The Breezes by Joseph O'Neill Page A

started making six months ago – 5 Tripods , they were named. Superficially, they looked fine: five stools, each with wooden seats of a slightly different design, each supported by the same three curved metallic legs. But those legs were the problem. They were unbalanced – so unbalanced that the stools would not stand up. The moment you removed them from the supporting wall, that was it: crash, over they went, in a slow, certain topple. My blunder, of course, was that in my impetuosity I had assembled the chairs without first checking their stability. Stability I had taken for granted.
    My task was clear. I had to redesign the legs while nevertheless leaving the chairs’ present structure intact, since it was too late to start wholly afresh. Then I had to drive the chairs over to Devonshire’s. All this within forty-eight hours. That deadline was my trump card. I was counting on time to spur me to action.
    Using a model, I desperately experimented with the addition of a fourth leg – a wooden leg, it had to be, because I had run out of stainless steel. Not only did it look terrible, but the glue I used to secure the leg to the seat simply did not hold. Every time I tried to place a weight upon the seat, off came the leg. Never mind, Johnny, I said to myself after the third failure, try again. Stick at it. Persevere. Never say die. I cleaned the wood, reapplied the glue and pressed the parts together once more. I stayed frozen there for minutes, my face reddening with determination. This time it was going to work. This time …
    I gently released my grip. After giving the adhesive time to take, I turned the stool up and gingerly stood it on its four legs. So far so good. It stayed up. Then came the moment of truth. I took a thick cabinet-making manual and gently placed it onthe seat. I waited. Nothing happened. The chair remained upright. It worked.
    I had done it. The stool may have been ugly, but it was a stool; it was better than nothing. All that remained was to affix this fourth leg to the actual chairs, and then I’d be home and dry. Blankly, I lit a cigarette. I couldn’t believe it. After so many fruitless months, the nightmare was over. The show would bomb, of course, but at least it would go on. From a legal point of view, if nothing else, I was in the clear.
    I heard a creaking noise. I turned around. It was the model chair, and like a foal doing its unsteady splits, it was slowly collapsing as the wooden leg gave way underneath it. With a thick report the book thudded to the ground, followed by the seat, with a crash. Shit, I shouted. Fucking, bloody, fucking shit.
    I flung my cigarette at the wall and heeled it to a crumbling butt. Sweating with anger, an idea occurred to me. I would cut the legs in half and use the extra metal tubing to provide a triangular lateral base. Yes, that was it! I’d chop the suckers in half! Let’s see how they’d like that! But just as I was poised to ignite the blue flame of the blowtorch, I envisaged the end product: crippled, squat, ugly seats that were neither one thing nor the other; stools that fell between two bloody stools. I removed my safety goggles and dropped the cutter. I looked up at the window’s dark rectangle and said out loud, That’s it. To hell with it. I give up.
    Strengthlessly, I sat down on the box again. The day of the exhibition, 16 May, was approaching with every passing second and there was nothing I could do about it. Inevitability had snared me, bagged and unstruggling. I was caught.
    And there is another irony – another twist apparent in retrospect: the very reason I started making chairs in the first place was precisely to evade this – the trap of certainty. It was not accountancy I wanted to escape from, it was the guaranteed future it offered. Even from where I stood, halfway through my traineeship, I could see the whole of the way ahead – a road without corners, straight and relentless