Robert Wilson - Eureka Street - A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

Within the week, Chuckie had made his meet. After some persuading, John Long had agreed to talk to him. Chuckie thought at one point of using his suspicions that Long had knocked off his mother when Chuckie was a kid but in the end he didn't have to.

John Long was a local boy made good, originating from Eureka Street. He had gone away to England for three years and had come back, still a teenager, with an unexplained two thousand pounds in the bank. He had bought a couple of shops on the row and then a couple more. He had moved away, and the Eureka Street residents only heard of his other expansions by hearsay or on those occasions when he returned to the street of his birth to flirt with the old women and patronize the old men. John Long, sadly named since he was unusually tiny, was now a prosperous if unpleasant-looking man in his fifties, who drove big cars and lived in Holywood, in a big house so spankingly new that it looked as though it had just been unwrapped.

They met on Thursday in one of Long's warehouses near prosperous Bangor. The trip was two buses and a three-mile walk in the rain for Chuckie, who arrived just as Long's Mercedes rolled noiselessly into the car park. Long got out of his car, a parody of the cigar-chomping, camel-coated, yobmade-good. He eyed Chuckie's bedraggled form with some disfavour. Chuckie silently promised himself that he would nurse this grievance, this entrance.

In his untidy box of an office, which was somehow more daunting, more impressive than a swish one, Long was blandly expansive. `Haven't seen your mother in years. She used to be a lovely-looking girl. How's she keeping these days?'

Chuckie remembered Long's visits, the sleek-haired man with the expensive smell and the bags full of unlrish fruits: grapes, melons and peaches. He hadn't liked him then but had loved that expensive smell, the thick car parked outside and the rumour of magazine glamour that the man always brought with him. He remembered the complicated whispers that had bothered and frightened him. He remembered how he had hated it when the man had offered him the fancy fruit and told him to go and play.

`She's fine. She asked to be remembered to you.'

`Aye, I'm always thinking of Peggy these days. We're all getting old. Tragedy for the women especially.' Long raised his hand over his sparse hair. He had always been vain though never handsome. His complacency was misplaced. He had aged terribly. His face had collapsed and his wrinkles were like ancient scars that ran in little rills all over his face, following the local contours of nose, eyebrow or ear like fault lines.

'Ma looks pretty good, you know.'

`I'm sure she does. I'm sure she does'

Chuckie sensed that early antagonism wasn't apt. He hoped that Long was going to help make him rich. He tried to smile amiably. His teeth were too apparent in the attempt.

Long decided that that was enough badinage.'So you wanted to talk to me, son?'

`Aye.'

Long sat back, placed his feet on his messy desk and lit another cigar without offering one to Chuckie. The man was not too fussed about making it easier for him. There was a bad pause, which Chuckie committed to his growing grudge book, and then he made his pitch.

He told Long about his plans of setting himself up in business, about his plans for getting sponsorship, government grants, all kinds of funny money. While keeping the specifics unspecific, he waxed about his dreams of networks of companies, each servicing the others, of monopolies, empires. He talked blithely about sums of money he could barely count. He grew hot and indiscreet, and as the talk got bigger, his voice got smaller. Eventually, it just dried away and he fell silent.

Long chewed on his cigar with an air of spurious concentration and sighed with unfaked satisfaction. Chuckie knew that the local mogul was enjoying this. It was nice to be able to patronize the past, to prove to yourself that you'd really left the place you came from. Long swept his feet from the desk and leant forward, theatrically dynamic. His eyes narrowed with pleasure.'I won't lend you any money.'

Chuckie tried to say that he hadn't asked but Long waved his objections away. He spat in the wastepaper basket. `No money but I'll offer you some advice. How does that grab you?'

`Not very nicely.'

Long ignored him. He extinguished his cigar and looked through the glass partition at the goods that lay neat in his warehouse. It looked as though he liked the view. He turned his eyes on Chuckie, almost emotional. `You're just a wee ballocks from Eureka Street, son. But I started out the same way. I worked hard and now I've got everything you want. And do you know what? It was easy. I never had much to do with women, bar tarts'

Chuckie was careful not to flinch. He knew that Long was too dim to realize exactly what he'd said, though Chuckie silently damned his mother for making the mistake of this man.

Long stood, concluding the interview and lending effect to his pause.'Do you wanna know what the recipe for success is?' `What?'

`No women. I started off thinking that the recipe for success was work now, fuck later, and then I thought it was fuck now, work later, but then I worked out that it was, of

He left the pause there like a weary schoolteacher, waiting for young Lurgan to rhyme it off by rote.

'What?' said Chuckie.

`Work now, work later. Don't bother fucking at all.'

He smiled the smile of a seer.

The rain had eased to the grey slant typical of Irish funerals. Chuckle, neither sugar nor salt, knew he would not melt but he felt keenly the humiliation of the walk back to the bus station, especially when John Long's Mercedes passed him. The two short greeting blasts of the horn had a satiric lilt that wounded him.

In the hour it took to get to the bus station he had stoked his anger and grief so that the eventual retribution to be visited upon unlong John had become a visceral component of his dreams of wealth. He had had two options, two plans for raising the initial sums so necessary to the commencement of his capitalist career.

The first plan had been to ask Long for the money.

The second plan had been to think of another plan.

He broke his second last fiver in paying his bus fare back to the city. He hoped his dole would arrive the next day. But as the bus moved out of the station and Chuckie looked around at his damp fellow passengers, who had started to steam slightly from the heat of the vehicle, his mood lifted inexplicably. Despite the multiple humiliations and grievances of his present life, he knew that he could spend a warm forty minutes with his head against the window thinking of the American girl.

He planned to call her tonight and his thoughts were nerveless as he wondered what he would say. He wiped some steam from the window and settled his arms on the shelf of his belly. Already he drew comfort from the thinking of her. Again, his plans seemed more plausible. Having her in his life would definitely be an expensive business. He would definitely have her in his life. Ergo, somehow, he would definitely have the money.

He loved her name. Max. He was very glad that she was American. He wasn't entirely sure that he would or should love her. Love was a little ambitious. Exchange of bodily fluids would do to be going on with.

Chuckie always wanted sex, but on his own terms; terms more lyrical and tremendous than might be imagined. He sought forms of mystic union he considered impossible with the women of Belfast. They were not natural docks for his living liquids. He was very glad that she was American.

Chuckie thought often of his old girlfriends. Recollections without haze, like erotic memoranda. He thought of the year he was seven and he fell in love with a piano teacher, who played Mozart and the blues. He thought of the bad old good old days when he was sixteen and his mother didn't allow girls in the house; when he lost count of the number of nights he spent in phone boxes after the pubs were shut, ringing round everybody he knew trying to find someone who would lend him a bed or even a quiet corner for a shag, quick or slow.