Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (17 page)

Then a very bad thing happened. She didn't tell Chuckie what it was. All he needed to know was that a bad thing happened.

Her mother flew to Phoenix and took her home. She spent a month in Miami. She tried to be calm and she tried to be good. But her mother's smile made her face itch. So, without pleasure, she fucked her uncle/stepfather in her old bedroom and then she ran away again.

She rode Greyhounds for near a month. She had everywhere to go and nowhere to stop. There was nothing for her in New York now that her father was dead. She could not go back to Miami. And all the places she'd stopped in the two years after she left home were only motels and dirty rooms to her. So she just rode buses along and across, up and down America.

On a two-day stop in Reno, she asked an old man where she stood on the map she'd bought. He'd looked at it long and then smiled at her sadly. `Oh, you're not even on this map, honey.'

In a truckers' bar in North Carolina, she tried to pick up the girl who worked behind the bar. Brown-haired, brown-eyed, the girl had served her beers for two hours, her hips twitching without artifice as she walked. Max cornered her in the restroom and pushed her against a wall.The girl had peeled her off like a dirty shirt.

She came to a stop the night she slept in an alley near the bus station in LA.The air was full of big-city noise and she trembled as she slept.There were cries and gunshots. It seemed to her that the whole of this big city was angry. Suddenly tired, she slept till dawn and then boarded a bus to Kansas.

She hadn't seen her grandparents since her father had died. Her father's father had sold all his land but they still lived in their old house sixty miles from Wichita. Her grandfather's straight back had bent from his years in the dirt he owned and he did not mourn its loss.

Her grandparents, Don and Bea, had fought for twenty years. Two decades ago there had been an argument so divisive that they had split their sitting room into two. One side was feminine, brushed and clean. It had furniture, curtains, there was well-swept order and peace. Her uncle's side was greasy and hardly furnished at all, apart from a buggy old armchair beside the fire. The border between the two regions was only visible because of the unwavering margin between the shine of her floorboards and the dull glisten of the accumulated dirt on his. The strange thing was that they never went anywhere without being together. Always separate inside their home, they walked, sat or stood firmly side by side when they confronted the outside world. Speculation was rife about whether their bedroom was divided in a similar way to their living room. It seemed impossible that a couple who could bear each other so little would sleep together.

She stayed there a year. In that year, she talked of her father with her grandparents. In that year her mother visited once to tell her she was getting divorced and remarried to a doctor from San Diego. Max decided to go to college.

Just before she was to leave, Don died. Bea was deranged with grief. When the family came to see Don's body lying in its coffin, she stopped the procession half-way through. She clambered onto the coffin and hunkered over the body like a child, sobbing. The rest of the family were astonished to see these protestations from the woman who'd split the room to get away from her husband. They buried him next day. Bea allowed only one

Afterwards, she did not change the layout of that divided room. She cleaned her own half and maintained his own portion in its usual disarray. She conceived a particular fondness for Max and it was thus that Max finally saw the bedroom and knew the truth about whether it, too, had been divided so starkly. She sneaked in one day while Bea was sleeping in her armchair.

She was surprised by what she saw. She told no one about the ordinary room with the deep curtains and the one plump double bed.

She went to UCLA a month later.

It felt like two years of summertime. She sat reading on lawns. She smelt the fragrance her friends brought with them. She talked politics. She talked school.

She fell in love with her philosophy professor. He was a handsome, untidy young man who smoked secret cigarettes in his office. Half the girls and a quarter of the boys on the humanities campus wanted to fuck him. Some had tried and so far all had failed. His smile was as crumpled as his suit and there was something generously ill-fitting about him in general.

One day she saw him in the coffee bar with a couple of young children. Max's heart sank a little to see him married. She joined their table. The young professor was gracious and friendly as always. He introduced her to his children. Married or not, he was made more beautiful by the children crawling over him. She understood why his suits were always crumpled.

Max made cutesy with the kids. She found out their ages. She asked them about their favourite toys and television shows. In a calculated moment, she praised the beauty of the little girl and asked her if her mother had made the ribbons in her hair.

The young professor's smile tightened.The little boy stopped his play and the little girl frowned.

`We don't have a mom.'

The young professor swallowed and spoke to her in a low, level voice, the kind of voice to which children did not listen. `I'm a widower. Their mother died in a car crash a year ago.'

They talked there for an hour. At one point he excused himself to go to the bathroom. The little girl took the opportunity to tell Max that her mother was gone and her daddy looked after them and how sometimes their daddy's face was sad when he looked at them and how sometimes he cried when he was putting them to bed at night.

The young professor returned and took the child on his knee once more. He whispered something lumpy to her and kissed her soft cheek. He looked at Max, at the mist of her eyes and his smile was gracious. `Ah, has Alice been telling you sentimental stories about me?' he asked, gently amused. `She thinks it will make people fall in love with me.'

The little girl was right. There was a month of moves at him. He was unfailingly polite, unfailingly busy with something else. Some other girls told her she was wasting her time. The young professor didn't sleep with his students. If they had failed, Max had no chance.

But there was a night after a late lecture when it rained. She had walked from the theatre with him and they had shared her small umbrella, which kept neither of them dry. They talked under there, the umbrella keeping them close. She had wished it was smaller yet.

The young professor had given her a ride home that night. When he pulled up, she knew by the rigidness of his neck as they parted that he had considered the possibility of feeling something for her. It was easy from there.

Within a month they were spending most nights with each other. She was astonished by the heat of his desire and the wildness of his remorse. She had never met a man who didn't want to. It made her want to very much. And, afterwards, as the young professor lay, naked and grieving for his dead wife, her eyes were full of his flesh.

When he lectured, she marvelled at how her fellow students listened. She flushed with pride to hear him talk. The low red of the evening sun through the windows would make his hair shine like memory and she would want to take him publicly where he stood.

And when he touched her, his touch was courteous, his kiss gentle. He seemed to have a remnant of the manhood her father had possessed, a tender, fightless thing.

Everything in her changed. For both of them she began to believe in a time soon to come. A time when they could forget the damaged process of their lives and be married.

The young professor's children loved her and she was warm with them. But she noticed a stiffness in his face when she touched them. She could tell when he was thinking of his dead wife and she would ask him about her. She asked him about her clothes, about her habits, her tastes so that she could avoid doing anything that reminded him of her. Sometimes, she would find photographs of the dead woman and would feel unpardonable jealousy.

And when they argued, she cried bitterly and hated his wife and said cruel things. It was easy to love the dead, the silent, forgivable dead. He was angry when she talked of his wife.

Her grandmother died. She blew her brains out with bon's old rat-rifle.The young professor was gentle with her while she arranged to fly back to Kansas. There, her mother cried in her arms and was sorry for all the things she could not remember. They buried her grandmother beside her husband. Bea had left Max most of the money she'd had. It was over a million dollars. Max's mother cried again. She was already rich but Max's legacy wounded her.

She spent two weeks in Kansas, clearing up the crazy old house. When she returned to the West Coast she went to the young professor. It was a weekend. He was with his children. They greeted her like a stranger. They had retrieved the world they'd had before her arrival, the world centred on the unspoken, unseen presence of the dead wife and mother. Later, when he put the children to bed, he lingered with them for an hour and more.

That night she fucked him like a whore, like he was a whore. She mauled and moulded his flesh in her hands. Then, when he started to cry, she got up and packed a bag. Before she left she took a picture of his dead wife from the drawer in which she knew it lay. She stood at the foot of his bed, while he sobbed, and threw the photograph onto the empty space she'd left on the pillow

As she had always done, Max ran away. She flew to San Diego and fought with her mother within an hour. She flew straight back to LA. She packed some bags and boarded a plane for New York. It used to be she would run away by bus. Now, with her grandfather's money, her flights were properly airborne.

In La Guardia, she telephoned her mother, she telephoned the young professor. Neither gave her a reason to come back. She wept briefly.

And then she left America.

She flew club class New York to London. JFK to Heathrow. It had been two airborne and airport days. LA to San Diego. San Diego to LA. LA to New York. New York to London. The plastic airports had seemed more substantial than the cities themselves on the flightsome night.

She was going to Paris. Her father had spent a year there before his marriage. He had always talked about how beautiful it was, how happy he had been.

At Heathrow, she grabbed her bags and wheeled her trolley to a stand-up coffee bar. Numbly, she drank her feeble drink. London looked like New least, the airport did. The men were shorter and their teeth were bad but everything else was much of a muchness. She hoped Paris would be better.

She wheeled her trolley to the Air France desk. A viciously pretty British woman dressed in multiple nylons asked if she could help.

'Yeah, gimme a ticket to Paris'

The woman's smile twitched briefly. 'What kind of ticket, madam

'A plane ticket, honey. Like I'd ask you for a bus ticket.'

Her smile flattened completely and disappeared.' My name is Helen, I don't answer to Honey.'

'Fuck it,' said Max. She walked away.

She spent six motiveless hours sitting on her bags, numbly avoiding an alternative destination. Paris was a city she had sought without much reason. It hadn't worked out. She would have to go somewhere else. It didn't really matter where. She looked up at a departure screen and saw the word that trade up her mind:

BELFAST

She stepped off the plane at Aldergrove. Sticky drizzle immediately coated her hot face.This had been the first time that she had been in the exterior of any place for the previous two transitional days.

She stepped through the airport nervously. She knew it would be OK if she managed to walk past the spot where her father had been murdered. She remembered the place well from the television reports. It had looked to her like all the places she would never know. Her heart was hot and rapid but she walked on bravely. She passed it without trauma. She was almost disappointed.

She took a squat bus to Belfast. There she disembarked and waited. Trolleyless, laden with bags, she couldn't think of what to do. Her travelling had lost its energy. She felt heavy and motionless. She simply sat on the pile of her bags once more.

She lit a cigarette and pulled her collar tighter round her neck. She was breathless with the strangeness of this new town, with all its sticky cold and its planetary tame. It was like walking into a cowboy film. There was an open rank of blue and white buses with mysterious names all rolled above their windshields: Enniskillen, Dungannon, Omagh, L'derry. There was an unreality in this, an unlikelihood that pleased her.

That night she sat on a broken chair and stared out of the uncurtained window of the room she had rented. The window looked out to a road on which people congregated on the warm evening. A shop was still open and groups of women chatted outside its bright window. Across the road she saw two small queues for a cinema.The queues made her unaccountably happy. She watched as they grew and then shrank to nothing and it was quite, quite dark. She did not feel alone.

It pleased her that her life could be so random. The passage from Los Angeles to this obscure Belfast street had been entirely without volition. Unfortunate glances, involuntary decisions, chance conversations. It seemed a suitable way to move herself around the planet.

That night she slept deep and true ...

When she had finished all her talking, all her story, Max looked down at Chuckie. He lay beached on the bed, the meagre sheet drawn around him. There was a look on his face she had not seen before; a warmth for him flickered in her belly. She hadn't talked so hard in years. She wondered what it was about this dumb, fat guy that had produced all this narrative in her. She smiled. He had done an admirable amount of listening. There were depths to chubby Chuck. Looking down at his lap, she saw the rim of his erection against the sheet. She was surprised but not upset. She laughed. `Hey, Chuck. Have I been turning you on?'

He looked up at her and paused. His face was pale with the strain of new emotions, unplumbed depths. His eyes were moist with love.

`How much is a million dollars in sterling?' he asked.