Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (38 page)

My surprise was superseded by astonishment and then vexation when Septic Ted popped his head round the door and smiled uncertainly at me. `Hiya, Jake.'

`Fancy seeing you here, Septic:

`Amazing, isn't it?'

`No.'

Aoirghe affected to ignore our sloppy chat but I could see that even she was anxious. I was furious. What was sleazy Septic doing there?

`Let's get the sofa in,' I said, grimly enough.

It took longer than it should have. I kept giving the thing sharp nudges, trying to drive it into Septic's groin. After a while, he started to return the favour. This silent battle impeded our progress. By the time we finally deposited it in Aoirghe's sitting room, we were sweating and blowing like whales.

`Boy,' said Aoirghe. `For young guys, you two are really out of shape. I'll make some coffee.'

Septic looked terrified at the prospect of being left alone with me, even for a minute. `Ah, not for me. I have to head on. Going to the Wigwam, Jake?'

`Yeah,' I said. `I'll see you there.'

He blanched and left. I noticed no flesh on flesh as he parted from Aoirghe. That was something.

She turned to me. `Edward just called round to discuss something with me,' she said nervously.

`Who?'

'Edward, your friend'

'Oh, Septic, right!

There was an uncomfortable silence. I prepared to leave.

'Coffee?' she asked.

'Please,' I squeaked.

I followed her into the kitchen. We chatted vaguely. I told her the sofa looked nice in her flat. She said she'd been worried it wouldn't suit the rest of her decor. I said that the occasional incongruity was a mark of style. She said that was OK for small items but that sofas made big statements. I said it didn't matter, the sofa looked well anyway.

The usual stuff that people who don't like each other talk.

It was strange. Both our faces looked hot and our voices were tense. I'd never been in her flat before. We had not often been alone and we certainly had never been polite. I didn't know how long I could sustain my end of the disquisition on interior design. I felt my mouth drying out.

I hadn't thought much about Aoirghe. I had pondered much on her politics and her bad attitude but I had not deeply considered her. What kind of bus had she ridden to school when she was a kid? What was her favourite colour? Did she like lapsed-Catholic ex-tough guys with low self-esteem?

Appraised in this manner, Aoirghe, for a brief moment, didn't seem so bad, after all.

It was a very brief moment.

In a sudden access of affection, I asked her playfully what her surname was. I couldn't believe that I didn't already know. I mentioned this to her.

Her face went taut as a drum.'Are you trying to be funny?' she asked bitterly.

`Ah, no,' I said, doing my innocent face. (It was one of my favourite faces. I don't know what it looked like but it felt superb.)

She muttered something else to me, handed me a cup of coffee and stalked off into her sitting room.

`Sorry?' I said, following her.

`Jenkins,' she spat. 'My surname is Jenkins.'

How I wish I hadn't so precipitately slurped up that first mouthful of coffee. It splattered onto her new sofa close to the spot where I'd spat all that tea in Chuckie's house. I coughed. I choked.

`Jenkins,' I said brightly. `That's a nice name.!

Old Aoirghe's glare was genocidal again.

'No, really. I mean it.'

You know the way when you're a kid and you get caught doing something really bad and you're in real trouble and the adults confront you and you think to yourself, Oh, fuck, this is serious! And then you piss yourself laughing anyway? Well, I tried not to laugh. I passionately wanted not to Jenkins. Aoirghe Jenkins. It must have broken her republican heart that she wasn't called something Irish like Ghoarghthgbk or Na Goomhnhnle. I laughed. Like a drain.

`You're such an asshole,' said Aoirghe.

`Fuck, here we go again.'

`What do you mean, here we go again?'

`You're always busting my balls about something.'

Then Aoirghe told me what it was about my balls that they needed so much busting. She told me I was arrogant and sexist. She told me I was naive and unmotivated. She told me that I wasn't republican because of an innate self-loathing, a deep political self-hatred. I was rather she could have doubted the real intensity of my self-love.

I sipped my coffee. `At least I'm not a fascist,' I murmured.

`Are you saying I'm a fascist?' she screeched.

`Well, you republicans are always telling me that you're nationalist and socialist at the same time.' I did my wide showman's smile. `Nationalist and socialist. Now, children, does that remind us of any famous twentieth-century political movements?'

I tried to smile at her. I was doing my best to keep it light hearted, to accuse her of fascism almost playfully.

`Fuck you,' she said.

`Come on, Aoirghe, it's really childish to fight like this.'

'Childish? That's rich, coming from you. Everything I've ever heard you say has been infantile. Just because I have some political commitment you think you can take the piss.'

`Political commitment is not what you have, sweetheart.' I knew how much she hated being called sweetheart. I cupped my hands over my testicles just in case. `Fountain Street was not an expression of political commitment!

`I didn't do it.'

'You fucking support it.'

`No, I don't.'

`Condemn it, then. Say they shouldn't have done it. Say it was wrong.

She was silent for a moment, her face coloured. `It was regrettable,' she hazarded.

`Regrettable?' I screamed. `Tell me it was wrong.'

She pursed her lips together and looked at her hands. I stood up and bent over her, putting my face close to hers. If I could have found it in my heart to say something tender and sensual, this might have been a good move.

`You can't condemn it. You think it was absolutely fine, a regular way to behave. And that, my dear, means you're a fucking Nazi!

`It was regrettable but the end justifies the means.'

I felt her spit on my face. I wheeled away and straightened up.

`Brilliant. So, it's time for the Maoist-bullshit part of the evening now? The end justifies the means. That's based on an immature attitude about life, never mind politics. There is no end, there is only means. It's fucking pointless!

I only noticed I was shouting when my throat started to hurt. I stopped. I sat down. I sipped my coffee and looked at my hands.

`A united Ireland is an achievable goal. It will happen.We will win. It's right. That's my opinion and it will never change,' she suggested.

`An opinion that remains unchanged quickly becomes a prejudice,' I said, quite mildly.

Her eyes narrowed. She smiled triumphantly. `What about all your peaceable stuff?F

`That's different. That's a conviction. Convictions are portable. You take them with you anywhere you go. They always apply.!

'Such as?'

`Violence is wrong. That applies in all situations.!

'You must have forgotten that when you decked Gerry,' she said.

'Who?'

`The Peace Train. The guy at the station with the moustache. You broke his nose. Wasn't that wrong?'

`Oh, yeah. Well, I'm an imperfect follower of my own theories. And, yes, it was wrong.' I lit a cigarette and stood up. `Anyway, I've given up violence. I bought a violence patch from the chemist. I stick it on my arm and I feel less need to beat people up.'

No, amazingly, she didn't laugh. She continued not laughing for another twenty minutes or so before I finally left. Just before the end of that comedy-free conversation she told me mutinously that Amnesty International were having a Belfast press conference in a fortnight's time and they wanted me to attend and tell the world how I was abused by the police. She had promised them that she would try to persuade me.

At least I got a laugh out of that. I pointed out some of the reasons why that might be a little difficult. I painted her a broad picture. `Go fuck yourself,' I said. (I was getting pretty slick.)

She threw me out. I liked that about Aoirghe. She was consistent.

I drove around for a while.The streets were less deserted than latterly and my mood lifted again. It was one of those nights when every song on the radio makes your trousers tight. It was a bad night to be without a girlfriend. It was warm. It was almost like any summer Friday night when the girls were out barelegged in short skirts and the boys were wearing linen trousers stained by their sixth pint and innocent Belfast lay bemused and strewn with their drunken litter and everyone laboured under the misconception that I drove a taxi.

I dropped in at the Wigwam. I was an hour late but I wasn't hungry. I found the boys at our usual table. As always they were talking about what really mattered.

`There absolutely has to be life on other planets,' said Deasely. `To suppose that amongst the multibillions of stars and thus more multibillions of planets, to suppose that ours is the only planet to produce the right conditions for sentience is monumental arrogance. Mathematically, there has to be something in that vast black darkness'

`What, Ballymena?' quipped Septic.

I sat down and they nodded their greetings at me. Deasely continued. `The universe has everything we need to think about. Too much twentieth-century science has been microscience, the science of molecules, atoms, genetics. The real science is the new way of thinking that lying on your back looking at the stars can never fail to produce.!

The nationalist waitress sidled up to me. `Sian,' she said.

'Yeah, right,' I replied.

Ever since she'd read about me in the papers, this girl had been giving me the Gaelic thing there. She asked me what I wanted in what she supposed to be a seductive tone. I asked for some coffee. She said something else in Irish that I didn't understand and loped off with a big smile. At least someone wanted to sleep with me, but I still felt like weeping.

`The most beautiful concept in the cognitive universe is the glitch in stellar calculations produced by the imponderable of the speed with which they are moving away from us and the speed with which we are moving away from them. All measurements of distant stellar bodies are unreliable because of distance, speed and time. The mathematics depend on where we stand. From somewhere else, the results would be different. There can be no absolutes. That is so tremendous. It's so political. The act of observation is ultimately vain,' mentioned Donal.

`Maybe that's why Jake can never work out why he can't get a girlfriend,' suggested Septic. Nobody laughed. I lifted my hand. I cocked my invisible gun and blew out his invisible brains.

The freedom-fighting waitress brought me my coffee. I stared at the floor.

`Not eating?' asked Slat.

`Not hungry.'

`What's she saying? Septic asked, as the waitress moved off muttering her thick dark stuff. `Does anybody know what she said?'

Without Chuckle there we were all Catholics but, still, none of us had a clue. Septic's finest comic episode had come a few years before when a French girl he wanted to pork had asked him what the Irish word for silence was. Septic had replied, with entire sincerity, that soilence was the Irish word for silence. He had been easier to like in those days.

`What have you got against chuckie pussy?' Septic asked me. I ignored him.

`The very difference between the evident manufacture of the basic chemical elements in interstellar space and the nonmanufacture in intergalactic space tells us that-'

`Fuck up, Deasely,' snapped Septic.

I hoped that Septic's ill wasn't even looking at any of the many women dining in the that his plans to investigate Aoirghe's pants had come to naught thus far. I was sure that this was the case. Septic liked to boast. I asked him what he'd been doing over there and his lips were uncharacteristically zipped.

We talked idly for a while. The waitress brought us some drinks, but we failed to be festive. We missed Chuckie. We'd met a couple of times here since Chuckie had gone and it simply hadn't been the same without him. His was an unlikely loss and I think we were all shamefaced that our fat Protestant friend's absence cost us so dear. But we sat it out for an hour or so, looking at each other unhappily, mumbling incoherently about this, mumbling incoherently about that. Near eleven I announced my intention of going home. Nobody wept. No one protested.

As I was preparing to leave, Tick, in a new suit and shoes, came in looking for Chuckie. When we told the suddenly elegant indigent that his friend was in America, the old man sat on the floor and sobbed like a baby. 'I brought these,' he blubbed.'He asked me and I brought him these'

He held some pieces of paper in his quivering hand. I took them. I read. They were receipts. Chuckie had actually asked old Tick to invoice him. I totted up the total. Eight hundred pounds. I took Tick aside. `How much money did Chuckie give you?'

'Oh, absolute hundreds,' replied Tick.

`How many absolute hundreds? Eight hundred?'

Tick nodded and started bawling again.

'Jesus,Tick.Why are you crying? I'll make sure he gets them. He won't mind if they're late. He went away.!

'It's not that,' he sobbed.

'What, then?'

Tick wiped a remarkable-looking droop of snot from his nose and mouth with the sharp sleeve of his new suit.'Chuckie asked me to double every amount. He said it would do no harm. My conscience wouldn't let me.That's fraud. I'm a wino but I'm an honest wino.'

He dissolved in tears. I patted his head gently. I looked at my hand. I wiped it on my trousers. The others were looking over inquisitively at us by now. I helped the broken Tick out of the cafe. `I'll talk to Chuckie,' I said. `I'm sure he'll understand.'

Tick pressed my hand and limped off. I watched him. His sharp suit still looked grotesque on his grubby body. That was the thing about was always so surprising, so unwelcome.

I said farewell to the others and left the Wigwam. At the door, the Gaelic-speaking waitress gave me some old Mick chat but I ignored her. I made like Tick and limped off home on my own account.