Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (32 page)

Caroline Causton had called Chuckie at the office. The police had come to Eureka Street on the off-chance of finding a relative and Caroline had quizzed them. For a blank black moment, Chuckie had thought that Caroline was telling him that his mother had been injured or killed. When he heard about the shock, he was upset but unmistakably relieved.

He picked Caroline up on the way to the idea of `shock' had reduced his urgency. The Accident and Emergency Department at the City Hospital was in uproar. Chuckie and his neighbour fought through the crowd as quickly as possible. A nurse told them that Peggy would be under observation for a few hours and that then they might take her home. She wasn't hurt but her shock was unusually severe and they had to be careful.

Chuckie and Caroline waited for three hours. Chuckie had not thought about what had happened until then. He could avoid thinking about it no longer. The evidence, the result was before him. The hospital was thronged with the injured and their relatives. He didn't see anything too dreadful. He had arrived much too late for that. He did, however, see scores of people weep. He had never seen scores of people weep before. Some wept quietly, some hysterically. Some bawled openly. One woman, whose husband had just died, squealed dreadfully, as though she were dying herself. The screams continued. The other weeping stopped as people turned to look at her. Her knees had given way and she had fallen to the floor where she scrabbled and beat her hands. Chuckie felt a bad taste in his throat. Another woman tried to raise the crazed widow. Calm down, she kept saying, calm down. Jesus, thought Chuckie. Tall order. Let her scream, help her scream.

Before they took his mother home, a medic gave them careful instructions about looking after her. It was vital that she was kept warm and quiet. Caroline and Chuckie decided that they would watch over her that night, sharing the duty. When they got back to Eureka Street, they steered Peggy into Chuckie's bedroom. The larger room was more appropriate, they felt. It was an easy task: she was malleable as a child. Chuckie went downstairs while Caroline undressed his mother and put her into bed.

Caroline went across the street to get some things and tell her husband. The man was mutinous, apparently, but his wife was adamant. When Caroline told him about this, Chuckie was filled by an abrupt and uncharacteristic desire to go across the road and beat Mr Causton's head in with a brick.

Caroline took the first watch. She told Chuckie to get something to eat and then to try to sleep until she called him. Chuckie guessed that if he slept Caroline would watch over her friend all night. He said nothing.

When she went upstairs, he enjoyed four grins, silent hours downstairs in the tiny house. He tried to eat a sandwich but it tasted like rubber. The smell in his throat from the hospital had lingered. He tried watching television but could not concentrate on the flicker of those coloured lights. He saw some news footage of the Fountain Street scene. His mother had been there. It was an impossible thought. An impossible event.

The little house made the event seem even more improbable. The interior of was the only scene in which he could think properly of his mother. It was where she belonged. She was so of the place that sometimes the distraction between the woman and her house grew blurred, and sometimes it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The tiny house was like the tiny woman. Plain, smallscale, indoors.

Chuckle was appalled to find tears in his eyes. His already overblown self felt bloated with emotion. His nose tingled and twitched and he felt wetness on his cheeks.The idea of his useless, small-time mother enduring all that was unbearable. He closed his eyes and tried not to look at her furniture or her pathetically ornamented mantelpiece.

At three o'clock in the morning, he went upstairs and relieved Caroline. She refused to go home. She said she would sleep on the sofa downstairs.

It was worse to watch. His mother slept soundly enough, twitching occasionally, and, at one heart-breaking point, whimpering like a little girl. Chuckle's heart filled. He touched her face and found her cheek wet with drool. He had never watched her sleep before. He felt like a lover. He felt like a father. Silently, guiltily, he wept at the thought that she might have been hurt, at the thought that she might ever be hurt.

A week had now passed since Fountain Street. To Chuckie, his mother seemed little improved since that first dreadful night. She was speaking, true. But not much. Not so as you'd have noticed.

He put the teapot and cup on a tray and carried it up to her room.

She lay in her bed with her small face quarter-turned into her pillow. He put the tray on the little table beside her head.

`There's your tea,' he said gently. His throat was still thick with this unaccustomed emotion so his voice sounded strange to him. He bent down beside her. She opened her left eye and murmured her thanks.

Chuckie looked at the bottle of sleeping pills by his mother's bed. There were three left. There had been the same number for a week now. He knew she didn't sleep. He wondered why she wouldn't take her nitrazepam. He hadn't asked her yet.

`Caroline says she'll come over lunchtime,' he announced to the wall.

He helped her gently into a sitting position. He poured some tea. He made it badly and it looked greasy and dark. Peggy drank a little. Chuckie looked at the untouched magazines by her bed. He had chosen poorly and had mixed up middle-aged knitting magazines with youthful glossies filled with pictures of naked young women and articles about penis size.

`Would you like me to get you some more magazines? Would you like me to get you some different ones?'

She tried to smile at him but there was a droop in her features that made him think she was going to cry.

'I've just got to ring the office,' he said hastily.'I'll be back in a minute.'

He looked back towards the bed as he walked away. She sat motionless, the forgotten cup cooling in her hand. As he stood at the door he glanced at the wall beside his head. The muchpainted photograph of himself and the pontiff was there. He had taken it from the drawer and hung it over his list in its old place in the hope that it might make her laugh. It had not yet succeeded. He touched it fondly and went downstairs.

Chuckie hadn't spent much time at the office in the past week. Events and schemes were afoot there that he barely understood. Luke had tried to explain as simply as he could, but Chuckie, sudden mother-lover, found no room in which to do any new thinking, any new comprehending.

He called Luke. He told him that he would spend the rest of the morning with his mother.'How are we doing?' he asked.

'You told me not to tell you, Chuckle!

That was true. It had all become too frightening for Chuckle. His fattest fantasies were being made copious flesh and he could not face all the facts of his id. He didn't know all the grisly details. What he didn't know couldn't keep him awake at night.

'Well, what about the ecumenical dating agency?You can tell me about that,' he said.

'I hired someone to run it yesterday and the ads go in the papers tomorrow. It's moving along nicely.'

'We're not going to make much money out of it.'

'Why not? We always do'

That was fair enough, thought Chuckie, they always did. He didn't want to ask himself why.

'Is the kid still there?' he asked.

'Yes,' said Luke, in some embarrassment. 'I've told him repeatedly to go away but he just asks me whether my dick reaches my arse.'

'Relax,' said Chuckie.'Send him round.'

He hung up.

For twenty minutes Chuckie cleaned, tidied, and avoided going up to his mother's room. Every few minutes, his conscience would lead him inexorably to the foot of the little staircase but his dread and love prevented him from mounting that obstacle.

After twenty minutes the bell rang. He answered the door to find Roche, slightly less dirty than usual, standing on his doorstep, looking entirely unimpressed.

`Come in,' said Chuckie.

`Ta,' said Roche.

He led the boy into the kitchen, not noticing the feral looks of calculation on the child's face. They sat by the table and Chuckie poured yet more tea. He'd bought a score of yuppie coffee-makers of various degrees of complexity and ingenuity but he couldn't help yet preferring a cup of tea brewed with working-class over-insistence.

`Do you have a first name?' he asked the boy.

Roche's indignation was immediate. `Are you trying to get up me again? You're just like your friend - always trying it on.'

Jake had warned him. Chuckie had listened but it had made no difference. Roche was still around. Chuckie had first encountered him when he had gone up to Catholic Land on the Lower Falls and rounded up some kids there to go twiggathering for him. There weren't enough Protestant urchins to go round and every bone in Chuckie's body, every atom of his being, was ecumenical. This kid had gathered three or four times as many sticks as the others but Chuckie suspected that he had operated some sinister form of sub-contracting. Whatever, Chuckle had recognized a kindred soul and had paid him extra.

That had been a mistake. Roche had been lurking around their offices ever since. Tentative at first, he had become bolder and for the last week Chuckie had been dealing with irritated phone calls from Luke, complaining about the boy's presence around and outside the building. Chuckie knew the kid should have been going to school or something but he had made him run a few errands. Once or twice he had even invented something for the kid to do. Roche guessed this and despised him heartily for his weakness, but Chuckie couldn't help liking him.

'Well?' he asked.

'Well, what?' squeaked Roche.

'Your name.'

He saw the boy's mouth open in some imminent bellow of homophobic accusation. He cut him short.'Forget it,' he said. 'I don't want to know.'

There was an uncomfortable pause. Chuckie sipped his tea. Roche stared dumbly at him. The boy was unsurprised not to be told why he had been summoned. Evidently he suspected another manufactured task.There was a faintly supercilious curl to his stained features.'How's your old ma?' he asked suddenly.

Chuckie spluttered his tea. `I don't know,' he mumbled uncertainly. `I think she's improving.'

'That's good'

Chuckie stared.

'These things take time,' Roche continued, with an air of infinite gravity. 'Especially at her age.'

`Yeah. Right. Absolutely.'

'Don't worry about it. It'll be OK.' He patted Chuckie's shoulder with his tiny filthy hand.'Mind if I smoke?'

Chuckie shook his head. The boy lit up. He sat back in his chair and exhaled comfortably. He looked about the little kitchen with a placid expression.

Chuckie pulled some money from his pockets.'I want you to do something for me.'

`No handjobs, remember!

Chuckie tried to smile. 'Go to McCracken's and buy a big bunch of flowers and then take them here,' he passed the boy a scrap of paper,'and give them to Max.'

'The Yank chick?'

'Yes,' answered Chuckie, somewhat resentfully.

'What kind of flowers?'

`I don't know Flowers:

`You're a poet.!

`What?'

'What kind of flowers? Do you want roses, carnations, lilies? What do you want to say to this girl?'

`Just buy the fucking flowers.' He passed Roche some notes.

The boy looked at the notes in his own hand and then at the rest. A smile hinted around the squeeze of his narrow eyes. `I tell you what,' he suggested, `why don't you slip me fifty and I'll make sure you say something special to her?'

`And keep the change, right?'

Roche tried to look affronted. `There won't be much. I'll get something swanky. I'm a bit soft-hearted that way myself.'

Chuckie gave him the rest of the money. The boy left.

After he had gone, Chuckie stood for some minutes in the narrow hallway. He suspected that he should have been wondering all kinds of things about the boy. What were his dreams? He didn't, though. He couldn't. As always now, his thoughts were full of his mother. Possessing all these new contemplative skills was proving as vexatious as possessing all this money.

Having screwed up his courage, he was about to go upstairs when the bell rang again. He opened the door.

A surly man in overalls looked back at him. `Lurgan, fortytwo Eureka Street?' he asked.

`Yup,

`There are two vans here now and another couple coming this afternoon ... Are you sure about this, mate? I've never delivered an order this big.' The man had pushed his way past Chuckle and now stood in the middle of the little sitting room. `Fuck,' the man said. `We're never going to get all this stuff into a house this size. Sign here.' He thrust a piece of paper into Chuckie's hand and left.

Chuckie read the delivery note. He remembered. He regretted.

Chuckie had always had an intense and troubling relationship with mail-order catalogues. They had always meant much to him. In the tiny, muted world of Eureka Street, they had been injections of colour, prosperity and glamour. His mother's house was not a house of literature. There was a Bible and there were catalogues. It was obvious which the fat, consuming young Chuckie would have preferred.

As he grew older, he became conscious that they were tacky, sad, but some component in his soul made him find the world of commodities represented there glamorous, quite intoxicating.

They had been a joy to him but they had been a sadness too. Throughout his childhood, these tomes had been an emblem of his mother's poverty. When he had been young, she had tried to curtail his endless perusing of their unattainable bounty. He could not understand that she could not supply him with the toys and goods he could see before him in these glorious books. He never understood her pain at the hunger they caused in him, a hunger she could not satisfy.

And although she herself had always looked lovingly through every last bright page, she had only ever selected the meanest items from the least exciting sections. She always had to pay by instalments, weekly sums so small they made him blush. These books, so addictive, so beautiful, had been a part of their mutual shame.