Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (35 page)

`Well, he can't have me.'

Chuckie hung up. He got a hotel room at the airport. He asked the girl at reception about the street where Max's mother lived. The girl told him it was an easy cab ride. He asked for an alarm call and tried to go to bed. He failed. The flabby clock of his body was lagging and sprinting on its own accord. He lay open-eyed for a couple of hours and then he called a cab to take him into town.

It was nearly three o'clock but San Diego wasn't sleeping. The downtown streets were close to lively. Chuckie went into a bar with two hundred dollars and made some brief friends. He drank numbly, talking nonsense and hearing more. He felt like a small blip on some big screen. He felt empty, deracinated. He missed the Wigwam and Lavery's. He missed Jake, Slat, Septic and Deasely. He missed his mother. He missed Eureka Street. It was as though he missed himself. Those were much of what constituted him.

After an hour he left the bar and walked out into damp San Diego. The sidewalks glittered, wet and marvellous. Though it was late, citizens still walked those streets. The underlit shopfronts were lined with pairs of underdressed women whom Chuckie supposed were prostitutes. These girls wore cheap pendants, which flashed in the street-light. San Diego was a naval base and some of the girls wore T-shirts that bore legends such as `Marine Girls', `Fuck me, the Navy!'

There was plenty of fight too. Every block or so, Chuckie would see a brawl erupt in some bar, on some street. Men kicked each other's heads to pulp, smashed bottles in faces, pulled and used knives. Outside one nightclub, he saw two marines beat a lone sailor. They banged his face against walls and trashcans, they kicked each of his teeth right out of his head.

And there were the noises of the incidents he did not see. The muted sound of war from the interiors of houses, apartments and bars. The dull shouts of angry men and the stifled screams of women. Sometimes he thought he heard gunfire.

The streets were littered with rubbish and bottles. The walls were littered with billboards and mugshots. On one wall he saw a local newspaper hoarding, which carried a giant version of each day's front page. CONGRESS PASSES NAVY BILL. MORE SAN DIEGO CLOSURES. And just at head level as he passed by, near the foot of the giant page, a headline about the murder of two San Diego prostitutes. Whore murders were not important. They were gestures, indications of mood.

Chuckie began to scan the streets in serious search of a taxicab. It was only San Diego but Chuckie was terrified now. He lamented the foolishness of his small-hours adventure. The streets upon which he walked felt splattered with somebody's blood or somebody's semen. He had a sudden and unwelcome sense of how fragile and inappropriate all his chubby, formless Irish flesh was in the midst of all this. He longed for the comfort of familiar Belfast and the understandably butch and brutal Sandy Row. He longed for the safety of some terrorism, some civil war.

It took him an hour to get a cab and he felt that he had walked half-way back to the airport by then. Back at his hotel, he cancelled his wake-up call and almost made a trembling, homesick pass at the bright new girl at reception. Fifteen minutes later, he slept like a dead man.

He woke so late and breakfasted so long that it was nearly five o'clock before his cab rolled up outside Max's mother's house. It was a big house, roughly the same size as the entire compass of Eureka Street. It daunted him badly.

A servant or some kind of housekeeper answered the door and there were a bad couple of minutes while Chuckie explained that he wanted to talk to Mrs Paxmeir about her daughter. There were some more bad minutes when he was introduced to Matron Paxmeir herself and had to explain his mission once more. He was rendered almost speechless by Mrs Paxmeir's appearance, which did nothing to plead his case.

Mrs Paxmeir was a gross facsimile of her daughter. Emaciated, paper-thin, she wore a smile tightened by sunburn and ill-will. Despite her dragonish exterior, Chuckie found himself oppressed by her TV-anchorwoman glamour. She looked like a woman who had never been to the toilet.

She told Chuckie that she had seen Max two days before. She didn't seem to know why her daughter had visited but she seemed conscious that she had disappointed her in some way. That consciousness did not trouble the woman. As she grew older, she said, she found herself growing less interested in her daughter's various dramas.

`I always knew she'd end up with someone like you,' she informed Chuckie.

`Someone like me?'

`Yeah:

`What does that mean?'

`Well, you know, somebody small-town.'

`Thank you.'

They both heard the housekeeper at the door. It appeared that Paxmeir's husband had come home. She seemed to intend being rid of Chuckle before she had to make any introductions.

`I don't want to keep you,' said Chuckle. 'If you could tell me if you have any idea where she went, I'll take my leave. Her grandmother's old house maybe?'

`Yeah, maybe,' the woman replied indifferently.

Chuckie tried to glare at her but failed. He felt a new affection for Max, a new pride in her. With this harpy as a mother, Max was a genetic miracle. It was astonishing that she could walk and talk when she came from such a source. What she was, she had made herself.

Mrs Paxmeir noticed his appraising look. `You think I'm a pretty bad mother, eh?'

Chuckie blushed and stammered. Despite his dislike, he did not want to insult the woman. He intended to marry her daughter, after all. `Hey, listen,' he stumbled, `a friend of mine once told me that the maternal instinct was a fiction.'

`A real bright guy.'

'So so., ,

She stood up on her spindly legs, preparatory to his departure. `You got big feelings for Max?'

'I think so.'

She smiled thinly. `That's not always enough for my little girl. I should know. She's strange that way.You watch your step, Irish boy.' She manoeuvred him through the hallway and opened the front door herself.

`I always do, Mrs Paxmeir. I always have.'

`Call first next time.'

`Absolutely.'

She closed the door behind him. He didn't turn round. Across the street, his cabby waited. Chuckie was glad that somebody cared.

He spent another night at the airport hotel. There was a flight to Kansas City in the morning but he was stuck in San Diego for that night. He clung to the hotel like a piece of driftwood. He ate room-service sandwiches, drank room-service coffee and watched insane hotel television, failing to interest himself even in the miraculous variety of naked young women on one of the cable channels.

Much later he went down to the lobby just to talk to someone. He asked the girl at reception several spurious questions. Joining in the conceit with professional briskness, she answered his questions efficiently but amiably. Then switching into her general-chat mode, she asked Chuckie, with that same efficient amiability, where he came from. He told her.

`Gee, you're Irish. That must be great for you,' she squeaked, with restrained enthusiasm.

`Where I come from, it's not a very distinguishing feature.!

The girl looked question marks at him.

'Well, we're all Irish there.' He realized what he had said.'Or, at least, so some say. Some people say that we're British and some Northern Irish, but on the other He looked at her blank, enquiring face, which registered no distress at his meandering. `Forget it, he said.

`Sure, no problem.' The girl beamed at him. Chuckie was forced to admit that her smile was neither vacuous nor false. Her grace was simultaneously professional and genuine. He had only been three days in America. It was a combination to which he had not yet grown accustomed. Americans were simply frequently in a very good mood.

`Nice talking to you,' she said, with a concluding smile.

Chuckie smiled back at her. `Definitely,' he replied.

Back upstairs, his head on his pillow, his elbow on his gut and his genitals in his fist, Chuckie decided that he liked Americans.

When he woke, he felt differently. Jet-lagged, lonely, Chuckie struggled around his hotel room, washing, shaving, dressing. His mood was inexplicably black. In the bathroom he raged impotently at all the mirrors in which he could see his extra, his unnecessary flesh. His body didn't look like it could do much romantic pursuing. He could hear the usual faint accompaniment of American hotel bathrooms. Through each thin wall, through ceiling and floor, he could hear people brushing their teeth. It had been the same in the hotel in NewYork.This was America. People brushed their teeth all the time and the sound of other people brushing their teeth had always driven him crazy.

Mutinous, ugly, Chuckie checked out and found his flight for Kansas City. As he waited in the departure lounge, he knew why he was unhappy. As he came close to finding her, he discovered that he dreaded it. He was supposed to persuade her to return with him. He could think of nothing to persuade her.

On the plane he tried to sleep but the man sitting next to him stirred and twitched in that way that Chuckie was beginning to recognize as the beginning of an American conversation. Chuckie was most unkeen. He grabbed a magazine and scanned its pages silently.

`Hi, there!

Chuckie looked round. They were already at twenty thousand feet. The man had had several minutes in which to think of an opening gambit more complex than this.

'Hello'

'You English?' the man asked.

`Not quite'

`Not quite. What does that mean?'

Chuckie stared. The man seemed almost annoyed by his prevarication. He was a massively tanned fellow of sixty or so with one of those abundant, entirely white heads of hair that Chuckie longed to pull. His head didn't look real. Though white, his hair was as thick and strong as any young man's. Why didn't Americans go bald, Chuckie wondered.

'I'm from Belfast!

'Northern Irish.!

'Yeah:

`Not quite British.' The man smiled.

`You got it,' said Chuckie, in American.

There was a lull in their chat and Chuckie returned gladly to his magazine.

`What you doing over here?' the man asked him, obviously rejuvenated by the little pause.

`This and that:

The man laughed, showing his expansive, expensive teeth. With hatred in his heart, Chuckie tried to calculate how many times he would have to brush them every day to get them to gleam so.

`You're doing some business over here, right? That's the kind of answer I always give if I'm cutting some kind of deal.!

`Not really.'

'What do you do?' challenged the man.

`This and that.'

The man whooped with triumph. `I knew it. You're cutting some deal.' He began murmuring to himself, as though remembering his multiplication tables. `San Diego, Kansas City. What could it be?' He looked up at Chuckie again. `You in agribusiness?'

`Not yet,' said Chuckie.

His interlocutor barked with laughter. Chuckie was amazed to find himself such an effortless comic success. (When he had landed at New York, the immigration officials, after giving him some grief, had asked him whether he had any previous convictions. Yeah, Chuckie had replied. That God existed and Distillery would win the European Cup. Though mostly mystified, the men had laughed like drains.)

`When I said not yet, I didn't mean that I was intending to go into agribusiness,' he explained. `I just meant you never know. If you'd asked me if I was gay, I would have said the same. Not yet is the best you can say.'

The man stopped laughing and peered at Chuckie with something disconcertingly like awe. Chuckie's homespun meta physics had always brought the house down in the Wigwam but round here it looked like it would get him published.The man pulled a grave friendly face and thrust his hand towards Chuckle. john Evans; he said.

'Chuckie Lurgan,' replied Chuckie Lurgan.

The men shook hands.

There was the tiny hint of another gap in the dialogue and Chuckie tried to return to his magazine. He was nowhere near quick enough.

`I do a bit of this and that myself,' said Evans. `In fact, I do a lot of this and that.' He took Chuckle's magazine from his lap and flicked through until he reached the page he wanted. He set it back on Chuckle's knees. `That's me.' He pointed at the glossy pages.

Chuckie looked and saw a double-page article about John Evans, the San Diego tycoon. He was the man in the photographs, sure enough. The article called him a billionaire. If Chuckie had not been trying to think about Max, he would have been impressed. 'It says here you've got a private jet,' he said, making conversation.

`That's right!

'Is it broken at the minute?'

'What?'

'What are you doing on this plane?'

'Oh, right' The man smiled delightedly, as though he'd been asked a question he relished answering, which was indeed the case.'Nah, the jet's fun sometimes but I like to fly regular airlines when I can. It's the only chance I get to meet ordinary folks and annoy them about how rich I am.'

He belted out his big laugh and Chuckie sniggered politely. This American Croesus was beginning to get on his nerves.

`Tell me more about what you call this and that,' said Evans.

Chuckie told him.

After an hour, Evans was frankly drooling. Chuckle's narrative was not producing the effect he had intended. He had hoped that his brief summation of the paucity of his enterprises would make this super-rich American shut up and leave him alone. His attempt failed disastrously. Evans, experienced businessman, brilliant dealer, had never heard anyone downplay the scope of their business concerns. Chuckie's attitude perplexed him crazy. He was desperate to know what stroke Chuckie was trying to pull. He made a few hints about the capital he could inject into fresh ventures. Chuckie didn't even listen. He just complained that Belfast City Council had objected to his idea of setting up a ready-to-wear balaclava franchise in Northern Ireland. It was madness. Northern Ireland's peculiar circumstances created a huge market for such a product, he whinged.

Evans grew frantic. He was used to men trying to wheedle his cash out of him.This eccentric, secretive Irishman was refusing to be interested. He must be on to something huge, Evans concluded. There was something in Kansas he wanted to keep to himself.