`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 uncha
racteristically 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.
It was a beautiful night. I left the Wreck parked outside the Wigwam and loped slowly towards Poetry Street. Belfast was tense and scared; there were, doubtless, people being done to death at that very instant but, all in all, it was beautiful.The city sounded like an old record that crackled and hissed. But you could still hear the trouble, distant or close. In the broad night, the sirens whooped and chattered like metallic married couples.
I removed my jacket and opened my shirt. I slowed my pace. I dodged the drunken men and tried not to look at the miraculous girls. I read the walls with a feeling of unaccountable joy. After a few yards, I noticed that there was a smattering of dyslexic OTGs:TGO, ODG, OTD. I stopped and touched the wall in question. I had guessed right.The poor draughtsmanship was characteristic and the paint was still wet.
`Roche!' I bellowed. `Roche, where are you?'
A few passers-by stopped to stare. I ignored them.
`Roche!'
Several of the passers-by shook their heads and walked off, thinking I was a madman. A small dirty head peered round the entrance of an alley nearby. There were smudges and flecks of paint in the boy's hair. `Oh, it's you.'
`You're still not getting it right,' I said.
`What?'
I pointed to his imperfect graffiti.
`Hey, Jake.'
'What?'
'Have you got a Postgraduate Certificate in Education?'
'No.'
'You can fuck off, then.' He smiled happily at me.
`Come on,' I said. `I'll give you a ride home.'
It was nearly midnight, the street was full of drunks. It looked like that twelve-year-old was going to debate the point but I think he recognized I was getting all adult there. We walked back to the Wreck.
Roche had continued to hang around after Chuckle's departure for America. The kid was everywhere. Luke Findlater told me that he was around Chuckie's offices most of the day and I often saw him lurking in Eureka Street when I went calling on Peggy Lurgan. He must have forgotten what school looked like. I taxed him about his education one day and he suggested that I should eat his bollocks. I liked Roche. He had some imagination.
He was also a handy errand boy to have around Eureka Street. Chuckle had left a shitload of cash in a box in the kitchen and I used that to get the kid to stock the house. He had very high wage expectations. I don't know what Chuckie had been paying him but I never saw any change.
As we drove up West, Roche told me that he had seen the OTG man again. He had noticed something else this time. Every time the man wrote on walls he would write some kind of sentence before and after the legend OTG then he would simply paint over everything but those three letters. Every time I'd seen OTG written in the city it had been preceded and followed by bands of paint, the first band slightly shorter than the second. I'd thought it was merely a decorative conceit.
'What does it say before he paints it out?'
I turned off the Westlink and Roche murmured something into his chest.
'What?'
'I don't know,' he muttered.'It's hard to make it out before he paints over it.'
I stopped at some traffic lights. `Listen, kid. So you don't read too well. It's no big deal. I was slow at school. All the best people were.'
`You haven't speeded up much,' Roche replied defiantly.
I drove the little prick home in silence. Just as we turned into Beechmount, he asked me to stop the car. `Let me out here,' he said.
`I can take you up to your door just as easily.'
`Here's fine,' he said, too loudly.
I stopped the car. The kid got out. `Thanks,' he said insincerely.
I watched him as he walked off. He kept looking back at me. I knew what the score was. I swung the car across the street just as he turned a corner out of sight. I stopped the car. I got out and followed.
As I suspected he might, he walked past the street where he lived. He ducked down a few side-streets and ended up back on the Falls Road. I had an idea where he was going. I went back and fetched the Wreck. I drove to the Grosvenor Park, a dilapidated and tiny concrete and grass esplanade with a few dingy swings and a clapped-out bandstand. I parked and walked slowly up to the bandstand. The bench there was unoccupied. I was surprised. Then I bent down and looked underneath. Roche lay there, his head propped on his schoolbag, a tarpaulin pulled over his shoulders.
I waited for the quip that didn't come. Amazingly, the boy said nothing. He stared at me mutely, with something like shame in his eyes. For once, he looked like he was twelve years old.
`What's wrong?' I asked. `A bit of bother chez Roche?'
`What?'
`Forget it.'
I was squatting on my haunches. It was growing uncomfortable. I lit a cigarette. He stared at me. I offered him one. He lit up greedily.There was silence and the air felt warm and magical on my face. It wasn't such a bad night on which to sleep rough. Still.
`Come on,' I said, standing up, `you can sleep at my house.'
Roche stuck out his head from underneath the bench and opened his mouth to protest.
'Relax,' I said.'I'm not going to try to have sex with you.'
The boy shut his mouth, satisfied. He gathered up his meagre stuff and scrambled to his feet. He looked expectantly at me.
'Hey, kid,' I said,'I think I should tell you something!
`What?'
'You're much less sexually attractive than you believe.'
That night I dreamt a year's worth of dreams.
Six a.m. Roche ended up pulling me out of bed by my hair. I chased the persistent little shit downstairs but I hadn't a chance of catching him. My cat looked on with interest as I chased the boy round the kitchen.
'The phone,' he bellowed.'It's your fat friend from Ame
rica'
I stopped, suddenly calm. I picked up the receiver while Roche made mutinous noises in the background.
'Chuckie?'
'Jake. Hi.'
'Do you know what fucking time it is?'
Chuckie knew what time it was. Chuckie didn't care. If he'd been in Eureka Street, I might have driven round to beat the shit out of him but he knew it wasn't worth an international flight.
Chuckie had called me for two reasons. First, he wanted me to give up my job and start working for him. He told me he was worried about Luke Findlater. He was a nice guy and good at his job but Chuckie wanted someone he could trust on the inside there. Besides, Luke kept saying things like sot;Qne and egregious. It was getting on Chuckle's nerves.
I told him wearily that I didn't know anything about busi ness or money. He refuted my objections. I was so tired and pissed off that I said I'd work for Chuckie for a grand a week. I was astonished when he said yes. It wasn't that he'd agreed, it was that he'd barely noticed.
`What was the other thing?' I asked fuzzily.
`What?'
`You said you'd called me for two reasons.'
`Oh, yeah.' He paused.
The line burred and chirped. It wasn't very atmospheric but I wondered what Chuckie was working up to.
`I'm going to be a dad.'
`What?'
`Max is pregnant. We're gonna get married.!
`I took a deep breath. `That's great. Congratulations, Chuckie.'
'Yeah. Listen, don't tell my mum. I'll tell her when I get back. How's she doing?'
'Ah, fine,' I said vaguely.
`Good. I'm really grateful for what you've been doing with her, Jake.'
`What do you mean by that?' I snapped nervously.