Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other Read online

  `When did she go?' I asked, to change the subject.

  His Catholic-hating smile hardened into his wife-hating smile, a much uglier thing. `Last month. Told me she was fucking her cousin and pissed off the day before Christmas. Didn't miss her. Drunkest I'd ever been. Drunkest anybody's ever been. Didn't miss her. Won't miss her.' He nudged me. `Gives me a chance to have a go at all the wee tarts running round the estate. That's the life for me.'

  A tear tracked down the tired lines in his face while he talked all his tough talk. Here we go again, I thought. He talked more hardman bullshit like he didn't know I knew how soft and small and sad he was. I didn't listen with either ear.

  Crab and Hally finally lumbered out of the house carrying both parts of the sunbed.The van door was open so they loaded up without my assistance. The guy ignored them all the while and continued cajoling me with his man-of-the-world stuff. Crab got into the driver's seat, grumbling about not getting a look at the tart with the sunbed.The man's face did not flicker. Hally pushed him out of the way and climbed in.

  And it was when Crab started the van and we moved off that it happened. I looked back and the guy waved at me. A tired, amiable, clapped-out gesture. I don't know. I'd taken stuff from old folks, from women, from kids even. It's supposed to be easier to feel sorry for them but I'd never felt sorrier for any one than I felt for this tired guy, this silent weeper who'd waved at me as I'd driven away with the last remnant of the woman who had left him.

  And that was enough to do it.The low-rent street, the crappy houses, the sky pale and drooping, the waving man with the wet face. It all looked like I felt and I decided that I wanted to go home. I was going to take the rest of the day off. A morning's worth of repo work was enough sadness for anybody.

  The van was getting full and we decided to drive back and unload. Crab and Hally bickered on as we drove back to the garage from where we worked. Soon they guessed my mood and left me out of their banter. I couldn't get the picture of the guy with no wife and no sunbed out of my head and I couldn't swallow the taste of shame.

  Back at the garage, I left my two colleagues and walked into Allen's office. He owned the garage and ran his debt-collection gimmick from there. He was talking money into the telephone. He motioned me to wait. I waited without patience.

  `What do you want?' he asked, when he had finished. Allen was an ex-dipso, car salesman, repossessor, loan shark, all-round wide-boy. He was the only sixty-year-old bald guy I had ever seen in a pair of leather trousers. He was not a man with much grace.

  'I'm going home. I'm sick.'

  `The fuck you are.'

  'Stop me.'

  He frowned and decided to stop trying to look menacing. He wasn't any good at it.That's what he'd hired Crab, Hally and me for.

  'What's wrong with you?'

  'I'm sick.'

  He looked out of the small window to where he could see Crab and Hally unloading the van. 'Have you gotta problem with this work, Jackson?'

  'Nah, I find it massively rewarding. I thank God every day for the fulfilment of it, the sense of achievement. What do you think?'

  He didn't couldn't, he didn't understand all those syllables.

  `Why don't you go be a fucking brain-surgeon, then?'

  `I'm thinking about it.!

  `You get up my nose, you know.' Happily reminded, he started to pick the organ in question. `Crab and Hally don't have a problem. Admittedly, they're stupid cunts but they don't have a problem because they know that what you don't pay for you can't have. We take stuff from scumbags who shouldn't have bought it in the first place. Don't buy things you can't afford' He dislodged a wieldy piece of snot and paused thoughtfully. `If you don't like it go get another job. I'll live with the disappointment of losing you. Fuck me, who cares if we're not nice - we're necessary. That's more important.' He smiled and flicked the snot from his fingers. Just in case I thought he was justifying himself or anything like that, he added, `Anyway, do you think I could give two fucks?

  'Can I go home now?'

  He dismissed me with a wave. `Yeah, fuck off. And don't do this again.'

  At the door he called me back. I turned reluctantly and looked at him without interest.

  `You're a real soppy prick, you know.'

  'Yeah,' l said, `I've been told.'

  Back home in Poetry Street, I smacked a cup of coffee into me. Fancy coffee; black as Mick beer and strong as radiator paint. The only way to drink it. Cost me three quid a pound but a man had to have good coffee. Since Sarah had ironed out my tastes it had become a first principle. I lived at the posh end of town now so I ground my coffee and drank it from overpriced, underglazed kitchenware. This was Poetry Street. This was bourgeois Belfast, leafier and more prosperous than you might imagine. Sarah had found this place and moved us in to lead our leafy kind of life in our leafy kind of area. When her English friends or family had visited us there they had always been disappointed by the lack of burnt-out cars or foot patrols on our wide, tree-lined avenue. From my downstairs window, Belfast looked like Oxford or Cheltenham. The houses, the streets and the people were plump with disposable income.

  From my upstairs window, however, I could see the West; the famous, hushed West. That's where I'd been born: West Belfast, the bold, the true, the extremely rough. I used to send Sarah's visitors up there. There were plenty of those local details up West.

  A radio waffled softly from the flat downstairs. It was barely ten o'clock and the student kids downstairs were probably just getting up. I pulled my curtains wide and Saturday sunlight slapped itself around my room like a coat of paint. I squinted out at all the Belfast birds in all the Belfast sky. Across the Lisburn Road, a diminutive cleaning woman chucked some flaccid garbage from the doorway of the fancy Indian chickenhouse. A group of cats appeared from nowhere and started filling their faces. I recognized my own prominent amongst them. He was the fat one with no testicles. I thought about calling him in for his breakfast but I decided not to bother. I didn't particularly like my cat. My cat was a bit of a wanker.

  I looked to my own dry toast and cigarettes. I ate in good heart, a neat trick on two hours' sleep and a baby hangover. I went to the door and looked again for the mail that never arrived. I picked up the local paper and took a read at that instead. Another taxi-driver shot the night before. Taxi-drivers were fashionable victims just then. It was all the rage. It was all the hatred. At the bottom of the front page there was an ad for a Christmas pantomime. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs WITH REAL DWARFS!!!

  Everything was looking local.

  Under the circumstances, Belfast was a pretty famous place. When you considered that it was the underpopulated capital of a minor province, the world seemed to know it excessively well. Nobody needed to be told the reasons for this needless fame. I didn't know much about Beirut until the artillery moved in. Who'd heard of Saigon before it blew its lid? Was Anzio a town, a village or just a stretch of beach? Where was Agincourt exactly?

  Belfast shared the status of the battlefield.The place-names of the city and country had taken on the resonance and hard beauty of all history's slaughter venues. The Bogside, Crossmaglen, The Falls, The Shankill and Andersonstown. In the mental maps of those who had never been in Ireland, these places had tiny crossed swords after their names. People thought them televised knackers' yards. Belfast was only big because Belfast was bad.

  And who would have thought it thirty years before? Little Belfast could be such a beautiful city. Squatting flat in the oxter of Belfast Lough, hazily level with the water, the city was ringed with mountains and nudged by the sea. When you looked up the length of most Belfast streets, there was some kind of mountain or hill staring back at you.

  But, yeah, Belfast continued to fail to surprise me. A couple of days before, a bomb had gone off near the police station just across the road from my flat. I'd watched from my window as the Lisburn Road was evacuated. The flower shop, the newsagent's, the hairdresser's. After sealing off the road, they did a control
led explosion. Jesus! Blew in two of my windows and scared the chocolate out of me into the bargain. How controlled were these controlled explosions? It fucked half the other half was pretty fucked already. What new definition of the word `controlled' was this?

  It was, of course, nothing serious. As Belfast bombs go, it went. Little to relate. Nobody died, nobody bled. It was no big deal. That was the big deal. It was dull stuff. Nobody really noticed. What had happened to us here? Since when had deto nations in the neighbourhood barely raised a grumble?

  It had been a while since I had been that close to an explosion, what with me moving to this middle-class end of town and all. It was strange.You forget what they're like. But when it went off, I remembered what they were like, quicker than I wanted to.

  What were bombs like? naturally. And loud. And frightening. They were loud and frightening in your gut like when you were a child and you fell on your head and couldn't understand why it hurt like panic in your belly. They were fairly irreversible too. Bombs were like dropped plates, kicked cats or hasty words. They were error. They were disarrangement and mess. They were this was important - knowledge. When you heard that dry splash, that animal thud of bomb, distant or close, you knew something.You knew that someone somewhere was having a very bad time indeed.

  It wasn't the bombs that were scary. It was the bombed. Public death was a special mortality. Bombs mauled and possessed their dead. Blast removed people's shoes like a solicitous relative, it opened men's shirts pruriently; women's skirts rode up their bloody thighs from the force of the lecherous blast. The bombed dead were spilled on the street like cheap fruit. And, finally, unfuckingbeatably, the bombed dead were dead. They were so very, very dead.

  (Incidentally, the controlled explosion was carried out on a bin bag full of discarded Kentucky Fried Chicken. There were little pieces of singed white-meat all over the place. My cat was a very happy cat.)

  It was Saturday. I couldn't look for another job on a Saturday and I had the purposeless day to get through. I thought of my cheap friends.They would do. It was Chuckie Lurgan's thirtieth birthday. It would be a big event and his present wouldn't need wrapping. The only decision would be which bar to get him lushed up in.

  I left my flat and found the Wreck still unstolen. Nobody was ever going to steal the Wreck. It was the only thing I liked about it. I called my wreck the Wreck for obvious reasons. It was a hugely shitty vehicle but it had incredibly clean windows. Rusty bodywork covered in three-year-old filth but the windows gleamed. I cleaned them every day so that I could see my city when I drove.

  I headed for Chuckie's house.

  We ended up in Mary's bar again. It was very present tense.The usual cast: Chuckie Lurgan, Donal Deasely, Septic Ted, Slat Sloane and me. The boys, the crowd. Oh, boy, I needed new friends.

  Mary was there, working her tables, making no tips. My chest tightened when I saw her and I found out what I'd only guessed. That I'd made myself want her. The way I do. The way we all do. I'd caused myself to need her. When she took our order she said hello to me in a voice commendably level, admirably sure. Mary was just a working-class Belfast girl waiting table but she had a bit of style.

  Chuckie's cousin came in after a while. He had the girl with him. They were getting married, apparently. Chuckie's cousin seemed unhappy. From the way he followed her gaze, from the way he looked where she looked, I guessed he thought that she was too pretty. He was right. I wouldn't have married her. Chuckie told me that the cousin was so jealous he dusted her breasts for fingerprints.

  And, as usual, the talk got talk was always big in Belfast bars. The old mix, constitutional democracy, freedom through violence and the eternal rights of man. We used to talk about naked women but after a few years we stopped believing each other's lies. Chuckie hijacked the high moral ground which was a bit rich for someone as stupid as Chuckie. I mean, history and politics were books on a shelf to Chuckie and Chuckle was no reader.

  Some guy from Delhi Street started Buffing on about revo lution. I got involved. I got angry. I was only there to see if Mary would go home with me again and, as always, I got involved.

  It felt like another of our wasted nights. Six hours of flapping our gums about things we didn't understand at a cumulative cost of about twenty quid per head. Donal and Slat were talking crap about morality and genetics while Chuckie chimed in with his usual dumb-fat-guy routine. The talk seemed easy, like it had fallen off the back of a lorry. But the talk was truly difficult. It was hard, hard work.

  Chuckle's cousin and Chuckle's cousin's girl had a row. One of those two-way tiffs conducted in the Irish manner (pretty shrill). I couldn't be sure but I came away with the distinct impression that the whole thing blew up because the girl refused to shave her bikini-line. They went home in separate taxis. I must say, it seemed a lot of fuss about a haircut.

  And, as the night passed by, Mary served us our drinks and I failed to talk to her. Sometimes she looked at me, sometimes she didn't. I knew because I looked at her every time she breathed. It looked like we'd drink out our time and I'd miss my chance if chance I had.

  And soon enough there was that grim business of barmen shouting time while my drunken pals tried to jostle me into leaving. I kept meeting Mary's eye and leaving messages there. I panicked like a general whose army is retreating. Chuckie was so drunk that he seemed to have lost the ability to speak English but even he seemed to have worked out what I was about.

  `You taking her home?' he leered.

  I blushed at him for want of anything better. Slat was mouthing about moving on to Lavery's but Chuckie silenced him with the broad flat of his hand and leaned to me confidentially.'Iss awright. Iss ma birthday. I'll take care it.'

  And then he did. To my horror, he stood and called Mary over. She answered his summons, her face sceptical but toler ant.

  'Whass name, love?' asked Chuckie, with bland patronage.

  `Mary.'

  `Well, Chuckie paused to wave a mild goodbye to some exiting group of yob mates. `Well, Mary, my friend here, who's a good friend, a good man, my friend here wants to take you home.'

  Mary smiled no smiles and promised no promises. She took Chuckie's beer glass from his hand and turned to me. `Wait for me,' she said. `We'd better talk.'

  For the second night in succession I sat near the door while the punters stumbled out and the staff cleaned up. It was somehow less embarrassing the second time. This time, the bouncer, a different, bigger, Saturday-night kind of guy, wore Republican tattoos. I didn't talk to him. I was scared of not seeming Catholic enough.

  And I watched Mary as I waited. In blue polka-dot dress like the other waitresses, she bent to wipe the tables. She was the kind of girl I wouldn't even have pissed on when I was sixteen (I learnt that phrase from girls who had used it to decline my own tender offers). But now she had all it took. I loved that about girls. The odd things that could make you want to make them your own. Who was responsible? Where could I complain?

  When she had finished, she put on her coat and stood beside me. She didn't smile and I knew that what was coming was meant to be bad. But there was something in her face that made me hope it would not be so.

  We left and walked out into the overstocked streets of afterhours Belfast. Everywhere, the pavements were blistered with drunks and bums. We weren't the only boys and girls standing on those pavements but I think we were probably the soberest. They were all doing their shouting, laughing, crying, getting arrested thing. We felt like the small still centre of some unpleasant weather.

  She turned to face me, lowered her eyes to the pavement and then back up towards mine. A big move. There was no fun in that face of hers any more. It was all serious from here on in.

  `Look, I just don't know what's going on.,

  Was it just me or was that everybody's favourite line? It's not a complicated line. But when some grave big-eyed girl tells you that, doesn't it make you want to run around and punch the air like a footballer?

  The street was ful
l of drunks and noise, her face was blank with some pain or fear and her line was blunt enough for two. I had to say something decent.

  `Let's walk,' I said.

  That night she was so beautiful it was stupid. I wanted to ask her who had made her so beautiful and why? What was it for exactly?

  We walked a very round walk to my flat. We dodged the chuck-out crowds in Shaftesbury Square, with all their shouts and pukes and fights. Ours was a more lyrical path. We took in the special streets with the nice trees and the big lamps. We walked by the river where everything could feel briefly eighteenth century.

  The night was too good, too big and dark to believe. The weather broke and a light rain fell like retribution. She looked like a love song that night and my heart leapt in dumb, frantic syncopations.

  We were talking the usual talk of people who want to make love but who haven't quite brought it horticulture, synchronized swimming, all that stuff.

  I shook like litter (leaves don't shake, I've always thought, whereas your average litter habitually trembles like demons). I shook, hands, lips and heart, which proved, somehow joyously, that I was alive after all, that some bits still worked.

  I stopped her dead in the middle of Governor's Bridge and we faced each other. She looked tired from her six smoky hours in the bar but nevertheless! Her face was framed by the dark sky, the wide, wide river and the lights of the streets that straggled down the hill. What with the crisp cold and all that street-lamp glitter in her eyes, it looked so great that I could only think she had rehearsed it. Nipped up the previous evening with a set of mirrors and measuring tapes and worked out the best possible angle in which to make my heart stop.