Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other (48 page)

When she had been a young woman, Chuckle's mother had been obsessed by the beauty of her breasts. She had loved their firmness, their fullness, their marvellous unlikelihood. Her breasts had been magical to her. For much of the time between sixteen and twenty, she had longed to show them to the world. To walk the streets of Belfast with her dress around her waist. She had longed to astonish and gratify one of the dull boys who dated her by opening her blouse without a word and letting him fill his mouth with their taut abundance.

Needless to say, Peggy Lurgan had astonished and gratified no one. Her breasts had languished in glorious privacy seen only by herself and occasionally by her friend, Caroline. By the time Chuckie's father had finally penetrated to the mysteries beneath her clothes, the magic had somehow gone.

But Peggy had always remembered the bliss of her boson. Indeed, as she grew older, her remembrance of the early to mid-sixties was indissolubly linked to the memory of her chestly beauty. The Kennedy Assassination. The vague beginnings of American and Northern Irish civil unrest. Such recollections were hazy adjuncts to the historical fact of her private prize.

Recently, the obsession had returned. It had been so long since she had taken her sleeping pills and tranquillizers that many such unbidden memories flooded her unfogged brain now but her breast-vanity was the chief revenant. She was glad that she had felt that way and was glad that she was beginning to feel that way again. They were still pretty good. For a fiftyyear-old woman, they were spectacular.

Then there had been that thing with Jake Jackson, Chuckie's friend. She had noticed that he had noticed. The fact of making an attractive young man obviously uncomfortable in that manner intoxicated Peggy. She felt that she was beginning anew.

The memories that came to her made her spine tingle with joy. One night she conjured the image of a woman washing her hair in the scullery tub of a poor house near the markets while her husband, sturdy but idle, scraped his scraped limbs in the hottest tub in Templemore Avenue baths. These were memories of her father and mother.

Her childhood surged back. She remembered how everyone on her street had avoided the Friday tickman, on his bike, motorbike or old tin car. Pay up and shut up. No palms were laid before his feet. She remembered sneaking down to the covered market when the Antrim women came to the iron-bound stalls to show what they would sell, throwing dappled light on the ground from the red shawls they used as awnings. She remembered their shrill shouts:

Tupporth here!

Aggie, where's the calico?

My man's going.

See youse in the tram shed.

She remembered childhood sweets and secrets. She remembered the smell of her father's cigarettes and shoe polish. She remembered fifties Belfast, buttoned-up, Presbyterian. She remembered winter mornings, her fingers growing cold in the scullery, losing the stored heat of sleep as her mother lit the fire.

Most of all she remembered Caroline. Her friend seemed to be a constant presence in almost all her recollections. They lived on the same street. They were in the same class at primary school. Their mothers were friends. They even played together on the same rope swing on the lamp-post at the bottom of their street. For forty-five years or more Peggy and Caroline had been together.

In Peggy's nitrazepam-free mind, their early years together were most vivid. The years that followed their girlhood and adolescence were smudged and murky in comparison with the glitter of those early times.

She could not have said that the friends loved each other dearly. It was more that their pasts and futures would have been unthinkable without the other. As they grew into women, this unspoken indivisibility increased. A few days after the bomb at Fountain Street, Peggy had spent a morning looking through all her old papers for a photograph of the two friends. She wept throughout the morning as she found photographs of her parents, obituary notices, letters from cousins she had forgotten, cheap old jewellery.

After a couple of hours, she had found the photograph, which was both more and less than she had remembered. Written on the back in faint pencil was the legend: Peggy and Caroline, May i 962. She started to cry again. She stared at it ruefully for an hour.

The picture, milky rather than faded with age, showed the girls sitting on the railings beside the City Hall. They wore patterned dresses with exuberant skirts. They smiled wide black-and-white smiles in a bright black-and-white world. They were eighteen. They were both beautiful. Their youthful hair and skin, the sheen in their eyes and the brightness of their smiles gave Peggy a desperate sensation in her stomach.

She remembered the day vaguely. A hapless bright Saturday, they had wandered the town, window-shopping with two boys from the Newtownards Road. One of the boys, Andy, the one who had taken the photograph, had been pursuing Caroline for weeks. Caroline had been joyously uninterested. In a few weeks' time, Andy, exasperated by their solidarity, would give Peggy a pair of old work trousers, telling her she might as well be Caroline's boyfriend since they did everything else together.

The photograph made Peggy feel indescribable things. It made her deeply sad and filled her with joy simultaneously. The photograph represented a junction in their lives. A time before Peggy had met Hughie and Caroline had met Johnny. Their black-and-white selves were frozen in the photo. A time when everything was different. When Belfast itself was different. She inspected the soft grey out-of-focus metropolis in the background. Buildings had disappeared and new ones had sprouted; violence and husbands had come, their effects equally devastating.

But the picture showed two pretty eighteen-year-olds for whom all possible futures were possible futures. It showed the point where the road had forked. It demonstrated where it had all gone wrong. And, yes, her breasts had looked amazing in that dress.

For days, the suddenly untranquillized Peggy had stayed quietly in her bedroom, thinking. She kept the photograph by her bed and constantly referred to it as if for cues or clues. She thought about the man who had come soon after the photograph had been taken. She remembered Hughie's drunken, inexpert fumbling amongst her clothing. She remembered how old he had seemed. She couldn't remember having said yes. She couldn't remember having been asked.

Peggy became pregnant and Caroline had perhaps married Johnny out of pique. Hughie failed to marry Peggy and Peggy had moved into Eureka Street and produced her fat, bald baby. Few now could remember the kind of courage which that then took. Hughie didn't even live with her. He stayed sometimes but, as he told Peggy, he had other commitments.

She vaguely remembered marrying him just before her parents had died. She recalled that it did not dull the shame for them. She could not remember Hughie leaving. His latest absence just stretched out and became permanent. She remembered being left alone with her only son. After a couple of years, Caroline and her family had moved into the house across the street. Her life took on the gloomy pattern that would not alter for nearly three decades.

Thirty years of loneliness. Twenty years of growing old. Ten years of various tranquillizers, sleeping pills and antidepressants.

Then Chuckle got rich.

Then she stood on Fountain Street and watched everybody die.

That view had changed Peggy for ever. The two women, thrown so violently together again, probably realized at the same time. What had seemed like ever-presence had been love.

It happened on the night that Chuckle had called from America to say he was flying back in three days' time. He was getting married and having a baby, she didn't have to worry about him any more.

They had both been ashamed, they had both been scared. But in the end it was pretty easy. They took off their clothes and smiled. Both women had thought in their private hearts that this event would lead to disgust as they beheld again each other's bloated old flesh, but that did not happen. Each could only find beauty in what they saw.

Caroline was surprised that she was not surprised. Peggy was surprised by this thing between her legs that she had ignored for so long. Peggy had had little sex: Chuckie's mother had slept with only one father. They had copulated only thirty or forty times. This double score of erotic incidents came to represent the world of sex for Peggy. It was a small and slightly vicious world. Despite the infrequency of their lovemaking, she came to know Hughie's habits well. She extrapolated at first, using her experience with Hughie to represent the activities of all men. She concluded that all men wiped their dripping foreskins on their women's thighs after sex, that they all got that brutal look in their eyes when they came. Then she stopped extrapolating, considering that it was unfair to attribute Hughie's foibles to the entire gender. In the end, from what Caroline told her, she changed her mind again and extrapolated like mad, suspecting that, after all, knowing one was knowing them all.

The next morning, the two women had chatted like girls over breakfast. Sunlight flooded the kitchen and the little house was transfigured. A bridge had been built between them as they were now and as they had been in the photograph. For the first time in her adult life Peggy had decided that this was what she wanted.

It was difficult, of course. Sandy Row was scandalized. Caroline's husband went unviolently berserk and left Eureka Street with the eighteen-year-old youngest son. Peggy and Caroline were visited by vicars and missionaries and no one on Eureka Street spoke to them. They nearly got into the newspapers. It looked like Protestant Belfast would never deal with their consensual but idiosyncratic behaviour.

Then Chuckie had returned home and spent a fortnight in the front bedroom, speaking to neither woman. At first, Peggy had been upset by her son's reaction. He had passed out on the street on his first night home. Caroline had intolerantly suggested jet-lag. Chuckie's subsequent gloom and silence made his message clear. It wasn't so much that he didn't like what she was doing. He hated every micro-second of what she was doing. She didn't want to change anything for Chuckie. She would give up this new joy for no one, although she tried to modify it a little. But the walls were so very thin and her delight was ungovernable.

After a comatose fortnight from Chuckie, Peggy and Caroline grew restive. They enlisted Max's American girl had been sympathetic from the she persuaded Chuckie to go to the Wigwam and meet his friends again.

That night Peggy and Caroline breathed free. It was blissful to be rid of Chuckle's morose, disapproving presence. The two women played Eddie Cochrane records and told each other that this was love. But after a couple of hours, Peggy was unnerved. She missed Chuckie. It was her big secret. It was what had filled her last thirty years. It was what had brought the little light to her tranquillized decade. Chuckle had been a miracle child, a presence she could never have expected. Peggy loved her son like she would never be able to love anything else. For thirty years Chuckie had ruled her thoughts like a government of love. She decided that it was time she told him.

She put on her coat and asked Caroline to come with her. Caroline had been slightly rebellious but they went to the Wigwam looking for Chuckie.

Peggy failed to see why he ran away when they got there.

The morning after the riot on the Falls Road, Chuckie woke late. His curtains were open and his head ached from having slept several hours in direct sunlight and from the nitrazepam he'd nicked from his mother's neglected bottle. He shook his groggy head, lurched out of bed and stumbled into the bathroom.

He fumbled with his pyjama trousers, dozily trying to find his member.

'Ah, Chuckie.'

He leapt softly into the air and spun round to confront the two hitherto unnoticed naked women sloshing around in the bath. Caroline and Peggy both smiled mutely at him.

`Fuck it,' said Chuckie.

He went downstairs and urinated in the kitchen sink.

Afterwards, he switched the kettle on. Uncertainly, he walked to the foot of the little staircase. His voice quivered slightly as he said, `Hey, I'm making some tea. Do you two want some?'

There was a hesitation. Then he heard some splashing and what he could only describe as whoops of delight rendered tinny and echoey by the tiny Eureka Street bathroom. A door opened and Peggy stood at the top of the staircase, wrapped in a flimsy towel. Caroline, obviously still naked, slipped her head around the banister and stared at him. His mother looked happy. The silence was over. It was how Chuckie had intended his mother to look. Son and mother stared at each other, silent and almost loving.

`Some time this week, Chuckie,' said Caroline. `Milk and two sugars.

Later that day Chuckie decided that this base-level, lowincome-group resolution over a cup of tea was typical and commendable in equal measure. No rapprochements, no negotiations or accords could be made in deep Eureka Street in any other way. He decided that this was one of the nice things about being working class.

Chuckie sat in the swanky office of the enormously expensive architect whom he had just hired to build him a new house and decided that he didn't care what his mother did with her private parts. He didn't approve but it was not in his remit. His mind was full and he didn't have space to think about Peggy and Caroline munching at each other every night.

`What about that?' asked the expensive, well-dressed, suntanned architect. He held a sketch in front of Lurgan's unseeing eyes. `What about that?' he repeated.

`That's fine,' murmured Chuckie absently. `That's just grand.'

Somehow, he had understood how much his mother loved him. He had never comprehended this before. It had come as something of a shock.

`And the price?' asked the architect.

Chuckie was silent.

The architect touched his Corbusier spectacles nervously and scribbled a figure at the bottom of the sketch. `That's the absolute minimum,' he suggested.

Chuckie dragged his weary gaze to the paper in front of him.