Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (42 page)

'Mr Lurgan, we get a lot of advice about places we could capitalize,' said a man in a New York suit.

`I don't give advice,' said Chuckie.

`We're worried about the war there,' said another man in a New York suit.

`There's a ceasefire,' retorted Chuckie.

`It could all start again,' suggested yet another besuited man.

`We're worried about what your guys are doing in Israel,' said the last of the three-pieces.

Chuckle smiled blankly.

'We do a lot of Jewish business in New York. We don't want to irritate anybody there,' the man explained, only partially.

`Well,' Chuckie began, `I know what you mean.'

He stopped. He had no idea what the man meant. He stared at that trim, tanned foursome. It struck him that they might actually believe that the IRA were some kind of Arab terrorist group. He changed tack quickly. `If you think that's a problem, then the best option for you is to invest in this region and thus get some leverage with these ... Muslim guys.'

The man with the Arab theory nodded, as though admitting the justice of this point.

`Also, Belfast is a crucial Western port in a vital geographical area'The men murmured uneasy assent. It took some minutes but Chuckie finally deduced that several had supposed Ireland to be just off the west coast of Africa. He thought hard before he corrected their misapprehension.

An hour later, he had made another eight hundred and seventy thousand dollars. He had persuaded them to give him the money to help buy a factory unit, which Luke had told him they already owned. He would use their money to set up the Stateside utilities companies about which he'd so long dreamt. Irish-American Electricity, the American-Irish Water Company, US Hibernian Gas.

In a week he had bamboozled, bluffed, duped and outwitted a selection of America's finest and hardest-headed businessmen. It had barely troubled him. They knew nothing about his country and sometimes believed wildly inaccurate stories. One man, perhaps thinking of Iceland, thought there were no trees; another firmly believed the island of Ireland to be situated in the Pacific. Chuckie found that their ignorance was not the product of stupidity. These men simply didn't want to know much about the rest of the world. News that was not American was not news. Such had always been the case but now that there had been a couple of ceasefires, Northern Ireland was much televised. It was by no means a lead story but it was on television all the same. Americans found themselves forced to have an opinion. There was a gap, a void between what they actually knew and the opinions they felt they must now hold. Chuckie Lurgan aspired to fill that void.

He was not alone. Jimmy Eve and a coterie of Just Us celebs had flown to Washington immediately after the announcement of the first ceasefire. Despite having less than per cent of the Northern Irish vote, they ambled into the White House and hung out with the President. Chuckle briefly considered telephoning the leader of the low-polling British Liberal Democrats and charging him ten grand for the idea that if he wore a C&A suit and shot a few policemen he'd get an audience with world leaders.

The Americans loved Eve. Several matronly Irish-American women insisted on describing him as hunky, despite his patent lack of physical beauty. The New York Times compared him with Clint Eastwood. He had a patchy beard which grew up to his eyes and a mouth like a guppy. There was no way around it, the man looked like a weasel. Chuckie was mystified.

Eve did television shows coast-to-coast. His hairy, carnivorous smile was everywhere. He talked the language ofAmerican civil rights to interviewers too ill-educated in their own country's history to notice. He talked about South Africa. He talked about equal rights and democracy. He talked about Eastern Europe. He talked about inclusiveness and parity of esteem. One anchorman asked him when he thought Irish Catholics would be given the vote. Eve fought hard with his temptation to say something like, Never too soon, or, I hope I see it in my lifetime. But he also resisted the temptation to correct the anchorman's profitable error. He just ignored the question and started talking about what a bunch of fuckers the British were.

However, the finest moment came when he was interviewed simultaneously with a stray Ulster Unionist and Michael Makepeace, the leader of the Ulster Fraternity Party, a collection of vegetarian middle-class doctors who did much lamenting and quite a lot of unsatirical body repairing. For twenty minutes, it was the usual back and forward. Chuckie, watching TV in a Minneapolis hotel room, had seen this hundreds of times but America obviously loved the way these guys just badmouthed each other so happily. It was like the trailers for a boxing match or like the fake badinage of professional wrestlers. It was fun.

But then something extraordinary happened. The Ulster Unionist had persisted in claiming that the ceasefire was no ceasefire until the IRA gave up their weapons. The man obviously considered it his best, if not only, point. Finally, the anchorman put that very question to Eve. He asked him if there was any chance of IRA arms being handed in. Eve did his usual waffle about democracy and military occupation and Chuckie was about to change the channel when the anchorman turned to the Fraternity leader with his bright but sincere American smile. `And what about you, Mr Makepeace, will you, too, give up your weapons?'

Chuckie lay back on his bed and howled like a hound. His delight was complete. By the time he regained an upright position, Makepeace's mouth was still moving but sounds still failed to issue. Chuckie heard an off-mike titter, probably from Eve, and he would always the leader of the lentil-munching, fete-giving Fraternity Party looked almost pleased that anyone would think he looked butch enough to have a few Kalashnikovs stashed.

As the days passed and Eve received the vital presidential imprimatur, his progress took on some of the glamour and resonance of a rock tour. Chuckie saw him stand outside a Boston public building with the poet Shague Ghinthoss by his side. Both men were shaking hands, their faces turned towards the bank of cameras, their smiles wide. Journalists shouted questions but Eve and Ghinthoss ignored them until one man shouted that he was from Swedish television. At those enchanted words, both men abruptly assumed a tender, sensitive expression, their four eyes pleading and mild. Then they glanced at each other, each man calculating the unlikelihood of the other being the first to a Nobel.

In NewYork, one dissenting protester, who carried a placard reading Stop the Punishment Beatings, was arrested and punitively beaten up by a trio of zealous New York cops. Several of the Just Us entourage could be seen casting admiring glances at the NYPD technique. Just Us were triumphant. America didn't know Protestants even existed. Many thought that Great Britain had actually invaded in 1969. A passing English historian was interviewed and mentioned that the Army had been drafted in to protect Catholics.

`Well, you would say that,' the interviewer replied, an indomitable, investigative smile on his brave and trustworthy American face.

It wasn't so much that real history was rewritten. Real history was deleted. Its place was taken by wild and improbable fictions. Ireland was the land of story and just Us campaigners had always been the best storytellers. They told the world a simple story. They edited or failed to mention all the complicated, pluralistic, true details. It had always been thus and the world had always loved it.

Theirs was a narrative in which the innocent, godly CATHOLIC Irish were subdued and oppressed by the vicious English and their Protestant plantation spawn. Italian socialists, French Maoists, German Communists and the entire population of Islington swallowed it all whole, but every now and then inconvenient voices were raised. Why do you guys shoot young boys for stealing cars? How socialist is that? And that business of blowing up shops, bars, cafes, it doesn't feel enormously left wing, does it? How come you have to kill so many Irish to liberate the Irish? Although these were infrequent objections, they still nonplussed the boys and girls from just Us who had no logical riposte.

This simply didn't happen in America. The United States presented a trusting, sentimental face for Jimmy Eve. He puckered up whenever possible. True, in America he diplomatically downplayed just Us's supposedly socialist credentials. But he hardly had to. The Americans were not going to draw any parallels between just Us and the spick Commie rebels in South and Central America. Just Us was full of white guys.That was enough.

All this had a superbity that Chuckie could not match but he incorporated Eve's Broadway-hit status into his own spiel. He began to develop two separate personae for dealing with these businessmen. If required, he could be the ultimate croppy boy within seconds, lamenting the filthy English invasion of his land. He became the ultimate Catholic, he grew misty-eyed when talking of the Kennedy clan and blessed himself, inaccurately, before signing any documents. He even began to affect a spurious command of spoken Irish until one sharpeared Star Trek fan pointed out that the noises coming from his mouth sounded suspiciously like the Klingon for `Phasers locked and ready, Captain'.

Alternatively, he sometimes found it useful to assume an entirely English manner. East Coast WASPs responded to this particularly well. They had a vague belief in some vestigial Northern Irish aristocracy. Chuckie knew he sounded more like Perry Mason than James Mason but they seemed to go for it.

There had been one frightening occasion upon which Chuckie had made an initial miscalculation. He had sailed into an important meeting in Boston doing his full Mick routine. `Top o' the mornin' to yous all, now. What say we get all our aul jawin' done and then we get down to Maloney's for a few o' the fine stuff?'

He was just about to start complaining about the health of his pigs when he noticed the frowns on the faces of the four men around the table. Then he noticed their striped ties and highly polished brown brogues, the pictures of old college rowing eights on the walls. It looked like there were fancy old WASPs in Boston too. His transition was immediate and effortless. He smiled thinly at the only man he'd met previously.

`I do apologize, old boy. I've just been listening to some unspeakable bog-wog called Eve on the motor car wireless. They're always banging on about something or other these days. Drives me barmy, I must confess:

He sounded dreadful. His phoney David Niven accent was mangled by his customary broad Ulster tones. He thought the men might punch him for taking the piss but, as always, it worked a treat. They gave him some more money.

He saw many parallels between the bullshit that Eve was selling and his own success. Indeed, he began to watch each television appearance that the Irish ideologue made, and as Eve's lies and fantasies became more abhorrent and ever more stepped up the wildness of his own approaches. Chuckie Lurgan and Jimmy Eve sold Ireland long and short, begetting their monstrous perjuries in tandem, united in an hallucinatory jubilee of simulated Irishness. Chuckie even began to feel something like a grudging affection for his hirsute counterpart.

This uneasy twinship came to a riotous head near the end of Chuckie's second week away from Max. In Washington to tell some lies about a textile company he wanted to start in Dungiven, Chuckie had become so famous that he gave a newspaper interview. In this piece, he had mentioned that he was a Protestant. Jimmy Eve was in town for a few nights, giving head to any Irish-American congressmen who came his way. Spookily, it was the first time that he and Chuckie had coincided geographically. Eve was scheduled for another multitude of television-appearances. The producer of one network show happened to see the little piece about Chuckie and decided, uncharacteristically, that it might be a good idea if, just for once, Eve was confronted by an alternative view. He called Chuckle's hotel and booked him to appear the next night.

Chuckie had been missing Max for near a fortnight. He felt himself growing rather grumpy. He called her every couple of hours but it didn't begin to be anything like enough. He grew mutinous and peevish.

Additionally, on the night before his first television appearance, Chuckie failed to sleep. He was remarkably agitated. All his life, this fame business had been magical to him and now he was about to achieve some small renown on his own part. And, whatever he believed about Jimmy Eve, he could not deny that the man was becoming increasingly famous. Chuckie, veteran Protestant Pope-chum, was familiar with this sensation of reluctant awe.

By the time Chuckie arrived at the television studios the next evening, he was so nervous he had practically stopped breathing. While in Make-up, the producers came to see him and were concerned about his evident anxiety. He could see that they were considering cutting him from the show. He was ashamed. He excused himself and sat unhappily in a cubicle in a nearby restroom.

After a few lonely minutes, he heard footsteps. A cubicle door was opened close by. Chuckie waited, scarcely breathing. The business of defecation had always embarrassed him and he decided to wait until this invisible man had finished his task before he himself could leave.

He grew conscious of strange noises: scrapings and small impacts. Suddenly uneasy, he looked up and saw a man staring down at him, obviously perched on the cistern of the nextdoor cubicle.

`How ya doing?' the man asked, airily.

`Fine. Thanks'

'You on the show tonight?'

Chuckie nodded.

`Got the jitters?'

Chuckie nodded again.

`Hold up.!

The man disappeared from his position. There were more scuffles and then Chuckie heard a polite knock on his cubicle door. Bewildered, he opened it. The man pushed into the cubicle beside him, locking the door behind him. He took a mirror and some small papers from his pocket. He set them on top of the cistern behind Chuckie's head.

'Outs the way, man. I got just the thing for confidence problems.'

Happily, he proceeded to cut four fat lines of cocaine on the little mirror. He pushed it in Chuckie's direction.'Go for it, big guy. If you get this in you, you'll be a star.You'll get a fucking Oscar.'