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

  They met on Thursday in one of Long's warehouses near prosperous Bangor. The trip was two buses and a three-mile walk in the rain for Chuckie, who arrived just as Long's Mercedes rolled noiselessly into the car park. Long got out of his car, a parody of the cigar-chomping, camel-coated, yobmade-good. He eyed Chuckie's bedraggled form with some disfavour. Chuckie silently promised himself that he would nurse this grievance, this entrance.

  In his untidy box of an office, which was somehow more daunting, more impressive than a swish one, Long was blandly expansive. `Haven't seen your mother in years. She used to be a lovely-looking girl. How's she keeping these days?'

  Chuckie remembered Long's visits, the sleek-haired man with the expensive smell and the bags full of unlrish fruits: grapes, melons and peaches. He hadn't liked him then but had loved that expensive smell, the thick car parked outside and the rumour of magazine glamour that the man always brought with him. He remembered the complicated whispers that had bothered and frightened him. He remembered how he had hated it when the man had offered him the fancy fruit and told him to go and play.

  `She's fine. She asked to be remembered to you.'

  `Aye, I'm always thinking of Peggy these days. We're all getting old. Tragedy for the women especially.' Long raised his hand over his sparse hair. He had always been vain though never handsome. His complacency was misplaced. He had aged terribly. His face had collapsed and his wrinkles were like ancient scars that ran in little rills all over his face, following the local contours of nose, eyebrow or ear like fault lines.

  'Ma looks pretty good, you know.'

  `I'm sure she does. I'm sure she does'

  Chuckie sensed that early antagonism wasn't apt. He hoped that Long was going to help make him rich. He tried to smile amiably. His teeth were too apparent in the attempt.

  Long decided that that was enough badinage.'So you wanted to talk to me, son?'

  `Aye.'

  Long sat back, placed his feet on his messy desk and lit another cigar without offering one to Chuckie. The man was not too fussed about making it easier for him. There was a bad pause, which Chuckie committed to his growing grudge book, and then he made his pitch.

  He told Long about his plans of setting himself up in business, about his plans for getting sponsorship, government grants, all kinds of funny money. While keeping the specifics unspecific, he waxed about his dreams of networks of companies, each servicing the others, of monopolies, empires. He talked blithely about sums of money he could barely count. He grew hot and indiscreet, and as the talk got bigger, his voice got smaller. Eventually, it just dried away and he fell silent.

  Long chewed on his cigar with an air of spurious concentration and sighed with unfaked satisfaction. Chuckie knew that the local mogul was enjoying this. It was nice to be able to patronize the past, to prove to yourself that you'd really left the place you came from. Long swept his feet from the desk and leant forward, theatrically dynamic. His eyes narrowed with pleasure.'I won't lend you any money.'

  Chuckie tried to say that he hadn't asked but Long waved his objections away. He spat in the wastepaper basket. `No money but I'll offer you some advice. How does that grab you?'

  `Not very nicely.'

  Long ignored him. He extinguished his cigar and looked through the glass partition at the goods that lay neat in his warehouse. It looked as though he liked the view. He turned his eyes on Chuckie, almost emotional. `You're just a wee ballocks from Eureka Street, son. But I started out the same way. I worked hard and now I've got everything you want. And do you know what? It was easy. I never had much to do with women, bar tarts'

  Chuckie was careful not to flinch. He knew that Long was too dim to realize exactly what he'd said, though Chuckie silently damned his mother for making the mistake of this man.

  Long stood, concluding the interview and lending effect to his pause.'Do you wanna know what the recipe for success is?' `What?'

  `No women. I started off thinking that the recipe for success was work now, fuck later, and then I thought it was fuck now, work later, but then I worked out that it was, of

  He left the pause there like a weary schoolteacher, waiting for young Lurgan to rhyme it off by rote.

  'What?' said Chuckie.

  `Work now, work later. Don't bother fucking at all.'

  He smiled the smile of a seer.

  The rain had eased to the grey slant typical of Irish funerals. Chuckle, neither sugar nor salt, knew he would not melt but he felt keenly the humiliation of the walk back to the bus station, especially when John Long's Mercedes passed him. The two short greeting blasts of the horn had a satiric lilt that wounded him.

  In the hour it took to get to the bus station he had stoked his anger and grief so that the eventual retribution to be visited upon unlong John had become a visceral component of his dreams of wealth. He had had two options, two plans for raising the initial sums so necessary to the commencement of his capitalist career.

  The first plan had been to ask Long for the money.

  The second plan had been to think of another plan.

  He broke his second last fiver in paying his bus fare back to the city. He hoped his dole would arrive the next day. But as the bus moved out of the station and Chuckie looked around at his damp fellow passengers, who had started to steam slightly from the heat of the vehicle, his mood lifted inexplicably. Despite the multiple humiliations and grievances of his present life, he knew that he could spend a warm forty minutes with his head against the window thinking of the American girl.

  He planned to call her tonight and his thoughts were nerveless as he wondered what he would say. He wiped some steam from the window and settled his arms on the shelf of his belly. Already he drew comfort from the thinking of her. Again, his plans seemed more plausible. Having her in his life would definitely be an expensive business. He would definitely have her in his life. Ergo, somehow, he would definitely have the money.

  He loved her name. Max. He was very glad that she was American. He wasn't entirely sure that he would or should love her. Love was a little ambitious. Exchange of bodily fluids would do to be going on with.

  Chuckie always wanted sex, but on his own terms; terms more lyrical and tremendous than might be imagined. He sought forms of mystic union he considered impossible with the women of Belfast. They were not natural docks for his living liquids. He was very glad that she was American.

  Chuckie thought often of his old girlfriends. Recollections without haze, like erotic memoranda. He thought of the year he was seven and he fell in love with a piano teacher, who played Mozart and the blues. He thought of the bad old good old days when he was sixteen and his mother didn't allow girls in the house; when he lost count of the number of nights he spent in phone boxes after the pubs were shut, ringing round everybody he knew trying to find someone who would lend him a bed or even a quiet corner for a shag, quick or slow.

  He liked to think of the scores of Belfast girls who bore his invisible graffito on their inner thighs:

  Chuckie was here

  Briefly but memorably.

  Many of Chuckie's thirty wasted years had been devoted to the search for erotic congress. He had spent much time wandering the city, searching Belfast for sex, tramping leprous streets in pursuit of some quality lewdness. He had found it first in the Central Library, with its lemony reference room, with a girl repeating her 0 levels at the College of Business Studies. They had sat by the twenty-volume collected speeches of Winston Churchill and somehow it became the scene of Chuckie's twenty-eighth orgasm, the first by the hand of another.

  And thus had started an erotic career much more successful than he had a right to expect. Chuckie was not handsome. His sandy hair had started to recede before his twenty-first birthday, his belly rolled like a full balloon and he had the breasts of a thirteen-year-old girl. Nonetheless, women slept with him with something close to monotonous regularity. He had always been proud of his and pink as a baby's forearm - and he attributed some of his success t
o this, his best feature.

  But no girl, no woman had made a dent in the marsh of his selfhood. And Chuckie lamented this. Chuckie wanted to be lost in someone. Chuckie wanted a girl who would make life burn in his heart like a heavy meal. Chuckie wanted to discover the secret of true love.

  `Got a light'

  An old woman stood over his seat, her damp coat trailing off her shoulders. She brandished her breasts at him.

  'Mmmm?' asked Chuckie.

  'A light. Got one?'

  Chuckie, who rarely smoked, always carried a lighter. It was meant to grease the wheels of conversation with foxy, darkhaired girls in bars. He fumbled in his pockets and passed the cheap, disposable thing to the old woman. She lit her cigarette and made to hand it back to him.

  'No, you keep it,' said Chuckie.'I've given up'

  The old woman paused with her hand held out in an exaggerated posture of surprise. `Ach, God love you, son. That's very decent of you.'

  She lurched back to her seat. Chuckie could see her sitting four rows forward in the no-smoking section, telling her companion - an equally corpulent, equally decrepit his largesse. The exclamations of surprise were audible through most of the bus and Chuckie had to suffer a complicated series of nods and smiles from the old women, who had both turned round to favour him with their acknowledgements of his beam geste. Some of the other passengers also turned and there were some quiet smiles at his expense. Chuckie blushed and worried.

  He tried to stare through the wet windows. The fields and houses drooped in the aquatic exterior. He was glad to be abus in such weather. As he looked around the vehicle, he could not repress a sensation of cosiness, as though this Ulsterbus with its condensation, its body heat and smells was some kind of biosphere that sustained them all. He would almost miss it when he was rich.

  When Chuckie got home, his mother was in the kitchen making smells he didn't like. He heard her call out some greeting. Without answering, he went upstairs to his bedroom. There he exchanged his wet apparel for dry. Then he sat on his bed and combed his thin wet hair.

  Chuckie slept in the larger bedroom that faced onto the street. His mother had made it so years before, so long ago that he had forgotten his gratitude and her sacrifice for a decade or more. His window was open and, after a few minutes, he could hear his mother's voice from the open street. She was standing on the doorstep swapping talk with the other matrons of Eureka Street. It felt like all the evenings he had ever known. Sitting in his eight-foot bedroom, listening to his mother talk, her head six foot from his feet. The houses were tiny. The street small. The microscale of the place in which he lived gave it a grandeur he could not ignore.

  In Eureka Street the people rattled against each other like matches in a box but there was a sociability, a warmth in that. Especially on evenings like this, when the sun was late to dip. When finally it did dip, there was an achromatic half-hour, when the air was free from colour and the women concluded their gossip, the husbands came home and the children were coaxed indoors from their darkening play.

  He put down his comb and looked out of the window. Mrs Causton had come across the road from the open doorway of Her husband was still working and her kids weren't young so she had twenty minutes to talk away until her old man came home. His mother had known Caroline Causton for forty years or more. They had been at school together. As Chuckie looked down on them talk, with bent heads and folded arms, he couldn't help feeling something close to sorrow for his mother.

  Chuckie's mother was a big woman, built historical, like a ship or a city. He found it hard to picture her as a girl. But something in the quality of the light or his mood, some insipidness in the air, suddenly helped him to strip the aggregate of flesh and years from both women and he glimpsed, briefly, a remnant of what they had been. As always, he wondered what she had dreamt. He resolved that he would stop being ashamed of his mother.

  Chuckie had been ashamed of his mother ever since he could remember. Shame was, perhaps, the wrong word. His mother provoked a constant low-level anxiety in him. Inexplicably, he had feared the something he could not name that she might do. Since he had been fourteen years old, Chuckie had lived in quiet dread of his mother making her mark.

  Sometimes, he would comfort himself with thoughts of her incontrovertible mediocrity. She was just an archetypal working-class Protestant Belfast mother. Not an inch of her headscarf nor a fibre of the slippers in which she shopped departed from what would have been expected. She had doppelganners all along Eureka Street and in all the other baleful streets around Sandy Row. It was absurd. He spent too many hours, too many years, awaiting the calamitous unforeseen. Nothing could be feared from a woman of such spectacular mundanity.

  Nevertheless, she worried him.

  For ten years, Chuckie had dealt with his unease most undutifully. After his father had left home and Chuckie was faced with the prospect of living with his mother, he decided simply to avoid her as best he could. And he did. There had been a decade's worth of agile avoidance. He couldn't remember when they had last had a conversation of more than a minute's duration. It was a miracle in a house as tiny as the one they shared. The sitting room, kitchen and bathroom were the flashpoints in this long campaign. She was always leaving little notes around the house. He would read these missives. Slat called at six. He'll meet you in the Crown. Your cousin's coming home at the weekend. He told her almost all the things he needed to tell her by telephone. Sometimes he would leave the house just so that he could find a phone box and call her from there. Sometimes it felt like Rommel and Montgomery in the desert. Sometimes it felt much worse than that.

  Caroline Causton looked up and saw him at his bedroom window He did not flinch.

  `What are you up to, Chuckie?' quizzed Caroline.

  `Nice evening.' Chuckie smiled. His mother, too, was looking at him now. She couldn't remember when she had last seen her son's face split with a smile of such warmth.

  `Are you all right, son?'

  `I was just listening to you talk,' explained Chuckie gently. The two women exchanged looks.

  `It reminded me of when I was a kid,' he went on. His voice was quiet. But it was an easy matter to talk thus on that dwarf street with their faces only a few feet from his own.

  `When I was a kid and you sent me to bed I would sit under the window and listen to you two talk just as you're talking now When the Troubles started you did it every night. You'd stand and whisper about bombs and soldiers and what the Catholics would do. I could hear. I haven't been as happy since. I liked the Troubles. They were like television.'

  As Chuckie's mother listened to those words, her face fell and fell again and, as Chuckle finished, she was speechless. She clutched her hand to her heart and staggered.

  'Shall I call him an ambulance?' asked Caroline.

  Chuckie laughed a healthy laugh and disappeared from the window.

  Caroline faced his mother.'Peggy, what's got into your boy?'

  But Peggy was thinking about what her son had said. She remembered that frightened time well but his memory seemed more vivid, more powerful than her own. She remembered soldiers on the television and on the streets. She remembered parts of her city she'd never seen being made suddenly famous. She remembered the men's big talk of resistance and of civil war, of finally wiping the Catholics off the cloth of the country. Chuckle remembered pressing his head against the wall underneath his bedroom window and the whispers of his mother and her friend. For the first time, she glimpsed how beautiful it might have seemed to him.

  Caroline was unmoved. `Is he on drugs?'

  Chuckle's mother smiled her friend away and went indoors. She found her son in the kitchen. She had to catch her breath when she saw that he was happily cooking the meal that she had begun.

  'Nearly ready,' said Chuckie.

  An hour later, telling his mother he wanted to do some work on a job application (she was still unused to the heady sensation of such a ball-by-ball commentary), Chuckie went upstairs to his bedr
oom.

  There he opened the little desk he'd used, or mostly not used, when he was a schoolboy. He took out a sheet of paper, an old pencil and his school calculator, a massive thing, unused for a dozen years. He switched it on and was amazed to find it still worked. The omen was propitious.

  Before he wrote anything he looked around the tiny room. He felt a lump in his throat at the thought that he had slept almost every night of his long life in this tiny room. The walls bore the marks of old posters ripped and replaced as his passions had formed and formed again; footballers, rock stars, footballers again, and then beautiful big-hipped girls in their underwear. These were the signs of his growth as surely as if someone had marked his height on the wall as he grew.

  He looked at the picture of Pope and self above the little desk. It was one of the few photographs of himself that Chuckie possessed. He was young in that photograph. He was not so fat but neither was he an oil painting. Actually, thought Chuckie smiling, in that photograph that's exactly what he was.

  He took the photograph/painting from the wall and slipped it into a desk drawer. That was then and this was now. He composed himself, drew breath, looked round one more moist-eyed time and started to write.

  It had been more difficult than he might have imagined. He judged that he should not count the past week and should only tot up the totals until his thirtieth birthday since that was the day that he had made all his big decisions. Most of it was, by its nature, imprecise and he had spent much time hazarding estimates. However, he was confident about most of them.

  He wrote his list. This is what his list said: