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

He liked to think of the scores of Belfast girls who bore his invisible graffito on their inner thighs:

Chuckie was here

Briefly but memorably.

Many of Chuckie's thirty wasted years had been devoted to the search for erotic congress. He had spent much time wandering the city, searching Belfast for sex, tramping leprous streets in pursuit of some quality lewdness. He had found it first in the Central Library, with its lemony reference room, with a girl repeating her 0 levels at the College of Business Studies. They had sat by the twenty-volume collected speeches of Winston Churchill and somehow it became the scene of Chuckie's twenty-eighth orgasm, the first by the hand of another.

And thus had started an erotic career much more successful than he had a right to expect. Chuckie was not handsome. His sandy hair had started to recede before his twenty-first birthday, his belly rolled like a full balloon and he had the breasts of a thirteen-year-old girl. Nonetheless, women slept with him with something close to monotonous regularity. He had always been proud of his and pink as a baby's forearm — and he attributed some of his success to this, his best feature.

But no girl, no woman had made a dent in the marsh of his selfhood. And Chuckie lamented this. Chuckie wanted to be lost in someone. Chuckie wanted a girl who would make life burn in his heart like a heavy meal. Chuckie wanted to discover the secret of true love.

`Got a light'

An old woman stood over his seat, her damp coat trailing off her shoulders. She brandished her breasts at him.

'Mmmm?' asked Chuckie.

'A light. Got one?'

Chuckie, who rarely smoked, always carried a lighter. It was meant to grease the wheels of conversation with foxy, darkhaired girls in bars. He fumbled in his pockets and passed the cheap, disposable thing to the old woman. She lit her cigarette and made to hand it back to him.

'No, you keep it,' said Chuckie.'I've given up'

The old woman paused with her hand held out in an exaggerated posture of surprise. `Ach, God love you, son. That's very decent of you.'

She lurched back to her seat. Chuckie could see her sitting four rows forward in the no-smoking section, telling her companion — an equally corpulent, equally decrepit his largesse. The exclamations of surprise were audible through most of the bus and Chuckie had to suffer a complicated series of nods and smiles from the old women, who had both turned round to favour him with their acknowledgements of his beam geste. Some of the other passengers also turned and there were some quiet smiles at his expense. Chuckie blushed and worried.

He tried to stare through the wet windows. The fields and houses drooped in the aquatic exterior. He was glad to be abus in such weather. As he looked around the vehicle, he could not repress a sensation of cosiness, as though this Ulsterbus with its condensation, its body heat and smells was some kind of biosphere that sustained them all. He would almost miss it when he was rich.

When Chuckie got home, his mother was in the kitchen making smells he didn't like. He heard her call out some greeting. Without answering, he went upstairs to his bedroom. There he exchanged his wet apparel for dry. Then he sat on his bed and combed his thin wet hair.

Chuckie slept in the larger bedroom that faced onto the street. His mother had made it so years before, so long ago that he had forgotten his gratitude and her sacrifice for a decade or more. His window was open and, after a few minutes, he could hear his mother's voice from the open street. She was standing on the doorstep swapping talk with the other matrons of Eureka Street. It felt like all the evenings he had ever known. Sitting in his eight-foot bedroom, listening to his mother talk, her head six foot from his feet. The houses were tiny. The street small. The microscale of the place in which he lived gave it a grandeur he could not ignore.

In Eureka Street the people rattled against each other like matches in a box but there was a sociability, a warmth in that. Especially on evenings like this, when the sun was late to dip. When finally it did dip, there was an achromatic half-hour, when the air was free from colour and the women concluded their gossip, the husbands came home and the children were coaxed indoors from their darkening play.

He put down his comb and looked out of the window. Mrs Causton had come across the road from the open doorway of Her husband was still working and her kids weren't young so she had twenty minutes to talk away until her old man came home. His mother had known Caroline Causton for forty years or more. They had been at school together. As Chuckie looked down on them talk, with bent heads and folded arms, he couldn't help feeling something close to sorrow for his mother.

Chuckie's mother was a big woman, built historical, like a ship or a city. He found it hard to picture her as a girl. But something in the quality of the light or his mood, some insipidness in the air, suddenly helped him to strip the aggregate of flesh and years from both women and he glimpsed, briefly, a remnant of what they had been. As always, he wondered what she had dreamt. He resolved that he would stop being ashamed of his mother.

Chuckie had been ashamed of his mother ever since he could remember. Shame was, perhaps, the wrong word. His mother provoked a constant low-level anxiety in him. Inexplicably, he had feared the something he could not name that she might do. Since he had been fourteen years old, Chuckie had lived in quiet dread of his mother making her mark.

Sometimes, he would comfort himself with thoughts of her incontrovertible mediocrity. She was just an archetypal working-class Protestant Belfast mother. Not an inch of her headscarf nor a fibre of the slippers in which she shopped departed from what would have been expected. She had doppelganners all along Eureka Street and in all the other baleful streets around Sandy Row. It was absurd. He spent too many hours, too many years, awaiting the calamitous unforeseen. Nothing could be feared from a woman of such spectacular mundanity.

Nevertheless, she worried him.

For ten years, Chuckie had dealt with his unease most undutifully. After his father had left home and Chuckie was faced with the prospect of living with his mother, he decided simply to avoid her as best he could. And he did. There had been a decade's worth of agile avoidance. He couldn't remember when they had last had a conversation of more than a minute's duration. It was a miracle in a house as tiny as the one they shared. The sitting room, kitchen and bathroom were the flashpoints in this long campaign. She was always leaving little notes around the house. He would read these missives. Slat called at six. He'll meet you in the Crown. Your cousin's coming home at the weekend. He told her almost all the things he needed to tell her by telephone. Sometimes he would leave the house just so that he could find a phone box and call her from there. Sometimes it felt like Rommel and Montgomery in the desert. Sometimes it felt much worse than that.

Caroline Causton looked up and saw him at his bedroom window He did not flinch.

`What are you up to, Chuckie?' quizzed Caroline.

`Nice evening.' Chuckie smiled. His mother, too, was looking at him now. She couldn't remember when she had last seen her son's face split with a smile of such warmth.

`Are you all right, son?'

`I was just listening to you talk,' explained Chuckie gently. The two women exchanged looks.

`It reminded me of when I was a kid,' he went on. His voice was quiet. But it was an easy matter to talk thus on that dwarf street with their faces only a few feet from his own.

`When I was a kid and you sent me to bed I would sit under the window and listen to you two talk just as you're talking now When the Troubles started you did it every night. You'd stand and whisper about bombs and soldiers and what the Catholics would do. I could hear. I haven't been as happy since. I liked the Troubles. They were like television.'