The Breezes

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.

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