Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (8 page)

The night was conditional, as dark as undark chocolate. Chuckie loved the gentle commencement of his city's mild summers and, though the rain began again, his mood lifted further.

The phone box was empty, which somewhat daunted him. He had counted on a wait while he marshalled his thoughts for this big call. But he stomped in there with the full vigour of intention. Doing it was the only way of getting it done.

He picked up the phone. He pressed its cold plastic against his cheek, sharing the streptococci of a double hundred Sandy Row Protestant neighbours. He dialled her number.

Chuckie was confident. Chuckie was more than confident, he was adamant. The telephone was his instrument, his device. He preferred the telephone to the non-electronic conversation. On the telephone he was incorporeal, he was all voice. Chuckie knew that he wasn't thin. He was fat but he was ambulatory. On the telephone, the plenty of his flesh hindered him not. On the phone, he could be as slim and pretty as he needed to be.

`Hello,' the telephone said.

Chuckie exhaled. `Hi. I'm looking for Max.'

`You found her.'

`Hello. This is Chuckie Lurgan. We met last week. Lunch in the Bot. The Botanic Inn.'

`Yeah, I remember.'

`You said that I could call you if I liked.'

`Yeah.'

`Well,' Chuckie smiled audibly, `I liked.'

They talked. For twenty-three minutes while a queue formed and grew, they talked. They talked of America, of Ireland, of her mother, of his mother, her flat, her flatmate, his prospects, her passport, the way the leaves were just showing on the trees, of horticulture generally, of the chances of a good summer, of his friends, her friends, alcohol, love, secrets, life, God, and what was showing in the Curzon that weekend.

As the twenty-fourth minute arrived, and there was audible grumbling from the four-strong queue, the proposal was made. Max started a winding precis of her commitments for the weekend while she made up her mind. Chuckie stuck his hand through the broken window of the phone box and gave his neighbours a little wave.

She talked on. Chuckie didn't listen. Idly, he inspected the graffiti scratched or scraped into the metals and plastics of the phone box interior. All the favourites: Red Hand Commandos; Diane Murray sucks for free; No Surrender; Hughie loves Deb; KAI (Kill All Irish); UVF; UDA; UFF. Square on the plate of the box itself, just above the numerals pad, someone had laboriously and elegantly gouged the legend:

OTG

Chuckie double-took and peered question marks. What did that mean?

yeah, what the hell, why not?' Max was saying.

He'd never seen it before, nor anything like it. The letter 0 didn't feature much in Irish or Ulster graffiti.

'So, OK, I'd be glad to,' she went on.

He frowned with irritation. He hated not knowing. `OTG,' he murmured to himself, `OTG'

'What?' Max asked.

'Mmmmm?' mumbled Chuckie.

'What did you say?' Max's voice was sharp.

`I said, oh, I agree.'

'What?'

'Oh, I agree.'

'To what?'

'To what you said.'

'So its a date, then?'

`Ah' Chuckie panicked, `yes, absolutely.'

'OK, see you there.'

The phone clicked in the American style, without formality.

The door of the phone box opened.

`Listen, fuckface, I've had it,' said Willie Johnson, an impatient Eureka Street neighbour. `If you don't want that phone stuck up your arse, you'll give me my turn.!

Chuckie stumbled out of the box. He hadn't a clue to what assignation he had agreed. Max had said, `See you there' Where?

Chuckie stepped to the end of the now five-strong queue. He waited. After an hour, during which his neighbours delighted in taking much time over their own conversations, he called Max back and checked the details.

`Maybe you should write it down,' she advised.

'Yeah,' said Chuckie. `Maybe I should.'

After his call, he ran into Stoney Wilson again. Stoney had been walking in the other direction but his life was such that he had nothing better to do than change direction and walk with Chuckie wherever Chuckie might choose.

Stoney was one of those people to whom Chuckie always promised himself that he would be much more unpleasant but to whom, unerringly, he was shamefully amiable. Chuckie was always helpless when faced with people about whom he had made private resolutions.

Nevertheless, he didn't want to walk back home because he knew that Stoney would follow him to the door and expect to be asked in. Chuckie didn't feel that he had the energy to refuse him. So, though it was now dark and though the rain had begun its fun again, they walked aimlessly up and down the length of their little local streets, passing the dirty shops on Sandy Row with their windowfuls of spiders and flies, and passing quartets of ambling policemen, all submachine-guns and

Stoney was full of some story he'd just heard on the radio about some UVF robbers who'd ripped off some jewellery store in Portadown.The punchline was that they'd called a taxi as their getaway car. Typical Prods, said Stoney. The joke was meant to be the ineptitude of Protestant paramilitaries, that despite the blood-drinking myths of Protestant tumult, they weren't as good as the Catholics. But it seemed to Chuckie that they operated on simpler lines than the other lot. Political complexity wasn't their thing. They wanted to terrorize Catholics. They terrorized Catholics by killing Catholics. It had always seemed to Chuckie that they were pretty good at that.

`Were you using the phone box?' Stoney asked, with circusstyle slyness.

`Aye'

'Didn't you used to have a phone?'

'Still do.'

'So why-?' Stoney broke off theatrically. They passed the Rangers Supporters' Club where the coats and gloves of famous Loyalist killers were encased in glass and hung on the walls.

'Fancy a pint?' asked Stoney.

'Not in there, I don't.'

Double-chinned double-Protestant Chuckie could barely have pronounced the word integrity but there was no place in his big gut for the hatred and fear they peddled there. He glanced unfavourably at his companion and promised himself again that one day he would insult this man so dreadfully they'd never have to talk again. But, for now, he merely turned on his heel and started retracing his steps towards his own street.

Stoney followed, not unaware of the sudden impediment in their good fellowship.To mend it, he assumed a comic tone.'So why were you using the phone box, Chuckle?'

Chuckie stopped dead and turned to face him full.

`What's with the questions? While you're at it, why don't you ask me whether space is curved finitely or infinitely?' Stoney opened his mouth. `I'm fucked if I know whether it is or not,' Chuckie added quickly.

Stoney was delighted with Chuckle's brusqueness.'Were you calling some girl?' His eyes glinted greedily.

Chuckie walked on.With Stoney, it was impossible to be irritated for long. `Yes,' he said.

`Where's she from?'

`I don't know exactly.'

`Is she a Taig?'

`Fuck's sake, Stoney, she's American.'

Stoney clapped his hands with delight. `American.Very good. I always wanted a Yank girl. They've got very clean teeth.!

Chuckie laughed.

'Have you shagged her yet?' asked Stoney.

Chuckie paused to decide whether or not to be angry. He decided not to be angry. `Yes,' he lied.

`How was it?'

`Demonic.'

`You're a lucky fucker, Lurgan.There's your cousin's got himself a wee honey too and you're both fat bastards:

'Where's the light of your life tonight?' Chuckie asked him. It was a good subject change. In his experience, married guys always talked gleefully about everybody else's love life. Chuckie thought he'd depress him by asking him about his own. Stoney had a dreary wife and a dreary two-year-old kid who shared her mother's button nose and amazed expression.

`She's round at her ma's. Didn't fancy the trip.'

`Yeah, yeah, and you're left to wander Sandy Row on the pull. Hard times, Stoney, hard, hard times.'

Chuckie gestured at the wet streets, empty of people other than themselves. He laughed harshly and walked on. Stoney's little legs had to skip to keep up. They passed the bookie's on the corner, the bookie's that swelled and burst every lunchtime and where Chuckie would see men like his father in a thousand different guises. The place was doing powerful trade because, nowadays, even Catholics were venturing within its doors. They were becoming too frightened to bet in their own betting shops. There'd been a couple of simple massacres in Catholic betting shops over the past couple of years. Chuckie was sure that these new customers comforted themselves with the thought that money was money and that no one cared whether it was Protestant or Catholic money. Chuckie was also sure they were fooling themselves.

`What'd you say?' he asked Stoney, who'd been breathlessly mumbling something to him.

Stoney swallowed and puffed. `I hear you're going into business.

'Do you?'

`Aye. What kind of business exactly?'

Chuckie frowned. They were near Eureka Street now. Then he could be happily free of this fellow. `I'd rather keep the details to myself for now.'

'Oh, until you hold your press conference, no doubt.' Stoney laughed carefully. He didn't like to overtease. He went on more gently, `Good business is getting paid a hundred grand a year for watching television all day. That's good business'

They reached the corner of Eureka Street. Chuckie turned down towards his house. Stoney stopped and said goodbye to his back. Chuckie waved once without turning. Stoney shrugged and moved on. He didn't care. Chuckie was just a fat shite with no da.

Chuckie walked blithely down Eureka Street. His mood was unaccountably tremendous; he was impervious to Stoney's mumblings about good business. No badinage would deflect him. He was going to be rich. If only he could find a way of getting some start-up capital. If only he could persuade somebody to give him something for nothing.

Something for nothing. In a sense, Stoney Wilson had been right. Good business was getting paid as much as possible for as little as possible. That was capitalism in essence. Something for nothing. He needed the impossible. John Long was right. He was a fantasist. Something for nothing. Where could he find a dick who would give him that?

In that rainy moment as he stepped over the cracked paving stone between and it struck him like some soundless klaxon. That last mental phrase burgeoned in his mind like some thermonuclear aftershock. He stopped stock still on Eureka Street and looked for stars he could not see. The clouds were low and the mist of rain was thick. Even where the land rose towards the West, nothing beyond the lit precincts of the city was the mountains had disappeared. Rain always made Belfast seem smaller, more itself. Rain always made Belfast look to Chuckie as though it was the last place left in the world.

But now the rain washed and cooled the fever of his ecstatic face. He was transfigured, amazed. Afterwards it would always seem to him that he had been touched by something godly, something almost famous. Afterwards, it seemed that the whole strange evening had been the simple etheric precedent for this moment: the eavesdropping on his mother, their first conversation for ten years, his life-list. It was the indication that, before the day was through, his world would change for ever.

For five minutes Chuckie stood thinkfully in the rain two doors down from his own. And in the shabby, damp, poorly lit theatre that was Eureka Street, the tangle of his thoughts untangled, smoothed themselves out like paper and Chuckie read there an idea so tremendous, so grand, that he felt like a bigger man already.

The way my head banged, when I opened the curtains that Monday morning, I knew it had just been the weekend.

I remembered as I peed and made coffee, practically simultaneously. I'd spent the weekend in the Crown. I'd all but slept there. Slat, Chuckle, Donald Deasely and Septic Ted. I had been chugged naturally. Drunk was hardly the word. A few pints of Bass and I'd been telling eight-foot Protestants why I was a lapsed Catholic. Well, I don't really drink. So, when I really grief.

Chuckie had been weird. He hadn't been there the whole time, which was weird enough in itself. Chuckie had never met a beer he didn't drink and his missing any of our carousing was unheard of. The sensation of being drunk without him was most uncustomary. He'd met some girl, he told us, some beautiful American. We laughed, naturally, but we were worried. There was a new light in Chuckle's face, a new angle to the way he carried that blunt head of his. I always hated it when my friends surprised nie. That wasn't what they were for.

I thought about having a shower but pulled on my working clothes instead. I had forty minutes to get out of the house and coffee was more important than hygiene. I checked for mail (no mail) and let my cat in.

Another wasted weekend. Nothing said worth saying; nothing done worth doing. I wanted to do other things. I wanted to see Mary and find out how reluctant she could be. I should have made my weekend a fruitful thing including her. But no. I pissed it away down the Crown.