Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (40 page)

'If anybody finds out, they'll think you're having sex with him.'

I frowned. `What can I do?'

Slat smiled sadly. `There's nothing you can do.'

`What about social workers or something?'

`Social workers can't take a child-care referral from some guy on a building site, Jake. It's got to be the cops or a GP or something.'

`Brilliant. Somebody has to do something. When I was a kid, I got Matt and Mamie. There's got to be something like that for Roche.'

`Things are different now, Jake. Social services are an arm of the state. They don't mediate between state and individual any more. It's the new Britain or the new Northern Ireland or whatever you want to call it. What do you think I do all day? It's why I do the work I do.'

`Should I let him move in, then?'

'No!' Slat almost shouted. Some diners looked round at us and ►ny revolutionary waitress sneered.

'No,' he repeated. `Tell him he has to go back home. He should tell his teachers about his troubles. They can put the wheels in motion.'

`His teachers? Jesus, Slat, this kid probably can't remember what street his school's on.'

'That's the way it is.'

And that was fair enough. That was the way it was.

I tried to spend the rest of the day shopping but found that I quickly ran out of things I wanted to buy. This depressed me somehow. After lunchtime, something Protestant in me made me go down to Chuckle's office and start some form of work. Luke Findlater was there and he did his best to explain the main areas in which he and Chuckle were doing business. He was rational and clear, but after twenty minutes I still had to lie down and breathe deeply.

Chuckle's ventures were almost all wildly improbable. It was as though all his corrosive yob fantasies had been given grotesque flesh. To my horror, I discovered the rejected proposal for the chain of ready-to-wear balaclava shops. I was told how much money they had made from the leprechaun walking-stick scam. I saw how much money the various government investment agencies had granted Chuckle for no reason I could readily identify.

Additionally, Chuckle's rapid accruing of wealth had not been without its amorally democratic grandeur. He had ripped off and duped Protestants and Catholics with egalitarian zeal. He was a pan-cultural exploiter. I discovered that he had bought a controlling share in a regalia company that supplied the Orange lodges and Loyalist bands that marched so Protestantly on the Twelfth of July. He had just negotiated a contract for this company to supply the Vatican with various regalia and uniforms. If anyone heard about this, Chuckie would be hung upside down from some street-lamp in East Belfast.

After an hour or so, I'd got a pretty fair picture of the state of his business machine. Soon, I grew bored. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. Luke, thankfully, was kind.

`I'll get a desk brought in and get you a phone and stuff.'

The telephone rang. He answered. He listened, then cupped his hand over the receiver. `You speak French?'

`Sure,' I bluffed.

`Here,' he passed the phone to me, `we've opened a chain of Irish restaurants in Paris.You can deal with this. Tell them you're the executive director or something like that.'

It took fifteen French was but a halting thing - but I worked out that jean-Paul or whoever was complaining that he had been told to put Irish lasagne on his menu and he didn't know how to make such a thing. They were opening the next day and could I please tell him the recipe.

It was a dreadful predicament. I racked my brains but I had run short on French nouns in general and French nouns describing foodstuffs in particular. The only one I could remember was pommes de terre. At least it was vaguely Irish - amazingly Irish, in fact. I gave it to jean-Paul or whatever his name was.

He was mystified. `Pasta aussi?' he enquired.

`No. Fuck it, point de pasta'

`Merde! Vraiment. Pommes de terre?'

`Absolument.'

'OK.'

I hung up. It wasn't my problem. It wasn't my idea.

I spent the rest of the day there. I didn't do any real work. I just told young Luke all about how bad my life was. It took hours. Then we talked about the ceasefire. He seemed to think that there was big money to be made if it panned out. I almost dreaded the thought.

He went home early. I hung around the office for another couple of hours. As I sat there, looking at the house that Chuckle had built, I felt real envy. He was getting everything I'd ever wanted. The great woman, the great business and now a baby.

It was my big secret. I was hilariously broody. I desperately wanted to procreate. It was a need in me that made me sweat in the middle of the night. For months I had been assailed by dreams of ready-made sons and daughters arriving on my doorstep (importantly motherless), five years old and already reading Pushkin. Roche would never constitute an adequate substitute for the beribboned marvels of my fantasies.

It was one of the reasons that I was pissed at Sarah. I couldn't live with the thought of her killing the kid.

I had one other big secret of the day. It was why I was lurking pointlessly in Chuckle's empty offices. It was why I didn't want to go home. I couldn't face telling Roche that he had to leave.

Septic called me there. He chatted tensely about nothing for a while and then tried to persuade me to go to Aoirghe's big Amnesty thing. He said if I helped him out he stood a chance. I told him I wasn't going to grease any wheels for him. I didn't lose the bap. I was actually pleased. It sounded like Septic had been invited round to Aoirghe's for the unsexy task of leaning on me. It nearly cheered me up. Septic was still my friend but it had been some years since I'd liked him.

When I could bear Chuckle's office no longer, I drove around the city for forty minutes. When I got bored with that I called in at Eureka Street and said a brief and prim hello to Chuckle's mother. Caroline Causton was there and although Peggy blushed at my arrival, the heat seemed to have gone out of our exchanges. As I sat there for half an hour, I sensed that something was going on. When I left, I had the crazy sensation that they might be sleeping together. I even shook my head to rid myself of that impossible thought. I drove around the town at slightly illegal speeds for another twenty minutes. Then I called in at Mary's bar. She wasn't there and a friend of hers who didn't like me bought me a beer. I left. I drove around some more. I went home.

Roche was watching the television that Chuckie had given me. To my surprise, he was avidly absorbed in a news special about the IRA ceasefire. We watched Mickey Moses, the Just Us spokesman, thank the brave volunteers for their efforts in the long struggle. Mickey had the kind of twitch in one of his eyes that made me feel that he was missing the sniper's scope already.

`You like to keep up with current affairs, then?'

`There's money to be made out of this,' said Roche.

`You'll go far.'

I went into the kitchen to make some coffee and feed the cat, whose dish was already piled high. Roche had cleaned up my kitchen. Many months of my household habits had dulled its sheen somewhat but now it glittered as it had when Sarah had lived there. It must have taken him ages. I felt like weeping.

`I cleaned up a bit.'

I turned round. The boy was standing near the door. There was something crucially different about him.

`Fuck,' I said. `You're all clean.'

`You're big with the personal comments, aren't you?'

`Sorry.'

Horribly, Roche seemed amazed that I had apologized. I could have sworn that his eyes watered. His voice quivered uncharacteristically. `Aye, well, don't do it again.'

I threw a plastic bag towards him. `Here, I got you some stuff. I wasn't sure about your size and they didn't seem to stock runt so it might be touch and go.'

He snickered, happier with the abuse than the apology.'You got some calls. Some woman with a funny name and an old dear called Mamie. I had a big chat with her. She said you had no folks. And there was another one I can't remember.'

I was just about to complain that he hadn't written it down when I remembered Roche's textual sensitivities. I called Mamie.

Mamie had, indeed, had a long chat with Roche. She quizzed me about what was going on. I tried to minimize my own piety but she couldn't disguise the delight in her voice. I could even hear it in the pauses when she didn't speak. She thought I'd joined their club. She thought I was repeating their benevolent pattern. For the first time since I'd met her, she told me she was proud of me.

I tried telling her that it wasn't that simple. I wanted to tell her that my largesse was temporary, that I was about to tell the kid he had to leave but I couldn't muster the courage. So I just listened to ten minutes' worth of what a lovely man I'd become. Then she told me that this thing they wanted to give me was a letter from Sarah. She'd given it to them before she left. She'd told them to give it to me when they thought I was ready. Apparently, that auspicious time had arrived.

I got her off the phone quickly after that. I found, to my annoyance, that my heart was racing and I felt nauseous. A letter from Sarah. I was furious. I didn't want any explanations from her. For the first time, I felt something other than supine longing for the woman who had left me.

This new preoccupation somehow made me feel better about telling Roche he had to go. My anger would be useful in being butch with the kid. This was a form of emotional diversion with which my cat was familiar. It was time I tried it on the higher species.

It was made more difficult by Roche suddenly walking into the kitchen, modelling his new clothes for me. In this neatly pressed, brand new costume, he looked almost ridiculous. He looked like any other kid. Only the filthy, ripped trainers on his feet gave any hint of the true urchin.

`Very nice,' I said.

He smiled almost boyishly. `Are you sure they don't make me look spazzy?'

`Spazzy?

`You know ... geeky.'

I lit my last-ever cigarette. `Listen, kid. I spoke to a friend of mine today about you.'

Roche's smile shut itself down as tracelessly as a Belfast shipyard. `You want me to leave,' he stated.

`It's not like that,' I pleaded.

`Forget it. I was leaving anyway.' He stalked off to his bedroom.

I tried to follow him. `Listen, you don't have to go straight away. Stay a few days.'

He shut the door behind him. He did not reply. I knocked for a few minutes but he wouldn't talk to me or open the door. I decided to have a shower and give him time to cool down.

As I stood under the imperfectly warm water, I heard the unmistakable bang of my front door. I had known perfectly well that Roche would leg it while I was in the shower. That was why I had had the shower in the first place. No cowardly ruse was beneath me. Guiltily, I soaped my testicles.

The rest of that evening was grim. Roche had left behind all the stuff I'd bought for him. He had, naturally, stolen my new ex-Eureka Street television and VCR but he had rejected my gifts. I was not surprised. It was his style. I knew he'd nick them. I hoped it might make me feel a little better. It did.

Nevertheless, I felt so bad about the kid I even forgot to think about Sarah's letter, my new prosperity or how much I disliked Aoirghe, a subject upon which I had dwelt of late. My cat wisely avoided me. I listened to the radio for hours. Roche had pinched the major electricals, after all. It was all news on the radio that night, what with the ceasefire and all. I didn't bother switching it off. In the previous twenty-four hours, there had been five fatal shootings and seventeen kneecappings. The IRA had cleared its backlog of murders and punishment shootings while it still could. How charming of them. How confidence-inspiring.

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.