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

'Impossibility never stopped anything actually happening.'

'But I love Paul. I don't want to hurt him.'

Paul was the cop boyfriend. I couldn't muster much feeling for his civilian predicament.

`It's just impossible,' she continued.

I was energized, ardent. `You're right. It isn't possible. Or likely. Or even democratic. Nobody gave you the right to make me feel like this!

'And what about Sarah?'

I was briefly surprised by her high-grade memory. `Sarah? That's old love, that's dead love. That's love that never was. I do her no disservice. I doubt that she remembers me at all.'

The sick look returned to her face.The one she had worn when she saw me first that night. Her mouth pursed under some assumption of sisterhood. `Two years' time, you'd say the same of me.

'Would IF

'Yes!

`Would you like some long odds on that?'

She smiled, pleased and flattered despite her firm intentions. I'd never had a problem with vanity.

'I'm going to marry him,' she said.

`That's what you think.'

`What would you know about it?'

I was confident. I was sure. That was always a bad sign.

`Do you often sleep with someone when you intend to marry someone else?'

My mouth was still moving with those last couple of words when I knew how badly I'd blown it. Her cheeks flushed and she sat straighter. She pulled her coat tighter around her and pushed her coffee cup away from her. She looked like she was going to go.

And then for the first time I experienced lust-free lust. I wanted someone's flesh pressed to mine in a way that was almost completely without desire. But she walked out. She just stood up, shook her head, mumbled something I couldn't hear and walked away. My head fell upon the table. It made a hollow noise.

I left soon after. Though it was not late, the streets hummed with discontent and wintry malice. There were lots of cops around. I even thought I could see Mary talking to one of them but I couldn't be sure. I hoped that if it was her then it wasn't her boyfriend she was talking to.

It was near chuck-out time for the bars and there'd been a couple of big bomb scares in the city centre. The siren sounds wafted in the wind and down Arthur Street I could see some desultory scurrying and white tape stretching. The cops were always jumpier if there was a series of bomb hoaxes. I think they preferred real bombs to endless hoaxes. It was like Russian roulette and I don't think they liked waiting for the one that would be real. It had been a pretty busy day for the boys with bombs. One at lunchtime in a multi-storey car park. A mortar had been fired at some soldiers and there had been the one Chuckie and I had heard earlier. And then all the hoaxes.

But as I looked at the people on the streets, I couldn't help thinking that it was still no big deal. It used to be different. We all used to be much more scared. After the biggest blasts in the seventies (recently revived for a second successful season), the colour of the streets always seemed drained and muted as if the colours, too, had been blown away.

But now it was all just an inconvenience, all just a traffic jam.

I found the Wreck in a side-street. A couple of cops and soldiers were loitering there. I got in and tried, ineffectually, to start it up. Just as it was beginning to chug into some semblance of life, a soldier sauntered over, his rifle slung across his pelvis in a carefree fashion.

I wound down my window and put on my I-don't-mindbeing-questioned-by-the-security-forces-I-know-you-haveto-do-it face. It was a pretty complicated expression.

The young soldier leaned down to my open window. His face was adolescent and his accent was Lancashire prole. `This your car?' The inevitable start to the litany of enquiry.

`Yes.'

'This your only car?'

`Yes' My voice was untesty. It might have been a tense day for these guys with all the ordnance going round town. I reached for the glove compartment to get some papers to prove that the Wreck was indeed mine.

The soldier snorted briefly. `No, no, that's all right, mate. It's just we thought you were driving it for a bet.'

I didn't need to laugh since he laughed so hard he laughed for both of us. I could hear his colleagues pissing themselves across the street. The soldier bent double and squeezed some feeble words of apology between the whinnies of his laughter. The Wreck, showing rare form, started amidst all the mockery and I drove off.

A couple of hours later, I was at home, making chase with my cat. He'd peed in the bath again and the sight of that little yellow pool around my plughole had sent me spare. It was so yellow. Somehow, you didn't expect it to be yellow. Like it was almost human. Unlike the cat itself. I'd chased him down the stairs, under the chairs, over the tables and so on. He was fucking quick, my cat.

I suppose that being pissed at my cat just because I was already blue wasn't fair. Mary, Sarah, my job: none of it was his fault. But he was unlucky enough to come near the end of a story he wasn't really part of. So, I ran after him with murder in my heart.

I'd got home depressed. Mary had left me making no mistake. When I got back there were a couple of messages. I had nearly wept at all this human contact, even though one had been from Marty Allen, telling me what an asshole I if I didn't know already. Chuckie had called too. He sounded jugged again. Apparently, he'd just had a big date with his American girl. She'd agreed to go out with him again. But apparently she wanted a double date with her flatmate. That was where I came in. Chuckle had happily volunteered me to field the friend. Next Thursday, the message said.

I would think about that later. But for now the important thing was to catch my cat and kill him. I'd nearly cornered him between a bookshelf and a sofa when my doorbell rang loudly. I froze. I thought the Pet Protection League were on my case. I looked at the big clock on my wall. It was after midnight. Belfast isn't the best town for those after-midnight social calls and, as I walked to my front door, I had the familiar fifteen-second feeling that there were two men in bomber jackets and balaclavas with Browning automatics standing at my door with some sincere political objectives. I shucked through it, as I always did, and opened up.

A policeman stood there, his hand raised to the bellpush. I sighed with a mixture of guilt and relief. I spent most of my life thinking that I should be arrested so cops made me uneasy. I wondered if I was going to get grief for hitting Crab. A complaint to the cops wasn't his style, but Marty Allen might have done it just for fun.

`Yes?' I asked.

The cop narrowed his eyes and asked me in a shaky voice, which surprised me, whether my name was my name. What now? I thought, as I answered that, yes, my name was indeed my name.

The bang on my chops seemed to happen all by itself. I'd seen no arm, no hand. The blow knocked me back against my open door and he followed up with the other glove across my mouth.

Imagine my surprise!

He'd come in on me now and swung me round onto the staircase and I felt the stairs bang into my spine. After he'd cracked me in the balls and headbutted me a couple of times, I began to understand I was in a fight there. I was upset, naturally, and it was beginning to hurt as well. I was wondering what to do when he started giving me some elbow to the side of the head.

In my experience, sudden fights had always been like this. When somebody really surprised you, it was really surprising. In the movies, tough guys always handled surprise fights with lightning reflexes, immediate escalation. Us real-life tough guys needed time to get used to the idea, we needed written invitations, consultations, legal advice.

I was getting messed up rapidly by the time I'd summoned the verve to consider a response but by that time the cop himself was puffed out. He stepped back to catch a breath. Then I realized that something was missing. Where were his colleagues? How come the others were missing all this fun?