Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (6 page)

Too soon, Pete the Priest was busting his balls to move on to Lavery's, preparatory to the mid-afternoon crawl and then the usual Monday night saucehunt. But he had done big work with this girl. He had made some decisions. He had made some moves. She had magically given him her phone number.

He had left under protest with a new feeling creeping under his flesh. A big feeling for the friendly American girl that felt consonant with his imminent tycoon status. He and Pete drank the rest of the day, as usual, losing each other in a tight clinch in the Rotterdam between the beer and the spirits. He had somehow got back across town to the Bot in the vain hope she might still. be there, and in the more serious hope that her drinking habits would be much too moderate for that to be possible. She had not been there and Chuckie had just looked at her phone number on its paper scrap and scrounged a few beers off people who couldn't say no. As the night had wound down, he couldn't help feeling that it was all starting for him.

And, now that he was home, that excitement had not left him. Even the dissipation of his half-cut booze-buzz did not daunt him. The thought of her lent some curious reality, some warm flesh to his dreams of wealth. Somehow, she made it possible. Maybe it was because he knew she was high-grade, top-notch. Maybe it was because she made his dreams necessary.

He wasn't sure but all he could do was think of her. When she had smiled, her lips had stretched like they would split. Maybe it was the shape of her skull or the tone of her skin. All he knew was that he liked it, and later that evening, in all the other bars, it was with him when she wasn't.

Chuckle rose from his chair and decided to go to bed. He was ashamed to retire at such an unmanly had not gone to bed before midnight since he was twelve years old. He knew that he would be insomniac with passion but he did not care. The open-eyed idleness of his armchair was insupportable to him. He would see better and calmer in the dark.

He switched off the lights and climbed the narrow staircase. In the bathroom, he urinated copiously once more but did not bother to brush his teeth. He calculated that he drank a pint and a half of good Ulster tapwater every day and concluded that this represented enough fluoride for any man. His teeth were clean enough. Chuckle gilded no lilies.

He switched off the bathroom light and crossed the tiny hall to his bedroom door. Before entering his own room, he glanced through the open door of his mother's. His eyes adjusted quickly to its small gloom and he could see the massive form of his chubby mother, wrapped and warped like a slug in her bedding. She slept fast. Her mouth hung open and he detected a tiny glint of drool on her cheek. He wondered what she dreamt.

(Mrs Lurgan dreamt of the cold night of Tuesday z November 1964 when, at the age of twenty, in a polka-dot dress shorter than it should have been, she had ridden one hundred and seventy yards, scrabbling and weeping on the roof of the heavy black car in which the Beatles were being driven away from the ABC cinema and on up Fisher-wick Avenue until, solicitous for her, the car had stopped and she fell off onto the tarmac, which had been considerably harder than it looked.)

Chuckle undressed and crept into bed. He waited and shivered as the mattress warmed. He thought of his perfect, perfect girl and his penis unfurled itself slowly. He was surprised by his desire and wrapped his arms firmly around his chest. He decided not to touch himself for her. He felt strongly that he should at least call the girl before he took the liberty of masturbating about her. He started to paint diem pictures of her calling him at the office or sitting in the passenger seat of his phantom car, complete with steering wheel and sun-roof, as they idled lovingly through the car-wash.

Soon, disappointingly soon, he fell asleep.

Within the week, Chuckie had made his meet. After some persuading, John Long had agreed to talk to him. Chuckie thought at one point of using his suspicions that Long had knocked off his mother when Chuckie was a kid but in the end he didn't have to.

John Long was a local boy made good, originating from Eureka Street. He had gone away to England for three years and had come back, still a teenager, with an unexplained two thousand pounds in the bank. He had bought a couple of shops on the row and then a couple more. He had moved away, and the Eureka Street residents only heard of his other expansions by hearsay or on those occasions when he returned to the street of his birth to flirt with the old women and patronize the old men. John Long, sadly named since he was unusually tiny, was now a prosperous if unpleasant-looking man in his fifties, who drove big cars and lived in Holywood, in a big house so spankingly new that it looked as though it had just been unwrapped.

They met on Thursday in one of Long's warehouses near prosperous Bangor. The trip was two buses and a three-mile walk in the rain for Chuckie, who arrived just as Long's Mercedes rolled noiselessly into the car park. Long got out of his car, a parody of the cigar-chomping, camel-coated, yobmade-good. He eyed Chuckie's bedraggled form with some disfavour. Chuckie silently promised himself that he would nurse this grievance, this entrance.

In his untidy box of an office, which was somehow more daunting, more impressive than a swish one, Long was blandly expansive. `Haven't seen your mother in years. She used to be a lovely-looking girl. How's she keeping these days?'

Chuckie remembered Long's visits, the sleek-haired man with the expensive smell and the bags full of unlrish fruits: grapes, melons and peaches. He hadn't liked him then but had loved that expensive smell, the thick car parked outside and the rumour of magazine glamour that the man always brought with him. He remembered the complicated whispers that had bothered and frightened him. He remembered how he had hated it when the man had offered him the fancy fruit and told him to go and play.

`She's fine. She asked to be remembered to you.'

`Aye, I'm always thinking of Peggy these days. We're all getting old. Tragedy for the women especially.' Long raised his hand over his sparse hair. He had always been vain though never handsome. His complacency was misplaced. He had aged terribly. His face had collapsed and his wrinkles were like ancient scars that ran in little rills all over his face, following the local contours of nose, eyebrow or ear like fault lines.

'Ma looks pretty good, you know.'

`I'm sure she does. I'm sure she does'

Chuckie sensed that early antagonism wasn't apt. He hoped that Long was going to help make him rich. He tried to smile amiably. His teeth were too apparent in the attempt.

Long decided that that was enough badinage.'So you wanted to talk to me, son?'

`Aye.'

Long sat back, placed his feet on his messy desk and lit another cigar without offering one to Chuckie. The man was not too fussed about making it easier for him. There was a bad pause, which Chuckie committed to his growing grudge book, and then he made his pitch.

He told Long about his plans of setting himself up in business, about his plans for getting sponsorship, government grants, all kinds of funny money. While keeping the specifics unspecific, he waxed about his dreams of networks of companies, each servicing the others, of monopolies, empires. He talked blithely about sums of money he could barely count. He grew hot and indiscreet, and as the talk got bigger, his voice got smaller. Eventually, it just dried away and he fell silent.

Long chewed on his cigar with an air of spurious concentration and sighed with unfaked satisfaction. Chuckie knew that the local mogul was enjoying this. It was nice to be able to patronize the past, to prove to yourself that you'd really left the place you came from. Long swept his feet from the desk and leant forward, theatrically dynamic. His eyes narrowed with pleasure.'I won't lend you any money.'

Chuckie tried to say that he hadn't asked but Long waved his objections away. He spat in the wastepaper basket. `No money but I'll offer you some advice. How does that grab you?'

`Not very nicely.'

Long ignored him. He extinguished his cigar and looked through the glass partition at the goods that lay neat in his warehouse. It looked as though he liked the view. He turned his eyes on Chuckie, almost emotional. `You're just a wee ballocks from Eureka Street, son. But I started out the same way. I worked hard and now I've got everything you want. And do you know what? It was easy. I never had much to do with women, bar tarts'

Chuckie was careful not to flinch. He knew that Long was too dim to realize exactly what he'd said, though Chuckie silently damned his mother for making the mistake of this man.

Long stood, concluding the interview and lending effect to his pause.'Do you wanna know what the recipe for success is?' `What?'

`No women. I started off thinking that the recipe for success was work now, fuck later, and then I thought it was fuck now, work later, but then I worked out that it was, of

He left the pause there like a weary schoolteacher, waiting for young Lurgan to rhyme it off by rote.

'What?' said Chuckie.

`Work now, work later. Don't bother fucking at all.'

He smiled the smile of a seer.

The rain had eased to the grey slant typical of Irish funerals. Chuckle, neither sugar nor salt, knew he would not melt but he felt keenly the humiliation of the walk back to the bus station, especially when John Long's Mercedes passed him. The two short greeting blasts of the horn had a satiric lilt that wounded him.

In the hour it took to get to the bus station he had stoked his anger and grief so that the eventual retribution to be visited upon unlong John had become a visceral component of his dreams of wealth. He had had two options, two plans for raising the initial sums so necessary to the commencement of his capitalist career.

The first plan had been to ask Long for the money.

The second plan had been to think of another plan.

He broke his second last fiver in paying his bus fare back to the city. He hoped his dole would arrive the next day. But as the bus moved out of the station and Chuckie looked around at his damp fellow passengers, who had started to steam slightly from the heat of the vehicle, his mood lifted inexplicably. Despite the multiple humiliations and grievances of his present life, he knew that he could spend a warm forty minutes with his head against the window thinking of the American girl.

He planned to call her tonight and his thoughts were nerveless as he wondered what he would say. He wiped some steam from the window and settled his arms on the shelf of his belly. Already he drew comfort from the thinking of her. Again, his plans seemed more plausible. Having her in his life would definitely be an expensive business. He would definitely have her in his life. Ergo, somehow, he would definitely have the money.

He loved her name. Max. He was very glad that she was American. He wasn't entirely sure that he would or should love her. Love was a little ambitious. Exchange of bodily fluids would do to be going on with.

Chuckie always wanted sex, but on his own terms; terms more lyrical and tremendous than might be imagined. He sought forms of mystic union he considered impossible with the women of Belfast. They were not natural docks for his living liquids. He was very glad that she was American.

Chuckie thought often of his old girlfriends. Recollections without haze, like erotic memoranda. He thought of the year he was seven and he fell in love with a piano teacher, who played Mozart and the blues. He thought of the bad old good old days when he was sixteen and his mother didn't allow girls in the house; when he lost count of the number of nights he spent in phone boxes after the pubs were shut, ringing round everybody he knew trying to find someone who would lend him a bed or even a quiet corner for a shag, quick or slow.

He liked to think of the scores of Belfast girls who bore his invisible graffito on their inner thighs:

Chuckie was here

Briefly but memorably.

Many of Chuckie's thirty wasted years had been devoted to the search for erotic congress. He had spent much time wandering the city, searching Belfast for sex, tramping leprous streets in pursuit of some quality lewdness. He had found it first in the Central Library, with its lemony reference room, with a girl repeating her 0 levels at the College of Business Studies. They had sat by the twenty-volume collected speeches of Winston Churchill and somehow it became the scene of Chuckie's twenty-eighth orgasm, the first by the hand of another.

And thus had started an erotic career much more successful than he had a right to expect. Chuckie was not handsome. His sandy hair had started to recede before his twenty-first birthday, his belly rolled like a full balloon and he had the breasts of a thirteen-year-old girl. Nonetheless, women slept with him with something close to monotonous regularity. He had always been proud of his and pink as a baby's forearm - and he attributed some of his success to this, his best feature.

But no girl, no woman had made a dent in the marsh of his selfhood. And Chuckie lamented this. Chuckie wanted to be lost in someone. Chuckie wanted a girl who would make life burn in his heart like a heavy meal. Chuckie wanted to discover the secret of true love.