Hally followed and stood between me and the door.
'How's Crab?' I asked him.
He laughed. `How the fuck should I know? I took him to the hospital but I didn't fucking wait. I'm not his fucking ma'
I moved to put my key in the car door. He didn't get out of my way. I stood up straight.
`You quit?' He was squaring up for something. I knew he didn't like me but I knew he wouldn't hit me. That would be so upsetting that it just couldn't happen.
`Yeah, I quit.!
He nodded some internal assent like it was something he had predicted for years. `Do you mind if I ask you something?'
'What?'
`Are you a Catholic?'
I laughed a big sad laugh. `What do you think?' I asked.
`Well,' he said ruminatively, `I always figured you were a poof but I couldn't work out whether you were a Fenian as well.'
`Get a life,' I said, as I got into my car. `Nah, get two.'
Hally was too pleased with his insult to bother hitting me and he let me drive away unmolested. As I pulled onto the main road, it occurred to me that I'd never buy enough petrol to get far enough away.
So now I was unemployed. It had been a good move. I suppose I should have felt cleaner after that primary integrity but those gestures cleanse only in films. If I felt cleaner at all, it was a micro-feeling. It was a small, small thing. I didn't want to take anything away from anybody again. I knew how they felt. England had repossessed Sarah from me and I was still sitting there fat and sad with that loss.
When I remembered the Sarah stuff, it was like reading a book someone else recommended.You wanted it to have been so much better than it was.
She was a broadsheet journalist from London. I'd just got a shitload of compensation for a beating I'd had a couple of years before from soldiers outside a bar down Cornmarket. I'd only been in hospital for a while but the soldier angle had helped and the Northern Ireland Office was glad to give me forty grand to shut me up. I bought the place on Poetry Street. It was an old Church building, half wrecked and split into three. I got it for almost nothing so I bought it outright. Sarah moved in and made the old place breathe. We lived it out amongst the trees and it was good. For two years of side-by-side, we were happy.
Two years. We practically rebuilt the flat. Sarah made it beautiful. I put stubby pencils behind my ear and nails in my mouth and felt like a real man. I tried to like her friends. She tried to resist the impulse to have mine arrested. It was a pantomime of happiness, a parody of bliss. I loved her like I didn't know was possible. I loved her more than I thought was legal. The sight of her handwriting made my eyes fill with reasonless tears. When I heard sirens I convinced myself that they were ambulances going to the site where her shattered body lay. Sometimes at night, when she slept and I couldn't, I lay with my arms around her, just loving her. I felt that if I had a zipper running down the front of me from throat to belly I would unzip myself and cram her inside and zip her up in there. I could never hold her close enough.
Sometimes I worried about her work. She hated her job. Her paper would only run Ulster stories if the details were particularly appalling, if the killings were entirely barbaric. London editors were not interested in everyday Ulster. Sarah had to go to grimmer places and speak to grimmer people every time.
So, sooner than it should have, it started to go wrong. The reports she had to write, the things she had to see couldn't have helped Sarah fall in love with my city. She started talking about going back to London. I started ignoring her. Then she did three days' reporting on an Armagh pub massacre in which six people died. She quit her Ulster job and bought a plane ticket.
The night before she left was long. She pleaded with me to go with her. I refused. Her pain was inordinate. It was not a situation without remedy. London was an hour away. I could always change my mind. She could change hers. It was bad that she was going but it appeared to me that there'd always be the possibility of rewrites.
But within a fortnight, she'd told me the thing that I couldn't bring myself to believe, to understand. She'd had an abortion in her first week back in London. I hadn't known she was pregnant.
And then it was six months of nothing. Six months of something less than misery. She had crushed my heart flat. I didn't know how much I would have wanted to be a father but I didn't know how much I didn't either. It was always a surprise how much that hurt. How could she make the mistake of not loving me as I loved her?
Since she'd left, my love had been measured by the object it lacked. Since then, I'd been sitting alone late at night, smoking, wondering what it was like to be her.
After my big resignation, I got back to Poetry Street to find Chuckie Lurgan sitting in a chubby heap on my doorstep waiting for me to come home. My cat was sleeping on his knee. For some reason, my cat seemed to like Chuckie. I needed a new cat.
I let them in and fed them both.
He had called work and Allen had told him I'd been sacked.
`Jesus, you're not popular there any more,' Chuckie said.
While we were eating, he grew more and more excitable. He talked rapid nonsense and blushed often. He had a grubby tabloid in his hand. I made coffee while I waited for him to get to the point.
I asked him about his big-deal American girl. He was uncharacteristically reticent. Slat had told me that she was pretty nice and that, for some reason, she seemed keen on old Chuck, but Lurgan was giving me no change from all my blunt enquiry. He told me he was seeing her that night but then he changed the subject.
`Have you seen this OTG thing?' he asked me vaguely, as I headed for the kitchen.
`Yeah. Do you know what it means?'
'Nah, it's a new one on me,' he called from the other room.
'Is it an organization or a slogan?'
`Fucked if I know.'
`I've asked around,' I said. `Nobody has a clue.'
`What do you think?' asked Chuckie.
'Jesus, I don't know. Odyssey To Glengormley. Orangemen Try Genocide. Oxford's Too Green'
I could hear Chuckle's chubby chuckle. `Ominously Taut Gonads,' he suggested enthusiastically. `Optimum Testicle Growth. Osculate This, Girls!'
I let him have his laugh out while I got on with making the coffee.
`I saw Bun Doran limping up the road on the way over,' he called out to me.
`Uh-huh,' I grunted noncommittally, while I fiddled with the coffee beans. I wondered when exactly Chuckie was going to tell me what was on his mind.
`Yeah, apparently he's also bought a big house with the money he got from his settlement!
There was the muffled crump of a distant explosion.
'Sounded like Andytown,' surmised Chuckie from the living room.
`Nah,' I shouted back. `City centre.'
`Sounded big.'
`Didn't sound small,' I concurred.
I came back into the room with the coffee pot. Chuckie was toying with the newspaper on his lap.
`How much did he get?' I asked.
'Who?'
`Doran'
'Oh, yeah. He got a hundred and twenty grand, the bastard.'
'He's got legs like an Action Man now. It's hardly excessive.'
Barry `Bun' Doran was a guy we knew. A weirdo from Bosnia Street with whom Chuckie had been to school. Doran only worked as an office clerk but he had a big bee in his bonnet about personal freedom. He didn't like authority. A couple of years before he had decided that, most of all, he hated traffic lights. He felt that they interfered with his personal autonomy, his right to walk where and when he wanted. He started a campaign of ignoring the commands of traffic lights. He was run over by a bus on the Dublin Road. His legs were so badly broken that even when fixed up they were stiff as boards.
Chuckie was unrepentant. 'A hundred and twenty grand, though.You two had the right idea. I'd break my own legs for that.'
I poured myself some coffee. Chuckie didn't really drink coffee so I opened a can of sucrose, comminuted oranges, sodium be
nzoate, sodium metabisulphite drink for him. His fat face split in a smile and his eyes disappeared in his cheeks.
`Did you see the papers on Sunday?' he asked, with a poor assumption of nonchalance.
'There are lots of Sunday papers, Chuckie.'
`The local ones.'
I lit the hundredth cigarette I'd smoked since I gave up giving up.'No, I didn't see the local ones.'
Chuckie pulled a facial expression I'd never seen him do before. Chuckie pulled a facial expression I'd never seen anyone do before. His mouth turned down, his lips turned out and his nose turned up. It was amazingly unattractive.
'Take a look at this.' He opened the paper he was holding and pushed it over to me uncertainly. I picked it up. It was the smallads page of the only mucky paper that Northern Ireland produced, a paper with sexsational stories about mythical locals and pictures of Derry girls with large pale naked breasts.
I started reading through the ads page:
IRELAND'S NEW X-RATED CHATLINE
I looked at Chuckie.
'Underneath,' he said, in a small voice. I read on.
GIANT DILDO OFFER!!!
BIGGEST DILDO EVER!
BUY NOW! THE MASSIF
NOW AVAILABLE AT A SENSATIONAL THIS LOVE TOOL WILL THRILL EVERY WOMAN. SEND CHEQUES OR POSTAL ORDERS NOW! OFFER ONLY WHILE LIMITED STOCKS LAST.
SATISFACTION GUARANTEED. FULL REFUND IF OTHERWISE!
There was an address underneath. A box number. I looked quizzically at my plump chum. This wasn't all that funny. This wasn't all that surprising. It was hardly worth a trip across town to tell me about. But there was something in Chuckie's little eyes that made me tremble.
`Hey, Chuckle, this has nothing to do with you, has it?'
He looked at me plaintively. He spread his fat hands wide in a placating gesture.
`Chuckie!'
`I told you I needed start-up capital. I couldn't get any fucking grants if I didn't already have some capital. Apart from doing a Doran and getting myself run over, there was nothing else for it.'
`But Jesus, Chuckie, selling sex aids?You can't do that. This is Northern Ireland.!
He looked offended. `I don't intend to sell any sex aids.'
'What?'
He reached into his little canvas bag. He pulled out a long paper package and unwrapped a massive fake rubber penis. Veined, knobbly and bizarrely pink, it looked faintly like Chuckie himself. Chuckie set the thing on the table between us. My cat growled in fright. I was speechless.
`That's the only one I've got,' Chuckie said.
`You what?'
`I've only got one dildo. I gave Speckie Reynolds fifteen quid for it down the market.!
'I don't understand.'
`Watch,' whispered Chuckie.
He pulled a little rectangular tin out of his bag. He opened it and pulled out a rubber stamp, which he dipped in the ink sponge. He stamped an envelope that lay on the table. I picked it up and read the legend:
GIANT DILDO REFUND
Chuckie smiled the smile of the just-published poet.
`It's simple,' he said. `I've had seventeen hundred and forty replies already. That's seventeen hundred and forty cheques for nine ninety-nine. That's seventeen thousand, three hundred and eighty-two pounds. I opened a bank account this morning. I'll have ten chequebooks by next Wednesday.'
`But you can't keep the money.'
`Don't worry. I'm going to write refund cheques for all of them. Nine ninety-nine a full whack. And before I send them I'll take my little stamp here and I'll stamp GIANT DILDO REFUND on the cheques.!
He paused. He bent down to stroke my cat, whose fur was still rising in fright at the thing on the table.
'Can you honestly imagine anyone toddling down to their bank to lodge a cheque that has GIANT DILDO REFUND stamped all over it?' He smiled beatifically.
Isn't capitalism wonderful?'
That night, I went to see Mary. I still didn't know where she lived so I landed up at the bar where she worked. As I went in, the Protestant bouncer showed me, with a turn of his puffy shoulders, that he was sick of the sight of me. My eye had already turned dark where the man with the bed had hit me earlier. I must have looked insalubrious. I guessed the bouncer might show some form if I pissed him off too much so I gave him a special smile.
Mary's face went sick when she saw me. I saw a mumbled word between her and a colleague and the colleague approached me and asked me what I wanted to drink. I lied and she brought me some beer.
I sat there for two hours, beer upon beer. I hated bars but it was a difficult city in which to lead a life without them. In the end, some shame in me made me just walk up to her and ask her to talk to me.
'Give me a minute,' she said wearily.
She whispered some more with her friend and then grabbed her coat and stood by my table. Her face was grim. She didn't look like she meant to go anywhere nice with me.
'Not here,' she said.
She took me to a swish hamburger joint nearby. We sat and drank cheap coffee.
'What happened to your eye?'
'I was moving some furniture!
'What?'
'I hit my head against something.!
`I don't believe you.'
'You don't have to.'
There was a pause. Not a comfortable one. She looked at me. Her eyes shone and I knew there was bad news and bad news. She gave me the bad news first.
'I want you to leave me alone,' she said.
It wasn't easy to take this talk from her but I guessed that she had made a lot of things not happen. She wasn't treasuring any memories and I was making myself one big drag. But there was that love we'd made which she could not delete. It was less than a week and my mouth still tasted of her mouth. I felt like I could breathe her breath.
`Mary, I can't leave you alone. I don't want to leave you alone. That makes it complicated.!
Her face went slack and her mouth trembled in a way that made it so very difficult not to just kiss her right there.
'What do you want from me?'
And what did I want from her? I wanted her hand on my face, her head bent for me, her lips on mine. I wanted her to say soft words that would make my heart lurch and my face burn.
I gave her that. Exactly. Word for word. That wasn't bad going and I imagined there'd be some big reward for all that unblank prose.
`You don't understand.' Her voice was gentler, more permissive after all my fancy talk.
'What don't I understand?'
`It's impossible.!
I had a series of great speeches in stock all about possibility and impossibility. And it was hard not to feel optimistic sitting there amongst the bright plastic and the teenage bon vivants with all the primary colours making shapes in Mary's eyes.
'Impossibility never stopped anything actually happening.'
'But I love Paul. I don't want to hurt him.'
Paul was the cop boyfriend. I couldn't muster much feeling for his civilian predicament.
`It's just impossible,' she continued.
I was energized, ardent. `You're right. It isn't possible. Or likely. Or even democratic. Nobody gave you the right to make me feel like this!
'And what about Sarah?'
I was briefly surprised by her high-grade memory. `Sarah? That's old love, that's dead love. That's love that never was. I do her no disservice. I doubt that she remembers me at all.'
The sick look returned to her face.The one she had worn when she saw me first that night. Her mouth pursed under some assumption of sisterhood. `Two years' time, you'd say the same of me.
'Would IF
'Yes!
`Would you like some long odds on that?'
She smiled, pleased and flattered despite her firm intentions. I'd never had a problem with vanity.
'I'm going to marry him,' she said.
`That's what you think.'
`What would you know about it?'
I was confident. I was sure. That was always a bad sign.<
br />
`Do you often sleep with someone when you intend to marry someone else?'
My mouth was still moving with those last couple of words when I knew how badly I'd blown it. Her cheeks flushed and she sat straighter. She pulled her coat tighter around her and pushed her coffee cup away from her. She looked like she was going to go.
And then for the first time I experienced lust-free lust. I wanted someone's flesh pressed to mine in a way that was almost completely without desire. But she walked out. She just stood up, shook her head, mumbled something I couldn't hear and walked away. My head fell upon the table. It made a hollow noise.
I left soon after. Though it was not late, the streets hummed with discontent and wintry malice. There were lots of cops around. I even thought I could see Mary talking to one of them but I couldn't be sure. I hoped that if it was her then it wasn't her boyfriend she was talking to.
It was near chuck-out time for the bars and there'd been a couple of big bomb scares in the city centre. The siren sounds wafted in the wind and down Arthur Street I could see some desultory scurrying and white tape stretching. The cops were always jumpier if there was a series of bomb hoaxes. I think they preferred real bombs to endless hoaxes. It was like Russian roulette and I don't think they liked waiting for the one that would be real. It had been a pretty busy day for the boys with bombs. One at lunchtime in a multi-storey car park. A mortar had been fired at some soldiers and there had been the one Chuckie and I had heard earlier. And then all the hoaxes.
But as I looked at the people on the streets, I couldn't help thinking that it was still no big deal. It used to be different. We all used to be much more scared. After the biggest blasts in the seventies (recently revived for a second successful season), the colour of the streets always seemed drained and muted as if the colours, too, had been blown away.
But now it was all just an inconvenience, all just a traffic jam.
Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other Page 8