Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (16 page)

That evening, it had been different. He took a taxi to her flat, his thoughts filled with money. He had rung her bell absently. She had come to the door, sloppily dressed, and mumbled things he did not hear and then disappeared. He had nodded to the taxi-driver and had loitered there, waiting to take her to the restaurant he'd booked. He was wondering whether the UDB money would queer his chances of an IIZB grant when Max had reappeared at the door and dragged him indoors by his lapels.

One minute he had been standing idly on the doorstep, the next he'd had surprising portions of her stuffed between his lips.

Chuckle sat upright suddenly. The sheet fell from his face.

`Fuck,' he said.

`Again?'

He looked at her blankly. `The taxi-driver.'

Despite his protestations, Max had pulled on a gown and walked out to pay the driver. Chuckie watched from the window, just in case the scumbag tried anything on. There was enough chat for him to get anxious but Max returned before he could pull his trousers on. He asked her how much the driver had charged.

`He was so amazed that you were porking a girl like me that he only charged me ten. I think he felt sorry for me.' She smiled, somehow delightfully.

`Come here,' said Chuckie.

It was then nine o'clock. It took two hours for Chuckie's pub itch to leave him. His ear was filled with the silent ticking of his internal clock. Time for three or four pints. Still time for a couple. Just time for a quick one.

It wasn't that he wasn't happy. They made a couple of extra stabs at love, long blunt enjoyable stabs. They drank coffee and wine. They talked. They listened to music she liked and which he found magical for her liking. It was just that they were staying in. Without the noise of barmen's complaints, shouts for orders, the look of woozy mirrors and the smell of beery piss, Chuckie was rather at a loss. He couldn't entirely manage the concept of an evening out being an evening in.

Third time around, his penis felt as barnacled as an ancient crab and there was a distinct fishing fleet odour in the air. Third time around, he got the point of the staying-in notion. Afterwards, as he gasped and chugged and choked, Max said, with some admiration, `Jesus, Chuckie, I thought this was supposed to be fun.'

To his disbelief, they ended the conscious portion of the evening watching a late-night black-and-white movie on the television. Everything in him and about him changed. In common with all the other fat working-class Protestants he had ever known, Chuckie had always felt a certain shame in watching television. It was an onanistic vice, the resort of the deracinated. It was what friendless folk did when they didn't want to talk to their mothers or wives.

Now, as Max chuckled at fifty-year-old American jokes and cooed at the cleft in Cary Grant's chin, television seemed a dignified, elegant thing, a box at the opera, the enclosure at Ascot. It was only in the way of looking.That grim pursuit, that last resort had all kinds of resident beauties. As he began to relax, he started laughing at all the humour, and even privately conceded that Cary Grant was not entirely without appeal.

When he found himself settled by her sleeping form under the single sheet that the heat of her body made unnecessary, he was surprised.The subject of his staying over had not come up. Had he asked? Had she offered? He lay there a full two hours, blissfully sleepless, amazingly unfiscal. Trapped within the walls of his generous flesh, Chuckie had always wanted an out-ofbody experience. He wanted to know what it would be like out there in the slim, attractive world. Flat on his back with Max breathing American beside him, Chuckie came closer to the incorporeal than ever before. He felt less than light, more than airy. He hoped that other yuppies did this.

Next day, Chuckie met up with the IRB, the Industrial Resources Board. A government agency set up to encourage investment in Northern Ireland, the IRB had vast sums of British government money at its disposal, much of which Chuckie coveted. He had thought much about how to persuade them to give him some. It was hard to know what the IRB looked for in an enterprise. They were mostly famous for giving enormous sums of British cash to American motor manufacturers who built expensive factories producing cars so ludicrous that they ended up only being sold to film companies, who used them as the comic props for celebrated timetravel comedies. American textiles manufacturers were given hundreds of thousands of pounds to investigate the possibility of opening companies in Northern Ireland. They always returned home, profitably discovering that such moves were impossible. Colombian gentlemen with dark glasses and white powdery trails from nose to lip met the IRB and walked away with a million or more. Chuckie felt sure he had a chance.

At eleven o'clock exactly he strode into the plush IRB offices. He was kept waiting for only about a minute and a half, a thrilling departure from his previous experience of waiting rooms. No fewer than six besuited timeservers descended into the foyer to greet him. He shook hands half a dozen times, giving confident, up-tempo snorts as he was introduced to each in turn. They moved on to a glossy boardroom with pictures of rare IRB successes on the wall. They gave him coffee and biscuits. They chuffed on about how good it was to see an internal initiative getting off the ground, pressed their smiles smooth and waited for him to speak. Chuckie coughed and looked around him. It was nice in here. The six men looked at him. There was silence.

Chuckle hadn't actually thought of anything to say. He had no ideas. He had no real reason to offer them to explain why they should give him thousands of their pounds. He had not thought it entirely necessary to have a plan. Up to that point, he had been right. Now, as he prepared to speak to these six men, his mind was blank.

He walked out four hours later, dizzy and hungry. John Long was wrong. Slat was wrong. John Maynard Keynes was wrong. Malthus had no idea. Chuckie had simply made it up as he went along. He had dished out a whole series of off-the-cuff pipe-dreams and improbabilities, inventing non-existent projects and ideas never intended or likely to exist. After three hours of bullshit, lies and fantasies, some of which he couldn't even understand himself, they had agreed to grant him eight hundred thousand pounds over the first eight months of his operation. A hundred grand a month.

That night, he booked a table in the most expensive restaurant in restaurant so expensive that only civil servants and IRB men ate there; the food was revolting and came in tiny portions but Chuckie planned to sneak a hamburger and chips before he went. He bought a bottle of champagne that cost more than he had earned in the previous year and went round to Max's.

Of course, the table at the restaurant languished Chuckie-less and the champagne was used mostly to douse Max's astounding breasts in a particularly vivid moment. The evening stretched before them as an endless potential of interior fun. Max tried to have sex with him in most of the square feet on the property. Chuckie wondered if she had had to train for this. If she'd been to sex university and had taken refresher courses. I'm too fat for this, he thought to himself. I'm too ugly, I'm too Irish. But then he remembered the eight hundred grand and went for it as though qualified.

Max called a pizza joint and they delivered some food, which saved Chuckie around two hundred and fifty pounds and gave him the opportunity of doing something he had never done before with pepperoni in his mouth.

They broke for an hour and Chuckie thanked her. He told her she was something special. He told her he was on cloud eight.

'Don't you mean cloud nine, Chuck?'

They talked.

Chucked had often wondered what conversation was for. When he had been young, he had, in common with most children, no patience for what adults did with their lives. They just seemed to talk.They didn't run around or play or have any real fun. There was a lack of dynamism, an existential lack of point. This irritation had stayed with Chuckie, and sometimes he had found himself unaccountably depressed by what adult life amounted to. What was the point of all this talking? Why did he have to do it? Why did he have to listen to it?

The irony was that Chuckie had always been so fat and lazy that he had never run about, or played or had fun anyway.

But that night, Max taught him what talk was for. She showed him why he should be interested. She told him her story. He hadn't even asked.

She told him this:

Max had loved her father like she loved herself. He was a negotiator. He persuaded people in foreign countries not to kill each other. She could see why they listened to him. He was very good at talking. His face was nearly as soft and brown as his eyes. His reassuring, deep voice always made her sleepy and happy. It always made her feel that it was a good world that such a man could live in it.

When Max was thirteen, her mother left her father. Everybody but her mother was surprised. Her mother hated NewYork, anyway, and any fast-track advancement her husband made was nothing to her. His younger brother, however, was a comfort. After a year, they wanted more than splendidly illicit sex swapped in cars, bathrooms or the beds of either brother.

Max's father looked after Max for a week while his brother and his former wife flew to Miami for a week to get things organized. He told his daughter that her mother was going to marry his brother. Max was scared of all the new rules now that her uncle would be her father. She wondered why her father didn't cry.

He cried when he saw her off at the airport. In the departure lounge, he looked the way he looked when she saw him on television, tall and slim in a neat blue suit amidst the scrum of people.

Miami was not as bad as she might have supposed. She went to a new school and it was OK. She made some friends and they were OK and pleasantly impressed by her New York credentials. Her mother seemed happy and John, her father/uncle, was indulgent. Most of the time, Max didn't even mind the way they pawed each other in front of her.

By her fifteenth birthday, she was the only virgin she knew. At school, her friends were all getting laid with an abandon and a courage that she could barely understand. When they asked her about herself, she invented cousins, even brothers with whom she did what they did. But they did not believe her and fixed dates for her, sometimes with boys who had already passed through their hands. She didn't like the boys, she didn't like the way they tried to make their muscles bulge, the tightness of their jeans and the swollen look that all their faces shared. One of them had cornered her on the back seat of his car, had scratched at her nipples with his fingernails and had thrust her hand into his open trousers. She had grasped his penis while he kissed her and mauled her breasts. It was so hard and felt much too big. It struck her that it did not feel fully human. It excited her like a crime but she had stopped him and he had never seen her again.

Max didn't trust the idea of sex. It was not something that she could square with her idea of manhood. Of who her father was. His gentleness, his charity were her ideal of how a life should be lived and that ideal was sexless.The only role that sex had played in the life of her father was to induce his wife to run away with his brother. Sex was an acid that corroded. It was something that stopped people being good.

For two or three years, it worked well. She saw her father every two or three months. She always saw him in New York. He was busier than ever and was becoming quite famous for his placid skills. He was a common sight on television news.

On her sixteenth birthday, her father took her out to dinner in a Manhattan restaurant where everybody smiled and some blushed to see him. She was proud of him. She was proud of the way he dealt with the people who stopped at their table to talk to him, the men confidential and trusting, the women openly admiring.

Her father told her that she was beautiful.

The band played `Your Kiss Is on My List of the Best Things in Life'.

Six months later, there was a talk of the possibility of a Nobel Peace Prize. He had just negotiated a settlement in a tribal dispute in a Central African Socialist Republic that had cost ten thousand lives a year. He was invested with almost saintly status, and television pictures were beamed all round the world of her tall and handsome father surrounded by happy villagers. Then he was sent to Northern Ireland.

He was shot dead twenty minutes after he stepped off the plane. He didn't even make it out of the airport. The police and the Army were amazed. The airport was one of the most heavily guarded spots in Northern Ireland. They reported that the Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries had joined forces to execute such a daring attack.

The IRA and the UVF both claimed responsibility. An American newscaster told the camera that her father had been executed because he was too good at his job. The Irish didn't want him persuading them away from their war.The Irish liked their war.

Max cried through the ten lost days until they flew her father's body back and burned it at an unprivate private funeral. Her mother sobbed without tears for the cameras and her uncle/stepfather made husky eulogies of his dead brother for reporters. Some of those ghouls shouted her name and took her picture when she looked at them.

That night Max ran away.

She ran to Jacksonville, she ran to Pensacola, she ran to Fayetteville and Tulsa, she ran to Amarillo and Lubbock, she ran South again to El Paso, she ran to San Antonio.

She stopped running in Phoenix. In a bus-station coffeeshop, she looked at her watch and saw that two years had passed. She took a pile of dimes and called her mother.

Max had changed. She talked now. She talked in the tough rhythms of cheap crime novels. She talked funny talk about giving head, spit or swallow. Men liked the way she talked. They were impressed by the shell of her independence.

She was a virgin no longer. She'd lost that in a rented room in Sarasota when she fucked a boy she didn't love. It had been a relief but she'd left him that night, unable to sleep beside his animal heat and noise. In the rest of those two lost years, it seemed to her that she had disinterestedly fucked half of the men in America. They'd mostly been grateful but it had touched nothing in her. It had been less than exercise. It had been nothing. Anyway, she only really liked alcoholic men. And they liked her. In sympathy with their own poisonings, she started to find comfort in amphetamines and barbiturates. Stoked on benzedrine in the sweaty arms of some bum in a hotel room, she could sometimes feel free of pain. In two years she thought of her father no tines.