Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (46 page)

Slat had brought Wincey, who looked like she was the mother of everybody else at the table. She must have been fifty. Brown-haired, well made-up, plump but trim, she was the kind of woman that Chuckle's mother might now go for. Slender, intelligent, sensitive, Slat looked like her youngest son. But Slat was obviously besotted. They persisted in whispering close together like amorous teenagers. I heard her ask how many of us were Catholics. I heard the distinct erotic and colonialist quality of her gasp when Slat told her that we were almost all Catholics.

Septic, too, was accompanied. His escort was, to my infinite surprise, young Aoirghe. I was trying not to think about the irritation this was causing me. They weren't exactly swapping sweet nothings and Septic's hands only seldom fluttered near her airspace but they were together and that pissed me off.

It wasn't the usual Wigwam scene. Bar Luke and me, the boys had all paired off. It was Couple City. It was like the last scene of a Shakespearian comedy: everybody was getting married off apart from us minor comic characters. I'd always hated Shakespearian comedies.

At first, the chat was general. Current weather conditions. Sharon Stone. Garden furniture. Jimi Hendrix. There was more unease, more discomfort than we'd ever experienced on one of these evenings. Some of that was to be expected. We no longer had a quorum. Our numbers had doubled. We'd been forced to spread out and grow up. But there was much strangeness: even Chuckle's silence was not particularly remarkable amongst all the newness. None of us boys seemed to have spoken so far.

`Was he that black boy who killed himself years ago?' asked Wincey.

`That's right,' replied Pablo. `A beautiful man.'

`Didn't he take lots of drugs?'

`Whenever possible.'

'That's terrible'

'Probably.'

I saw both Donal and Slat shiver with pleasure and affection. The exchange was obviously characteristic of each of their paramours and this they found infinitely sweet, it seemed.

`Jimi Hendrix was a victim,' declared Aoirghe. Septic flinched. We all flinched as she went on,'He was a black man in a white man's world. It had to end the way it did'

I laughed.'He was a stoned man in a white man's world.That had more to do with his death than the accident of his skin,' I suggested.

'He made beautiful music,' sighed Pablo.

'It was the music of the oppressed; Aoirghe hissed at me.

I laughed and Slat rapidly began talking about Chelsea football club. He supported Arsenal so it was an eccentric choice.

`If they don't buy a central defender early in the season, they'll be relegated' He fizzled away into silence and everyone but Wincey and I glared at him.

`Oh, I am sorry,'Aoirghe said with a theatrical air. `I wouldn't want to annoy Jake by being too committed.'

How could she open the door for me like that?

`I'd have no problem with you being committed, sweetheart!

Slat and Donal gave me their cheap-shot looks and Septic practically clapped his hand over Aoirghe's mouth to prevent her reply. The moment passed without violence.

'Did you hear the OTG guy has been arrested?' piped up Donal, over-brightly.

'What?' I asked, suddenly interested.

`I heard on the radio.'

'Nah,' said Slat. 'The cops waded in after a student party. A whole lot of the kids had taken a bucketload of speed and fucked off round the Holy Land with spray cans. Not the real McCoy.'

`Mass action. That's so sixties; squeaked Wincey.

We all stared at her in silence. I tried to smile at her.

'Absolutely.' l grinned. I liked Wincey. I nearly began to wonder what she'd look like in some high-thigh Lycra ...

`So the real guy hasn't been found?' asked Max.

`How do you know it's only one guy or even a guy at all? It could be several people.!

Roche saw him,' I told them.

'When?'

'A couple of times. It was definitely the right guy.'

`Nobody knows what it means yet?' asked Max.

`No,' said Septic.

`Feeble pacifist bullshit,' murmured Aoirghe.

I laughed into my beer.

`I have an idea what it means,' said Donal quietly.

`What do you think it means?' asked Slat.

`Nothing,' replied Donal.

Everyone pulled their disappointed faces.

'I'm serious,' said Donal. `I think it's entirely random. It could be any three letters of the alphabet. It doesn't really matter what they are. This is the city of the three-letter initial written on walls. I think someone's satirizing us.!

`Well, it's worked,' said Pablo.

'It has to be someone very persistent,' grumbled Septic.

`He must just have wanted to see what happened. To see if other people copied they did. It must have been touch and go whether it was going to start a terrorist gang, a religious cult or a political party.!

`So, it's ultimately pointless?' I suggested.

'Not at all, satire is never pointless. It makes us look stupid and besides it's just a pretty good wheeze.'

I felt suddenly depressed. The same conviction had been growing in me. I didn't like to have it verified in this manner. I wouldn't say I'd been placing any hopes, spiritual or political, on this OTG thing but I'd been glad to have it around. I liked the way it had pissed everybody off.

The conversation stuttered on uncertainly.

'It's pointless now that it's all over anyway,' said Septic.

'What precisely is all over?' I asked him.

'You know, the Troubles,' he glanced at Aoirghe,'the war.'

'Five dead and thirty seriously assaulted,' I mentioned. 'Doesn't sound very over for them.'

'Cut it out, Jake,' said Max kindly. Even Chuckle looked up when she spoke.

'Yeah, it's over, right enough,' said Donal diplomatically. He raised his beer.'Here's to all of us making it through unscathed.'

We raised our beers and toasted that notion. It was no surprise to me that we'd all made it through.We were all so middle class now. We'd never been in any danger.

Post-toast, the conversation lightened rather. I didn't look anywhere near Aoirghe and smiled only grimly at Septic Ted. We rumbled on, talking, eating, drinking. Even Chuckie began looking up from his plate. There was a difficult interlude when my revolutionary waitress, obviously just finishing her shift, leant over our table and murmured at me,'I worked it out, shithead. It wasn't my politics that bothered you. You just didn't like me because I'm working class'

She stomped off and everyone started chatting in a charitable attempt to conceal my humiliation. I noticed that Luke Findlater followed her to the door and stopped her there. Even at that distance, I could hear the excitement in his voice as he said: 'So, you're working class, then? Would you like to tell me about that?'

They left together, hand and glove, foot and shoe.

So, now everyone had scored. Everyone had got some love in their life. Earlier that evening, I'd even seen my girl from the supermarket walking down the street arm in arm with her spotty colleague with the hearing-aid. I wished them well but I was a little miffed that she had recovered so quickly from her pash for me.

I ate some strings of lettuce and watched mournfully as my friends talked around the table. Apart from Aoirghe and Septic, they were all guilty of sundry hand-brushings, thigh-meetings and face-touchings. Their limbs twined like some amorous undergrowth. I felt like a monk or a referee. Nobody was twining anything with me.

Yeah, Belfast felt like a city of love that night. A city of sex. It felt strange. It felt uncharacteristic. It felt slightly illegal and it felt like I hadn't been invited. I drank some beers.

A couple of nights before, I had found myself listening to a Muddy Waters record four times in a row. I'd been hearing the blues non-stop for a month or more. I'd always loved it when depressed old black men sat on bad wooden chairs in the middle of New Orleans and sang about some woman, yeah, who'd left them, yeah, 'cos they loved some other man, yeah, and it was all right, yeah. Except that it wasn't all right, yeah. It was awful, yeah. I was settling myself into this solitary, unloved predicament. I was beginning to enjoy it.

I blamed Chuckie. I had to blame someone. I looked up at my fat, silent friend.

`Hey, Chuckie,' I said aggressively. `Hey, Lurgan.'

There was silence. Chuckie wasn't looking at me: he was staring over my shoulder at the door with a mute and horrorstricken expression. I turned round and looked in the same direction.

`Shit,' I whispered, to no one in particular.

Peggy Lurgan and Caroline Causton had walked into the cafe uncertainly enough. It was new to them and they were surrounded by people twenty years younger, but when they saw our table, they approached with a confident step.

`Hello, everybody,' smiled Peggy. `This is Caroline.'

I kept Chuckie in sight right down Shaftesbury Square and Great Victoria Street. He pulled a sharp left down Glengall Street and I cursed myself for not having jumped in the car in the first place. I simply had no idea that Chuckie could run so fast. Sitting around like a fat cabbage, it was hard to imagine him getting much over six miles an hour. But here he was, a hundred yards in front of me, really travelling. My own lungs were bursting and I felt inches away from a heart-attack. I smoked too many cigarettes for this kind of lark. Nevertheless, I skidded round the corner on my metal-tipped heels and pelted up Glengall Street after the fat fuck.

He'd simply burst out of the cafe when his mother arrived with Caroline. Plates, bottles and waitresses were sent spinning in his chubby wake. I had told the others to stay where they were and had sprinted after him. What were friends for? Something else, probably.

By the time we were half-way past the traffic-only, doublelane Westlink, Chuckle's pace had slowed to a vivid jog. I could see bits of him wobble under the exertion. Unfortunately, I was so fucked by this point that it was all I could do to match his pace. Motorists braked and swerved wildly. Horns blared and drivers shouted. Chuckle ran on and I had to follow, guts churning, arteries bursting.

But when he turned up the foot of the Falls, I stopped and lay down. After a couple of minutes while my lungs started working and my heart-beats became distinguishable again, I lifted my head from the pavement to look for my friend. A bottle crashed and splintered on the spot where it had been.

I looked about me. The street was full of people running, shouting and throwing things at each other. An armoured police Land-Rover had pulled up close by and the bottle that had just missed me had been destined for them.

`Fuck ye.'

`Bastards'

'Up the Ra.'

Oh, good, I thought. A riot. Just what I needed.

At each end of the dark lamp-lit street, masses of people had started charging towards me. On one side, I had the helmeted and shielded Royal Ulster Constabulary, and on the other, the forces and supporters of national liberation. I sat like a prick in the middle, pebbles and bottles failing to bounce all round me.

The first few baton rounds of plastic bullets woke me up. I'd seen these things in action before. They might have been made of rubber but they really messed you up. I stood up and charged into the midst of the least they wouldn't arrest me.

Sure enough, the wave of people parted and I made my way to the rear of the charging throng. I could see that various types of desultory rioting were taking place all along the length of the Lower Falls. Bunches of kids were throwing stones and breaking windows with no apparent end in mind. I looked around for Chuckie.

My search was interrupted when the charging rioters, having clashed with the police, retreated again and charged back the way they had come, straight towards me. I ducked into Divis to avoid them. I watched as the rioters and police tore up the slight hill and then moved on. I had a peek round the foot of the flats to see if Chuckie was there. I didn't hang around too long. I could hear shouts and impacts from high up. I hadn't seen a riot in a few years but I was still too much of an old hand to get banged on the bap by a tower-block trash-can dropped from the fifteenth floor. Some people would do something like that just to see what it felt like.

I moved up the Falls, ducking the trouble, keeping close to the buildings, running in the shadows between street-lamps. The Army were out now and I didn't want to go making anyone anxious. The soldiers ran after the rioters and the rioters ran after the soldiers. Bottles were thrown and heads were kicked. A few cars were burning, up by the swimming baths, and some kids with scarves round their faces had stopped a bus and were hauling the passengers off. The riot was a halting thing (it had been a while, after all) but rioting was a bit like riding a bicycle: no matter how long it had been, you never really forgot how to do it.

There were only a couple of TV news crews so far, but wherever they went, the riot would surely follow. Gangs of kids chucked bricks to order. If they'd been asked for retakes, they'd have gladly obliged. The sinister figures of older men could be seen amongst these kids, obviously directing them where to go and what to do. I'd seen lots of that kind of stuff. I'd seen riots on this road where these guys had openly passed out cash to the stone-throwing youngsters. I'd seen riots where five kids chucked a few bricks surrounded by twenty or thirty photographers who had broadcast pictures of mayhem to the world. It was boring, frankly.

I saw some kids with milk-bottle petrol bombs. They stood on the side of the street and chucked their bombs at cop LandRovers as they whizzed up the road. After all the cops had passed, the kids had one petrol bomb left. They looked at each other in confusion until the kid with the bomb just threw it at one of his mates. I suppose he had to do something with it. They all laughed but at least they helped pull the burning jacket off the bombed boy.

I watched two chunky policemen hold a young rioter down by the hair while they both kicked him repeatedly in the face. The cops kept losing their balance but always leapt up quickly and resumed their work.The sound was distinct amongst all the clangour, a horrible wet repetitive sound. I headed over there through the crowd, but by the time I crossed the road, cops and rioter had disappeared.