Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

  EUREKA STREET

  ALSO BY ROBERT MCLIAM WILSON

  Ripley Bogle

  Manfred's Pain The Dispossessed

  EUREKA STREET

  A NOVEL OF IRELAND LIKE OTHER

  ROBERT McLIAM WILSON

  ARCADE PUBLISHING • NEW YORK LU

  Copyright © 1996 by Robert McLiam Wilson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  FIRST NORTH AMERICAN EDITION 1997

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress CataAyinq-in-Publication Data Wilson, Robert McLiam, 1964-

  Eureka Street / by Robert McLiam Wilson.-] st North American ed. p. cm.

  ISBN 1-55970-396-2 1. City and town life-Northern Ireland-Belfast-Fiction. 2. Protestants-Northern Ireland-Belfast-Fiction. 3. CatholicsNorthern Ireland-Belfast-Fiction. 4. Friendship-Northern Ireland-Belfast-Fiction. 5. Belfast (Northern Ireland)-Fiction. 1. Title

  PR6073.1469E94 1997 823'.914-dc21 97-25043

  Published in the United States by Arcade Publishing, Inc., New York Distributed by Little, Brown and Company

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  One

  All stories are love stories.

  It was a late Friday night, six months ago, six months since Sarah had left. I was in a bar making talk with a waitress called Mary. She had short hair, a very round ass and the big eyes of a hapless child. I had known her three hours and I was getting the two-year blues already.

  Chuckle Lurgan had sloped out of there half an hour previously after gracefully running out of cash and twenty minutes' worth of heavy hints from me.

  In a bar full of waitresses, Mary had been one among many but I'd more than noticed her. She had started by not liking me. Maybe a lot of men might have suspected some reluctant I just thought she wanted to kill me and didn't bother to wonder why. She was hard. She bristled and showed me her sharp little spines. I'm sure she understood that this would make me fall in love with her. I'm sure she knew that.

  Then she had begun the amiable waitress routine, teasing me as she served us our drinks. In the end she just sat across from me in Chuckle's vacant seat whenever she had a quiet moment. This constituted a relationship. There was something in the way she looked at me, sloe-eyed, speculative, without warmth. Then there was something in the tilt of her head as she refused my cigarettes and lit her own. I think I thought she liked me. I think I thought I should take her home.

  And the special way she looked at me could have been nothing compared with the special way I felt myself look at her. I could feel it written all over my face.

  It was me all over. The erotic high-style in the back bar of an Oirish pub. But for all my big talk, I was a blusher, a gulper. I couldn't say anything as straight as a stick. So while I hummed and while I hawed, Mary asked me to take her home.

  Sitting late in the bar while they closed up was more disconcerting than you might readily suppose. I looked down the neck of my bottle, ignoring the giggles of Mary's colleagues. The big Protestant bouncer took off his tux, rolled up his sleeves and flashed his UVF tattoos. He tried giving me some old chat while he swept the floor but I was afraid of saying something too Catholic. I ignored him as best I could and tried to think of Sarah. I couldn't manage it.

  I suppose it was the first full night of spring and the blunt warm wind lifted my mood as Mary and I left the bar. I ignored my wreck of a car and suggested that we walk.

  In her smart dress and sheer tights, Mary looked like something in a crime novel. I wasn't accustomed to girls like that. Somehow it made me feel cheap but, as she smiled at me, I couldn't help but concede that she was pretty. She talked energetically about her job. With all my heart I tried to listen but drifted off, letting the wind make shapes with my hair. But I was glad she talked. I was glad of the noise.

  `What do you do?' she asked as we passed Hope Street.

  I smiled. `I do a lot of things. I'm a debt counsellor right now,' I lied, after a fashion.

  `That's nice.'

  That's the thing about when you he. If they don't believe you, you despise yourself, if they do believe you, you despise them.

  There was a police checkpoint stopping cars at the mouth of the Lisburn Road. As we passed, a cop greeted Mary by name. I didn't like that. There was still enough of the working-class Catholic in me not to like that.

  'He comes into the bar sometimes,' Mary said afterwards. The excuse in her voice meant she had guessed what I was thinking. I didn't like that either.

  She was impressed by my street. It was leafy. It was green. She even liked the name. I lived on a street called Poetry Street. It wasn't always a good sign when people liked the name of my street. She was impressed by my flat. My flat makes me look like I have a lot of money. She looked at all Sarah's swish furniture and pictures, at all Sarah's faultless taste, and liked me more. She ran her fingers along the bookshelves and smiled at me like I was some intellectual.

  I made a pot of coffee all by myself and that, too, impressed her.

  `Nice place,' she said.

  I didn't know if I liked or admired her but I wanted her. I was lonely that night, womanless. It wasn't the sex I craved. It was the joint cornflakes, the hand on my hip in the dark, somebody else's hair on my pillow. I needed the small presences of someone. I needed Sarah's little bits.

  'Do you own or rent?' she asked.

  I don't know what I did with that face of mine but hers fell at my reaction. There was a sudden extra width in the big eyes and a tremble of the lips. I hated it when people did that kind of stuff to out with some duff line and then looking like they were six years old when I frowned.

  `I'm sorry,' she said. `That was a stupid thing to say.'

  I didn't disagree but that was when I knew I couldn't sleep with her. I don't my small experience of women, I've found it hard to sleep with them at such tirnes.Times when you get the impression that there's more to them than an opportunity. Sleeping with girls was great, sleeping with people was a bit more complicated. Maybe it was a bad thing, maybe a sign of my immaturity, but I knew that there was some kind of tenderness in it as well.

  I stood up as tactfully as I could manage. She stood too.There was nothing to say and little to do. I couldn't think of how to tell her of the big mistake that this had been. I moved towards her and she opened her shoulders and lifted her face uncertainly. It looked like she expected me to kiss her. And then I wanted to, very badly indeed.

  `I must go,' she said, surprisingly.

  Her cab took twenty minutes. We talked a little. I was oddly flattered that she didn't like me; that she had made her mistake and had corrected it so staunchly. I told her about Sarah and she told me about her policeman boyfriend whom she was going to call when she got home. I thought she was talking about the guy she had greeted when we left the bar but he was just a friend. Mary thought he would tell her boyfriend about seeing her with some guy and she wanted to pre-empt that strike.

  `I'm sorry,' she said. `This was a bad idea.'

  'Well...' I mumbled.

  `I don't do this.'

  `Me neither.!

  'First night of spring.' She smiled.

  `Yeah.'

  Then she left me to the rest of the coffee and myself. Much as Sarah had done.

  There are
those nights when you're pushing thirty and life seems over. When you feel like you'll never tie up any ends and no one will ever kiss your lips again.

  I wandered the rooms of my empty flat. I liked my flat. But sometimes, when home alone, I felt like I was the last man living and my two bedrooms were a humiliation of riches. Since Sarah left, I hadn't prospered. Life had been slow, life had been long. She'd been gone six months. She didn't want to live in Belfast any more. She was English. She didn't need it any more. There had been a lot of killings back then and she decided that she'd had enough. She wanted to go back to somewhere where politics meant fiscal arguments, health debates, local taxation, not bombs not maiming not murders and not fear.

  So, she had gone back to London. Chuckle had comforted me with the observation that English girls were a waste of time. She didn't write. She didn't call. She didn't even fax. She'd been right to go but I was still waiting for her to come back. I'd waited for other things in my life. Waiting was nothing new to me. But waiting had never seemed like this. It looked as though I was going to have to wait for longer than I'd got. The clock was running in sprints and I wasn't even off the blocks. People had got it all wrong about time. Time wasn't money. Time was speed.

  That night, I lay in my bed with my windows open, the helicopters chuckling comfortingly as they hovered over all those Catholics out west. Sarah had always hated that noise. I had always liked it. It had helped me sleep when I was a child. I hoped it would fail now. It was near four and I was working at half past six. I wasn't worried, though. I knew I had enough unhappy thoughts to keep me well awake so I dozed, feebly wishing that either Mary or Sarah could have somehow found it fit to lay her head next to mine.

  Next morning Rathcoole, a Protestant estate on the northern quiff of the city, concrete and cold. Not even eight o'clock and we were doing our third call already. Here I was, working Saturday again. We'd started off at half past six with a threepiece suite from a sleepy, anxious young couple. The woman had cried and the man had gulped nervously as he comforted her and watched our burly forms lumbering about his home. Then we'd picked up a fridge, microwave, electric guitar and mountain-bike from a family on the edge of the estate. Their house looked like it was made of cardboard and they were used to interference. We'd busted in there while all but the seven year-old were in bed. The dad had grumbled briefly but nobody feels like a fight in their pyjamas. They gave us no trouble.

  We pulled up at the third house on our list. We were to take a television from a couple of pensioners. Crab stayed in the van and Hally and I walked up the little path and rapped the door in that hard, hard way we had. I went in behind him when the old guy opened up. We didn't say anything as we stepped over the rubble of the dingy hallway into the sitting room.

  Curtains closed, the room was glutinous and dark. A television chuckled in a brassy nook ignoring our incursion like a brave comic shunning hecklers. An old lady sat on a sofa dimly illumined by the blue glow of breakfast television. Her reactions were tardy. She turned towards me. The old guy followed us in, swearing inaudibly, his pruny face slack like he wasn't surprised. The old lady made a couple of efforts to raise the tub of her belly off the sofa. The TV suddenly went to advertisements and the old girl was bathed in Caribbean warmth as she tottered to her feet. She began to shout. `Get out of here, you dirty hallions! Whoohjoos think y'are? My grandson's in the UDA. I'll have youse kneecapped'

  Blah blah blah, the usual.

  Silently, I unplugged the set and picked it up. It was my turn to carry and Hally's turn to be hardman. He flexed himself and looked pretty big in that murky little room. I moved to the door. The old man mumbled some exasperated oath at me and the old lady aimed a swipe of her hand at my retreating back.

  Hally stopped and turned round to face her. He bent down a long, long way and put his face within kissing distance of hers.

  `Fuck up,' he advised.

  Outside I loaded the van and we moved on, Crab trundling through the cheap streets in second gear. Hally was rumbling and red with disappointed aggression. It looked like no one would give him the trouble he sought this morning and even he balked at smacking some old biddy. I looked at him and sighed. I didn't like my job.

  CZ45, outstanding, £135, resale maybe 10o to The company would want back on a gogglebox of that price. Twenty pounds' profit split three ways. We were tycoons. I didn't like my job.

  Crab and Hally bitched at each other while I looked out at all the bricks and all the sunshine. The day before they'd picked up a video and stereo in Ballybeen. Hally had been driving and he'd told Crab that the woman they were stiffing was so badly broke that she'd put out to keep her stuff. He'd given poor old Crab some big story about her being an unmarried mother in her late twenties, blonde, big tits: usual list of yob desirables. Crab had gone wild with anticipation. Hally and I had sussed the poor slob was a virgin. Needless to say, it was all crap as Crab discovered when some fat matron had answered the door and smacked him about for trying to take her stuff. This grievance still rankled. It wasn't like Crab had a lot of other things to think about.

  I was feeling sour. I worked in the repossession industry. How else was I supposed to feel? Repo work had the capacity to take the edge off my morning and it was always the morning for us boys. That's when we did our best work. People were disoriented in the morning, half dressed, malleable, not generally pugilistic. It seemed that trousers were necessary for confident protest. We didn't work after never knew what size the guy might be or how much he might have drunk; it was also harder to find women alone after dark and people kept mistaking us for the IRA.

  Oh, boy, people were always mistaking us for the IRA. I suppose it was easy to mistake one trio of macho Puckers for another. My colleagues were very basic human beings indeed. Crab was big, fat and ugly. Hally was big, fat, ugly and vicious. I tried not to hate people. Hating people was too tiring. But sometimes, just sometimes, it was hard.

  I had a personal theory as to why the people we dealt with were so easy to deal with first thing in the morning. I had a feeling that poverty like theirs felt worse first thing. It might have been easier to dream or fantasize at night when some optimism or booze could make you bullish but in the pallid light of morning it must have all seemed pretty permanent, this poverty, this shame. It must have seemed fairly realistic.

  What depressed me most was that so many people gave us so little trouble. Like they expected our invasion. Like they guessed we had a right and they had none. When an unmarried mother who owes twenty quid on a three-hundred-pound fridge lets you walk out with it and no grumbles, something very odd is going on.

  Crab was definitely getting excited about our next call. A sunbed. Crab felt that a sunbed guaranteed some big blowsy tart -just what he needed before breakfast.We pulled into the street and stopped at the address. The house looked smarter than its neighbours: there was a fancy door and some intricate porchwork. Somebody doing well enough to buy sunbeds and build fancy porches had obviously lost their job and now we were coming to take it all away.

  I stayed in the van because Crab was so desperate to get a look at the woman his imagination had created. He and Hally knocked and waited. I lit a cigarette and settled down. I felt like shit. Some would say that working-class aspiration always ends like hoodlums taking all the gaudy baubles away. I still felt like a criminal.

  I couldn't get Mary out of my head. I had told her I was a debt counsellor.Which was a big fat laugh. I could never get the hang of being seedy and it appalled me to think of what I had become again since Sarah had left. Some repo thug who lies to the waitresses he takes home. The high life.

  Hally was still knocking at the door and Crab was looking disappointedly through the windows. Nobody home. Just as I was beginning to hope that he wasn't going to do it, Hally had whipped out his chisel and jemmied the lock. I hated it when he did that. The cops had hassled us too many times already. I didn't want any more grief. But I said nothing as the two disappeared inside.

 
I put my head back and closed my eyes. I felt ashamed of the night before. I wondered if I would have felt more ashamed if I'd slept with her. It was just that the girl had somehow shown that she was much better than me. When she had asked me to take her home, it had been a stylish, independent thing to do. Maybe it was always like that when girls did it. But I had smudged it and made it somehow sordid. I wished I didn't have that knack.

  A hand tapped me on the shoulder and I jerked upright, eyes open. A man was standing by the open van window. He was unshaven and weary-looking.

  `That's my house,' he said. `What's going on?'

  His tone was desultory, certainly not aggressive. Even so, I thought about getting out of the van in case he cut up rough.

  `Repossession,' I said, more dismissive than I felt.

  'What are you taking?' he asked, curiously.

  `Sunbed.'

  'Ah, right,' he murmured, without interest. He eyed my cigarette. I offered him one.'Thanks, mate.'

  Crab and Hally were still inside. This man didn't look like he intended moving.

  'They'll be ages taking that fucking thing apart: He tittered grimly.

  I flicked something between a smile and a nod at him.

  'I'm glad to see it go,' he said, lazily confidential. 'The bitch fucked off so her stuff can fuck off after her.'

  Me, I never knew what to say to unhappy people. I never knew what to add or subtract.

  'Lost your job?' I asked clumsily.

  `Aye, fuck'The man was briefly energized. `I was at Short's ten years. Laid me off four months ago. They're letting fucking Taigs in now.'

  Yeah, yeah, I thought. There was a new Commission now to make sure that Catholics had fair representation in the workforces of the province. Equable commentators like this guy blamed this Commission for all the economic, social and moral ills of the planet generally. They had liked it the old way, when Catholics were glad of an indoor bathroom and a couple of raw spuds. But what could he have expected? That kind of stuff couldn't have gone on for ever. Not because it was wrong or anything like that, because it was embarrassing. Would he have been comfortable if he'd known I was a Catholic? I wondered. Probably.