Read Online The Breezes by Joseph O'Neill - Free Book Online Page B

windscreen, each surge of droplets wiped out then instantaneously replaced by fresh, momentary troops, in turn effaced in their thousands as the wiper swung back over the glass. ‘I remember when United were a great team, when we won the league, the Cup and the Continental Cup in three straight years. I tell you, Johnny, those were the days. What a line-up: Neville Clarke, the Tiger of Antigua, in goal, Guthrie, Knox, Walker and Janusz at the back, Dingemans, Dean and Lazarus in midfield, Loasby, Le Quesne and Newman up front. Sixty thousand for every home match and never once a fight.’ Yet again, Pa shook his head. ‘You should have seen Redrock Park in those days, Johnny. The stands would be bursting over and the schoolboys would be passed down over our heads to the front of the terraces. The atmosphere was different. You didn’t see moats or fences or firecrackers, you didn’t see pitch invasions. And thesinging…’ Pa swallowed. ‘By God, Johnny, you should have been there to hear the singing.’
    I did not reply to this, because I knew that Pa had not been there to hear the singing either. The first time Pa had even taken notice of Rockport United was when I began supporting them as an eight-year-old and when every match day saw his white-fisted, oblivious boy hunched over the radio and transported in its tiny racket to the heart of the ringing stadium, my day, sometimes even my week, hinged precariously on the game’s outcome. Out of sympathy, Pa became a Rockport United fan, too. He enrolled me in the supporters’ club and then, to keep me company, put his own name down. He bought me all of the gear so that I could listen to the game properly kitted out: the strip, the red and white scarf, the bobble hat incorporating the club’s famous symbol, the prancing red lambs. Pa bought a club rattle and he bought a pair of lucky underpants to wear on Cup days. Why he thought those underpants – red and white checks – were lucky, I do not know, because in all of the time that he wore them United never won a thing. But that did not deter him. Every season the Cup would start afresh, every year Pa pulled on those shorts and every year United got knocked out.
    Christmas Day, 1979. I am twelve years old, Pa is forty-two and there is my mother in her blue apron, temporarily leaving the last turkey that she will ever cook to watch her children open their presents. There, under the Christmas tree, is a record with my name, Johnny , written on the wrapper between the sledges and the snowmen. Eagerly I rip open the package, hoping for the album that all my classmates are listening to – Spare Head: I Shouldn’t Have Eaten That Second Banana – but it is not to be. What I have instead is a recording of the 1968 Continental Cup final, when on a hot and floodlit Parisian night United beat Lisbon 4-1 after extra time to win the trophy.
    Pa swoops as I kneel there, removing my gift from my hand. ‘This is brilliant,’ he says, clumsily dropping the disc on the turntable. ‘This,’ Pa says, ‘is what I call brilliant. ’
    He listens to the record – both sides – maybe three times that day, and that day the house resonates with the euphoria of one hundred thousand supporters of Rockport United. Each time agoal is scored my father’s arms half rise in joy and a great smile cracks across his face; then, quickly, before the cheering has died down, he darts over to the record-player, returns the needle by a fraction of an inch, switches up the volume by a notch or two and listens to it one more time.
    My father is scoring goals at will. It’s there! the commentator cries again and again. It’s there! It’s there!

6
    The windowpanes clank and shudder in the wind. I take a look outside. It’s still raining, and still there’s no sign of Angie; no sign of anyone in the street except a young boy on a bicycle, standing up on the