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

'He called a press conference?'

`A big mistake. He'll fucking kill you for that. Then he'll eat you.

'My two hundred?'

'Your one hundred, you mean.!

He took out his wallet and counted out a hundred in twenties. It was more than I'd expected and that was fair enough. He'd sold me my dodgy stolen wreck of a car for two hundred. He didn't owe me much. He smiled some unpleasant smile he must have seen in the movies.

'Is it Crab or have you just lost your balls for it?' he enquired.

I had no explanation for him and I couldn't think of any tough-guy quip so I left. Downstairs, Hally was unloading the van, swapping tit jokes with a group of Allen's pre-pubescent mechanics. He didn't seem inconsolable about Crab's predicament and he was unconcerned about my presence. I headed for my car.

Hally followed and stood between me and the door.

'How's Crab?' I asked him.

He laughed. `How the fuck should I know? I took him to the hospital but I didn't fucking wait. I'm not his fucking ma'

I moved to put my key in the car door. He didn't get out of my way. I stood up straight.

`You quit?' He was squaring up for something. I knew he didn't like me but I knew he wouldn't hit me. That would be so upsetting that it just couldn't happen.

`Yeah, I quit.!

He nodded some internal assent like it was something he had predicted for years. `Do you mind if I ask you something?'

'What?'

`Are you a Catholic?'

I laughed a big sad laugh. `What do you think?' I asked.

`Well,' he said ruminatively, `I always figured you were a poof but I couldn't work out whether you were a Fenian as well.'

`Get a life,' I said, as I got into my car. `Nah, get two.'

Hally was too pleased with his insult to bother hitting me and he let me drive away unmolested. As I pulled onto the main road, it occurred to me that I'd never buy enough petrol to get far enough away.

So now I was unemployed. It had been a good move. I suppose I should have felt cleaner after that primary integrity but those gestures cleanse only in films. If I felt cleaner at all, it was a micro-feeling. It was a small, small thing. I didn't want to take anything away from anybody again. I knew how they felt. England had repossessed Sarah from me and I was still sitting there fat and sad with that loss.

When I remembered the Sarah stuff, it was like reading a book someone else recommended.You wanted it to have been so much better than it was.

She was a broadsheet journalist from London. I'd just got a shitload of compensation for a beating I'd had a couple of years before from soldiers outside a bar down Cornmarket. I'd only been in hospital for a while but the soldier angle had helped and the Northern Ireland Office was glad to give me forty grand to shut me up. I bought the place on Poetry Street. It was an old Church building, half wrecked and split into three. I got it for almost nothing so I bought it outright. Sarah moved in and made the old place breathe. We lived it out amongst the trees and it was good. For two years of side-by-side, we were happy.

Two years. We practically rebuilt the flat. Sarah made it beautiful. I put stubby pencils behind my ear and nails in my mouth and felt like a real man. I tried to like her friends. She tried to resist the impulse to have mine arrested. It was a pantomime of happiness, a parody of bliss. I loved her like I didn't know was possible. I loved her more than I thought was legal. The sight of her handwriting made my eyes fill with reasonless tears. When I heard sirens I convinced myself that they were ambulances going to the site where her shattered body lay. Sometimes at night, when she slept and I couldn't, I lay with my arms around her, just loving her. I felt that if I had a zipper running down the front of me from throat to belly I would unzip myself and cram her inside and zip her up in there. I could never hold her close enough.

Sometimes I worried about her work. She hated her job. Her paper would only run Ulster stories if the details were particularly appalling, if the killings were entirely barbaric. London editors were not interested in everyday Ulster. Sarah had to go to grimmer places and speak to grimmer people every time.

So, sooner than it should have, it started to go wrong. The reports she had to write, the things she had to see couldn't have helped Sarah fall in love with my city. She started talking about going back to London. I started ignoring her. Then she did three days' reporting on an Armagh pub massacre in which six people died. She quit her Ulster job and bought a plane ticket.

The night before she left was long. She pleaded with me to go with her. I refused. Her pain was inordinate. It was not a situation without remedy. London was an hour away. I could always change my mind. She could change hers. It was bad that she was going but it appeared to me that there'd always be the possibility of rewrites.

But within a fortnight, she'd told me the thing that I couldn't bring myself to believe, to understand. She'd had an abortion in her first week back in London. I hadn't known she was pregnant.

And then it was six months of nothing. Six months of something less than misery. She had crushed my heart flat. I didn't know how much I would have wanted to be a father but I didn't know how much I didn't either. It was always a surprise how much that hurt. How could she make the mistake of not loving me as I loved her?

Since she'd left, my love had been measured by the object it lacked. Since then, I'd been sitting alone late at night, smoking, wondering what it was like to be her.

After my big resignation, I got back to Poetry Street to find Chuckie Lurgan sitting in a chubby heap on my doorstep waiting for me to come home. My cat was sleeping on his knee. For some reason, my cat seemed to like Chuckie. I needed a new cat.

I let them in and fed them both.

He had called work and Allen had told him I'd been sacked.

`Jesus, you're not popular there any more,' Chuckie said.

While we were eating, he grew more and more excitable. He talked rapid nonsense and blushed often. He had a grubby tabloid in his hand. I made coffee while I waited for him to get to the point.

I asked him about his big-deal American girl. He was uncharacteristically reticent. Slat had told me that she was pretty nice and that, for some reason, she seemed keen on old Chuck, but Lurgan was giving me no change from all my blunt enquiry. He told me he was seeing her that night but then he changed the subject.

`Have you seen this OTG thing?' he asked me vaguely, as I headed for the kitchen.

`Yeah. Do you know what it means?'

'Nah, it's a new one on me,' he called from the other room.

'Is it an organization or a slogan?'

`Fucked if I know.'

`I've asked around,' I said. `Nobody has a clue.'

`What do you think?' asked Chuckie.

'Jesus, I don't know. Odyssey To Glengormley. Orangemen Try Genocide. Oxford's Too Green'

I could hear Chuckle's chubby chuckle. `Ominously Taut Gonads,' he suggested enthusiastically. `Optimum Testicle Growth. Osculate This, Girls!'

I let him have his laugh out while I got on with making the coffee.

`I saw Bun Doran limping up the road on the way over,' he called out to me.

`Uh-huh,' I grunted noncommittally, while I fiddled with the coffee beans. I wondered when exactly Chuckie was going to tell me what was on his mind.

`Yeah, apparently he's also bought a big house with the money he got from his settlement!

There was the muffled crump of a distant explosion.

'Sounded like Andytown,' surmised Chuckie from the living room.

`Nah,' I shouted back. `City centre.'

`Sounded big.'

`Didn't sound small,' I concurred.

I came back into the room with the coffee pot. Chuckie was toying with the newspaper on his lap.