Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (15 page)

'I'd have asked you but you were being all

I put my arms around her old shoulders. I put my lips to her old cheek.'Yeah, yeah,' I said.'Tell it to the marines.'

Matt came back. He stood awkwardly, empty-handed, semaphoric. 'Can we help?' he said uncertainly. He looked at Mamie. She shook her head. He smiled in relief. 'I was going to take a turn outside. Do you want to come with me?'

I looked at Mamie. She turned back to her mixing bowls.

'Yeah, sure,' I said.'Why not?'

Matt and I walked for an hour. We went right down as close to the docks as we could. Matt stood on the lip of the land and sniffed. He looked out at all the Belfast fish in all the Belfast sea. He was happy there, some docker's fantasy coursing through his old blood. There never was a more inappropriate lawyer. Matt should have been a stevedore, he should have been a longshoreman, he should have been a contender.

Matt wiped some imaginary sweat from his brow. He turned to me and smiled his favourite John Wayne smile. Matt's version was inaccurately humane and generous. `We know about Sarah.!

I sighed patiently. `Yeah, Mamie told me,' I said.

'I thought so: He threw a stone into the water. The plop was loud. `She came to see us before she left.!

My heart went all hot. `Yeah?'

'She wasn't very happy.'

I picked up a pebble. It was my turn to throw a stone. `Well, Matt. She was the one pushing all the buttons. She was the one with all the choices' I threw the stone. I missed and it landed in a bush. The entire sea to aim at and I fucking missed.

Matt put his hand on my shoulder. `We were worried when you didn't call,' he said.

`I'm sorry. There were lots of things I didn't want to talk about.!

He smiled. `Was it bad?'

'It wasn't good, Matt.!

`No.'

'What happened to you two? It was so great between you.'

A pair of vulgar gulls wheeled low like jets, screeching.

I had an opportunity then. If I'd told him about the secret abortion, they might have stopped flying her flag so much. Mamie, the disappointed mother, would have been particularly outraged. It had always been so hard for me to resist the lure of cheap sympathy.

`Why did she leave?' Matt asked again.

`Well, Matt, you know to live without'

The old man's eyes were harsh as he followed the flight of the gulls but his mouth was pursed in admiration for their faded beauty. `You're not funny every time, Jake,' he said.

I kicked some gravel. Jesus, Matt, every time? I'm not even funny most of the time.'

`You don't want to talk about it?'

'Matt, this is disturbingly perceptive of you.' I laughed. I changed the subject to one he could never resist.'Hey, Manmie's looking well.'

Matt gurgled with delight.'Yeah' His eyes glittered.'She's still a fine-looking woman.'

Mamie looked her age but Matt could never see it so. He was hilariously uxorious. Forty years on and still he could barely contain his lust for her. Matt could never believe that his wife was sixty. He still saw the twenty-two-year-old he'd married. He reminded me of Pierre Bonnard. Bonnard painted his wife for fifty years, standing in the bath, lying buff on the rug. At seventy he still painted her like she was nineteen. I'd always had a thing about soppy old guys. It was an ambition of mine. One day, I thought, I might just end up some soppy old guy.

`I hope I die before she gets old.' He laughed.

'You're barking, Matt.'

He kicked a stone into the oily water.'Yeah, but I'm happy that way.'

We walked on. In the distance we could see the jutting hulk of old Grosvenor Wharf with its mile-long warehouses. It was desolate now. The thousands who had worked there worked there no longer. Yet this sight always put Matt in a good mood. He was a lawyer. No one he knew had lost any jobs there. I hoped it would stop him talking about Sarah. I didn't need any reminding.

Back indoors, Mamie had progressed no further with the meal she was preparing. Her face was smudged with the disturbing brown of some nameless gravy and a truly astonishing smell was leaking from the oven.

' 'What's with the whiff? Smells delish.'

This was Matt's attempt at cajolerie. I wouldn't have risked it.

Jake?' asked Mamie.

She straightened from the job and looked at me. I hated it when she asked me that. Jake? It always meant that there was trouble coming. There was something squeaky and interrogative in the way Mamie sometimes said my name.

`Yes?'

`Do you know a couple called Johnson?'

I should have remembered. I should have thought. Typically, Mamie did a form of community visiting around that area. Not content with letting a whole lot of unfortunates come and live in her house, she had to go and be nice to a lot of others whom she couldn't actually house. I should've guessed that she'd have run into the Johnsons. The best thing to do, of course, was to confess.

`Never heard of them,' I replied vacantly.

`That's strange:

`Why?'

Matt coughed placidly. Mamie ignored him. `They live in Rathcoole. She's sick and he's not working. Ring any bells?'

In my confusion, I even dipped my finger in one of Mamie's sauces and tasted it. I had to be very nervous to do something like that.

`Don't think so.' I choked.

`They tell a strange story.'

`Yeah?'

Mamie looked hard at me. She stopped smiling. `You haven't been going around buying beds, have you, Jake?'

`I've already got a bed, Mamie.'

Matt coughed and chuffed a bit. He smiled a big nervous smile and spoke to Mamie. `Jake says he's got to go now, sweetheart.'

Mamie ignored him. `What are you working at now?' she asked.

I told her I was a brickie again. She asked to see my hands. I gave them to her. She inspected them minutely and then grunted half in satisfaction, half in disappointment. It was humiliating but it deserved to be.

'What happened to your face?' It was worse because she hadn't mentioned it before. She knew that.

'I was moving some furniture!

She almost smiled.

'Stay out of trouble,' she said.

`That would be nice,' I replied sincerely.

That was the problem with Matt and Mamie. Their world was a loving world, a decent world. They couldn't understand shabbiness or harm. They had no imagination.

That night I met the boys. Sloane, Deasely and the others. What with Chuckle gone, it was hard to drink the way we were used to. After a couple, we all got depressed. Slat suggested that we eat. Slat had always had vaguely civilized pretensions. We went to a cafe. We dined. We didn't drink much. We talked. It was very strange.

I went home almost happy. On the wall by the police station on Poetry Street, someone had written two or three more OTCs. The new lettering was even more plump and prosperous than before. Enigmatic fuckers.

When I opened the front door, my cat came bounding out. In my new mood of goodwill, I bent to stroke him, to bond, to spend quality time. He just shot out past me and dived into the garden for a piss. Fucking cat. I wished he'd grow some new balls so I could cut them off again.

But he'd made the right decision. It wasn't an interior night. I didn't go in. I just sat on my doorstep and thought my way through my day.

There had been one pleasant interlude. A man from Amnesty International had called me. I told him he must have had the wrong number but he told me that it was me he wanted. Amnesty had set up an international commission on human rights violations in Northern Ireland. He was responsible for police brutality. My name had been mentioned to him in connection with an incident of police violence. He wondered if I would like to talk to him about my ordeal, in strict confidence.

Then I worked it out. I asked him if he knew any girls who had names that sounded like chest complaints. Yup, it was the delightful Aoirghe's work. I sorted him out. I told him it hadn't exactly been official police business. He asked me if I thought official police business could include beating up the citizenry on their doorsteps. I lost it then. I didn't like this guy vibing me for not being radical enough about being creamed by a cop. That I considered de trop. So, naturally enough, I told him to go fuck himself sideways.

I called Chuckle's number. I got his mum. Chuckie was nowhere to be found. Peggy found Max's number for me anyway but then I couldn't get her off the phone. Peggy was keen to talk. She was worried. I'd never known her so garrulous, so I listened up. She said that something was wrong, that Chuckie was acting weird.Where have you been? I thought. I calmed her down, I reassured her. Jesus, I think I told her something like Chuckle's a unique individual after all. Only a mother would have listened to toss like that. Chuckie had told me that sometimes his mother made him strangely uneasy. Sometimes I knew what he meant.

I called Max's number. I got the answering machine. I left a message for Aoirghe, telling her that I would eschew her participation in my private life. Not quite in those words. I think I was adamant. It had been her voice on the answering machine message. That had helped.

Out on my doorstep, the night sounded like an old record that crackled and hissed. Cars swished by as regular as a second hand. Helicopters droned high in dull Zs. A woman laughed distantly like some urgent bird. Far across the city (Wicked West), a series of dry impacts that may or may not have been automatic gunfire erupted and subsided.

Chuckle Lurgan had the most imprecise notions of what the Augustan age might have been, but in the moment that his hand first met the warns flesh of Max's breasts, he had felt more than Palladian. And, as she kissed his eyes and pushed him back and down on her own sofa, Chuckle's mind was filled with columns: the ardent one that had filled his trousers for the previous half-hour and the double set of credits that ranged on the internalized screen of his greed.

Her brassiere snapped and dropped and she seemed to expand under his hands. At three o'clock that afternoon, after two hours of vague talk and big-teeth smiles, the Ulster Development Board had awarded him a start-up grant of seventy-five thousand pounds. She ran her hands under and between the flaps of his open shirt. His skin began to feel like liquid under her touch (he was so chubby these days his skin would have felt liquid under most people's touch). End of the week he'd have one hundred and ninety thousand pounds in the bank. He hoped his dreams wouldn't suffer from all this reality.

He was distracted by the spectacle of Max shrugging off her skirt without the use of her hands.That was good. Slat had told him he had no chance but the UDB said that his business plan was one of the most imaginative that they had seen. Slat's problem was his unprofitable adherence to logic. Her dynamic pants round her ankles, Max stood in front of him. Chuckie's attention, that wavering, troubled thing, centred and fixed.

`God bless America,' said Chuckie.

She:

- kissed him,

- pulled his clothes from him,

- made noises in his ear,

- rubbed herself against him like he was a bath-towel,

- made him blush,

- made him laugh,

- made him forget he was fat,

- vigorously, rigorously,

- wiped the money right out of his head.

And apart from the passage which ended with her saying, more impatiently than was strictly necessary, `It's called a clitoris, Chuck,' he couldn't help feeling that it had gone very well indeed. Begun in surprise, continued with enthusiasm, it had ended in success.

And he had been amazed to hear the noises she made. She had actually laughed. No moaning, no whooping, no whimper, just a massive, muscular shudder of her hips under his hand and a great belch of triumphant rowdy laughter, not a belly laugh. Something bigger. Something lower.

And then they lay side by side, she brown and naked, he white and baggy as a badly blown balloon.

`Hey, Chuckie.'

`Yeah?'

`You OK?'

Chuckie closed his open mouth. `Mmm-hhmm,' he affirmed.

Max sat up. She smiled proudly at the wreck of him. `Can I fuck or can I fuck?' she asked.

Chuckle moaned helplessly, Max sipped at her now cold tea. 'I'm sorry. I should have taken it easier first time round. I just got carried away.'

Chuckie put his pillow over his face and whimpered tinily.

Max laid her head on the pillow. `I don't know why they call it French sex. The blowjob is a distinctly American phenomenon'

Aoirghe had been away for a fortnight. Chuckie had spent that fortnight wondering whether it would happen, when it would happen. He liked her more than he could say but that didn't have to stop him thinking about sex. The surprise of her regard was so great that he imagined it likely that she might not favour him with her flesh.

He had been much with her without skin meeting skin. Opportunity had been limited. He had his mother. She had her flatmate. But even after Aoirghe's disappearance, quietus had seemed remote. Nothing had happened. He found himself growing more circumspect. He hadn't even tried to touch her breasts, never really finding the line, the trajectory, which would end with such an action seeming reasonable, unconsidered, legal.