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

  `Would it be terrible,' I said, `if I asked you to kiss me?'

  And, well, that's the way it goes, isn't it? I was standing there arguing the toss with this girl about whether we would walk and talk or stand and kiss or just part in the middle on that most medium Belfast bridge and suddenly something happened in me, something so big it near blew us both away. It was like God had come and spoken to me, like the best bit in your favourite song and I knew that she had everything I'd ever wanted, ever needed and I could hold this big-eyed girl and still miss Sarah and it was all all right in some way.

  And, hey, I'm pretty handsome too and I think that helped, I think that argued my case.

  And she kissed me and I remembered that I'd forgotten what that was like.

  I realized, when she took her clothes off, that I hadn't even tried to estimate what her breasts might be like, which was pretty sensitive going for a guy such as me. And her breasts were eventually strange soft things, pale and unobtrusive. She thought I was disappointed, making the woman's mistake of not understanding how little her breasts mattered in the scheme of love.

  And I knew when my skin touched her skin that I probably wasn't going to kill myself for a while, that life was fundamentally a pretty sound commodity when it could include a girl like Mary. And when she touched me she touched the matter in me. She touched me through.

  `Jake,' she said. `Jake.'

  Why not? That was my name.

  She left before dawn. She wanted to get home in case her rozzer beau called when he came off his night shift. Our second taxi-waiting conversation in two days. She was trying to make me understand that this was all, a new one-night habit that girls had developed; these days it was the guys who spent weeks waiting by the phone.

  I don't know why I couldn't take that seriously, why I couldn't make that matter. After all that love we'd made, we'd opened a dialogue that she couldn't end by stepping into a taxi in the middle of the night.

  She told me that she liked me. That in different circumstances, in another time, on another planet, something might have come of it. But she said that we had to be sensible. She loved this cop of hers and she couldn't wreck her life because of the way my eyes crinkled when I smiled.

  I smiled.

  When the cab came, I walked her out. She got into the back seat and rolled down the window. The driver stayed where he was and pretended, commendably, that he had no ears.

  'This isn't it,, I said confidently, as I bent over her.

  `Yes, it is.' She'd reapplied her lipstick, she was redraped in tights and heels and no longer naked; some of her erstwhile firmness had returned.

  `Can't be' I smiled for all I was worth.

  `Don't wait around for anything!

  `You can't stop me.'

  'I can ask you.'

  She told the driver her address and he put the car in gear. But then, just as she'd finished all her tough work, her face cleared of its purpose and she lurched towards me and clumsily kissed my face through the open window. Her eyes bulged with the promise of tears, she bumped her head as she sat back, hair and lipstick messed, and she was gone.

  I stood on the street watching her go and thought how difficult it was not to fall in love with people when they did things like that.

  I smoked some cigarettes and drank some coffee and spent my night looking out of each of my windows.

  I'd had an unhappy childhood. My folks had fucked me about in complicated and uncomplicated ways. A poor boy's childhood is thought to be a bad thing. It's supposed to fuck you up. It's supposed to teach you not to care. It's supposed to make you sad. I don't think having that childhood of mine ever really made me sad. I just think it made me fall in love with girls all the time.

  Before I went to bed I called my cat in. He took his usual ten minutes of hunting crouches, slow stalks and cavalry gallops to come. Before I closed the door behind him I noticed a new graffito on the wall beside the police station.

  The local kids would write things there for the purposes of bravado or initiation. But it was no big cops were too bored to hassle them. Every month or so some civic-minded old guy who lived nearby would come and paint it over. And then the kids would start all over again. It had become a ritual and it was how I told what time of the month it was. It was an epic and somehow touching battle, very Belfast. The kids wrote the usual stuff of both sides: IRA, INLA, UVF, UFF, UDA, IPLO, FTP (Fuck the Pope), FTQ (Fuck the Queen), and once (hilariously) FTNP (Fuck the Next Pope). But tonight's graffito was a new one on me. It was early in the month. The old guy had painted recently so the wall was nearly clean, and someone had chosen to write in white three-foot-high letters:

  OTG

  I was too tired to wonder what it meant.

  Chuckie Lurgan walked across the Ormeau Bridge with unsteady step and the dust of a hangover pill in his pocket. He winced at the Lagan, which gurgled and bubbled loud, bright water. Under his feet, the bridge felt unsteady as though it, too, were drunk. Frightened, Chuckie picked up his pace to cross the intoxicated bridge.

  A car horn blared cruelly and Chuckie almost fainted. The sun broke through some sluggish clouds and Chuckie felt aggrieved by its shine.The day's incidentals seemed malevolent. But, despite the sardonic morning, Chuckie felt that much was beginning for him.Though in the pockets of his grimy trousers he had only three pounds and something near sixty pence, Chuckie was large with potential. Chuckie was thirty now. Chuckie had plans.

  He turned into Agincourt Avenue, a street he had never liked. It was without trees and the rustic in him objected to so much undiluted brick and pavement. As Chuckie walked, his thoughts grew confident and steady. After another useless night, he had decided to get things organized. He was tired of the incoherence of his life. Two days before, he had turned thirty. Things must change, he sensed. On this momentous Monday, he was walking the long walk from Four Winds because he had concluded that he was too old to ride on the bus any more. Such transport was undignified for a man a weekend more than thirty.

  He was walking from Four Winds because he had woken that morning to find himself crashed and damaged in Slat Sloane's two-up, two-down in Democracy Street. It has been the usual boneheaded weekend. Forty-six pints and two meals. Chuckle's pastimes were a form of reverse evolution. He spent time and money making himself less capable, less evolved. And it seemed to take a whole load of money and time to end up a protozoic reptile on Slat's kitchen floor.

  `I'll kick your nappies round the block, wee ba!'

  Two warring boys swore at each other as they rolled fistfully on the pavement of Damascus Street. As Chuckie passed through the Holy Land, he rehearsed his plans. He needed money. He needed much money. But Chuckie was not foolish enough to consider looking for a job. Employment was the goal of fools. Chuckie had decided that he would set up in business for himself. He felt that only self-employment would entirely satisfy his independent instincts. Chuckie knew that he had some way to go, but phrases like start-up capital, overheads and profit margins peppered his thoughts and felt quite as good as money in the bank.

  He passed the dingy launderette on the corner of Collingwood. He smiled prosperously at a slovenly girl who sat at the window awaiting her wash. She frowned and turned away. Chuckie fancied this some form of reluctant coquetry. He was pleased and ran his hand complacently through his thin hair. As he glanced down the length of Jerusalem Street, Chuckie was realistic enough to understand that his project was as yet hugely initial. But the thought of an eventual office, an eventual secretary (hugely bosomed) and an eventual desk cheered him enormously. The three pounds and near sixty pence seemed to grow heavier in his pocket. Despite a sudden urge to vomit or sneeze, Chuckie felt a grander man.

  `How's about ye, Chuckle!'

  Chuckie stopped dead and stared at the speaker. He searched the rubble of his sludgy thoughts for the man's name and was surprised by his success.

  'Hiya, Wilson.'

  Stoney Wilson smiled too greedily at the compliment of his surname. C
huckie concluded that this would take some time. Wilson's bony hand poked him comically in the sternum.

  `You're looking bad, Chuckie.'

  'I'm dead but I haven't the wit to stiffen.'

  Again, Wilson smiled his eager smile and his equine teeth and gums glistened in the sunlight. `Been a while since you saw this time in the morning, I'll bet.'

  Soon-to-be-prosperous Chuckie took exception to this. 'I take exception to that.'

  'Easy on, Chuckie. I was only messing.'

  Chuckie frowned an unmollified frown and looked at the pavement. He tried to dislodge a splat of old chewing gum with his blunt toe. Wilson searched for a way to continue the dialogue.

  'I heard your Ned's getting married to that girl with the great knockers. What's her name?'

  `Agnes'

  `Yeah, Alice. I wouldn't mind walking round the block with her on my own account. When's the happy day?'

  'I don't know.'

  Wilson's weak mouth was mobile with feeble merriment.

  'You'll be the last of the single Lurgans. A great responsibility.'

  Chuckie frowned again. He remembered a night spent in Wilson's wigwam on Constitution Street when Wilson did his country-boy-in-Belfast act. Three hours of the halcyon days in Portrush-sur-Mer. Wilson had dropped out of the technical college after a couple of months but he still presumed upon his brief brush with tertiary education. Chuckie wanted to escape before the geek started up about Dostoevsky or somesuch.

  `Listen,Wilson. Gotta run. I've an interview for a big job this morning. I don't want to be late-You know how it is.!

  Wilson's eyes narrowed with incredulity. His mouth flapped open, ready for some comic reply, but his wit deserted him. He muttered some thick valediction and patted Chuckie's arm manfully.

  'See you about,' said Chuckie, walking on quickly.

  He crossed the road towards Palestine Street. A large car swooped just past his burly form, swerving and blasting its horn. He turned mildly as the receding driver leant out and shouted at him. Chuckie raised his arm in a gesture of squat profanity and apologized as best he knew. `Go fuck yourself, shit for brains!' he suggested.

  Placidly, Chuckie trundled up Palestine Street. Soon, he mused, when he had a car of his own, he would make a point of sounding his horn at pedestrians whenever possible. He promised himself that if he didn't own a car by the end of the year then he would steal one. He wanted a car very badly. He wanted that chattel under him. He wanted a steering wheel in his skilful hands, a sunroof over his head. He wanted to visit car washes and garages. He wanted to go to car parks with something to park. Chuckie longed to be a solid automotive citizen.

  By the time he crossed Botanic on his way to the public bar of the York Hotel, Chuckie had decided on the manufacture, colour and engine size of the shiny car that all his plans would bring him.

  The distinguishing features of the Lurgan clan were that they had historically loved fame and that the Lurgan women too often were not married to the fathers of their children. The Lurgan lineage was matriarchal. And the Lurgan family were starfuckers one and all.

  In 1869, Mortimer Lurgan, a shabby copying clerk at the Ulster Bank in Donegall Place, spent eighteen cold hours on a pavement outside the Chandlers' building in College Street. A reading was to be given by the famous English novelist Charles Dickens. It was his first visit to Belfast and probably his last. Mortimer Lurgan wanted to be in the front row for such an event.

  His desire was fulfilled and, that night, Mortimer could be seen sitting in the very centre of the very front row of seats, greasy with delight, even though he could hear nothing since his night on the street had rendered him temporarily deaf.

  After the reading, one of the organizers introduced Mortimer to the exhausted novelist. When Dickens was told that Mortimer had slept on the street in his eagerness to attend, his old, lined face flickered with brief interest. `Well, Mr Logan,' he said, `it is pleasant to meet such a true aficionado.' Smiling kindly, Dickens was bundled into a curtained carriage.

  For the next six weeks, Mortimer Lurgan walked on air as he replayed the details of this brief but touching interview. The spot on his right hand where Dickens had touched him felt livid and ticklish with transmitted greatness. Mortimer resolved two things: that he would one day get round to reading one of the great writer's novels and that he would find out what 'aficionado' meant.

  During the summer of 1929, John Lurgan and his family holidayed in a small cottage near Bundoran.The family of their local doctor in Belfast, the Flynns, had found a cottage close by. Dr Flynn was famous in Belfast for his work in the poor areas like Sailortown and the Short Strand. He was accompanied by his wife, two sons and one daughter. One of the Flynn sons fell horribly in love with Jenny,John Lurgan's pretty eighteen-yearold daughter. But jenny soon found herself bored with the youth. Early in the holiday, the entire county had buzzed with that the great actor Charlie Chaplin had rented a large house on the coast for part of the summer. Jenny had been beguiled by the possibility of meeting him and plotted many entrances to the famous actor's home, including: faked injury or heart attack, nude bathing in the lake and impersonation of minor Swedish royalty.

  Young Flynn, though a good-looking boy, could scarcely hope to dent jenny's lust for the movie star. Her family were keen on the lad. He was amiable and soundly bourgeois but Jenny wouldn't, couldn't listen to their plans of dull advancement. Her hopes were bent on that touch of celebrity, so close she could almost reach out and bathe in its glow. While jenny wasted her summer, trying to scrape an acquaintance with Chaplin, young Flynn made desperate, disappointed plans. None came to fruition and he spent the summer failing to fill his arms with jenny's fragrant young form. That autumn he left Ireland, a rejected and unhappy youth. He went to America, changed his name to Errol and, within a brace of years, he became a movie star. Subsequently and lastingly, Jenny was sour.

  In 1958, jenny's ceased washing her left hand for eighteen months to preserve the ghostly trace left on her flesh when she had touched Eddie Cochrane's jacket sleeve as he left at the stage door of the Ulster Hall following his concert. Though the hand became first black then brown and finally blue with dirt, and a small piece of chewing gum stuck to the inside of her left index finger actually crystallized with age, Peggy would not wash the imagined mark that Cochrane had left. Her hand was finally washed (two hours of scrubbing in which the skin came off like paper) on the day she heard that Eddie had died.

  Chuckie's father, though only belatedly his mother's husband, had been immune to this fame-lust. He was not a Lurgan. Chuckie had taken his mother's name when he was born. His father had been a businessman who had spent his best years down Sandy Row selling love pills to middle-aged matrons. He refused to marry Chuckie's mother for two long years, in which time he planted the seed of Chuckie. He had married her on Chuckle's first birthday. Then, tired of the Lurgan opprobrium, and finally exasperated by the mother's collection of sixties pop-star portraits, he had debunked, leaving behind a lingering impression that, if suicide failed, he was bound for Idaho.

  Chuckie knew this to be lies or storytelling. He had seen his father a couple of years previously, lie-down drunk in a docker's bar that never closed. He had briefly considered approaching him and having some mannish hug thing there with him on that line of cheap bar-stools. He didn't, though. His father's face was flushed with the sunless tan of the full-time dipso.The man lived in the country in which all Irish alcoholics lived. Chuckie didn't want to see what that would look like.

  Chuckie himself demonstrated his family's weakness on a number of occasions. When Ronald Reagan visited Ireland, playing the big Mick card in a tiny two-house town in Kerry, Chuckie had slept fruitlessly in a nearby field for the chance of pressing the palm of the American President, a man he despised.

  But more importantly, more massively, Chuckie had flipped when the Pope came to Ireland.

  Now, Chuckie was a Methodist. And in God's own country, the substantial, upstanding Protesta
nt was meant to reserve a particular hatred, a particular fear for the evil Kommandant of all the Romish hordes. All his life Chuckie had been capable of shouting, `Fuck the Pope,' with the hardest and most Protestant of his friends. But when he heard that the man in question, the new Polish Pope, was coming to Ireland, he was in a quandary. Sure, the guy was a Taig, a Fenian, the logical extension of all that was Catholic in the world. But no one could deny that he was famous.

  Helpless in the glare of the Pontiff's undoubted acclaim, Chuckie secretly arranged to go on one of the special buses down to the big outdoor mass at Knock. He signed his name as Seamus McGuffin, hoping that would lend a Romish air to his broad Ulster features and his wide-apart, deeply Protestant eyes.

  Thousands of people were there.The sun beat down and the Catholics broiled in that heat. Chuckie felt like he was the last Methodist left.

  The Mass itself was a dull and mystifying affair. Chuckie sweated at his ignorance of the responses that the rest of the crowd made as though it were second nature. He had been under the impression that the Catholic Mass was still celebrated in Latin and had planned to mumble meaninglessly when required to make those Taig noises. He was horrified to find that they now said Mass in English and that his lunatic mumblings were no effective disguise. He panicked for a while before it dawned upon him that the people around him thought that he was merely some physical or mental unfortunate who'd been brought to this event instead of on a more reliably miraculous pilgrimage to Lourdes.

  The Pope was a windswept dot on a raised altar in the distance. Chuckie was disappointed. But a rumour had circulated that the Holy Pole intended to have one of his favoured walkabouts on the periphery of the enormous throng. Just before the end of the service, Chuckie pushed himself right through to the front, just on the off-chance.