‘Face it? The only thing you ever face are those fucking files you’re always reading.’
A silence fell.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said eventually. ‘I don’t know why I said that. I’m sorry.’
Angela went back to organizing her papers. ‘John, don’t worry,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I can understand. You’ve lost your mother.’
I shouted, ‘This has nothing to do with my mother.’
She came to me. I was trembling. She came over to me and held me in a tight, continuing hug. I was scared, but I didn’t say anything. I know, she said. She kept squeezing me. I still didn’t say anything, but nevertheless Angela said, I know.
9
I miss her. I wish she were here right now.
We’d be lying down together on the sofa with a blanket pulled over us. We’d be lying there thankful for each other’s simple existence. That’s not sentimentality, that’s a fact. Or we would be passing the time in some other way – joking around with cards, maybe, or working out a crossword. Something simple. Over there on the table, for example, is the one-thousand-piece jigsaw it took us a fortnight to finish. That scene from New England in the fall has lain there for a year, serving as a table mat. Angela did the sky, assiduously fitting the pale blue pieces at the top and the marginally less pale blues below, whereas I concentrated on the trees, thousands of fiendishly jumbled golds and reds. Then there was the toughest part, which we did together, the ground covered with fallen leaves, leaves of every possible kind of yellow.
Maybe I should get us another jigsaw. Yes, I think that’s what I’ll do. I’ll go out tomorrow and get us another one, a real monster with nothing but sky and sky-reflecting water. It’s time we did another one.
Apart from anything else, it’ll do me good. That’s just what I need after all that time in the cellar, some kind of occupational therapy. I’ve been going bananas down there. I’ve killed the best part of the last month manipulating a board known as the Master Maze, spending hours dribbling a small silver ball through a labyrinth punctured by one hundred holes. I became hooked, and even once I mastered the technique of effortlessly reaching the safety zone at the centre of the board, I kept playing like a moron, setting myself the goal of reversing the ball from the maze’s heart right back to the starting point.
That hasn’t been the worst of it. There was that period when, still clammy from the fear of the night before, I dedicated a large part of the day to obsessively quantifying my remaining lifetime. Pa was my yardstick. Thus I would take his age, fifty-six, and calculate that there were still thirty years before I reached it. Thirty years, I reminded myself, was four years more than the entirety of my life to date. That wasn’t too bad, was it? But then I would work out that, aged twenty-six, probably a third of my life had already passed, and that in ten years’ time – ten years being a mere five-thirteenths of my life already lived, being merely the years that had flicked past since the time I was sixteen years old, a time which felt like yesterday! – I would probably have used up half of my total existence allotment! In just ten years from now! I also realized that my age was catching up with Pa’s in terms of the latter’s divisibility by the former: whereas, not so long ago, at the age of twenty, I had been a mere two-fifths of my father’s age, four years hence I would be only half as young as him. And then this question arose: what about Pa? How long did old Pa have to go – before he was under the ground, alone and cold?
Pa! My Pa!
It’s not right. I can just see him, innocently sweating in the garden in his V-neck pullover and his beige self-belt trousers. ‘I wonder what she’s up to now,’ he is saying. He is hoeing the soil where the rose-bushes are planted. ‘This is what she loved to do when she could get a minute to herself, away from you kids. You were a handful, I can tell you.’ He sinks the hoe into the ground and turns the earth. Worms appear. ‘This was hers. This was where she found herself, when she worked the garden. And I mean work. Those weeds didn’t stand a chance once she’d pulled her boots on, and her hat (remember her hat?). It was a massacre.’ He picks up a pair of old shears and snaps at the border of the lawn. His breath is short. ‘If she could see the garden now …’ He rises from his stoop and points at a bush with the shears. ‘See that? Your mother planted that.’ Then he looks upwards in the mild spring sunshine. ‘I’ll bet you anything she’s looking down and wishing she could be here.’ He sweeps his eyes around the garden, then suddenly kneels by a patch of sprouting grass he has spotted. ‘I’d better take care of this,’ he says, clacking the shears, ‘or she’ll give me hell.’
I thank my stars that this is one area where he and I definitely differ: death. Just about the one worry he does not have is that of meeting his Maker. For Pa that phrase is literal – he really does believe that when he dies he will, God permitting, encounter the Man Upstairs Himself. In his belief, not only will he meet up with the Lord, but he will also run into his parents, his old buddies and, best of all, Ma. Pa looks forward to the time he will be reunited with his wife and his marriage will resume from where it left off and these years of separation will come to an end. He anticipates that day with the certainty of a man in the night anticipating the dawn. Which is great; it’s wonderful he has this consolation. The snag is that, however talented he may be at scheduling railway timetables and fixing points failures, Eugene Breeze is not the country’s foremost theologian.
I discovered this early on, in the course of my preparation for my first communion. One Sunday, due to the absence of the regular teacher, Pa volunteered to take the CCD class I attended after each mass and to undertake our sacramental instruction for that day. The subject under discussion, I remember, was the parable of the house built on rock and the house built on sand. The illustrated children’s booklet showed it all. Two men decided to build houses for themselves. The first man – a hippie with smooth cheeks and long, curling hair – quickly put up a rickety shack on the beach which rested precariously on stilts. While the hippie strung up bring lights on his bamboo balcony and partied the nights away, the second man – a serious fellow with a dark beard and a steady gaze – unceasingly swung a pickaxe on an unpromising pile of rock, digging foundations and laying bricks until, slowly but surely, a sturdy detached home took shape there. So there you had it, one house built on sand and the other on rock, and even the class dunce knew what was going to happen next. We turned the page and, sure enough, up blew a storm, up curled a giant angry blue wave and down went the beach-house.
‘What do we learn from this?’ Pa asked us.
There was a silence. We knew that this was a parable and therefore that the story was not about what it seemed to be about, namely the importance of location and materials in the construction of houses. But that was all we knew. Also, I think that the story had frightened us a little bit. The last drawing showed the hippie lying on the beach next to his wrecked house, and we could not tell if he had pulled through or not. Eventually a seven-year-old arm went up. ‘You have to do things properly,’ someone said.
‘That’s right,’ Pa said encouragingly. He waited a while longer for another interpretation, tossing a piece of chalk in his hand. Then he said, ‘But let me tell you something else this story says. It says that if you believe in God, God will be like a rock in your life. He’ll always be there with you.’
This was met with another silence. Then a girl said, ‘But why shouldn’t we believe in God?’
This only threw Pa for a moment. ‘Well, Deirdre, some people don’t believe in God. But they’re wrong, because God is real. He sent Jesus, his only son, down to the world to show us how much he loved us.’
‘What about people who don’t believe in God, like the savages?’ Deirdre said. ‘Do they go to hell?’
Pa smiled. ‘No, God looks after them as well. God loves the whole world.’
Then Deirdre said what we were all thinking. ‘I don’t understand. What about him?’ She jabbed her finger at the unconscious figure stretched out on the beach.
This question clean-bowled Pa. I remember him mumbling something, but whatever he said was not an answer, and to this day the problem of evil has Pa defeated; thus whenever news of suffering innocents hits our screens, he looks on in a distressed confusion, muttering to himself. There but for the grace of God go we, I hear him whispering as we watch footage of an earthquake in central India where over a hundred thousand people dreamlessly lie in the rubble of their homes. This, remember, from a man fully insured against Acts of God.
To be fair, I do not blame Pa for his failure to crack these puzzles. Why should he have a watertight theory of everything? After all, who the hell is he? Just another human being who gets up in the morning and does his best to get through the day without mishap. Like everybody else, he leaves the business of ontological breakthroughs to the specialists, relying on any developments to filter down through the usual channels. Good news travels. Look at the Gospel. A few fishermen – correction, a few writers who borrowed their names – record pure hearsay concerning a long-gone woodworker and before you know it, on the strength of evidence that wouldn’t stand up a second in any half-decent court, the whole world has latched on to it. Even now, two thousand years later, a huge infrastructure is still in place to broadcast these same glad, unreal tidings. You can’t turn a corner in Rockport without running into a church. So who can blame Pa for falling into line on religion and leaving the fine detail of it to the experts?
The problem, though, comes when you actually scrutinize these experts in action. Just the other day, for example, I came across a theological debate in the newspaper which was literally a scandal – a stumbling-block to faith.
The subject of the argument was the efficacy of prayer. The first writer, an Anglican bishop I believe, stated that prayer had no power to alter the relationship between the beneficiary of the prayer and the real world. It did, however, strengthen the relationship between the worshipper and the Lord. Thus praying for the success of your child in his or her exams would confer a spiritual benefit upon you, but would not help your child. The Lord did not give preferential treatment to examinees lucky enough to have people requesting His intercession.
This theory, with its implicit admission that God is at best a concerned bystander, was depressing enough, but at least it made sense. The next theory – by a Roman Catholic bishop, a leader of my own church – was not merely disheartening, it was ludicrous. He said this: that a prayer for good exam results would be efficacious even if you were standing there with the results letter unopened in your hand. The reasoning: that since the Lord’s omniscience extended to a knowledge of the future, He would have known about your last-minute, too-late prayer in advance and would therefore have interceded before the prayer was made!
What really got me down was the glee with which the prelate expounded this exquisite absurdity. It was clear, from the note of exclamation and grinning triumph upon which his argument ended, that he felt it possessed an ingenuity and logic that made it truly irresistible. Even now I can see the bishop at his desk, licking the envelope addressed to the newspaper with a long, satisfied application of the tongue. That is that, he thinks. My good deed for the day.
When I think of Merv, the poor fucker! And these are the clowns we’re supposed to go to for guidance!
Suddenly everything swerves, and without warning I find myself recalling an afternoon many years ago when Pa and I sat before the television watching the live broadcast of Rockport United versus Clonville in the replay of the semifinals of the FA Cup. The red United shirts are swarming forward towards the Clonville goal as the team searches for an equalizer, and in the stands fluid crowds surge and eddy like sea water trapped in a creek, the fans pouring through the crush-barriers in red and white currents each time the team comes close to scoring and then sucking back up the terraces in the aftermath of the near-miss. One-nil down and ten minutes to go! My father and I are transfixed by that game and when the sound of descending feet comes from the staircase we do not look up – how can we, when at that exact moment Mickey Lazarus is swinging over a deep cross to the leaping figure of Dean? Then, just as the header skims the bar, there is the noise of the front door shutting quietly, a click of locks, and though Pa looks up momentarily to see who it is, his attention is drawn straight back to the television, to the action replay of that last attack. There is the move all over again, Lazarus jinking left and then jinking right and then striking that high, floating ball one more time.
‘He was pushed!’ I shout. ‘That should have been a penalty! Pa, Dean was fouled when he went for the ball!’
We hear the distant slam of a door, a car door, and Pa gets to his feet and goes to the window, all the time keeping an eye on the television, where for a last, agonizing time, Peter Dean and his marker are slowly rising together at the far post. An engine starts in the street, and just as Pa goes to open the curtains to look outside, another ooh rips out from the turned-up soundbox of the TV and he spins round just in time to catch Seamus Loasby, the legendary United centre forward, clean through with no one to beat but the keeper, scoop the ball over the bar and into the crowd, and just in time to miss waving goodbye to his wife as she drives off into town for the last time.
That moment, which came only months after Pa’s best-ever day, Christmas Day, 1979, was probably the worst in Pa’s life. It was at that moment that United blew their last chance of a big trophy; and it was at that moment, at twenty-five minutes to five on Wednesday, 16 April 1980, that Ma was lost for good. All of this on a day my father was wearing his lucky underpants.
It could happen to me. I could lose Angela just as my father lost my mother. Not literally; not lightning striking twice. But any day Angela could be gone, for good.
10
My God, she’s two and a half hours late.
Anything could have happened to her. Anything.
Right that’s it.
I snatch up my coat and grab the keys. Enough is enough. It’s time to take matters into my own hands. It’s time for action.
I catch sight of myself in the mirror. There I am, standing in the middle of the room in my coat. What do I think I’m doing? Am I going to run around the streets looking for her, asking passers-by whether they’ve seen a woman with long dark hair and blue eyes? Am I going to shout her name down alleyways? Whistle? This is Angela we’re talking about, not Trusty.
I pocket the keys. I have to be calm, calm and methodical. I have to think. Where is she most likely to be?
I go to the telephone and punch some numbers.
No answer at her parents’ home.
Her office. I’ll ring up her office.
I dial the number, panting slightly.
No reply. Nobody at the switchboard.
I ring again, to make sure.
Still no reply.
Damn. Damn.
I know: I’ll telephone the flat. It’s a long shot, but maybe Rosie will be able to tell me something. Maybe she’ll have received a message. You never know.
Rosie picks up the telephone immediately, with a gasped ‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ I say. She is silent – and I remember that Steve, too, is absent.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ Rosie says. ‘He’s been gone for hours.’
I move the telephone to my mouth, but I say nothing. This is not the moment to ask about Angela.
‘I’m going to kill him when he gets back,’ Rosie swears. ‘I’m going to … I’m going to …’
She abandons the sentence, her vocabulary of vengeance failing her, but she’s said enough to make me nervous. With her track record – the smashed plates, the hurled dictionaries, the slapped faces, the upturned tables – Rosie’s threats of violence have a certain credibility. Look at what happened on Tuesday night. I was trying to watch television when I became aware that a fight was going on, which means that I became aware of Rosie shouting at Steve. I turned up the sound of the TV and tried to ignore it. This didn’t work, because whatever the fracas was a
bout, it involved a lot of running in and out of the room and a lot of slamming of doors. As far as I could make out, the altercation was following the usual pattern: initial bust-up in the sitting-room; muffled reconciliations in the bedroom; twenty-minute silence; half-time break as Steve padded out to make two cups of tea; fresh losses of temper; raised voices; and another showdown in front of me in the sitting-room. The same old farce they went through, and put me through, night after night.
Eventually there arrived a lengthy lull and it seemed as if at last things had been patched up. Steve emerged from the bedroom to go to the lavatory and Rosie came into the room and asked for a cigarette. She stood there for a moment, smoking calmly, and did not react when the flushing sound came and went from the bathroom. Steve returned, still tucking his shirt into his trousers. He gave me an apologetic grin. Rosie swivelled and silently, with a full swing of the leg, brought the toe of her shoe hard against his shin. The crack of the bone sounded above the volume of the television. Crying out, Steve grabbed his injured leg and took three or four sidewards hops on the other leg, trying to keep his balance. He failed. He fell over, the back of his head catching the door-edge with another crack. Before I could react, Rosie was standing over him kicking him again and again while he lay curled on the ground moaning, grunting like a tennis player bashing a groundstroke each time she made contact with her foot.
‘Rosie! For fuck’s sake!’ I shouted.
I jumped up to stop her but by this time she was already down on her knees next to Steve and sobbing ashamedly, Sorry, sorry, sorry …
Christ, it makes me sweat just thinking about it. So I say into the telephone, ‘Rosie, calm down, all right? Don’t get angry with him. He’s just gone out, that’s all. He’ll be back.’
But then my anxiety about Rosie’s death threats wanes a little, because I remember that for a long, long time now there has been a chasm between Rosie’s promised actions and her actual ones. I’m going to … How many times have we heard that phrase from her over the years? ‘I’m going to quit that job tomorrow,’ she vows almost every time she returns from a hard day at work. ‘I’m going to go to Mrs Freely and hand in my notice.’ Her cigarette catches fire, the lighter lid snaps down hard beneath her thumb, the flame is engulfed. ‘I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. It’s all so disgusting, everything about it makes me feel sick – the passengers, the food, the pilots, the stewards, the girls, these clothes…’ She makes a gesture of revulsion at her uniform. ‘One of these days I’m going to … I’m going to …’ She sucks at her cigarette, plotting. ‘Yes, I’ll show them.’
The Breezes Page 9
