Читать книгу The Breezes - Joseph O’Neill - Страница 9

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.