Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (43 page)

He put a thinly rolled-up dollar in Chuckie's hand. Chuckie stared at the little mirror and its four tracks of powder. Now Chuckie was not altogether a drugs virgin. He'd done a little speed, he'd smoked rejected it as a thin person's vice. He was, in essence, a conservative man. But he was also an anxious conservative man.

He stuck the tube of money in his nose and inhaled one of the lines of powder. His eyes pricked and his face appeared suddenly delicious. He felt as though he would like to eat his own lips. He put the dollar in his other nostril and hoovered up another track. This time, his very gonads grew elated. He had an ecstatic sense of simplicity. He cursed himself for never having previously investigated the Wonderful World of Cocaine.

The man protested only mildly when he snorted up the last two chunky portions of the substance. Chuckie felt as needy and blameless as a greedy superpig and the man felt a certain evangelical satisfaction at introducing such a keen newcomer (and Chuckie pressed a fistful of money into his hand, which also helped console him).

Chuckie straightened up and strode out of that pisser like another man, like several other men. He felt absolutely fucking tremendous as he was quick to inform the waiting TV people in the make-up room. Surprised at this new super-bullishness, the producers decided that he was ready for broadcast and the make-up artists went to work, dabbing at his sweat patches, smudging his spots, failing to damp the lunatic glitter in his eyes. When they finished their work, Chuckie leapt to his feet and strode unaccompanied into the studio, godlike, austere, filled with glorious chemical rectitude.

Thirty-five minutes later, the interview was coming to an end. On the periphery of his vision, Chuckie could see the floor manager signalling that a countdown was imminent. He was broken-hearted. He tried to look pleadingly at the interviewer but the man paled visibly under his demented gaze. He ignored the crumpled figure of Jimmy Eve and tried to finish what he was saying before they were counted out.

`And the other thing is that it always comes down in the end to cold, hard cash. That phrase is no accident. Those are its attributes. America, fabulous America, understands this. All you wonderful Americans out there don't need to listen to our moronic politicians.You don't listen to your own, why should ours be any different? What America understands is what I a dollar, cutting a deal. There are no nationalities, only rich and poor. Who gives a shit about nationhood if there's no jobs and no money? Bread before flags, that's what I say. I'm here in America to do a bit of business. It's the real peace. Don't listen to assholes like this.' Chuckie gestured towards the silent Jimmy Eve. `This man wouldn't know an economic policy if it came up and bit him on the bollocks. Interested Americans should invest in my country. They should give their money to men like me.' Chuckie smiled a ghastly smile.

The tirade continued for another minute or so. Chuckie saw the floor manager counting down the seconds and he helpfully reached some notional full stop. There was a moment's dread ful silence, until the presenter managed to gasp a flabbergasted good night.

The red lights on the cameras went dead and the men and women behind them started to bustle importantly. Chuckie removed his own chest mike, shook hands with the presenter, chucked the just Us leader under the chin, waved a cheery farewell to all and sundry and went off looking for the man he had met in the toilets.

Jimmy Eve had said nothing during those seventeen and a half minutes of national television. He had made several attempts to speak but Chuckie had charged him down with coked-up exuberance. The politician had sat silently, pale and sweating, while the lunatic Protestant had ranted, only sporadically interrupted by the flailing presenter.

Afterwards, Eve's entourage had been mystified. As they bundled him into a waiting limousine, they quizzed him as to what had gone wrong, why he had not performed. Eve said nothing. He looked close to tears and his forehead was cold and damp. When they reached their hotel, they called a doctor. The doctor could find nothing wrong with Eve although he manifested some of the symptoms of shock.

This was not surprising. Something shocking had occurred. Ever since he had arrived in America, Eve had made a big event out of who would shake his hand and who would not. He had tried to discomfit British government officials and opposing Irish politicians by offering his hand whenever there were cameras around. He knew that these people could not possibly shake his hand and he knew that that looked so unreasonable on American television. There he was, making the ultimate gesture of peace and amity, and those unreasonable reactionaries continued to reject him.

Thus when Chuckie Lurgan had surged into the television studio, Eve had offered his hand in his usual demonstrative and significant manner. He had never heard of this Lurgan guy but he knew he was a Protestant and that he was there to put for ward the Unionist position.Thus, he was enormously surprised when this excited fat man took his hand firmly and shook it vigorously. His surprise increased when the man moved close to him and hugged him one-armed in the American fashion, putting his face close to Eve's own.

The two men remained in that position for what seemed like a long time. The smile on Lurgan's face was so joyous and the way he murmured so intimately in Eve's ear led the producers to think that they had been set up and that these men were related. They did not notice Eve's abrupt pallor and immediate sweat. They did not remark the tremble of his hands as he regained his seat.

When Chuckie was seventeen he had suffered a brief fad for rugby football. He began to play for the third fifteen of a club situated in the nearest bourgeois area to Eureka Street. He had not lasted long. Chuckie had not fitted in. His own team-mates disdained him and opposition players treated him with open contempt. Chuckie was neither good enough nor butch enough to reply with any on-the-pitch heroics, but he found a way to unburden himself of some of his resentments.

He began to place himself in the front row of scrums. When both front rows locked shoulders, his face would be inches from that of another player. Chuckle would proceed to hiss nauseating and vile abuse of a nature that sometimes shocked himself. He told these nice middle-class boys that he had had sex with their mothers and sisters, sometimes their fathers and brothers as well. Sometimes he threatened to have sex with the boys themselves, sometimes he threatened them with arcane amputations and extractions: penises lopped off, bottoms burnt, testicles torn apart. Occasionally, to vary the monotony, he did this to one of his own team-mates.

It always worked. It produced in the victim a state of something approaching catatonia. The dazed individual, a rabbit in headlights, would then be haplessly mashed in some hospitalizing tackle.The obscenity or level of threat was not the effective ingredient. What worked so brilliantly was the sheer surprise. These young men were astonished to have their bourgeois pastime invaded so abruptly by this back-street coarseness.

And this was what had produced the uncustomary silence in Jimmy Eve. Fired by a million years' worth of resentment against this duplicitous Nazi (Chuckie had never felt so Protestant before, he had never felt Protestant at all), Chuckie's rage had been massive. He had whispered things so appalling in Eve's ear that he would always prefer to forget exactly what he'd said. It was bound to be his finest performance. The four fat lines of cocaine had helped.

Two days later, Chuckie and Max boarded a 747 bound for London.They had settled the here-or-there question in the way both had known they would. After a difficult parting from the old house in Kansas, during which Max tried to be stoic but blubbed like a baby, they flew to New York and spent a night there. With Max beside him, that city was a different and much more appealing experience.

Once they had boarded the British Airways plane and Chuckie heard of the cabin crew, he breathed a sigh of European relief. He had liked America enormously but his last two days had been mayhem. His television appearance had made him briefly famous. Excerpts were shown on other networks; the entire event was even repeated. Other stations called him and asked him to be interviewed in tandem with American politicians, one even offered him a job as their political correspondent. The CLAD.(Campaign to Legalize All Drugs) called him. Max had to deal with much of this telephone traffic. Her mulishness protected him. He was referred to as the MFG in Irish politics, the Mad Fat Guy. There were even rumours of T-shirts being printed. Jimmy Eve skulked home a week early.

This sudden fame upset Chuckie. It shattered the love for celebrity that had never left him. If someone as unevolved as Chuckie himself could be celebrated, however briefly, then notoriety was not worth the having. It was oddly appropriate to his experience of America. That country ran on the fuel of celebrity. It was the true spiritual currency of the nation. In America, actors and actresses were gods, the populace hung on their every word. Chat-shows were the discourses in which these beings diagnosed for the people.

When first in New York, Chuckie had felt that movie-unease was a feeling restricted to him. Every step he took on those famous pavements was self-conscious. That, he felt, was a visitor's sensation. By the time he got to NewYork second time around, he had established that this sensation was the common experience of the inhabitants as well. Everyone behaved like the movies they'd seen, like the movies in which they'd want to star.The streets were full of men and women acting out images of what they wanted to be. The cops acted like movie cops.The young bloods acted like movie young bloods. The men in suits were motion-picture men in suits. Chuckie even saw a streetsweeper who wielded his brush with a discernibly cinematic air.

In New York, there was a glitch in reality, a hair in the gate, a speck on the lens.There were gross parodies of machismo and arcane street competence everywhere he looked.

The fact that Chuckie now knew that everyone on the planet was an infant who watched too many movies meant that he would never be able to stop making money.

But as the aircraft flew away from America and Max rested her head on the plump shelf of his belly, Chuckle knew that making money had, perhaps temporarily, lost its mystique. He needed to look for something else to give substance to his life. As he looked at her slumbering face, he knew he didn't need to search.

When they reached Aldergrove airport, Chuckie felt his spirits lift. Through the Atlantic air his mood had been subdued, but as soon as that Ulster drizzle smacked his fat chops, he knew he felt better. Max bought some flowers and laid them on the spot where her father had been shot. Her face was red and Chuckie said nothing.

Even the taxi-driver's predictable churlishness moved him. As they drove at speed down the motorway, he found himself becoming grotesquely sentimental. Moving south on the motorway towards Belfast, the mountains hit him like a friend. It was near dusk. The city was laid out beneath him, flat, shyly illuminated. The sky looked like litmus paper and Chuckie knew that there was no excitement in the world like the excitement of this dour provincial cityscape.

They drove to Max's flat first. Aoirghe helped them unload Max's baggage. She embraced Max, but merely scowled her habitual scowl at Protestant Chuckie. He wondered if she had found out about his run-in with Eve. It didn't seem likely. He parted from Max after ten minutes of nuzzling embraces on the pavement while the grouchy driver looked on.

Max went inside and Chuckie told the driver to take him to Eureka Street.

`Are you sure you don't want to do any more fucking snogging there, mate?'

Chuckie, New York veteran, fascist-slayer, MFG, spent the rest of the journey telling the driver what the trouble with him was.

A few hours later, he sat in the jumbled living room of little No. 42, oppressed by a burgeoning sense of unease. His welcome had been all that he could have hoped. His mother was much better, Caroline Causton had attempted courtesy and the house had been cleared of the majority of his recent madcap catalogue purchases. But there was something about the two women that began to perplex him. As the evening went on, he kept waiting for Caroline Causton to stand up and announce that she was going across the street to her own house. This persisted in not happening.

Chuckie tried to ignore the unspoken restraint under which both women mysteriously laboured. He gently questioned his mother about how she was feeling. He told them about his trip to America. Caroline stayed still. He told them some more about his trip to America.

all these big Yank tycoons, they were all scared shitless of China. They thought it was the coming place and they didn't want those slit-eyed bastards taking all their money so, of course, the dumb fucks went and sent all their money to China and invested

His voice trailed away. He felt like he'd been talking for hours (he had). He noticed that both women had now stood up. Peggy Lurgan bent over him and kissed his face. `Welcome home, son.' She straightened up. `We're going to bed now,' she said casually.

Chuckle stared his question marks all around the little room as the two women headed for the stairs.

His mother paused in the doorway. Both women looked at him. `Yeah,' Peggy said lightly, `Caroline's moved in with us. 'Night, Chuckle.'

She started to climb the stairs and Caroline favoured him with the merest ghost of a wink before following her.

Chuckie sat in his favourite armchair, mouth open, breathing slow. His flesh grew cold and he began to think he was in shock. After a while, however, he calmed down. He even began to smile. What he had been thinking was, of course, absurd. His mother and Caroline were simply too middle-aged and unsophisticated to have mastered the meaning that might have been imputed to their words. They probably didn't even know what lesbians were. His mother had forgotten to tell him that he would have to sleep on the sofa because Caroline would be sleeping in his bed. He nipped upstairs to check.

His heart raced faster when he saw his room empty. But the fact that his bedroom was unoccupied proved nothing. They had been friends since they were little girls. They probably felt it natural to share a bed, especially since Caroline had been looking after Peggy so recently. He would maybe drop a gentle hint to his mother the next day, demonstrating that such an arrangement might be unseemly.