5

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.’

She sounds troubled. ‘He left the house this afternoon and, well, he hasn’t come back.’

I say, ‘Right, I see.’ I feel a dull surprise, because it is not like Steve to be away from home for any length of time; but that is all I feel.

‘I just don’t know where he could be,’ Rosie says. I can hear her expelling a cloud of smoking breath and then immediately taking another deep drag. ‘I’ve tried ringing his friends, but none of them knows where he is.’ Rosie says, ‘I don’t know what to do, John. This isn’t like him. Something’s happened to him,’ she says.

There is a silence, and I know that Rosie is expecting some comforting words from me. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘how about, how about trying …’ Then I stop. I do not have a clue where Steve might be and when it comes down to it, well, when it comes down to it I do not care. ‘Look,’ I say finally, ‘don’t worry, Rosie, he’ll be back. He’ll show up sooner or later.’

She is weeping now, but she still manages to say, ‘You’re heartless, John. I’ve always said that about you. You just don’t give a damn about anybody.’

‘Rosie,’ I say, ‘Rosie, listen, Steve will be– ’

But then she hangs up.

Heartless? What does she expect me to do, go out into the rain and find her boyfriend for her? Set up a search party? Spend an hour on the phone commiserating? Bang my head against the wall just because I’m her brother?

I light a cigarette. Maybe I am heartless; but what choice have I got?

Look at what happened on Friday, for God’s sake. She came home at about midday and bolted straight past me and Steve to her room, slamming the door behind her and falling on her bed with a dead thud. Two things were shocking. First of all, she seemed to be liquefying: teardrops were travelling over her cheeks down to her chin, her lips shone with run from her nose, and even her fingers were dripping. Then I registered the second thing about her: her hair.

Ah, Rosie’s hair … Rosie’s hair is a family legend. It is packed securely in that suitcase of Breeze myths that is clicked open from time to time at family gatherings, its hand-me-down contents familiar and sentimental and orienting. Rosie’s hair is in there with the story of Grandma Breeze’s radical feminism as a young woman and the time when she granted asylum in her bedroom cupboard to a suffragette wanted for vandalism; of the number of languages (six: English, Irish, French, German, Italian and Spanish) which my mother’s mother, Georgina O’Malley, spoke fluently; of the invention by great-grandfather Breeze of an egg incubator, and of how he failed to patent the invention and missed out on millions.

Rosie’s long Irish locks, which when gathered and braided dropped from her head in a thick, fiery rope, have made her stand out like a beacon at baptisms, Christmases and weddings, and be recognized and kissed and admired by distant Breezes who have never met her but who have received word of her flaming head. If I should have children, no doubt they too will learn of the two-foot mane that Aunt Rosie once sported and how one day, the day before yesterday to be precise, Friday, she came home with it cropped down to her skull, dashing past me like a carrot-topped soldier late for parade.

Rosie barricaded herself into her room for the rest of the day. When Steve occasionally emerged from it to fetch her something from the kitchen and left the door ajar, I could hear muffled sobbing. I did not say anything; what was there to say? Pa, though, could not restrain himself when he came round yesterday morning on his way to visiting Merv Rasmussen in hospital.

‘Rosie … Your hair.’

She said nothing. She was in the kitchen with her back turned to him, busying herself with dishes in the sink. Pa was stock-still, his head tilted sideways, rooted in the hallway like a nail badly hammered into wood.

After a moment he looked up at me. Then he looked at Rosie again and then he looked at me again. He rubbed his face with one hand. He was lost for words, that was obvious. He wanted to say something, but as usual could not think what. No matter what he says or does not say, no matter how gently he treads, his words always seem to snag on Rosie’s tripwire sensibilities and blow up in his face. To her chagrin, Rosie, who is always buying him presents and sending him cheerful and amusing postcards from around the world, simply cannot talk to him face-to-face without something going off within her. When that detonation happens, she instinctively produces a wounding remark, retaliating for some nameless injury which my innocent father has caused her to suffer.

So Pa decided not to pursue the matter. He said, with a forced casualness, ‘So, who’s coming with me to see Merv?’

Not me, I thought. Although I knew Merv, I hardly knew him well enough to visit him in intensive care.

‘Well?’ Pa said, jingling his keys. He still had not moved from his original spot in the hallway. ‘Johnny? Rosie? Are you coming, my love?’

Rosie said from the kitchen, ‘Johnny and I don’t know him. He’s your friend. You see him.’

Pa said, ‘But Rosie, my love, the man’s at death’s door. He needs all the support he can get. He’s met you and Johnny. He knows you. He knows you’re my children. I’m sure he’d like you to be there.’

Racking up soapy plates with a clatter, Rosie said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She scrubbed furiously at a frying-pan, rasping it with all of her strength. ‘I mean, let’s be honest, it won’t make any real difference to Johnny or me whether what’s his name – Marv? – lives or dies. We hardly know him.’ She banged a dish. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s that kind of hypocrisy.’

Pa flinched. He gripped his car keys and there was a moment of silence.

Then he said, ‘Is that what you think, Rosie? Is that really what you think?’ He slowly shook his head. ‘Well, I’m getting out of here,’ he said, disgust in his voice. ‘All of you, you all …’ He did not finish his sentence. He walked out of the front door and made for his car.

‘Brilliant, Rosie,’ I said. ‘Bloody brilliant.’

Rosie turned towards me and shouted, ‘Go with him! Don’t let him go there alone! Can’t you see that he needs someone to go with him? Go on,’ she shouted, ‘get after him!’

She was right; and I snatched a jacket and ran out into the street and caught up with my father just as he was steering the car out of its parking slot. I opened the front passenger door and got in.

We drove along in silence.

The hospital was situated a few miles to the north, at the top of the hill overlooking the old harbour. It was a dark, cloudy afternoon. The leafing trees shook around in the wind and Rockport and its components – the oily canals, the bunched cranes and, north of the river, the housing towers with balconies flagged with drying clothes – jerked slowly by as we stopped and started.

Two miles and ten log-jammed minutes later, Pa still had not spoken. Usually, when Pa has been hurt by Rosie, he pours his heart out to me. ‘What’s the matter with that girl?’ he asks helplessly. ‘She’s got everything: she’s smart, she’s got a good job, and, to cap it all, she’s beautiful!’ He shakes his head. ‘She doesn’t mean the things she says, Johnny, not deep down. I know that. It breaks my heart to see her so unhappy. I just don’t know what to do about it. I’m at a loss. There’s something gnawing away at her and God help me I don’t know what it is.’ And off he goes, beating a path around the room. ‘Is it money? How’s she doing for money? Maybe she needs some funds. Here,’ he says, taking out a pen and cheque book, ‘I want you to give this to her.’

‘Pa, don’t do that,’ I say. I physically stop him from writing the cheque. ‘She’s fine for money. You know it’s not money.’

‘What is it, then? Johnny, all I know is that when she was a kid she was a little bundle of dynamite. You’d have to see it to believe it. Do you know that she used to bring your mother and me breakfast in bed? She was just four and half years old.’ I know what Pa is going to say next. He is going to say, She used to bring us boiled eggs with our faces drawn on them, can you imagine? ‘She used to bring us boiled eggs with our faces drawn on them,’ Pa says. ‘Can you imagine? Then you used to come in as well, and the two of you kids would jump into bed with us.’ Those were glory days for my father, the days when his double bed bulged with all four Breezes. ‘I don’t know,’ Pa says. ‘Maybe she misses your mother. A girl needs to have her mother. She really loved Ma, you know, Johnny. The two of them were like two peas in a pod.’ Then he says, ‘But your mother’s not with us, God rest her soul, and what can I do about that?’

But this time Pa was not coming out with all of this. This time he was keeping quiet.

I felt bad. I should have agreed to go with him to the hospital without hesitation.

‘What’s that noise?’ Pa suddenly demanded.

I could hear nothing.

‘You hear that? I’m stopping the car.’

‘I can’t hear a thing,’ I said.

‘You can’t hear that? You can’t hear that humming noise?’

‘Pa, that’s the engine. That’s the sound of the engine.’

He pulled over to the side of the road. ‘I’m going to have a look,’ he said. ‘I’m going to open her up.’ He stepped out into the wind and raised the bonnet.

I stayed where I was. As usual, Pa was hearing things. Although he drives a Volvo of perfect reliability, my father never stops detecting problems with it and constantly takes it to the garage for unnecessary services and check-ups and all-clears. The cause, I suspect, is this: Pa cannot believe that, unlike almost everything else in his life, his car will not let him down. Far from comforting him, this makes him anxious. Oppressed by the knowledge that this state of affairs cannot last for ever, that trouble simply has to be brewing somewhere in that machine, Pa drives around in a state of fretfulness, waiting for the worst. I just wish that the damn thing would break down and put him out of his misery once and for all.

‘Try her now,’ Pa shouted from behind the hood.

I switched on the motor. It made a faultless, purring sound.

‘OK!’ Pa shouted. He leaned over into the engine and made an adjustment. ‘OK, try her now!’

Again I turned the key and again the motor sounded like a stroked cat.

Pa slammed down the bonnet and came in out of the wind. ‘That should hold her together until I can reach a garage,’ he said, putting on his seat belt. ‘It was a good thing we stopped. I reckon there’s an oil leak in there. It could have seized up at any minute.’

We drove off again. Thanks to the pit stop, the incident with Rosie no longer fouled the atmosphere, and when a short while later we got held up in more traffic by the docks, I felt able to turn on the car radio. I moved the dial to Station 5, the sports station. John Hall was on, previewing the next day’s soccer fixtures. Pa turned up the volume.

‘It’s the last day of the season,’ John Hall said, ‘and, the championship having already been won by Clonville, attention will be focused on the relegation clash at the bottom of the First Division between Rockport United and Ballybrew. It’s make or break time. Both teams have the same number of points, but United have marginally the better goal difference. They can therefore settle for the draw, whereas Ballybrew need maximum points – a problem, since Ballybrew have yet to win a game away from home this season. My prediction? United to avoid the drop.’

‘Let’s hope he’s right,’ Pa said as the car inched forward. The wind had dropped but the sky had darkened further. The wipers were slowly mowing rain from the windshield. Pa tapped the wheel. ‘Johnny, what are we doing down there, scratching about with the likes of Ballybrew? A big club like United should be right up there with the Clonvilles, contesting the championship.’ We moved forward by a car-length. The rain relentlessly arrived on the windscreen, each surge of droplets wiped out then instantaneously replaced by fresh, momentary troops, in turn effaced in their thousands as the wiper swung back over the glass. ‘I remember when United were a great team, when we won the league, the Cup and the Continental Cup in three straight years. I tell you, Johnny, those were the days. What a line-up: Neville Clarke, the Tiger of Antigua, in goal, Guthrie, Knox, Walker and Janusz at the back, Dingemans, Dean and Lazarus in midfield, Loasby, Le Quesne and Newman up front. Sixty thousand for every home match and never once a fight.’ Yet again, Pa shook his head. ‘You should have seen Redrock Park in those days, Johnny. The stands would be bursting over and the schoolboys would be passed down over our heads to the front of the terraces. The atmosphere was different. You didn’t see moats or fences or firecrackers, you didn’t see pitch invasions. And the singing…’ Pa swallowed. ‘By God, Johnny, you should have been there to hear the singing.’

I did not reply to this, because I knew that Pa had not been there to hear the singing either. The first time Pa had even taken notice of Rockport United was when I began supporting them as an eight-year-old and when every match day saw his white-fisted, oblivious boy hunched over the radio and transported in its tiny racket to the heart of the ringing stadium, my day, sometimes even my week, hinged precariously on the game’s outcome. Out of sympathy, Pa became a Rockport United fan, too. He enrolled me in the supporters’ club and then, to keep me company, put his own name down. He bought me all of the gear so that I could listen to the game properly kitted out: the strip, the red and white scarf, the bobble hat incorporating the club’s famous symbol, the prancing red lambs. Pa bought a club rattle and he bought a pair of lucky underpants to wear on Cup days. Why he thought those underpants – red and white checks – were lucky, I do not know, because in all of the time that he wore them United never won a thing. But that did not deter him. Every season the Cup would start afresh, every year Pa pulled on those shorts and every year United got knocked out.

Christmas Day, 1979. I am twelve years old, Pa is forty-two and there is my mother in her blue apron, temporarily leaving the last turkey that she will ever cook to watch her children open their presents. There, under the Christmas tree, is a record with my name, Johnny, written on the wrapper between the sledges and the snowmen. Eagerly I rip open the package, hoping for the album that all my classmates are listening to – Spare Head: I Shouldn’t Have Eaten That Second Banana – but it is not to be. What I have instead is a recording of the 1968 Continental Cup final, when on a hot and floodlit Parisian night United beat Lisbon 4-1 after extra time to win the trophy.

Pa swoops as I kneel there, removing my gift from my hand. ‘This is brilliant,’ he says, clumsily dropping the disc on the turntable. ‘This,’ Pa says, ‘is what I call brilliant.’

He listens to the record – both sides – maybe three times that day, and that day the house resonates with the euphoria of one hundred thousand supporters of Rockport United. Each time a goal is scored my father’s arms half rise in joy and a great smile cracks across his face; then, quickly, before the cheering has died down, he darts over to the record-player, returns the needle by a fraction of an inch, switches up the volume by a notch or two and listens to it one more time.

My father is scoring goals at will. It’s there! the commentator cries again and again. It’s there! It’s there!