Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

by Robert Mclaim Wilson

  After four or five hours of this, I grew so depressed that I went outside to clear my head and breathe some air. It was another warns night and I sat there on my step for an hour, trying not to think about ceasefires or twelve-year-old boys with domestic problems. Sometimes, Belfast looked like the past, remote or recent, the confident Protestant past. I couldn't see how any of its fires would cease.

  How did I feel about the big-deal ceasefire? It was news. It was event.What did it mean to me and the tiny group of mine?

  Sitting on my step that night I felt three things.

  First of all, I felt as though Belfast had finally given up smoking. A twenty-five-year-old hundred-a-day habit had just stopped. I dreaded the withdrawal.What were we supposed to do with our afternoons now? How were we going to look cool?

  Then I felt fury. Nothing had changed. The boys in the skimasks had called it a victory but their situation was exactly the same as it had been a quarter of a century before. Three thousand people had died, countless thousands had had bits blown or beaten or shot off, and all of the rest of us had been scared shitless for a significant proportion of the time. What had this been for? What had been achieved?

  Additionally, I couldn't help thinking that if I was husband, wife, father, mother, daughter or son to any of the twenty-seven who'd died in the last eight days I'd have been highly fucking miffed at the timing of this old armistice.

  Actually, I felt four things. I also felt like they'd start it all again any time they time they got pissed off or menstrual.

  As I began to think of going back inside I saw a girl walking alone on the road at the junction of my street. A trio of skin heads was walking towards her. The girl noticed them and quailed. Her step veered to the edge of the pavement. Her head drooped and she tried to make herself small. I shared her fear but there was nothing I could do. She was almost jogging by the time the rough boys drew level.

  As I had dreaded, one of the youths put out an arm and grabbed her. She stopped, terrified, her arms thrown up to ward off a blow. One of the velvet-heads bent down to pick something up. He handed her the thing I hadn't seen her drop and the three boys walked on.

  It wasn't much, I knew. It was only a small event but suddenly Belfast seemed again a place to be.

  Because, sometimes, they glittered, my people here. Sometimes, they shone.

  In the high-capacity car park outside the shopping mall, Chuckie Lurgan sat behind the wheel of a rented Subaru watching the lugubrious women sitting silently in their cars. It was 9.3o a.m. and, although it was summer, the air was cold. Chuckie was beginning to find American mornings beautiful. On his only morning in New York City the light had been early but already tired, the sun on the buildings smoky and dry, like it didn't have enough gas to get through the day. But the Kansas version of 9 a.m. was enchanting. The ground frost breathed up its wisps like a landful of cigarettes.

  Chuckie wound down his window and looked up at the sky. He knew that it was getting thinner. The ozonosphere was degrading at a rate that negated replenishment. The earth was being dug up and scattered with corrosive filth. The seas were being fished out and the people were growing everywhere. Every day a hundred species became extinct. (Chuckle had been watching an environmental TV programme the night before and found himself newly concerned. What had previously seemed the worst kind of style-free tree-hugging now seemed crucial to father-to-be Lurgan.)

  Chuckle felt that his skin was crackling and warping under the toxic light of the unfiltered sun. In ten years he felt that he would be bald and shrivelled with radiation. The planet, too, would lose its hair and juice. His own city would warp and buckle. Desert Belfast, dry and dead. He found his eyes begin to water.

  He was waiting for Max. She was in the mall deli trying to buy chocolate croissants. At breakfast, that morning, she had mildly desired these croissants. Though he thought it absurdly early in her pregnancy for cravings, Chuckie had strenuously insisted that they drive the twenty miles to the nearest deli. She had grumbled but had complied.

  After the old lady had told him about Max's pregnancy, Chuckie had spent a couple of days in his hotel room. For thirty hours he had contemplated fatherhood amongst the cloistered plastics and nylons of the little roadside motel. Then he slept for ten hours, rented a car and drove out to see Max.

  When he drove up she was sitting on a rocking chair on her porch. The gentle motion of her chair did not falter as he got out and approached her. His heart failed and surged a hundred times in that thirty-second walk, but Max, Max looked serene. Max looked like she had expected him.

  He mounted the porch and stopped a few steps from her chair. She looked blankly at him, rocking gently back and forth. There was no welcome in her eyes but there was no refusal either. The Ulsterman took the initiative.

  `Marry me,' said Chuckie Lurgan.

  It grew dark and chilly out on the porch while they talked. Max told him about the secret thing that had happened to her when she had run away after her father's death. At the end of those two missing years, she had found herself pregnant and too stoned to know by whom. She promised herself that she would have an abortion but, somehow, she never seemed to get around to it. It was a drag to organize, the telephones, the doctors and the clinics. She didn't have the money. She didn't have the time. There were occasions, late at night, just as she was falling asleep when she knew well that she was leaving it late. But the bid was always warm and it was always nice just to dream the bloody thing away so that she would wake up slim-bellied, unfertilized.

  But she left it late past the legal termination date. She was six months gone when she finally decided to give it a go.

  But that night she and a retired boxer from Tulsa had a party with some cheap crack. Her arm rested on the bump of her belly as she slotted the needle there. She knew exactly what she was doing but she did it anyway.

  The people in the hospital had said bad things to her. She remembered one doctor. A young man, unshaven and weary. His voice had been gentle and he had smiled but she had been startled at the thing that she had seen in his eyes. She saw the shame he felt for her.

  She had hit him and scratched his face with her ragged nails. A big nurse had rescued him, thumping her back onto the bed. She called Max a dirty whore, pronouncing it broad in the Southern fashion, making it a much uglier word ... hoor.

  And there was much time after that.There was a broken time in big rooms where the walls were cold as floors and no one spoke to her. It was like headaches she had had when she was a girl. She knew that there was a thing to endure and only by thinking of its end would she see it out.

  She was only truly frightened when they told her that the child had lived. She wept and chided them. That night she dreamt of monstrous births and repulsive babies. The thing had seemed like a virus in her. She had expelled it. That was enough. They could expect no more of her.

  For a week or more, she refused to see the child. The nice doctor, his face still scarred from her nails, made a list of all that she had taken when pregnant. As his hand had written down the second page, she understood what she had done. The child would be a monster, made of chemicals and nightmare. One nurse let it slip that the baby had been born addicted and her fears were confirmed. She saw the loathsome little thing with its lizard eyes glittering with greed and narcotic hunger.

  When they brought it to her, she wept as if to die. Her heart was glass and broken. That wizened thing was all that she was. She had made it so.

  And it seemed that when her baby died only she was surprised.

  This was why she ran back to America when she discovered that she was carrying Chuckie's child. When she finished talking, Chuckie simply asked her, gently, caringly, what that had to do with anything. That was then and this was now. He had found it a simple task to persuade her that leaving him was not an option. He found it a simple task to tell her he loved her. He found it a simple task to look at her flawless belly and hope that the child would not, eventually, come to look like him
.

  The old lady neighbour came round for a while, keen to stay as long as Chuckie. She fought it out for an hour or two but when she looked at the acquiescence in Max's face, she decided it wasn't worth getting tired for. Chuckie spent the next hour and a half gauging the weight of Max's now placid breasts and asking her again to marry him.

  He spent a short week there, pitilessly uxorious. He followed Max around the house and yard. He practically helped her to sit and stand. The old lady openly tittered at his excessive attentions. Sometimes Max grew vexed at his solicitude. One night, after the old lady had gone home, she snapped at Chuckie that he should stop clucking. But it was impossible to be long angry with him and within ten minutes she was rolling on top of his comprehensive belly, urgently whispering, Cluck me, cluck me, in his ear.

  It was a joyous, absurd, consequential week. They spent those days more happily than Chuckie could have thought possible. He was drawn deep into all manner of metaphysical speculation. He found himself considering his own mortality for the first time.

  By the time the week had passed Chuckie had grown abashed by such thoughts. He knew himself to be a pragmatic man (actually, he knew himself to be a fat, lazy bastard but he was now too rich to merit that summation). Mystical profundities ill-suited him.

  There was something appropriate in his new situation. Something that he felt was more his speed. He was about to have a Ulster Protestant in him guaranteed it would be a son. It was time to provide for his international family. It was time to make some more money.

  Chuckie saw Max walking across the parking lot towards him. He felt his customary surge of pleasure to think that this spring-heeled, healthy American woman was his. Her genetic contribution to the child would dilute much of the unwelcome Lurgan inheritance.

  Max opened the Subaru's passenger door. `No chocolate croissants,' she said morosely.

  'OK, we'll drive out to Shaneton.You said there was a mall there'

  'Chuck, that's forty miles from here.'

  'So what?'

  Max glared at him. `I bought some croissants and I bought some chocolate.'

  Chuckie looked question marks.

  `We can put them together, Chuck. Or you can have a bite of one and then a bite of the other in quick succession. Mix them in your mouth and it's the same thing!

  `Don't get humpy. This was your craving.,

  'It wasn't a craving. I just fancied some'

  'Fair enough.'

  'Chuck, stop that. Not in the parking lot.'

  Chuckie moved back into his own seat.

  'Jesus, Chuck, for a fat guy you're always surprisingly horny.'

  He smiled. `For a horny guy, I'm always surprisingly fat.'

  He stared at her. She failed to fall off her seat at his comedy. Max and her mother were the only Americans who did not find him hilarious. `You love me,' said Chuckie.

  `Don't I know it?' replied Max.

  That night they talked about the future. They talked about where they would live. Chuckie knew that a return to Belfast was not assured. He would go anywhere that Max took him.

  `Here or there. That's the big question, I suppose,' she said, trying to remove his lips from her nipple and bring him back to the point.

  He looked up at her vaguely. `Here, there, makes no difference to me.' He smiled. `I can turn a buck anywhere. The world's my can of Tennant's: He moved back to her breast. Max sighed at the thought that she would marry this man. She rubbed her hand on the back of his sparse, almost sandy head. She wondered if this was how it had been for Peggy Lurgan.

  `Yeah,' she said, suddenly mindful. `You should call your mother.!

  That night Chuckie called Eureka Street. Caroline Causton answered. She told him that Peggy was out shopping. Chuckie felt a momentary thrill that his mother felt so much better. This brief pleasure was quickly replaced by bewilderment that Caroline should be answering his telephone.

  'You think it's better that you still hang around for a while longer?' he hazarded, as vaguely as he could.

  `What do you mean?' Her tone was exacting.

  Chuckie grew tense. `Relax, Caroline. I was just asking a question.!

  `Am I not welcome or something, Chuckie?'

  'Don't be stupid. I'm just trying to work out how my mother

  There was a brief silence.

  `She's much better but she wants me to be with her. Is that all right with you?'

  There was something in her tone that Chuckie didn't like. There was something in her tone that he hated.

  'OK, take it easy.'

  'I will if you will.'

  'Tell her I called, will you? I haven't spoken to her since I left.'

  'I'll tell her. She's fine. Don't worry.'

  There was another silence. Chuckie had wanted to tell his mother. Now he wished he could wait but he found that the news was too big inside him.

  'Caroline, I'm going to be a father'

  'I know.'

  'What?'

  'Peggy told me.'

  'Who told her?'

  'That American girl of yours. The night before she left.'

  'That's nice'

  'You getting married, then?'

  'Aye'

  'Congratulations, son. I've got to go now. You take it easy. 'Bye'

  She hung up. Chuckie felt deflated. His big news had depreciated in value on its first telling. And, although Caroline's tone had been warmer towards the end, there had still been something in it that Chuckie had not liked.

  He called the office immediately. He told Luke instead. He hadn't known Luke very long and wasn't yet sure how entirely he liked him but at least the man was graciously animated at Chuckle's momentous news.

  'John Evans has been calling again,' Luke told him.

  'Who?'

  'The billionaire you met on the plane. Jesus, Chuckle, what did you tell him?'

  'Why?'

  'You must have given him the best snowjob in history. He wants a part of everything we're doing. He calls every day. He's even threatening to fly over. He wants to know what our action is, or something transatlantic like that.'

  `What have you told him?'

  `Nothing. I was too embarrassed to tell him. This man is a very big cheese. I'd heard of him. He's famous. I wasn't going to tell this Rockefeller about our twig-dipping franchises. I still have a reputation:

  `Don't get poncey.'

  `It drove him nuts. Absolutely crazy. I don't think he's used to secrets being kept from him. I think his money usually gets him what he wants:

  `Gimme his number,' said Chuckie grimly.

  `Are you sure you're in the right mood for this?'

  `Gimme the fucking number.!

  Chuckle called Evans but he called Slat first. He called Septic and Deasely, he called his cousin, he even called Stoney Wilson. He called old schoolfriends, old enemies. He called people he had once passed on the street. He told them all that he was going to be a father. Despite the reservations of some about the continuance of the Lurgan genetic strain they were all pleased for him. He felt better. Then he called John Evans. He told him the truth about all the bullshit businesses and the ridiculous ways in which he had raised capital. As he had expected, Evans offered him five million dollars on the spot.

  'I'll get back to you,' said Chuckie casually.

  Then he went off to make some money.

  One week later Chuckie found himself in a swanky high-rise in Denver.

  'Mr Lurgan, we get a lot of advice about places we could capitalize,' said a man in a New York suit.

  `I don't give advice,' said Chuckie.

  `We're worried about the war there,' said another man in a New York suit.

  `There's a ceasefire,' retorted Chuckie.

  `It could all start again,' suggested yet another besuited man.

  `We're worried about what your guys are doing in Israel,' said the last of the three-pieces.

  Chuckle smiled blankly.

  'We do a lot of Jewish business in New York. We don't
want to irritate anybody there,' the man explained, only partially.

  `Well,' Chuckie began, `I know what you mean.'

  He stopped. He had no idea what the man meant. He stared at that trim, tanned foursome. It struck him that they might actually believe that the IRA were some kind of Arab terrorist group. He changed tack quickly. `If you think that's a problem, then the best option for you is to invest in this region and thus get some leverage with these ... Muslim guys.'

  The man with the Arab theory nodded, as though admitting the justice of this point.

  `Also, Belfast is a crucial Western port in a vital geographical area'The men murmured uneasy assent. It took some minutes but Chuckie finally deduced that several had supposed Ireland to be just off the west coast of Africa. He thought hard before he corrected their misapprehension.

  An hour later, he had made another eight hundred and seventy thousand dollars. He had persuaded them to give him the money to help buy a factory unit, which Luke had told him they already owned. He would use their money to set up the Stateside utilities companies about which he'd so long dreamt. Irish-American Electricity, the American-Irish Water Company, US Hibernian Gas.

  In a week he had bamboozled, bluffed, duped and outwitted a selection of America's finest and hardest-headed businessmen. It had barely troubled him. They knew nothing about his country and sometimes believed wildly inaccurate stories. One man, perhaps thinking of Iceland, thought there were no trees; another firmly believed the island of Ireland to be situated in the Pacific. Chuckie found that their ignorance was not the product of stupidity. These men simply didn't want to know much about the rest of the world. News that was not American was not news. Such had always been the case but now that there had been a couple of ceasefires, Northern Ireland was much televised. It was by no means a lead story but it was on television all the same. Americans found themselves forced to have an opinion. There was a gap, a void between what they actually knew and the opinions they felt they must now hold. Chuckie Lurgan aspired to fill that void.