Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

by Robert Mclaim Wilson

  And I must admit I had a sneaking admiration for his style. He might have been a hypocritical Janus-faced tosspot but if there was a camera crew around he'd be there.

  I had no sneaking admiration for what followed. A couple of folk singers got up and did their dreadful stuff. A chick with a harp strummed for a little while and then a group of young painters had an impromptu exhibition of what they called their peace pictures. These heroes were told to move amongst the crowd with their little daubs. I moved up close for that.TheTV camera zoomed in on one guy who was holding a painting of what looked only vaguely like a dead fish.

  'Oh, yes,' I heard him say into the boom.'My painting represents the struggle for peace. I had to decide whether the fish should be alive or dead. I think it has great significance that in this painting you can't really tell whether the fish is dead or alive,' you couldn't really tell it was a fucking fish, 'and, of course, the fish also has all sorts of religious and political connotations. It reminds me in a way ofTolstoy.'

  I nearly hit him for that. I'd always been fond ofTolstoy and at least old Leo had done some actual work. I'd seen lots of arty bullshit in Northern Ireland. Provincial but famous, it could produce almost nothing else. Subsidized galleries stocked full of the efforts of useless middle-class shitheads too stupid to do anything else, too stupid to pass the exams that their folks paid for. But I'd never seen anything to match the fishboy.

  'This fish gives me hope,' he said emotionally. 'I think this fish can give us all some hope.'

  The great Ghinthoss embraced the fishboy grandly and people around them applauded.

  We got on the train. We set off. It was quite sweet for forty minutes or so. It felt like quite a clean-shaven, cardiganned thing to be doing. Here I was riding a Peace Train from Belfast to Dublin to protest against the IRA planting bombs on the Belfast to Dublin line. There was going to be another meeting at Dublin station.

  But we didn't get to Dublin. There was a bomb on the Belfast to Dublin line. Boom boom.

  The train was stopped on a bridge over an embankment just after Portadown. People were stunned, not by the irony but by the unexpectedness of it. I thought that odd: bombs were the subject of their efforts. But these were educated bourgeois and they didn't expect that anything they did could be affected by these vicious, callous, working-class terrorists. When those guys planted the bomb they must have been tempted to strafe the train as well.

  Robbed of their Dublin protest, some of the peace folk just got off the train and waved their placards about on the line.The railway people went nuts but the TV crew loved it. There was some problem with the line on the way back. It looked like being a long delay so most of the rest of us got out too.

  I sat on the bank and smoked some cigarettes. Like I said, I was beginning to have fun. And I was glad that we hadn't made it to Dublin. It wasn't that I didn't like Dublin. Sometimes Dublin was OK but sometimes Dublin gave me the shits.

  I was only thinking this acrid stuff to avoid thinking about the girl sitting on the grass close by, whom I was definitely considering marrying. Yeah, I was in love. Again. How bored my friends would be when I told them.

  I'd noticed her first as we were boarding the train. Midtwenties, dark-haired, short, grave-featured. I made sure we were in the same carriage and watched her furtively. Like most of the other women soulful wore no make-up though her mouth was set in a line of pursed, inept lipstick. She was with a small group of enthusiastic girls and good-natured, turtle-necked, clean-shaven boys.

  She noticed me notice her. I took no comfort from this because of my suit. I was the only man not wearing some form of woolly jumper. I hoped it lent me a decadent, attractive air, but for all I knew it might have made me look like a secret policeman.

  When the train was stopped and we all got out, her group sat close enough to where I was sitting. Without Slat and the others, I'd felt uncomfortably solitary, as though I stuck out. But there on the grass with the event crashing around everyone's ears, I felt that my besuited uniqueness could only have looked pretty desirable.

  With the train stopped on the bridge and everybody sitting on the grass or doing community singing or giving desultory TV interviews it was all pretty embarrassing. Even the train looked faintly embarrassed on the bridge, as though fearful of us seeing up its skirt.

  Her group seemed comfortable enough.Those girls and boys chatted in some infinitely tolerant, infinitely self-sufficient way. I tried hating the guys she was with but I couldn't.They looked so much nicer than me. I could only applaud her taste.

  Still, after twenty minutes or so, I began to hope that she liked me. She looked in my direction with varying frequency but her gaze was grave. And my heart started its business, its racing, charged-up, I'm-still-young routine. I felt all springtime, all happy. I thought about trying out the Reluctant Look.

  I had no chat-up lines. Hardly anybody ever slept with me. I couldn't be called a sleaze. But I had one thing that worked.The Reluctant Look. I hadn't used the Reluctant Look for years now. The problem with the Reluctant Look was that it always worked. Always. Anyway, it was banned in several European countries. The UN would get involved. Maybe I'd also thought about growing up to the point where such artifice would seem childish, unworthy, dishonest. But then again, maybe not.

  I wound up for the RL. I wrinkled the corners of my eyes, I pouted slightly, I felt a wash of melancholy descend on my features (I was nearly thirty and I was still at this stuff). Just as I was about to unleash the full ballistic terror upon her, a boom microphone was shoved under my nose.

  'Do you think it's ironic that the Peace Train has been halted by a bomb on the line?'

  'Wha'?'

  I looked up to see myself surrounded by the film crew. The cameraman moved in for a close-up while the producer repeated the question.

  I stared dumbly at him.

  He coughed and tried again. `What message do you have for the people who planted this bomb today?'

  There was another silence. I was staring silently at someone else. I'd just noticed that Shague Ghinthoss was with them, standing there with a proprietorial air. He beamed at me with the fauxhumility of an everyday evangel. Already, he'd hijacked it so that whatever film they were making had become a biopic. Great.

  The producer followed my gaze. It gave him an idea. `We have Shague Ghinthoss, Ireland's greatest living poet, here. Would you like to ask him a question?'

  `Yes.'

  He was delighted to get a response from me. `What is it?'

  I addressed Ghinthoss. `You're a poet?'

  `Yes, I have that honour.' He smiled patronizingly.

  `I've always wanted to know something.!

  `Yes?' smiled Ghinthoss.

  'What the fuck do you guys do in the afternoons?'

  The producer said, `Cut,' acidly enough but at least the soundman sniggered. They moved off. Ghinthoss glanced back at me when the others weren't looking. It was a good look. He must have practised. I'm winning, his look said. I searched my memory for a look that said I couldn't give two fucks, but I couldn't find one.

  Intriguingly, the camera crew had moved on to the group in which my girl sat. They behaved amiably enough. They weren't inviting celebrity but they didn't tell them to go away either. They also seemed able to bear with the excitement of meeting Shague Ghinthoss. I found my regard for them increasing.

  After a minute or so, I stopped watching. I lit another cigarette. I found myself missing Chuckie. It would have been fun to see what that fat fucker would have made out of all this. Money, probably.

  `What did you say to them?'

  I looked up, startled, squinting into the sun. She sat down beside me, pressing her skirt behind her knees. I hadn't seen h--r coming.

  'Whatever it was, they don't think much of you.'

  I was surprised, gratified (a little disappointed?) to find that she had approached me. I was also puzzled. I had planned to spend the rest of the eventual journey back fantasizing impossible approaches to her, o
pening gambits, accidental acquaintance-formers. I would have executed none. I would have been quite content to let her leave unmolested. It was part of the joy of it. Her very graveness made it so much less likely that I would ever have said anything to her. Maybe that's why I liked those grave girls so much.

  'Ah ... well ... I, ah, didn't have much to say.'

  She smiled. She was very pretty. Too pretty for me, perhaps. I'd always preferred slightly plain girls. It was somehow so much sexier when they took their clothes off.

  'Me neither; she said conspiratorially. What with my train of thought, it took me some time to remember she was talking about the TV crew. I liked her inclusive tone. It put us in the same Venn diagram.

  'The people you're with don't seem to mind.'

  'No. They're easy-going'

  'They seem nice, your friends.'

  'They're all right.'

  I was surprised at the coolness in her tone. I was even more surprised when she asked me for a cigarette. She looked too clean to smoke. When she lit up I knew that was because she didn't smoke. She tried manfully to swallow her chokes but it was pretty clear.

  'You're a surprising character to be at a thing like this,' she said.

  'Don't I look like the peaceful type?'

  She pointed at my face. It was only a scratch and a fat lip but I saw what she nmeant.'What happened?'

  'I was moving some furniture.'

  She gave me an old-fashioned look.

  `I move a lot of furniture.!

  Somehow I was getting trapped in my usual macho-bullshit routine. I wanted to talk about Racine and Flaubert with this girl but it looked as though she liked the macho bullshit instead.

  'You read any Rousseau?' I asked her sadly.

  We talked for a while. Her name was Rachel. I liked her such a lot. She looked like the kind of girl I'd die for and, besides, my heart was so full and my mind so empty. I was as nervous as a seventeen-year-old but she seemed impressed, she seemed persuaded.

  At one point a bearded guy with a couple of kids passed by. He was carrying the baby but a six-year-old girl trailed along at his hip. She was crying monotonously in some well-rehearsed grievance. The man's patience snapped. He stopped, bent over the little girl and slapped her hard on her bare legs. `I told you to stop that, he hissed at her. The child cried more.

  That didn't seem very peaceable to me. That was the thing about these always wondered who they liked to beat the shit out of.The man walked on a little. His daughter sobbed bitterly. She stood a few feet from me. She saw me looking at her and her sobs were slightly interrupted. I beckoned her to me. She came hesitantly.

  I got out my handkerchief and wiped her wet face. Her face was red and smeared but she was a pretty little thing. `If you cry much more, you'll melt,' I said. It was a bad line but she was tactful enough to pretend to titter. I smoothed her hair down. `What's your name, sweetheart?'

  `Doris.'

  I didn't blink.

  `Now you look nice again, Doris.'

  She smiled at me. I looked over at her pugilistic owner. `Your daddy's waiting for you.'

  She ran on to join him. I was no magician but I always found that children were pretty calm if you denied yourself the pleasure of knocking them about.

  I lit a cigarette, trying not to look at Rachel. I knew what I'd done. I'd been doing it for years.Things that I hoped would make girls want to sleep with me.Years before I might have criticized myself for such ostentatious gallantry, such a cynical display of tendresse. These days I comforted myself with the thought that I would have done the same if Rachel had not been there. And at least I hadn't decked the father. All the while my heart had pounded audibly and I had been racked by a profound desire to walk up and punch his head in. I hadn't done that. For me, that was a significant step. I was a reformed character.

  When I finally worked up the courage to look at Rachel I saw that light in her eyes, the unmistakable glitter that meant that she thought me sleepable-with.

  'That was a nice thing to do,' she breathed.

  `She didn't deserve to be slapped:

  'You like children?'

  She was going the full way here, she was practically gasping. I think she thought I was some well-dressed desperado with a sensitive side that she could unlock. I think she watched too much television.

  'Yeah, I like kids.'

  'Why don't you have any?' She smiled at me. `You'd make a good father,' she said. She flicked her eyes my way.

  Now, when a woman says something like that to you, there's no mistaking what she means. It had only been said to me a couple of times but I'd always ended up getting bits of myself wet.

  I tried winding it down a bit. I liked her. I didn't want her giving me any cut-price cutesy. She was too nice for that. I was too old for that. I wanted to like her too much. I should have eased off but I couldn't help myself. I was looking for love. Again.

  I almost felt sorry for Rachel. She hardly deserved me and all my grief. But I didn't want her to stop talking to me. I didn't want her going away. After Sarah, Mary, Aoirghe and the others, my self-esteem was low, their poor opinion of me had kickstarted my own. Such unanimity was convincing. I was feeling more than susceptible. If Rachel said anything too nice to me, I'd lick her hand and fetch sticks for her.

  We were stuck there for ages. Rachel and I talked for half an hour before she returned to her friends. Then they herded us back into the train, which rolled slowly back into Portadown. Ghinthoss and some of the others insisted that everybody get out there and have another demo. The station employees tried to stop it. Portadown was hardly the big smoke, the station was just a single long platform and a breezeblock hut but Ghinthoss was adamant so out we got.

  We hung there for another hour. By now Northern Ireland Railway's schedule was fucked. There were only two or three lines in the country and we'd done a better job of blocking one than the IRA themselves. The NIR people begged us to get back on the train. In the end they called the police. When the fuzz arrived, Ghinthoss obviously pondered the possible benefits to his career. Having a full pacific battle with the cops might have had an attractive 1960s, Parisian-riots air but, on the other hand, he didn't want to lose any glitter with the authorities: there were too many prizes, grants and subsidies available to the genteel and careful Irish poet, too many knighthoods and laureateships. With a great air of sacrifice and suppressed menace, he told us all to board the train.

  With the chaos on the tracks it took us more than an hour to get back to Belfast. I'd exchanged a few words with Rachel at Portadown but nothing had been hadn't signed anything. I knew I only had minutes left to solidify this liquid situation. I wanted to see her again, desperately.

  As we all disembarked at the station it looked like it wasn't going to happen. In the small-scale melee I tried to keep as close to her group as possible but we had no chance to exchange any words. We were nearing the outer doors of the station and it looked like she would slip away for ever when fate - or, at least, fascistic

  About forty or so just Us demonstrators with placards and another couple of TV crews were strewn across the electronic doors of the station. I recognized one as Mickey Moses, the messianic public relations man; he was surrounded by a group of Just Us women, hard-eyed, Maoist, a typical bevy of republican unlovelies. Many of the men looked tough enough and pretty keen as well. I'd seen lots of just Us demos, they were childish affairs. But this one smelt somehow different. Deep down, right in my molecules I could feel trouble coming.

  Our crowd milled to a stop twenty yards away from the just Us lot. I looked round for Rachel and saw Shague Ghinthoss instead. He was standing uncertainly, close by the TV crew, his expression more confused than those of most of the crowd. Perhaps only I could fully appreciate his dilemma, after the previous night's republican rabble-rousing and this afternoon's beatnik peace-talk. Several of his many constituencies were pressing their claims.There were now three television crews on the scene. That was an opportunity not to be mis
sed.

  I saw him slip furtively into the ladies' toilets. Good decision, I thought. Once the grief cleared, he'd be around to give three separate speeches of heartfelt lamentation to the TV crews. He might scam a Nobel if there were any deaths.

  Meanwhile some words were being exchanged at the front. I elbowed my way up there just in time to see the first chair thrown. A few bottles and stones followed. (Where had they found stones? They must have brought them in with them, which was undeniably and commendably far-sighted.) Some peace girls started screaming and crying. Elbowing through some more, I got to Rachel and grabbed her hand. The Just Us front rank of beer-bellied heavies had charged our crowd and peaceful heads were being kicked already. Someone shouted to call the police, others thought running was the best idea. I dragged Rachel towards the elevators at the side exit of the station.

  Before we got there one of the fat freedom-fighters weighed up to us. Leather jacket, stiff hair, moustache and tattoos, standard wide-boy warpaint. He liked the look of us. His blood was up. He grabbed my collar, called me a Prod fucker and took his swing. He occupied but a rudimentary position on the evolutionary scale so his big paw was easy to evade. I could have reasoned with him but I just busted his nose and teeth with one of those joyous, unrehearsable elbow punches that only come along once a year or the moustache made for an easier target.

  A couple of guys who'd been following up stopped momentarily.They were surprised. I don't think that we peaceniks were supposed to show such good moves, and guys like that could never fight for fuck. Maybe with Armalites you don't have to.

  Their pause gave Rachel and me time to slip out and down the escalator. We tripped through the car park double-time. Nobody followed us.The sounds of the fight receded in the city hum of Belfast traffic. I'd parked the Wreck on the other side of the station and the only way to get there was to walk across the front concourse. I thought it was better to leave that for a while. The cops had just arrived but I didn't want to be there for the sorting-out. And I'd remembered that there was a little patch of river accessible from the station car park. I'd been there before and I knew it was a good place to hide and not a bad place for a first kiss. It wasn't dark yet, when all the glittery lights on the river would have rendered it a fait accompli, but it was twilighty, it was pink enough for me.