The Breezes

by Joseph O'Neill

  ‘Well, not quite,’ I said. I paused. ‘Simon, there’s something I have to tell you.’ I looked at the tips of my shoes.

  ‘What is it?’ he said, his mouth still full. ‘What’s the matter?’

  I thought I detected a note of personal concern in his voice. I raised my head to speak and looked him in the face. I had made a mistake. There was nothing solicitous in those eyes. There was only pure threat.

  Shocked, I fell momentarily silent; nevertheless, looking again at the ground, I forced out what I had to say.

  Devonshire said, ‘What do you mean, you won’t be ready for another two to three weeks? The show’s four weeks away. The catalogue needs to be ready next week.’

  I was silent. I made a feckless gesture with my hands.

  Crumpling wrapping paper in his fist, Devonshire stood up and sat on the ledge of the fountain. Momentarily he just regarded me, wiping his mouth with a paper tissue. Behind him, a team of rusty fishes spurted loops of glistening water into the air. Then he said, ‘One week, Johnny. That’s all I’m giving you.’ He stood up and turned his back to me and tilted up to the sun. ‘Otherwise, my boy, you’re going to compensate me for my loss. Do you understand?’

  I did not like the sound of that word – compensate.

  Devonshire turned unhurriedly and picked up his jacket. ‘One week,’ he said. ‘Don’t let yourself down, Johnny,’ he said.

  That week expired last Monday, the day when I left this message with his assistant: Tell Mr Devonshire the chairs will be ready by next Monday. Guaranteed.

  Next Monday is tomorrow; which is why, yesterday morning, after I had finished my coffee and cigarette, I forced myself down the stairs into the basement for a second time. There they were, in the gloom, the five unfinished stools I had started making six months ago – 5 Tripods, they were named. Superficially, they looked fine: five stools, each with wooden seats of a slightly different design, each supported by the same three curved metallic legs. But those legs were the problem. They were unbalanced – so unbalanced that the stools would not stand up. The moment you removed them from the supporting wall, that was it: crash, over they went, in a slow, certain topple. My blunder, of course, was that in my impetuosity I had assembled the chairs without first checking their stability. Stability I had taken for granted.

  My task was clear. I had to redesign the legs while nevertheless leaving the chairs’ present structure intact, since it was too late to start wholly afresh. Then I had to drive the chairs over to Devonshire’s. All this within forty-eight hours. That deadline was my trump card. I was counting on time to spur me to action.

  Using a model, I desperately experimented with the addition of a fourth leg – a wooden leg, it had to be, because I had run out of stainless steel. Not only did it look terrible, but the glue I used to secure the leg to the seat simply did not hold. Every time I tried to place a weight upon the seat, off came the leg. Never mind, Johnny, I said to myself after the third failure, try again. Stick at it. Persevere. Never say die. I cleaned the wood, reapplied the glue and pressed the parts together once more. I stayed frozen there for minutes, my face reddening with determination. This time it was going to work. This time …

  I gently released my grip. After giving the adhesive time to take, I turned the stool up and gingerly stood it on its four legs. So far so good. It stayed up. Then came the moment of truth. I took a thick cabinet-making manual and gently placed it on the seat. I waited. Nothing happened. The chair remained upright. It worked.

  I had done it. The stool may have been ugly, but it was a stool; it was better than nothing. All that remained was to affix this fourth leg to the actual chairs, and then I’d be home and dry. Blankly, I lit a cigarette. I couldn’t believe it. After so many fruitless months, the nightmare was over. The show would bomb, of course, but at least it would go on. From a legal point of view, if nothing else, I was in the clear.

  I heard a creaking noise. I turned around. It was the model chair, and like a foal doing its unsteady splits, it was slowly collapsing as the wooden leg gave way underneath it. With a thick report the book thudded to the ground, followed by the seat, with a crash. Shit, I shouted. Fucking, bloody, fucking shit.

  I flung my cigarette at the wall and heeled it to a crumbling butt. Sweating with anger, an idea occurred to me. I would cut the legs in half and use the extra metal tubing to provide a triangular lateral base. Yes, that was it! I’d chop the suckers in half! Let’s see how they’d like that! But just as I was poised to ignite the blue flame of the blowtorch, I envisaged the end product: crippled, squat, ugly seats that were neither one thing nor the other; stools that fell between two bloody stools. I removed my safety goggles and dropped the cutter. I looked up at the window’s dark rectangle and said out loud, That’s it. To hell with it. I give up.

  Strengthlessly, I sat down on the box again. The day of the exhibition, 16 May, was approaching with every passing second and there was nothing I could do about it. Inevitability had snared me, bagged and unstruggling. I was caught.

  And there is another irony – another twist apparent in retrospect: the very reason I started making chairs in the first place was precisely to evade this – the trap of certainty. It was not accountancy I wanted to escape from, it was the guaranteed future it offered. Even from where I stood, halfway through my traineeship, I could see the whole of the way ahead – a road without corners, straight and relentless as a highway through wheatfields, one that took you cleanly through bright and glassy distances, through exams, years in junior and middle management, a partnership in a small firm, through a mortgage and kids and retirement and through, finally and blindingly, to the end. The end! It hit me night after night. No matter how tired or drowsy I was and no matter how many sheep I counted, inevitably it flapped down towards me as I lay there in the distractionless dark; and then it suddenly arrived, all claws – that realization. The repercussions were physical. My entire organism was thrown into confoundment: something catapulted in my gut, my face flushed with heat, my brain dispatched furious signals to my extremities. Most strongly of all, though, in the midst of this panic, I felt hoodwinked. Most of all I felt like a man stung by a terrible con.

  I would leap out of bed in horror. I would hit all of the lights, grab a cigarette and begin walking around in my bare feet, trying to clear my mind. I would switch on the radio and, if things were really bad, the television, trying to find a late-night movie or game show, anything. Only when Angela lay with me, when, the warm freight of her breasts in my hands, I glued her to me for the long duration of the night, were things any better. But it was not enough – a man cannot lead the life of a limpet. So I turned my hobby into my career. The make-or-break, one-day-at-a-time life of a chair-maker, I reasoned, would be a life of corners, of hairpin twists and turns. There would be no long view. There would be nothing in sight but the job in hand.

  Fat chance. I was like the prisoner who lowers himself down on a rope of bedsheets only to discover that he has escaped into the punishment wing. That is to say, for a while, my extrication looked like coming off. I worked hard, ideas came, I worked hard at the ideas. I made chairs, sold them all and made a small name for myself. But as soon as things started to go right, things started to go wrong. ‘Your struggling days are over,’ Pa said, hugging me like a goalscorer when he heard the good news about the exhibition. ‘You’re getting there, son. Now you’ve got some light at the end of the tunnel.’ This immediately made me feel uneasy: the whole point of the exercise was to stay in the tunnel, in my burrow of activity. A day or two later, I received an enigmatic telephone call. ‘Put on a jacket and tie,’ my father said. ‘I’m picking you up in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Just get dressed,’ Pa said.

  I did as I was told and put on the outfit Merv’s tailor had made for me. It didn’t fit, but it was the only suit I had.

  In the car, Pa said, ‘Johnny, I’m taking you to see a friend of mine – an adviser. I’d lik
e you to listen to what he has got to say. Just hear him out, that’s all I’m asking.’

  ‘Who is this guy?’ I said.

  ‘Mr O’Reilly,’ Pa said.

  ‘Who’s Mr O’Reilly?’

  The pensions and insurance man, that was who. The last person in the world I needed to see. But fifteen minutes later, there I was with my father at the office of the man to whom he had entrusted the best part of his income. O’Reilly worked high up in the Wilson Tower, the tallest skyscraper in the city, its transcendent bulk edged with blinking lights to warn off aircraft. Those beacons were redundant when Pa and I arrived there when the huge dusk sun reflected on the Tower’s steel-and-glass flanks lighting the building like a blaze. Inside, though, all was cool and regulated, and when the bing of the elevator sounded and we were delivered into the air-conditioned chill of the thirty-first floor, it felt like we were aboard a jet plane, as though the Tower gathered momentum as it gained altitude until, at a crisis in its ascent, it took flight.

  Before us was an enormous open-plan working-space where all the men, without exception, wore creaseless white shirts, dark ties and dark trousers and sat behind glossy black desks. O’Reilly was no different. The moment he saw us he leapt to his feet and gave me a firm handshake. ‘How are you, John? Tommy O’Reilly.’ He was about thirty-five years old. His hair was slicked back in long gleaming furrows. ‘Let me get you some coffee,’ he offered smilingly. ‘Please, sit down.’

  Pa and I sat down. He winked at me. I imagine he thought that, like him, I was nervous. ‘Look around you,’ Pa whispered, peering furtively about him. ‘Drink it all in.’

  After a delay, O’Reilly returned with three coffees. He fell into his leather swivel chair and smiled at me like an old pal. Then, pulling out a sheaf of papers from a drawer, he said, Let’s just complete this questionnaire before we do anything else. For the next ten minutes we filled out those papers question by question, box by box, with O’Reilly making simple personal enquiries in a quiet voice and transcribing the information I gave him in a slow, soothing, methodical hand. It was so relaxing that, by the end, I was on the point of sleep. Then he put the sheets away and took a sip from his coffee. Mock horror in his voice, he said, ‘John, don’t tell me you’re not interested in a pension?’

  I wanted to please O’Reilly for the patient interest he had shown in me. I smiled at his joke and made an equivocal movement with my hands.

  ‘Pensions are for old guys, right?’ O’Reilly was still spinning around in his chair, handling his coffee. ‘Financial planning – that’s for guys with big bucks, right?’

  Again, I made a noncommittal, open-minded movement. ‘I don’t really know much about it,’ I said.

  O’Reilly put down his coffee, plucked a fresh black biro from the special thicket of black biros at his elbow and started drawing and writing as he talked. ‘Then, John, with due respect, you’re what we call an uninformed client. This firm does not do business with any person unless he or she has been properly informed. We do not wish to take advantage of anyone or push anyone into something they don’t understand. What I’ll do today, then, is simply give you some information.’ He looked up at me, his scribbling finished. ‘Once you’ve had a chance to think about it, you may want to come back and talk to me further. But take a look at this. This goes to the question you must have in your mind right now: why even think about financial planning?’

  Bringing his paper with him, O’Reilly got up from his chair and sat right next to me on my left, shoulder to shoulder. On my right side, Pa put on his glasses and craned over to see what was going on.

  The paper was headed JOHN BREEZE. On it was drawn a line, a line which was regularly intersected with vertical ticks, respectively marked, from left to right, with the numbers 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 and 80. Each space between the ticks – an inch or so – represented a decade of my life.

  ‘OK,’ O’Reilly said. ‘This is you now.’ He marked the mid-twenties spot. ‘No worries, no responsibilities. Right now, you’re concentrating on developing your chair-making business. And that’s how it should be,’ O’Reilly said benevolently. ‘But let’s look a little further down the road, shall we? OK. John, you want kids, a family, right?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said automatically. ‘I suppose I do. Yes.’

  ‘And somewhere to live?’

  I nodded dumbly.

  With hypnotizing carefulness, O’Reilly drew two minuscule children and a box-like house. They hovered stupidly over my thirties. Then he drew an arrow from 30 to 50. ‘That’s twenty years of responsibility, Johnny. Minimum. Twenty years of shelling out – even if you don’t want to have your children privately educated. Gene, am I right?’

  Pa gave a strange intoxicated chortle. ‘You certainly are.’

  O’Reilly said, ‘What about you, John? Anything you disagree with there?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Right. Now, you’re not going to work for ever, are you? When do you want to retire? Around sixty? Sixty-two? Let’s call it sixty.’ He drew an old man with a stick at the 60 mark and then grinned, mock apologetically, at Pa. ‘What are you going to live off? You’re self-employed, right? Well, that means you’re going to have to make provision for these eventualities.’ He gave me a friendly smile. ‘You understand what I’m saying?’

  I nodded.

  As an afterthought joke, O’Reilly sketched a coffin at the end of the line. ‘There’s no need to provide for that – at least, not yet.’ He winked.

  I smiled back, but already I had stopped listening. Like a sucker punch, that diagram had caught me unawares. There it was, the long and the short of my life, reduced to an ineluctable line eight inches across the page. The A to Z of John Breeze.

  I can see, here, that my shock might be characterized as an imbecility. Well, it is true, anyone can tell you that life is short and then you die. Everybody knows that. But there are degrees of knowledge, and in this instance I was in the grip of an extreme state of cognition. This was not a case of simply being apprised of a new fact; no, judging by the sudden sensory jolt I experienced, I had, like the man in the sci-fi movie, the fall guy in the silver pyjamas frozen by the beam of the nerve gun, been zapped – the information of my doom had hit me at some electrical, irrational, neurovascular level.

  That was it. From that moment forwards – yes, I can time it that precisely – things began to go downhill. The panics returned. Worst of all, it made no difference whether Angela lay with me or not and whether I stuck to her like a mollusc to rock. Even she, even love, was not enough.

  I stopped functioning. When my faulty tripods came back from the workshop, I could not bring myself to fix them. Day after day I went down into the basement and day after day, I just sat there on the box, smoking cigarette after cigarette.

  I have tried to speak to Angela about it – in a roundabout way. ‘What’s the point?’ I have said. ‘Who needs these things? Who cares whether I make them or not? The world is full of chairs. The last thing anybody needs is yet another place to sit down.’

  ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself,’ Angela said.

  ‘I’m not feeling sorry for myself,’ I argued. ‘I’m being honest. Whether I finish these chairs or don’t finish them won’t make a scrap of difference to anything. I go down there and I feel totally superfluous. I feel like nothing, like I’m disappearing from the face of the universe.’ Angela laughed. ‘I’m being serious,’ I said. ‘That’s what I feel. If you’re so much as a minute late for work, all hell breaks loose. If I decided never to chop another piece of wood again, no one would give a damn. I’m telling you, it scares the shit out of me.’

  ‘My God, you’ve become so self-obsessed, so self-indulgent. It’s not attractive, you know.’

  Not attractive? What the hell did that have to do with it?

  Angela said, exaggerated patience in her voice, ‘Johnny, I know what you’re thinking: everything is meaningless. Well, you’re right. Management consultancy is meani
ngless, farming is meaningless, running a railway is meaningless. So what? I mean, what are you going to do about it? You have to accept it and get on with it.’

  ‘Why should I accept it?’ I said. ‘Where does it say that I have to accept it?’

  ‘Because what else are you going to do? Spend the rest of your life with that miserable look on your face?’ She kneeled down on to the floor to pick up some papers. ‘Johnny, a part of me doesn’t believe that we’re having this conversation. This is all so basic.’

  I began to get angry. ‘Basic? What are you suggesting, that I’m stupid to think about these things? You think that this is a question of intelligence?’

  Angela looked at me. ‘No, not intelligence. Maturity, maybe.’

  ‘Well, that’s just fine. I’m immature. And so were Shakespeare and Plato and anybody else who ever asked himself what the hell it’s all about. They were just immature. They should have kept their thoughts to themselves.’

  Angela came over to me, laughing. ‘Don’t get upset now, darling. You should hear yourself.’

  I pushed her away from me. ‘I’m sorry, but this isn’t funny. Just because I’ve got the guts to take on board that we’re going to die – that’s right, Angela, even you’re going to die, you’re going to end up something that a Hoover could suck up – you think I’m some kind of a jerk.’

  It was Angela’s turn to lose her temper. ‘Do you think you’re the only one with this problem? Don’t you think that we’ve all got to face up to the same thing?’