms that she is given, lost the album. No one blamed her, but for months afterwards she would burst into tears of bereavement at the thought of those essential images being gone for ever. Now that Pa’s silver-framed photos had gone, those snapshots on Rosie’s old bed were, apart from our memories, the remaining threads to the family’s past. I took a look at them. There was only one picture left of my mother: seated on a patio somewhere – at a friend’s house, I supposed; I did not recognize the background – my mother’s face is plunged into darkness, the photographer (Pa, no doubt) having made the mistake of shooting into sunlight. All you can make out of her is the curled outline of a 1960s haircut and the silhouetted knees, crossed; apart from a chin and nose which show as flecks in the gloom, she is faceless.

  I checked the bin-liner once more, but no, that was all that remained of Ma. There were no other pictures of her.

  I put the photos back into the bin-liner and touched his shoulder. ‘Pa,’ I said. ‘Pa, the police are downstairs,’ I said.

  He followed me down.

  The policewoman asked him the same questions she had asked me. He replied in a toneless voice, after lengthy pauses, looking stupidly into space. Meanwhile, the other policeman had started sniffing around – literally. His nostrils were twitching, as if he had caught the whiff of something.

  ‘Thank you very much, Mr Breeze,’ the policewoman said gently. ‘Your father’s still in a state of shock,’ she said to me.

  The policeman whispered something in her ear. In response, she too began breathing in sharply.

  ‘It’s the dog,’ I said with embarrassment. I pointed to the stain in the hallway. ‘We have a dog. I haven’t had time to clean all of it up yet.’

  They looked at each other, then examined the traces ingrained in the carpet. Then they looked at each other again.

  ‘You sure, sir?’ the policewoman asked. ‘You sure it’s the dog?’

  ‘Well, yes. I mean, what else …’

  ‘You see, sir,’ the policewoman said, looking me in the eye for the first time, ‘it’s, well, it’s becoming something of a thing for burglars to, well, defecate in the house they’ve robbed. It’s like their signature.’

  Their signature?

  The policeman, meanwhile, kneeled down and snipped a few of the darkened threads and placed them in a little plastic bag. ‘Exhibit A,’ he said.

  I washed the carpet as soon as they left. Then I ran Pa a fresh bath and made sure he undressed and got into it. I went to the kitchen and made us some sandwiches and tea. When, quarter of an hour later, Pa, an in-and-out bather, had not yet come down, I went up to see what was going on.

  He was still in the bath, lying hip-deep in the shallow, lukewarm water, his torso completely dry. He did not turn when I came in.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said.

  He turned his eyes – one pointed at me, one at the shower-curtain – and blinked: in the affirmative, I thought.

  ‘I’ve made some tea and sandwiches,’ I said.

  He stirred, his knees sploshily displacing water, but he did not get up. The movement sent red and green and white trails of dissolved soap smoking up through the bathwater. Pa has this habit of gumming together the slivers of used soap into a multicoloured bar, like an Italian ice-cream.

  He raised his elbows and took hold of the rim of the tub, perfect, shiny particles of water starrily clustered on the silver and black hairs of his armpits. Then he let go and slid back down the slope of the tub, the skin of his bottom making a squeak.

  ‘Come on,’ I said softly, my hands under his armpits, smelling for the first time in a long time the tang of my father. I hauled up his dripping, aged form – the tender pectorals, the diminished penis, the gleaming, brittle shinbones. It was palpable, the terrible vicinity of death.

  I dropped a large towel over his shoulders. ‘You go on ahead,’ I said.

  I pulled the plug and the water began to sluice away, stranding green and red nuggets of soap on the white floor of the bath.

  8

  If Whelan, of Whelan Lock & Key, 24-hour Service, had done his job properly – if he had repaid the faith which Pa had shown in him – that burglary would probably never have taken place. All it needed was a half-decent lock on those french windows and an alarm that actually worked. But Whelan messed up. It doesn’t surprise me. The man is hopeless. For seven days now I have been imploring him on the phone to come round and fit new locks on the front door of the flat, and for seven days – and in spite of three appointments – he has failed to show. The last time I spoke to him was on Friday, immediately after Pa’s anxious call. Although Whelan had let me down twice already, I decided to have another crack at it. Third time lucky, I figured. Besides, I wanted an explanation for his conduct.

  ‘Mr Whelan, I waited for you all morning yesterday,’ I said.

  ‘Yesterday morning, was it?’ Whelan enquired. There was genuine curiosity in his voice.

  ‘We’d made an appointment,’ I said.

  ‘Number 47, was it?’

  It was. I did not say anything.

  ‘I remember now,’ Whelan said. ‘It’s all coming back to me now. Yes, that’s right. I came round in the afternoon, but there was no reply when I rang. Yes, I remember now,’ Whelan said.

  ‘Mr Whelan,’ I said tiredly, ‘I was in all afternoon.’

  Whelan said, ‘Were you? Well, isn’t that a strange thing?’

  Desperately, I said, ‘How about this afternoon? Can you come this afternoon?’

  Whelan sucked in air. ‘This afternoon is hard, Mr Breeze. Very hard. It would have to be tomorrow, Saturday. It would have to be Saturday.’

  I had to get the door fixed. Saturday, I agreed. Ten o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll be there, Mr Breeze,’ Whelan guaranteed. ‘Count on it.’

  Today is Sunday. Still no sign of Whelan.

  Yesterday morning, while waiting for that joker, I forced myself to go down into the basement workshop. As usual, it was so gloomy that I had to switch on the light, weakly diffused by a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. I sat down on a box and lit a cigarette and stared at the lifeless shapes of my works in progress. This lasted about a minute. Then I looked up at the barred, dirt-smudged window: dustbins and,
looming behind and blotting out the sky, the hedge, dark with new leaves. I groggily bolted back upstairs.

  I went to the kitchen and made myself a double-strength cup of coffee. I flicked another cigarette out of the packet. A thin sweat started filming my upper lip. Just a month previously, this telephone conversation had taken place with the gallery owner.

  ‘How’s it going, John?’ Simon Devonshire said.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Just great.’

  ‘So, when do we get to see your stuff? We’re all very excited, you know.’

  ‘You’ll get it soon,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all under control.’

  Devonshire laughed and said, ‘It had better be. I’d like the chairs within the next week or two. We need to photograph them for the catalogue.’

  The catalogue? ‘The catalogue?’

  ‘We’re going to have to have a meeting about that,’ Devonshire said, ‘to discuss the philosophy that underpins your work. People will want to know what they’re looking at.’

  ‘My philosophy.’ I swallowed. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

  Devonshire laughed again – as far as I could tell, Devonshire was always laughing. He said, ‘Don’t worry, John, we’ll think of something. Leave the theorizing to us. You just concentrate on finishing those pieces and we’ll look after the rest.’

  Then, two weeks later, we met for lunch. We sat on a grassy slope by a fountain in a small park in the city centre. I had made up my mind to break the news to him with these words: Simon, there’s something I have to tell you. I have no chairs. I’m sorry, I’ve tried, but there it is: it hasn’t worked out.

  It was a hot spring day, nineteen or twenty degrees, and Devonshire was elated. ‘Just look at that,’ he said, gesturing grandly at the sun. ‘And look at those bastards,’ he said, pointing at a brilliant gathering of trees in flower. ‘Extraordinary. Absolutely bloody extraordinary.’

  I dutifully looked at the magnolias. There was a forceful charm about Devonshire which made him difficult to resist. Although in his mid-forties and, as a gallery owner of real influence, possessed of a certain amount of absolute power, with his enthusiasm, straw-coloured hair and animated expression he still had an uncorrupted, boyish demeanour. His gold-buttoned blazer discarded on the grass and his cotton shirt flapping out of his jeans, he sat down insouciantly in the sunlight and with a groan of comfort unwrapped a smoked salmon sandwich. He took a giant bite and half of the sandwich disappeared. ‘So, Johnny, I take it that we can pick up the stools this afternoon.’