The Breezes (7 page)

It doesn't bear thinking about.

But then, right now, what does? This afternoon – does that bear thinking about?

Too shaken up by the incident with the midget to drive the car, Pa let me chauffeur him home. ‘Just take it easy on the gear changes,' he said as I removed the keys from the pocket of his anorak. He eased himself into his seat with difficulty and tiredly strapped his belt across his chest. ‘Go slowly,' he said, then fell back and closed his eyes. By the time I had accelerated into the main road and found a niche in the traffic, he was fast asleep. He sat in a sideways slump, his head knocking slightly against the shivering window, his breath expelled in a slow, regular gasp. I felt a warm gladness that he was slumbering there, in the comfort of his car, that he had found a secure respite from the day's brutalities. He looked so vincible, with his cornered shrunken body and his powerless hands. When we get home I'll run him a hot bath and make him some soup, I decided. Yes, and maybe I'll fix him one of those salami and gherkin sandwiches that he likes. Then, with beers at hand and the Sunday newspapers scattered about and Trusty nuzzling at our feet, we'll settle back and watch the United game on TV. That should see him right, I thought.

About five minutes later, Pa woke up.

‘Can you hear that, Johnny?'

I said, ‘Pa, take it from me, there's nothing wrong with the car, all right? Now go back to sleep.'

‘No,' he said, ‘not the car. Listen to that.'

Then I heard it, too: the sound of the crowd at Redrock Park, its cries and handclaps amplified by the acoustical stadium and carried by the wind over rooftops to Pa and me, sitting in a car almost a mile away. I lowered the window a touch.
We love United
, they were singing,
We love United, we do, oh, United,
we love you.
And then, euphorically,
Here we go, here we go, here we go …

‘Just listen to that,' Pa said. ‘What an atmosphere. And there's still half an hour to go before the kick-off. Look at those crowds,' he said, pointing to groups of fans walking quickly across the road. Studying his watch, he said, ‘We'll be home in five or ten minutes. For a quick wash and a bite before it starts.' For a moment we continued to look at his timepiece with the built-in referee's stopwatch, figuring out his schedule, and then with a vigorous rubbing of hands he exclaimed, ‘Johnny, I can feel it in my bones, we're going to win today, we're going to win!' He looked at me with a grin, and when I caught his eye we both burst out laughing. ‘That's right!' Pa said, joyously assuming a hillbilly American accent, ‘we're going to whup their asses, boy!'

I drove on through the familiar bends of the road home, amazed at how swiftly my father had recovered from the morning's degradations. Just twenty minutes ago he had been spat in the face and insulted, and less than an hour before that he had been sexually assaulted by a terrier and publicly reviled. Yet here he was again, restored to enthusiasm. Was there no limit to his resilience?

It could only be that this ability to recuperate and rally was a product of Pa's faithfulness. Pa is the most faithful person I know. There is no thing or person which he does not believe in. God and the life hereafter, the future well-being of his children, the success of his football team, the loyalty of his dog, the reliability of Whelan, the potential of Steve, the value of employment, the upturn in the housing market: come what may, Pa has been absolutely trusting and hopeful in respect of all of these glassy entities. No matter how often and violently they shatter on the floor and how irreparable their fragmentation, by a mystery of fidelity the smithereens are always reconstituted in Pa's mind. But where does this credulous optimism come from? Is it a necessary biological witlessness, a natural reality-blocker secreted by some gland in the brain? Or does it arrive from some occult, immaterial source?

I enjoyed my father's crazy hopefulness while it lasted, because it would, of course, be followed by a crazy nervous
fearfulness that his hopes would be dashed, and I knew that before long the confidence would drain from him and he would be transformed into a wreck barely able to remain in the same room as the televised football match, that he would stand rooted at the doorway to the kitchen, a man appalled and mesmerized by a scene of horror, half watching the action through the fingers clasping his white face as the opposition advanced on the United goal like zombies from a nightmare …

I pulled up in front of the house. Although we were in a hurry, Pa remained seated for a moment and breathed, as he often does when he arrives at his front door, Home sweet home. I think that he can be forgiven this sentimentalism. That building – a detached three-storeyed suburban house with a garden, green-railed balconies at the front and back, a pear tree, two lilac trees, double garage, clambering roses and four bedrooms – has been the asylum of the Breezes for almost twenty years.

We walked up the path to the front door, which I unlocked and pushed open. Then we saw it: a pile of shit on the floor at the bottom of the staircase. We looked at each other: Trusty.

I said heavily, ‘Don't worry about it. I'll fix it. You go on upstairs and have your bath.'

Before I went to fetch the tissues, scrubber and carpet shampoo, I went to the sitting-room to switch on the television. I did not want to risk missing a minute of the game. I picked up the remote control, aimed it at the corner of the room, and punched the button.

Nothing happened. The television was not there. I realized instantly, even before I noticed that the curtains were billowing in the broken-open french windows, that there had been a burglary. I wiped my face with my hand. Then I called upstairs. ‘Pa, can you come down?'

‘What?' he asked nervously as he descended the stairs in his socks and track suit. ‘What's the matter?'

I said nothing. I just led him into the living-room.

‘What's happened?' Pa said. ‘Where's the TV? Where's the CD?' He turned around on the spot. ‘But that's impossible,' he said. ‘There's a safety catch on those windows. Whelan put it
there himself. And there's an alarm – why isn't the alarm ringing?'

He walked over to the french windows and tried to drag them shut, but the hinges had been broken. The draught kept pouring through and the living-room fluttered like a field. ‘I just don't understand this,' Pa said. ‘What about Trusty? How could she let this happen? Where is she, anyway?'

There was a silence as we stood there trying to take things in.

‘Well,' I said, ‘I guess we can forget about watching the game.'

Pa was not listening. He was moving his palm over the vacant mantelpiece in a slow caress. He raised his hand to his face and blankly regarded his powdery fingertips. The photographs. The one-and-only, silver-framed family photographs had been removed. The famous honeymoon picture; the last remaining picture of my father's mother, a young woman in the 1920s leaning confidently against a car upon which the photographer, his head under the hood of his camera, has cast his shadow; long-haired Rosie at her first communion; me, a ten-year-old in my Rovers kit, drinking juice during the half-time break with my team-mates; and several others that I can't bring back. Holiday snapshots, most of them, nothing special when they were up there. The usual lucky moments captured in the usual way.

Pa sat down wordlessly. Upstairs, the falling bathwater thundered against enamel.

I went up and turned off the taps. When I returned downstairs, he was still sitting, looking dumbly ahead of him. ‘Pa,' I said. I touched him on the shoulder. ‘Your bath's ready.'

He got to his feet. He slowly walked up the stairs. He went into his bedroom and closed the door behind him.

I got on to the telephone and rang the police.

‘I suppose we'd better send somebody over,' the switchboard operator said. ‘We'll have someone there within half an hour.'

‘Should I touch anything?' I said.

The officer sighed. ‘Look, if you want us to carry out a
forensic examination and the rest of it, then I suppose you should leave things as they are. But frankly, Mr Breeze …'

‘I understand,' I said.

‘I mean, there are so many break-ins these days,' he said apologetically. ‘Besides, you don't really want us camped in your house for hours, do you?'

‘Don't worry,' I said. ‘Thanks,' I said.

The first thing to do was clear up Trusty's mess. But where was Trusty? Outside, most probably, looking for some action. Trusty was on heat, and although she is only two years old, when she is on heat, she's hot. If you even half open a window or a door she will be through it like a shot, frenzied by her lust. There are many evenings which Pa and I have spent combing the neighbourhood gardens where that dog engages in her trysts, whistling and calling her name in the moonlight: Trusty! Trusty! And when we do finally spy her, she snarls furiously and makes another dash for it through the hedges. The scenario of Trusty's disappearance was therefore obvious: instead of recognizing the intruder for the enemy he was, she had welcomed him as a rescuer and had bolted through the french windows he had cracked open. So much for the
BEWARE OF THE DOG
sign which Pa had posted at the front and back of the house.

I have my theory as to why Trusty has turned out this way. At the time of her very first period in heat, Pa and I took her for a walk in the field near the house. Trusty was still young and innocent and had barely learned to walk without treading on her long ears. So there she was, hopping over the grassy earth with her nose to the ground, eagerly inhaling the novel smells, when a large muscular animal, an Alsatian, ran up to her and fucked her without hesitation. Then it ran off.

We had all been helpless – Pa, Trusty and I. Pa had a go at pulling off the Alsatian by the collar, I shouted and waved and threw sticks, Trusty wriggled and fought. But the police dog stuck to its guns and we were forced to watch as Trusty, a dazed look in her beseeching, unconsenting brown eyes, was raped by a beast twice her size. I think that this shocking experience, which should have turned Trusty off sex altogether,
probably had the opposite effect. I think that it turned her into the libidinist that she is.

Once I had tidied the living-room there was nothing for it but to clean up in the hallway. I retrieved the necessary equipment from the broom cupboard and approached the pile of excrement, which for some reason looked odd. I scraped it up quickly, leaving only a faint stain on the floor. Just as I was getting out the carpet shampoo, the door rang: the cops.

I opened the door to two uniformed constables, a man and a woman. The woman was the senior of the two. She looked around and asked the questions while her colleague wrote down my replies in his notebook. ‘This stuff that's been stolen,' she said, ‘is it yours? Or is it your dad's?' She wandered over to the french windows.

‘My father's,' I said.

‘Is he in?'

‘He's upstairs,' I said. ‘Up in his bedroom.' (This wasn't like him – he normally would have been the first to greet the forces of law and order.)

‘Could we have a word with him?' the policewoman asked, peering out into the garden. ‘We have to take a statement.'

I'll get him, I said, and ran up.

But Pa was not in his bedroom. I went out on to the landing and said, ‘Pa?' and there was no reply; but then, as I quietened, I heard a snuffling noise from the third floor. I went up the stairs. ‘Pa?'

I stood still. There it was again: snuff, sniff, snuff. I pushed open the door to Rosie's old bedroom – the bedroom with the big skylight and the blue-flowered wallpaper and the piles of children's books.

It was him all right. He was standing in the no man's land between the bed and the wall, his head turned away towards the corner of the room. He was still in his track suit. On the bed was an old, torn bin-liner and a scattering of photographs. As Pa drew his sleeve across his nose he sniffed again, and the daylight caught his face and I saw that his eyes were more red and glistening and swollen than ever.

I went across to the bed, to the photographs. These were the leftovers – the last pictorial records of the Breezes in our
possession. They were also the worst ones. The clear, lovely pictures – of my mother holding the hands of her two children one snowy winter, of summer picnics, of my parents at the altar – had been taken by Rosie just before she went to university and collected in a marvellous album. Then Rosie, in the way that she mislays all of the gold rings and heirlooms that she is given, lost the album. No one blamed her, but for months afterwards she would burst into tears of bereavement at the thought of those essential images being gone for ever. Now that Pa's silver-framed photos had gone, those snapshots on Rosie's old bed were, apart from our memories, the remaining threads to the family's past. I took a look at them. There was only one picture left of my mother: seated on a patio somewhere – at a friend's house, I supposed; I did not recognize the background – my mother's face is plunged into darkness, the photographer (Pa, no doubt) having made the mistake of shooting into sunlight. All you can make out of her is the curled outline of a 1960s haircut and the silhouetted knees, crossed; apart from a chin and nose which show as flecks in the gloom, she is faceless.

I checked the bin-liner once more, but no, that was all that remained of Ma. There were no other pictures of her.

I put the photos back into the bin-liner and touched his shoulder. ‘Pa,' I said. ‘Pa, the police are downstairs,' I said.

He followed me down.

The policewoman asked him the same questions she had asked me. He replied in a toneless voice, after lengthy pauses, looking stupidly into space. Meanwhile, the other policeman had started sniffing around – literally. His nostrils were twitching, as if he had caught the whiff of something.