Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (9 page)

Even as I drank my coffee, I tried telling myself stories about it. I tried to remember and believe what fun it had all been. But it had been no fun. We had all hated it. Slat had practically wept with despair on the Sunday afternoon and even Septic Ted, not known for his delicacy or depth, had said that there had to be something else.

So why had we done it? None of us had drunk that much for years. We hadn't been so childish, so objectionable, so male for years. Why? I don't know about the others but it was simple for me.

It was because I knew Mary wouldn't call. It's because I didn't want to be there when the phone didn't ring.

My cat was screaming at me. He was getting it was the way I'd had his balls cut off. He was trying out a series of new miaows and yowls on me. There were diphthongs, voice-throwing, operatic quavers. It was seven o'clock. Too early for this shit. I piled his dish high to shut him up but he could miaow while he ate these days. I switched on the radio to drown the noise.

`A part-time UDR soldier was killed last night in an explosion in the Beechmount area of West Belfast.Two other soldiers were injured. The incident happened just after ten o'clock. A bomb was thrown at the soldiers' Land-Rover. A security force spokesman said that ..

I switched off the radio. In Belfast the news was an accompaniment like music but I didn't want to hear this stuff. Coffee- jar bomb. Yeah, that was another big craze. I got the idea that people were impressed by this new thing, this wheeze, this caper. Me, I wasn't impressed. It was easy to do that ugly stuff.

Suddenly I longed to leave Belfast. Because of an inadvertently heard news story, the city felt like a necropolis. When the bad things happened, I always wanted to leave and let Belfast rot. That was what living in this place was all about. I got this feeling twice a week every week of the year. Like everyone here, I lived in Belfast from day to day. It was never firm. I always stayed but I never really wanted to.

Depressed, I grabbed my coat and left my flat. In Mullin's I bought several cigarettes and a pint of pasteurized. I lit a fag and drank the milk while I drove down the Lisburn Road and on to Bradbury Place, still grubby and paper-strewn after its usual festive night. It was early and the people were soft and pretty, most still rumpled and creased from their recent sleep. Men in suits walked with habitual confidence, unaware that their hair stuck up endearingly; trim women didn't notice that the labels on their dresses were showing and their lipstick was slightly crooked. Belfast was only half awake and its citizens were mild and lovable as children.

As I drove there under the pale sky, I weltered in sentiment. And it was briefly good to be doing what I was doing. Driving to my hard day's toil. In my big boots, my artisan's shirt and my rough trousers I felt dignified, I felt worthy, I felt like the nineteen thirties.

Then I remembered what I did for a living.

I was a repo man. I was a hard guy. I was a tough. I'd been doing it for nearly six months. I'd been doing it since Sarah had left. I'd just gone back to the way I'd mostly been. Before Sarah, I'd sometimes earned my living by fighting people, hitting people or just by looking like I might do any of those things. Bouncer, bodyguard, general frightener, all-purpose yob, I had had the full range. It wasn't that I was big. It wasn't that I was bad. It was just that I was so good at fighting.

In the years after I went to college, I used these skills and butched my way round London, punching heads for cash-in fist. I went to America for a short stint, quickly discovering that they were all much too good at fighting, and then back to my imperfectly macho hometown. I seldom had to do any real harm. When sporadically called to punch a head or two, I punched a head or two. It seemed easy then. I was like an actress doing a nude scene. I told myself I didn't really mind.

Then one night, doing the door at a dockers' bar, I'd had to mash some old guy who'd been goosing the barmaids. He'd turned bolshie when I'd chucked him out and had kept coming at me. No matter how many times I hit him, no matter how hard, he was so roofed that none of it hurt. In the end I'd laid him out cold. As he lay there on the filthy pavement, his face red and ragged, his gut exposed, I'd felt like chucking my stomach.

And soon afterwards, Sarah had come and ironed me smooth, pressed the tough stuff right out of me. It was only then that I worked out why it was always so easy to hit people. It was because I had no imagination.

The human route to sympathy or empathy is a clumsy one but it's all we've got. To understand the consequences of our actions we must exercise our imaginations. We decide that it's a bad idea to hit someone over the head with a bottle because we put ourselves in their position and comprehend that if we were hit over the head with a bottle, then, my goodness, wouldn't that hurt! We swap shoes.

If you do you can do violence or harm becomes decreasingly possible for you.You hold a gun to someone's head, hammer cocked. If you can see what this would do to that head, then it is literally impossible to pull the trigger.

I had happily hurt people because I had no imagination.

Because of Sarah I didn't fight for two years.Then Sarah left. A fortnight later, a guy from Ottawa Street told me what a cunt I was outside the toilets in the Morning Star. I decked him. I picked his teeth out of my knuckles.

People talk about the red mist of the angry, of the sociopath. Only people who've never fought say that. There's no mist. Things are distinctly uncloudy. Rather, there is a great philosophical clarity, an absolute reliability about the decision to throw the arm. Everything seems fine and sensible and punching someone's head away seems like the dignified, democratic thing to do. And the other secret about being good at fighting is to know that you're no good at fighting. That's for the movies. No one can ward off blows and dodge swipes like they do in the movies. Being good at fighting is simply knowing which bits hurt, which bits break and just having a swing at those. That's all.

I'd tried giving up. When Sarah had been with me, it had been hard to think I'd ever done it. But when Sarah had left I'd started again. It had been a natural progression, an inevitable decline. I'd known Marty Allen all those years before. We'd been involved in a variety of bellicose enterprises and he was glad to bring me in on his repo thing. He'd yuppied up since the last time I'd seen him. He even called his new trade Credit Adjustment but I knew I was back to punching heads and baring teeth.

Crab, Hally and I worked North Belfast. It was mostly poor up there so we had a lot of ground to cover. We were thrillingly ecumenical and we raided Protestant estates with all the elan and grace with which we raided Catholic ones. I could never see the difference. There were grim estates and their multiple greys. There were pale, flabby people and their crucial lack. There was the damp, inoneyless smell. Both types of places were simply deep cores of poverty.They could paint their walls any colour they wanted, they could fly a hundred flags and they still wouldn't pay the rent and we would still come and take their stuff away from them.

It was Povertyland. It was the land where the bad things happened. Solvent snorting Evostik down an alley in Taughmonagh, keeling over and drowning in a twofoot puddle. Going out with a sniff and a gurgle. It was the land of Love on the Breadline. Kids here used clingfilm for condoms; they bought their 015.99 engagement rings from the Argos catalogue. They shacked up together for warmth, for forgetting. It was the land where they wrote things on the walls.

I was never surprised that they bought all this stuff they couldn't afford. That's what I'd have done. That's I had done. The only times I'd ever truly shopped were when I had no money. Buying things is the only activity that makes you feel better about not being able to buy things.

And it was such sad stuff. Mail-order stuff, catalogue stuff, penny-a-word, poundstretchers' stuff. Sometimes, after a few runs, the back of the van would look like a iop stall at a church fete. It amazed me that anyone could want this garbage back. But someone did. So back we took it.

Old, young and medium, the people all looked like I felt. Which was truly, impressively bad. They lived in countries of poverty, in climates of poverty. They ate it, slept it, breathed it in and out.

But they'd bought on, unsurprisingly. They were still allowed to purchase, to consume. They'd shored themselves up with comfort goods. They'd committed the crime of wanting what they could not have and they all came quietly. I had not hit anyone since I'd started working in repo again. I hadn't needed to. I would never need to. They were already beaten, these people. There was nothing more I could do to them.

The really surprising thing was that we never got any grief from either of the forces of national liberation. Both sets, aboriginal and colonist, had been paid off by Marty Allen. They left us alone mostly. The cops, too, just about tolerated us. But it was tricky. IRA, INLA, IPLO, UVF, UFF and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. A whole horde of dumb fucks with automatic weapons and the three of us wandering in and out taking people's televisions away. Luckily, Crab and Hally were too stupid to give it much thought, but me, I had a lot of executive stress.

After the first couple of hours of that morning, I should have realized it was all going wrong. We were working the little streets off the Shore Road. Albino Protestant land. Some furniture in Peace Street, a microwave and multigym from Parliament Street and a stereo, video and camcorder in Iris Drive. We'd made ten people unhappy and frightened. The Iris Drive address was a couple with six children. The kids had wasn't untypical, we were used to one of them, a girl of about six, had become hysterical. She screamed and wailed. I was amazed that she could be so terrified. Was she incredibly fond of luxury electrical goods or were we just frightening men? Whatever, we really scared the piss out of her and I felt bad. I felt worse that we got no abuse. Neither father nor mother, brothers nor sisters said any bad words to us as we tramped in and out of there.

But just as I went to close the door behind me, the mother had stared at me. Just once, and not for long, but I had never seen such contempt, such fear. I wondered what I looked like that she could look at me like that. It didn't take me long.

Afterwards we drove back up to Rathcoole.We were a little irritated as we'd been there only last week, but Allen had said it was a big deal, a special pick-up and that we had to do it today. Hally looked through his list (with his literacy skills no mean or brief feat).

`It's a bed,' he said.

`What?' Crab was driving, his mood suitably foul.

`A bed!

`We're going back up there for a fucking bed'

'Aye. I think it's some kind of big fuck-off bed. We're taking it off somebody called Johnson. Marty says it's worth a lot of money.'

Crab grunted some Neanderthal grunt and turned into the estate. On one of the walls, he spotted some graffiti. `Have you seen that, Hally?'

`What?'

Crab pulled to a halt. He pointed at the smeared, scribbled pebbledash wall. `That'

Hally leaned across him and looked out. `What, "Tina sucks my cock"?'

`No, no. The big letters.!

'OTG,' said Hally.

'Aye'

`What about it?' Hally asked, mystified.

`Have you seen that before?'

`Nah.'

`What about you, Jakie?'

I ignored him. I wasn't in the mood.

`What does it mean?' said Hally.

`How the fuck do I know?' snapped Crab. `I've seen it around a couple of times. Some of the lads are getting fucked off about it. They wanna know who the fuck these OTG cunts are.'

Hally pondered. `What, you think they're like a movement, an organization?'

`Yeah, probably.'

`And nobody knows who they are.'

'No.'

`Have they done anything yet?'

'Like what?'

'I mean have they claimed responsibility for anything yet?'

'Nah, don't think so.'

'So, how do you know it's an organization, then?'

'What else would it be?'

`Could mean anything.'

'Like what?'

`I don't Old Thick Git, Open The Gate, Omelettes Taste Good. I don't know. Fuck.'

'Then don't fucking blather about things you don't know, you thick fuck' Crab pouted. Oops, I thought, and blinked.

I missed the blow I just heard the wet slap and the sound of Crab's head bouncing back off his headrest. When I opened my eyes Crab's nose was bleeding and Hally was looking aggrieved.

`Don't call me stupid,' said Hally, mildly.

It took us twenty minutes to find the house. A bad twenty minutes. Things were tense enough without navigational difficulties.That was the thing about yob friendships. They were so very blunt. Mild controversies were conducted bone on bone. None of these people ever agreed to disagree. They were both psychopaths but Hally would be able to kill Crab every time. This consciousness weighed on Crab's mind. His neck grew red with hatred and suppressed rage. By the time we lumbered out of the van, the air between us was thick and hot with violence and anger.

But we got on with it. We did our usual thing. We knocked on the usual kind of door. The usual kind of fifty-year-old fat guy answered. We had our usual conversation with him. He made the customary mild objections and made the characteristic attempt to close the door. Hally put his typical boot in the way and pushed his way through in the traditional manner. The man had the expected change of heart and decided, as always, to co-operate.

It was routine. It was standard.

Inside, the blinds of the front room were still closed. The man, Mr Johnson, stood in shorts and vest. Crab stood close to him, invading his airspace. On the wall, a plain devotional hung, an unCatholic tract. God is Love, it said.Yeah, I thought, we'll see.

Crab asked the man where the bed was. Hally asked him where the fuck he thought it would be. Crab's face convulsed with fury. An itch started at the base of ny skull.

`Listen, fellas,' said the man, his voice pressed flat with false bonhomie, `my wife's really sick. She's had a stroke. The bed's for her. It's a special bed, like a medical one. It cost me fifteen hundred quid. I've only a few payments to make. Can't we make some kind of deal? She's really sick.'