Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (2 page)

CZ45, outstanding, £135, resale maybe 10o to The company would want back on a gogglebox of that price. Twenty pounds' profit split three ways. We were tycoons. I didn't like my job.

Crab and Hally bitched at each other while I looked out at all the bricks and all the sunshine. The day before they'd picked up a video and stereo in Ballybeen. Hally had been driving and he'd told Crab that the woman they were stiffing was so badly broke that she'd put out to keep her stuff. He'd given poor old Crab some big story about her being an unmarried mother in her late twenties, blonde, big tits: usual list of yob desirables. Crab had gone wild with anticipation. Hally and I had sussed the poor slob was a virgin. Needless to say, it was all crap as Crab discovered when some fat matron had answered the door and smacked him about for trying to take her stuff. This grievance still rankled. It wasn't like Crab had a lot of other things to think about.

I was feeling sour. I worked in the repossession industry. How else was I supposed to feel? Repo work had the capacity to take the edge off my morning and it was always the morning for us boys. That's when we did our best work. People were disoriented in the morning, half dressed, malleable, not generally pugilistic. It seemed that trousers were necessary for confident protest. We didn't work after never knew what size the guy might be or how much he might have drunk; it was also harder to find women alone after dark and people kept mistaking us for the IRA.

Oh, boy, people were always mistaking us for the IRA. I suppose it was easy to mistake one trio of macho Puckers for another. My colleagues were very basic human beings indeed. Crab was big, fat and ugly. Hally was big, fat, ugly and vicious. I tried not to hate people. Hating people was too tiring. But sometimes, just sometimes, it was hard.

I had a personal theory as to why the people we dealt with were so easy to deal with first thing in the morning. I had a feeling that poverty like theirs felt worse first thing. It might have been easier to dream or fantasize at night when some optimism or booze could make you bullish but in the pallid light of morning it must have all seemed pretty permanent, this poverty, this shame. It must have seemed fairly realistic.

What depressed me most was that so many people gave us so little trouble. Like they expected our invasion. Like they guessed we had a right and they had none. When an unmarried mother who owes twenty quid on a three-hundred-pound fridge lets you walk out with it and no grumbles, something very odd is going on.

Crab was definitely getting excited about our next call. A sunbed. Crab felt that a sunbed guaranteed some big blowsy tart -just what he needed before breakfast.We pulled into the street and stopped at the address. The house looked smarter than its neighbours: there was a fancy door and some intricate porchwork. Somebody doing well enough to buy sunbeds and build fancy porches had obviously lost their job and now we were coming to take it all away.

I stayed in the van because Crab was so desperate to get a look at the woman his imagination had created. He and Hally knocked and waited. I lit a cigarette and settled down. I felt like shit. Some would say that working-class aspiration always ends like hoodlums taking all the gaudy baubles away. I still felt like a criminal.

I couldn't get Mary out of my head. I had told her I was a debt counsellor.Which was a big fat laugh. I could never get the hang of being seedy and it appalled me to think of what I had become again since Sarah had left. Some repo thug who lies to the waitresses he takes home. The high life.

Hally was still knocking at the door and Crab was looking disappointedly through the windows. Nobody home. Just as I was beginning to hope that he wasn't going to do it, Hally had whipped out his chisel and jemmied the lock. I hated it when he did that. The cops had hassled us too many times already. I didn't want any more grief. But I said nothing as the two disappeared inside.

I put my head back and closed my eyes. I felt ashamed of the night before. I wondered if I would have felt more ashamed if I'd slept with her. It was just that the girl had somehow shown that she was much better than me. When she had asked me to take her home, it had been a stylish, independent thing to do. Maybe it was always like that when girls did it. But I had smudged it and made it somehow sordid. I wished I didn't have that knack.

A hand tapped me on the shoulder and I jerked upright, eyes open. A man was standing by the open van window. He was unshaven and weary-looking.

`That's my house,' he said. `What's going on?'

His tone was desultory, certainly not aggressive. Even so, I thought about getting out of the van in case he cut up rough.

`Repossession,' I said, more dismissive than I felt.

'What are you taking?' he asked, curiously.

`Sunbed.'

'Ah, right,' he murmured, without interest. He eyed my cigarette. I offered him one.'Thanks, mate.'

Crab and Hally were still inside. This man didn't look like he intended moving.

'They'll be ages taking that fucking thing apart: He tittered grimly.

I flicked something between a smile and a nod at him.

'I'm glad to see it go,' he said, lazily confidential. 'The bitch fucked off so her stuff can fuck off after her.'

Me, I never knew what to say to unhappy people. I never knew what to add or subtract.

'Lost your job?' I asked clumsily.

`Aye, fuck'The man was briefly energized. `I was at Short's ten years. Laid me off four months ago. They're letting fucking Taigs in now.'

Yeah, yeah, I thought. There was a new Commission now to make sure that Catholics had fair representation in the workforces of the province. Equable commentators like this guy blamed this Commission for all the economic, social and moral ills of the planet generally. They had liked it the old way, when Catholics were glad of an indoor bathroom and a couple of raw spuds. But what could he have expected? That kind of stuff couldn't have gone on for ever. Not because it was wrong or anything like that, because it was embarrassing. Would he have been comfortable if he'd known I was a Catholic? I wondered. Probably.

`When did she go?' I asked, to change the subject.

His Catholic-hating smile hardened into his wife-hating smile, a much uglier thing. `Last month. Told me she was fucking her cousin and pissed off the day before Christmas. Didn't miss her. Drunkest I'd ever been. Drunkest anybody's ever been. Didn't miss her. Won't miss her.' He nudged me. `Gives me a chance to have a go at all the wee tarts running round the estate. That's the life for me.'

A tear tracked down the tired lines in his face while he talked all his tough talk. Here we go again, I thought. He talked more hardman bullshit like he didn't know I knew how soft and small and sad he was. I didn't listen with either ear.

Crab and Hally finally lumbered out of the house carrying both parts of the sunbed.The van door was open so they loaded up without my assistance. The guy ignored them all the while and continued cajoling me with his man-of-the-world stuff. Crab got into the driver's seat, grumbling about not getting a look at the tart with the sunbed.The man's face did not flicker. Hally pushed him out of the way and climbed in.

And it was when Crab started the van and we moved off that it happened. I looked back and the guy waved at me. A tired, amiable, clapped-out gesture. I don't know. I'd taken stuff from old folks, from women, from kids even. It's supposed to be easier to feel sorry for them but I'd never felt sorrier for any one than I felt for this tired guy, this silent weeper who'd waved at me as I'd driven away with the last remnant of the woman who had left him.

And that was enough to do it.The low-rent street, the crappy houses, the sky pale and drooping, the waving man with the wet face. It all looked like I felt and I decided that I wanted to go home. I was going to take the rest of the day off. A morning's worth of repo work was enough sadness for anybody.

The van was getting full and we decided to drive back and unload. Crab and Hally bickered on as we drove back to the garage from where we worked. Soon they guessed my mood and left me out of their banter. I couldn't get the picture of the guy with no wife and no sunbed out of my head and I couldn't swallow the taste of shame.

Back at the garage, I left my two colleagues and walked into Allen's office. He owned the garage and ran his debt-collection gimmick from there. He was talking money into the telephone. He motioned me to wait. I waited without patience.

`What do you want?' he asked, when he had finished. Allen was an ex-dipso, car salesman, repossessor, loan shark, all-round wide-boy. He was the only sixty-year-old bald guy I had ever seen in a pair of leather trousers. He was not a man with much grace.

'I'm going home. I'm sick.'

`The fuck you are.'

'Stop me.'

He frowned and decided to stop trying to look menacing. He wasn't any good at it.That's what he'd hired Crab, Hally and me for.

'What's wrong with you?'

'I'm sick.'

He looked out of the small window to where he could see Crab and Hally unloading the van. 'Have you gotta problem with this work, Jackson?'

'Nah, I find it massively rewarding. I thank God every day for the fulfilment of it, the sense of achievement. What do you think?'

He didn't couldn't, he didn't understand all those syllables.

`Why don't you go be a fucking brain-surgeon, then?'

`I'm thinking about it.!

`You get up my nose, you know.' Happily reminded, he started to pick the organ in question. `Crab and Hally don't have a problem. Admittedly, they're stupid cunts but they don't have a problem because they know that what you don't pay for you can't have. We take stuff from scumbags who shouldn't have bought it in the first place. Don't buy things you can't afford' He dislodged a wieldy piece of snot and paused thoughtfully. `If you don't like it go get another job. I'll live with the disappointment of losing you. Fuck me, who cares if we're not nice - we're necessary. That's more important.' He smiled and flicked the snot from his fingers. Just in case I thought he was justifying himself or anything like that, he added, `Anyway, do you think I could give two fucks?

'Can I go home now?'

He dismissed me with a wave. `Yeah, fuck off. And don't do this again.'

At the door he called me back. I turned reluctantly and looked at him without interest.

`You're a real soppy prick, you know.'

'Yeah,' l said, `I've been told.'

Back home in Poetry Street, I smacked a cup of coffee into me. Fancy coffee; black as Mick beer and strong as radiator paint. The only way to drink it. Cost me three quid a pound but a man had to have good coffee. Since Sarah had ironed out my tastes it had become a first principle. I lived at the posh end of town now so I ground my coffee and drank it from overpriced, underglazed kitchenware. This was Poetry Street. This was bourgeois Belfast, leafier and more prosperous than you might imagine. Sarah had found this place and moved us in to lead our leafy kind of life in our leafy kind of area. When her English friends or family had visited us there they had always been disappointed by the lack of burnt-out cars or foot patrols on our wide, tree-lined avenue. From my downstairs window, Belfast looked like Oxford or Cheltenham. The houses, the streets and the people were plump with disposable income.

From my upstairs window, however, I could see the West; the famous, hushed West. That's where I'd been born: West Belfast, the bold, the true, the extremely rough. I used to send Sarah's visitors up there. There were plenty of those local details up West.

A radio waffled softly from the flat downstairs. It was barely ten o'clock and the student kids downstairs were probably just getting up. I pulled my curtains wide and Saturday sunlight slapped itself around my room like a coat of paint. I squinted out at all the Belfast birds in all the Belfast sky. Across the Lisburn Road, a diminutive cleaning woman chucked some flaccid garbage from the doorway of the fancy Indian chickenhouse. A group of cats appeared from nowhere and started filling their faces. I recognized my own prominent amongst them. He was the fat one with no testicles. I thought about calling him in for his breakfast but I decided not to bother. I didn't particularly like my cat. My cat was a bit of a wanker.

I looked to my own dry toast and cigarettes. I ate in good heart, a neat trick on two hours' sleep and a baby hangover. I went to the door and looked again for the mail that never arrived. I picked up the local paper and took a read at that instead. Another taxi-driver shot the night before. Taxi-drivers were fashionable victims just then. It was all the rage. It was all the hatred. At the bottom of the front page there was an ad for a Christmas pantomime. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs WITH REAL DWARFS!!!

Everything was looking local.

Under the circumstances, Belfast was a pretty famous place. When you considered that it was the underpopulated capital of a minor province, the world seemed to know it excessively well. Nobody needed to be told the reasons for this needless fame. I didn't know much about Beirut until the artillery moved in. Who'd heard of Saigon before it blew its lid? Was Anzio a town, a village or just a stretch of beach? Where was Agincourt exactly?

Belfast shared the status of the battlefield.The place-names of the city and country had taken on the resonance and hard beauty of all history's slaughter venues. The Bogside, Crossmaglen, The Falls, The Shankill and Andersonstown. In the mental maps of those who had never been in Ireland, these places had tiny crossed swords after their names. People thought them televised knackers' yards. Belfast was only big because Belfast was bad.

And who would have thought it thirty years before? Little Belfast could be such a beautiful city. Squatting flat in the oxter of Belfast Lough, hazily level with the water, the city was ringed with mountains and nudged by the sea. When you looked up the length of most Belfast streets, there was some kind of mountain or hill staring back at you.

But, yeah, Belfast continued to fail to surprise me. A couple of days before, a bomb had gone off near the police station just across the road from my flat. I'd watched from my window as the Lisburn Road was evacuated. The flower shop, the newsagent's, the hairdresser's. After sealing off the road, they did a controlled explosion. Jesus! Blew in two of my windows and scared the chocolate out of me into the bargain. How controlled were these controlled explosions? It fucked half the other half was pretty fucked already. What new definition of the word `controlled' was this?