Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (11 page)

`Nah,' I shouted back. `City centre.'

`Sounded big.'

`Didn't sound small,' I concurred.

I came back into the room with the coffee pot. Chuckie was toying with the newspaper on his lap.

`How much did he get?' I asked.

'Who?'

`Doran'

'Oh, yeah. He got a hundred and twenty grand, the bastard.'

'He's got legs like an Action Man now. It's hardly excessive.'

Barry `Bun' Doran was a guy we knew. A weirdo from Bosnia Street with whom Chuckie had been to school. Doran only worked as an office clerk but he had a big bee in his bonnet about personal freedom. He didn't like authority. A couple of years before he had decided that, most of all, he hated traffic lights. He felt that they interfered with his personal autonomy, his right to walk where and when he wanted. He started a campaign of ignoring the commands of traffic lights. He was run over by a bus on the Dublin Road. His legs were so badly broken that even when fixed up they were stiff as boards.

Chuckie was unrepentant. 'A hundred and twenty grand, though.You two had the right idea. I'd break my own legs for that.'

I poured myself some coffee. Chuckie didn't really drink coffee so I opened a can of sucrose, comminuted oranges, sodium benzoate, sodium metabisulphite drink for him. His fat face split in a smile and his eyes disappeared in his cheeks.

`Did you see the papers on Sunday?' he asked, with a poor assumption of nonchalance.

'There are lots of Sunday papers, Chuckie.'

`The local ones.'

I lit the hundredth cigarette I'd smoked since I gave up giving up.'No, I didn't see the local ones.'

Chuckie pulled a facial expression I'd never seen him do before. Chuckie pulled a facial expression I'd never seen anyone do before. His mouth turned down, his lips turned out and his nose turned up. It was amazingly unattractive.

'Take a look at this.' He opened the paper he was holding and pushed it over to me uncertainly. I picked it up. It was the smallads page of the only mucky paper that Northern Ireland produced, a paper with sexsational stories about mythical locals and pictures of Derry girls with large pale naked breasts.

I started reading through the ads page:

IRELAND'S NEW X-RATED CHATLINE

I looked at Chuckie.

'Underneath,' he said, in a small voice. I read on.

GIANT DILDO OFFER!!!

BIGGEST DILDO EVER!

BUY NOW! THE MASSIF

NOW AVAILABLE AT A SENSATIONAL THIS LOVE TOOL WILL THRILL EVERY WOMAN. SEND CHEQUES OR POSTAL ORDERS NOW! OFFER ONLY WHILE LIMITED STOCKS LAST.

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED. FULL REFUND IF OTHERWISE!

There was an address underneath. A box number. I looked quizzically at my plump chum. This wasn't all that funny. This wasn't all that surprising. It was hardly worth a trip across town to tell me about. But there was something in Chuckie's little eyes that made me tremble.

`Hey, Chuckle, this has nothing to do with you, has it?'

He looked at me plaintively. He spread his fat hands wide in a placating gesture.

`Chuckie!'

`I told you I needed start-up capital. I couldn't get any fucking grants if I didn't already have some capital. Apart from doing a Doran and getting myself run over, there was nothing else for it.'

`But Jesus, Chuckie, selling sex aids?You can't do that. This is Northern Ireland.!

He looked offended. `I don't intend to sell any sex aids.'

'What?'

He reached into his little canvas bag. He pulled out a long paper package and unwrapped a massive fake rubber penis. Veined, knobbly and bizarrely pink, it looked faintly like Chuckie himself. Chuckie set the thing on the table between us. My cat growled in fright. I was speechless.

`That's the only one I've got,' Chuckie said.

`You what?'

`I've only got one dildo. I gave Speckie Reynolds fifteen quid for it down the market.!

'I don't understand.'

`Watch,' whispered Chuckie.

He pulled a little rectangular tin out of his bag. He opened it and pulled out a rubber stamp, which he dipped in the ink sponge. He stamped an envelope that lay on the table. I picked it up and read the legend:

GIANT DILDO REFUND

Chuckie smiled the smile of the just-published poet.

`It's simple,' he said. `I've had seventeen hundred and forty replies already. That's seventeen hundred and forty cheques for nine ninety-nine. That's seventeen thousand, three hundred and eighty-two pounds. I opened a bank account this morning. I'll have ten chequebooks by next Wednesday.'

`But you can't keep the money.'

`Don't worry. I'm going to write refund cheques for all of them. Nine ninety-nine a full whack. And before I send them I'll take my little stamp here and I'll stamp GIANT DILDO REFUND on the cheques.!

He paused. He bent down to stroke my cat, whose fur was still rising in fright at the thing on the table.

'Can you honestly imagine anyone toddling down to their bank to lodge a cheque that has GIANT DILDO REFUND stamped all over it?' He smiled beatifically.

Isn't capitalism wonderful?'

That night, I went to see Mary. I still didn't know where she lived so I landed up at the bar where she worked. As I went in, the Protestant bouncer showed me, with a turn of his puffy shoulders, that he was sick of the sight of me. My eye had already turned dark where the man with the bed had hit me earlier. I must have looked insalubrious. I guessed the bouncer might show some form if I pissed him off too much so I gave him a special smile.

Mary's face went sick when she saw me. I saw a mumbled word between her and a colleague and the colleague approached me and asked me what I wanted to drink. I lied and she brought me some beer.

I sat there for two hours, beer upon beer. I hated bars but it was a difficult city in which to lead a life without them. In the end, some shame in me made me just walk up to her and ask her to talk to me.

'Give me a minute,' she said wearily.

She whispered some more with her friend and then grabbed her coat and stood by my table. Her face was grim. She didn't look like she meant to go anywhere nice with me.

'Not here,' she said.

She took me to a swish hamburger joint nearby. We sat and drank cheap coffee.

'What happened to your eye?'

'I was moving some furniture!

'What?'

'I hit my head against something.!

`I don't believe you.'

'You don't have to.'

There was a pause. Not a comfortable one. She looked at me. Her eyes shone and I knew there was bad news and bad news. She gave me the bad news first.

'I want you to leave me alone,' she said.

It wasn't easy to take this talk from her but I guessed that she had made a lot of things not happen. She wasn't treasuring any memories and I was making myself one big drag. But there was that love we'd made which she could not delete. It was less than a week and my mouth still tasted of her mouth. I felt like I could breathe her breath.

`Mary, I can't leave you alone. I don't want to leave you alone. That makes it complicated.!

Her face went slack and her mouth trembled in a way that made it so very difficult not to just kiss her right there.

'What do you want from me?'

And what did I want from her? I wanted her hand on my face, her head bent for me, her lips on mine. I wanted her to say soft words that would make my heart lurch and my face burn.

I gave her that. Exactly. Word for word. That wasn't bad going and I imagined there'd be some big reward for all that unblank prose.

`You don't understand.' Her voice was gentler, more permissive after all my fancy talk.

'What don't I understand?'

`It's impossible.!

I had a series of great speeches in stock all about possibility and impossibility. And it was hard not to feel optimistic sitting there amongst the bright plastic and the teenage bon vivants with all the primary colours making shapes in Mary's eyes.

'Impossibility never stopped anything actually happening.'

'But I love Paul. I don't want to hurt him.'

Paul was the cop boyfriend. I couldn't muster much feeling for his civilian predicament.

`It's just impossible,' she continued.

I was energized, ardent. `You're right. It isn't possible. Or likely. Or even democratic. Nobody gave you the right to make me feel like this!

'And what about Sarah?'

I was briefly surprised by her high-grade memory. `Sarah? That's old love, that's dead love. That's love that never was. I do her no disservice. I doubt that she remembers me at all.'

The sick look returned to her face.The one she had worn when she saw me first that night. Her mouth pursed under some assumption of sisterhood. `Two years' time, you'd say the same of me.

'Would IF

'Yes!

`Would you like some long odds on that?'

She smiled, pleased and flattered despite her firm intentions. I'd never had a problem with vanity.

'I'm going to marry him,' she said.

`That's what you think.'

`What would you know about it?'

I was confident. I was sure. That was always a bad sign.

`Do you often sleep with someone when you intend to marry someone else?'

My mouth was still moving with those last couple of words when I knew how badly I'd blown it. Her cheeks flushed and she sat straighter. She pulled her coat tighter around her and pushed her coffee cup away from her. She looked like she was going to go.

And then for the first time I experienced lust-free lust. I wanted someone's flesh pressed to mine in a way that was almost completely without desire. But she walked out. She just stood up, shook her head, mumbled something I couldn't hear and walked away. My head fell upon the table. It made a hollow noise.

I left soon after. Though it was not late, the streets hummed with discontent and wintry malice. There were lots of cops around. I even thought I could see Mary talking to one of them but I couldn't be sure. I hoped that if it was her then it wasn't her boyfriend she was talking to.

It was near chuck-out time for the bars and there'd been a couple of big bomb scares in the city centre. The siren sounds wafted in the wind and down Arthur Street I could see some desultory scurrying and white tape stretching. The cops were always jumpier if there was a series of bomb hoaxes. I think they preferred real bombs to endless hoaxes. It was like Russian roulette and I don't think they liked waiting for the one that would be real. It had been a pretty busy day for the boys with bombs. One at lunchtime in a multi-storey car park. A mortar had been fired at some soldiers and there had been the one Chuckie and I had heard earlier. And then all the hoaxes.

But as I looked at the people on the streets, I couldn't help thinking that it was still no big deal. It used to be different. We all used to be much more scared. After the biggest blasts in the seventies (recently revived for a second successful season), the colour of the streets always seemed drained and muted as if the colours, too, had been blown away.

But now it was all just an inconvenience, all just a traffic jam.

I found the Wreck in a side-street. A couple of cops and soldiers were loitering there. I got in and tried, ineffectually, to start it up. Just as it was beginning to chug into some semblance of life, a soldier sauntered over, his rifle slung across his pelvis in a carefree fashion.

I wound down my window and put on my I-don't-mindbeing-questioned-by-the-security-forces-I-know-you-haveto-do-it face. It was a pretty complicated expression.

The young soldier leaned down to my open window. His face was adolescent and his accent was Lancashire prole. `This your car?' The inevitable start to the litany of enquiry.

`Yes.'

'This your only car?'

`Yes' My voice was untesty. It might have been a tense day for these guys with all the ordnance going round town. I reached for the glove compartment to get some papers to prove that the Wreck was indeed mine.

The soldier snorted briefly. `No, no, that's all right, mate. It's just we thought you were driving it for a bet.'

I didn't need to laugh since he laughed so hard he laughed for both of us. I could hear his colleagues pissing themselves across the street. The soldier bent double and squeezed some feeble words of apology between the whinnies of his laughter. The Wreck, showing rare form, started amidst all the mockery and I drove off.

A couple of hours later, I was at home, making chase with my cat. He'd peed in the bath again and the sight of that little yellow pool around my plughole had sent me spare. It was so yellow. Somehow, you didn't expect it to be yellow. Like it was almost human. Unlike the cat itself. I'd chased him down the stairs, under the chairs, over the tables and so on. He was fucking quick, my cat.

I suppose that being pissed at my cat just because I was already blue wasn't fair. Mary, Sarah, my job: none of it was his fault. But he was unlucky enough to come near the end of a story he wasn't really part of. So, I ran after him with murder in my heart.

I'd got home depressed. Mary had left me making no mistake. When I got back there were a couple of messages. I had nearly wept at all this human contact, even though one had been from Marty Allen, telling me what an asshole I if I didn't know already. Chuckie had called too. He sounded jugged again. Apparently, he'd just had a big date with his American girl. She'd agreed to go out with him again. But apparently she wanted a double date with her flatmate. That was where I came in. Chuckle had happily volunteered me to field the friend. Next Thursday, the message said.