Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

by Robert Mclaim Wilson

  Outside, the sunshine had cooled but was sunshine still. Her mood lifted further and she even, faintly but perceptibly, swung her hips when she walked.

  She wondered why she hadn't found him handsome until that night. Now, she wanted to chew his smile right off his face. His broad teeth with the tiny front gap, his strong chin and the skin dark with imminent stubble, they all made her feel clumsy and hot inside.

  She smiled at herself in a dark window. Mechan's beauty parlour. Rosemary checked that window often. Rosemary checked many windows often.There were few pedestrian routes through the city that Rosemary could not plot for regular intervals of reflecting surfaces. She had a map of the city whose milestones were places where she might look at herself. Dark windows, matt displays, even parked cars. Rosemary was uncomfortable if she was forced to walk more than two or three hundred yards without the possibility of checking how she looked.

  It wasn't vanity. It was concern. Rosemary's hair had ruled her life since she'd been thirteen. Idiosyncratic, untameable, her hair had a unique capacity to make her unhappy. For years she had spent hundreds of pounds on cutting it, treating it and shaping it in a variety of She had watched other women and their hair, she had calculated their difficulties, their budgets. If she drove her car behind a car full of women, she could calculate to a nicety the combined annual trichological expenditure represented there.

  In the past couple of years, she had established some control over her hair. With the help of an electronic straightening device and a mysterious post-shampoo unguent that seemed to thicken it, she had won the battle. Too often, her hair still looked like an unfashionable air hostess's coiffure, and bad-hair days were more than bad for her, but it was progress.

  Nonetheless she had not lost her self-checking window habit. She was not alone, she noticed. Other women routinely checked their ghostly selves in those demi-mirrors, and many more men seemed to do it than women. Even the ugly fat men inspected their images with monotonous regularity. The more attractive men seemed to do it with uneasy fascination but the ugly fat men looked at themselves with entirely candid, undisguised approval. It was only lately that her looking had become an act of approval. She was beginning to like herself. She was beginning to think that if she'd been a man she might have liked to climb all over a woman like herself. She was twentysix. It was about time.

  As she looked out at the broad expanse of Royal Avenue, it seemed that the street was full of men who would desire her and that their desire would be different from the unwelcome, reducing thing it had always been before. It was as though Sean had released or revealed a world that was full of good desire, generous desire. People wanted their flesh to touch flesh, warm skin on warm skin. What could be the harm in that?

  Rosemary crossed the street, smiling at a man who hadn't noticed her. He looked at her then, gratified and puzzled by the width and warmth of her smile.

  It was a quarter past one. She had only fifteen minutes before she had to be back at work, back to the slender joys of insurance. For the first time in three years, she felt herself yearn for the office and its milky half-light and its somniferous warmth. An afternoon of desultory phone calls could not be too onerous. She would kick off her shoes and knead the warm carpet under her desk with her bare was the first day of the year on which she had not worn tights and she was pleased to see that few other women had dared on so unsunny a day. There would be plenty of time to think about Sean and his hard/soft skin and the possible futures they might have.

  She cut down Queen's Arcade and walked through its murk.

  This place, normally so tawdry to her, a poorly covered row a man wide, was transfigured and glamorous. Her spirits, not peaking, lifted further. She hoped she would always feel this.

  She felt as though he had kissed her every inch. He was her fifth. Oh, let me be your fifth, he had pleaded, when she had told him she had slept with four men. No one before had shown his gentleness or his appreciation. The memory of his stunned silences and his sheer gleeful gratitude made her stumble halfway down the arcade, again making her stomach feel heated and wet inside.

  She had refused to spend the night and she hadn't smiled when he said he would call her. It had hurt her to have the mood so dispelled by those words, I'll call you. They were the only words he had said that she had heard before. As she drove home, she had gained some perspective, made it no big deal. Men were like that. She should feel anger, not shame. But she could not control her joy when she got home and her grumpy flatmate Orla had tersely announced that someone called Sean had just telephoned for her, unconcerned that it was half past three in the morning. Orla said that he sounded drunk, though Rosemary knew that he had drunk from her. Orla went back to bed in some dudgeon and Rosemary called him back. His voice was wide awake but soft and he did sound intoxicated. He told her, cornily, that his bed felt too big without her and that her hips had made him feel that he could now die happy. Maybe it wasn't much but it felt like enough.

  She emerged from the dark of Queen's Arcade. A hazy strip of cloud had passed, the sun blushed warmer and she felt its tiny warmth in her already hot face. She smiled and then smiled again at the thought of her reasonless grinning. She loosened her collar. Though lightly clad, she felt wrapped and snug in her skin. The heat of her flesh was marvellous. She thought she would never be cold again. She felt as though every living, breathing inch of her was goaded into some kind of heat, some slow, productive burn.

  The light of Fountain Place brought her to some approximation of her senses. She had wandered and bought skirts for so long that she had neglected to get her lunch. She didn't have much time left. She turned into the small sandwich shop to which she always went. She stopped at the door to let a handsome, raffish young man in a green suit pass by. He, struck by the flush of her face and neck, smiled flirtatiously and held the door open with a vaguely gallant air. She smirked happily and stepped under his arm. She turned to murmur some thanks and stopped existing.

  The largest part of one of the glass display cases blasted in her direction. Though fragmented before it reached her, the pieces of shrapnel and glass were still large enough to kill her instantly. Her left arm was torn off by sheeted glass and most of her head and face destroyed by the twisted mass of a metal tray. The rim of the display case, which was in three large sections, sliced through or embedded in her recently praised hips and some heavy glass jars impacted on her chest and stomach, pulverizing her major organs. Indeed, one substantial chunk of glass whipped through her midriff, taking her inner stuff half-way through the large hole in her back.

  The young man who had opened the door for was thirty-four but still had unlined skin and thick hair, had always been thought younger than he was but what had irritated him in his early twenties now delighted him, as he saw his old schoolfriends married or bald and he could still comfortably date girls ten years younger than also killed, though he took nearly twenty seconds to stop existing. Some of the display case had removed one of his legs completely and mutilated his groin and pelvis. Glass from the door had smashed open his face, ripping off his nose, and penetrated his brain. His name was Martin O'Hare. He had been to school. He had read Great Expectations and had wanted to be an astronomer. He had been in love with people and people had been in love with him. He had a story, too.

  Inside the sandwich shop (how unglamorous, how untremendous - Northern Ireland had never dealt in epic murder sites: alleyways, corner shops, betting shops, sandwich shops, mobile shops, crap pubs, bad dance halls, up against a variety of walls painted and unpainted), Kevin McCafferty stopped existing. Kevin had been serving a salad and bacon baguette, with Flora rather than butter, to a middle-aged businessman he didn't like. Kevin was poorly paid but was doing the double to get by. He was tired of being on the dole and he wanted to be famous. He sang in a band whose name changed every rather, every month. He didn't really like music and he knew he couldn't sing. But it was an excuse to wear his hair long, chase girls and perhaps, one day, to appear on tele
vision, which he greatly desired.

  (Kevin achieved his ambition six months later when an independent film company broadcast a documentary on Channel 4 about the Troubles and used some of the Fountain Street sceneof-crime photographs that were to be taken within the next five or six hours. Kevin, standing so close to the blast, had been impressively mangled but, though decapitated and missing a leg and a large portion of chest and abdomen, there was, crucially, something recognizably human about his meat. Other victims had been blown entirely to bits and though the colour pictures of those people (or pieces, more properly) were certainly shocking, the director decided that they lacked that human dimension, that extraordinary shockingness that Kevin's beef-like approximation of the human form possessed. The Broadcasting Complaints Authority later upheld a record number of complaints about the programme from people who didn't want to look at that kind of thing and from Kevin's mother who insisted, correctly and miraculously, that she recognized her son's internal organs, his exposed ribs and spine, his headless, grotesque self. The film director's wife refused to sleep with him for nearly three months and the RUC scene-of-crime photographer committed suicide five months later in an incident that wasn't necessarily related.)

  Kevin had a story, too.

  Natalie Crawford also had a story. She was eight years old so it wasn't, up to then, a very long story or perhaps even enormously interesting to most adult readers (apart from her indulgent parents, of course) but, in the normal course of events, her story would have grown, used a larger cast, involved more scenes and events. Even so, an eight-year-old's story was quite a lot to end so abruptly. She, her sister twelve-year-old who was already in love with a boy from Carryduff who, she insisted, despite his impressive spots, had eyes just like Brad Pitt's - and their mother, Margaret, all stopped existing more or less in unison when a blown-apart drinks fridge showered its hot metal on their soft, unresisting flesh.

  The Crawford family had its own collective story. The loss of the three Crawford women certainly robbed that story of much of its dynastic heft. In addition, husband-and-father Robert certainly felt that the rest of his personal narrative wasn't quite the ringing thing it should have been. Wifeless, childless, Robert simply refused to live with it. He refused to deal with it. Afterwards television crews, doing pieces about the grieving relatives, used him gleefully for the first couple of weeks. The dead wife and two little girls made such a good story. In the months that followed, with Robert's stubborn resistance to comfort or happiness, the TV crews avoided him. His passionate grief, his lack of development, his unreasonable and untelegenic refusal to forgive didn't make such a good story.

  Robert's great grief was that his wife and children had only been in Fountain Street that day because he and Margaret had had such a furious row about his never doing the dishes. The backlog and arrears of ten years of marital resentments had, as always, been exercised and rehearsed in full force and Margaret had stomped off into town with the two children to cry, sulk and get killed.

  Robert never got used to how much this hurt; he never lost his surprise at the stormy extent of his grief. It would wake him in the middle of the night. He didn't have to dream about it: it lay like a crust over his thoughts, conscious and unconscious, a massive hurt for which he had no room but which grew anyway like something obscene rising in his gut. The first time he masturbated after the explosion, three months later, he had cried himself to sleep, dead with shame and guilt. It was as though nothing he could do could match the dignity of how he should remember them. It was as though he had only learned to love them after they had been blown apart. Love choked him as much as grief. Dreadful, uncontrollable tenderness that had nowhere to go. He had nowhere to put all the love they had made him feel when they died. He had never known how dreadful, how damaging love could be.

  Robert's story became uncommercial. He lost his job. He lost his friends. He remember not to it just rained in his heart for the rest of his life.

  So, thus, in short, an intricate, say some, mix of history, politics, circumstance and ordnance resulted in the detonation of a one-hundred-pound bomb in the enclosed space of the front part of a small sandwich shop measuring twenty-two feet by twelve.The confined space and the size of the device created a blast of such magnitude that much of the second floor of the front part of the building collapsed into it and out onto the street. There were fourteen people in the sandwich bar. There were five people in the beauty parlour upstairs when it collapsed and twelve on the street in the immediate vicinity of the flying shrapnel and collapsing beauty parlour. Thirty-one people in all, of whom seventeen stopped existing then or later and of whom eleven were so seriously injured as to lose a limb or an organ.

  In a glass-fronted bookshop across the street a security guard and two browsers in the travel section were badly wounded when the bookshop window exploded.The security guard lost one eye completely but merely the sight of the other, while the face and scalp of a middle-aged woman leafing through a picture book about Mauritius were permanently mutilated. The other browser lost much of the delicate tissue of his neck and face.

  A street bin thrown across the exit of Queen's Arcade by the force of the blast hit a schoolboy sitting on one of the stone benches there and so damaged his pelvis that he would never walk properly again.

  There were many people with cuts and scratches, there were many people frightened. Some of the amateur ambulancemen and women, who had waded in when the smoke and dust had cleared, saw dreadful, emetic sights that would rest like a film over everything they would see subsequently in their lives.

  In the ringing, piercing silence of the aftermath of the bomb, there were a few moments of something grotesquely like peace. The dead were dead, many of the dying were unconscious, or incapable of speech, most of the injured and the terrified were in shock or simply very, very surprised. Because it had been very, very surprising. An everyday, entirely forgettable, urban situation (any cafe, any shop, any pub, any street) explosively converted into a slaughterhouse. The living took a few seconds to understand, to start their screams.

  Three minutes later, some policemen had arrived. Some stood or squatted by the injured or dying, some clambered over the rubble to look for survivors, one intelligent policeman just turned and ran away.Within five minutes, the first ambulance had arrived. The two paramedics, thinking themselves veterans, waded in with some aplomb; within seconds they were gagging.

  Some of the immediate rescue operations were hampered by the delicacy of the police. One of the traditional features of these explosions was that the bombers would plant a second or even third device timed to detonate some minutes later, planted just where they thought the police might set up their cordon lines. Police and firemen took some time to make sure this was unlikely - one sandwich-shop victim, who might not have died, died.

  By the time ten minutes had passed, the death-toll had risen. More paramedics struggled with their horror and more police officers and firemen scrabbled amongst the debris. Several passers-by had simply crumpled to the ground like nauseous children, formless heaps, trembling, silent.

  After fifteen minutes, most present had grasped the situation. A cordon had been erected. Onlookers and journalists were restrained. Digging crews had been set up. A triage system was working efficiently, supervised by a youthful doctor who would never know how much she had physically resembled Rosemary l)aye. It was notable, nevertheless, how many people still refused to understand what had happened. Several of the shocked onlookers sat staring dumbly at the excrement and tissue and blood, incapable of comprehending how political this was. One nave fireman, upon retrieving what seemed to be a portion of a severed head, naively believed this to have been a sadistic act. A woman with a bloody face who comforted her young son near the bookshop had no real conception of the historical imperatives leading to such an event. One French tourist, who'd been closer to Castle Street than to the bomb itself but still had been badly scared, even wondered to himself why anyone who might want the Br
itish to leave the Irish alone would announce this by killing Irish people. But he was French.

  There was all round a lamentable lack of overview, of objectivity. Those involved refused to put the event in its proper context. And for some unruly souls, this was a process that continued for some time. Indeed, one churlish triple amputee actually told a newspaper some weeks later that he would never be able to understand or forgive the people who had planted the bomb.

  One can excuse much of this by their surprise and some of the immediate physical distress attendant upon such an event, but the more consistent refusal of some to listen to reason or explanation is perhaps harder to fathom. Maybe, at such times, many people simply refuse to read between the lines. Maybe they believe the lies that their eyes tell them.

  For the men who planted the bomb knew it wasn't their fault. It was the fault of their enemies, the oppressors who would not do what they wanted them to do. had reasonably asked to have their own way.They had not succeeded.They had then threatened to do violent things if they did not get their way. When this had not succeeded, they were forced to proceed with extreme reluctance to do those violent things. Obviously it was not their fault.

  It was the politics of the playground. If Julie hits Suzy, Suzy doesn't hit Julie back, Suzy hits Sally instead.

  The rest of the day at Fountain Street was a stretched, slow thing.The hours passed as though time itself had been damaged in the blast.Time passed at the pace it took a man to walk across the rubble. Time passed like death.

  They removed the seriously injured. They removed the medium injured. They removed the slightly injured. They removed the shocked. They didn't remove the frightened. Some of the frightened had to stay. They themselves were some of the frightened. Witnesses were interviewed by the police. The police were interviewed by the press. Politicians gave statements. Medics gave statements. There was a round of hearty condemnation and outrage on all sides. Few paused to think how often they'd repeated those words over the last double decade or so. The accessible bodies were removed and then the dig for the more inaccessible remains began in earnest.