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

I called Chuckle's number. I got his mum. Chuckie was nowhere to be found. Peggy found Max's number for me anyway but then I couldn't get her off the phone. Peggy was keen to talk. She was worried. I'd never known her so garrulous, so I listened up. She said that something was wrong, that Chuckie was acting weird.Where have you been? I thought. I calmed her down, I reassured her. Jesus, I think I told her something like Chuckle's a unique individual after all. Only a mother would have listened to toss like that. Chuckie had told me that sometimes his mother made him strangely uneasy. Sometimes I knew what he meant.

I called Max's number. I got the answering machine. I left a message for Aoirghe, telling her that I would eschew her participation in my private life. Not quite in those words. I think I was adamant. It had been her voice on the answering machine message. That had helped.

Out on my doorstep, the night sounded like an old record that crackled and hissed. Cars swished by as regular as a second hand. Helicopters droned high in dull Zs. A woman laughed distantly like some urgent bird. Far across the city (Wicked West), a series of dry impacts that may or may not have been automatic gunfire erupted and subsided.

Chuckle Lurgan had the most imprecise notions of what the Augustan age might have been, but in the moment that his hand first met the warns flesh of Max's breasts, he had felt more than Palladian. And, as she kissed his eyes and pushed him back and down on her own sofa, Chuckle's mind was filled with columns: the ardent one that had filled his trousers for the previous half-hour and the double set of credits that ranged on the internalized screen of his greed.

Her brassiere snapped and dropped and she seemed to expand under his hands. At three o'clock that afternoon, after two hours of vague talk and big-teeth smiles, the Ulster Development Board had awarded him a start-up grant of seventy-five thousand pounds. She ran her hands under and between the flaps of his open shirt. His skin began to feel like liquid under her touch (he was so chubby these days his skin would have felt liquid under most people's touch). End of the week he'd have one hundred and ninety thousand pounds in the bank. He hoped his dreams wouldn't suffer from all this reality.

He was distracted by the spectacle of Max shrugging off her skirt without the use of her hands.That was good. Slat had told him he had no chance but the UDB said that his business plan was one of the most imaginative that they had seen. Slat's problem was his unprofitable adherence to logic. Her dynamic pants round her ankles, Max stood in front of him. Chuckie's attention, that wavering, troubled thing, centred and fixed.

`God bless America,' said Chuckie.

She:

— kissed him,

— pulled his clothes from him,

— made noises in his ear,

— rubbed herself against him like he was a bath-towel,

— made him blush,

— made him laugh,

— made him forget he was fat,

— vigorously, rigorously,

— wiped the money right out of his head.

And apart from the passage which ended with her saying, more impatiently than was strictly necessary, `It's called a clitoris, Chuck,' he couldn't help feeling that it had gone very well indeed. Begun in surprise, continued with enthusiasm, it had ended in success.

And he had been amazed to hear the noises she made. She had actually laughed. No moaning, no whooping, no whimper, just a massive, muscular shudder of her hips under his hand and a great belch of triumphant rowdy laughter, not a belly laugh. Something bigger. Something lower.

And then they lay side by side, she brown and naked, he white and baggy as a badly blown balloon.

`Hey, Chuckie.'

`Yeah?'

`You OK?'

Chuckie closed his open mouth. `Mmm-hhmm,' he affirmed.

Max sat up. She smiled proudly at the wreck of him. `Can I fuck or can I fuck?' she asked.

Chuckle moaned helplessly, Max sipped at her now cold tea. 'I'm sorry. I should have taken it easier first time round. I just got carried away.'

Chuckie put his pillow over his face and whimpered tinily.

Max laid her head on the pillow. `I don't know why they call it French sex. The blowjob is a distinctly American phenomenon'

Aoirghe had been away for a fortnight. Chuckie had spent that fortnight wondering whether it would happen, when it would happen. He liked her more than he could say but that didn't have to stop him thinking about sex. The surprise of her regard was so great that he imagined it likely that she might not favour him with her flesh.

He had been much with her without skin meeting skin. Opportunity had been limited. He had his mother. She had her flatmate. But even after Aoirghe's disappearance, quietus had seemed remote. Nothing had happened. He found himself growing more circumspect. He hadn't even tried to touch her breasts, never really finding the line, the trajectory, which would end with such an action seeming reasonable, unconsidered, legal.

That evening, it had been different. He took a taxi to her flat, his thoughts filled with money. He had rung her bell absently. She had come to the door, sloppily dressed, and mumbled things he did not hear and then disappeared. He had nodded to the taxi-driver and had loitered there, waiting to take her to the restaurant he'd booked. He was wondering whether the UDB money would queer his chances of an IIZB grant when Max had reappeared at the door and dragged him indoors by his lapels.

One minute he had been standing idly on the doorstep, the next he'd had surprising portions of her stuffed between his lips.

Chuckle sat upright suddenly. The sheet fell from his face.

`Fuck,' he said.

`Again?'

He looked at her blankly. `The taxi-driver.'

Despite his protestations, Max had pulled on a gown and walked out to pay the driver. Chuckie watched from the window, just in case the scumbag tried anything on. There was enough chat for him to get anxious but Max returned before he could pull his trousers on. He asked her how much the driver had charged.

`He was so amazed that you were porking a girl like me that he only charged me ten. I think he felt sorry for me.' She smiled, somehow delightfully.

`Come here,' said Chuckie.

It was then nine o'clock. It took two hours for Chuckie's pub itch to leave him. His ear was filled with the silent ticking of his internal clock. Time for three or four pints. Still time for a couple. Just time for a quick one.

It wasn't that he wasn't happy. They made a couple of extra stabs at love, long blunt enjoyable stabs. They drank coffee and wine. They talked. They listened to music she liked and which he found magical for her liking. It was just that they were staying in. Without the noise of barmen's complaints, shouts for orders, the look of woozy mirrors and the smell of beery piss, Chuckie was rather at a loss. He couldn't entirely manage the concept of an evening out being an evening in.

Third time around, his penis felt as barnacled as an ancient crab and there was a distinct fishing fleet odour in the air. Third time around, he got the point of the staying-in notion. Afterwards, as he gasped and chugged and choked, Max said, with some admiration, `Jesus, Chuckie, I thought this was supposed to be fun.'

To his disbelief, they ended the conscious portion of the evening watching a late-night black-and-white movie on the television. Everything in him and about him changed. In common with all the other fat working-class Protestants he had ever known, Chuckie had always felt a certain shame in watching television. It was an onanistic vice, the resort of the deracinated. It was what friendless folk did when they didn't want to talk to their mothers or wives.

Now, as Max chuckled at fifty-year-old American jokes and cooed at the cleft in Cary Grant's chin, television seemed a dignified, elegant thing, a box at the opera, the enclosure at Ascot. It was only in the way of looking.That grim pursuit, that last resort had all kinds of resident beauties. As he began to relax, he started laughing at all the humour, and even privately conceded that Cary Grant was not entirely without appeal.