Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

  '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.

  Surrounded by what looked like a foreign film crew at the rails beside the City Hall, I could see the unmistakable figure of Ripley Bogle, tramp, waster, tosspot, holding forth to some journalists. I hiked across the road to see what was going on. I sidled up close and could hear Bogle spouting on in French to the interviewer. The cameraman moved in tight and I saw my indigent ex-schoolmate pull an urbane expression and deliver his final bon mot.

  The director made a signal and the camera crew dispersed. Bogle shook hands with the producer and the interviewer, and pocketed an envelope obviously stuffed with cash. I waited until the French guys had moved off a little and then I approached old Bogle there. He spotted me and smiled in surprise. `Jake Jackson?'

  '(a va?'

  He laughed and shook my hand. `I can hardly believe it,' he said.

  He looked dreadful. In the midst of the ample evening sunshine and all the summer greenery of the trees around us, he looked wintry and decayed. He'd always been the good-looking type, but he was as faded and grimy as an old photograph, white face and bloodless lips. I felt a sudden shock of grief, as though someone had died.

  `Jesus, man, you look like shit,' I said, tactfully.

  `Thank you.'

  `Sorry.'

  He stuffed the envelope into his pocket and made to move on.

  I changed the subject.'What was that with the telly people?'

  'Peace dividend. Lots of foreign TV crews and I'm the only polyglot clochard in town. I turn an honest and superbly educated dollar. I've gotta meet a German crew in a few minutes. Gotta go.'

  He tried to walk off. I put my hand on his chest, arresting his progress.'Look, I said I was sorry for what I said:

  'Yeah, forget it.'

  I offered him a cigarette. He accepted. We ignited manfully, leant our backs against the rails and watched a series of heartbreaking women dawdle past.

  'You like the way you live?' I asked him.

  'What do you think?'

  'How long has it been like this?'

  'Decades'

  'Why do you live this way if you don't like it?'

  'I have a problem.'

  'What's that?'

  'I don't have enough money.'

  'Jesus, you went to Cambridge, you'd get a job with your eyes closed'

  He smiled.'Look at me,' he said.'Would you give me a job?'

  'Wouldn't take much to clean you up.'

  'It would take more than I've got.'

  I tore a piece off my cigarette packet and scribbled a telephone number on it. I handed it to him.

  'What's this?' muttered Bogle, perplexed.

  'You know the thing about depending on the kindness of strangers?'

  'If you say so.'

  I tapped the piece of paper I'd given him.'Call these people. He's called Matt. She's called Mamie. You've got something they need.'

  He looked at me strangely. 'I remember. Your foster-folks, right?'

  `Your long-term recall's still firing, then.' I tried to move off.

  Bogle put his hand on my chest. His face was animated, somehow younger. I had a sudden memory of what he used to be. `Why are you doing this?'

  I laughed. `You're frightening, Bogle.You're very expensively educated. It's spooky to see all that going down the plug.You're a symptom of the grand malaise in our society.' I removed his hand from my chest. `You scare the piss out of me,' I added.

  He laughed appreciatively. His teeth were still good and he looked momentarily healthy and almost winsome.'Are you sure it's not just because you're a soppy old fucker? You were always a soppy old fucker at school.'

  I patted his hand away.'I'm hard,' I replied.'I'm a very tough individual.'

  I walked on, reasonlessly elated. I had no idea whether he would get in touch with Matt and Mamie. I thought it was more unlikely than likely. I didn't imagine I'd done anything to patch up that spectacularly damaged life. But the trees were bright in the sun and the women were pretty and half dressed and I was stubbornly jubilant.

  As I waited at the pedestrian lights to cross into Bedford Street, a youngish mother walked past me wheeling a threeyear-old boy in a pram. The mother ignored my casual glance but the little boy looked straight at me.

  `Keep it country,' he said ringingly.
>
  'OK,' I replied.

  Amongst the gossip that I hadn't related to Deasley was a piece of news I couldn't share. The people I knew had taken to confiding in me recently. Perhaps their confidences were provoked or encouraged by the aura of failure and celibacy I was giving off. It was worrying when too many people liked you. Mass likeability wasn't always a good sign.

  Luke Findlater told me his big secret. He had been bothering everyone since I'd met him. It felt strange to have him around. It was odd to have such a piece of star material play such an incidental role. His work for Chuckle, although demanding and important, obviously wasn't the major part of his narrative.

  What was he doing in Ireland? He had come up with several excuses. Tired of the London and international rat-race. Fond of the countryside. Liked the natives and all that. But one afternoon, in the office, he turned to me and told me the real reason.

  He had first come here a year ago. He had to negotiate a land sale in Derry and flew over the evening before his meeting. He checked into a Waterside hotel, grateful that it had running water and electricity. He called the lawyer he would be dealing with and arranged their agenda for the next day. The lawyer invited him to dinner. Luke refused politely. He wanted to take a look round this new town. This famous place. He showered. He dressed and he hit the streets.

  And that was fatal. His life had been so simple to him before he had stepped so Englishly out there. As his foot hit the crooked Irish pavement of Shipquay Street, he knew that he felt good, elated even, but he scarcely knew how much had changed, how big that irrevocable step had been.

  What was it?

  Well, certainly the evening was all banked, sloping cloud, warm air and heady crepuscular stuff; certainly, he felt good in shapely tweed suit, open-necked white shirt, handsome hair and kissable face; certainly he was twenty-seven, rich, privileged, healthy and happy, but it was something else.

  The first thing he saw was a group of six men walking together towards him. Drinking friends, they were not yet drunk but already boisterous. They all wore jeans and fake leather jackets, grey shoes and white socks. None was taller than five feet six, all were variously overweight and unhealthy, they all had moustaches.

  The second thing he saw was a group of four men miracu lously like the first six, only much uglier.

  The third thing he saw was a trio of Derrymen. He began to think they were all brothers.

  Luke began to feel like Helen of Troy or Rudolph Valentino. He was stupidly handsome, arrestably beautiful amongst these troglodytic Hibernian half nen. In the hour he walked around the town, he saw one man only who could be considered even close to six feet tall and none at all who could be conceived of as handsome. The women he saw were normal. They were like women everywhere he'd been, mostly beautiful, mostly possible to love. They wore more make-up here and their hair often seemed stiff with unguents and sprays but they were recognizably of his own species.

  He shook his head to himself at this disparity. How unfortunate for the women. If all of the men of this country looked like that it would be an easy country in which to shine, in which to seduce. In Northern Ireland, a handsome man would be a god.

  Sometimes the concept that changes lives arrives unheralded. The invention of the wheel, the printing press, the theory of relativity. It slips unbidden into someone's thoughts and for some time it lurks like an unexploded bomb. Often, it is only after some time has passed that its nature is understood. But at the door of the Gweedore bar, Luke rested his hand on the broad brass handle and paused. He breathed deeply and understood his destiny. He smiled, he went into the bar and started realizing that destiny.

  After a week there had been Saoirse, Siobhan and Deirdre. By a fortnight, Sinead and Aoife had added their contributions, the third saw the advent of Orla, Una and Roisin.

  Luke was proud. He was not an arrogant man. He had never before practised such promiscuity. He tried not to triumph but it was hard. These girls liked him so very much. He was not unaccustomed to being found attractive but there was an excess to this, a frenzy, that sometimes disturbed him. Whenever it disturbed him most, he simply walked the streets and inspected the men's white socks, moustaches and windcheaters again. He could only concede that he was different. That there might be something to like.

  He went to Belfast and quickly rented an apartment there. He had barely worked for three weeks but he cared little. He called a couple of people in London and New York. He told them that Ireland was the coming place and that he had decided he needed to be on hand. He could still work contracts elsewhere. The place had airports. A fortnight later, he was working again.

  It was a place that suited him. It was a life for which he had been made. He was besotted with Irish girls because they were so easily besotted with him. Elegantly, handsomely, he had dated twenty-four working-class Irish girls in his first four months on the island. He loved them for their vigour, their vulgarity - he loved the whole sublime atmosphere of post-colonial eroticism. Most of them were gobsmacked by his looks, his eloquence, his sophistication and his unarguable poshness. The others just thought he was gorgeous, great in the sack and they tolerated the rest.

  He knew that it was wrong. The crucial element was con- descension.They had to be both surprised and honoured by his attention. In surrendering his birthright amongst these women, he was crucially rewarded for being his graceful, accomplished self. There was also a gentle pleasure in playing out an extra life-size version of himself in their back-street world of tiny interiors, where he glittered like some exotic beast amongst their colourful (sometimes criminal) parents and gum-chewing siblings.

  After five or six months, he began to feel guilty. He felt then that he had used up the thrill of dating yob Irish girls. If he was becoming scrupulous, then the reason had gone. He thought briefly about going to South Africa to scour the townships and see how he fared amongst the surprised and grateful black girls.

  But he fought his way through the intermittent prickings of his conscience and started all over again. Belfast, Derry, Lurgan, Antrim, Ballymena, Enniskillen, Portadown. They gave their daughters to him. He felt that he exploited no one and no one exploited him. If he gave them a small part of the joy and gratitude that they made him feel then it was no robbery.

  They were funny, these Deirdres, these Siobhans. They were fun, these Aoifes, these Sineads. They gave him so much - pleasure, happiness. There was much of beauty in the exchange and more tenderness than might be supposed. But the best thing they gave him was their version of him. For them, he was something special, something unique. He knew that, to them, it must have seemed really great to be him.

  When they were around, these Orlas, these Mauras, these Medbhs, they were was really great to be him.

  Slat Sloane had only recently confessed a tandem peccadillo to me. Slat was the only socialist I knew. Slat was the only socialist any of us knew. But Slat told me that because of an erotic incident during the last election with a Democratic Unionist Party canvasser called Margaret, he could now only sleep with right-wing women. It was the only thing that worked for him. The more overtly Nazi the better. DUP women were wonderful, naturally, but he coveted Free Presbyterian females.

  In the last couple of years, Slat's sex life had become a hunt for right-wing women of a certain age. He started going to DUP and Official Unionist meetings, and even Conservative ones, in the hope of scoring with the treasurer in the toilets. (Sometimes it worked.) On a week's holiday in Houston, he stayed in a hotel where a Republican convention was being held and got criminally boffed by the wife of a rabidly xenophobic Ohio she ruined the experience by disagreeing with some of her husband's more excessive notions.

  Slat told me that he slept with these women for several reasons. It was naughty because they were so entirely right wing, because they were so entirely middle-aged. But mostly he slept with them because they hated hinm. That was a sensation difficult to replicate with non-political girls.

  The upshot of this was that Slat w
as forced to inform me that he had got engaged a week before to someone ominously called Wincey. That sounded right-wing, Protestant and middle-aged all at once. She would be in the Wigwam tonight. I could hardly wait.

  I had often worried that my friends and I seldom talked about politics. There we were, living in Northern Ireland, the country of calorific nationalisms, Christolatry and a splittable and splitting populace. We never really mentioned it. It was good to see that local conditions weren't entirely passing us by. I was glad that my friends' sex lives were incorporating the sectarian and post-colonial experience. It meant I didn't have to think about them myself.

  Eight fifteen p.m. Usual table in the Wigwam. Everyone was there. Slat was there, Donal was there, Luke was there. Even Chuckle was there. He was completely silent, true, and Max seemed to be holding him down in his seat, but he was there. It had been a month since any of us had seen him. Septic had started a rumour that he was hiding out because he'd had a hundred grand's worth of plastic surgery in California. He and Max had arrived late and even the sceptical amongst us had been half expecting to see a new slim, epicene Lurgan. When the same old fat, balding Chuckle walked by Max - we were much relieved.

  When we'd said hello, he had grunted reluctantly. With her usual skill, Max had smoothed it over and made us comfortable. Pregnancy suited her. She was more beautiful and serene than before. As she talked and joked to fill Chuckle's silence, she made the rest of us feel that we lacked something.

  Donal was there with his new boyfriend. Pablo seemed a nice enough young nian, if pointlessly good-looking and wellmuscled. I caught Septic staring distastefully at the inordinate bulge in Pablo's trousers. It was easy to see precisely what Donal was getting these days.

  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.