Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

by Robert Mclaim Wilson

  It always worked. It produced in the victim a state of something approaching catatonia. The dazed individual, a rabbit in headlights, would then be haplessly mashed in some hospitalizing tackle.The obscenity or level of threat was not the effective ingredient. What worked so brilliantly was the sheer surprise. These young men were astonished to have their bourgeois pastime invaded so abruptly by this back-street coarseness.

  And this was what had produced the uncustomary silence in Jimmy Eve. Fired by a million years' worth of resentment against this duplicitous Nazi (Chuckie had never felt so Protestant before, he had never felt Protestant at all), Chuckie's rage had been massive. He had whispered things so appalling in Eve's ear that he would always prefer to forget exactly what he'd said. It was bound to be his finest performance. The four fat lines of cocaine had helped.

  Two days later, Chuckie and Max boarded a 747 bound for London.They had settled the here-or-there question in the way both had known they would. After a difficult parting from the old house in Kansas, during which Max tried to be stoic but blubbed like a baby, they flew to New York and spent a night there. With Max beside him, that city was a different and much more appealing experience.

  Once they had boarded the British Airways plane and Chuckie heard of the cabin crew, he breathed a sigh of European relief. He had liked America enormously but his last two days had been mayhem. His television appearance had made him briefly famous. Excerpts were shown on other networks; the entire event was even repeated. Other stations called him and asked him to be interviewed in tandem with American politicians, one even offered him a job as their political correspondent. The CLAD.(Campaign to Legalize All Drugs) called him. Max had to deal with much of this telephone traffic. Her mulishness protected him. He was referred to as the MFG in Irish politics, the Mad Fat Guy. There were even rumours of T-shirts being printed. Jimmy Eve skulked home a week early.

  This sudden fame upset Chuckie. It shattered the love for celebrity that had never left him. If someone as unevolved as Chuckie himself could be celebrated, however briefly, then notoriety was not worth the having. It was oddly appropriate to his experience of America. That country ran on the fuel of celebrity. It was the true spiritual currency of the nation. In America, actors and actresses were gods, the populace hung on their every word. Chat-shows were the discourses in which these beings diagnosed for the people.

  When first in New York, Chuckie had felt that movie-unease was a feeling restricted to him. Every step he took on those famous pavements was self-conscious. That, he felt, was a visitor's sensation. By the time he got to NewYork second time around, he had established that this sensation was the common experience of the inhabitants as well. Everyone behaved like the movies they'd seen, like the movies in which they'd want to star.The streets were full of men and women acting out images of what they wanted to be. The cops acted like movie cops.The young bloods acted like movie young bloods. The men in suits were motion-picture men in suits. Chuckie even saw a streetsweeper who wielded his brush with a discernibly cinematic air.

  In New York, there was a glitch in reality, a hair in the gate, a speck on the lens.There were gross parodies of machismo and arcane street competence everywhere he looked.

  The fact that Chuckie now knew that everyone on the planet was an infant who watched too many movies meant that he would never be able to stop making money.

  But as the aircraft flew away from America and Max rested her head on the plump shelf of his belly, Chuckle knew that making money had, perhaps temporarily, lost its mystique. He needed to look for something else to give substance to his life. As he looked at her slumbering face, he knew he didn't need to search.

  When they reached Aldergrove airport, Chuckie felt his spirits lift. Through the Atlantic air his mood had been subdued, but as soon as that Ulster drizzle smacked his fat chops, he knew he felt better. Max bought some flowers and laid them on the spot where her father had been shot. Her face was red and Chuckie said nothing.

  Even the taxi-driver's predictable churlishness moved him. As they drove at speed down the motorway, he found himself becoming grotesquely sentimental. Moving south on the motorway towards Belfast, the mountains hit him like a friend. It was near dusk. The city was laid out beneath him, flat, shyly illuminated. The sky looked like litmus paper and Chuckie knew that there was no excitement in the world like the excitement of this dour provincial cityscape.

  They drove to Max's flat first. Aoirghe helped them unload Max's baggage. She embraced Max, but merely scowled her habitual scowl at Protestant Chuckie. He wondered if she had found out about his run-in with Eve. It didn't seem likely. He parted from Max after ten minutes of nuzzling embraces on the pavement while the grouchy driver looked on.

  Max went inside and Chuckie told the driver to take him to Eureka Street.

  `Are you sure you don't want to do any more fucking snogging there, mate?'

  Chuckie, New York veteran, fascist-slayer, MFG, spent the rest of the journey telling the driver what the trouble with him was.

  A few hours later, he sat in the jumbled living room of little No. 42, oppressed by a burgeoning sense of unease. His welcome had been all that he could have hoped. His mother was much better, Caroline Causton had attempted courtesy and the house had been cleared of the majority of his recent madcap catalogue purchases. But there was something about the two women that began to perplex him. As the evening went on, he kept waiting for Caroline Causton to stand up and announce that she was going across the street to her own house. This persisted in not happening.

  Chuckie tried to ignore the unspoken restraint under which both women mysteriously laboured. He gently questioned his mother about how she was feeling. He told them about his trip to America. Caroline stayed still. He told them some more about his trip to America.

  all these big Yank tycoons, they were all scared shitless of China. They thought it was the coming place and they didn't want those slit-eyed bastards taking all their money so, of course, the dumb fucks went and sent all their money to China and invested

  His voice trailed away. He felt like he'd been talking for hours (he had). He noticed that both women had now stood up. Peggy Lurgan bent over him and kissed his face. `Welcome home, son.' She straightened up. `We're going to bed now,' she said casually.

  Chuckle stared his question marks all around the little room as the two women headed for the stairs.

  His mother paused in the doorway. Both women looked at him. `Yeah,' Peggy said lightly, `Caroline's moved in with us. 'Night, Chuckle.'

  She started to climb the stairs and Caroline favoured him with the merest ghost of a wink before following her.

  Chuckie sat in his favourite armchair, mouth open, breathing slow. His flesh grew cold and he began to think he was in shock. After a while, however, he calmed down. He even began to smile. What he had been thinking was, of course, absurd. His mother and Caroline were simply too middle-aged and unsophisticated to have mastered the meaning that might have been imputed to their words. They probably didn't even know what lesbians were. His mother had forgotten to tell him that he would have to sleep on the sofa because Caroline would be sleeping in his bed. He nipped upstairs to check.

  His heart raced faster when he saw his room empty. But the fact that his bedroom was unoccupied proved nothing. They had been friends since they were little girls. They probably felt it natural to share a bed, especially since Caroline had been looking after Peggy so recently. He would maybe drop a gentle hint to his mother the next day, demonstrating that such an arrangement might be unseemly.

  Chuckie was confident that he was right and could not explain the sweat on his palms and the sensation of bloodlessness in his face. He stepped across Eureka Street and knocked on the Causton house front door. There was no answer. He knocked again.

  The door of an adjacent house opened. Old Barney came out in his slippers. Chuckie had known this man all his life. He had always seemed old. Chiefly notable for his extraordinary smoker's cough and the veloci
ty of his spitting, he had a habit of opening his front door to spit onto the street. He never looked first and most of the Eureka Street residents had been inadvertently spat on at some time or other. He didn't do that so much any more - no one liked to think of where he now many would still cross the street instead of passing his house.

  `Ach, what about you, Chuckie? Back from the United States of America, then?' He coughed, rumbled and hawked.

  Chuckie ducked. He heard the phlegm splash on the street behind him and straightened up. `Are the Caustons not in?'

  Barney looked vaguely shifty. `Aye, well, they've gone away for a few days. I think there's been a bit of a dispute in the family.'

  Chuckie experienced a surge of relief. His mother had merely taken her friend in because her husband was maltreating her. `Yeah,' he said, `Caroline's staying with us.!

  Barney coughed again. Chuckie ducked and waited for the splash. It did not come. He looked up at the old man. He realized that, for the first time in his life, Barney had just executed a nervous cough.

  'I know,' the old man said quietly. He looked up at one of the upstairs windows of Chuckie followed his gaze just in time to see a light extinguished. The old man's face quivered in panic. `Gotta go, Chuckie,' he muttered. He started to call his old dog.

  Chuckie was bemused by his urgency. `What's going on, Barney?'

  The old man continued to call his dog with increasing urgency. Chuckie noticed that another neighbour had opened her door and was trying unobtrusively to recall her own pet. Both kept glancing at the upstairs of the Lurgan house with petrified expressions.

  'Barney?'

  But Barney had collared his old pooch, swiftly skipped inside his front door and banged it shut behind him. Chuckie walked towards his other neighbour but she, too, grabbed her dog and went indoors hurriedly.

  Chuckie Lurgan stood stock still in the middle of Eureka Street. It was quiet. He felt like laughing. It had been like some bad western when all the townsfolk rushed indoors before the bad guys rode into town. He stood bemused in the pleasant silence, his sparse hair sticking to his skull because of the rain. From America to this. But, as he stood there, he could not help but feel fond. Wind-whipped drizzle darted around the streetlamps. In the haze of the sodium lights he could see serried ranks of heavier drizzle swoop in time to the wind's gusts. His mind cleared.

  It filled again as he began to hear the noise that had obviously cleared his street. It was a low, spectral wail. The sound chilled his blood. The noise died away and then commenced anew, louder and deeper. It was eldritch, ghastly.

  It took Chuckie some time to comprehend that the sound was issuing from his own house, it took him some more time to understand that it was being made unmistakably by his mother, and a final brief period to guess what might be provoking her to howl so.

  Chuckie sank to his knees in the middle of wet Eureka Street. His hands went out before his face and his world went black.

  Seventeen

  `You can't be serious,' I said.

  'I swear to God,' said Deasely. `Apparently he fainted on the street. The milkman found him in the morning.!

  `That's got to be a spoof.'

  'Straight up.'

  Luke Findlater looked daggers at me. He'd been trying to get me off the phone for the last ten minutes.

  `Have you seen him?' I asked.

  `No,' said Deasely. `Have you?'

  `I've tried. He was in bed and wouldn't open the door. Peggy says he hasn't been out of the house for a fortnight. He won't speak to her and he doesn't come to the phone when I call.'

  Another phone rang and Luke picked it up. I ignored him.

  'Do you think he'll come to the Wigwam tonight?' asked Deasely.

  `Max said she'd told him she'd leave him if he didn't come out. She seems to think he'll be there.!

  'Should we avoid referring to it?'

  'I think that would be best, don't you?'

  'Maybe.'

  Luke cupped his hand over his telephone and whistled to interrupt. 'It's John Evans,' he hissed, sotto voce.

  'Who?' I asked.

  'The Yank billionaire. He wants to speak to you.'

  'You talk to him.'

  'He doesn't want to talk to me because I'm English. He thinks I'm some kind of office boy. He thinks you Micks are the big operators. He's desperate to know where Chuckie is'

  'Tell him I'm on a call.'

  'This man is giving us millions of dollars. I can't do that.'

  'He loves it when we treat him rough. It sets his pulse racing.'

  I turned back to Deasely and finished my gossip.

  It took a long time. There was such a lot of gossip around. Events had been moving apace. For instance, Peggy Lurgan was now a lesbian living with Caroline Causton. This was spectacular news. People had called press conferences. Peggy and Caroline were the most Protestant and the most working-class women I had ever met. Such women did not normally end up munching blissfully at each other, or so everyone had believed.

  The news had had a seismic effect in Eureka Street and Sandy Row. Indeed, much of working-class Protestant Belfast was in uproar. Uncomplicated men watched their wives with new attention and fear. Several gave their wives preventive beatings just in case they might have considered stepping out of line in this most unProtestant fashion.

  The effect on Chuckle was less seismic than coma-inducing. He had gone into deep hiding. No one but Peggy and Max had seen him since the night he had come back from the States and Peggy had only seen him in his rare trips out of his room to eat or evacuate his bladder and bowels. He was obviously traumatized. Chuckle's liberalism had often surprised me. For a Prod prole, his politics were uniquely unimpeachable; his almost exclusively Catholic acquaintance was proof of that.

  But he drew the permissive line at his mother putting out nightly for another woman. My concern was that, since Chuckie did not leave the house and Eureka Street houses were famously small and thin-walled, he would be presented with the most detailed auditory impressions every night. In that house, he would be able to hear the rustle of their pubes.

  For me the news of Peggy's conversion came as a relief. It meant that I definitely didn't have to think about her sporting provocative underwear any more. I could put all that behind me.

  In some ways, the impact upon Donal Deasely had been the most surprising. Encouraged by Peggy's unexpected Sapphic courage, Deasely came out. He told us he was gay. It was something of a shock for those of his friends who had known him for ten years and more. No one had noticed. Which showed how sensitive and perceptive we all were. We'd noticed that he had had very few girlfriends but they had definitely been girls.

  When he told me, I felt like a liberal parent presented with a homosexual child. I was delighted to be able to demonstrate my permissiveness. I was, frankly, a little jealous. Deasely was leading a life completely free of PMS. What was I thinking? It had been so long since I'd got laid there hadn't been too many menstrual storms for me either. Apparently, Deasely was going to bring his current boyfriend to the Wigwam that night. He was called Pablo, it seemed. I could barely wait.

  Other news. Roche had disappeared more effectively than Chuckle. No one had seen him since the night I'd so unceremoniously kicked him out of my flat. Faithfully, I kept my eye out for him at the office and checked around Eureka Street. I even called at his house. His big-vest daddy didn't answer and the broken woman who spoke to me had no idea where he was nor any real interest.

  Oh, yeah, there was the ceasefire as well. We were a fortnight in and there had been several more ceasefires.The UVF and all the Protestant paramilitaries had laid down their arms. To my amazement, they had even apologized. The INLA, the IPLO had declared ceasefires.The IJKL, the MNOP and the QRST (both members of the latter turning up to the press conference in a mini-cab) had all followed suit. A fortnight in and only five people had been shot murkily dead and thirty-eight people beaten half to death with baseball bats.

  In Chuckle's second abse
nce, Luke and I had managed to bring his grotesque financial empire into some kind of trim. With the aid of constant and unsolicited cash injections from the patently barmy John Evans, we had managed to pay for several of the businesses that Chuckie had already bought and set up a few new ones of our own, though thoroughly in the Lurgan style. We had started to export High Quality Irish Garden Soil to American reality, it was the cheesy side layer from the big municipal landfill by the motorway.

  Business was easy. A few years ago, I'd met a man who owned a garage in West Fermanagh. Any time business was slow, he would go out with a pickaxe in the middle of the night and chip out a sizeable hole in the road half a mile away from his joint. For weeks afterwards, his casual trade would soar, ripped tyres, bent wheel rims, fucked axles. He had the gift.

  Of course, Chuckle's gift was something infinitely grander but the principle was largely the same. On the day I was gossiping with Donal, Luke and I were doing our sums and making an attempt to calculate what Chuckie Ines current assets might be. We worked hard and tirelessly. By three o'clock that afternoon we came up with a figure that scared the piss out of us both. We gulped. We looked at each other silently. We stood up. We put on our coats. We said we'd meet at the Wigwam. We took the rest of the day off. I drove out to see Matt and Mamie, trying not to think about how scarily plutocratic the invisible Chuckie had become.

  Still warm in the belief that Roche was shacked up round my place, Matt and Mamie were flushed with pleasure to see me. They stood, arm in arm, beholding the philanthropic marvel I had become.They wittered on for ten minutes about how proud they were.

  `The kid's gone,' I muttered.

  `What?'

  `He's left. He left a fortnight ago. He only stayed one night.!

  `Where is he now?' asked Mamie sharply.