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