Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (5 page)

The Pope was a windswept dot on a raised altar in the distance. Chuckie was disappointed. But a rumour had circulated that the Holy Pole intended to have one of his favoured walkabouts on the periphery of the enormous throng. Just before the end of the service, Chuckie pushed himself right through to the front, just on the off-chance.

Chuckie's gamble paid off gloriously. The Pope did, indeed, amble briefly along the crush barriers nearest the altar. He touched hands and gave blessings. The people around Chuckie went wild with delight and, as the Pontiff passed by where he was standing, Chuckie threw out his hands amongst the forest of stretching limbs and brushed the Pope's own fingers.

When the Holy Man had gone, the people around Chuckie crowed and bubbled with excitement. He had never seen faces so edified, so glazed with glee. Their lives had been touched with some piety, some great sacredness they craved. But Chuckie's pleasure was more substantial. His hand buzzed with surplus blood, it felt suffused, electrified by the touch of fame, the touch of serious global celebrity.

A shabby photographer, who'd been snapping crazily, touted his wares to the crowd, telling them that he'd got shots which featured themselves and the Pope simultaneously. Chuckie despised the gullibility of the others but ordered a couple his own behalf anyway.

Two weeks later, a package arrived with his photographs. One was meaningless, a blur of arms and a white cassock out of focus; the other, however, was perfect. The blur of arms was fainter, less chaotic, and out of the melee of people, two figures were clear.The Polish Pope faced the lee of the crowd, one arni outstretched. In the midst of that crowd, Chuckie stood five feet distant from the Pontiff, his right arm stretched towards the Pope, his fingers six inches from the Pope's own.

It was a big moment for Chuckie in a number of complicated ways. He felt he had entered the annals of his ancestors' fameseeking activities with some style. But also, swollen with the joy and pride of this famous encounter, Chuckie was forced to take the clement, ecumenical step of having the photograph framed and mounted on the sitting-room wall of his most Protestant domicile.

And from this a moderation was born in Chuckie. He was still only seventeen, and when some of his coarser faithmates heard of what he had placed on his wall, they judged him still young enough to take the meat of their schoolboy beatings. And amidst the billings and bleatings and bleedings, Chuckie, who only defended the Man because he was famous, began to see an absurdity in this hatred, in this fear. Could it matter that the Pope was a Taig if the Pope was in the papers?

And in the next few years, this new moderation led to a change in the people Chuckie knew. He met Slat Sloane, Jake Jackson and a series of other Roman Catholics. He spent time with them, ate in their houses, met their parents and, crucially, saw the pictures on their walls. It him to find, as he developed this extensive Catholic acquaintance, that everybody's parents had been in Knock when the Pope came to Ireland and that everybody had the same kind of photograph on the walls from that Pope on the periphery and some family member close to him amongst the scrum of devout others.

For the first couple of years Chuckie had failed to bring any of his Catholic friends back to his home, partly because he was unsure of the reaction of his Methodist had never discussed ecumenicalism, so he couldn't be sure where she partly because he was wary of bringing friendly Catholics to a street so firmly set in the red, white and blue epicentre of the Protestant Loyalist belt of the city.

However, he also had to admit, it was because he didn't want them to see his Pope photograph. With their experience of Pope photographs, he knew they would fail to be impressed. Chuckie decided that something would have to be done. He had an idea. He took the frame from the wall, the photograph from the frame and brought the picture to Dex, an alcoholic one-time commercial artist who lived on Cairo Street. Dex had been dubbed Dex on account of his remarkable facility for painting two-handed. The guy was a spray-paint genius who never boasted that he had once painted for a national CocaCola advertisement. Chuckie promised him two bottles of Bell's for good work and absolute discretion. Then he told him what he wanted.

Two days later Chuckie retrieved his photograph, refrained it and put it back on the wall. His Cairo Street friend had carefully painted over all the human figures apart from Chuckie and the Pope. What was left was the Pope and Chuckie, arms stretched towards each other, in some murky brown dreamscape.

After only an hour, Chuckie had taken down the photograph and returned to Cairo Street. He slapped the second of his bottles out of the painter's hand and set him back to work.The picture was now patently unrealistic. It needed a landscape.

Another two days passed. Chuckie had already promised Slat and Jake that they could soon come and visit down at chez Lurgan. He was so anxious, he nearly lost some weight.

The second time he picked up his photograph, he was happier. Dex had painted some highly realistic trees and hedges, some good green grass, an unlikely sky and even a garden looked like Chuckie and the Pope were hanging out in some pleasant garden or hotel grounds. Chuckie put it on his wall, called Jake and told him to come round later that afternoon.

But the hour he waited was fatal and when Jake found his Catholic way to Chuckle's Protestant door, Chuckie lay on the floor for twenty minutes ignoring his friend's increasingly irritated knocking. The exterior scene of him and the Pope wasn't special enough. It looked too much like a chance meeting, a casual and unwelcome acquaintance. He went back to Cairo Street.

Dex's liver was suffering as Chuckie gave him his fifth and sixth bottle of whisky in a week. Give me an interior, he said. Give me walls and a roof and stuff. Dex looked at him in trepidation. Then I'll be happy, said Chuckie, without conviction.

And he nearly was. Having apologized to the furious Jake, Chuckie was delighted to see the latest of Dex's handiwork. The old saucehound still had it in him. Now the Pope and Chuckie stood in some modest but spacious room, possibly domestic, possibly of some seminary. There were walls, ceiling, chairs, bookshelves, even a bay window, which shed an excessively transfiguring shaft of light close to the Pontiff. Chuckie stuck it on his wall and promised himself that this would be it.

Chuckie invited every Catholic he had ever met to come round to his house on the following Saturday. His mother would be glory complete.

Chuckie woke early that Saturday. He drank sweet tea as he stared at his photograph and flinched as the shame began to rise. Despite the delicacy of Dex's spray technique, the picture had visibly thickened. Chuckle's heart sank as he could only concede that something was still wrong.The posture of the two figures was now too dramatic. In the exterior version the fact that they were standing, arms outstretched towards each other, had not seemed too incongruous. But now, in that calm interior setting, the attitudes were quite absurd. The outstretched arms above the bookcases would get a belly laugh.

It was still a few minutes short of nine o'clock. Chuckie dressed and headed round for Cairo Street.

He found Dex lying on his own front doorstep, his clothes a stained geography of the night before. It was past ten o'clock before he regained the power of speech. Chuckie explained the remaining problem with the photograph and told Dex to sort it out somehow and make it less ridiculous. Chuckie told him he had one hour. He went home without hope.

When Slat, Jake and the others arrived, Chuckie stalled as best he could. He directed them into the narrow kitchen where they smoked, drank tea and lied about drugs and girls for an hour. Septic Ted, who was hung over, kept asking that they should go into the sitting room so that he could he down and fart some. Chuckie, who had often boasted of the superiority of his Pope snap, was finally giving up hope when there was a knock at the front door.

Dex stood on the step, his face hideously pale and sweaty. He held the framed photograph in his hands like a desperate peace offering.

`Put it on the fucking wall and get out of here,' hissed Chuckie.

Humbly, the cowed Dex sidled into the living room. Chuckie returned to the kitchen, marked conversational time for ninety-five seconds and then heard the retreating Dex close the front door. Young Lurgan suggested that everyone adjourned to the sitting room.

His friends filed out and filed into the front room. Chuckie entered that room at the tail of the procession and already he could hear murmured exclamations of surprise and edification:

God, who'd have thought it?

They're all at it.

All dipsos.

Fucking typical.

From across the room, Chuckie tried to press a modest smile on his features. He could make out the photograph between the heads of his friends and could see no difference. He could see the two figures in the pictured room, arms out to each other. He shuffled towards the picture promising cruel revenge, though conceding that he hadn't given llex enough time. Until, two feet from the famous photograph, he saw that llex had really fixed it, that he had rendered the absurd postures unremarkable, and Chuckie finally understood the genius of the man.

For there they stood, Pope and Chuckie, arms still outstretched towards one another, a whisky bottle in the Pope's hand, a glass in Chuckle's.

Six weeks later, Dex was dead.The kids shouted that he was now an ex-Dex and much amused themselves. The local matrons stood in armfolding pairs on doorsteps. That's where the drink always took you in the end, they would say, loud enough for any passing husbands to hear.

Chuckie, however, hid his photograph and silently disagreed.

In the lizard lounge of the Botanic Inn, Chuckie Lurgan told a joke. No one laughed too hard and Chuckie was conscious of failure. He began to think about going home. He was tired from his unaccustomed early waking and a day's fiscal planning in six different bars. He had drunk too much cheap beer, bought by too many people he didn't really know. As he looked around the thickly peopled gloom of the bar, he was groggily conscious of dissipating his entrepreneurial energies.

Resolute, he drained the last third of his last pint in massive rolling gulps and set the defeated glass on the bar. He bid an unnoticed farewell to a man from Pacific Avenue and struck a path through the crops of people. He urinated odorously in the toilets and then left the bar, felt return.

Outside, it was briefly wet and the rain fell like fingers on his face. Chuckie looked for a bus stop.

Eureka Street, The darkness was soft and coloured. In Mr and Mrs Playfair mumbled in their tidy bed, a brand new Easi-sleep reduced to C99 in a bomb-damage clearance sale in a broken store at Sprucefield. Across the street in Johnny Murray, by the half-light of a shaded lamp, offered the beauty of his erect penis to a wardrobe mirror. In Edward Carson watched television and drank deep from a can of beer; he was pleased that his children (Billy, Barry and Rosie) were finally asleep and that his irritable wife was, at last, having her protracted bath; in his general pleasure, Edward laughed at something on the television that he didn't find funny. In No. 27, the rococo legend BELLEVUE painted on a wooden plaque by the door, Mr and Mrs Stevens were absent, holidaying in Bundoran; Julia, their daughter (gladly left behind), was showing both her breasts to Robert Cole, who previously had glimpsed only the upper portion of the left one during a memorable party in Chemical Street. In a silent man smoked his sixty-fifth cigarette of the day and thought of his policeman son, dead ten years.

In Chuckie Lurgan sat in a second-hand armchair of cheap construction. It was getting near eleven and his time felt wrong. Like himself, his time felt sluggish and inert. He was waiting for nothing yet felt himself goaded by a sensation of attendance. He rose from his armchair and went to the window. He looked out onto the street. His gaze swept over Nos. 7, 12, 22, 27 and 34 without comment. He was aware of some vague inflation, some massiveness in Eureka Street. It did not worry him. He imputed it to the inevident God and regained his seat.

He heard the muffled impacts of an argument between the Murtaghs next door. He winced at the sludgy sound of their proletarian controversy. Chuckie was ashamed of the way his fellow citizens spoke. The accents of his city appalled him. His own accent was as thick as any, but to Chuckie, other Belfast people sounded as though they had lighted matches or burning cigarettes in their mouths. He longed for elocutionary elegance.

But this irritation was momentary, for Chuckie was big with love. Shocks of lissom bliss puckered his flesh and he shuddered down the length of his cerebrospinal axis. He had seen her, all of ten hours previously, in the quartered sunlight from the four-paned window of the upstairs room in the Botanic Inn, the perfect girl in the perfect bar. He had fallen, he deemed, in love.

She was having lunch with friends as Chuckie was beginning the serious part of his day's drinking. Glancing over at her while trying to persuade Pete the Priest to buy him a drink, Chuckie had felt profoundly heterosexual. A quick look at the mirrored wall beyond the optics told him (mistakenly) that he was looking well. It wasn't that she was beautiful. She was pretty, certainly. It was more that she somehow reminded Chuckie of himself. He ambled over to her table.

He had given her some old chat. To his amazement she had been polite, even friendly. Chuckie was accustomed to the brutal end of brush-offs and her amiability encouraged him more than it should have. She was an American so her friendliness might just have been constitutional with her. But, try as he might, he couldn't prevent himself from flopping into the chair that her hard-faced girlfriend had vacated to head for the pisshouse.

He hadn't told her too many lies and hadn't looked exclusively at her breasts.That was good going. Relative honesty and looking at her face while she spoke was good behaviour by Chuckle's standards. Briefly, he had felt like a plump David Niven.

She was called Max and had been living in Belfast for a year. She told him that she worked in a nursery or kindergarten. Her friend, who had a funny name, told him later that Max owned the nursery in which she worked. Chuckle's bowels had melted sharply at the thought that she might be rich as well.