The Breezes

by Joseph O'Neill

  I gave him a smile. I felt it was my turn to say something.

  Billy casually approached the bed. There was recklessness in his movements which I did not like. He regarded his father with an expression of curiosity.

  Pa said, ‘I think we’ll be going now.’

  Billy did not move for a couple of seconds. Then, in the same briskly informative tone, he said, ‘The problem is the lungs. The danger with fire is that you inhale the smoke and the flames.’

  Pa, distressed, said, ‘Are your father’s … Are his lungs …’

  ‘Burned,’ Billy said.

  Burned lungs? That did not sound too good.

  Pa said, ‘What … What happened, Billy? How did it happen?’

  Billy said, ‘The other car just swerved into Dad’s lane. The driver doesn’t know why. He can’t explain it. Dad’s car just went whoosh. It was a fluke. Dad couldn’t move. He was trapped by his seatbelt. It buckled or melted or something. Funny, that, isn’t it?’

  My father took out his handkerchief again and slowly dragged it across his mouth and then his eyes. Then he began wiping the condensation from his glasses.

  ‘This place is like a sauna, isn’t it?’ Billy said with a laugh. ‘Lose weight while you watch.’

  I smiled weakly. I straightened my stance, preparing to leave.

  Pa showed the flowers to Billy. ‘I’ll just put them here, shall I?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Billy said. ‘Just chuck them over there.’

  Pa put the flowers and the card on a table. We left the room and entered the cool of the corridor.

  Mrs Rasmussen was still there, waiting for us. But there was someone else with her, too.

  Pa said, ‘Paddy.’

  Mrs Rasmussen said, ‘Billy, this is Mr Browne.’

  This man, Paddy Browne? The bloodthirsty, furtive Network Secretary? Influenced by Pa’s demonology, I had imagined him as a small carnivore of a man, a weasel, a devourer of frogs and mice and birds. I had him down as sharply dressed and long-faced, with twitching, watery eyes and a small, neatly trimmed moustache. But this fellow, tall and in his early thirties, had an open and intelligent face. He wore jeans and a thick white Aran sweater. His hair was black and uncombed and his brown brogues were comfortably battered. There was nothing slippery about him at all.

  He shook hands with Billy. ‘I work with your father,’ he said to Billy. ‘I’m terribly sorry about what has happened.’

  ‘It’s good of you to come, Mr Browne,’ Mrs Rasmussen said.

  ‘Not at all,’ Paddy Browne said, ‘not at all.’

  Pa, meanwhile, had put his jacket back on, the jacket with the Network insignia on its breast pocket, and I could not help comparing and contrasting him with Paddy Browne. Paddy Browne was relaxed, youthful and winning. Pa, sweating, evasive, plastic pocket protectors protruding from his bulging jacket as he stood there in his cheap grey slacks and polished shoes, looked uncomfortable, old and acquainted with defeat. He said stiffly, ‘Paddy, this is my boy, John.’ He did not meet Browne’s eye.

  We acknowledged each other with a nod.

  ‘Amy, we’ll be heading off now,’ Pa said. He hugged her lightly. ‘We’ll be praying,’ he said. ‘If you need anything, you know where to come.’ Then he said gently, ‘He’ll be all right. These places work wonders. We’ll have him back on that tennis court in no time.’ He turned to Billy. ‘So long, Billy.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said to the Rasmussens.

  Pa walked down the long corridor with unusual agitation. ‘What’s he doing here?’ he wanted to know as soon as we were out of earshot. ‘He hardly knows Merv. Who does he think he is, coming down here? The Pope?’

  This uncharitable reaction was not like him. I said, ‘He’s here to see how Merv is, just like you.’

  Pa grunted. He still could not find it in him to give Paddy Browne that credit. It has not always been like this. When Paddy Browne first arrived on the scene two years ago, Pa was all in favour of him. ‘That’s what we need around here,’ he said at the time. ‘New blood. We need dynamic young guys like Paddy to shake things up a bit, guys with new ideas. There are too many timeservers in the Network, too many people stuck in their old ways. It’s time we cleared out the dead wood. We need imagination and vision,’ Pa said boldly. ‘We need to take the Network into the year 2000. Paddy Browne is just the fellow I could use at my side. Pa did not figure at the time that he might be counted as dead wood – wood that could be cut without injury.

  Then Pa said with a sudden gasp, ‘My gosh, John, those burns! Those burns!’ He put his hands to his cheeks. ‘What’s going to happen to him? What’s he going to look like?’

  I dreaded to think. The scarring would be monstrous. Merv would be unrecognizable beneath the fibrous, melted, contracted tissue. They would have to get him a new face. I remembered reading somewhere how they did it: by cutting away undamaged skin from one part of the body and transplanting it to the burned part. But apart from his right foot, Merv was burned all over. How far could the skin from one foot stretch?

  ‘My God,’ Pa said, as we walked slowly out to the car. ‘My God. Merv.’ He fell into his seat and gripped the wheel tightly. He was horrified. His mouth hung loose and he stared through the windscreen.

  I had nothing comforting to say. Either way, things looked bad for his best friend. If he pulled through, he would be hideously disfigured. If he did not, well, then that would be that; then he would be dead.

  Pa turned the ignition key. The engine started, then quit. But instead of simply giving it more choke, Pa for some reason decided that this was the moment to take a precautionary look under the bonnet. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said. ‘There’s something I want to double-check.’

  For a minute I waited in the car, but then I got out and walked over to the boundary of the car-park and rested my elbows against the safety rail put there to stop people from tumbling down over the cliff edge. Apart from the usual couple of bushes grittily sprouting from some schism in the rock, the drop was sheer. A faller would land two hundred feet directly below, on the tiled roofs of the old fishermen’s cottages now painted in pastel colours. I raised my eyes. Beyond the haven and the pretty jetties crammed with sailing-boats, the roll-on, roll-off docks of the modern port began: trucks, containers, container ships, warehouses, cranes, tugs, forklifts, more cranes. Slightly to the right of that you could see, in an inland quay, the fishing smacks and trawlers. To the south and west of the port was the city proper, eighteenth-century in the centre, then tower blocks, then the floodlights of the soccer stadium, then a dense mishmash of buildings which finished up by sprinkling suburbs evenly over the lower flanks of Rockport Mountains, which curved down from my right to the coastal plateau where I stood. Supervising all of this, its beacons sparking in the slow, regular beat of a steady heart, was the Wilson Tower, its translucent lightning conductor glowing with extra clarity in the darkness of the afternoon.

  That lightning conductor – we could have done with having it up there a few years sooner.

  I turned around with a sudden irritation that I could not suppress. What the hell was he doing? The car was fine, for God’s sake. ‘Come on,’ I called. ‘Let’s get going.’

  ‘One second, son,’ Pa promised, bending deep into the engine, ‘just one second.’

  I looked out over Rockport, a model congregation of six hundred thousand human beings. I remembered a history schoolbook illustration of what it had looked like in the olden days: a sea-threatened hamlet hulked over by rain and hills, with a boundary wall raised miserably against vehement casual forces – invaders, floods, wolves, sea gales. A large shanty stood at the centre of the village and a thread of smoke climbed through the hole in its roof. That was where hopeful sacrifices were made in appeasement of the gods, where the population slept together in a warming pack, their bodies each other’s radiators, dreaming of security. Now the boot was on the other foot, now Rockport bossed the elements. The earth, the waters, the fires and even the mobile air h
ad been harnessed like a team of horses and made to run and run, towing the city like a quick chariot. Energy! The metropolis, hot and kinetic, growled and twitched and glittered with its mutations. The traffic moved constantly through streets teeming with dynamized citizens, themselves yoked and consentingly driven by the strong flow of money. Such unity, such output: I could smell them in the industrial aromas that drifted up to me from below. Yes, Rockport had the whip hand now, Rockport had the power. There were no more wolves. Any animals that were not milked or eaten or kept as pets were designated as wildlife and preserved for our enjoyment. The dangerous heaths had been turned into football fields, the dunes splashed delicately with the greens of golf courses, the sea tamed by breakwaters and looted steadily for fish and gases. Invasions were history and hunger was history. Subsistence was no longer the aim of the game: now, by such fabulous cities, we had minimum standards of welfare and economic safety nets – now we had surplus, and from that hilltop it looked as though the dream of security had been realized and wondrously surpassed. It looked as though we were home and dry.

  Then came the slam of a bonnet. I turned to see Pa walking over to the driver’s door, wiping his hands. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

  I got back into the car. Pa started the car and ran the engine – and kept running it. I turned my head. His eyelids were fluttering and his Adam’s apple ducked rapidly in his throat. His hands were trembling on the steering wheel. ‘Stop the car,’ I said. He obeyed me. ‘Now, take it easy,’ I said. ‘Just wait a while.’

  Again Pa obeyed, breathing deeply and systematically for several moments. Then he started up.

  We drove slowly through the car-park. Pa said, ‘You want me to drop you off at home?’ I said, Yes, that would be great. He pressed on the accelerator as we hit the road and kept his foot down for some time, which was unlike him. He said ‘That’s better, isn’t it? You hear how she’s running better?’ Yes, I said. ‘Tell you what,’ my father said after several moments. ‘Here’s what we do tomorrow. I’m refereeing in the morning. Why don’t you meet me at the pitch? Then maybe we could have some lunch and watch the United game at the house, have a couple of beers. How does that sound to you?’

  I thought about it. Why not? I thought. The chairs – there was no point in kidding myself about them. I was through with the chairs. And Pa could do with the company. And I could do with taking it easy at his place and getting out of the flat, away from Rosie and Steve. I’d get a bus to Angela’s afterwards. Yes, I thought, not a bad schedule for a Sunday.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Good thinking,’ I said.

  Down we drove, down into Rockport.

  12

  It is five to twelve and I am sweating in my coat and I have run out of cigarettes. This cannot go on. This has to end.

  I write a note for Angela: GONE TO DOOLEY’S. BACK SOON, LOVE, JOHNNY. Then I walk down the stairs of the apartment block and step outside, my umbrella rattling under the lightening rain. The wind has died down.

  The walk to Dooley’s takes two minutes. Inside, it is quiet as usual. Two men and a woman sit around the corner of the bar and an old fellow is on his own at a table, studying and fingering his glass of whiskey like a grandmaster pondering the endgame. Nothing much else is going on. The gambling machine is popping out colours over by toilets but no one feels lucky enough to play. Up in a nook of the ceiling, images come and go on a silent television that nobody is watching.

  I order a pint of Guinness and a packet of Marlboros and pull up a stool at the bar. When my beer arrives I immediately take a long and deep draught. Then I light up. That’s better. That’s more like it.

  I turn around on my stool. A sports programme has started on the television: football. I pick up my beer and move over towards it. Nobody else budges.

  A team in red shirts and white shorts is attacking the goal of a team in green. Rockport United versus Ballybrew: the highlights of today’s game.

  I pick a comfortable chair and sit down to watch. To my surprise, I’m jittery as a fan. I thought that I had grown free from my absurd affinity for this club and the eleven random men who each Saturday, years ago, ran out as the clumsy agents of my dreams. But tonight, for some reason, something is at stake, some stubborn deposit of boyish hope is at risk.

  It’s simple: if United avoid defeat, they stay up and Ballybrew are relegated; if Ballybrew win, they stay up and United go down.

  Up on the screen, the players are running about in a soundless stadium. United have the ball. It’s with Thompson, the sweeper, in the centre circle and moving forward; he checks, pointing his arm like a visionary towards the opponents’ goal, indicating, perhaps, the long and incisive path that his pass will take, and in my imagination I hear the rumble of anticipation from the crowd; then he kicks it fifty yards back to his own keeper. Thompson’s not taking any chances.

  Who can blame him? Safety first, that has to be the United motto for the day. Let Ballybrew make the running. They’re the ones who need the victory, not us. Besides, we don’t have an attack worthy of the description. The United tactic is to pump long balls into the danger zone in the hope that a rebound or lucky bounce will break for them. But no such thing happens this time. The United centre forward, Mulligan, a big, brave, unathletic number nine, hemmed in by green shirts like a man in a thicket, unsuccessfully attempts a jump, his heavy leap taking him barely two inches off the ground, and the ball drifts straight through to the Ballybrew keeper. He, in turn, volleys the ball as far as he can away from his own goal – right across the pitch, in fact, into the hands of the United keeper.

  So the game continues, in an erratic sequence of broken, strenuous play. The teams are doing their best, but their best is not good enough; football is just too hard for them. Out of habit, I keep track of the referee. ‘Look at that,’ Pa would say if he were here. ‘Look at how he keeps to the diagonal.’ The diagonal: this is the referee’s beat, along an invisible line that runs across the field between one corner flag and another, a line from which the prudent arbiter should not stray. ‘That’s not as easy as it looks,’ Pa would say. ‘Although, of course, he has two linesmen to help him out. Boy, what I could do with two linesmen …’

  Suddenly we’re in the second half and the players are poised on the halfway line for the restart, shaking their shining, lubricated thighs. Only forty-five minutes to go. Only forty-five minutes to hold out.

  We cut portentously to a United throw-in on the right wing, a promising position, and I hope against hope: is it possible? Will this be a United goal? The long throw lands at the feet of Mulligan, his back to the goal at the edge of Ballybrew’s penalty area. Painfully he starts to turn, a slow, elbowing swivel which surely will fool nobody; but somehow, by a miracle of shins and knees, he holds on to the ball and, with a barge of his left shoulder, breaks free from the defenders and lumbers into a space …

  Shoot! Shoot now!

  Mulligan shoots, and the ball hits the crossbar and ricochets into the crowd. Unlucky! Good effort! The camera pans in for the reaction close-up and for a moment the screen is filled with the biblical spectacle of Tony Mulligan looking in anguish at the sky before he shakes himself, snots out of one nostril and runs off to take up his position. And suddenly the sound of the TV is switched on – the girl behind the bar is smiling at me and holding a remote control – and the commotion of the contest enters the bar with a boom, and from that moment rhythm arrives from its mysterious source to infuse and transform the United play, and now there is movement, now the leather sphere has been tamed and is switched fluidly from red shirt to red shirt as we run unerringly for one another, flicking and nodding and back-heeling the ball around like a beach ball, now the wind and rain are dismissed, the imprisoning touch-lines mere scenery. Shot after shot rains down on the Ballybrew end, time and again the ball is scrambled desperately off their line, but it doesn’t matter, it’s only a matter of time before the goal comes, and time is on our side; the longer the game goes on the more certain t
he draw, our victory, becomes; yes, every second is another coin in the bank. Surely, the commentator says hoarsely, shouting to be heard above the din of the fans, surely this cannot go on for much longer! Now there are only two minutes to go, one hundred and twenty seconds until we’re there. Here we go, here we go, here we go, our fans chant, here we go, here we go, here we go-oh. A cacophony of whistling sounds around the ground, urging the referee to blow for time, but there is one minute left, and somehow Ballybrew have been awarded a free kick thirty-five yards from the United goal, too far out, in this wind, for a direct shot at goal, the commentator says; but nevertheless United have formed a wall – better safe than sorry – and three players now stand arm-in-arm ten yards away from the kick, their hands over their balls, their faces pale and unflinching as a Ballybrew player lines up to shoot …

  He shoots. The ball strikes a shoulder in the wall, loops into the air and floats bizarrely towards the goal so that the goalkeeper, who has moved a few yards off his line to narrow the angle, is forced to do a backwards flip in order to fingertip it over the bar for a corner …

  The keeper crashes to the ground. The ball falls slowly and comes to a halt. It is beyond the United goal-line and between the posts. It is a goal. Ballybrew have scored.

  But that’s impossible.

  That’s – no, hold on a minute, that’s –

  Foul, surely! Offside! No, no, that can’t be right! This cannot be happening!

  Ref! Referee!

  ‘Quite remarkable scenes here at Redrock Park,’ the commentator bawls, ‘as a cruel deflection puts Ballybrew into the lead – quite against the run of play. But that’s football, and I make it that ninety minutes have gone and we’re now playing injury time.’

  Injury time. There’s still a chance. It’s a funny old game; it’s not over till the fat lady sings.

  ‘And that’s it!’ the commentator exclaims, ‘that’s it! It’s all over!’