Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (31 page)

Jake glanced back at the ebbing dust plume. 'I hope you're the only one!

In common with 84,637 other people in Northern Ireland, Luke Findlater discovered that a big blast had occurred in the very first radio report of the incident on that day. Every lunchtime he listened to an eccentric agricultural programme on Radio Ulster called Farming Ulster Update. He heard, with delight, items about silage management, pig-farming and sheep-dip. The Englishman knew that it was probably some crass patrician taste for obscure kitsch but it genuinely charmed him.

Within only twelve minutes of the explosion in Fountain Street, the presenter of this programme had stopped speaking, fumbled with some paper and announced in an uncertain voice that he had received unconfirmed reports of a serious explosion in Belfast city centre and that several people had been killed.

The man's voice, so associated with the risibly mundane matters of manure and chicken-crops, formed those words strangely. The effect was disturbing. Luke felt cold. He sat back in his chair with a peculiar sensation. He looked around the office. He had not lived long enough in Northern Ireland to find such things usual, customary The furniture in his room, the very stationery seemed grotesquely commonplace under the circumstances.

Luke had been about to send a fax. Now he proceeded to send that fax. He stood by the machine, feeding the paper through, feeling the unaccountable, unanswerable consciousness of something inappropriate.

Fifteen minutes later, when Septic Ted learnt of the bomb he felt nothing quite so complicated as the feelings that had oppressed Luke. He was a veteran. He had lived in that city all his life. He knew several of the scores.

He had taken the day off work and was lounging on a sofa watching daytime television. He had nearly dozed off when the news flash appeared. He drank another mouthful of beer and burped acidly.

`Wankers,' he said.

Septic was not unfeeling. He was used to it.

Chuckle Lurgan learnt of the Fountain Street explosion thirty minutes after the event. He had gone home to have lunch with his mother. To his irritation, she had been absent and had not come back after an hour. He was driving back to the office from Eureka Street when his telephone had rather, parped thinly. Chuckie was yet too doubtful of the intricacies of driving to risk combining that task with a telephone conversation, delightful and flash though that would be. He pulled up on some Bedford Street double yellows and answered the call.

It was Luke Findlater. He told Chuckie how they had earned some money in the two hours since he'd been gone and how they were to earn more in the twenty minutes before he got back to the office. Chuckie, as always, liked to hear this but preferred not to be there. 'I've got to get some things in the city centre,' he said.'I'll park the car, do my stuff and see you in forty minutes.'

`That might be a problem. There's been a big explosion somewhere central. The centre might be cordoned off.'

'When?'

`Don't know. Not long ago.'

Chuckie hung up. He started the car and turned left at the bottom of Bedford Street, getting onto the wide square circuit of one-way traffic around the City Hall. As Luke had predicted, the police had laid stretches of white tape across the approach to Donegall Square. Chuckle's car became hemmed in as those behind him manoeuvred to change their route. He stared down the broad boulevard of Donegall Place. Groups of ambulances, fire engines and police cars clustered near the Bank of Ireland but he couldn't tell where the bomb had been.

A policeman held up the traffic so he could pass by. The man's face was pale and blank. Chuckie didn't like that look. He had seen it on policemen's faces before. Even at the periphery of such incidents, even hundreds of yards away, they often wore that numb, pallid expression.

Diverted, he turned left past the building he had always known as the College of Knowledge. He was irritated that his shopping plans had been dashed, but there was a small, indolent part of him that hoped no one had died.

Crab and Hally heard about the bomb nearly fifteen minutes after Chuckie. At two minutes before two o'clock they were in the van, just about to turn into the New Lodge, a Catholic area - a task which, they hated to admit, was more daunting since they had lost Jake, their conveniently Catholic colleague. They were listening to a song neither liked. Crab had just spotted a young woman in a tight skirt and had shouted something that had sounded to the woman like some meaningless elongated howl but which both Crab and Hally understood to represent the statement `I'd fuck ye any day of the week, big darlin'.'

They had laughed big fat laughs like the big fat men they were.

When they had stopped laughing they found that the song neither liked had ended and the two o'clock news had begun. An announcement was made about the Fountain Street bomb.

'Do you think it was one of theirs or one of ours?' said Crab to Hally.

`Do you think it got more of theirs or ours?' said Hally to Crab.

`City centre. Hard to say how many Taigs there'd be down there.!

`That place is near Castle Street. They're bound to be Taigs.'

'One of ours, then.'

`Aye.'

`Good one. Never too many dead Taigs. Fuck them.'

`Yeah, fuckers.'

They turned into the New Lodge and looked about those Catholic streets with a new sense of triumph.

And so it continued. The city's discovery of its shame was gradual, piecemeal, intermittent.

Slat Sloane had heard when a workmate told him. He had felt a pain and a shame that he couldn't quantify. He had thought of the dead, and his own tender flesh had puckered and tingled in sympathy with theirs.

Donal Deasely had found out when his office on the other side of town had been evacuated by the police. The city had ground to a halt because of several subsequent bomb-scares which the police had treated seriously, concerned about the possibility of a follow-up device. He had heard the earlier blast but it had sounded distant and no big deal. He had been surprised when one of the policeman told him about Fountain Street. He felt momentary shame about thinking it nothing.

Max, veteran of American violence, had been surprised. It had been her first big bomb. There had been many shootings, but she was American, she was used to that. The explosion confused her. What had it been for, exactly?'

policeman all he needed to know when his shift was sent to Fountain Street to secure the scene and protect forensic material. He spent two hours standing sixty yards away from the rubbled hole of the sandwich shop. After the first hour, he had given himself a sore neck from not turning in that direction.

Young Roche heard, hours later, when on his way home from school he met a boy he he had attended school that day. The boy told him that there'd been a big bomb down the town and that forty people had been killed. Roche had sold the boy three cigarettes for fifty pence before they parted.

Aoirghe, Matt and Mamie, Mary, even drunken old Tick all found out about Fountain Street in their various ways at their various times and to their varying degrees of horror or pity. Suzy, Rachel and several of the other women with whom Jake had failed to sleep also heard, learnt and discovered. By the time darkness fell, the knowledge had spread through Belfast with the imperceptible but unstoppable velocity of the fading light itself.

The knowledge permeated the city like weather, like a very local depression. That night's nightlife was desultory, hushed. Some had found the news heart-stopping, some had found it dull but there were few who had not found it. Some parents held their children in a tighter embrace that night, some lovers spoke more gently, even some fighters didn't quite fight. The citizens were busy, they couldn't think about it all the time but they thought about it all the same, and there were few who would not have wished it away if they could.

The city and the citizens knew that this act had supposedly been committed on their behalf. A mandate was claimed. As the citizens fought, worked or idled their way through their evening, they almost all knew that no vote had been taken, no proposal put forward. Nearly every citizen thought privately, individually, No one asked me. It was a silent but complete unanimity. It was a silent but complete rejection.

The evening passed and the city grew darkly quiet once more. The southside shop-fronts, all the streetlit sidewalks became deserted. From up high, the city looked the same as it had looked the night before. There was one floodlit patch where you might spot rubble and searchers, but generally Belfast looked like it always looked.

The streets still glittered like jewels, like small strings of stars.

'I think she wet her bed last night,' said Chuckie.'When I went in this morning, the sheets were soaked.'

The doctor gazed at him without replying. Chuckie was growing irritable. The man had been staring at him in this manner for some minutes. Time was short and he was worried about his mother. 'I don't want her taking any more tranquillizers,' he said.

The doctor stopped his hand as it reached for his penpocket. He looked blankly at Chuckie.

Chuckie looked around the confines of the little kitchen in which they stood. He kept his temper.'Is it some kind of longlasting shock or something? Is she going to get better?'

The doctor gawped silently.

`Why are you looking at me like that?'

The doctor, not a young man, coloured. He was Chuckle's own doctor. He had known the man for fifteen years and more. He had come to Eureka Street several times. He had always been quick to get away. He had never dawdled so.

'Well?' he enquired.

'God, you've changed,' the doctor wondered hesitantly. His tone was awestruck and Chuckie paused, his anger gone.

`What do you mean by that?' he asked narrowly.

The doctor swallowed nervously. `Well, I haven't seen you since ... since ...

`Since what?'

`Since you were ... ah ... different'

Chuckie chose the calm route. `I've made a little money. Big deal. I'm not a freak.'

The doctor nodded doubtfully. Chuckie inspected his reflection in the tiny square mirror above the kitchen sink. Bar the swanky suit, he didn't think he'd changed so very much.

He took his Havana from his mouth; the cigar caught slightly on his big gold ring. He tried to bring the doctor back to the subject. `My mum?'

`Look, Chuckie - sorry, Charles. Your mother has had a terrible shock. She wouldn't be normal if it didn't have a pretty devastating impact on her. She'll recover when she feels capable of it. If you don't want me to prescribe tranqs then there's nothing I can do. I've seen several people in her position. It always gets better with time. Quicker than you'd expect. People are resilient.'

Chuckie looked discontented.

`I don't think she wet the bed. She probably just sweated a lot. What sleep she'll get will be very disturbed.You know she's stopped taking her sleeping pills.'

Chuckie nodded unhappily.

'Peggy's been taking those things for fifteen years. She'll be feeling like a dried-out heroin addict. That plus her recent shock is a heavy burden.You have to be patient.'

The doctor smiled at him. `And get some sleep yourself. You look rough.'

Chuckie shook the doctor's hand and showed him out.There was a slight controversy on the doorstep when Chuckie tried to tip the man a hundred pounds, but that was soon smoothed over and the doctor was more discomfited than outraged.

Chuckie went back inside. He moved to the foot of the stairs and called up to his mother's his own room - that he would make her some tea. He took the subsequent silence as assent.

He busied himself in the kitchen. He was growing accustomed to the domestic tasks that had once defeated him, but he still frowned in puffy concentration. He was thinking hard.

Chuckle had been thinking hard for a week now. He had been thinking hard since the night his mother had been brought home bleeding tears, mute but hysterical.

Peggy Lurgan had been walking past the corner of Fountain Street just as the bomb exploded. The freak of the blast wind had knocked her off her feet and, despite her surprise, she had been almost amused. It was an undignified pratfall, a middleaged woman like her sent sprawling arse over tip. For a few seconds, she had suspected an unusual gust of wind or a collision with an unseen person. For those first few seconds she was fine.

Unfortunately Peggy had sat there, uninjured but motionless, for nearly fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, in the confusion and mayhem, no one had thought to move her before then. Unfortunately, though protected from the blast by the corner of a stationer's shop, she had been blown into a position with an unrestricted view of the sandwich-bar debris. Unfortunately she had been only thirty yards away. Unfortunately her eyes remained open. Unfortunately she didn't look away.

After those nearly fifteen minutes, Peggy was taken to hospital. She waited there for minutes she could not count. She knew she was cold and that was as much as she could easily comprehend. Someone told her she was suffering from severe shock but she didn't really hear and couldn't really care. She was just cold. She was just frightened.