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But if I were him, I would be fearful of long shots, too.
The incident in the pub this morning. Now that’s what I call a dark horse.
Pa and I had just sucked down the remains of our beers and were about to make a move when, pushing through the crush, a man suddenly came forward and pointed at Pa. ‘I know you,’ he said. He kept pointing. ‘It’s Breeze, isn’t it? You’re him. You’re Gene Breeze, aren’t you?’
Pa glanced at me nervously and said, ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am.’ He turned to the man. ‘How – how can I help you?’
‘I thought I recognized you,' the man said. ‘I said to myself, I know that face from somewhere.’
It is important, here, to point something out: the most remarkable thing about the newcomer was his size. He was a midget. He could not have been more than four feet tall.
I picked up my coat and said, ‘Let’s go, Pa.’
The man said, ‘You want to know if I’ve got any problems, Breeze? You want to know if I’ve got any complaints? Well, pal, I do. I’ve got a whole pile of fucking complaints.’
He put his beer down and stood at the end of the table. Pa was cornered.
Pa said, ‘How can I help you, Mr …'
‘Don’t worry about my name, Breeze, you’re the one with questions to answer.’ Again he jabbed his index finger in Pa’s direction. ‘You got that, Breeze? You’re the one doing the answering around here.’
I could not believe it. This runt, this titch, was threatening two fully grown men.
‘How is it,’ the man demanded, ‘that I’m late for work almost every day of the week? Eh, Breeze? How is it that I spend two grand a year on fucking travel and still I get to stand in a crowded, dirty train every morning – if I’m lucky?’ He wiped the small wet hole of his mouth and started moving towards Pa. ‘Well? I only live fifteen miles from Rockport: so why does it take me, on average, one hour to get into town?’
Pa, his face yellow-grey again, was completely lost. He started shrinking into his anorak as the stranger slowly advanced like a miniature gunman, punctuating his sentences with absurd stomps of his cowboy boots. The stranger said, ‘You haven’t got much to say for yourself, have you, Breeze? Eh? Why do I spend half my life freezing on a fucking train platform? Well, Breeze? Sorry – well, Gene?’
‘I …’ Pa said. ‘I …’
I decided to intervene. ‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘Listen, I don’t know who you are, but…’
‘Enjoying yourself, Breeze?’ the man sneered. ‘Having fun, are you? I am. I should do this more often. I should liaise with you more often.’ Now the midget’s red face, bright as a stop light, was directly below Pa’s. ‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘You want to know how I feel, Gene, old boy? You really want to know how I feel?’
The man spat straight into Pa’s face, the saliva spurting up and sticking with a tacky splash on his eyebrow and on the frame of his glasses.
The man drew back. ‘There you go, Gene. Stick that in your report.’ Then, before I could react, before I could snap his fucking dwarf’s neck, he walked off.
‘Pa,’ I said. ‘Pa, Jesus, I…’
Pa had not moved. He was still frozen in the corner with shock, the spittle now slowly dripping down on to his lips.
I took out his red linesman’s handkerchief and wiped his face and glasses. ‘Come on,’ I said, stuffing the handkerchief back into his pocket. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
That fleck of shit spat at Pa because Pa is the manager of the Rockport Railway Network, Northern Section. He is the man responsible for the smooth running of two hundred and sixty trains a day. It’s a large responsibility which has not been lessened, it has to be said, by the poster campaign which the Network has recently embarked on. Plastered over every train and every train station in north Rockport is a photograph of my father holding a telephone. It is not a very good photograph: his hair is uncombed, his cream tie clashes with his brown shirt and grey jacket and, worst of all, his face bears an apprehensive and culpable expression. The caption reads:
GENE BREEZE – AT YOUR SERVICE
Hello, I’m Gene Breeze, your Network Manager. If you have any comments – good or bad – about the service we provide, let me know. I want to know how you feel to help me meet your requirements. So don’t hold back. Liaise with me or my staff on Rockport 232597.
THE ROCKPORT NETWORK – WE’RE GETTING THERE
The network motto, ‘We’re getting there’, has, of course, become something of a joke, because everybody knows that the Network is getting nowhere. It has personnel problems, rolling-stock problems, signalling problems and investment problems. Above all, it has delay problems – delays that have been attributed to such malign agents of nature as swans (flying into the overhead lines), leaves (falling on the tracks) and rodents (gnawing into cables). Staff morale is low and passenger dissatisfaction is high, and for an hour at the end of every day Pa has to listen to the abuse and anger of the Network users. That is on top of the nine hours he puts in trying to run the railroad itself.
It angers me to think of what he goes through. Not long ago, I tried to talk him out of fielding the complaints personally.
‘I have to, son,’ he said. ‘I have to. I owe it to the customers. It’s not right that I invite them to ring me without me being there at least some of the time. They are my clients. They have a right to talk to me.’
‘But, Pa, you have a public relations team to look after that. Let them answer the calls.’
‘As the manager,’ Pa said, ‘I am responsible for the complaints. The buck stops with me,’ he said. ‘The way I see it, being answerable to the public means just that: answering the public.’
‘But the other network managers don’t do that,’ I said. ‘Pa, you’re the only one who actually does what those posters say.’
‘You’re right,’ Pa admitted. ‘But then, it wasn’t their idea to start this campaign.’
I said, ‘It was your idea?’
‘Yes,’ he said proudly. ‘I was the one who suggested it to the directors. No matter what Paddy Browne says, I’m not devoid of ideas.’
Paddy Browne is the Network Secretary and, according to Pa, the man behind the moves to depose him. It was Paddy Browne who recently suggested to Pa that he should think of early retirement. That day, Pa came round to the flat and stood fuming in my basement workshop as I tinkered, for the sake of appearances, with a piece of wood.
‘Early retirement? Early retirement? You know what that means, don’t you? It means the sack, that’s what it means.’ He started wandering around the room, weaving his way between the various obstacles. He uttered the loathsome name once more: ‘Paddy Browne.’ He pointed at the door. ‘He wants me out, that’s what he wants. No, no, I can see it with my own eyes,’ Pa said, waving me down as though I had voiced a protest. ‘He undermines everything I do. Every time I say anything at a meeting, Paddy’s there with a ‘Yes, but”, and ‘Surely what you’re trying to say is this …” It’s eating away at me, Johnny, it’s tearing me apart. Johnny,’ Pa said wildly, ‘Johnny, he’s after my blood. He won’t rest until he sees me out.’
‘Are you sure you’re not reading too much into it?’ I said.
‘Listen, the man has commissioned a study of the management structure, he’s bringing in people from the outside. The management structure! That’s a good one! The management structure is me: I’m the management structure!’
I said nothing.
Pa said, ‘And I know what they’re going to recommend. They’re going to recommend my dismissal.’
‘You don’t know that, Pa,’ I said.
‘Just you wait and see,’ he said. ‘I know how Browne operates. He’s going to produce these bar charts and efficiency graphs which will show that I’ve got to go. Johnny, you should see the stuff he comes up with. It’s all green arrows and red arrows and flow charts and diagrams. He goes around with this portable computer, this lap-top, as he calls it, and everything he writes comes out looking like – like the Ten Commandments.’ Pa suddenly raised his voice. ‘You don’t believe me? Here,’ he said, stormily snatching a folder from his briefcase and flying sheets of paper into the air, ‘here, read this. Just read it.’
I took the folder and flicked through its contents, a twenty-page company report of some kind. The document, headlines printed in bold, key points emphasized in italics and statistics illustrated by multicoloured pie charts, was immaculate. The sentences were short and unambiguous and the concluding opinion was headed ‘Findings’, as though unimpeachable discoveries of fact had been made. I handed the papers back to Pa. ‘I see what you mean,’ I said.
‘What did I tell you? I’m right, aren’t I?’ Pa closed his briefcase. ‘I haven’t got a hope against that kind of presentation,’ he said. ‘Not a hope. Hell’s bells, Johnny, all I know about is trains.’
I said cautiously, ‘Maybe retirement wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Think of all the free time you’d have. Think of all the things you could do.’
Pa swung around. ‘Free time? Are you crazy? I don’t want free time! I want to work! Besides,’ he said in a different voice, ‘I’ll be honest with you, we need the money. If I retired, who would make the mortgage payments on this flat?’
‘Pa, sell the flat. Rosie and me’ll be fine. Don’t let us stop you.’
Pa said, ‘We were unlucky with this place. As soon as we bought it the market fell. They say prices never dropped so quickly in twenty years.’ He shook his head. ‘We can’t afford to sell now. We’d lose too much.’
Although Pa was telling the truth about the property market, I knew that he was just using it as an excuse. The fact of the matter is, Pa will never sell the flat so long as Rosie and I are still in need of it.
So there is something else for me not to worry about – the calamitous possibility of Pa being laid off tomorrow, the day that the management report comes out. Calamitous is not an exaggeration. My father without employment is simply unimaginable. His veneration of work is such that, whenever he picks up a newspaper, the first place he turns to, before even the sports pages, are the appointments pages.
‘Listen to this, son,’ he says, reading out an advertisement in a low, reverential voice. ‘And this,’ he says turning to another one, ‘just listen to this one.’ He holds up the sheets to the light in wonderment. ‘Would you believe it?’ he says. ‘Would you believe it?’
There he sits, his mouth open. And we are not concerned with especially desirable posts here, with company directorships or academic sinecures. No, we are concerned with ordinary vacancies, openings for sales engineers and area housing managers, for biomedical technicians and senior improvements officers. These are the jobs that enthral Pa.
It is almost inevitable, when he peruses the jobs pages, that he suddenly drops the paper, produces a pair of scissors and starts cutting away at the broadsheet. ‘Johnny,’ he says as he snips away, ‘Johnny, this is it. This is the one.’ He thrusts his handiwork at me and sits back to study my reaction.
SALES PEOPLE – Young progressive advertising company requires Sales People in all areas to carry out major expansion programme. Training and support will be provided, car with a telephone a prerequisite. Generous expense allowance plus commission.
‘Well? What do you think?’
‘Pa, Steve doesn’t have a car.’
He is thrown for a moment, but then he bounces right back. ‘That’s just a detail,’ he says boldly. ‘What’s a car? We can find Steve a car no problem. No,’ he says, waving the cutting like a winning lottery ticket, ‘this is just the job for Stephen. Look – it says he’ll get training and support. I’m telling you, that boy has it in him to do great things. It’s not too late. He’s just a young man, he has his whole life ahead of him. With a bit of help, who knows how far he’ll go?’ Pa tucks the cutting into his wallet. ‘I’ll send it to him straight away.’
I have been through this with my father many times before, so I do not say anything. The short point is that Steve is not a worker. He has not lifted a finger in the five years that I have known him and he is not about to change now. While his inner being may be a mystery, I do know Steve this well: if you offered him a salary of twenty thousand a month to do exactly what he liked, he would turn you down – it would sound too much like work. I have not reached this conclusion lightly. Like Pa, I used to pass on to Steve ads which I had seen in the newspapers. That’s right. I used to get the scissors out, too. Whenever I got wind of a cushy number, old Steve was the first to hear about it. But that strategy was like Steve himself: it didn’t work; and after what happened last time, I have sworn that I will never try it again.
Wanted, the advertisement said. Trustworthy house-sitter for period residence while owners go abroad for a month. Generous pay.
‘Steve,’ I said, ‘take a look at that. Now that’s what I call a job.’
Steve reached out from the sofa and looked at the newspaper for a whole minute. ‘Thanks, Johnny,’ he said. Then he carefully placed the paper on the floor.
I made a decision. I fetched a sheet of paper and typed out the application myself. ‘Sign here,’ I said to Steve.
‘God, thanks, John,’ Steve said as he wrote his name.
Then I posted the letter. I went to the post office, bought a stamp and personally mailed the fucker.
The reply came quickly. It was good news: Steve had been granted an interview on Thursday, at nine in the morning. Great, Steve said. Great stuff.
That Thursday morning I arose early – those were the days when I was still productive, back in September of last year. By eight-fifteen, though, Steve had not stirred from his bed: Rosie’s bed: the bed which Pa had shelled out for. When I opened the bedroom door, there he was, a mound under the duvet.
‘Wake up, Steve,’ I said, shaking him by the shoulder. ‘Wake up. You’ve got to go to your interview.’
He rolled over and stared at me with uncomprehending, unconscious eyes. Then he rolled over again and went back to sleep. There was nothing I could do to rouse him. I said to Rosie, Rosie, for God’s sake, tell him to get up. Tell him to go.
Rosie, who was busy getting ready for work, said, ‘Oh, forget it. He won’t do it, he’s useless.’ She put her head through the door and shouted, ‘You’re useless, aren’t you, Slug?’ Then suddenly she snatched up a handful of objects – lipsticks, hairbrushes, books – and started hurling them at him. ‘You just lie there and rot and vegetate and do nothing, you bastard! Get up!’ she screamed, tugging at the duvet. ‘Get up, you shit!’
‘Take it easy, Rosie,’ I said. ‘It’s all right, don’t worry about it.’
Rosie started weeping with anger and humiliation, the tears leaving tracks through her deep stewardess’s make-up. ‘He’s so …He’s just so …’
I said, ‘It’s OK, Rosie … Rosie, it’s all right.’ I led her out of the bedroom and up to the front door. ‘We’ll sort it out. Now you just go to work, all right?’
‘He’s such a bastard, Johnny,’ Rosie said, swallowing back mucus and cleaning her face. ‘He’s such a bastard.’ Then she put on her green hat and headed out into the street to the job she hates.
What a dope I was to allow myself to get into that situation – to allow myself to get involved with Steve like that.
Never again.
Pa, though, does not see it that way. Again and again is his motto. As far as he is concerned, where there is life there is hope, and in spite of everything he still believes that inside Steve there lie secret deposits of energy waiting to be tapped, gushers. Pa has got it wrong. Steve is not the North Sea or the Arabian peninsula. There are no oilfields in Steve.
5 (#ulink_3b736d25-6746-578f-85bc-98922945ba4a)
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.’
