Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (47 page)

I saw two masked men with guns rob their local off-licence, completely unnoticed amidst the chaos. I saw an old lady being mugged by a plump young skinhead. He punched her to the ground and ripped her handbag from her hands. I saw a big heavy, who looked like one of the just Us stewards, jump on the skinhead and beat him to the ground in his turn. The guy then took the handbag and sloped off.

I saw the cutting edge of Northern Irish self-determination.

I was attacked a couple of times myself. I put both my guys down without too nuich trouble. Rioters were never much cop at actual fighting and I was, by now, in a very bad mood. I didn't go mad or anything. I just put them down. They were very neutral events, more like callisthenics than combat. I found a tooth lodged in the elbow of my jacket later but that was hardly my fault.

What was this riot about? There had to be a reason. This was Catholic Land. The war was over. These guys were supposed to have won. Why, then, were they so pissed off?

I learnt later that the riot had been caused by the early release of a British soldier, who had shot a couple ofjoy-riders dead a few years before. The squaddie had been convicted of murder, untypically, but had only done about ten minutes for it. It had been a tactless move but the reaction surprised me. The IRA themselves routinely shot young folk who stole cars and were always campaigning vigorously that all their imprisoned members who had murdered and maimed people should be released. Everyone seemed to have a very shaky grasp on jurisprudence these days. I wondered what the old lady who'd had her head bashed and her bag stolen would have said.

I wandered around hopelessly as the riot faded away. I was wrong about rioting, it wasn't really like riding a bicycle. It had been a pretty crap riot. Everyone had looked a little embarrassed, slightly existential. Several motorists had been badly beaten up by people who wanted to disguise their uncertainty and confusion.

I wandered but Chuckie was nowhere to be found. On the wasteground by Leeson Street, some people had gathered round a couple of burning cars, making something almost festive out of the night's events. I asked a few if they'd seen any fat, balding Protestants. Only in uniform, they replied good- naturedly. The heat seemed to have gone out of these people. They were now normal citizens again, far from atavistic.

I heard some of them gossiping about a kid who'd been given a baseball-bat beating by the boys down at the bottom of Leeson Street. He'd broken into a senior IRA man's car at the beginning of the riot. He hadn't driven it away, he had simply urinated on the driver's seat.

I knew it had to be Roche. That was his style. I skipped down Leeson Street as fast as I could. By the time I arrived, two paramedics were already shunting the victim into the back of the ambulance. I stopped them and had a peep. One eye was beaten closed and much of the upper part of the face and head was matted with old blood but it was definitely ugly and stunted enough to be Roche.

I was impressively calm for quite a long while. In the ambulance I was calm. All the way to the hospital, as Roche lapsed in and out of consciousness, I was calm. In Accident and Emergency, I was placid as Roche waited his turn for treatment. The riot had produced one or two serious injuries, including a lorry driver who had had bleach poured down his throat while his truck was hijacked (what were they doing with bleach?). I was even-tempered when one of the nurses told me that Roche had a broken leg, a broken arm, cracked ribs and a fractured skull. I was composed as I waited to be allowed in to see him. All in all, I was serene, collected, tranquil.

But when I saw the TV crews arrive. When I saw the Amnesty International man arrive. When I saw Aoirghe arrive. When I heard they'd all come to see a senior Just Us councillor who'd been arrested after the incident with the bleach and endured a four-stitch head wound. When I heard that this man's car had been vandalized and urinated on by the police. When I heard the Amnesty guy start prosing on about humanrights violations to the TV cameras.

Well, what do you expect? It was me. I flipped. I lost it.

Laudably, I didn't hit anyone, but one of the nurses told me that the things I screamed at these people didn't include any recognizable forms of human speech. I bellowed. I frothed and champed. Several people looked like they wanted to go home.

I grabbed the Amnesty guy by the lapels and gave him some nuclear lip about why he should be monitoring the right of twelve-year-old boys not to have the crap beaten out of them. It was pointless, however. He couldn't understand a word I said. I couldn't understand a word I said.

By the time I'd finished, my voice had dried to a scraped-out croak. Sweat dripped off my face onto my shirt. I grabbed the back of a nearby chair to steady myself. Everyone stared at me in aghast silence. Then they moved off muttering and went to visit their wounded political hero. Only Aoirghe remained. She looked me full in the face. Her expression was different - something I couldn't associate with her. She came closer to me and put her hand on my arm. I flinched.

`What are you doing here?' she asked.

I had no excuse. I'd never done the like before but I grabbed her by the front of her shirt and dragged her to the booth where Roche lay tubed and bandaged. The kid looked awful, his face was mutant and swollen. To Aoirghe he must have looked as though he were dying.

I didn't scream this time. I did unleash a torrent of extraordinary abuse in Aoirghe's direction but I tried to keep the volume down. I said dreadful, unforgivable things to her. I had had a lot of experience with people telling me what the trouble with me was. I gave it a go from the other end.

When I paused for breath and cardiac massage, I saw that she was crying. It was an amazing sight. She crumpled shirt had been ripped by my wrathful hand. Some people can look pretty when they cry. Most people just look like wet snails. Aoirghe was one of those who didn't look their best. Her nose ran, her eyes were red and her face was creased like a clam. She looked pitiable. My heart might then have misgiven me and I might have stopped shouting at her.

What did I do? I did what all the unjustly angry really fucking went for her. I piled on in.

After a few minutes, she ran out into the corridor, sobbing. I followed her all the way to the exit, abusing her viciously. She fled the building. As the swing doors banged shut behind her, I stopped shouting and tried to be calm. I knew I should have felt much better but I didn't. I shook my head like a dog. It didi 't help.

I waited for hours there. The cops had gone to fetch Roche's parents but Roche's stepfather (or whoever he was) had told them to fuck off, that the kid didn't interest them. A social worker was coming in the morning to try to sort out a foster home or something for him. Meanwhile I waited.

I called Peggy and she told me that Chuckle had arrived home about an hour before. He was talking now, apparently. It seemed that the silent routine was over. I wanted to give him a piece of my mind for leading me into the riot so I asked Peggy to put him on the blower. She thought it was better if I waited until he calmed down a little. She said he was manic. She asked me to call the next day. I could have sworn she blew me a kiss as she hung up.

I waited on for Roche. I watched as the just Us guy was discharged with a small plaster on his forehead. Two cops led him gently out as he struggled and screamed cinematically for the news crews. I watched the Amnesty guy give another brief statement about police brutality and the rule of law. I thought about making him wait with me to see Roche but I decided, accurately, that he didn't want to know.

I felt so bad about what I'd said to Aoirghe that I didn't even have the heart to fall in love with any of the nurses and doctors. I just drank Casualty coffee and nipped outside every fifteen minutes for a smoke.

I was finally allowed to talk to Roche at about four o'clock that morning. When I went in to see him, I was more upset than I needed to be. Amongst the bruises, bandages and cuts, I could easily discern the wide-boy presence of Roche's conscious self.

'How are you feeling?' I asked lumpily.

'Fabulous,' said the kid.

'You don't look so bad now,' I said.

He glared at the quiver of my lips and the bulge of my firmly uncrying eyes. 'Don't VOL) start bawling,' he warned. 'All them good-looking nurses will think you're my boyfriend or something.!

I smiled. `There's a social worker coming to see you tomorrow. Did they tell you that?'

'Aye: He laughed indulgently.

`What's funny?' I asked.

`They take photographs of you to show foster parents. I was just thinking of the groovy foster mum I'd get if they take the photographs tomorrow' He gestured at the wreckage of his tiny body. `The way I look I'd arouse the maternal instincts of any late-twenties piece of ass you'd care to mention.'

`You're disgusting.'

`Hey, Jake.'

`What?'

`You coming to see me tomorrow?'

I got all emotional again. `Yeah, sure thing.'

'Well, get the doctors to give me more of these flying, boy.'

I laughed again.'I think I hate you,' I said fondly.

A nurse came in and asked me to leave. I said goodbye to Roche. I patted the only undamaged portion of him that I could find and he yelped in pain anyway.

`That was some routine with the girl there,' he said, as I was walking away.

'What?'

'Your big screaming match with your woman with the funny name.

'Aoirghe?'

`Aye.'

'I thought you were asleep,' I said guiltily.

`Nah, I was keeping an eye on you.You really gave it to her.'

'I was very uptight.'

`She seemed sorry, said Roche.

I looked closely at him. Roche could not have made his eyes twinkle if he'd tried.

`I don't think so; I replied. `She's not the sorry type.'

Roche settled down into his bed. `Yeah, maybe not. Nice tits, though.'

I left.

I had to walk back to the south of the city. I had left the Wreck parked near the Wigwam. I was tired and lugubrious after my big night. I walked slowly. My right hand hurt from when I had hit someone during the riot. I had run out of cigarettes a couple of hours before and I had no cash. I started humming blues riffs to myself. It sounded bad but appropriate.

I cut across the motorway and the industrial estate, heading in a straight line for the railway track near Poetry Street. I bummed a fag off a drunk lying near the Park Centre. I saved it and walked on.

There was a dampness in the air and a dampness in my spirits. The riot had depressed me and Roche had an infinite capacity for making me feel bad, but that did not explain the droop in my mood.

I'd overstepped the mark with Aoirghe Jenkins back there. She deserved a little and I'd given her more than a lot. Her politics were poisonous but she hadn't beaten up any twelveyear-olds. My heart sank as I remembered what I had said to her.

It was after five by the time I crossed the railway tracks at Adelaide Halt. I stopped on the footbridge. I was only a few hundred yards from Poetry Street but I sat down on the steps of the bridge facing the mountain. I fished in the pockets of my ruined suit for my borrowed cigarette. I found the fag and I found Sarah's letter as well. I smiled and decided to read it. It was getting pretty light and it seemed like the right time. I lit the cigarette and opened the letter.

I read Sarah's one-word letter and sat thinking and smoking for quite a long time. I looked up at the hill. It looked down at me. The fields from the mountains rolled out towards the city like a proffered tailor's cloth, checked and regular. Clouds of liquid grey issued and gathered over the city like witchbrew.

The one word in Sarah's letter was Forgive.

It was minutes before dawn. The birds were anxious. They suffered last-minute, curtain-up nerves. A yellow spider of crane metal picked itself out in the gloom, its noselight winking bright against the faded mountain. The slopes were a gradual beginning on which buildings dotted themselves with increasing density. Houses, farms, quarries, stations and schools. They tumbled into ensemble and merged urban and flat at the foot of the hill.

I thought about forgiving.

Yet the sky didn't lighten. The atmosphere thickened like gravy and all seemed stained. A man crossed the footbridge, a white plastic bag drooping from his motiveless hand. He shuffled onto the footpath parallel to the rails. His bobbing back faded into flatness until he seemed like a tiny shimmer on a painting: cuckold, worker, citizen.

I thought about Chuckie and Max. I thought about Peggy and Caroline. I thought about Donal and Pablo. I thought about Slat and Wincey. I thought about Luke Findlater and the Maoist waitress. I even thought about the boy and the girl from the supermarket.

Now the mountains were beginning to clear, show themselves, gaining form and colour. On each side of their broad sweep they were fringed with tassels, trees on one side and the regular cadence of a sloping quarryworks on the other. They looked like a cheap sofa. They looked like something Chuckie would buy. They were beautiful.

I thought about Aoirghe.

I went looking for my car. I had stuff to do.