Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (23 page)

When I got back, Chuckie had called (Slat had called too, Amnesty had called again and Crab and Hally continued their old guff but I ignored them all). I called Chuckie back. He and the rest of the boys were going to some kind of gathering in one of the new yuppie bars on the Dublin Road. I was too bored and lonely to say no.

I got my cat and forced him to sit on my knee while I watched the old folks in the two houses opposite me. I'd often seen these two playing out their comedy. They didn't seem to talk to each other but they always did the same things at the same times. He was Asian, obviously a widower, a soft-bellied old guy often being visited by various clutches of children and grandchildren. She was true Ulster intemperate stock, a bluehaired old dear often dressed in a miraculous pair of pink seminylon stretch slacks (no visitors). That evening they were out gardening in their little patches of green out front. They bent over their shrubs, their heads nearly touching, tugging at a weed bush that bordered both their little gardens. I sometimes suspected they didn't get on but I had to say that, that evening, the races sure seemed united in their mutual hatred of weeds. It was beautiful.

When I got to the bar where I was meeting the boys, I was horrified. There was a sign over the door.

`An Evening of Irish Poetry Tonight 8 p.m.,' it said.

`Oh, fuck,' I replied.

Obviously there were no bouncers that night. What hordes would they be fighting off? I stood on the doorstep and pondered. Could any solitude be worse than this? I was amazed that Chuckie would attend such a gathering. I mean, Slat, Septic and the rest of us were basically yobbish, vulgar and sad but we could claim some form of brush with education, with literature. Chuckie, however, was moronically ill-informed. I suspected Max's hand in this.

Inside, I found that my suspicions were correct and I also found, to my meagre delight, that Aoirghe was with them. I walked up to them. I patted Chuckie's arm, said hello to Max and was greeting the fearsome Aoirghe when I unfortunately coughed.

Her eyes narrowed. `Are you taking the piss again?'

`Jesus!' I choked. `I just coughed. Gimme a break.'

Her eyes narrowed more (how could she see anything like that?). `Yeah, and I got your message. Thanks very much, it was charming' She hissed the last word.

I blushed and coughed again. `Whoops, sorry. Sorry about the message. I was pissed about getting nosy calls from Amnesty.'

She turned to Max and started some chat with her. I shrugged my shoulders at Chuckie, smiled amiably at him and grabbed him viciously by the balls.

`Ow.,

'I don't fucking believe it, Chuckie. How come you didn't tell me she was going to be here?' I gave his pebbles another twist. `Hmm?'

`Fuck, Jake. Let go. It wasn't my fault.'

I released him.

Slat, Septic and Donal arrived. We stood in a bunch waiting for the wimp who couldn't stand the pressure of resisting buying the first round.

'Look,' Chuckie whispered to me, 'she's just staying for the poetry. After that, she's fucking off with one of the poets.'

My relief was tempered with a qualm of jealousy. That moment scared me badly. I shook my head and cleared my mind. I held my hand in front of my face and counted my fingers. I was OK.

'What's wrong with you?' asked Chuckie.

`Never mind that. What the fuck are you doing at a poetry reading?'

Chuckie looked slightly miffed at my surprise. Septic muffled a laugh.'It was Aoirghe's idea. One of the guys reading is a councillor for just Us. He wrote a book when he was in the Maze.'

'Oh, great.'

`One of them's famous,' said Chuckie consolingly. `Shauny ... Shinny ... Shamie ...'

'Sugar Ray Leonard?' suggested Septic.

'Chuckle struggled on manfully, `Shilly . . .

'Shague Ghinthoss,' shouted Max.

`Even better,' I complained.

Shague Ghinthoss was an inappropriately famous poet who looked like Santa Claus and wrote about frogs, hedges and long-handled spades. He was a vaguely anti-English Catholic from Tyrone but the English loved him.They had a real appetite for hearing what a bunch of fuckers they were. I liked that about the English.

Max sloped over with a book. Aoirghe trailed along reluctantly behind her. Max smiled. `It's the launch of this new book. It's supposed to be very good' She passed it to me.

'According to whom?' I asked grammatically.

Chuckie coughed and old Aoirghe looked ready to tell me. I dipped into the book to avoid her eye.

'Of course,' she put in acidly, 'I wouldn't expect you to be sympathetic to any writers belonging to the Movement but even you couldn't deny Shague Ghinthoss's reputation.'

`Is that right?'

'There's a beautiful one of his on the first page,' said Max brightly.'It was good of a writer of his repute to endorse a book like this, don't you think?'

`I bet I can recite it without reading it.'

Chuckie looked impressed at satire passed him by. Aoirghe bristled. I passed the book to Deasely, open at the first page. Donal adopted a pedagogical expression.

I cleared my throat.

I stopped. There was no applause. Deasely looked at me severely. He tutted. `You left out the fifth blah, Jackson. Go to the back of the class and buy me a beer.'

He chucked the book back to Aoirghe. She looked like she was pissing blood.'Jesus, Jackson.Your friends are near as bad as you. Do you boys go to asshole support groups at weekends?'

It was a bad, bad evening. Before the reading started we were both to a number of Aoirghe's friends and associates. To do her justice, they weren't all extremist republicans. There was a man who taught Television-watching Skills at the University of Ulster. There was an old college chum of hers, a man with a Theory of everything. He had a Theory of Poetry. He had a Theory of Parties. A Theory of History. A Theory of Haircuts. He told me all of them. He did not include a Theory of How Not To Be Boring.

Then the reading commenced. We stood still while a series of twats in poetic clothes (a varying costume, always expressing equal measures of nonconformity, sensitivity and sexual menace) drivelled on about the flowers, the birds, the hedges, the berries, the spades, the earth, the sky and the sea. Whatever you said about Shague Ghinthoss's reputation, he definitely had one. All these tossers bore his mark. Unlike Ghinthoss, none of these boys was from the country. They were all pale-faced city boys and most obviously had never seen any of the hedges, berries or spades about which they wrote so passionately.

It was clear, in addition, that these were all nationalist hedges, republican berries, unProtestant flowers and extremely Irish spades.These subtleties were dashed, however, when the penultimate poet did his stuff. This unprepossessing john, we were told, had had his work translated from the original Gaelic into Russian but not into English. He was to read one of his poems in Irish and some guy would translate into English. (I should point out that I had seen this poet at the bar, showing a fine grasp of idiomatic English when he was trying to chat up one of the bar admittedly, he seemed to have some difficulty in understanding the phrase, `Fuck off, you ugly twat.')

This man read, haltingly but confidently, a poem entitled `Poem to a British Soldier About to Die'. It was hard enough to follow the text in detail, what with the simultaneous translation and the fact that it was crap, but the sentiments were apparent enough. The poem told the young British soldier (about to die) why he was about to die, why it was his fault, how it had been his fault for eight hundred years and would probably be his fault for another eight hundred, why the man who was going to shoot him was a fine Irishman who loved his children and never beat his wife and believed firmly in democracy and freedom for all, regardless of race or creed, and why such beliefs gave him no option but to murder the young British soldier (about to die).

There was silence after he finished. I waited for the boos and catcalls. How foolish. It wasn't until a few seconds into the cheers and whoops that I realized that everybody loved it. Weren't there any Protestants here? I looked over at Chuckie but he was blithe. He hadn't even been listening, a condition he shared with many of his faithmates.

The fat poet milked the applause. Some of the other scribes joined him on the podium. The rapture sounded as though it would never end. These culture vultures were frenzied in their acclaim. After a time the hubbub died down. The chubby humanist waited for total silence, then leaned close to the microphone.

`Tiocfaidh ar La,' he bellowed.

Chuckle jumped in his skin. `What?' he squeaked.

Thankfully, no one heard him in the resumption of the tumult.

It went on. It was as bad as could be. The great man, Ghinthoss, got up and read. He read about hedges, the lanes and the bogs. He covered rural topography in detail. It felt like a geography field trip. In a startling departure, he read a poem about a vicious Protestant murder of a nice Catholic. There were no spades in this poem, and only one hedge, but by this time the crowd were whipped into such a sectarian passion they would have lauded him if he'd picked his nose with any amount of rhythm or even in a particularly Irish manner.

He milked it all. Then he took some questions. I'm not saying they were entirely facile but their content was mostly eugenic. These people gathered close together, snug in their verse, their culture, they had one question. Why can't Protestants do this? they asked themselves. What's wrong with those funny people? Why aren't they spiritual like us?

Ghinthoss was grandly forgiving. He seemed to think it was not all the Protestants' fault. Given a million or so years of Catholic supremacy, Protestant brows might lift, they might start with a few uneasy grunts, invent the wheel and wear bearskins. If we were kind, the poor dumb brutes might be able to manage a few domestic poetic tasks in a century or so.

'Mr Ghinthoss,' I asked in a pause (oh, I didn't want to, I couldn't help myself, I bit my tongue, I put my hands over my mouth but it just would come out),'Mr Ghinthoss,' I enquired, 'could you tell us, whether, great poet that you are, whether .. . whether your dick reaches your arse yet?'

I was always good at public speaking.

As I was being thrown out I arranged to meet the others. They wanted to go to Lavery's - I was being lifted in the air by two ten-foot revolutionaries at that point so I couldn't debate the venue.

I checked myself out in the bathroom of a hamburger joint nearby. A graze on my forehead, a cut on my lip. Oh, my poor fucking face. It was getting boring, this Jake-beating thing, it was happening every day. I used to be so pretty. I used to be so tough.

I didn't want to go into Lavery's until the others were there so I nipped into Mary's bar just to see if she was there.

She was. Her face fell like I don't know what when I walked in. The place was pretty empty. I knew if I sat at the bar she wouldn't have to wait on me. I could easily have saved her that.

I sat at a table near the wall.

'Can I get you anything?'

`Hello, Mary.!

'What would you like to drink?'

'Mary, no grief. Just say hello:

'Hello'

`Double gin. Neat. No ice.'

There was a pause.

'Please,' I added.

The firmness in her face fled. Abruptly she pulled out a chair and sat opposite me. `Listen,' she said, `Paul's terrified that he's going to get into trouble for that thing between you. Some detectives have interviewed him. They said they were going to talk to you.They told him he could get a prison sentence, never mind lose his job'

`They came today.!

`What did you say?'

'I told them nothing had happened.That it was all a mistake.'

`What about the stuff in the papers?'

I told her I didn't know how it had happened. I told her it had nothing to do with me. Then I told her about Aoirghe.

It was lovely for a while there. I'd never had Mary listen so carefully to what I said. I'd never had her so interested. It was because of her concern and love for another man, sure, but I didn't care. It was nice anyway. My aspirations were thrillingly modest.