Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (24 page)

She laughed about Aoirghe. `You've got woman trouble, Jake,' she said. `You always will have. Men like you always do.'

It had been going so well up to that point. I had been deciding that I liked her enough not to care about anything else.That it was OK if she didn't want to sleep with me again, I could allow that. Then she had to go and say such a thing. What kind of man was I like? Where were these men like me? What was wrong with us? Why couldn't we get laid?

She brought me my drink. I dallied there for a quarter-hour. I didn't touch the gin. (I could never drink gin neat. I'd only ordered it that I might seem butch and epic.) As I was leaving I said goodbye and told her that she was wasn't entirely true. She kissed my face. I felt worse.

I went into Lavery's. Slat and Deasely were already there. They'd been thrown out of the poetry reading minutes after me. Slat had asked the poet whether it was entirely nice to kill soldiers and got himself chucked out. Deasely had reacted to Slat's expulsion by bellowing, `I like Protestants,' and had soon followed his friend. Feeling some pride, I bought them many drinks. I wondered if anyone at the verse gig could have imagined that they had ejected three Catholics. It seemed unlikely.

By the time the others arrived, I was feeling dreadful. I'd had a couple of drinks. I didn't want to get drunk. Lavery's was horrible. The men, the seeking bachelors and married rogues. The big laughs, the glittering eyes, sharp after groups of women. The beer-buying, the phonecall-making, the endless pissing. I was tired of the Irish and their bogus dissipation.

There were four main sets of people.

There were the expected groups of Alcoholics-inResidence, giving their seminars in the corners. All Belfast bars had was no surprise. Lavery's had one enormous difference. Lavery's seemed to be running a training scheme, an apprenticeship. There was a tableful of guys who were beginning their slide. They'd started out in Lavery's; as they passed their wino exams they might fan out to other bars or actual indigence but they'd started here and they couldn't stop. They'd always be Lavery's graduates.

There was a whole set of men in their late thirties, forties or even fifties who had some vague attachment to or yen for the music business. Wrinkled, obese, they were identifiable by their grey ponytails and the remarkable sexual success they achieved with quite attractive women in their early twenties.This success gave these men confidence. It had not dawned on them that this apparent the more glaring because my relatively handsome friends and I couldn't get a because the physical laws were in abeyance in the warp of Lavery's time and space. It was because of the special physics prevalent there that they had a chance. On the street, they were just sad old geeks.

The third group was the largest. Students from Queen's. Kids too dumb to go to a proper university, they hammed it up in this bar. Almost all country boys and girls, they did their best to be urban, metropolitan. It was only weeks since they'd been joy-riding tractors and shagging sheep.

And finally, of course, there was a selection of astounding dark-haired girls running their fingers through their hair, walking up and down past the bar, their eyes meeting no man's.

About four hundred and fifty people of various ages on three floors spending around six or seven thousand pounds, they sweated and bellowed through their evening. They tried to make it look like fun but they couldn't manage it. I was one of the few people who could admit that I was there because I had no life.

It was better when Chuckie and his massive entourage arrived. Aoirghe was not amongst them but some of her friends had come. The television-watching man was there and the other man with all the theories but there was an enormously attractive girl with them. Dark-haired, a little full-blown, bighipped, she looked like a seedy Snow White. She was my callipygian ideal. I wanted her, naturally.

I think Max must have noticed. She introduced us. Her name was Suzy. We chatted for a little while, amiably supervised by Max. After a few minutes, the big group had moved perceptibly away from us. There was a pause between Suzy and me, a consciousness that we were now in a sense almost alone, almost confidential. She looked up at me (she was fucking attractive).

`What kind of music do you like?' she asked (I promise!).

Come on, it had been a difficult month. I was emotional, I was bruised, I was fucking horny. I had some decisions to make.

`Rhythm and blues,' I said. `Comic opera, early eighties ska, forties crooners, showtunes, big bands, Mozart ...'

It didn't matter how horny I was, it just refused to pan out with this girl. After we'd got over the music hurdle, we chanced the others. Her face was turned to mine. She was beautiful but she kept giving me the full range of all her enticing routines, fluttering eyelashes, drooping lids, flattering smiles. At one horrible and confiding point she told me that she had a theory of life (it couldn't be a theory about life, it had to be a theory of life, it had to be an eighteenth-century disquisition, it had to be the fucking Origin of Species).

`Would that be your brother over there?' I pointed out the theory man from the reading.

`Yeah. How did you guess?'

`I'm mystic that way.'

'Huh?'

'Nothing. Well, what is it?'

`What?'

'Your Theory of Life'

'Oh, yeah.'

With an air of infinite mystery and importance, Suzy socked it to me. Her Theory of Life was that whatever she wanted she went out and got it. Jesus, even then I engaged. Free of contempt, I tried to point out some of the flaws in her complex reasoning. What if what she wanted was inimical to the desires and wants of others? Even when I'd rephrased that it didn't make much of a dent in her. That did it. I told her about Rousseau and the Social Contract, the natural right and the social right, the idea that with rights we are sovereign and subject at the same time and that her sovereignty was my subjection and vice versa.

It took her twenty minutes but, in the end, she went away.

I rejoined the bigger group and hung out with my failed male pals while we all watched Chuckle and his beautiful intelligent American. I still hadn't stopped desperately desiring Suzy but I knew if I sat on my hands, bit my tongue and shut my mouth until I left the joint I'd be OK.

Aoirghe came back with her chubby Nazi poet. I'd had a few more drinks by then but I still shouldn't have said what I said.

`Hey, Aoirghe,' I said. `Don't you prefer your dates to at least look like they might have had some hair once?'

When was I going to learn not to take this girl on? She gave me a whole load of abuse about my remark, she gave me a whole load of abuse about my stunt at the reading, she gave me a whole load of abuse about what a fucker I was. She managed all this in the time it took her date to get her a drink at the bar and return.

'This is Seamus' She introduced him reluctantly.

`And this was Jake,' I said, as I walked away. It was a crap line but that had never stopped me before.

`Hey, Jackson,' she called after me, `I hear you're going on the Peace choo-choo tomorrow.'

`Yeah?'

`Maybe I'll see you there. There might be a reception committee waiting for you when you get back.'

I leered at fat Seamus.

`You have fun in the meantime, buttfuck.' I really did whisper that last bit under my breath as I turned round. The cow must have been some kind of Batgirl or something. I didn't see her coming. She hit me over the right ear. I went flying into a group of moustachioed hardmen, sending their drinks flying. They needed no further invitation. It had been a dull night for them and I was their only nibble.

They dragged me outside and would have beaten me luckless if Max hadn't fired out there and done some big FBI routine on them. I think that they were impressed that she was just so American and just so beautiful. They didn't touch me. It was a very post-modern pub fight.

Max brushed me down and tried ineffectually to set me to rights. `Are you OK?F

'No,' I replied.

'Go home.'

`Hey, Max. What's wrong with me? Why can't I find a girl like you? What's Chuckie got that I haven't? Bigger tits, yeah, but that's not everything.!

She laughed. Manna to the drunk. I liked her so much.

'What's wrong with me?'

`Almost everything,' she answered.

I'd always hated it when people gave that kind of snappy, wisecracking, ultimately meaningless, enigmatic answer.

`I've always hated it when people give that kind of snappy, wise...

I don't think I made it to the end of the sentence.

Waking is the wrong word for what I did that morning. There was no emergence from darkness, there was no jolt into consciousness. I didn't wake up as disease just got this new open-eyed, standing-up symptom. I drank some water. It felt as though the first few mouthfuls were absorbed straight into the hard dry sponge of my tongue. I made coffee easily enough but then I poured it into the ashtray. I lit the filter end of two consecutive cigarettes. I was so fucked I smoked them anyway.

It was looking grim there until my cat put in his bid for his breakfast. Miaow! That was just what I needed. I chased him for nearly fifteen minutes, finally cornering him in the bathroom. While I was trying to figure out some method of holding him down so that I could pee on him, he escaped out of the window. I peed in the sink instead.

I felt much better for that. I washed, I brushed, I groomed. I had a fat lip and a mark on my brow but I looked better than recently. I made more coffee and switched on the radio. Outside, it looked like summertime. It was July so it had come early to Northern Ireland. It would be over by lunchtime. Not intending to go to work, it had been nice to put on my suit (the dark blue - last night's charcoal was in pretty bad shape) but it still felt like an after-hours Agincourt between my ears. I decided I wasn't going to drink again. It wasn't how bad I felt; it was how bored I'd become.

`A man was shot last night in an apparent punishment shooting. He is critically injured in hospital. The IRA say that he had been repeatedly warned about antisocial behaviour. Police said ...'

There was me switching off the radio again. Soon, I'd forget what music sounded like. Antisocial behaviour? Fuck, what was that? Did he pick his nose in mixed company? Did he wear bad shoes? The IRA said that they policed their own areas. They sure did. They shot kids in the car thieves, kids who smoked a spliff or two, maybe kids who gave them lip. Hush ma mouth, but that never sounded socialist to me.

I checked my mail. There was nothing too interesting. Until I opened the door, that is. There, on my doorstep, a package lay. I knew immediately that Crab and Hally were doing their stuff again. Nobody else liked me enough to send me parcels.

I picked it up gingerly. I squeezed it. Not squishy. Glad there was no shit, I opened it confidently enough. In it was a photograph of Matt and Mamie's house and some ball-bearings. I went back inside.

I drank some more coffee, I even switched the radio back on. It took me some minutes but I finally worked out why they'd sent the ball-bearings. The dumb shits mustn't have been able to get their hands on any actual bullets so they'd sent the BBs as a kind of air-rifle substitute. I almost laughed outright. I still called old M&M though.

`Hello.!

`Mamie?'

`Yes. Who's that?'

Jake!

'What's wrong?'

'Nothing. I just called to see if you were both OK.'

'Jake, I've never known you conscious before nine o'clock, never mind making social phone calls'

'Yeah, yeah:

'Are you going to tell me what's wrong?'

'Let me talk to Matt'

There was some inaudible scuffling and grumbling and Matt came on the line. `Hello, Jake:

'You had any surprise callers recently, Matt?'

'No. Will we have?'

'No. 'I paused. I'd chosen to speak to Matt not because I was sexist but because I knew Matt was marginally less macho than his wife. If Mamie heard about it she'd be out there with a Kalashnikov. `Don't say anything to Mamie but if you get any visitors you don't know, you call me.'

'All right.' '

'It's nothing, Matt. Just some guys looking for me about some money. They might remember that I used to live there.'

Right,' he said insincerely.

'I'll speak to you soon.'

Matt was silent. 'Listen, Jake,' he said uncertainly, `we've got something here for you.You can have it when you call next. If we live that long.'

I laughed.'You're not going to tell me what it is? You always loved mystery, Matt. Hey, listen, tell Mamie I'm going on the Peace Train today. She'll like that'

I heard him relay the information and I heard Mamie's unmistakable snort of derision.

'Tell your old lady to give me a break,' I chided him. 'She should be pleased. It's a whole new me.'

`That would be nice,' said Matt.

I hung up. I called Chuckie and told him about my parcel. Let me think about it, he said. He felt that he could help. I didn't hold out much hope. I said I'd meet him at the station for the Peace Train Jaunt. He sounded a little vague. Sure, he said, sure. I didn't like the sound of that but he'd hung up and I couldn't be bothered calling him back.