Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (44 page)

Chuckie was confident that he was right and could not explain the sweat on his palms and the sensation of bloodlessness in his face. He stepped across Eureka Street and knocked on the Causton house front door. There was no answer. He knocked again.

The door of an adjacent house opened. Old Barney came out in his slippers. Chuckie had known this man all his life. He had always seemed old. Chiefly notable for his extraordinary smoker's cough and the velocity of his spitting, he had a habit of opening his front door to spit onto the street. He never looked first and most of the Eureka Street residents had been inadvertently spat on at some time or other. He didn't do that so much any more - no one liked to think of where he now many would still cross the street instead of passing his house.

`Ach, what about you, Chuckie? Back from the United States of America, then?' He coughed, rumbled and hawked.

Chuckie ducked. He heard the phlegm splash on the street behind him and straightened up. `Are the Caustons not in?'

Barney looked vaguely shifty. `Aye, well, they've gone away for a few days. I think there's been a bit of a dispute in the family.'

Chuckie experienced a surge of relief. His mother had merely taken her friend in because her husband was maltreating her. `Yeah,' he said, `Caroline's staying with us.!

Barney coughed again. Chuckie ducked and waited for the splash. It did not come. He looked up at the old man. He realized that, for the first time in his life, Barney had just executed a nervous cough.

'I know,' the old man said quietly. He looked up at one of the upstairs windows of Chuckie followed his gaze just in time to see a light extinguished. The old man's face quivered in panic. `Gotta go, Chuckie,' he muttered. He started to call his old dog.

Chuckie was bemused by his urgency. `What's going on, Barney?'

The old man continued to call his dog with increasing urgency. Chuckie noticed that another neighbour had opened her door and was trying unobtrusively to recall her own pet. Both kept glancing at the upstairs of the Lurgan house with petrified expressions.

'Barney?'

But Barney had collared his old pooch, swiftly skipped inside his front door and banged it shut behind him. Chuckie walked towards his other neighbour but she, too, grabbed her dog and went indoors hurriedly.

Chuckie Lurgan stood stock still in the middle of Eureka Street. It was quiet. He felt like laughing. It had been like some bad western when all the townsfolk rushed indoors before the bad guys rode into town. He stood bemused in the pleasant silence, his sparse hair sticking to his skull because of the rain. From America to this. But, as he stood there, he could not help but feel fond. Wind-whipped drizzle darted around the streetlamps. In the haze of the sodium lights he could see serried ranks of heavier drizzle swoop in time to the wind's gusts. His mind cleared.

It filled again as he began to hear the noise that had obviously cleared his street. It was a low, spectral wail. The sound chilled his blood. The noise died away and then commenced anew, louder and deeper. It was eldritch, ghastly.

It took Chuckie some time to comprehend that the sound was issuing from his own house, it took him some more time to understand that it was being made unmistakably by his mother, and a final brief period to guess what might be provoking her to howl so.

Chuckie sank to his knees in the middle of wet Eureka Street. His hands went out before his face and his world went black.

Seventeen

`You can't be serious,' I said.

'I swear to God,' said Deasely. `Apparently he fainted on the street. The milkman found him in the morning.!

`That's got to be a spoof.'

'Straight up.'

Luke Findlater looked daggers at me. He'd been trying to get me off the phone for the last ten minutes.

`Have you seen him?' I asked.

`No,' said Deasely. `Have you?'

`I've tried. He was in bed and wouldn't open the door. Peggy says he hasn't been out of the house for a fortnight. He won't speak to her and he doesn't come to the phone when I call.'

Another phone rang and Luke picked it up. I ignored him.

'Do you think he'll come to the Wigwam tonight?' asked Deasely.

`Max said she'd told him she'd leave him if he didn't come out. She seems to think he'll be there.!

'Should we avoid referring to it?'

'I think that would be best, don't you?'

'Maybe.'

Luke cupped his hand over his telephone and whistled to interrupt. 'It's John Evans,' he hissed, sotto voce.

'Who?' I asked.

'The Yank billionaire. He wants to speak to you.'

'You talk to him.'

'He doesn't want to talk to me because I'm English. He thinks I'm some kind of office boy. He thinks you Micks are the big operators. He's desperate to know where Chuckie is'

'Tell him I'm on a call.'

'This man is giving us millions of dollars. I can't do that.'

'He loves it when we treat him rough. It sets his pulse racing.'

I turned back to Deasely and finished my gossip.

It took a long time. There was such a lot of gossip around. Events had been moving apace. For instance, Peggy Lurgan was now a lesbian living with Caroline Causton. This was spectacular news. People had called press conferences. Peggy and Caroline were the most Protestant and the most working-class women I had ever met. Such women did not normally end up munching blissfully at each other, or so everyone had believed.

The news had had a seismic effect in Eureka Street and Sandy Row. Indeed, much of working-class Protestant Belfast was in uproar. Uncomplicated men watched their wives with new attention and fear. Several gave their wives preventive beatings just in case they might have considered stepping out of line in this most unProtestant fashion.

The effect on Chuckle was less seismic than coma-inducing. He had gone into deep hiding. No one but Peggy and Max had seen him since the night he had come back from the States and Peggy had only seen him in his rare trips out of his room to eat or evacuate his bladder and bowels. He was obviously traumatized. Chuckle's liberalism had often surprised me. For a Prod prole, his politics were uniquely unimpeachable; his almost exclusively Catholic acquaintance was proof of that.

But he drew the permissive line at his mother putting out nightly for another woman. My concern was that, since Chuckie did not leave the house and Eureka Street houses were famously small and thin-walled, he would be presented with the most detailed auditory impressions every night. In that house, he would be able to hear the rustle of their pubes.

For me the news of Peggy's conversion came as a relief. It meant that I definitely didn't have to think about her sporting provocative underwear any more. I could put all that behind me.

In some ways, the impact upon Donal Deasely had been the most surprising. Encouraged by Peggy's unexpected Sapphic courage, Deasely came out. He told us he was gay. It was something of a shock for those of his friends who had known him for ten years and more. No one had noticed. Which showed how sensitive and perceptive we all were. We'd noticed that he had had very few girlfriends but they had definitely been girls.

When he told me, I felt like a liberal parent presented with a homosexual child. I was delighted to be able to demonstrate my permissiveness. I was, frankly, a little jealous. Deasely was leading a life completely free of PMS. What was I thinking? It had been so long since I'd got laid there hadn't been too many menstrual storms for me either. Apparently, Deasely was going to bring his current boyfriend to the Wigwam that night. He was called Pablo, it seemed. I could barely wait.

Other news. Roche had disappeared more effectively than Chuckle. No one had seen him since the night I'd so unceremoniously kicked him out of my flat. Faithfully, I kept my eye out for him at the office and checked around Eureka Street. I even called at his house. His big-vest daddy didn't answer and the broken woman who spoke to me had no idea where he was nor any real interest.

Oh, yeah, there was the ceasefire as well. We were a fortnight in and there had been several more ceasefires.The UVF and all the Protestant paramilitaries had laid down their arms. To my amazement, they had even apologized. The INLA, the IPLO had declared ceasefires.The IJKL, the MNOP and the QRST (both members of the latter turning up to the press conference in a mini-cab) had all followed suit. A fortnight in and only five people had been shot murkily dead and thirty-eight people beaten half to death with baseball bats.

In Chuckle's second absence, Luke and I had managed to bring his grotesque financial empire into some kind of trim. With the aid of constant and unsolicited cash injections from the patently barmy John Evans, we had managed to pay for several of the businesses that Chuckie had already bought and set up a few new ones of our own, though thoroughly in the Lurgan style. We had started to export High Quality Irish Garden Soil to American reality, it was the cheesy side layer from the big municipal landfill by the motorway.

Business was easy. A few years ago, I'd met a man who owned a garage in West Fermanagh. Any time business was slow, he would go out with a pickaxe in the middle of the night and chip out a sizeable hole in the road half a mile away from his joint. For weeks afterwards, his casual trade would soar, ripped tyres, bent wheel rims, fucked axles. He had the gift.

Of course, Chuckle's gift was something infinitely grander but the principle was largely the same. On the day I was gossiping with Donal, Luke and I were doing our sums and making an attempt to calculate what Chuckie Ines current assets might be. We worked hard and tirelessly. By three o'clock that afternoon we came up with a figure that scared the piss out of us both. We gulped. We looked at each other silently. We stood up. We put on our coats. We said we'd meet at the Wigwam. We took the rest of the day off. I drove out to see Matt and Mamie, trying not to think about how scarily plutocratic the invisible Chuckie had become.

Still warm in the belief that Roche was shacked up round my place, Matt and Mamie were flushed with pleasure to see me. They stood, arm in arm, beholding the philanthropic marvel I had become.They wittered on for ten minutes about how proud they were.

`The kid's gone,' I muttered.

`What?'

`He's left. He left a fortnight ago. He only stayed one night.!

`Where is he now?' asked Mamie sharply.

'I don't know'

`Have you looked?' said Matt.

`Yes, I've looked.' My voice had grown edgy.

Mamie turned on her heel and walked into the kitchen.

`She'll get us some coffee,' Matt mumbled feebly.

I followed Mamie. I tried to explain to her the advice that even Slat had given me. Neither of these generous old folk could properly understand why I might come under sexual suspicion when harbouring a homeless twelve-year-old boy. That idea revolted them but I persuaded them that that was the way it was. I failed to mention that Roche had walked off with all my new electrical goods.

It took some time to persuade Matt and Mamie to talk about something else.

`You could have sent him to us,' Mamie suggested.

'I thought you said you'd been forcibly retired from the kindness business.'

`We have. We could have looked, after him unofficially for a while.'

'I'm sorry, Mamie. I should have thought of that.'

`Yes. You should have.' She turned to Matt. `You better get him his letter, then.'

Matt sloped off like an uneasy pooch.

In the meantime, Mamie told me some secrets. She'd been sick. I knew this. Matt had already told me he'd been worried for a while but that the doctors had finally said she was OK. Mamie told me that, at the height of their anxiety, they had discussed the possibility of her dying. Matt had freaked out, apparently. He had raged and broken furniture (that, I wished I'd seen). He had told her that he couldn't live without her, and if he thought she was going to die, he would kill himself first. Even I could see that this was not very supportive.

Mamie had always been the strong partner but she told me that there was no way she was going to let him die first. The thought of a future without Matt bled her of all her courage and stubbornness. She would make sure she would be the first to go. It might be cowardly, she admitted, but it was the way it was going to be.

Matt came back. I'd never envied anyone as much as I envied Matt and Mamie.

'Here you go' Matt handed me the red envelope while looking suspiciously at Mamie. It was Sarah's style. She'd always used fancy stationery. I decided, as my hand first touched it, that I didn't necessarily have to read it straight away. I was sure it was just another recipe for what the trouble with me was. So many people had told me recently that I didn't need any textual confirmation.

'I'm sorry we didn't give it to you before,' Matt said.'Sarah asked us to wait.'

'I understand,' I lied.

I spent an hour in the city centre buying things I didn't need. What with Belfast being such a small town, I bumped into about forty people I knew. I chatted long each time. I encountered Rajinder with his new girlfriend, Rachel. It was good to see him but after a few minutes I was uneasy. I drew him aside and whispered,'Is she Jewish?'

'Yeah,' he said.

'Aren't you a Muslim?'

'Yeah, but I'm Sunni'

I smiled kindly. 'Yeah, Rajinder your disposition is very pleasant but you're still a Muslim.'

'No, no. I mean I'm a Sunni Muslim. We're more moderate'

'I knew that,' I muttered quickly.

There'd been a couple of ceasefires and suddenly Belfast was the city of love. Muslim and Jew at it like rabbits. By all accounts Rachel's and Rajinder's parents had yet to call their own ceasefire but Rachel and Rajinder didn't care.

I met a dozen more folk I knew. Some I liked nearly as much as young Rajinder. I'd never been so glad of casual street encounters. I'd always responded well to kindness but that evening I'd have licked your hand for a gentle word.

I still felt like shit, though. So it was with joy that, on my way back to my car, I saw someone who was doing worse than me.