Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (49 page)

'Sure thing,' he said.'No problem.'

The architect gulped in surprise. He was disappointed that he had not scribbled a rather higher figure if this fat yob had found his original estimate so unexceptionable. He started scribbling again.

Chuckie had first known the tempestuous extent of his own mother love when Peggy had been exposed to all the ordnance down at Fountain Street. That was when he learnt that the frail and the harmable had to be loved. But it had only been when he'd parked his fat gut in the midst of last night's riot that he had guessed she might feel the same uncontrollable thing for him.

'Of course,' the architect elaborated, 'there might by contingency and add-on costs of all kinds. It might come to something He pushed the paper with his revised total at Chuckie.

'Uh-huh,' mumbled the fat man.

He had realized that he and his mother were both so small, so breakable, that each merited more love than they knew. He didn't want to spend too much time thinking about it, but he knew that Peggy and Caroline could do whatever they liked to each other and there was simply no room for him to mind.

'And if there are any planning problems then it will be likely to come to something close to ..'

The architect thrust another scribbled number in front of Chuckle's face. Chuckle woke up. He grabbed the pad from the man. He scored out all the numbers, wrote a figure almost half of the man's first estimate and spoke clearly for the first time. 'If you can't do it for this, I'll get some other yuppie fucker to do it instead.'

Then Chuckie Lurgan walked out of the building, thoughtfully.

That night in Max's flat, he watched television absently, one hand gripping a can of beer, the other rhythmically stroking Max's astonishingly occupied belly. Aoirghe had gone home to Fermanagh after some big fight with Jake Jackson and they had the flat to themselves. They had been watching news programmes for hours. The ceasefires were still playing to big houses on Northern Irish television. The situation had developed in eccentric fashion. The IRA had said they had given up violence but were going to keep their guns (just in case?), the UVF had said they were sorry for killing all those people, the US State Department had said that the ceasefire was all its own work (a claim disputed by several messianic Irish politicians), the Irish and British governments were having Exploratory Talks about the possibility of having some other Exploratory Talks, and around two hundred teenagers had been beaten with baseball bats and car tools by a selection of extremely unofficial policemen in balaclavas and leather jackets.

Some prisoners had been released early. Chuckie had been worried about this. These were men who had killed people, sometimes quite a lot of people. It was how they expressed their aspirations. Two or three hundred assassins were being released back into the melting pot of his Belfast. These were men who did not easily deal with the frustrations of normal life. And with the confessed inadequacies of his driving skills, Chuckie didn't want to go cutting up any of these guys in traffic.

Shague Ghinthoss, the poet, had been awarded a knighthood and the just Us party's very first Hero of the Revolution Award. This unfortunate conjunction had caused him some unease until a fresh-faced young hack had asked him whether he was going to accept both awards as some kind of pan-ecumenical gesture, an attempt to build bridges between the divided traditions. Ghinthoss's eyes had gleamed suddenly. `Yes,' he had said. `Funny you should mention it.'

A television special had been broadcast showing Ghinthoss, looking disturbingly like Santa Claus, receiving both awards. Picking up his knighthood, he had spoken of the cloudiness of nationality, the New Europe and the breaking up of borders. He had smiled twinklingly when someone asked him about the suddenly vacant poet laureate job. At the Hero of the Revolution Dinner and Disco, the very next day, he had told the rapturous crowd how he had always been an Irishman and how he would always be one. No one noticed any contradiction. A Shague Ghinthoss cookery book and a new collection of his Rejected Poems (1965-1995) was already in the pipeline. Chuckie damned himself for not having thought of that first.

As Chuckie watched television, something simmered in his non-stick mind. When he had been in America he had grown sentimental about his home town. America had seemed so vivid, so jumbled and chaotic. He had pondered affectionately on how Belfast had stayed gloriously the same throughout the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties. It had been unfortunately Protestant but thrillingly provincial. Political violence had somewhat disrupted the sleepy obscurity of the place but Chuckie felt that there was something in the heart of his birthplace that was profoundly everyday.

And now, as he watched television beside his wife-to-be (and son-to-be), Chuckie listened to a variety of people tell him that the Troubles were at an end. Peace had come at last. The war was over.

Then Chuckie lit on what he had been clumsily attempting to think:

What war? No one he knew had been fighting.

Initially, it seemed ludicrous to him. It was such an obvious thought. It was too simple to have any real significance. But, as the belly-rubbing minutes passed, the enormity of this notion impacted upon him. He babbled confusedly to Max about what was on his mind. She ignored him mostly. (Max had always believed Northern Irish violence to be distinctly overrated. The Irish were a bit precious about their trauma. They should have tried Manhattan on any Saturday night.)

That day, Chuckie had gone back into the office for the first time in a fortnight. Luke Findlater was glad, if disturbed, to see him. They had made a lot of money in those two weeks, and ever since Chuckie's American success, Northern Irish television companies had been looking for him desperately. His debate with Jimmy Eve had not gone unnoticed. Several cisatlantic broadcasters were queuing up to stage a local rematch.

Chuckie had ignored these blandishments and had told Luke that he was not interested. But, as he listened to Max's television telling him things he didn't believe, Chuckie changed his mind. He called Luke and told him to say yes to all the interviews he had declined. Luke was grumpy and mystified but, as always, Chuckie prevailed.

`Hey, Chuck,' said Max, `what are you up to?'

Chuckie kissed his way down her stomach.

`Mnrth thaghth orfthf njr thruhhth,' he replied.

Chuckie spent most of the next day borrowing money. With all his new skills and massive reputation, he found this an easier task even than hitherto. John Evans alone promised him fifteen million dollars. He ended the day with pledges of more than twenty-five million pounds from various people and organizations. Chuckie was happy.

He and Luke grabbed a pizza and dined in the office, talking tactics. Well, Chuckie dined and talked. Luke was so bewildered by the fund-raising he had witnessed that day that he was barely capable of speech and unable to eat solid food. Chuckie explained that he intended to use his television appearance that very night to launch a new industrial initiative. Jimmy Eve was scheduled to appear with him, but after his last experience Chuckie was confident of settling his revolutionary hash within the first few minutes. He could then devote the rest of the programme to announcing his new project. Massive reinvestment in the city of his birth, nothing less than the industrial rebuilding of Belfast. He told Luke that the riot had proved to him that Belfast people had amounts of energy they didn't know what to do with. Chuckie knew what to do with their energy.

It had struck Chuckie that the political conflict that had occurred during his entire adult life had been a lie. It was a war between an army that said it didn't want to fight and a group of revolutionaries who claimed that they didn't want to fight either. It had nothing to do with imperialism, self-determination or revolutionary socialism. And these armies didn't often kill each other. Usually they just killed whoever of the citizenry happened to be handy.

Chuckie was too stupid to think he understood a great deal of anything but he deeply understood the majority politics of Northern Ireland. The majority politics in Northern Ireland were not political. The citizens were too shy to give the grand name of principle to any of the things that they believed, but there were still things that they believed. And that peaceful majority spent its life keeping down jobs or failing to keep down jobs, buying washing-machines and houses and vacuumcleaners and holidays and carry-cots. The way they were doing these things had changed the face of the city in the last ten years. Protestant areas were Protestant no longer. Working-class areas had become bourgeois. The city was moving outwards like a spreading stain. That was what cities did and that was what Chuckie, correctly or incorrectly, understood as politics.

He was confident that his pragmatic announcement of massive job-creation projects would silence Jimmy Eve's feeble ideological spoutings. Ideology was a thick enough blanket but it wasn't as warm or sustaining as employment. Eve could arrange for the odd bomb here and there but he, Chuckie Lurgan, would bring back work to the city single-handed. He would be a hero.

He called his mother before he went to the television studio. She asked him what he would wear. His blue suit and his new Doc Martens, he told her. She told him that the outfit would look nice. Chuckie was faintly disturbed. Only a month before, she would have disapproved strongly of the DMs. Chuckie wondered if sexual deviance liberated everyone's sartorial tastes.

`I met a woman in the supermarket who wanted your autograph,' said Peggy. `She's the first woman from Sandy Row who's spoken to me in a fortnight. You're very famous, son.'

The faint Lurganish awe in his mother's voice pleased him.

`Caroline sends her love and says good luck,' Peggy continued.

Chuckie swallowed nervously. `Ah, thank her for me.'

'OK.'

`I have to go now,' he said. `I don't want to be late.'

`Hey, Chuckie,' said his mother.

`What?'

`You love me,' said Peggy, confidently.

`Sure thing,' said Chuckie.'No problem.'

The interview had been going for about fifteen minutes before Chuckie sensed that it wasn't going the way he had intended. When he arrived at the studio, he had been bundled into a separate waiting room, obviously at the request of Jimmy Eve and the Just Us crew. He was to be the third guest and, as he watched the show on the monitor in his dressing room, Chuckie was delighted to see that there was a small group of Americans in the audience wearing MFG (Mad Fat Guy) Tshirts. They had flown all the way from the States on the offchance of meeting him.

The first guest was an academic who had been wheeled on to give his views on the current ceasefire and to explain his theory that the mysterious underground OTG movement was the missing dynamic in Irish politics. It was this man's profound belief that OTG were the initials of the Omagh Trotskyist Group.

Eve was the second guest. Chuckie was pleased to see that he was nervous and trembling unmistakably.

Jimmy Eve had been trembling constantly for nearly three weeks now. Ever since his televised meeting with Chuckie Lurgan, it had all been going wrong for the Ardoyne ideologue. At Just Us meetings, his unease was evident and remarked upon. It was particularly bad, however, when he had to make public appearances. It made him angry and unappeasable. He had even seen his doctor about it. The situation had not been improved by his six-year-old daughter who, having asked him what a unitedireland was, had walked away only half-way through his explanation. The ostensible flush on his face was bad enough but it had brought a return of his old complaint, the inward tremble, the private shame.

Jimmy Eve had known for some years that almost everything he said was untrue. Mostly, that had not mattered. After a decade of Margaret Thatcher, he had learnt to believe his own lies in some careless, auto-pilot way. The consciousness of deceit was one he found easy to repress, to tuck away somewhere dark in his unthinking mind. But the sensation of being a liar was ever present again. It was disturbing his equilibrium and ruining his peace. He had even begun to wonder guiltily whether other prominent members of Just Us were conscious of what liars they were. His own lies were talismanic, mathematical. When he said that he only wanted dialogue he meant that he only wanted total victory. When he told reporters that he respected the rights of the Protestant community he meant that soon they wouldn't have any. When he called publicly for international monitoring of human rights in Northern Ireland, he certainly didn't intend them to poke their noses into any of the naughtinesses of his chums in the IRA.

The only lie he could still believe was the most important one, thank goodness. Whenever he said that everything was all the fault of the British Government, he still deeply believed that. That lie still held good.

Enough of Eve's uncertainty was visible to make Chuckie confident as he watched his dressing-room monitor. But fifteen minutes into his appearance it had all gone wrong. Chuckie had stepped onto the set to applause and cheers from his MFG fans, and as he had approached Jimmy Eve to shake hands, the man had stepped back as though to ward off a blow. Chuckie had shaken hands with the man with the Omagh Trotskyist theory and had launched happily into the announcement of his investment plans.

But it had been a damp squib, an irrelevance. The audience had applauded politely but Eve had wiped the floor with him. He had criticized the right-wing private enterprise and exploitation of plutocrats like Chuckie. He had accused Protestant businessmen of not building cross-border links towards an all-Ireland business community. He had interrupted Chuckie several times, confidently telling him that he didn't know what he was talking about, derisively doubting the totals that Chuckie said he had already raised. After ten minutes the man's tremor was stilled and Chuckie felt himself falling apart. He could see his T-shirted American fans whispering anxiously amongst themselves. He could not understand why he was not performing as well as he had on his last TV appearance.