Read the book: «The Breezes»

1

Fourteen years ago my mother, whose name was Mary Elizabeth Breeze, was killed by lightning, and you may think that my father’s quota of misfortune would have been used up once and for all on that violent afternoon. If so you are mistaken, because these last days’ events have slapped and hammered and clobbered him around in the way that certain absurd cartoon characters are by their creators. I have particularly in mind the tragedy of the coyote – Wile E. Coyote, he is called – who is doomed perpetually to hunt down a maddening desert bird, a roadrunner, and perpetually to fail in the most painful and disastrous fashion. Every one of Wile E. Coyote’s stunts rebounds on him, and every episode sees him reduced from a healthy animal to a steaming pile of charred, exploded fur at the bottom of a cliff. The terrible thing is that there is nothing the coyote can do to avoid this fate; no matter how faultless his stratagems, he will always be undone by a circumstance beyond his control – the animators’ desire to inflict upon him the maximum of defeat and humiliation. This is how it has felt these last days: my father’s misfortune has been so extreme, so capricious, that he could be the victim of some invisible, all-powerful tormentor. I should say that by misfortune I do not just mean setbacks pure and simple, those ordinary hardships that attach to us all as inevitably as shadows. I mean freakish reverses. I mean those blows that are, above all, bad luck – that are, as the dictionary puts it, evil accidents.

Take, for example, what happened this morning.

It was raining and I was tramping across the graceless heath that unfolds between the western outskirts of this city – the city of Rockport – and the bare hills that loom over it to the west. Crooked white lines on the heath painted out twenty-two bumpy and undersized football pitches, all of which were overcrowded with the slow throngs of footballers. A gale was blowing in fierce gusts, spraying the downpour over the sportsfields in erratic blasts. Goalkeepers froze in the mouths of the orange-netted goals; strikers lingered numbly around the penalty boxes, unresponsive to the shouts of the onlookers. I walked in the direction of the farthest field of all, the one boundaried by the road into the city, and minutes later, burying my chin in my coat and stamping my feet, I joined the spectators on the touchline – nine people and one dog – and began watching the game.

It was not a great match. Two unskilful teams – one in green, one in blue – were chasing after a white football with little success. The big problem was the wind: every time a pass was struck, a swerving gust would swing its phantom boot and propel the ball out on to the road, bringing the traffic screeching to a standstill and forcing yet another delay in play as a sodden figure slowly went to retrieve it.

Then I noticed something else. In their frustration, the players had started to foul each other, exchanging bodychecks and clattering, metallic late tackles; and as the fouls went unpunished, so the violence escalated: now a defender kneed a jumping attacker in the back, now someone retaliated by shoulder-barging the defender to the ground and now, right before my eyes, someone else threw a punch at the barger. This was mayhem. This game was completely out of control.

‘Ref!’ the man next to me shouted. ‘Ref! Get a grip of it, you blind bastard!’

‘Send him off!’ a woman screamed. ‘For Christ’s sake, send him off!’

I looked out for the referee. His face grey with exertion, his tongue a dab of yellow in his open mouth, he was jogging desperately up and down the field, trying to keep up with play – a Sisyphean struggle; each time he caught up with the ball someone would kick it right back to where he had come from.

Just then came a crack and one of the greens was rolling on the turf, hacked down by one of the blues. Puffing thin peeps on his whistle, the referee arrived, panting and struggling for something in his pocket.

‘Look here,’ the referee said, breathing heavily, ‘I – I saw that.’ He took another deep breath and pointed into the distance, at a dressing-room of his imagination. ‘Do that one more time and …’

At that moment the dog ran on to the field. It made straight for the referee and – there is, unfortunately, no more accurate description – began to fuck his left leg. Yes, that is what actually happened: a skinny mongrel sprinted up to the ref, grabbed his thigh tightly between its paws, and started thrusting at his knee with its slippery pink dick out there for all to see. The referee tried to shoo the dog away, but the dog – a terrier of some kind, with tenacity in its pedigree – would not back down. Hopping relentlessly along on its hind legs, it just kept right at it. Trying to shake his leg free, the referee suddenly slipped, landing badly on his behind. Everybody burst out laughing. Spread-eagled in the mud with the dog still writhing on his leg, the derision of the crowd and the players roaring in his ears, anguish and dirt all over his face, the ref blew for time.

That was Pa. The referee was Pa.

I have to say, before I dwell further on this outrage, that there exists a perfectly rational explanation for it. The reason that mutt went for Pa is that he has a dog of his own, a basset hound called Trusty, who is in heat, and clearly some of her love scent had perfumed him. That dog is a minx. After two years of cohabitation, my father is still trying to house-train her. For one thing, she still shits around the home. Although Pa has followed the training manual (The Wolf in Your Home) and chastised her while simultaneously pushing her snout into the dung, Trusty has never quite put two and two together and made the connection between the offence and the punishment; or, if she has, she has not let it bother her, a profound canine instinct informing her, correctly, that my father’s threats are as insubstantial as the breath that transports them. Either way, he still spends a lot of time on his hands and knees, scraping up. The only effect of his remonstrations, as far as I am able to tell, has been to make Trusty more wily in her choice of location. Whereas in the past she used to squat down on the deep-pile carpet in the living-room, now, like a grande dame caught short in the palace of Versailles, she tends to climb up the stairs and do it in rarely visited corners and recesses. If you go round to Pa’s house you have to watch your step. Trusty has toilets everywhere.

But let me return to what happened to Pa at the football. My father’s tumble would under normal circumstances have had some slapstick joke value, because, and let me say this at once, I find downfalls as funny as the next man. If some clown vanishes down a manhole or lands face-first in a cream cake, I’ll slap my thigh along with everybody else. But for once I am not laughing.

Again, I have to think of Wile E. Coyote – more precisely, of his adventure with the tunnel. The coyote, tired of outlandish artifice, comes up with a scheme which is cunning simplicity itself. Using paint, he depicts a road tunnel on the face of a mountain and then hides behind a boulder, lurking. The plan is obvious: the roadrunner will mistake the fake, super-realistic tunnel for an actual one and will crash into the mountain at great speed. As usual, the plan is about 75 per cent successful. Sure enough, along comes the roadrunner in a fast cloud of dirt and, yes, up it storms, straight towards the picture of the cavern; but then, instead of rebounding off the rock, the roadrunner goes through it – through the nonexistent tunnel! For a second or two the prairie wolf gapes at us, crushed and flabbergasted; but then a what-the-hell, ask-questions-later expression animates his crumpled features and, yellow-eyed and ardent, off he races, arms outstretched and hands grabbing, hot on the heels of the bird – and thuds face-first into the mountainside.

It is then, at the moment when he is slumped in a dazed heap at the bottom of the mountain, that the true dismality of his predicament dawns on Wile E. Coyote: that, even where the laws of nature are concerned, there is one rule for him and another for the roadrunner. It is the ultimate unfairness.

I am not suggesting that what is happening to Pa breaks the laws of material physics. But it does break what I always vaguely understood to be another law of nature: the law of averages. I was always under the impression that the law of averages meant this: in the long run, probability will operate so as to effect a roughly equitable distribution of chance – you lose some, but you also win some. But what if you lose some and then, against all the odds, lose some more – and then more still? Where does that leave the law of averages? Where does that leave Pa?

This is what I was puzzling over on the bus here. My head was poised heavily on the rain-steamed window as I sat there, slowly grappling with this enormous problem. And then the penny dropped: there is no such thing as the long run. My father’s life is too short to allow probability to take effect.

The vibrations of the bus banged my head against the pane.

Now, I can see a response to this: people make their luck.

To a certain extent, this is right. You make your own bed and you lie in it. But sometimes you are forced to lie in a bed which you did not make at all. No, it is worse than that: sometimes a bed you have never seen before in your life will crash through the ceiling and flatten you before you even know what’s hit you. How much of his lot has Pa brought on himself? Merv – did Pa bring Merv on himself?

I received the telephone call at home on Friday morning. Pa asked me how I was and, before I could answer, I heard a swallowing noise – a literal, phonic gulp.

I said, ‘Pa?’

There was a pause, and then Pa said quickly in a thick voice, ‘Listen, son, do you remember Merv, Merv Rasmussen?’

Of course I remembered Merv. He was one of Pa’s best friends, his work buddy and tennis partner. I had met Merv plenty of times.

Pa said, ‘He was driving along last night, just driving along on his side of the road, minding his own business, when this car just ploughs straight into him. Head-on. Just like that.’ Pa took a swallow of wonder. ‘This guy just swings across into his lane, then …’ Here his voice crumpled. I heard it again – gulp.

I said, ‘Is he going to be all right?’

‘I don’t know,’ Pa said. ‘The hospital told me he was critical.’

Critical was the last word I would have associated with Merv. Merv was friendly, tolerant and condoning. As far as I knew, Merv had never passed an adverse judgement on anyone in his life.

Pa said softly, ‘Johnny, I want you to do me a favour. I want you to pray for him.’ He was serious. ‘Just a quick prayer, that’s all. I’m telling you, son, right now he needs all the help he can get.’

I did not want to upset my father. I said, ‘OK, Pa. I will.’

He took a long and violent drag of air, as though surfacing from a long spell under water. His anxiety made his voice clean and eager. On the telephone, Pa can sound like a young man.

He changed the subject. ‘Have you switched the locks yet? Have you spoken to Whelan?’

‘Don’t worry, Pa,’ I said. ‘It’s under control.’

‘I want double locks on that front door,’ my father stipulated. ‘And tell Whelan to fit one of those big bolts, the ones you can’t just kick down.’

‘I will, Pa,’ I said.

‘Ask him about installing an alarm,’ Pa said, his sentences beginning to accelerate. ‘I want one of those alarm systems that are hooked up to the police station. I want an entry system, too, with a special code, and a spyhole in the door so you’ll see who’s coming.’

‘OK, Pa.’

‘I want you and your sister to be safe in that flat,’ Pa said. ‘And don’t worry about the money. I’ll take care of that.’

‘OK, Pa,’ I said – this despite the fact that there is plainly no need for this kind of security at the flat I share with my sister Rosie, which has double-glazed windows which explode when punctured, an impenetrable front door and a film of burglar-proof plastic on every pane of glass. Besides, even if some crook did break in, his pickings would not be rich. Whatever else our flat might be, it is no Aladdin’s cave. But I went along with Pa because I had learned that once he is gripped by a sense of imperilment in respect of his family – which is often – he will not be deflected. This is why we Breezes are insured against every imaginable risk. Pa has taken out a comprehensive family protection package that defends the three of us against the consequences of fire, theft, death, sickness and personal injury, of litigation, lock-outs, flooding, explosions, automobile collisions and war, of aviation mishaps, professional negligence, spatial fall-out, forgery, business interruptions and acts of God. You name it, we’re indemnified against it.

My father’s precautions do not end there. In order to guard against the tax detriments of his own death, he has ploughed as much cash as he can into an accumulation and maintenance fund in his children’s names and he has transferred to me, as a nominal gift, the ownership of the flat we live in. ‘In case I die within the next seven years,’ he said. I told him he was crazy. ‘What are you talking about? Seven years? You’re never going to die in the next seven years,’ I said. I put my hand on the curve of his shoulder, rounded like a rock worn smooth by years of water. ‘A fit man like yourself? Why should you?’

‘I could go any minute,’ he said, clicking his fingers. ‘Just like that.’ He gave me a look. ‘What are you looking so shocked about? That’s how it is, son, here today and gone tomorrow, and there’s no point in fighting it.’

One reason that Pa so often feels us to be threatened is that he believes that any adversity which befalls someone else is the prognostic of a Breeze adversity. This explained his present concern: having read about an unpleasant burglary in the neighbourhood (a case where the intruders had thrown acid in the face of the elderly woman who opened the door, blinding her), he was determined to take extra measures to ensure our safety.

‘Light, Johnny, light!’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘Johnny, here’s what you do: you get Whelan to install floodlights around the house so that you don’t get any shadows out there. You know what they say, a shadow is a burglar’s best friend. Yes,’ Pa said, ‘floodlights. With electronic triggers. My God, when I think of your sister alone at home, and those men lurking about outside her window …’ He lost his voice.

‘Take it easy, Pa,’ I said.

Pa resumed, his voice straining, ‘Remember, Whelan’s the man you want. Ring Whelan. You can count on Whelan.’

‘Leave it with me, Pa,’ I said. I did not tell him that twice already I had rung Whelan, twice Whelan had promised to come and twice Whelan had let me down. Pa had enough to worry about without worrying about Whelan. Thinking about it, there was not a significant aspect of his life that did not have him on tenterhooks. Everything gave him cause for keen suspense: work, where his job was under review; Rosie and her boyfriend, Steve; Merv Rasmussen; and me. Yes, Pa was losing sleep over me, too, the poor bastard. For three years now I have been one of the reasons why he gets out of bed in the mornings with black rings under his eyes.

Pa’s eyes. Among the traits which I am anxious not to inherit from my father, the eyes feature prominently. I roll off the sofa, walk over to the mirror resting on the fireplace and regard myself. What I am looking for is any sign that my eyeballs are losing their alignment. Pa has a wall-eye – a lazy eye. The left eye points in the correct direction but the other eye, the lazy one, looks about a foot to the right. In this respect, Pa has been unlucky. The divergence of his gaze is sufficient to confuse the onlooker, but not quite marked enough to reveal quickly to him which eye is the focused one. To obscure this defect, Pa has taken to wearing tinted glasses, phototonic shades which darken or lighten in accordance with the air’s luminousness. The ploy has not come off for him. I am afraid that the main effect of Pa’s shades and the just-visible wall-eye beneath them is to give him an insecure, shifty air.

I light a cigarette and for a moment watch myself smoking. Then I look closely at the eyes: still, I am glad to say, perfectly parallel.

However, I have seen photographs of the young Pa. At my age, his eyes were straight as arrows. The famous honeymoon portrait of him and Ma in Donegal shows it clearly: cheek to cheek with his brand-new, bursting, laughing wife, his shirt white and pressed and his tie knotted cleanly, Pa flies the camera a dead-on, bull’s-eye of a look, a look that has not the merest trace of a swerve. I know what this means: any day, without warning, some sleeping Breeze gene could wake up and order one of my eyes to make a sideways move.

I turn away from my reflection. There is no point in worrying about it, because there’s another paternal characteristic I can do without: the tendency to live in dread. I do not want to end up with a pockmarked, crack-lined face and a head of blitzed white hair. Come to think of it, I do not want to end up like Pa at all. Like father, like son is the last thing I want to hear in connection with me and my father.