Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (14 page)

When I got home, a car full of heavies had stopped outside my house. I parked the Wreck and opened nay front door. My flesh crawled and my blood pounded. As I closed it behind me I was almost disappointed that the muzzle of the Browning had not, in fact, been pushed hard against my ear.

Crab or Hally had been leaving messages on my answering machine. Death threats. Disguising their voices, trying to sound threatening. I didn't take any of it very seriously, but I knew if they got drunk or bored enough they wouldn't hesitate to nip round here or to tell some of their friends with balaclavas what a Catholic I was.

Inside, I looked out my window to see what the heavies were up to. Two of them had got out of the car. They were bad guys, all right, badly dressed, well-moustached. I saw them walk to the graffiti wall. For a moment I thought I'd worked it out. I thought that these were the OTG guys. But then they got out their cans and their brushes and they painted over both the OTGs written there. They drove off. I was relieved. I wouldn't like any mysteries to originate with guys like that.

I lay in bed with the windows open. I couldn't sleep. I'd forgotten what a good night's sleep was like. It was years ago and places distant. I'd used it up, like luck or wishes. In the end I lit a cigarette and switched on the tiny radio, which was the only noise, bar cat, I had left after selling my stereo and my television. A news bulletin told me that they'd shot another taxidriver. Maybe I'd sell my little portable too.

Next day, I worked through my Friday.

It had taken me a weekend to find another job. I'd called some people. Some people had called me back. I was flattered, amazed. I was stirred to find how high my stock still stood. A few of my old associates had soon heard I was out of work again and they were tripping over each other to offer me employment.

My answering machine had buzzed all weekend with their unanswered messages: Slug, Spud, Muckie, Rat, Dix, Onion, Bap and Gack. Why didn't I know anybody called Algernon? Fondly remembering my old form, my old skills, they had all made various offers but I didn't do that sort of thing any more. Even a stint of repo work had been a departure. Davy Murray's was the worst offer but it was the most legal. I took it and I'd ended up doing crew work for Davy just like I'd done in the old days. I was a construction worker again. I was a brickie. I was a tiler. I was a big success.

I'd worked this work on and off since I was sixteen. We were doing renovations on kitchens at the Europa, the biggest hotel in Belfast. The famous one they always used to blow up. (Stich past tenses are hazardous in Belfast, the one they still blow up, the one they will blow up.) Yeah, the one with no windows, the one with the wooden curtains. It was once the most bombed hotel in Europe but Sarajevo joints were taking all the records now.

My new job was OK. I worked in construction so I did constructive things all day. I liked the work. It was simple. It was legal. It wasn't the best use of my education but at least it was giving me some muscles.

Chuckie phoned when I got back from work. I apologized for blowing his plans the night before. No problem, he said. Aoirghe was going to Dublin for a while, which meant Chuckie was going to have Max all to himself for as long as was necessary.

`So you didn't go for old Aoirghe, then?' he asked.

`What do you think?'

I heard him laugh.

`Yeah, she's had medicine, right enough. But relax, she hates me too.

'Well, Chuckie, I hesitate to mention it, but wouldn't you be a bit Protestant for her tastes?'

`No, it wasn't that.'

`No?'

'No.You know the way she's a big Irish speaker. When I first met her, I asked her what the Irish word for constitutional democracy was.'

`What is it?'

`British conspiracy.' Chuckie guffawed. `I'm proud of that joke. It's the only one I ever made up by myself. It's not that funny but it's dead satirical.'

`I presume Aoirghe wasn't busting her gut at that one!

'I thought she was gonna nut me' Chuckie chuffed on for a while about this and that.

`How's business?' I asked him.

`Amazing.You would not believe it.'

He told me how business was. I would not believe it.

That night I sat in the Wreck and waited for Mary to leave work.The bar shut late and it was much unhappiness to sit there while the windows steamed up and to lie to all the cops who gripped their guns and asked me what I was doing. It was madness. For all I knew, Mary's pugilistic boyfriend might have been on duty and if he'd seen me waiting there he'd have emptied his clip into me just for fun.

After an hour and more I saw her leave. Her coat pulled tight, she jumped into a cab with one of the other bar girls. I could barely see her face and it only lasted about twenty seconds but it looked like a nice life she had there. It looked like she wasn't missing much.

Then, stupidly, I drove out to Rathcoole. I drove out to the house where the Johnsons lived. I parked the car in front of their house and sat there for an hour or two. It looked like I was turning into a watcher, a weirdo. I seemed to know all these people who wouldn't want to talk to me. I smoked and watched as the lights were switched off one by one. When the house was dark and I could be sure they were sleeping, I felt better. It was no atonement but it was all I had in me.

I went home. Someone had painted letters on my front door. Your ded. The spelling was Hally's; it even sounded like his accent. I knew there was trouble to come. Since when had my life become so controversial? I decided to think about it in the morning. I went to bed. I felt so bad, I was nice to the cat. Uneasy but willing, he took the opportunity of getting into the bedroom and sleeping on my face all night.

The weekend opened out to me like a menu in a cheap cafe. There wasn't anything I wanted there. It didn't feel good to be single any more. Saturday morning I went shopping, just so someone would talk to me, just so I'd have something to thank somebody for.

Chuckie had gone to ground for the weekend, undoubtedly on some mysterious financial enterprise. I wasn't sure that I could ever remember him being out of touch before. The new Chuckie was taking some getting used to. Slat and some of the others would be around but I didn't want to do any drinking. What with Chuckie being such a cosmopolite now, I thought I should try something a little more dignified than usual. I didn't know any dignified people so I thought I'd have to spend the day alone. I wondered if the Erasmus would last a full Saturday.

It didn't. In the end, of course, I couldn't take the solitude.

So, six months late, I went to see my foster-folks.

Matt and Mamie had been my foster-folks. They sounded like a nineteen-fifties novelty act. And that, after a fashion, was what they were.

Matt and Mamie had fostered me when I was fifteen. When all the bad stuff happened with my real folks, the cops and the social workers had nabbed me. After a few weeks of courtrooms and hostels, they dragged me over to Matt and Mamie's house.

Years later, they'd told me what a wolf-boy I was when I arrived. I was violent, withdrawn, the usual stuff. The various arms of all the state services had recommended institutional care but some optimist, some humanist, had thought I was recognizably human. That was the someone who had thought of Matt and Mamie.

They didn't need to remind me. I'd never forgotten the first day I went to them.They lived on the Antrim Road then.They weren't solidly their home, their belongings were unimaginable to me. After I had mutinously fielded an evening of solicitous non-enquiry from them, they showed me my bedroom.

It had all been so bad, my childhood, my youth, it had all been so I'd seen it all through like a hardwood cowboy. Nothing had finally hurt me beyond endurance and, for all the damage I'd taken, I was still standing. But that night I cried, I wept to die. I sobbed silently until my head was hot and bursting and my nose ran like twin taps.

And it was only because of the coverlet on my bed. Mamie had laid a green embroidered coverlet on my bed. I had no idea what it was made of but it was heavy and felt like prosperity itself. It was only a piece of material but it was too much for me, that coverlet. I had never seen such green. I couldn't really understand that this woman I didn't know would have put this thing across the bed for my comfort, for my pleasure. I rubbed my hot, snotty face in it and slept in my clothes.

Later, I decided that it was no big deal. I decided that it was only bed-linen. Later still, I changed my mind. Perhaps green coverlets are not profound things but I think it made me understand something of what I might have there'd been nobody around to love me like they should.

I lived with Mamie and Matt for a couple of years. By the number of grateful men of various ages who called on them, I soon guessed that Matt and Mamie had done the foster thing before. I was right. They had had no children and had made up for it by fostering the kids nobody would touch. That basically meant males over fourteen. They'd had some shockers: delinquents, hardmen, wide-boys and paramilitaries of every description. Only one had turned out bad. He was dead already, shot by his own side in some Republican feud.

We kids had stolen from them, cheated them and assaulted kid had even come home one night with a UVF gun with which he was going to kneecap Matt, but Matt and Mamie had continued loving them all, absolutely and unconditionally. Eventually these wide-boys, these halfmen just had to learn that language.

Matt and Mamie had stopped fostering now. Or rather they'd been stopped. They were too old. They'd been retired from the caring business. But they'd done their bit. Seventeen kids had passed through their hands from 1964 onwards. Mamie always talked proudly of having the biggest family in the city. Some of these guys were in their forties. They were lawyers, doctors, builders; they were husbands and fathers.

Matt and Mamie had fostered generations of the city's scum and persistently and without reward made human beings out of them.

Matt and Mamie were weird.

Matt and Mamie had been leaving messages on my machine for months. I hadn't called back. I'd only ignored them because I'd known what they'd wanted. I hadn't seen them since Sarah had gone.

They were both in their sixties now, living in a big house out on the Shore Road. It was in the general area where I'd been doing my repo work. I'd always been a bit panicky in case I bumped into them, doing that work of which they would so disapprove. Mamie hadn't wanted to move to the Shore Road but Matt had insisted. He had partially maritime fantasies. He'd always wanted to work in the docks. He'd even tried to leave school when he was fifteen. they'd been childhood dissuaded him. He hadn't wanted to listen to her but since he had tried fruitlessly to have sex with her at least once every twenty minutes between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, she had a carrot he couldn't resist. The new house was on the north edge of the bay of the city and Matt liked to walk the coast of Belfast, concrete and crane, the docks thick with the quality of the sea. He liked to dream there.

I rolled up to the house about two. Matt was in the garden, his big back bent over some dwarf hedgerow. I called out to him. He stood up and shielded his eyes with his hand. It was not sunny.

'Good to see you, son.'

I shook his hand. There was some muck there. `Likewise,' I said.

We went inside. Mamie was in the kitchen, cooking something major. Her meals had always been complicated affairs, taking military amounts of time and tasting pretty military in the end. She kissed my cheek with her big cold lips and told me to sit at the table. She went on cooking.

`You've been a stranger,' she said, wiping her brow.

I smiled but nobody was looking at me. `Yeah, well, you know how it goes.'

'I'm not sure I do know how it goes.'

Matt coughed uneasily. `You want a drink, son?'

'I'd drink any coffee that's going.'

Matt busied himself with my request. Mamie turned to face me. `How's Sarah?'

I looked at my fingernails. It felt pretty blithe but I knew it would fool no one. `She's fine.'

`Mmm,' replied Mamie.

A lot of Mamie's conversation had always consisted of indeterminate noises, grunts, mumbles and grumbles, all invested with their own peculiar significance. `Mmm' was not a favourable noise.

But then, having finished with coffee, Matt started his own series of peacemaker noises, coughs, chokes, sneezes. I nearly laughed. This wasn't Foreign Office but nobody could deny its diplomacy.

`I must urinate,' he announced.

He left the room. It looked intentional. It looked like Mamie had something to say to me that Matt didn't want to hear.

`You look thin,' said Mamie.

`I haven't been eating your concrete casseroles for near a year.

She took a swipe at me with one floury hand. `You should call us more.'

`Yeah, I'm sorry. I will, I promise.'

She stopped what she was doing and stood facing me with her arms folded. `She's gone, hasn't she?'

'Who?'

'Sarah'

Matt and Mamie didn't like me to smoke but I lit a cigarette anyhow.

'Yes. She's gone.'

Matt and Mamie had been big Sarah fans. They had dug her. To Matt and Mamie, Sarah had been a good thing, she'd been the only good thing. Mamie knew my news already so she didn't freak but she gave me one of her old-woman looks. It was one of the things I'd noticed about Sarah going. Everybody thought it had been my decision. They were wrong. I hadn't packed any bags. But that stuff, all that stuff, it just took too long to explain.

'Who's for dinner?' I asked.

Mamie didn't mind the subject change but she blushed for me. John and Patrick are coming special.'

John and Patrick were the first and second of Matt and Mamie's fosterings.They were both in their late forties. She was always ill-at-ease when she split her affections like this. I'd made her feel bad that I wasn't getting my feet under her table that night. She needn't have worried. I was OK. Mamie's cooking was dreadful. She had to take the day off to make an omelette. John and Patrick were welcome to it.