Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (10 page)

`It's not our job, mate. We have to take it away.'

`All right, listen. She's up there now, my wife. It's hard to move her. If you lads come back in an hour I'll have her moved and then you can take it.'

Crab bridled. He leaned into the man's face. `Fuck away off. Do you think we have all day to waste on your fucking problems?' He turned on his heel and ran up the staircase. He looked really crazy. We all piled after him.

When we got there we found him standing in a bare but neat little bedroom. He was staring at the tiny woman lying wrapped on the massive metal bed. Mrs Johnson was awake (probably) and her eyes stared out at us through the rictus of her distorted features. The itch in my skull heated and spread.

There was a pause then. A silence. A moment of shame, of something. A moment that showed us all what we'd come to: the sad couple, Crab, Hally and me. We all had a little time to see where we were and what we were doing.

And, who knows, anything might have happened. The three of us might have thought better of it. We might have left those people alone. We might have gone back to Allen with some bullshit or even cut a deal with the ugly fat guy who looked at his wife with such tender eyes.

But Hally had hit Crab and Crab was still angry and he badly needed some trouble. Silently, suddenly galvanized, he strode over to the bed and grasped the mattress with both hands. With one shudder of his huge shoulders he yanked the mattress high and the sick woman rolled off the bed and hit the floor and the wall with a weak thud. I nearly puked with shame.

But then things happened quick. The husband went nuts and jumped for Crab. I knew Hally would kill him so I weighed in there and tried to drag him away. The guy's face was distorted with rage and pain for his wife and he was swiping wildly. It was bedlam. He was screaming, the wife was bellowing in some horrible paralysed way and I was shouting at the guy to calm down. I was really scared. Not by the fight but by all the shame, all the horror. He caught me one on the right temple and I was surprised and impressed by the unexpected quality of that blow. I jerked my head away and became calm.

Doctors and nurses always say that when some horrible accident happens and the mangled victims start coming in, they can always cope with the horror and madness. They say that their professionalism takes over and they can get on with it. That's what happened to me. My professionalism took over. I grabbed a fistful of the guy's gut and squeezed as hard as I had ever squeezed anything. All the fight went out of him.

It was a great ploy, this belly-pinching routine. I'd learnt it in America when some big bouncer had done it to me. The pain was unbelievable and all you could do was whimper and wait for it to be over. It was as much about humiliation as pain. I always thought I was its only European practitioner. I was proud of it. It was a real winning move.

Crab and Hally were manhandling the bed onto the stairs. The thing was huge and even apes like them were struggling. I couldn't figure out whether I should give them a hand or keep my mitt on the husband's guts. He was crying by now. Looking over at his wife, I decided that he was all finished and I let go of him. I joined the others.

It took us twenty minutes. Hally got so fucked off that he kicked the wooden banisters away.That made our job easier but it was still a drag. I was very glad, though. I was happy that it was hard. It gave me something to think about.

After we'd shunted it into the van, Crab turned back towards the house. He looked ill. He looked like he had a bad heart. Like it worked but it was wicked.There were still some bits of the contraption up in that bedroom and he told us he was going to get them.

`No. I'll get them,' I shouted, and raced past him.

Back in the bedroom it was all very unpleasant. I hadn't wanted to go back but it was better me than Crab.The old guy was sitting huddled in the corner, his broken wife lying across his lap, his arms tight, tight around her shoulders. He was murmuring to her, apologizing, soothing.

I picked up the bed rails and turned to the man. He looked at me but just continued to rock the woman in his arms, murmuring. Her eyes stared out at me as well, her face twisted and unbearable. Ludicrously, I felt a pricking at the back of my eyes. `Look,' I said, `I'm sorry.'

They didn't reply. She couldn't and he wouldn't. Perhaps that was what made Crab come into the room from where he'd been standing, walk across the kneeling man and slap him backhanded across the face. Perhaps it had been some spurious gesture of comradeship with me, offence taken on my behalf. I don't know. It's also hard to say for how many seconds I fought the impulse. For I did fight it. I didn't want to do what I then did, I passionately didn't want to do it. But I skipped over and gave it to him across the back of the head with the metal rails and laid him out beside them.

It was mayhem after that. Hally came in and there was the usual back and forward. He and I shouted it out, hands carefully pressed to our hips. We didn't want any more fighting. Hally terrified me but I knew he'd never been sure of me. He could never figure out how tasty I was. Crab was conscious but he didn't look good. His hair was matted with blood and it looked like he would throw up at any moment. In all the bickering, the Johnsons, whose house we were in, remained absolutely impassive.

In the end Hally took Crab down to the van and said that he would drive him to Casualty at the Mater. When they'd gone I just left the room and closed the door behind me. I didn't think I'd try to apologize again. But, before I'd escaped, the crippled woman started grunting her strange noises at me. The same meaningless phrase over and over again. It was speech but it took me a few moments to understand what she was saying.

`You,' she was saying. `You.'

She was right. It was definitely me.

I walked back to Allen's. It took me an hour and a half. It wasn't a sure thing that Allen would fire me for what I'd done to Crab but I knew it was over anyway. I'd seen enough. I could wait table. I could carry bricks. I could give blowjobs down the docks. I just couldn't do this stuff any more.

Back at the garage, I tripped into Allen's office. Once again, he was on the telephone when I walked in. It sounded like some telephone sex line this time. I pressed the cradle down and cut him off. He didn't smile.

`What the fuck did you do that for, you wanker?'

'I quit.'

`Yeah? Well, good fucking riddance:

'I've got two hundred coming.'

`Heard you whacked Crab.'

'He called a press conference?'

`A big mistake. He'll fucking kill you for that. Then he'll eat you.

'My two hundred?'

'Your one hundred, you mean.!

He took out his wallet and counted out a hundred in twenties. It was more than I'd expected and that was fair enough. He'd sold me my dodgy stolen wreck of a car for two hundred. He didn't owe me much. He smiled some unpleasant smile he must have seen in the movies.

'Is it Crab or have you just lost your balls for it?' he enquired.

I had no explanation for him and I couldn't think of any tough-guy quip so I left. Downstairs, Hally was unloading the van, swapping tit jokes with a group of Allen's pre-pubescent mechanics. He didn't seem inconsolable about Crab's predicament and he was unconcerned about my presence. I headed for my car.

Hally followed and stood between me and the door.

'How's Crab?' I asked him.

He laughed. `How the fuck should I know? I took him to the hospital but I didn't fucking wait. I'm not his fucking ma'

I moved to put my key in the car door. He didn't get out of my way. I stood up straight.

`You quit?' He was squaring up for something. I knew he didn't like me but I knew he wouldn't hit me. That would be so upsetting that it just couldn't happen.

`Yeah, I quit.!

He nodded some internal assent like it was something he had predicted for years. `Do you mind if I ask you something?'

'What?'

`Are you a Catholic?'

I laughed a big sad laugh. `What do you think?' I asked.

`Well,' he said ruminatively, `I always figured you were a poof but I couldn't work out whether you were a Fenian as well.'

`Get a life,' I said, as I got into my car. `Nah, get two.'

Hally was too pleased with his insult to bother hitting me and he let me drive away unmolested. As I pulled onto the main road, it occurred to me that I'd never buy enough petrol to get far enough away.

So now I was unemployed. It had been a good move. I suppose I should have felt cleaner after that primary integrity but those gestures cleanse only in films. If I felt cleaner at all, it was a micro-feeling. It was a small, small thing. I didn't want to take anything away from anybody again. I knew how they felt. England had repossessed Sarah from me and I was still sitting there fat and sad with that loss.

When I remembered the Sarah stuff, it was like reading a book someone else recommended.You wanted it to have been so much better than it was.

She was a broadsheet journalist from London. I'd just got a shitload of compensation for a beating I'd had a couple of years before from soldiers outside a bar down Cornmarket. I'd only been in hospital for a while but the soldier angle had helped and the Northern Ireland Office was glad to give me forty grand to shut me up. I bought the place on Poetry Street. It was an old Church building, half wrecked and split into three. I got it for almost nothing so I bought it outright. Sarah moved in and made the old place breathe. We lived it out amongst the trees and it was good. For two years of side-by-side, we were happy.

Two years. We practically rebuilt the flat. Sarah made it beautiful. I put stubby pencils behind my ear and nails in my mouth and felt like a real man. I tried to like her friends. She tried to resist the impulse to have mine arrested. It was a pantomime of happiness, a parody of bliss. I loved her like I didn't know was possible. I loved her more than I thought was legal. The sight of her handwriting made my eyes fill with reasonless tears. When I heard sirens I convinced myself that they were ambulances going to the site where her shattered body lay. Sometimes at night, when she slept and I couldn't, I lay with my arms around her, just loving her. I felt that if I had a zipper running down the front of me from throat to belly I would unzip myself and cram her inside and zip her up in there. I could never hold her close enough.

Sometimes I worried about her work. She hated her job. Her paper would only run Ulster stories if the details were particularly appalling, if the killings were entirely barbaric. London editors were not interested in everyday Ulster. Sarah had to go to grimmer places and speak to grimmer people every time.

So, sooner than it should have, it started to go wrong. The reports she had to write, the things she had to see couldn't have helped Sarah fall in love with my city. She started talking about going back to London. I started ignoring her. Then she did three days' reporting on an Armagh pub massacre in which six people died. She quit her Ulster job and bought a plane ticket.

The night before she left was long. She pleaded with me to go with her. I refused. Her pain was inordinate. It was not a situation without remedy. London was an hour away. I could always change my mind. She could change hers. It was bad that she was going but it appeared to me that there'd always be the possibility of rewrites.

But within a fortnight, she'd told me the thing that I couldn't bring myself to believe, to understand. She'd had an abortion in her first week back in London. I hadn't known she was pregnant.

And then it was six months of nothing. Six months of something less than misery. She had crushed my heart flat. I didn't know how much I would have wanted to be a father but I didn't know how much I didn't either. It was always a surprise how much that hurt. How could she make the mistake of not loving me as I loved her?

Since she'd left, my love had been measured by the object it lacked. Since then, I'd been sitting alone late at night, smoking, wondering what it was like to be her.

After my big resignation, I got back to Poetry Street to find Chuckie Lurgan sitting in a chubby heap on my doorstep waiting for me to come home. My cat was sleeping on his knee. For some reason, my cat seemed to like Chuckie. I needed a new cat.

I let them in and fed them both.

He had called work and Allen had told him I'd been sacked.

`Jesus, you're not popular there any more,' Chuckie said.

While we were eating, he grew more and more excitable. He talked rapid nonsense and blushed often. He had a grubby tabloid in his hand. I made coffee while I waited for him to get to the point.

I asked him about his big-deal American girl. He was uncharacteristically reticent. Slat had told me that she was pretty nice and that, for some reason, she seemed keen on old Chuck, but Lurgan was giving me no change from all my blunt enquiry. He told me he was seeing her that night but then he changed the subject.

`Have you seen this OTG thing?' he asked me vaguely, as I headed for the kitchen.

`Yeah. Do you know what it means?'

'Nah, it's a new one on me,' he called from the other room.

'Is it an organization or a slogan?'

`Fucked if I know.'

`I've asked around,' I said. `Nobody has a clue.'

`What do you think?' asked Chuckie.

'Jesus, I don't know. Odyssey To Glengormley. Orangemen Try Genocide. Oxford's Too Green'

I could hear Chuckle's chubby chuckle. `Ominously Taut Gonads,' he suggested enthusiastically. `Optimum Testicle Growth. Osculate This, Girls!'

I let him have his laugh out while I got on with making the coffee.

`I saw Bun Doran limping up the road on the way over,' he called out to me.

`Uh-huh,' I grunted noncommittally, while I fiddled with the coffee beans. I wondered when exactly Chuckie was going to tell me what was on his mind.

`Yeah, apparently he's also bought a big house with the money he got from his settlement!

There was the muffled crump of a distant explosion.

'Sounded like Andytown,' surmised Chuckie from the living room.