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

As Chuckie's mother listened to those words, her face fell and fell again and, as Chuckle finished, she was speechless. She clutched her hand to her heart and staggered.

'Shall I call him an ambulance?' asked Caroline.

Chuckie laughed a healthy laugh and disappeared from the window.

Caroline faced his mother.'Peggy, what's got into your boy?'

But Peggy was thinking about what her son had said. She remembered that frightened time well but his memory seemed more vivid, more powerful than her own. She remembered soldiers on the television and on the streets. She remembered parts of her city she'd never seen being made suddenly famous. She remembered the men's big talk of resistance and of civil war, of finally wiping the Catholics off the cloth of the country. Chuckle remembered pressing his head against the wall underneath his bedroom window and the whispers of his mother and her friend. For the first time, she glimpsed how beautiful it might have seemed to him.

Caroline was unmoved. `Is he on drugs?'

Chuckle's mother smiled her friend away and went indoors. She found her son in the kitchen. She had to catch her breath when she saw that he was happily cooking the meal that she had begun.

'Nearly ready,' said Chuckie.

An hour later, telling his mother he wanted to do some work on a job application (she was still unused to the heady sensation of such a ball-by-ball commentary), Chuckie went upstairs to his bedroom.

There he opened the little desk he'd used, or mostly not used, when he was a schoolboy. He took out a sheet of paper, an old pencil and his school calculator, a massive thing, unused for a dozen years. He switched it on and was amazed to find it still worked. The omen was propitious.

Before he wrote anything he looked around the tiny room. He felt a lump in his throat at the thought that he had slept almost every night of his long life in this tiny room. The walls bore the marks of old posters ripped and replaced as his passions had formed and formed again; footballers, rock stars, footballers again, and then beautiful big-hipped girls in their underwear. These were the signs of his growth as surely as if someone had marked his height on the wall as he grew.

He looked at the picture of Pope and self above the little desk. It was one of the few photographs of himself that Chuckie possessed. He was young in that photograph. He was not so fat but neither was he an oil painting. Actually, thought Chuckie smiling, in that photograph that's exactly what he was.

He took the photograph/painting from the wall and slipped it into a desk drawer. That was then and this was now. He composed himself, drew breath, looked round one more moist-eyed time and started to write.

It had been more difficult than he might have imagined. He judged that he should not count the past week and should only tot up the totals until his thirtieth birthday since that was the day that he had made all his big decisions. Most of it was, by its nature, imprecise and he had spent much time hazarding estimates. However, he was confident about most of them.

He wrote his list. This is what his list said:

On my thirtieth birthday

I had

walked approx: sustained an erection for approx:

grown approx: had sex approx: earned approx:

3 2,000 meals

17, 5 20 litres of liquid (approx: 8,ooo of which contained alcohol)

20,440 miles

186,150 mins, 3,102.5 hrs, I29.27 days

5.40 metres of hair 175 times

no fucking money

He tacked the paper to the wall where his Pope photograph had been and sat back. It pleased him to think that he had been asleep for so long. That was exactly how it had felt as he considered the waste of his past life. He felt that he had always been sleeping. But it was not a depressing statistic. If you took a sanguine view, it meant that he was still young: it meant that he was really only eighteen years old.

He smiled to think how much and how long he'd pissed. His bladder was famously weak and it had been, perhaps, pressed into more work than it deserved. Some fastidiousness had prevented him from calculating his defecation rate.That was something he hadn't wanted to know.

The aggregate of his copulations depressed him. Though the total duration of his life's waking erections was fairly impressive, he hadn't had anywhere near enough sex. It was only 12.5 times per year since he was sixteen. There'd been enough girls — they just hadn't hung around for long. Max would change all that. He didn't know anything about couldn't even claim her he had a feeling that she would improve his averages.

He was going to telephone her now, he decided. It would wait no longer. Despite the new rapprochement with his mother, he didn't want her listening in. He decided he would sneak out to the phone box on Sandy Row. Leaving the sheet tacked where it which his mother would marvel while he was went downstairs.

The night was conditional, as dark as undark chocolate. Chuckie loved the gentle commencement of his city's mild summers and, though the rain began again, his mood lifted further.

The phone box was empty, which somewhat daunted him. He had counted on a wait while he marshalled his thoughts for this big call. But he stomped in there with the full vigour of intention. Doing it was the only way of getting it done.

He picked up the phone. He pressed its cold plastic against his cheek, sharing the streptococci of a double hundred Sandy Row Protestant neighbours. He dialled her number.

Chuckie was confident. Chuckie was more than confident, he was adamant. The telephone was his instrument, his device. He preferred the telephone to the non-electronic conversation. On the telephone he was incorporeal, he was all voice. Chuckie knew that he wasn't thin. He was fat but he was ambulatory. On the telephone, the plenty of his flesh hindered him not. On the phone, he could be as slim and pretty as he needed to be.

`Hello,' the telephone said.

Chuckie exhaled. `Hi. I'm looking for Max.'

`You found her.'

`Hello. This is Chuckie Lurgan. We met last week. Lunch in the Bot. The Botanic Inn.'

`Yeah, I remember.'

`You said that I could call you if I liked.'

`Yeah.'

`Well,' Chuckie smiled audibly, `I liked.'

They talked. For twenty-three minutes while a queue formed and grew, they talked. They talked of America, of Ireland, of her mother, of his mother, her flat, her flatmate, his prospects, her passport, the way the leaves were just showing on the trees, of horticulture generally, of the chances of a good summer, of his friends, her friends, alcohol, love, secrets, life, God, and what was showing in the Curzon that weekend.

As the twenty-fourth minute arrived, and there was audible grumbling from the four-strong queue, the proposal was made. Max started a winding precis of her commitments for the weekend while she made up her mind. Chuckie stuck his hand through the broken window of the phone box and gave his neighbours a little wave.

She talked on. Chuckie didn't listen. Idly, he inspected the graffiti scratched or scraped into the metals and plastics of the phone box interior. All the favourites: Red Hand Commandos; Diane Murray sucks for free; No Surrender; Hughie loves Deb; KAI (Kill All Irish); UVF; UDA; UFF. Square on the plate of the box itself, just above the numerals pad, someone had laboriously and elegantly gouged the legend: