Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

by Robert Mclaim Wilson

  I grabbed the Amnesty guy by the lapels and gave him some nuclear lip about why he should be monitoring the right of twelve-year-old boys not to have the crap beaten out of them. It was pointless, however. He couldn't understand a word I said. I couldn't understand a word I said.

  By the time I'd finished, my voice had dried to a scraped-out croak. Sweat dripped off my face onto my shirt. I grabbed the back of a nearby chair to steady myself. Everyone stared at me in aghast silence. Then they moved off muttering and went to visit their wounded political hero. Only Aoirghe remained. She looked me full in the face. Her expression was different - something I couldn't associate with her. She came closer to me and put her hand on my arm. I flinched.

  `What are you doing here?' she asked.

  I had no excuse. I'd never done the like before but I grabbed her by the front of her shirt and dragged her to the booth where Roche lay tubed and bandaged. The kid looked awful, his face was mutant and swollen. To Aoirghe he must have looked as though he were dying.

  I didn't scream this time. I did unleash a torrent of extraordinary abuse in Aoirghe's direction but I tried to keep the volume down. I said dreadful, unforgivable things to her. I had had a lot of experience with people telling me what the trouble with me was. I gave it a go from the other end.

  When I paused for breath and cardiac massage, I saw that she was crying. It was an amazing sight. She crumpled shirt had been ripped by my wrathful hand. Some people can look pretty when they cry. Most people just look like wet snails. Aoirghe was one of those who didn't look their best. Her nose ran, her eyes were red and her face was creased like a clam. She looked pitiable. My heart might then have misgiven me and I might have stopped shouting at her.

  What did I do? I did what all the unjustly angry really fucking went for her. I piled on in.

  After a few minutes, she ran out into the corridor, sobbing. I followed her all the way to the exit, abusing her viciously. She fled the building. As the swing doors banged shut behind her, I stopped shouting and tried to be calm. I knew I should have felt much better but I didn't. I shook my head like a dog. It didi 't help.

  I waited for hours there. The cops had gone to fetch Roche's parents but Roche's stepfather (or whoever he was) had told them to fuck off, that the kid didn't interest them. A social worker was coming in the morning to try to sort out a foster home or something for him. Meanwhile I waited.

  I called Peggy and she told me that Chuckle had arrived home about an hour before. He was talking now, apparently. It seemed that the silent routine was over. I wanted to give him a piece of my mind for leading me into the riot so I asked Peggy to put him on the blower. She thought it was better if I waited until he calmed down a little. She said he was manic. She asked me to call the next day. I could have sworn she blew me a kiss as she hung up.

  I waited on for Roche. I watched as the just Us guy was discharged with a small plaster on his forehead. Two cops led him gently out as he struggled and screamed cinematically for the news crews. I watched the Amnesty guy give another brief statement about police brutality and the rule of law. I thought about making him wait with me to see Roche but I decided, accurately, that he didn't want to know.

  I felt so bad about what I'd said to Aoirghe that I didn't even have the heart to fall in love with any of the nurses and doctors. I just drank Casualty coffee and nipped outside every fifteen minutes for a smoke.

  I was finally allowed to talk to Roche at about four o'clock that morning. When I went in to see him, I was more upset than I needed to be. Amongst the bruises, bandages and cuts, I could easily discern the wide-boy presence of Roche's conscious self.

  'How are you feeling?' I asked lumpily.

  'Fabulous,' said the kid.

  'You don't look so bad now,' I said.

  He glared at the quiver of my lips and the bulge of my firmly uncrying eyes. 'Don't VOL) start bawling,' he warned. 'All them good-looking nurses will think you're my boyfriend or something.!

  I smiled. `There's a social worker coming to see you tomorrow. Did they tell you that?'

  'Aye: He laughed indulgently.

  `What's funny?' I asked.

  `They take photographs of you to show foster parents. I was just thinking of the groovy foster mum I'd get if they take the photographs tomorrow' He gestured at the wreckage of his tiny body. `The way I look I'd arouse the maternal instincts of any late-twenties piece of ass you'd care to mention.'

  `You're disgusting.'

  `Hey, Jake.'

  `What?'

  `You coming to see me tomorrow?'

  I got all emotional again. `Yeah, sure thing.'

  'Well, get the doctors to give me more of these flying, boy.'

  I laughed again.'I think I hate you,' I said fondly.

  A nurse came in and asked me to leave. I said goodbye to Roche. I patted the only undamaged portion of him that I could find and he yelped in pain anyway.

  `That was some routine with the girl there,' he said, as I was walking away.

  'What?'

  'Your big screaming match with your woman with the funny name.

  'Aoirghe?'

  `Aye.'

  'I thought you were asleep,' I said guiltily.

  `Nah, I was keeping an eye on you.You really gave it to her.'

  'I was very uptight.'

  `She seemed sorry, said Roche.

  I looked closely at him. Roche could not have made his eyes twinkle if he'd tried.

  `I don't think so; I replied. `She's not the sorry type.'

  Roche settled down into his bed. `Yeah, maybe not. Nice tits, though.'

  I left.

  I had to walk back to the south of the city. I had left the Wreck parked near the Wigwam. I was tired and lugubrious after my big night. I walked slowly. My right hand hurt from when I had hit someone during the riot. I had run out of cigarettes a couple of hours before and I had no cash. I started humming blues riffs to myself. It sounded bad but appropriate.

  I cut across the motorway and the industrial estate, heading in a straight line for the railway track near Poetry Street. I bummed a fag off a drunk lying near the Park Centre. I saved it and walked on.

  There was a dampness in the air and a dampness in my spirits. The riot had depressed me and Roche had an infinite capacity for making me feel bad, but that did not explain the droop in my mood.

  I'd overstepped the mark with Aoirghe Jenkins back there. She deserved a little and I'd given her more than a lot. Her politics were poisonous but she hadn't beaten up any twelveyear-olds. My heart sank as I remembered what I had said to her.

  It was after five by the time I crossed the railway tracks at Adelaide Halt. I stopped on the footbridge. I was only a few hundred yards from Poetry Street but I sat down on the steps of the bridge facing the mountain. I fished in the pockets of my ruined suit for my borrowed cigarette. I found the fag and I found Sarah's letter as well. I smiled and decided to read it. It was getting pretty light and it seemed like the right time. I lit the cigarette and opened the letter.

  I read Sarah's one-word letter and sat thinking and smoking for quite a long time. I looked up at the hill. It looked down at me. The fields from the mountains rolled out towards the city like a proffered tailor's cloth, checked and regular. Clouds of liquid grey issued and gathered over the city like witchbrew.

  The one word in Sarah's letter was Forgive.

  It was minutes before dawn. The birds were anxious. They suffered last-minute, curtain-up nerves. A yellow spider of crane metal picked itself out in the gloom, its noselight winking bright against the faded mountain. The slopes were a gradual beginning on which buildings dotted themselves with increasing density. Houses, farms, quarries, stations and schools. They tumbled into ensemble and merged urban and flat at the foot of the hill.

  I thought about forgiving.

  Yet the sky didn't lighten. The atmosphere thickened like gravy and all seemed stained. A man crossed the footbridge, a white plastic bag drooping from his motiveless hand. He
shuffled onto the footpath parallel to the rails. His bobbing back faded into flatness until he seemed like a tiny shimmer on a painting: cuckold, worker, citizen.

  I thought about Chuckie and Max. I thought about Peggy and Caroline. I thought about Donal and Pablo. I thought about Slat and Wincey. I thought about Luke Findlater and the Maoist waitress. I even thought about the boy and the girl from the supermarket.

  Now the mountains were beginning to clear, show themselves, gaining form and colour. On each side of their broad sweep they were fringed with tassels, trees on one side and the regular cadence of a sloping quarryworks on the other. They looked like a cheap sofa. They looked like something Chuckie would buy. They were beautiful.

  I thought about Aoirghe.

  I went looking for my car. I had stuff to do.

  When she had been a young woman, Chuckle's mother had been obsessed by the beauty of her breasts. She had loved their firmness, their fullness, their marvellous unlikelihood. Her breasts had been magical to her. For much of the time between sixteen and twenty, she had longed to show them to the world. To walk the streets of Belfast with her dress around her waist. She had longed to astonish and gratify one of the dull boys who dated her by opening her blouse without a word and letting him fill his mouth with their taut abundance.

  Needless to say, Peggy Lurgan had astonished and gratified no one. Her breasts had languished in glorious privacy seen only by herself and occasionally by her friend, Caroline. By the time Chuckie's father had finally penetrated to the mysteries beneath her clothes, the magic had somehow gone.

  But Peggy had always remembered the bliss of her boson. Indeed, as she grew older, her remembrance of the early to mid-sixties was indissolubly linked to the memory of her chestly beauty. The Kennedy Assassination. The vague beginnings of American and Northern Irish civil unrest. Such recollections were hazy adjuncts to the historical fact of her private prize.

  Recently, the obsession had returned. It had been so long since she had taken her sleeping pills and tranquillizers that many such unbidden memories flooded her unfogged brain now but her breast-vanity was the chief revenant. She was glad that she had felt that way and was glad that she was beginning to feel that way again. They were still pretty good. For a fiftyyear-old woman, they were spectacular.

  Then there had been that thing with Jake Jackson, Chuckie's friend. She had noticed that he had noticed. The fact of making an attractive young man obviously uncomfortable in that manner intoxicated Peggy. She felt that she was beginning anew.

  The memories that came to her made her spine tingle with joy. One night she conjured the image of a woman washing her hair in the scullery tub of a poor house near the markets while her husband, sturdy but idle, scraped his scraped limbs in the hottest tub in Templemore Avenue baths. These were memories of her father and mother.

  Her childhood surged back. She remembered how everyone on her street had avoided the Friday tickman, on his bike, motorbike or old tin car. Pay up and shut up. No palms were laid before his feet. She remembered sneaking down to the covered market when the Antrim women came to the iron-bound stalls to show what they would sell, throwing dappled light on the ground from the red shawls they used as awnings. She remembered their shrill shouts:

  Tupporth here!

  Aggie, where's the calico?

  My man's going.

  See youse in the tram shed.

  She remembered childhood sweets and secrets. She remembered the smell of her father's cigarettes and shoe polish. She remembered fifties Belfast, buttoned-up, Presbyterian. She remembered winter mornings, her fingers growing cold in the scullery, losing the stored heat of sleep as her mother lit the fire.

  Most of all she remembered Caroline. Her friend seemed to be a constant presence in almost all her recollections. They lived on the same street. They were in the same class at primary school. Their mothers were friends. They even played together on the same rope swing on the lamp-post at the bottom of their street. For forty-five years or more Peggy and Caroline had been together.

  In Peggy's nitrazepam-free mind, their early years together were most vivid. The years that followed their girlhood and adolescence were smudged and murky in comparison with the glitter of those early times.

  She could not have said that the friends loved each other dearly. It was more that their pasts and futures would have been unthinkable without the other. As they grew into women, this unspoken indivisibility increased. A few days after the bomb at Fountain Street, Peggy had spent a morning looking through all her old papers for a photograph of the two friends. She wept throughout the morning as she found photographs of her parents, obituary notices, letters from cousins she had forgotten, cheap old jewellery.

  After a couple of hours, she had found the photograph, which was both more and less than she had remembered. Written on the back in faint pencil was the legend: Peggy and Caroline, May i 962. She started to cry again. She stared at it ruefully for an hour.

  The picture, milky rather than faded with age, showed the girls sitting on the railings beside the City Hall. They wore patterned dresses with exuberant skirts. They smiled wide black-and-white smiles in a bright black-and-white world. They were eighteen. They were both beautiful. Their youthful hair and skin, the sheen in their eyes and the brightness of their smiles gave Peggy a desperate sensation in her stomach.

  She remembered the day vaguely. A hapless bright Saturday, they had wandered the town, window-shopping with two boys from the Newtownards Road. One of the boys, Andy, the one who had taken the photograph, had been pursuing Caroline for weeks. Caroline had been joyously uninterested. In a few weeks' time, Andy, exasperated by their solidarity, would give Peggy a pair of old work trousers, telling her she might as well be Caroline's boyfriend since they did everything else together.

  The photograph made Peggy feel indescribable things. It made her deeply sad and filled her with joy simultaneously. The photograph represented a junction in their lives. A time before Peggy had met Hughie and Caroline had met Johnny. Their black-and-white selves were frozen in the photo. A time when everything was different. When Belfast itself was different. She inspected the soft grey out-of-focus metropolis in the background. Buildings had disappeared and new ones had sprouted; violence and husbands had come, their effects equally devastating.

  But the picture showed two pretty eighteen-year-olds for whom all possible futures were possible futures. It showed the point where the road had forked. It demonstrated where it had all gone wrong. And, yes, her breasts had looked amazing in that dress.

  For days, the suddenly untranquillized Peggy had stayed quietly in her bedroom, thinking. She kept the photograph by her bed and constantly referred to it as if for cues or clues. She thought about the man who had come soon after the photograph had been taken. She remembered Hughie's drunken, inexpert fumbling amongst her clothing. She remembered how old he had seemed. She couldn't remember having said yes. She couldn't remember having been asked.

  Peggy became pregnant and Caroline had perhaps married Johnny out of pique. Hughie failed to marry Peggy and Peggy had moved into Eureka Street and produced her fat, bald baby. Few now could remember the kind of courage which that then took. Hughie didn't even live with her. He stayed sometimes but, as he told Peggy, he had other commitments.

  She vaguely remembered marrying him just before her parents had died. She recalled that it did not dull the shame for them. She could not remember Hughie leaving. His latest absence just stretched out and became permanent. She remembered being left alone with her only son. After a couple of years, Caroline and her family had moved into the house across the street. Her life took on the gloomy pattern that would not alter for nearly three decades.

  Thirty years of loneliness. Twenty years of growing old. Ten years of various tranquillizers, sleeping pills and antidepressants.

  Then Chuckle got rich.

  Then she stood on Fountain Street and watched everybody die.

  That view had changed Peggy for ever. The
two women, thrown so violently together again, probably realized at the same time. What had seemed like ever-presence had been love.

  It happened on the night that Chuckle had called from America to say he was flying back in three days' time. He was getting married and having a baby, she didn't have to worry about him any more.

  They had both been ashamed, they had both been scared. But in the end it was pretty easy. They took off their clothes and smiled. Both women had thought in their private hearts that this event would lead to disgust as they beheld again each other's bloated old flesh, but that did not happen. Each could only find beauty in what they saw.

  Caroline was surprised that she was not surprised. Peggy was surprised by this thing between her legs that she had ignored for so long. Peggy had had little sex: Chuckie's mother had slept with only one father. They had copulated only thirty or forty times. This double score of erotic incidents came to represent the world of sex for Peggy. It was a small and slightly vicious world. Despite the infrequency of their lovemaking, she came to know Hughie's habits well. She extrapolated at first, using her experience with Hughie to represent the activities of all men. She concluded that all men wiped their dripping foreskins on their women's thighs after sex, that they all got that brutal look in their eyes when they came. Then she stopped extrapolating, considering that it was unfair to attribute Hughie's foibles to the entire gender. In the end, from what Caroline told her, she changed her mind again and extrapolated like mad, suspecting that, after all, knowing one was knowing them all.

  The next morning, the two women had chatted like girls over breakfast. Sunlight flooded the kitchen and the little house was transfigured. A bridge had been built between them as they were now and as they had been in the photograph. For the first time in her adult life Peggy had decided that this was what she wanted.

  It was difficult, of course. Sandy Row was scandalized. Caroline's husband went unviolently berserk and left Eureka Street with the eighteen-year-old youngest son. Peggy and Caroline were visited by vicars and missionaries and no one on Eureka Street spoke to them. They nearly got into the newspapers. It looked like Protestant Belfast would never deal with their consensual but idiosyncratic behaviour.