Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (3 page)

It was, of course, nothing serious. As Belfast bombs go, it went. Little to relate. Nobody died, nobody bled. It was no big deal. That was the big deal. It was dull stuff. Nobody really noticed. What had happened to us here? Since when had deto nations in the neighbourhood barely raised a grumble?

It had been a while since I had been that close to an explosion, what with me moving to this middle-class end of town and all. It was strange.You forget what they're like. But when it went off, I remembered what they were like, quicker than I wanted to.

What were bombs like? naturally. And loud. And frightening. They were loud and frightening in your gut like when you were a child and you fell on your head and couldn't understand why it hurt like panic in your belly. They were fairly irreversible too. Bombs were like dropped plates, kicked cats or hasty words. They were error. They were disarrangement and mess. They were this was important - knowledge. When you heard that dry splash, that animal thud of bomb, distant or close, you knew something.You knew that someone somewhere was having a very bad time indeed.

It wasn't the bombs that were scary. It was the bombed. Public death was a special mortality. Bombs mauled and possessed their dead. Blast removed people's shoes like a solicitous relative, it opened men's shirts pruriently; women's skirts rode up their bloody thighs from the force of the lecherous blast. The bombed dead were spilled on the street like cheap fruit. And, finally, unfuckingbeatably, the bombed dead were dead. They were so very, very dead.

(Incidentally, the controlled explosion was carried out on a bin bag full of discarded Kentucky Fried Chicken. There were little pieces of singed white-meat all over the place. My cat was a very happy cat.)

It was Saturday. I couldn't look for another job on a Saturday and I had the purposeless day to get through. I thought of my cheap friends.They would do. It was Chuckie Lurgan's thirtieth birthday. It would be a big event and his present wouldn't need wrapping. The only decision would be which bar to get him lushed up in.

I left my flat and found the Wreck still unstolen. Nobody was ever going to steal the Wreck. It was the only thing I liked about it. I called my wreck the Wreck for obvious reasons. It was a hugely shitty vehicle but it had incredibly clean windows. Rusty bodywork covered in three-year-old filth but the windows gleamed. I cleaned them every day so that I could see my city when I drove.

I headed for Chuckie's house.

We ended up in Mary's bar again. It was very present tense.The usual cast: Chuckie Lurgan, Donal Deasely, Septic Ted, Slat Sloane and me. The boys, the crowd. Oh, boy, I needed new friends.

Mary was there, working her tables, making no tips. My chest tightened when I saw her and I found out what I'd only guessed. That I'd made myself want her. The way I do. The way we all do. I'd caused myself to need her. When she took our order she said hello to me in a voice commendably level, admirably sure. Mary was just a working-class Belfast girl waiting table but she had a bit of style.

Chuckie's cousin came in after a while. He had the girl with him. They were getting married, apparently. Chuckie's cousin seemed unhappy. From the way he followed her gaze, from the way he looked where she looked, I guessed he thought that she was too pretty. He was right. I wouldn't have married her. Chuckie told me that the cousin was so jealous he dusted her breasts for fingerprints.

And, as usual, the talk got talk was always big in Belfast bars. The old mix, constitutional democracy, freedom through violence and the eternal rights of man. We used to talk about naked women but after a few years we stopped believing each other's lies. Chuckie hijacked the high moral ground which was a bit rich for someone as stupid as Chuckie. I mean, history and politics were books on a shelf to Chuckie and Chuckle was no reader.

Some guy from Delhi Street started Buffing on about revo lution. I got involved. I got angry. I was only there to see if Mary would go home with me again and, as always, I got involved.

It felt like another of our wasted nights. Six hours of flapping our gums about things we didn't understand at a cumulative cost of about twenty quid per head. Donal and Slat were talking crap about morality and genetics while Chuckie chimed in with his usual dumb-fat-guy routine. The talk seemed easy, like it had fallen off the back of a lorry. But the talk was truly difficult. It was hard, hard work.

Chuckle's cousin and Chuckle's cousin's girl had a row. One of those two-way tiffs conducted in the Irish manner (pretty shrill). I couldn't be sure but I came away with the distinct impression that the whole thing blew up because the girl refused to shave her bikini-line. They went home in separate taxis. I must say, it seemed a lot of fuss about a haircut.

And, as the night passed by, Mary served us our drinks and I failed to talk to her. Sometimes she looked at me, sometimes she didn't. I knew because I looked at her every time she breathed. It looked like we'd drink out our time and I'd miss my chance if chance I had.

And soon enough there was that grim business of barmen shouting time while my drunken pals tried to jostle me into leaving. I kept meeting Mary's eye and leaving messages there. I panicked like a general whose army is retreating. Chuckie was so drunk that he seemed to have lost the ability to speak English but even he seemed to have worked out what I was about.

`You taking her home?' he leered.

I blushed at him for want of anything better. Slat was mouthing about moving on to Lavery's but Chuckie silenced him with the broad flat of his hand and leaned to me confidentially.'Iss awright. Iss ma birthday. I'll take care it.'

And then he did. To my horror, he stood and called Mary over. She answered his summons, her face sceptical but toler ant.

'Whass name, love?' asked Chuckie, with bland patronage.

`Mary.'

`Well, Chuckie paused to wave a mild goodbye to some exiting group of yob mates. `Well, Mary, my friend here, who's a good friend, a good man, my friend here wants to take you home.'

Mary smiled no smiles and promised no promises. She took Chuckie's beer glass from his hand and turned to me. `Wait for me,' she said. `We'd better talk.'

For the second night in succession I sat near the door while the punters stumbled out and the staff cleaned up. It was somehow less embarrassing the second time. This time, the bouncer, a different, bigger, Saturday-night kind of guy, wore Republican tattoos. I didn't talk to him. I was scared of not seeming Catholic enough.

And I watched Mary as I waited. In blue polka-dot dress like the other waitresses, she bent to wipe the tables. She was the kind of girl I wouldn't even have pissed on when I was sixteen (I learnt that phrase from girls who had used it to decline my own tender offers). But now she had all it took. I loved that about girls. The odd things that could make you want to make them your own. Who was responsible? Where could I complain?

When she had finished, she put on her coat and stood beside me. She didn't smile and I knew that what was coming was meant to be bad. But there was something in her face that made me hope it would not be so.

We left and walked out into the overstocked streets of afterhours Belfast. Everywhere, the pavements were blistered with drunks and bums. We weren't the only boys and girls standing on those pavements but I think we were probably the soberest. They were all doing their shouting, laughing, crying, getting arrested thing. We felt like the small still centre of some unpleasant weather.

She turned to face me, lowered her eyes to the pavement and then back up towards mine. A big move. There was no fun in that face of hers any more. It was all serious from here on in.

`Look, I just don't know what's going on.,

Was it just me or was that everybody's favourite line? It's not a complicated line. But when some grave big-eyed girl tells you that, doesn't it make you want to run around and punch the air like a footballer?

The street was full of drunks and noise, her face was blank with some pain or fear and her line was blunt enough for two. I had to say something decent.

`Let's walk,' I said.

That night she was so beautiful it was stupid. I wanted to ask her who had made her so beautiful and why? What was it for exactly?

We walked a very round walk to my flat. We dodged the chuck-out crowds in Shaftesbury Square, with all their shouts and pukes and fights. Ours was a more lyrical path. We took in the special streets with the nice trees and the big lamps. We walked by the river where everything could feel briefly eighteenth century.

The night was too good, too big and dark to believe. The weather broke and a light rain fell like retribution. She looked like a love song that night and my heart leapt in dumb, frantic syncopations.

We were talking the usual talk of people who want to make love but who haven't quite brought it horticulture, synchronized swimming, all that stuff.

I shook like litter (leaves don't shake, I've always thought, whereas your average litter habitually trembles like demons). I shook, hands, lips and heart, which proved, somehow joyously, that I was alive after all, that some bits still worked.

I stopped her dead in the middle of Governor's Bridge and we faced each other. She looked tired from her six smoky hours in the bar but nevertheless! Her face was framed by the dark sky, the wide, wide river and the lights of the streets that straggled down the hill. What with the crisp cold and all that street-lamp glitter in her eyes, it looked so great that I could only think she had rehearsed it. Nipped up the previous evening with a set of mirrors and measuring tapes and worked out the best possible angle in which to make my heart stop.

`Would it be terrible,' I said, `if I asked you to kiss me?'

And, well, that's the way it goes, isn't it? I was standing there arguing the toss with this girl about whether we would walk and talk or stand and kiss or just part in the middle on that most medium Belfast bridge and suddenly something happened in me, something so big it near blew us both away. It was like God had come and spoken to me, like the best bit in your favourite song and I knew that she had everything I'd ever wanted, ever needed and I could hold this big-eyed girl and still miss Sarah and it was all all right in some way.

And, hey, I'm pretty handsome too and I think that helped, I think that argued my case.

And she kissed me and I remembered that I'd forgotten what that was like.

I realized, when she took her clothes off, that I hadn't even tried to estimate what her breasts might be like, which was pretty sensitive going for a guy such as me. And her breasts were eventually strange soft things, pale and unobtrusive. She thought I was disappointed, making the woman's mistake of not understanding how little her breasts mattered in the scheme of love.

And I knew when my skin touched her skin that I probably wasn't going to kill myself for a while, that life was fundamentally a pretty sound commodity when it could include a girl like Mary. And when she touched me she touched the matter in me. She touched me through.

`Jake,' she said. `Jake.'

Why not? That was my name.

She left before dawn. She wanted to get home in case her rozzer beau called when he came off his night shift. Our second taxi-waiting conversation in two days. She was trying to make me understand that this was all, a new one-night habit that girls had developed; these days it was the guys who spent weeks waiting by the phone.

I don't know why I couldn't take that seriously, why I couldn't make that matter. After all that love we'd made, we'd opened a dialogue that she couldn't end by stepping into a taxi in the middle of the night.

She told me that she liked me. That in different circumstances, in another time, on another planet, something might have come of it. But she said that we had to be sensible. She loved this cop of hers and she couldn't wreck her life because of the way my eyes crinkled when I smiled.

I smiled.

When the cab came, I walked her out. She got into the back seat and rolled down the window. The driver stayed where he was and pretended, commendably, that he had no ears.

'This isn't it,, I said confidently, as I bent over her.

`Yes, it is.' She'd reapplied her lipstick, she was redraped in tights and heels and no longer naked; some of her erstwhile firmness had returned.

`Can't be' I smiled for all I was worth.

`Don't wait around for anything!

`You can't stop me.'

'I can ask you.'

She told the driver her address and he put the car in gear. But then, just as she'd finished all her tough work, her face cleared of its purpose and she lurched towards me and clumsily kissed my face through the open window. Her eyes bulged with the promise of tears, she bumped her head as she sat back, hair and lipstick messed, and she was gone.

I stood on the street watching her go and thought how difficult it was not to fall in love with people when they did things like that.

I smoked some cigarettes and drank some coffee and spent my night looking out of each of my windows.

I'd had an unhappy childhood. My folks had fucked me about in complicated and uncomplicated ways. A poor boy's childhood is thought to be a bad thing. It's supposed to fuck you up. It's supposed to teach you not to care. It's supposed to make you sad. I don't think having that childhood of mine ever really made me sad. I just think it made me fall in love with girls all the time.

Before I went to bed I called my cat in. He took his usual ten minutes of hunting crouches, slow stalks and cavalry gallops to come. Before I closed the door behind him I noticed a new graffito on the wall beside the police station.

The local kids would write things there for the purposes of bravado or initiation. But it was no big cops were too bored to hassle them. Every month or so some civic-minded old guy who lived nearby would come and paint it over. And then the kids would start all over again. It had become a ritual and it was how I told what time of the month it was. It was an epic and somehow touching battle, very Belfast. The kids wrote the usual stuff of both sides: IRA, INLA, UVF, UFF, UDA, IPLO, FTP (Fuck the Pope), FTQ (Fuck the Queen), and once (hilariously) FTNP (Fuck the Next Pope). But tonight's graffito was a new one on me. It was early in the month. The old guy had painted recently so the wall was nearly clean, and someone had chosen to write in white three-foot-high letters: